The Propane Route My Cousin Locked Up

Inga’s plant sat back off Highway 11, a few miles west of International Falls, close enough to the Rainy River that you could smell it.

Her grandson was waiting by the loading riser in insulated coveralls.

Inga herself came out of the office before I had the brakes set.

She was small and straight-backed with white hair cut short, and she wore a man’s barn coat and a pair of rubber boots.

She went straight to Einar’s door and opened it and stood there looking at him.

“You got old,” she said.

“You didn’t,” said Einar, and she laughed, and for a moment they were two people I did not know at all, two young drivers in a yard somewhere in 1974 with their whole lives in front of them.

Her grandson knew his business. He chocked my wheels, hooked the liquid hose and the vapor hose to my truck, opened the valves, and started the pump.

I stood with him at the meter and watched the numbers roll, and listened to the familiar sound of the load going in.

You do not fill a bobtail to the top. Propane swells when it warms, so you fill it to about eighty-five percent and leave room.

On my tank, that comes to about 2,700 gallons. The fixed gauge on the side spits white vapor when you get there, and you shut it down.

While the meter ran, Inga took Einar into the office to sit by the stove, and I stood in the yard with her grandson and tried to do the math in my head.

Twenty-six tanks, most of them 500 gallons, most of them sitting somewhere between ten and twenty percent.

To fill every one of those tanks to eighty percent would take more than three loads, and three round trips of 140 miles each, and three days I did not have.

So I made a plan, the way Grandpa would have made a plan.

I would put about two hundred gallons in each tank. That would bring a 500-gallon farm tank from fifteen percent up to about fifty-five, which on an Iron Range farm in November is three or four weeks of heat, even with a cold snap.

That was enough to get everybody past Saturday and past whatever Knute did next.

That came to two loads. One today, one tomorrow, and the last few stops Friday morning.

When the fixed gauge spit, the grandson shut the valves and unhooked my hoses and the meter printed my ticket.

He tore it off and did not hand it to me. He walked it into the office instead, and a minute later Einar came out of the office door holding it.

He came across that frozen gravel with his bad knees, slow and careful, holding the ticket out in front of him in his bare hand like it was something that might blow away.

When he got to me, he put it in my glove and closed my fingers over it.

I looked at it. It was 2,710 gallons at $1.85 a gallon, which came to $5,013.50. I knew what wholesale was running that week at the bigger terminals.

That was not a profit price. That was what it cost Inga to put it in her own tank.

Underneath the total, in blue ballpoint, in a woman’s careful old-fashioned cursive, it said: Run it on your card today.

Tomorrow’s load goes on account. Pay when they pay you. And under that, just the letter I.

“She says Grandpa did the same for her in 1979,” Einar said.