The Last Load Out of Delmore

I met Efrain Salazar in the summer of 2003, in the parking lot of the custom harvest crew’s camp outside Ellsworth. He was twenty-nine. He had come up from the Rio Grande Valley with the crew that follows the wheat north every year, and he had been driving a grain truck on the harvest for six summers. He could back a hopper into a bin door in the dark with six inches to spare.

He did not have a commercial license.

That year an inspector in Kansas checked, and the crew foreman told Efrain he could not drive for them anymore without a license. The written test for the license was in English.

Efrain read English fine, as it turned out, but not the way the manual was written. It reads like a legal contract, full of words like gradient and compliance and articulated. He had failed the test twice. He showed me a sentence on his knee that began with the word “Whereas” and asked me what it meant. I told him I wasn’t sure.

I drove out to the camp every Tuesday night for six weeks, after my own loads. Luanne packed a pan of fried chicken each time. We sat at a picnic table under a bare bulb with moths in it, and I read the manual out loud to him, a paragraph at a time, and we stopped at each hard word and talked about what it meant on a real road with a real truck. He already knew all of it, in his hands. He just needed the words for it.

His wife, Marisol, started coming along in week three, with their oldest boy on her hip. By week six I was no longer the teacher.

He passed on the third try, with a ninety-four. He called me from the testing station in Salina, and I could hear the whole crew behind him yelling and banging on the walls of the cab.

I turned Efrain a thumper that first winter, and burned his name into it. Years later he told me he had never in his life been given a gift by a stranger before that, and he had not known what to do with it, so he had put it on a shelf in the kitchen for two years, where nobody was allowed to touch it.

After Quarry Road I stopped trying to explain it to myself.

The trucks came one after another. At every crossing and field approach, along the ditch grass under the power poles, they sat on the shoulder with their lights going and their drivers standing by the cab with their caps off. Men I had trained in 1991 and 1998 and 2006. Dewey Pohlman, who got the first thumper in 1988, with white in his hair now and a grandchild on his shoulders. A pair of brothers from Tescott I’d taught to chain a load in an ice storm. The quiet girl who drove for the church camp, who I’d shown how to back a trailer on a Sunday afternoon in an empty lot.

They did not wave. They stood with their thumpers upright against their shoulders. As my front bumper passed each one, he or she would turn and strike the nearest tire, once.

Tok.

Tok.

Tok.

It went on down the blacktop like a slow rain moving across a field. I drove with the window down and the sound coming in, one tok at a time, and the smell of milo dust and diesel, and the sun coming across the bean stubble flat and gold, and I understood two things at once.