The Gas My Neighbor Kept Taking

I am seventy-one years old, and until this fall I believed the most trouble a man could get into on Cottonwood Lane was letting his grass go to seed.

I live in Oak Hollow, Kansas, in a small white house with a green door that my wife Paula picked out in 1989 and that I have repainted exactly the same green four times since. Paula died two winters ago in March. Her side of the closet is still the way she left it, and I have not decided what to do about that, so I have decided nothing. I eat my supper at the kitchen table at six, I watch the weather, and on Sundays I drive out to the cemetery on County Road 9 with a thermos of coffee and sit with her for an hour.

I make that drive in a 1994 Ford F-150 that I bought the year our daughter went off to college. It is two-tone, tan over rust, and the passenger seat has a split in it that Paula covered with a quilted pad she made out of old flannel shirts. The truck does not look like much. Young men have knocked on my door offering to haul it off for free. But I have kept it alive for thirty years, and I know it the way you know a dog. I know what it burns in a week almost to the cup. A fill-up lasts me about three weeks, because I go to the hardware store, church, the grocery on the highway, the cemetery, and the barber, and that is my whole life.

That is why I noticed.

The tank that kept going down

It was August when I first caught it. I had filled up on a Monday morning at the Casey’s, all the way to the click, and driven to the hardware store and home. I did not drive again until Sunday. When I turned the key to go see Paula, the needle was sitting just under a half.

I stood in my driveway a while.

I am not a man who trusts his own memory much anymore, so I told myself I had been out more than I thought. I filled it again that Monday and wrote the odometer reading on the back of an envelope I kept in the glove box. Paula used to do that, and I picked up the habit after she was gone, the way you pick up a hundred small things of hers without meaning to.

By Thursday the tank was down by a third, and the odometer had moved four miles.

Four miles. A truck that size does not burn a third of a tank in four miles unless something is very wrong.

So I took it to Barry. Barry has run the shop on Third Street for forty years, and I have never been charged for a repair I did not need. He got it up on the lift on a Friday morning and checked the fuel lines, the pump, the tank, the cap, the filler neck, and the little hose that always seems to crack on those old models. He ran his hand along every seam with a flashlight in his teeth.

“Darrell, there is not one thing wrong with this truck,” he said. “No leak. No weep. Not a drop on the floor. Somebody is drinking it.”

“Who would drink gas out of a thirty-year-old pickup?”

“Somebody who thinks you are not going to look.”

That evening I sat on my porch and watched my own driveway for an hour, and nothing happened. The next morning I drove into Salina and bought a little camera for forty-four dollars, the kind with a lens the size of a thumbnail. My daughter had shown me over the phone once how to hook those up. I mounted it under the eave of my garage, facing the truck, and I propped my phone on the charger and went to bed.

I did not sleep much.