The Eight Tires I Took Back

That was when Royce came out with his coffee cup.

“Darla,” he said again. “What in the world are you doing?”

“Taking my tires home,” I said. It was the only thing I said to him for a good while.

I spun off the first ten nuts on his left rear hub.

Those are hub-piloted wheels, ten flange nuts on ten studs, and both the inside and outside dual come off together once the nuts are off. You just slide them off one at a time.

I worked the outside wheel loose with a bar and rolled it onto the dolly. A drive tire mounted on a steel wheel weighs well over a hundred pounds.

You don’t lift it. You roll it and you lever it and you let the dolly carry it. That’s the whole trick.

When I had it stood up against the dolly, I knelt down, opened my ledger on top of the tread, found the line, and read the code off the sidewall out loud.

I read every character. The letters, the plant code, the size code, the four numbers at the end. Three six two six. Week thirty-six of this year.

Then I read the line in my ledger, every character, the same way.

They matched.

Royce stood there with his cup. Behind him, in the shop door, two men had come out to see.

One was Thad, who has done Royce’s mechanic work for twenty years and is near sixty-five now, a quiet man in a seed cap. The other was Arlo Penner.

Arlo is twenty-four. He drives Royce’s truck two, the one I was standing beside.

He’s a tall, quiet kid from a family out past Halsey, the kind who calls women ma’am and means it. I had known him since he was in 4-H.

He stood in that doorway with his hands in his jacket pockets, and he looked at the tire, and then he looked at the ground.

I didn’t know it yet, but Arlo had been in the passenger seat of Royce’s pickup on Thursday when they pulled into our yard.

He had held the dolly. He had been sick about it for two days and had not said one word to anyone.

“Darla,” Royce said. “Come on, now. Let’s talk about this.”

“Second tire,” I said, and slid the inside dual off his hub.

I read it out loud. It matched. I read it again from the ledger so there wouldn’t be any question. It matched.

Then I stood up, left his hub bare for the moment, and went to the Kenworth with the jack.

I set the jack under our left rear axle, pumped it up, and spun off our ten nuts.

Royce’s two bald tires came off our hub, and I rolled them across the gravel one at a time, fifteen feet, and stood them against his truck.

The inside one had his paint marker on the rim. R2, LR. I didn’t say anything about it. I didn’t have to. Anybody standing there could read it.

Then I rolled my two good tires over and hung them back on our hub, inside dual first, then outside, lined up the holes, started all ten nuts by hand, and ran them down with the impact.

Then I went back to his truck and hung his two bald ones on his hub, the same way.

I am not a thief, and I was not going to leave a man’s truck sitting on a bare hub in his own yard, even that man.