The Truck
I should tell you about the truck, because the truck matters. It was a 1976 Ford half-ton, regular cab, with 212,000 miles on the odometer and a bench seat with a blanket over the worst of the tears.
An old farmer named Cletus had it sitting behind his machine shed for four years after his eyes got too bad to drive.
He had used it to haul feed and fence posts and grandkids, and it showed every bit of that life.
Ethan found it on his own. He had been mowing lawns for two summers, eleven yards a week around town, with a push mower and then a used rider he bought with his first summer’s money. He saved almost every dollar of it.
When he asked me to drive him out to look at Cletus’s truck, I figured it would be a parts truck and a lesson.
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I figured we would kick the tires, and I would show him the frame and the rust, and we would go home and keep looking.
But that old truck started on the second try. The engine was dry and tight, no knocks, no smoke out the back once it warmed up.
The clutch was good. The transmission went through all four gears without a grind.
The body was the bad part. The cab corners behind the doors were rusted through, both of them, the way every one of those trucks rusts.
The rocker panels under the doors were gone too, and the brake lines underneath were scaly and soft.
Cletus wanted a thousand. Ethan offered seven hundred, and I stood back and let him do it.
They settled on eight hundred, and my son counted it out on the hood in mostly twenties while the old man watched him and grinned.
“You take care of her,” Cletus said, and he shook Ethan’s hand like a grown man’s. “She took care of me a long time.”
Ethan had gotten his learner’s permit in the spring, right after he turned 15.
In Nebraska that means he can drive anywhere as long as a licensed driver 21 or older is sitting beside him in the front seat.