The Day I Towed My Son’s Truck Home

The Winch

I backed the rollback down the row between the cars until the end of the bed was about ten feet off the Silverado’s front bumper.

Then I set the brake, put it in neutral, and engaged the power takeoff, which runs the hydraulic pump off the transmission.

The controls on our rollback sit on the driver’s side rail, down by the rear wheel, so I can stand beside the load and watch it. A row of levers with a little plate over each one.

Tilt the bed. Slide the bed. Winch out. Winch in. I have run them so many times my hands know them like a piano player knows a hymn.

I tilted the bed up and slid it back until the tail of it touched the gravel. It makes a sound like a big door opening slow, the aluminum scraping, the hydraulics whining low.

Then I pulled the winch lever and paid out cable and walked the hook down to the front of the truck.

I hooked it right. I did not hurry, because Lonnie was standing in his office doorway, and his drivers were standing at the fence now, and Cale was standing just behind me, and I was not going to give one of them anything to talk about at the coffee shop except that Shay Rennick knows how to load a truck.

A chain bridle to the frame, both sides, J hooks on the frame rails, not the bumper and not the tie rods.

The truck was in park with the shaft out, so the rear wheels would roll free. I checked the steering wheel through the window. Locked straight. Good enough.

Then I went back to the controls and pulled the winch lever toward me, and the cable went tight.

That Silverado weighs about forty seven hundred pounds, and a ten thousand pound winch takes it up a tilted bed like a man pulling a wagon. It came slow and steady.

The front wheels caught the end of the bed and climbed. The cable sang a little, the way it does. The maroon hood came up the bed toward me in the bright noon light.

I kept my eyes on that truck the whole way. I did not look at the doorway, and I did not look at the fence.

Cale stood right behind my shoulder with his hands in his pockets, and he did not say a word, and I could feel him there like you can feel the sun.

When the front tires hit the stops I eased off, slid the bed forward, and leveled it.

Then I climbed up and chained it down at four corners, chains hooked to the frame and binders cinched tight, and I set a strap over the driveshaft in the bed so it would not walk.

When I came down off the bed, one of Lonnie’s drivers, the one I went to school with, was standing by my back wheel.

He had kicked a loose wheel chock out of my path where somebody had left it lying in the gravel. He did not say anything. He just nodded at me once and went back to the fence.

Lonnie

Lonnie came down the steps of the trailer when I was pulling my gloves back on. He walked across the gravel and stopped about six feet from me.

He is a big man, Lonnie, heavier than he used to be, with his mother’s eyes. He had his hands on his hips. I braced myself for whatever was coming, and then it did not come the way I expected.

“Your daddy always took your side,” he said.

I looked at him. He was not shouting. He was not even angry, now that it was done. He looked tired.

“Daddy took your side plenty,” I said. “He co-signed your first truck. He drove to Nashville at two in the morning to get you when you broke down on I-24. He put your name on the church prayer list every Sunday when you had your back surgery, and it stayed there for a year.”

Lonnie looked away, out past the fence toward the feed store.

“You’re mad at Boyd,” I said. “Be mad at Boyd. Go talk to him. He’ll sit on the tailgate with you and talk till dark. But you leave my boy out of it. He did nothing to you. He hung his grandpa’s cap in that truck, Lonnie. Daddy’s cap. The man who raised you.”

Something in his jaw went tight. He did not answer me.

“Your mother sets you a plate every Sunday,” I said. “She’s set it since May. Nobody sits in it.”

Then I turned and walked to the cab, because I had said everything I came to say, and the rest was up to him.