The Logbook at the Elevator Scale

Pam was at the computer.

She looked at me once, and then she didn’t look at anything but her screen.

I laid the papers out the way I had practiced at the kitchen table. First the logbook printout, every page of June, with the yellow and green marks down the side. It made a stack almost an inch thick.

Next to it I laid Josh’s four settlement sheets. He had handed me the last one through his pickup window that morning: 898 miles, less seventeen hundred ninety-six.

I had circled the empty miles on every one in red pen.

Beside those I laid the copies of Josh’s invoices to the elevator. One hundred seventy-five loads through the night before, every one billed to Frank, every one paid.

Frank set down his ticket. He read the settlement sheets one at a time. Then he picked up the invoices. Then he looked at me over his glasses.

“Two dollars a mile,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“For thirty-one hundred miles.”

“Yes, sir. Six thousand two hundred dollars.”

Out the window, the truck on the scale had pulled ahead to the pit. The next one was supposed to come on. It didn’t. The whole line had stopped.

Josh’s voice came over the radio on the shelf above the window. “Truck seven, why aren’t you rolling? Seven, I’ve got a field that needs a truck.”

Nobody answered him.

Frank reached under the counter into the long drawer where he keeps his carbon copies.

He pulled out his own scale tickets for the season, sorted by truck and tied with rubber bands. He found truck seven and slid the band off.

He took the first ticket off the top and laid it beside the first line of my logbook. He looked at the ticket, then the yellow mark, and he read the time out loud.

“Ten fifty-two in,” he said. “Ten fifty-two on the logbook, stopped at the elevator.”

He laid down the second ticket. “Eleven forty-one in. Eleven forty-one on the logbook.”

He laid down the third.

I won’t tell every one. It took Frank almost forty minutes. He read every time out loud in the same flat voice, like a man calling bingo at a fire hall.

Somewhere around ticket thirty, Mike Regier came in the scale house door. He took off his cap and stood behind me without a word. Then the two young drivers came in and stood behind him.

Then a farmer came in, waiting on the ticket for his own load. Then another one. By the time Frank got to the end, there were eight or nine people standing quiet against those walls.

Frank set down the last ticket. He took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, put them back on.

Then he took the highlighter right out of my hand and added up the green marks on the last page himself.

“Thirty-nine hundred and seventeen miles,” he said. “That’s every mile the truck went. Elevator to field, field to elevator. Not one mile anywhere else.”

“One hundred seventy-five loads,” he said. “Every one crossed my scale with her truck on it, and every one is a ticket in my drawer. And the hundred and seventy-sixth is sitting out there on her trailer.”

He tapped the settlement sheets. “There’s no thirty-one hundred empty miles in here anywhere. The truck didn’t have them in it.”