The Truck My Brother Sold For Scrap
It was one of those bright November days that look warm through a windshield and aren’t. The wind was straight out of the north. I put on my canvas coat and my cap and hung the strap over my shoulder, because I had decided on the way out that I wanted the man to see I was serious before I ever opened my mouth.
Nobody was at the counter. I could hear a grinder running somewhere in the back.
“Dad,” Josie said. She was at the side window, looking out at the yard. “Is that where they go?”
Along the west fence there was a row of cars with the glass out and the wheels off, lined up nose to tail, waiting. Every few months a crew comes through with a crusher on a trailer, and when they leave, that row is a stack of things about as thick as a suitcase.
There was also a gap about the length of a long-bed Ford, with fresh drag marks through the dead weeds.
I have had my stomach drop like that maybe three times in my life.
“It’s all right,” I told her, and I didn’t know if it was.
The grinder stopped. A door banged, and Lyle came up the hall wiping his hands on a red rag.
He is about sixty, a big, slow-moving man with a gray beard, and he has run that yard since his own father quit. I knew him to nod to. I did not know him the way my father knew people, which was all the way down.
He looked at me. He looked at the strap. He looked at Josie.
“You’re Harold’s youngest,” he said. “The one that called.”
“Yes sir. Tom.”
“I was at the visitation. You wouldn’t have known me, there was a line out the door.” He stuck the rag in his back pocket. “I’m sorry about your dad. I mean that more than people generally do.”
“Thank you.” I took the envelope out of my coat and held it out over the counter. “My brother sold you a truck on Tuesday. A ’78 Ford. I’d like to buy it back. There’s nine fifty in there. That’s fifty over what you gave, for the hauling and the bother.”
Lyle looked at the envelope a good while. He didn’t reach for it.
“Put that back in your coat a minute,” he said. “Come look at something first.”
He took us out the back door and past the shop and away from the rows, clear to the far edge of the yard, to a patch of gravel where he keeps the things he is working on himself.
It was sitting there alone with its nose to the south.
I don’t know how to explain what that truck is if you didn’t grow up on its seat. Two-tone, with the paint gone to chalk. A long bed with a wooden floor Dad put in himself when the steel one rusted through. One front fender is caved in over the wheel, and has been for two years. The grille is missing a tooth. It is not a pretty truck and it never was. He bought it new in the fall of 1978, the year he and Mom got married, with the six-cylinder and the four-speed because that was what he could afford. Then he just never saw a reason to buy another one.