The Last Pull in Grandpa’s Ford

I don’t remember much about the next thirty seconds except the noise. The Ford dug in and went, and the iron box in the bed bounced, and the sled came up off the line, and the weight box started its long roll forward on the rails. Ty kept the front end straight, feathering it, feeling it through the seat the way he does.

At about two hundred feet the Ford started to bog. The pan was digging in hard and the old truck had nothing more to give. Ty kept it pointed straight and kept his foot in it, and it crawled, and crawled, and stopped.

Gene called the distance. “Two hundred eighty-seven feet and four inches.”

At that point it was the longest pull of the night. The grandstand went wild. My nieces were jumping up and down so hard their sign tore in half.

Four trucks later, a man from up north in a Silverado that couldn’t have been five years old went two hundred ninety-four feet, and that was the class. Ty took second. The purse for second was a hundred and fifty dollars.

I have never seen a boy so happy to take second place in my life.

He climbed out of the cab with his helmet in his hand and his face all lit up, and the first thing he did was run back to the hitch and grab his grandpa around the shoulders. Dad was crying. I don’t mind telling you that. He was crying and he was laughing and he kept patting Ty on the back of the helmet.

“That’s three of us now,” Dad kept saying. “That’s three of us that pulled her. Three of us.”

The modified trucks pulled last, about forty minutes later, with the sun sitting low and gold over the track and the dust hanging in it.

Butch drove Hog Wild himself. He was too heavy for the class and he’d had to run light on the front, and the truck had never once pulled with him in the seat. He went about two hundred and fifty feet and the front end came up and danced, and he had to lift, and the sled stopped.

He took fifth out of six. There’s no purse for fifth.

He drove back to the pits slowly. Ty was already there, leaning on Butch’s white diesel pickup, the one that hauled the trailer, with his black fire suit unzipped partway down and his helmet in his hand. He’d come to help Butch load, the way he’d said he would on the phone.

I was standing a little ways off by our own trailer with Dad. Tricia and Pam were coming down from the grandstand together, arm in arm.

Butch got out of the truck and took off his helmet and put on his black ball cap. He stood there in the dirt a minute in his black T-shirt, all sweat and dust, and looked at my son standing by his truck.

Then he turned to Harold Pohl, who was standing a few steps away in his orange vest by the scorer’s table with a clipboard.

I watched them talk. I couldn’t hear a word. Butch reached into his back pocket and took out a checkbook, a farm checkbook, the big kind with three checks to a page. He leaned on the scorer’s table and wrote something, and tore it out, and folded it.

Harold handed him a plain white envelope off the table, the kind they use for purses.

Butch took the envelope in one big hand and put the check inside it. Then he stood there a second with the low sun behind him and the dust still hanging over the track and the sled sitting quiet at the far end, and the grandstand emptying out behind him.