Tuesday, 0214
Episode 1 of 3 of Three Forty Light by Roy Mattison
“Bring it up slow and stop on the green,” I said into the ramp speaker, and the kid in the Peterbilt rolled through the green and stopped on the yellow, so we did it twice.
That was the job most nights. I ran the static scale at the state motor carrier inspection station on I-70 westbound outside Ellsworth, Kansas, eleven at night to seven in the morning. A mile back, the sorter read the transponder box on a windshield and gave a green light to anybody current on a bypass account. Everybody else came up the ramp, every trip, every hour we were open. Most carriers buy the box inside a year, because the fuel it saves pays for it twice.
On the ramp I took the gross. Eighty thousand was the ceiling, twelve on the steer axle, thirty-four on the drives, thirty-four on the trailer tandems. Then the window: bill of lading, log printout, medical card if I felt like being unpopular. Then I either printed a ticket and waved a man off, or I put an out of service sticker on a brake chamber and ruined his week.
Tuesdays at 0214, give or take four minutes, a white daycab pulling a fifty-three foot dry van came up my ramp with TILDEN FREIGHT LINES across the door and 4091 on the nose of the trailer, tare 14,120 stamped underneath. No box on the glass, no green light, up the ramp. Ninety-seven weeks running.
And every one of those Tuesdays, the weight on my deck came in about three hundred forty pounds under what the paperwork said it should be.
“You know what that sign man charged me?” Gary Linkous said, the first week I met him. “Ninety dollars. Ninety. And he put a bubble in my nine.”
He had. The 4091 on the trailer’s right front was vinyl laid over an old repaint, and the bottom loop of the nine carried a blister of trapped air about the size of a dime. Linkous brought it up most weeks. He was vain about that rig the way some men are vain about a boat.
He was easy at the window. Log clean to the minute, fourteen hour clock never tight, not one violation in two years of me looking. Bill of lading out of Kansas City, consignee in Denver, declared gross 78,420, and that number never moved by a pound in ninety-seven weeks.
“Sacked sand,” he said about it, most weeks. “Forty-six thousand pounds of playground sand. I run it to Denver, they load the same sand back on me, Thursday I bring it home. Best job in America if you never think about it.”
“Company pay for anything?”
“Company is too cheap for PrePass. Every other outfit on this road buys the little box and sails past at seventy, and I am the last man in Kansas who has to look at your ugly face once a week.”
Then the scale would give me 78,080. Or 78,095. Or 78,060. Steer a little heavy, drives a little heavy, trailer tandems light by five hundred and change.
I raised it once, my first spring. The district weights and measures man drove out with his test blocks, certified my deck to within forty pounds, and explained that three hundred forty on seventy-eight thousand is four tenths of one percent, that diesel burns off between pump and ramp, and that nobody in Topeka was opening a file over it.
He was right about all of that. I printed the ticket every Tuesday and waved the man off and went back to my coffee.
The Tuesday it stopped, the air brakes let go at 0211 and I had the window open before I looked up.
It was not Linkous. The driver was maybe twenty-five, ball cap, no conversation in him at all. He fed the folder through the slot and kept both hands on the sill.
“Linkous sick?”
“Couldn’t say.”
Electronic log, clean. Medical card current. Bill of lading, Kansas City to Denver, declared gross 78,420, commodity line reading bulk pharmaceutical, palletized. Shippers change. Sand does not pay what sand used to pay.
I looked at my display.
78,420.
I looked at it longer than that deserved, then ran the axle breakdown to give my hands something to do. Steer 11,860. Drives 33,940. Tandems 32,620. Every group inside its limit, and the three of them landing within forty pounds of a number some clerk in Kansas City had typed nine hours earlier, which is as close as a certified deck promises.
“Problem?” the kid said.
“No,” I said, which was the first lie I ever told about Tilden Freight. I printed his ticket and passed it back and told him to watch the merge, because the eastbound ramp lights were out again.
He set his brakes and climbed down to walk his trailer, which no driver had done on my ramp in years. While he was back there I took my flashlight to the front of the van on the excuse of the marker lights, the way you do when you want to look and not be seen looking.
The tare stamp read 14,120. The vinyl 4091 sat on the old repaint exactly where it always sat.
Tonight the nine had no bubble.