…he asked me if I was going to red-tag it. Not why are you asking. Not what are you talking about. He’d been standing in my lot for twenty minutes waiting for a man with a clipboard to take the decision off him, and when I finally got there he was so relieved he had to turn around and look at the pumps for a second.
Del failed a field of vision test in September. He has a thing in his eyes that comes on slow, and he could still see well enough to pass the DOT physical with the doctor he’d been going to for eleven years, and the doctor passed him, and Del drove out of that parking lot knowing he shouldn’t have. That truck was paid for. It was the only thing he’d ever owned outright. He is sixty-four years old and there is no version of quitting that a man like that can say out loud to himself, so he did the only thing left, which was hand the truck to somebody else in a condition that made it not his call.
I red-tagged it. I wrote it up honest and I called it in, and I have never in twenty-six years felt worse about doing my job correctly.
He sold the Pete in January to a young fella out of Casper. He came in and had coffee with me the day it left the lot and we did not discuss any of this, because we are who we are.
He’s driving a school district van now, in town, forty hours.
