“You don’t have a truck,” I told him.
“You will,” he said. “Fourteen’s yours. Keep it.”
I did. I got my commercial license at twenty four and drove Wayne’s number 2 for eight years. In 2011 I bought a used 1999 tandem near Osakis, red, high hours and honest.
The first thing I did was have Wayne put 14 on her in the system. She has no name on her doors. Everybody in the county knew whose she was.
Deb says I love that truck more than most people. Deb is my wife. She’s 46, she keeps books for three farms out of our kitchen, and she is the smartest person I know.
Wayne died two years ago in March, of his heart, with his boots on. My mother had passed four years before. Brent came home for the funeral and stayed, because the pit was his now.
So, as it turned out, was the debt. I knew Wayne had bought a bigger loader the year before he died. I didn’t know he’d put the whole place up against a note to do it.
What I did know was that Brent wanted to run the pit like a business. He put a new computer in the scale house and started wearing a clean black jacket.
He built a new house on the hill above the township road, two stories, with a three car garage. You could see it from almost anywhere in the north half of the township.
I kept hauling. Farmers, the county when they needed extra trucks, a couple of contractors out of town. And in May, Brent called me about the township.
Our township has about sixty miles of gravel road and a road foreman named Roy Engstrom. Roy is 64, with a white mustache, and he can look at a road and tell you where it’s going to wash.
That spring the town board voted to regravel the whole north half. They wanted Class 5, about four inches, spread and bladed before the fall rains.
It came to roughly twelve hundred loads. The township bought the rock itself from the pit by the ton, on its own bill. The hauling was a second line, paid by the load.
That’s how townships around here do it, and that’s how Wayne always billed it. Two lines, rock and haul, so a board could see exactly what each one cost them.
“I need a truck all summer,” Brent told me on the phone. “Township roads. Forty a load, Curt. It’s steady work and it’s close. Don’t make it a thing.”
Forty a load is low. Going rate for a tandem on a short haul runs seventy to a hundred. But it was under six miles, and I could turn eleven or twelve loads a day.
And it was family, or I thought it was. Wayne always said the trucks out of his pit were one outfit, whoever owned them. I figured I’d help Brent keep the haul close.
So I told him yes. For the next four months, I hauled.
People who don’t do this work think a dump truck driver sits in a seat and steers. That summer it was anything but.