The Clean Ticket

Episode 2 of 3 of Three Forty Light by Roy Mattison

I photographed the nine twice, once with the flash and once without, standing in front of a running truck at two in the morning like a man inspecting a lamp. Then the kid pulled out and I went back inside and sat down with my phone.

I already had 4091 in there. In June I had written Linkous up for a mud flap, hanging low and shredded halfway across, and I took pictures whenever I wrote paper, because drivers argue and photographs do not. June 9, 0219, three shots of the right front corner. In all three the bubble sits in the bottom loop of the nine like a blister under a sunburn.

Same trailer number. Same plate, printed on both tickets. Same carrier DOT number on the door, 2288114. Same tare stamp, 14,120. Different trailer.

It took me twenty minutes to talk myself out of that and four to talk myself back. Vinyl gets replaced. A number gets peeled and reprinted after a body shop visit, and a fleet of thirty trucks has a man in the back with a plotter and a roll of white. That covers a bubble.

It does not cover three hundred forty pounds. A trailer that comes home from a body shop weighs what it weighed, or it weighs more, because they put steel in it. It does not come back three hundred forty pounds lighter for two years and then, one Tuesday, come back right.

So the ordinary explanation was two trailers wearing one number, and I said it out loud in an empty scale house at 0240.

The terminal on my desk queried the ticket history by DOT number. Any officer at any station can run it. Hal Mundt, who had run this place for nineteen years and worked days, ran that query about forty times a week and told anybody who stood still what a beautiful thing it was.

“Closest thing to a notary on the interstate,” Hal liked to say. “Scale ID, certification date, timestamp, axle breakdown, state seal. Goes in the file and it stays in the file.”

He had a subpoena laminated and taped to the cabinet over the coffee maker, out of a wrongful death case in Russell County in 2011, because he had been deposed for eleven minutes and had never stopped talking about it. Cindy Baird used to bet me a dollar he would work it into shift change before nine.

I pulled DOT 2288114 and asked it for everything.

Ninety-seven Tuesdays. Twenty-three months. Ninety-three of them light, the spread running 78,040 to 78,110 against a declared gross that had not moved by a pound. Four of them inside forty pounds of the paper, which is as honest as my deck gets.

I wrote the four dates on the back of a citation pad. March 14. August 8. November 21. And tonight.

Then I went out for air and watched a Tilden tractor run the right lane at sixty-eight with a green light burning on its bypass transponder.

I stood there with my coffee going cold and said Linkous’s line back to myself, the one about his company being too cheap for the little box. Then I went inside and pulled the bypass roster for the carrier, which took four minutes. Thirty-one power units on the Tilden account. Thirty-one transponders. Every truck that outfit owned could buy its way past me at seventy, except the one that came to see me every Tuesday.

The scale house phone rang at 0340 on a Thursday, which is not a thing that happens.

“Mitch Palko?” A pleasant voice, wide awake, an office behind it. “Craig Teague. Director of safety and compliance, Tilden Freight Lines. I wanted to thank you for your attention to our equipment.”

“All right.”

“That mud flap in June. Gary should have caught it in his pretrip. He is a good driver and a lazy inspector.” He laughed like we were old friends. “I also see somebody pulled twenty-three months of our weight history on a Tuesday night shift, and our bypass roster right behind it. Which is fine. That is public record. I am only telling you I saw it.”

“It is public,” I said.

“We are hiring inspectors for our own yard in Salina. Sixty-eight, plus family coverage, days, no ramp.” He let that sit a second. “You would not have to make that drive home to Wilson in the dark anymore. Blue pickup, third row of the lot, camper shell on it. My wife had one just like it.”

I did not say anything at all.

“Mitch,” he said. “Ask me the real question.”

I hung up instead.

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