The Day I Towed My Son’s Truck Home

Boyd

I called Boyd next. He was forty miles west on Highway 68 toward Cadiz with the wrecker, pulling a farmer’s stock trailer out of a ditch where it had slid off on the shoulder. I could hear calves bawling behind him.

“Lonnie hooked Cale’s truck,” I said, and I told him the rest.

Boyd did not say anything for a while. Then he said, “Did he drop the driveshaft or did he use dollies?”

“Dropped the shaft. Charging one fifty for it.”

“Course he did.” I heard a chain rattle. “Shay, I can’t leave this man. He’s got eleven head in this trailer and the axle’s sitting on the bank. I’m three hours, maybe four.”

“I know. I’m not asking you to come.”

“Take the rollback,” he said. “Take the rate sheet from city hall, the printed one, not your phone. Take the title and the boy’s license. Pay him one twenty five and count it out loud so his drivers hear it.”

“And the shaft?”

“Don’t try to put it back in his lot. He’ll say you’re doing repair work on his property and call it a liability. Winch it up and bring it home. I’ll bolt it in when I get there. Four bolts on the rear straps and it slides in the front. Fifteen minutes.”

“All right.”

“Shay.” His voice dropped down. “Don’t let him get you hot. That’s what he wants.”

“He won’t,” I said. And I meant it.

City Hall

City hall in our town is a brick building with a flag out front and two parking spaces.

Noreen has been the city clerk since before I could drive. She looked up from her computer when I came in and took one look at my face.

“Lonnie,” she said. Not a question.

“I need a printed copy of the impound rate sheet,” I said. “The one that’s posted.”

She did not ask me anything else. She went to the cabinet, pulled out a folder, and ran me a copy on the old machine in the corner.

Then she stamped it with the date, which she did not have to do, and handed it across the counter.

“He’s supposed to have this same sheet posted on his office window,” she said. “It’s in his contract with the town. Rates have to be visible to the public at the place of release.”

“I know,” I said. “I’ve seen it there. It’s been there so long it’s gone yellow.”

Noreen pressed her lips together. “Your daddy used to bring me a sack of peanuts from the feed store every Christmas,” she said. “In a paper sack, with the top folded over twice. Tell that boy I said he’s going to be all right.”

I went to the bank on the square and took out one hundred twenty five dollars in the exact bills I wanted. One hundred dollar bill.

One twenty. One five. I did not want change. I did not want anything left on that counter that could be argued about.

The Rollback

Our rollback is a white Ford F-550 with a twenty one foot aluminum bed and a ten thousand pound winch. Boyd bought it used out of Clarksville six years ago and put a new hydraulic pump in it himself.

I have driven it on probably two thousand calls. I can load a car on it in the dark in the rain, and I have.

I pulled out of our gravel drive at 11:30. It was a bright, cold morning warming up fast, the kind of early November day in the Pennyrile when the frost is gone off the fields by ten and the sky is so blue it looks painted.

The soybeans were all cut. The corn was mostly in. The tobacco barns along the road were full and smelled like curing leaf when you passed with the window down.

I drove the six miles into town at the speed limit with both hands on the wheel.

At 11:55 I called Cale. “When’s your lunch?”

“Twelve,” he said. “I get forty five minutes.”

“Walk across the road at twelve and meet me at Lonnie’s gate. Bring your license. Don’t say anything to anybody. You stand behind me and you let me talk.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And Cale. Clock out first. Do it right.”