The Truck I Sold For Payroll

The farmer who came for an estimate

Around ten a dually pulled in off the highway, a white Ford with a flatbed, and a man got out in a seed cap and jeans gone white at the knees. Roy Petersen. I did not know him but I knew the type the way you know weather. He farmed up toward Bevier, he said, and his wife had backed the Tahoe into the corner of the machine shed and crumpled the tailgate and the quarter, and the insurance wanted him to get an estimate, and somebody at the co-op had said Pell’s was honest.

I walked out to look at his Tahoe. And Roy Petersen walked past it and stood in front of my Ram with his hands in his back pockets and looked at that sign the way a man looks at a heifer he has already decided to buy.

“This yours,” he said.

“It is.”

“Why’s it for sale.”

I am not a liar. I have never been any good at it, which is probably why Shane always handled the adjusters.

“I need the money today,” I said. “I’m not going to dress it up for you. It’s a good truck and I’m selling it for a bad reason.”

He walked around it. He got down on one knee in the gravel, sixty odd years old, and looked under it at the frame, and ran his thumb along the rocker, and opened the driver’s door and looked at the pedals, because a man who knows trucks reads the pedals the way you read a horse’s teeth. Lightly worn. Babied.

He started it. He listened to it idle with his head cocked. He shut it off.

“Hundred and nine thousand,” he said.

“Hundred and nine two,” I said. “I’ll show you the oil records. Every three thousand, by me.”

He looked at me for a while.

“What’s a bad reason,” he said.

I had not planned to tell him. But there is something about a man on one knee in your gravel at ten in the morning that makes a lie feel expensive, so I told him the shape of it.

“My partner got into some trouble,” I said. “Money that was supposed to be there isn’t. I’ve got four men who’ve worked all week and they get paid at five, and this truck is what I’ve got that I can turn into their paychecks by then. That’s the bad reason.”

Roy Petersen nodded slow. He did not ask me whose trouble, or how, or any of the hundred questions a nosy man asks. He had done his whole life in a place where you can watch a man idle his truck and know most of what you need to know about him.

“I sold calves Tuesday,” he said. “Got the check sitting in the kitchen. Bank’s in town.” He looked at the Ram one more time, then back at me. “I’ll give you twenty two five. Cash. That’s two thousand under what you’d get if you weren’t in a hurry, and we both know it, and I’m an old man and I like a clean truck and I don’t like to haggle with somebody who told me the truth.”

“Twenty three,” I said, because my daddy would have risen up out of the ground if I had not.

“Twenty two seven,” Roy said, “and you throw in the estimate on my wife’s Tahoe for nothing.”

I put my hand out and he took it, and his hand was like a piece of the fence.