The Logbook at the Elevator Scale

The trucks in our outfit all carry an electronic logbook, a little screen on the dash wired to the engine.

It records when the truck moves, how far, where it is by satellite, and what the odometer reads every time the engine starts.

Outside of harvest, when we haul to the terminals or down into Oklahoma, the law says it has to run.

During harvest, hauling grain from the field inside a hundred and fifty air miles, a farm hauler is exempt.

Most of our drivers switch theirs to exempt in June and leave it there until July. I never did. It isn’t because I am better than the men I drive with.

The first summer I ever hauled, a man ran a stop sign in front of me, and I spent four months proving where I was. After that, I kept a record of everything.

Josh used to tease me about it. “You’re the only driver in Kansas who logs on purpose,” he said once, back when he still said things like that with a grin.

Caden rode with me all that harvest. School had let out in May, he was too young for a job of his own, and he had decided without anybody asking him that he was going to be my helper.

He was all elbows and knees and he ate like a combine. The first day he brought a spiral notebook with a green cover, and he set it on the dash.

Every time Pam handed me a ticket, he made a tally mark. Five to a bundle, four straight and one across. He did not tell me why, and I did not ask.

He also learned his father was saying things about his mother, though I did not know that yet.

The first settlement sheet came at the end of the first week. Thirty-eight loads at sixty dollars, which was right. Then: unauthorized empty miles, 412, at two dollars a mile, less eight hundred twenty-four.

I walked it into Josh’s office and set it on his desk. “What is this?”

He didn’t look up from his computer. “Fuel isn’t free, Shannon. You run my truck around the county empty, you pay for it. Same rate I charge a farmer.”

“I haven’t run your truck anywhere but the field and the elevator.”

“The truck says different,” he said.

“Then show me what the truck says.”

He looked up then. “I don’t have to show you anything. I’m the dispatcher. I know where my trucks are.”

I went out and looked at the logbook screen in my cab. There was not one mile on it that was not a road between a field and Frank’s scale.

I thought maybe it was a mistake, and he would fix it.

The second week it was 690 miles, less thirteen hundred eighty. The third week, the rain day, it was 1,100 miles, less twenty-two hundred. In three weeks I hauled one hundred thirty-eight loads, and Josh took back $4,404.

The house was paid for, but the electric bill was not, and neither was Caden’s dentist, who had told me twice that the back tooth would not wait until fall.

And then there was the other thing, the thing that hurt more than the money. Somewhere in that second week, the men I drove with stopped talking to me.

Mike Regier has driven beside me for nine years. He is fifty-two, with a gray mustache he has had since high school.