I bought the truck off him

The truck was forty-seven five. Twelve down, and the twelve came off my mother's house. She's been on Cottonwood since '94. There's four years and two months left on what I took against it.

I found it on a board. 2016 Cascadia, DD15, 561,000, one owner, Effingham, Illinois. I called from the yard on Getwell on a Thursday and the man told me it was 563 and change now, because he'd moved it twice since he put the ad up.

Greyhound to St. Louis, eight hours, and I had my seat and part of the one next to it. He came down and got me. Fifty-eight. He'd had it nine years running paper out of a plant in Mattoon. He was home most nights. The receipts were in a boot box. Not a folder, a Red Wing box with the lid still on it. Some of them went back to the year he bought it.

We sat at his kitchen table with that box for an hour and a half. Some of them he'd written on the back of. Cold start rough, and a date.

I drove it out to the interstate and back with him in the other seat. He had to run the seat back to get behind the wheel after, and when he got out he put it up where I keep it, which is all the way forward. Everybody who's sat in that seat says something about it. He didn't.

He came down to forty-six even after I told him where my down payment was coming from. He never asked me.

I took it home that same night, twelve hours with nothing in the box. I wasn't going to pay a man to bring me my own truck.

The note is eleven eighty-seven. Insurance is another nine and a quarter a month. Plates and the fuel tax on top of that. I was getting 6.1 loaded, so about sixty-two cents a mile in diesel at what it cost that spring. It ran clean for nine weeks.

Then it derated on me east of Forrest City with forty-two thousand pounds of dog food behind me. Every light on the dash came on at once and I got it into the Love's doing thirty with the flashers on. Dealer in Memphis quoted twenty-nine hundred with the tow.

I called Effingham because he had the history on it, and I hadn't finished telling him what it was doing before he said cylinder four. I pulled the codes out in the parking lot and it was four.

He's got a bay behind the house with a pit in it. I haven't got down in a pit since I put the weight on. Parts were six ten. He wouldn't take anything for the labor.

Second time was September, cylinder six, same deal. He had the cover off before I finished my coffee. He told me my fuel was dirty and to quit buying at that little place off Shelby. He put a second filter on it out of his own stock and wouldn't take anything for that either. He threw the trailer doors for me on my way out, both of them. My right shoulder's been finished since I was running company.

A guy in the yard on Getwell asked me why I'd haul a truck five hundred miles to get worked on when there's a Freightliner house twenty minutes from where we're standing. I told him what the dealer wanted for the first one and what I paid instead, and he did the math out loud and agreed with me.

Third time there was nothing wrong with the truck. February. He'd worked on it twice for nothing and it was sitting on me, so I put four hundred in cash in an envelope and drove it up there. He wouldn't take that either. Three hundred and forty miles each way, deadhead up. I told myself I'd find something out of Rantoul to cover the fuel coming home. I didn't look very hard.

It was in the teens up there that night and the wind was out of the northwest. Nothing was closed. I've run in worse coming out of Sikeston.

I was going to sleep in the bunk. He said not with that wind. He's got a spare room with his daughter's things still in it, and she's grown and over in Champaign.

I didn't sleep in the spare room.

In the morning the mirrors were iced over and the hood was white all the way back to the stacks. He ran hot water over the door seals for me out of a gallon jug so the door would come open. That was two trips to the kitchen.

I'd got diesel down the front of my shirt the night before and he came out with one of his own, and it didn't fit me. I wore it anyway. It's in the side box now with the chains.

I left out of there at six. He texted me around Dyersburg to ask was the road all right.

My mother calls on Sundays and asks is it running. That's the whole call, near enough. I tell her it's running and what I grossed, and she says all right, and then she tells me about her neighbor.

We text about the truck, mostly. He'll send me a picture of something and ask am I still getting 6.1. In April he wanted to know what I was paying for tires down here, because he thinks I'm getting beat on tires, and he's right.

There's a yard up in Mattoon with a wrecked '19 in it and he says the turbo on it is good. Six hundred. Mine's fine right now. It's at 590,000. He sent me the picture Tuesday. His thumb is in the corner of it, up over the top of the fender.