On Thursday a logging truck pulled up to the rear of the station. The battered Kenworth tractor, its trailer loaded with a tall rick of logs, groaned to a halt. Dust and the scent of freshly cut spruce tumbled forward into the service bay. Kirk, Bud, and I stared. The Kenworth’s tires looked fully inflated, had no flapping recaps; no steam or leaks issued from beneath the hood.
“Send him down the damn road,” Bud muttered nonetheless. “We don’t work on logging trucks, and sure as hell not loaded ones.”
“Go get ’m, Pauly,” Kirk said, and turned again to his work on a carburetor.
I stepped outside in the sunlight as the truck’s engine died. The sweet, pitchy smell of spruce was stronger than the little green Pine Tree Aire Fresheners we sold up front.
BENDER AND SONS the truck door read, its letters furred with oil and fine sawdust. Dale Bender himself swung down from the cab. At almost five feet ten I was the same height as Dale, but there comparisons stopped. He had black Elvis hair; mine was curly yellow. He had a rectangular, lantern jaw; I had a penlight. His shoulders, confined by a smudged white T-shirt, were as square and
wide as a plow; mine were as narrow and bony as a silage fork. His biceps, stitched with veins, were softballs; mine were tennis balls at best. Tucked up in his left shirtsleeve, making him still wider, was a pack of cigarettes. As I approached, he unrolled his sleeve, shook a Lucky Strike from the pack, and lit it. He used a stick match, flicking off the head with a thumbnail and bending his dark hair to the flame, then looking up and shaking out the match all in one extended gesture. Dale leaned against his truck. “What say, Sutton?”
As he exhaled, I breathed in his smoke. Dale Bender knew my name; not only that, he had spoken it with the comradely tone of one country boy to another.
“How’s it going, Dale?”
“It’s got to go,” he said, and spit.
His words struck me as truly wise. But maybe that was because, at school last year, I could not recall Dale Bender saying anything. Ever. Not one word. To most kids, high school was life at its most dramatic; for Dale, high school had been an annoyance. He plodded through the halls, the cafeteria line, like a prisoner whose life was on hold. His only pleasure came in football, where as a tackle he crushed ball carriers, and in wrestling, where he pinned his opponents quickly and violently, often injuring them.
“You seen Peggy Leikvold?”
“Peggy Leikvold?”
“You deef? Your hearing aid need batteries?”
“No,” I fumbled. “I mean, no I haven’t seen her today.”
“When did you see her?”
“Last week.”
“When last week?”
“Midweek, I guess. Wednesday. Thursday.”
“You guess, Sutton?”
I swallowed. “She charged gas. I could check the slips.”
Dale smiled and tilted back his head for a long draw on his cigarette. I realized he was kidding. I let out a breath. Then he narrowed his eyes. “She ask about me?”
I nodded yes.
“What did she say?”
“She said, ‘Have you seen Dale Bender?’”
“That’s it?”
“Word for word.”
“Was she with that creep Knutson?”
“No.”
“That’s ’cause he’s out of town.”
“When I filled his Corvette, Knutson did have a suitcase,” I offered.
“Tennis camp,” Dale said, and spit again. “Two weeks at some fancy-ass tennis camp. Must be nice.” He drew on his Lucky Strike, looked toward the intersection, and exhaled a long contrail of smoke. “Anyway, Sutton, I want you to give Peggy a message.”
I waited.
He turned. “Tell her I asked if she asked about me.”
I nodded.
“Got it, Sutton?”
“Got it,” I said.
“Say it,” he said.
I repeated it.
“That’s it,” Dale said, taking a last draw, then flicking his cigarette into the street. He climbed into the cab, then leaned out his window. “One more thing.”
I waited.
“I want you to keep an eye out for Peggy.”
“An eye out?”
“I want to know when she comes in, I want to know what she says.”
“Okay,” I said.
“She drives by, I want to know who she’s with.”
“I’ll try. It gets busy,” I said.
He pointed his finger at me and raised one eyebrow. “Try hard, Sutton.” Then his truck engine revved. Slowly he eased backward onto the street, after which, gear by gear, with heavy double-clutch shifting, the truck rumbled away north. He was still shifting, in no hurry, as one cannot be with his kind of load, when the Kenworth rolled out of sight.
Inside the office, Kirk said, “What did Bender want?”
“Peggy Leikvold.”
“Peggy Leikvold?” He laughed. “Just ’cause he got his draft notice doesn’t mean he gets Peggy Leikvold.”
“Dale got drafted?” I said quickly.
“Shipping out sometime this summer,” Bud said. “Be in Vietnam by fall.”
We were all silent.
“Maybe girls like that sort of thing,” Kirk said. He stared at the traffic. “Guys who might not be coming back.”
“If anybody comes back from Vietnam, it’ll be Dale,” I said.
Kirk turned to me. “What would you or any of your family know about it, Sutton?”