The Eight Tires I Took Back

I didn’t know that. Lyle had never told me.

“You can mail my last check,” Arlo said. “I’m done.”

Royce opened his mouth, and then he closed it again. He looked at Thad in the shop door, and Thad looked back at him and didn’t say a thing.

Royce looked at the bald tires on his truck two, and at the paint marker on the rim.

“Arlo,” he said finally. “The calves go Monday.”

“I know it,” Arlo said. “I’m sorry for the ranchers. I’m not sorry for this.”

He picked up my wheel chocks, all four, and carried them to the flatbed. He loaded the dolly.

He helped me lift the floor jack up the ramp, and then he coiled the air hose the right way, over and under, so it wouldn’t kink, and tied it off.

I did one more thing before I left. I tore a clean page out of the back of my ledger and wrote eight codes on it, Royce’s codes, the eight bald tires now back on his truck, and their positions. I walked it over and handed it to him.

“So you know which ones are yours,” I said. “In case you ever need to prove it.”

I didn’t say it mean. I meant it plain. He took the paper. His hand wasn’t steady either.

Then I said the last thing I had to say to him that morning.

“Your mother’s expecting all of us on Thanksgiving,” I said. “Lyle and I will be there. You come too. You owe him a sentence, Royce, and he’s going to be sitting right there waiting for it.”

I drove the Kenworth home first at forty miles an hour on her own rubber, and I swear that truck sat different on the road.

Then Arlo gave me a ride back for the flatbed in his own little pickup, without my asking, and neither of us said much on those two miles.

At the turn into Royce’s lot, he said, “Mrs. Ostrander, is Lyle hiring?”

I said, “I’d guess he might be. You’d have to ask him.”

I called Lyle from the yard like I’d promised. He was sitting in the elevator line in the daycab.

I told him it was done, all eight, every code matched, and every nut was four seventy-five.

He didn’t say anything for a while. I could hear the grain dryer roaring behind him and the radio going.

Then he said, “You found the page.”

“I found the page,” I said.

“I wasn’t going to show you that,” he said, and I could hear him smiling, embarrassed, the way he gets.

“I know you weren’t,” I said. “That’s why it got me.”

When he came home that evening, with the last of the light going, he walked straight past me into the yard and went around the Kenworth checking every nut with the wrench himself.

I didn’t mind. I would have done the same. Then he came in and sat down and ate supper and held my hand under the table like we were sixteen.

Sunday morning we went to church. Mother sat between us. During the prayers for the community, the pastor prayed for the ranchers shipping calves and the men hauling them, and I prayed for Royce. I didn’t want to. I did it anyway.

Monday morning, Royce’s truck two did not go anywhere. Royce couldn’t run it on those tires, and he couldn’t find a driver on a Saturday night in the Sandhills in the middle of shipping season.