The Ram Keys I Lifted Off the Hook

The Name on the Slip

Now I will tell you about the driver.

Greg works the shipping dock at the plant. He runs a forklift, loads trailers, and he answers to a foreman named Dale Prewitt.

Dale is a big easy man about sixty with a gray mustache and a habit of calling everybody “bud.” He has been Greg’s foreman for eleven years.

Dale decides who gets the overtime on the dock. Dale signs off on the vacation slips. When Greg wanted that week off in July to take the boat to the lake, it was Dale he had to ask, and it was Dale who said yes.

And Dale Prewitt, it turned out, ran the Casey’s carpool.

He lived out past us toward Kenney and had been hauling a load of plant folks to work for years, three or four of them splitting his gas, him in his crew cab at 5:30 on the dot.

When Greg “asked around” about a carpool for me, the ride he found me, the ride he signed me up for without blinking, was his own foreman’s truck.

I only put it together when I wrote out the slip and looked up who to tell him to pay. Dale Prewitt. I read the name twice.

I understood in one clean cold flash exactly what my counter-move was going to do. There was not one man at that plant Greg would less want to see him standing truckless at a Casey’s at 5:30 in the morning. Not one.

He had a fifty-nine-thousand-dollar Ram in his name and he was going to have to climb up into his own boss’s back seat and split the gas like a man who could not manage his own driveway.

I did not plan that part. I swear it on Ron’s grave. I just took the only keys left.

But the Lord has a sense of humor about these things, and I was not going to argue with Him about the timing.

The first morning Greg missed the 5:30 and had to call Dale and ask him, hat in hand, to swing back through town and get him. Dale did it. Dale is a good man.

But a good man still tells the story at break. By the second day the whole shipping dock knew that Greg Dillard’s wife was driving his new Ram to work while Greg rode in with the foreman.