Dale Patterson read the page twice, the second time with his lips moving, the way a man reads when he hopes the letters will rearrange. Behind him, the tent had stopped breathing. The trophy for first place sat on the scale where he had set it, and the needle trembled at four pounds and six ounces. “Fifteen million, nine hundred thousand dollars,” he said at last. He looked at Rhonda, and I saw something cross his face that I had not seen in thirty three years. It was not anger. It was fear. “Curtis, you sold the company. Seventy drivers. And you stood at my cleaning table with a fillet knife for two twenties.”
“Forty one fish,” I said. “It was a fine afternoon.” Somebody near the catfish fryer laughed, then stopped. Colt had not moved from the hay bale he was standing on, his beer going warm in his hand. I turned to him, because he was the one I had come for. “Son, the Kenworth across the road is on Line 19. So is Unit 22. So is the water truck. Junior counted them with me on Monday. You took three trucks on a Saturday night, and you told my yard manager that I had okayed it.” My voice stayed level. “I need to know why. Not for the lawyers. For me.”
Colt sat down on the bale. He is thirty five, with a bad knee and a good heart, and for eight years I had trusted him to drive my loads in the dark. He said that his father had come to him in March. He said Dale had told him Mabry Trucking was a sinking boat, that the oil companies were leaving, that in six months there would be nothing left but debt. “He said, get ahead of it, son. He said, take what you can, and we will start Patterson Hauling, and it will be our name, not his.” Colt looked at his boots. “I thought I was saving something. I thought I was saving us.”
A filleting knife and two twenty dollar bills were set down beside a trophy and gave one trucker the evening to bring his nephew back to the yard.
Rhonda crossed the tent. She stood next to her brother, a head shorter than him and ten times quieter, and she took the page out of his hand, gently, the way a nurse takes a thermometer. “Dale,” she said. “For thirty three years I have asked you to stop calling my husband that name. You laughed. You said it was a joke.” She folded the page in half. “I have heard that joke at Christmas and at funerals. I heard it when our mother was dying. And all this time, you were telling your son to take his trucks.” Her voice shook. “I am so ashamed that I stayed quiet.”
Dale put a hand on the edge of the scale. He is seventy, a big, red faced man who has never apologized for anything, and he made a sound I will not forget, something between a cough and a sob. “I was afraid of you,” he said.
“All these years, Curtis. You built a company with your hands that was worth more than the marina and the car lot together, and you never said a word about it. You came to my parties and filleted my fish.” He shook his head slowly. “I called you sand man because I could not stand to look at you straight. I needed you to be smaller than me.”
I let the tent hear that. Then I told them what would happen, in a plain voice, the same one I use on a dispatch call. The three trucks would be back at the yard on Highway 69 by dawn, with Junior, and Colt would drive the Kenworth himself, with a hand on the gate and his name on the delivery sheet. The buyer would never hear a word of this from me, because the trucks would be back before anyone noticed they were gone. “And you, Colt, will go to work for the new owners on Monday. At the bottom. As a driver, on the night shift, the same way I started you.”
Colt nodded, and wept, and I put my arm around his shoulders in front of two hundred strangers. “Uncle Curtis,” he said. “Do I get to keep the dream?” I did not know what he meant until he said it. He still wanted his own trucks. I looked at him, a good driver with a bad idea, and I thought of myself at his age, with a used dump truck and a loan I could not pay. “Earn it,” I said. “Two years of clean nights. Then come and talk to me. I may know somebody who sells trucks.” He laughed through his tears and said that he did too.
Rhonda and I left before the trophy was awarded. We drove home in the dark, past the lake, with the window down, and she held my hand on the seat between us. For a long while neither of us spoke. At the stoplight in Muskogee she said, “Do you want to sell the house and move?” “Why would I?” “So I never have to go back to that marina.” I told her we would go back every summer. We would walk onto that dock together, with our heads high, and her brother would hold the door. She leaned her head against my shoulder and fell asleep before the light turned green.
Colt drove nights for two years. He never missed a load and he never spoke of the dream again, which is how I knew he was serious. The week before Christmas, I drove out to the yard at four in the morning and found him sitting alone on the tailgate of Unit 14, drinking gas station coffee, with a thermos he had brought for me. We talked until the sun came up. By the time the shift changed, I had called a dealer in Tulsa and put a deposit on a truck in his name, not mine. His own name. Mabry would have been too small a word for what he had become.