The Propane Route My Cousin Locked Up

He taught me to drive the bobtail when I was twenty-five. He taught me which dogs bite and which ones only talk about it.

He also taught me something I had nearly forgotten until that morning.

Back in the seventies, when Grandpa only had one truck and too many customers, Einar and a woman named Inga ran the route together, one truck in the morning and one in the afternoon.

Inga left to marry a man up near International Falls, and the two of them built their own little plant up there on the highway.

Her husband had passed. Inga still ran it at eighty, with her grandson driving and her doing the books in an office that smelled like woodsmoke.

“Marit,” he said. “What’s wrong with the truck.”

“Nothing’s wrong with the truck,” I said, and I told him about the chain.

I told him about the twenty-six tanks and the freeze and the man from Duluth coming on Saturday.

Einar did not say anything bad about Knute.

He just breathed for a while on the other end of the line.

“You got your card on you,” he said finally.

“I have a card,” I said. “It has a twelve-thousand-dollar limit and I’ve never used more than four hundred of it.”

“Then go home, eat something, and get back in that truck,” he said.

“I’m going to call Inga. Don’t leave till I call you back. And Marit, pick me up on your way through Cook. I’m coming with you.”

“Einar, you can’t ride seventy miles each way in that cab with your knees.”

“I rode four hundred thousand miles in that cab with these knees,” he said. “Pick me up.”

He called me back in twenty minutes. Inga would be at her plant at nine. She would have the riser open and the meter ready.

She did not say what she would charge me, and Einar did not say, and I was too tired and too grateful to ask.

I picked Einar up at his little house on the river in Cook at a quarter to eight.

He was waiting on the step in his old wool coat and a cap with ear flaps, holding a paper sack of sandwiches and a second thermos.

It took him three tries to get up into the cab. I did not help him, because I knew better.

“Seventy miles,” he said. “Same as it was in 1974. Let’s go.”

Highway 53 was dry, the ditches full of brown cattails and the first skim of ice, and the birches had dropped every last leaf.

What was hard was knowing what you are driving away from. I kept thinking about the names in the route book.

The young couple on the Angora road with the new baby. The widow at the lake place, who is ninety-one and keeps her thermostat at seventy-four because her blood is thin.

And the Lindahl place, the last farm on the north loop, where Tove Lindahl lives with her three kids and a husband who works away on a pipeline crew in North Dakota three weeks out of four. Their tank had been at twelve percent on Monday.

“Tove’s down to twelve,” I said, out of nowhere, somewhere past Orr.

“I know,” said Einar. “You told me twice already. We’ll get her.”

He poured me coffee out of his thermos into the lid and held it while I drove, the way he used to when I was learning, so I could take a sip at the straight stretches.