“Good,” I said. “They stay in.” The rear door would have swung down into the slope, and a horse backing out of a leaning trailer onto ice is a horse with a broken leg.
The safest place for them was where they were, as long as we got the floor level.
I went back up to the shoulder. I swung the wrecker across both lanes of 59 at a slant, so my boom pointed down at the trailer and my rear end was solid on the shoulder gravel.
There was nobody coming either way. On ice mornings, nobody drives 59 unless they have to.
My wrecker is not new. It’s an old tandem-axle heavy with a thirty-five-ton boom and two planetary winches, each spooled with two hundred feet of five-eighths wire rope.
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I keep it clean, I keep it greased, and I know every sound it makes.
I put the outriggers down first, and then the rear spade. On ice, outriggers want to skate, so I threw a bucket of chicken grit under each pad before I let the weight on them.
My dad used to carry kitty litter. I carry chicken grit, because it’s cheaper and it bites better.
The truck settled and stopped moving. I checked it twice. Then I went down into the ditch with a chain bag over one shoulder and a pile of round slings over the other, and that was when Tiffany came down the slope after me.
Tiffany in the ditch
“I can wait for somebody else,” she said again, but it came out different this time. Quieter. Like she was saying it because she’d said it once and couldn’t figure out how to stop.
“They can’t,” I said, and I nodded at the trailer. Inside, a hoof slid on the floor mat with a long scraping sound, and the gelding grunted, and she flinched like somebody had slapped her.
“What do you need?” she asked.
“I need to know which horse is which,” I said. “And I need you to stay up on the shoulder once I start pulling. If a line lets go, I don’t want you anywhere near it.”
She swallowed. “The palomino’s on the low side. Front stall. Then my mare. Then the big gelding, he’s Marlys’s, I was hauling him for her. The sorrel in the back is a young one I’m starting.”
Her voice cracked on the word palomino. That was the first time I’d heard her sound like a person instead of a joke she was telling at my expense.
I didn’t say anything about it. I just nodded and went to work.