The general manager of High Plains Freight, a trim man in a pressed shirt who had driven forty miles with a sweating glass of tea on his dashboard, opened his briefcase on the tailgate of the pickup, took out a thick folder, and said, in a voice meant for the whole ranch to hear, “Mr. Pike, here is the logbook audit for driver 207.” I am Roscoe Pike, seventy seven years old, and I stood in the Texas sun in a pair of dusty jeans while the entire family reunion fell silent around a man in sunglasses who could not decide whether to run or to faint. My daughter Crystal had her hand over her mouth.
Jace found his voice first. “Roscoe,” he said, with a weak laugh, “this is some kind of joke.” I told him that I had never been fonder of a joke than of an honest day of work. The GM, whose name is Marvin Dell, laid the folder on the hood. Inside were fourteen months of logbooks, side by side with the receipts from truck stops, the fuel cards and the toll tags. In two hundred and eleven places, Jace had written that he was resting in a sleeper berth when the toll tag showed him on the road.
There was more. In his locker, Marvin said, a tub of pills had turned up three weeks earlier, the kind sold at gas stations to keep a driver awake. I had known for months. I had driven the Tuesday route and seen the bottles on the dash of the truck of Jace in Oklahoma City. I had kept my mouth shut, partly for my daughter and partly because a man who has been in the cab for fifty one years knows how the road can wear a man down. But I was done waiting. A tired driver is a loaded gun.
A logbook audit opened on a tailgate gave one old trucker the morning to bring his son in law back to the road home outside Amarillo.
I gave my terms to Jace, standing at the tailgate with my hat in my hand. “Son, you are off the road, starting today. You will not drive for me, and you will not drive for anybody else until a doctor says so. I will pay for the best program in Texas, a thirty day stay in Amarillo and a year of follow up, and your wife will go with you to the family sessions. When you are well, there is a dispatcher job waiting at the yard. Not the Dallas route. A desk. Where you can see your children at supper.”
Crystal pushed through the crowd to stand beside him. Her eyes were swimming. “Jace, I knew about the pills,” she whispered. “I found them in the glove box in March. I told myself you were just tired. I did not want to say it out loud.” Jace stared at her, and at me, and his shoulders folded. “I have been scared for two years,” he said. “Scared of falling asleep on the road, scared of what would happen to you if I did. I thought the pills were the only thing keeping us afloat.”
Then the fear took over. He snatched the folder of the audit from the hood of the truck and bolted down the gravel drive toward his own pickup, sunglasses flying, intending, I think, to destroy the logbooks and drive off across the Panhandle. He did not get far. Around the corner of the barn, under the shade of a big cottonwood, sat four uncles of Crystal, big, weathered ranchers in straw hats, drinking iced tea. One of them stuck out a boot. Another stood, slowly, and filled the drive with a pair of shoulders like a barn door.
Jace hit the rancher full on, and bounced backward into the dust. The folder flew open and a flurry of papers scattered across the road. The uncles gathered them with careful hands, squared them against their knees, and handed them to Marvin, who thanked them politely. Then the oldest uncle, a leathery man called Dub, reached down and helped Jace to his feet. “Son,” he said kindly, “you are not in any trouble you cannot get out of. But you are going to hear your father in law out.”
The money consequences were gentle for such a serious matter. I covered the treatment, which cost forty eight thousand dollars, and kept Jace on salary through the program. High Plains Freight, which I turned over to a board of managers, is worth eight million, three hundred thousand dollars, and I set up a trust so that Crystal and her children will never want. The audit went into a locked drawer, not to the state. Every driver in the company now takes a random test and a rest check, and I signed that order myself.
In the name of my wife Lorene, who passed in 2020, I started the Lorene Pike Fund. It pays for treatment for truck drivers struggling with pills and drink, and for scholarships for the children of drivers, in Potter, Randall and Deaf Smith counties. In the first year we placed thirty four drivers in treatment and sent thirteen children to college. One was a long hauler from Hereford who had been driving thirty hours straight, and who now teaches new drivers to sleep.
On a Tuesday morning in October, Jace, thin and clear eyed and eight months well, climbed into the passenger seat of my old Peterbilt, and we drove the route together, west on I 40 with the sun coming up behind us. He did not say much, and neither did I, which is the way of truckers on a long straight road. The wind turbines turned on the horizon, and a hawk sat on every third fence post. At the truck stop in Tucumcari, he bought two coffees and two slices of pecan pie, and he set one in front of me with a little bow. “Roscoe,” he said, “you smell like diesel.” I grinned. “That is the finest cologne in Texas,” I said. We ate in the sun.
