The Beet Truck Nobody Else Would Drive

The truck sat outside under the yard light with frost on the windshield, a white Kenworth tractor and its hopper trailer, nine years of Ben’s coffee rings on the dash.

I was on the cab step, scraping the glass with the edge of a credit card, when headlights swung across the gravel.

Shane’s pickup. He parked crooked and got out slowly. He had a gas station coffee in one hand and he looked tired in a way that surprised me.

He was forty, a head taller than his brother, with a farmer’s tan that stopped at his collar.

For a second he just looked at me, standing up on the step with my thermos and my braid. “What are you doing, Stephanie?”

“Fourteen loads,” I said. “Clarence’s got the slot open.” “That’s not your truck.” “No,” I said. “It’s Ben’s. And I’m the one who’s here.”

Behind him two of his other drivers had come out of the shop, Hank Olson and a kid named Brayden who had been driving for Shane two years.

They had stopped halfway across the yard with their thermoses, not pretending anymore that they weren’t listening.

Shane looked at them. Then he looked at me, and he opened his mouth. “You won’t make it through the first night,” he said.

He did not say it cruelly. That was what I remember. He said it like a man predicting weather.

“Twelve hours. In the dark. It’s not the driving, it’s the waiting.

You sit in line for forty minutes at a time with the heater going, and you fall asleep, and you wake up with a truck full of beets and nobody behind you with the patience to honk.

I’ve seen grown men quit at three in the morning. I’m not putting you in that.” “You didn’t ask me.”

“I don’t have to ask you. It’s my contract.” “It’s your contract,” I said.

“And it has a slot called Unit 7 that was empty for a day and a half. You’re three loads short a day. Clarence Hegg told me.”

His face changed. “Clarence told you.” “He told me the ticket doesn’t care whose hands are on the wheel as long as they can drive.

I can drive, Shane. I’ve driven a loaded grain truck since I was nineteen. You’ve eaten at my table. You know I can drive.”

“That’s not the point.” “What’s the point?” He did not have one. I watched him look for it. Hank Olson shifted his weight in the gravel.

“Shane,” he said quietly. “Let her go.” “Hank.” “I’m telling you. I’ve hauled for you eleven years. Your quota’s short.

That truck’s been sitting. Clarence called me an hour ago and told me to tell you the same thing. Let her go.”

Shane stood there with his coffee. After what felt like a long time, Shane took one step to the side.

“One shift,” he said. “Fourteen loads,” I said. He looked at me for another second. Then he walked into the shop and shut the door.

I climbed into the cab and turned the key. The engine caught with a roar that I felt in my teeth.

In the visor mirror, in the little light from the dash, I saw my own face, and I did not look like someone who was going to quit.

Here is what nobody tells you about hauling beets. It is not the driving. Shane was right about that much.