The Last Load Out of Delmore

He was stepping off the rear gate at a feedlot near Solomon, with ice on his boots, and he went down eight feet onto concrete. The doctors told Lila he might walk again and he might not. The bills came in the mail four days later.

I went to see him in the hospital. I sat in the chair by his bed, and he would not look at me, and I understood. A man like Kirby does not want to be helped. He had spent his life being the one who helped.

“I’ve got your route,” I said.

“Ansel, you can’t.”

“It’s three days a week. I can do your route on my off days.”

“You’ve got your own work. You’ve got a wife. You’ll kill yourself.”

“Then you can pay for my funeral,” I said, and he laughed, and then he cried, and then he told me to get out, and I did.

I ran Kirby’s route for nine weeks. I slept in my cab at the plant in Emporia more nights than I want to count. I took the checks the plant cut for Kirby’s loads and deposited every one, to the penny, and I put cash in an envelope each Friday and left it with Lila at the hospital cafeteria.

I told her the co-op had set up a fund. A made-up fund, the Delmore Drivers’ Relief. I wrote the name on the envelope myself.

Lila took the envelope. She looked at me for a long moment. She said, “That’s real good of them,” and put it in her purse.

Kirby worked it out around week six. He caught me in the hospital with a logbook open on my knee, the pages for his route in my handwriting, and he read three lines and put it down. He never said anything. He just looked at the wall for a long time. The following Sunday I found a pie on my porch that Lila had made, with a note on the plate in Kirby’s blocky printing that said, “For the fund.”

He walked again, after a fashion, and now it’s the chair. I turned him a thumper in the winter of 2008, and he uses it to this day, to poke at the dog and to point at things he wants brought to him.

At the third crossing, there were four trucks.

It was the Quarry Road corner, where the blacktop makes a little bend around a stand of cottonwoods, and the whole bend was lined with trucks, grain haulers and a flatbed and a long cattle pot, nosed in on the shoulder with their hazards pulsing in the morning light. Under the cottonwoods, in the shade, there were people. Women with lawn chairs. Kids sitting on tailgates with their feet hanging down.

At the front of them stood a broad man with gray in his mustache and a clean white shirt buttoned to the neck. Behind him, in a row, were four boys in descending sizes, from a young man of twenty-five down to a child of maybe ten, each in a white shirt, each holding a short club of hickory.

Efrain Salazar.

I eased off the throttle. I could not help it.

He did not lift his hand either. He nodded to me, once, very slowly, the way a man nods to a priest, and then all five of them struck the front tires of their trucks together, a ragged knock like rain starting on a tin roof. The littlest one hit too hard and almost lost his club.

I did lift a hand, that time. I did not mean to. It came up off the wheel on its own.