Somewhere in there it stopped working at home. I will not tell all of that. There was no one thing. There was a long, slow quiet, the kind where two people talk only about fuel and invoices.
Then one spring there was nothing left to talk about, and we both knew it, and neither one of us was mean enough to pretend otherwise.
The divorce went final in April. We split it the way people split a life when they are both too tired to fight over it.
He kept the name, the phone number, the shop on the highway and the dump truck. I kept the D6, the lowboy trailer and the note on the D6.
“Names are worth more than iron,” he told me, the day we signed. “Every rancher in three counties has that number in his kitchen drawer.”
He was right about the number. What he forgot was that a name does not push dirt.
By July I had done four small jobs on my own, mostly brush clearing for weekend people out of Austin who paid slow and argued about every hour. I was behind.
The D6 note was $2,100 a month. My savings were thinner than a dozer blade after a summer in limestone, and the shop where I had parked that machine for twenty years was not mine anymore.
I was parking it on a rented acre behind the feed mill, next to a stack of pallets and a broken hay rake. Every time I unloaded it there, I felt like I was leaving a horse in somebody else’s pasture.
Brody called on a Tuesday in the middle of July. I almost did not pick up.
“Ellis Vance wants a stock pond on his place off the county road,” he said. “Good watershed. A draw coming off two hills. He’s been hauling water to his cows since March.”
“So build it,” I said.
There was a pause. I could hear the shop radio behind him, the same station it had played for twenty years.
“I don’t have a machine,” he said. “You know I don’t.”
That was the truth he would not say plainly, and the truth I only understood later. The divorce had left him the name and me the dozer. Without me, he had a company and no machine.
Every call that came in on that number was a job he could not do. I think it scared him more than anything had scared him in his life. Brody was a lot of things, but he was not a man who liked to be found out as small.
“What’s it pay,” I asked.
“I’ll pay you as an operator,” he said. “Same as I’d pay anybody with their own iron. Nine thousand for the job. Half when the core’s in, half when she’s topped out.”
He did not tell me what he was billing. I did not ask. That was my mistake, and I have owned it since.
I met Ellis Vance on the first day of August, at seven in the morning, standing beside a five-hundred-gallon poly tank strapped to the flatbed of his pickup.