The Eight Tires I Took Back

She goes three days a week, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday on this schedule, and Thursday is my day to drive her. My brother takes the other two.

It is sixty-some miles each way. I sit in the waiting room with my ledger and do the ranch books while the machine does its work.

Mother is seventy-six and does not like to be fussed over, so I fuss quietly.

Lyle was gone that same day. We had kept our old daycab, a tired white Freightliner with a grain hopper, for local harvest work, and he had promised a neighbor he would haul corn from the neighbor’s bins to the elevator.

So the new Kenworth sat in our yard from seven in the morning until after dark with nobody home.

The keys were with Lyle. But you don’t need keys to jack up a truck and spin off wheels.

When I got home that evening, nothing looked any different. The Kenworth was right where Lyle had parked it, nose to the windbreak.

I had no reason to walk around it and look at the tires. Who looks at new tires?

Friday morning Lyle was up at four. He hooked the hopper, went around the truck with his flashlight, thumped every tire with his tire bat for air, checked his lights, and pulled out by five with a load of corn for Ogallala.

He told me later he never put the light on the tread. “They were new tires, Darla,” he said. “I knew they were new. We had them put on a week ago. A man doesn’t check new tires for tread.”

That is the honest truth of it, and he has been hard on himself about it since.

I tell him a man should be able to trust his own yard. That should not be something a person has to learn at forty-seven.

Royce had been clever about it, if you want to call it clever.

He had put his four best worn tires on the outside duals, where a man would see them first, and his four worst on the inside duals, where they were tucked behind and hard to see.

The outsides were worn but had tread. In the dark, with a flashlight, they would have looked a little rough, nothing more. The insides were down to nothing.

Lyle unloaded at the feedyard about eight and swung into the truck stop at Ogallala to fuel.

He said the truck had felt a little light in the rear on the interstate, a little wander he couldn’t explain, and it bothered him.

So while the pump ran, he got down on the concrete on his back and slid under to look at the inside duals.

He called me at 8:52 in the morning. I know because I wrote it down.

“Darla,” he said, and his voice was strange and flat. “These aren’t our tires.”

I was standing in the kitchen with the dish towel in my hand. I said, “What do you mean they aren’t our tires,” and he said, “I mean these aren’t our tires. I’m looking at cords on the inside duals. Steel showing.”

I sat down right there on the kitchen floor. I didn’t mean to. My legs just did it.

He had driven fifty-some miles of the interstate that morning with a full load, about eighty thousand pounds gross, on inside drive tires with the steel belts coming through.

If one of those had let go at sixty-five with the trailer loaded, I don’t like to think about it. I still don’t.