Then I walked out to my truck in the Friday afternoon sun with my hands shaking inside my gloves, and I sat there in the lot for a long while before I turned the key.
I am forty-five. I have run heavy wreckers for nineteen years and the 50-ton rotator for eleven.
My heavy recovery certification took three week-long schools and a written test I studied for at the kitchen table most of a winter.
When I started, some men told dispatch to send somebody else when they saw it was me.
I outlasted them by being careful and early, and by signing every plan so nobody could say I hid behind a man’s paperwork.
My husband was home when I pulled in. He is the mechanic at a feedyard north of us, and he was in the shop behind the house changing the oil in my old pickup.
He took one look at my face and set the wrench down.
“What did he do,” he said. It was not a question the way he said it.
I told him. He listened with his arms crossed and his jaw working.
When I finished, he wiped his hands slowly and said he would drive over and talk to Clay himself, man to man, that very evening.
“No,” I said. “Please don’t.”
“Bobbi, he put his name on your work.”
“I know he did. And if you go over there, it becomes about you and Clay, and then it’s about Mae and me, and then it’s Christmas and Easter and everybody sitting at different ends of the table for ten years. I’d rather handle my own work myself.”
He looked at me a long time. Then he nodded, the way he does when he disagrees but trusts me anyway, and he picked the wrench back up.
I loved him for that more than I could have said right then.
I did not call a lawyer. You do not take your sister’s husband to court over a billing line, and you do not win anything that way you would want to keep.
I needed the people who make the calls to know.
Towing lives on the trucking outfits that call you at three in the afternoon in a blizzard. Those are the only people whose opinion of you matters.
Every one of them would be in Reyna Holt’s yard on Monday morning. Clay had told me so himself, pleased as anything.
Reyna had called her drivers in to go over the rollover, and he was bringing the bill in person to ask for her whole account.
I knew exactly where the plan was. It was rolled up in a cardboard tube behind the seat of my truck, where I keep every plan until it goes in the file.
The call had come in at ten minutes to seven on Tuesday morning. I was already up, standing at the counter with my thermos, when my phone lit up with the dispatch number.
Mae runs our dispatch from the front office, and her voice was tight in the way it only gets on the big ones.
“Cattle pot on its side on I-40, westbound, past Wildorado,” she said. “Loaded. Driver’s still in the cab. Trooper’s asking for the rotator.”
“How loaded?”
“Thirty-eight head of fed steers, Reyna’s dispatcher says. Holt truck. Reyna’s already on the phone with me.”
I was out the door in four minutes. I called Lute on the way. Lute is sixty-three and runs our older 35-ton, and he was already pulling on his boots.
By the time I came over the rise west of Wildorado, the sun was up behind me, low and white, over flat brown grassland and a gray-blue sky.
The wind was already pushing thirty, and dust moved across the road in long, low ribbons.
I saw the trailer first. It was lying on its right side in the grass just off the westbound shoulder, a long silver aluminum pot with its belly facing the fence line and its roof facing the highway.
The tractor had gone over with it and lay on its side at the front, still hooked. The trooper had the right lane shut down with his lights going.
And I heard them before I stopped. You do not forget the sound of cattle in a rolled trailer.
It is low and steady and terrible, a bawling that comes up through the aluminum and through the ground and right into your chest.
The trooper met me at the rotator steps, young and polite with no color in his face.
The volunteer fire crew was on another call across the county, twenty minutes out at least. The driver was talking, he said, but would not come out.
“Won’t or can’t?” I asked.
“Says he’s fine,” the trooper said. “Says he’s not leaving his cattle. I can’t get up there without a ladder, ma’am, and I don’t have one.”
I had one, and nineteen years of climbing on wrecked equipment.
I set the short ladder against the trailer near the nose, where the aluminum was sound, and went up onto the side of that trailer, which was now the top of it.
The wind came straight across the grass from New Mexico and pushed at me like a hand.
I kept low along the frame line, where the crossmembers were, and stepped across to the tractor, where the passenger door now faced the sky.
I knelt down and looked through the glass. Dusty Arnell was hanging sideways in his seat belt, his left shoulder resting against the driver’s door below him, his cap gone somewhere in the cab.
He was sixty, a lean man with gray stubble, and he looked up at me with eyes as calm as a pond.
“Morning,” he said through the glass, like I had come to read his meter.
“Morning,” I said. “I’m Bobbi. I run the rotator. You hurt anywhere?”
“My pride,” he said. Then, before I could ask him anything else: “How are my steers? Can you see them? Are they down?”
I could not see them from there. I could only hear them. I told him the truth, that I could hear them, that they sounded scared but alive, and that there were cowboys coming.
Reyna had already called every ranch along that stretch, and the trooper said two horse trailers were on the way.
“I’m not leaving them,” he said. “Thirty-one years and I never laid a load down. Not once. I’m not crawling out and walking off like they’re freight.”
I got the passenger door open. It was heavy and the wind tried to slam it back down on my arm, and I braced it with my knee.
Then I lay flat on the side of that cab with my head and shoulders hanging down inside, close enough to smell his coffee and the diesel and the fear on him, because it was there under all that calm.