The Eight Tires I Took Back

He must have sat at the kitchen table with my book open and his pencil and thought about nineteen years of another man’s tires.

I had to stop. I put my glove flat on that page and held still and looked at the tread for a while, those crisp black grooves, and I could not have read a code out loud right then if you’d paid me.

When I looked up, Arlo had come out of the shop door. He was standing about ten feet away, and he was looking at the ledger, at the pencil writing.

He could read it from where he stood. I saw his face change.

I wiped my nose on my sleeve and read the fifth code. It matched.

“Sixth tire,” I said.

It matched.

After that, nobody in that lot was talking at all. Not Royce. Not Thad in the doorway.

The compressor ran and cut out and ran again, and the impact gun rattled, and a meadowlark that should have been gone south weeks ago sang somewhere off in the grass.

By the last two hubs, my arms were shaking. I’m forty-four, and I’m strong for a bookkeeper, but sixteen wheels at that weight apiece is real work for anybody, and I had already run the long torque wrench on six hubs.

Lyle’s torque wrench is a one-inch drive with a handle near four feet long. You set it at four seventy-five and you pull in a star pattern, across the hub, until it clicks.

On the first six hubs I had been putting my whole weight on it, both hands and a knee braced on the tire.

I was setting up on the seventh hub, the Kenworth’s left front drive, when Arlo took his hands out of his pockets.

He walked over across the gravel. He didn’t ask Royce. He didn’t look at Royce. He knelt down beside me and held out his hand for the wrench.

“Four seventy-five?” he said.

“Four seventy-five,” I said, and gave it to him.

He leaned on that wrench until it clicked. Then he moved it across the hub to the opposite nut and leaned again.

Star pattern, all ten, the way you’re supposed to. I called out the nuts and he pulled them.

Then he did the same on the last hub. I hung the wheels and ran them down with the impact, and he came behind me with the wrench. Twenty nuts. Twenty clicks. Not one of them hurried.

Royce watched every single one. He never moved off that edge of the gravel. His coffee had to have gone cold an hour before, but he still had the cup in his hand.

When the last nut clicked, Arlo stood up and laid the long wrench across the top of the last tire, careful, so it wouldn’t fall in the gravel.

He wiped his hands on his jeans. Then he turned around to face Royce.

“Royce,” he said. “I need to tell you something.”

Royce looked at him. I think he knew. I think everybody there knew.

“I held the dolly Thursday,” Arlo said. His voice wasn’t loud. Out there in the cold, it carried anyway. “In their yard. I held the dolly while you put those tires on Lyle’s truck, and I told myself it wasn’t my business, and I’ve been sick about it since.”

He swallowed.

“I’m not driving truck two on those tires,” he said. “They’re not legal and you know it. And I’m not driving for a man who’d put Lyle on them. Not Lyle. He gave me my first ride in a semi when I was eleven years old.”