The Beet Truck Nobody Else Would Drive

The board at the piler is a big whiteboard bolted to the side of the scale house, with every truck’s number down the left side and a row of tally marks for every load across the day.

Clarence kept it with a green marker and he never skipped a mark.

Shane’s trucks ran eleven to thirteen loads a shift that fall. They were good drivers, and the fields were far and the lines were long.

But on that board, Unit 7 had fourteen marks every single day, in a neat green row, and anybody who knew what they were looking at could see it from forty feet.

On the ninth day it sleeted. It came in at two in the morning, a thin cold slant of it, and it turned the field roads to black glass.

Half the trucks pulled over. The rest crept along at ten miles an hour with their flashers going.

I took the long way around by the section road with the hard gravel base, which added eleven minutes a load, and I made my fourteen anyway by not parking until twenty past five.

At the scale that afternoon I felt something wrong under me, a soft pull when I braked. I told Clarence.

He sent a mechanic out from the shop at the piler, a young man with a flashlight, and the mechanic slid under the trailer and came back out looking uncomfortable.

“Brake line’s weeping at the coupling,” he said. “Somebody already put a new clamp on it, but it’s an old line. It won’t last the week. You want me to log it?”

“Who put the clamp on?” “Dunno.” He shrugged. “It’s fresh. Somebody did it last night, I’d say. Maybe midnight.” Clarence looked at me. I looked at Clarence.

“Shane’s shop keeps a key to Unit 7,” Clarence said carefully. I did not say anything.

I thought about a tall man alone in a dark yard with a wrench and a flashlight, fixing a truck he had taken from his brother and given away, and I could not make the picture hold still.

I asked the mechanic to replace the line, and he did, and I was back on the road in twenty minutes.

The next morning at the scale, Shane’s pickup pulled alongside my window. He did not roll his down.

I saw his face through the glass, unshaven, gray under the eyes. He lifted two fingers off the steering wheel, a small gesture, one trucker to another.

I lifted two fingers back. That was all. He drove on. But something had shifted in the exchange of that small, sorry, wordless signal, and I felt it in the middle of my chest like a stone being turned over.

I told Ben that night. “He fixed the brake line?” Ben said. “At midnight.” “He didn’t say anything?” “He lifted two fingers.”

My husband sat for a while with the cast on the table in front of him. Outside, the first real wind of the season was blowing through the dead corn stalks along the road.

“When we were boys,” he said, “Shane used to get the way he got that morning. Scared. He’d hide something, or break something, or blame somebody.

And then later he’d fix whatever it was in the middle of the night and never say a word.