The Night the School Gym Opened

What the dispatchers did

I did not know this part until later.

On the second afternoon, the drivers started calling their companies. They had signal again, because the school’s Wi-Fi was good and the gym had the best cell reception in town. Forty drivers on forty phones, calling dispatchers in six states.

They told them where they were. They told them what had happened at the truck stop.

I found out afterward that Otis Bergeron’s company is a regional carrier out of Little Rock, and that his dispatcher called three other carriers she knew, and that those carriers each called the truck stop’s corporate office, since they all bought fuel there on account.

By Wednesday morning, according to Mark, who heard it from the county’s fuel supplier, the owner’s phone had received calls from nine fleet managers.

They weren’t angry calls. That’s what I heard. They were quiet and exact. They said: your manager shut off your pumps on our driver at twenty below with the interstate closed, and we’d like to know whether we should keep buying fuel from you.

Mr. Ketterman drove down from Minnesota that Wednesday afternoon, as soon as the road opened. I wasn’t there, but I heard what happened from three people, and the stories matched.

He walked into the truck stop at exit 212 and asked for Dwight. Dwight came out of the back with his hands in his pockets.

They talked for about four minutes with the office door closed. When Dwight came out, he had his keys in his hand and his coat over his arm.

He set the keys on the counter. He walked out through the lot to his pickup. He did not look at the two night girls who had come in to take back their shifts.

That is the consequence. Not a lawyer. Not a courtroom. A man who owned six truck stops heard it from nine fleet managers, looked at the number of fuel gallons he had lost in one week and the number he stood to lose, and made one decision.

I did not call it justice. I’m not sure I would. A man lost his job in January, in a county where work was never easy to find. His mortgage didn’t care that he had been afraid.

But I didn’t call anybody to tell them it was done, either. I didn’t tell Dwight I was sorry, and I didn’t tell him I wasn’t.