In the spring of that year, Butch came by the house on a Sunday after church and sat at our kitchen table and asked if Ty might want to drive for him that season.
I want to be fair to him here, because the rest of this story isn’t always fair to him. He didn’t ask Ty first. He asked me and Tricia, at the table, with his ball cap in his hands.
“My back’s shot,” he said. “And I’m too heavy for the class. The truck’s got a weight limit with the driver in it. Every pound I sit in that seat is a pound I can’t hang out front where it does me some good.”
That was true. Modified trucks pull at a set weight, and the driver counts. Butch is a big man, and Ty at the time weighed about a hundred and fifty pounds soaking wet. That’s better than a hundred pounds of weight Butch could bolt to the front bumper instead.
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“He’d have to be sixteen,” Tricia said.
“He’s sixteen in May,” Butch said. “Parent signs the waiver. I’ll get him a fire suit. He’ll do fine. He’s got the hands for it, Trish, everybody says so.”
We didn’t talk about money that day. I’ve thought about that a lot too. Nobody at that table said the word purse, not once. I think I assumed, and Tricia assumed, and maybe Butch assumed, and nobody checked whether we were all assuming the same thing.
Ty was over the moon. I signed the waiver at the first pull of the season, in early summer, at a fire department fundraiser over by the reservoir, on the hood of Butch’s diesel with a pen that kept skipping.
He won that night. Five trucks in the class, and he took it by eleven feet. Butch picked him up off the ground in a bear hug. I have a picture of it on my phone, the two of them with dust on their faces, grinning like fools.
The purse was three hundred dollars. The official handed Butch the envelope at the scorer’s table, and Butch folded it into his back pocket, and that was the last anybody saw of it.
Ty drove thirteen pulls for Butch that summer. He won seven of them. He placed in five more. The only time he didn’t place, the driveshaft let go about forty feet off the line, and that wasn’t on him.
I kept count. I’m a scale man, it’s what I do. Add it all up and Butch took home forty-two hundred dollars in purses with my son behind the wheel, and Ty didn’t see a dime of it.
He didn’t ask for any either. That’s the thing you have to understand about my boy. He would have driven that truck for free. He would have paid Butch to drive it, if he’d had the money. He mowed lawns all summer to put gas in his own car.
He bought his own fire suit, too. Butch had said he’d get him one, and then he came up with an old one that didn’t fit, and Ty took two hundred and forty dollars out of his mowing money and ordered a black one his size and never said a word about it.
Tricia noticed before I did. She’s a nurse. She notices things.
“Has Butch paid him anything?” she asked me one night in July, in bed, with the window fan going.
“I don’t think so,” I said.