The Truck Under the Blue Tarp

The Friday call

Travis called on a Friday evening, the twenty-fourth of April, while I was out turning the first of the garden dirt. He said he and Annika would come out around ten the next morning, if I’d be home. There was something he wanted me to see.

I stood in the kitchen with dirt drying on my hands and thought: he’s bringing me a check. I had it all worked out, an envelope, and Travis on my porch saying it was worth more than I thought, and me being gracious, because Lars would not have wanted a scene. I made rolls at five the next morning. I put out the good plates. I stood at the kitchen window and practiced a face.

What stood in the yard

They were early. I heard a heavy engine in the lane at a quarter to ten, and a minute later Annika came in through the back door in her church coat and said, “Mom, stay in here ten minutes. They have to set something up.” She wouldn’t look me in the eye.

So I stood at my sink with my rolls cooling and looked out the window over the faucet. I could see the corner of a green flatbed with a long shape on the deck under a bright blue tarp, and Isaac and his father walking around it with a ratchet.

At five minutes to ten Travis knocked on the frame of the screen door. I went out onto the porch, and that is when he stood in the gravel below the steps and held up his hand and told me not to say anything yet.

Behind him the flatbed sat in the yard with its ramps down. On the grass beside it, where Lars always parked, nose to the machine shed and tailgate to the sun, stood something the length of a pickup, wearing the blue tarp like a bedsheet.

“We trailered it out,” Travis said. “Ten miles of gravel. I wasn’t going to put a chip in that paint.”

He nodded at Isaac. Isaac took one corner of the tarp and Travis took the other, and they drew it back the way you would draw a sheet off a child asleep on the couch.

It was the Ford.

It was green. Not the green of my memory, which had faded to the color of a pickle. This was the green it had been the day Lars paid $2,100 for it, a dark, deep, farm-equipment green, with the cream on top as clean as a new cup and the line between the two colors so straight it looked ruled with a pencil. The rocker panels were whole. The cab corners, the ones that had bubbled orange every spring, were as smooth as a river stone. The tires were new, with the white lettering still on them. The bed was a deep honey color I couldn’t make sense of until I got closer and saw it was oak, real oak boards laid tight the way a barn floor is laid.