The Truck Money He Owed Me

The truck

Glenn found the Silverado. It was a 2011, white, with a long bed and about 140,000 miles on it, sitting in a farmer’s yard out past the cemetery with a For Sale sign on the windshield. The farmer wanted $9,500 and wouldn’t come down.

I didn’t have $9,500. I had three thousand and change, and summer was half over. I stood in that farmer’s yard and looked at that truck and wanted it so bad my teeth hurt.

Glenn walked around it twice, kicked the tires, checked under the oil cap and lay on his back in the gravel to look at the frame.

Then he stood up and brushed off his pants and looked at me.

“Here’s what we’ll do,” he said. “I’ll buy it today. The title goes in my name, because you’re a minor and that’s how it has to be. You pay me back. Every dollar. When it’s paid, it’s yours.”

“What about the three thousand?” I asked.

“That goes to me first. Then the rest as you earn it. And you pay your own insurance through the agency, at the family rate. That’s not a gift either.”

I shook his hand right there in the gravel.

I made the last payment in August, a year later, the summer before my senior year.

I counted it out on the kitchen table in twenties and tens, and Glenn counted it again, and then he wrote Paid in Full in my spiral notebook and signed it.

“That’s your truck now, son,” he said, and shook my hand again. “You earned it.”

“When can we put it in my name?”

“No rush. You’re still seventeen. When you turn eighteen we’ll run down to the treasurer’s office. It’s just paper.”

I believed him. Why wouldn’t I? It was just paper. I turned eighteen that September, the start of my senior year, and I was busy with the Army recruiter in Beatrice and the papers for that, and Glenn was busy, and nobody thought about the title again.

The Army

I signed up to be a motor transport operator, which is a fancy way of saying I’d drive trucks for the Army.

I graduated in May with my class of forty-one. I shipped out in June, and before I left I washed the Silverado in the driveway and parked it under the maple tree with the keys on the hook by the back door.

“Start it once a week,” I told Glenn. “Just run it ten minutes so the battery doesn’t die.”

“I know how to keep a truck, Tyler,” he said, and he smiled, and Mom hugged me so hard my ribs popped.

Basic training and my advanced training were both at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. Basic was ten weeks.

In basic you don’t get your phone except on Sundays, if you’ve earned it, and sometimes not then either.

It was hard, and the drill sergeants yelled, and I was tired in a way I didn’t know a person could be tired.

But I had mowed fifteen yards a week in Nebraska August heat. I could take being tired.

What I couldn’t take was the phone call. It came on a Sunday in late August, near the end of basic, when we had earned our phones.

Mom called on a Sunday afternoon and we talked about the weather and her job at the school office and how Pete, Doc’s old dog, had finally died.

Then she said, in that bright voice she uses when she’s nervous, “Oh, and Glenn sold your truck. He got a good price for it. He said it covered your rent, honey. All those years. He said you two had talked about it.”