Tailgate Lessons

The bike was still standing there when Desmond threw the rig in reverse, which in hindsight was the problem. He had looked at that stretch of gravel behind the Rusty Wheel maybe four seconds, saw nothing, and committed. Then the mirrors showed a bicycle tipping over in slow motion, one pedal catching the frame of a silver Corolla, and Desmond hit the brakes hard enough to rock the trailer.

He climbed down with his heart somewhere around his belt buckle. The bike was fine. The Corolla had a scratch the length of his thumb. The bike belonged to nobody he could see, which meant it belonged to somebody about to come around the corner mad.

The somebody turned out to be Clark Easton, standing by the bar's back door with a to-go cup and a grin that Desmond had wanted to knock off his face since the loading dock thing two years ago.

"That was beautiful," Clark said. "You backed a fifty-three foot trailer over a bicycle. Do you know what the odds of finding a bicycle back here even were?"

"Some jerk left it there."

"Some jerk is me. That's my bike. I ride it to campus." He picked it up, spun the front wheel, seemed satisfied. "You know what I teach, Desmond? Supply chain. Logistics. First week of class I tell them the most expensive mistake in freight is a driver who doesn't walk his blind side. You want to guess what lesson I'm putting on the whiteboard Thursday?"

Desmond took off his cap and slapped it against his leg. It was Tuesday, he was thirty-four years old, and he had been driving rigs since he was twenty-one, which was longer than Clark had been allowed to rent a car without a co-signer, probably. "Go on then. Put it on the whiteboard."

"Oh, I will. Right next to the photo I'm mentally taking right now."

"Nothing got hit except your junker bike."

"The Corolla has a scratch. That's Arnie's Corolla."

Desmond looked. It was, in fact, Arnie's Corolla. That figured.

Inside, the Rusty Wheel smelled like fryer grease and the lemon stuff Arnie mopped with. It was early enough that only the dart crowd had settled in, which on a Tuesday meant four guys and a chalkboard. Arnie was behind the bar working a tap handle with the boredom of a man who had owned the place for fifteen years and could pour two drinks at once while reading a racing form.

"You scratched my car," Arnie said, before either of them got a stool.

"The bike moved," Desmond said.

"The bike was parked. The car was parked. You're the only thing out there that was moving." Arnie set two sodas down without asking what they wanted, because he had hired both of them for odd jobs at different times and knew neither could afford to be picky. Desmond had painted his kitchen. Clark had fixed his ice machine, twice, and argued about the parts both times.

Clark took the stool one down from Desmond, which was as close as either man had sat to the other since the loading dock dispute, back when Desmond was thirty-two and Clark thirty-one and the whole thing had ended with a freight company's regional manager threatening to ban them both from Dock 4 for life. Arnie had heard the story so many times he had versions of it he told to strangers.

"So let me get this straight," Arnie said, leaning on the bar. "The theory professor almost got run over by his own bicycle, and the man with two million miles under him is the one who put it there."

"Two million is an exaggeration," Desmond said.

"How many?"

"Eleven hundred thousand."

"That's over a million, which rounds to two million in bar math." Arnie wiped the counter where nothing needed wiping. "You two have been circling each other in my bar for two years. Dart league starts Thursday. I need peace in here Thursday. So here's my offer. Free tab for a month if you each teach the other one thing. One useful thing. Without killing each other."

Clark laughed out loud, a real one, which surprised Desmond because he'd mostly heard the dry version. "Teach him what? There's nothing to teach a man who's been driving since before I could drink legally."

"He's thirty-three," Desmond said. "He could drink legally before he finished his master's."

"Thank you. See, this is what I mean." Clark turned on his stool. "Fine. I teach him the campus grid. Every one-way, every loading window, every alley the GPS doesn't know. He gets lost on Elm Street twice a week. Arnie, tell him."

Arnie nodded at Desmond. "He does. The produce guys at the co-op said he circled the quad three times last Friday. In a forty-foot box truck."

"Those streets turn on you," Desmond said. "One-ways that flip direction at two p.m. That's not a road system, that's a trap."

"It's a grid, and it's knowable, which is my whole point. Book knowledge beats knuckle-dragging. That's the lesson I'd give him."

"And what would I teach him?" Desmond asked.

Arnie looked out the back window at the gravel lot, where the light poles came on at dusk and the DOT inspection yard across the fence didn't open until morning. "Well. There's a trailer hitched to nothing out back right now, and that man has never driven anything bigger than a pickup. You want to teach a logistics professor what a blind-side back actually feels like?"

Clark opened his mouth. Closed it. "I understand the theory of backing a trailer."

"Sure you do," Desmond said. "Off-yaw, steering correction, all that. Knowing it in your head and doing it with your hands are different animals. Ask my bike."

"He keeps bringing up the bike."

"The bike earned it."

Arnie slid the sodas closer. "So. One lesson each. Clark gets him through campus without circling the quad. Desmond gets that trailer parked blind. Free tab for a month. And if either of you throws a punch, you're both banned and I'm telling the dart league you're cowards."

Clark put his hand out before Desmond could think about it. Desmond shook it. It was a handshake like arm wrestling that nobody had agreed to start.

"Friday morning," Clark said. "Six a.m., before the campus wakes up. Meet me at the north gate."

"Six a.m. is ungodly."

"So is circling the quad in a box truck. Six a.m."

* * *

Six a.m. Friday, the campus was empty the way campuses only are, all that brick and landscaping sitting there like a model town with the people lifted out. Clark was at the north gate on his bicycle, helmet clipped to the rack, holding a tablet with a map on it.

"You brought a tablet," Desmond said, climbing down from his day cab.

"I brought documentation." Clark turned the tablet around. It was a hand-annotated map, every street colored in, arrows for the two p.m. one-way flips, little marks that said things like DELIVERY WINDOW 6-9 and DO NOT TRUST THE GPS HERE.

"You drew this yourself?"

"Over two years. Adjunct pay means I also do the department's freight receiving, so yeah, I learned it the hard way, same as you." He tapped the screen. "Here's your route in. Left on College, which is two-way until nine a.m., then hang the right on University before it becomes one-way against you."

"College and University. Who named these."

"The founding committee, apparently as a joke." Clark got on his bike and pedaled alongside while Desmond crawled the cab through the empty streets, calling out turns like a rally driver. "Now left. This one's the killer, there's a sight line problem at the corner, the hedge is taller than your hood."

Desmond made the turn and had to admit, to himself only, that the hedge thing was real. "Okay. That's one. What's the window for the co-op dock?"

"Six to nine, but the good spot is the angled one behind the loading office, and you have to come in off the alley, not the street, or the co-op manager makes you wait for the bread truck."

"See, none of that's on any GPS."

"None of it. This is my point. Two years of this. I could teach that whole grid in my sleep." Clark coasted ahead and swung the bike around at the next corner, a man showing off his one great collection, and it held an almost happy quality. "Saturday, then. Your lesson. I'll bring the tablet."

"Leave the tablet. Bring your hands."

Saturday the gravel lot behind the Rusty Wheel was empty except for Desmond's day cab and the rented pup trailer he had hooked to it, sitting at an angle Arnie had clearly arranged for maximum cruelty. Clark showed up in a button-down shirt and a lanyard, which was the most professor thing Desmond had ever seen at six in the morning in a gravel lot.

"You're wearing a lanyard."

"It has my ID on it."

"Who's checking your ID in my parking lot?"

"Nobody, fine." He pulled it off and shoved it in his pocket. "Where do we start."

"Seat. Get in. Now, before you touch anything, tell me what you're going to do."

Clark talked it through, and it was all correct, every term right, hand-over-hand at the wheel, gooseneck effect, steer toward the trailer when it drifts. Desmond listened with his arms crossed and let him finish.

"Every word of that's true," Desmond said. "Now do it."

Clark put his hands on the wheel and did it, and the trailer did what trailers do, which is nothing you planned. He overcorrected, then overcorrected the correction, and the trailer sat there at an angle no dock would ever accept, jackknifed into its own bad decisions.

"Stop. Brake." Desmond got out, walked back, and stood at the nose of the trailer. "Come look at this."

Clark climbed down and came around. "The tractor's pointed the wrong way. I had the wheel the wrong direction."

"You had it right, then you panicked and put it back. Everybody does. That's the thing I can't teach you at a whiteboard, that moment when your gut says turn left and the trailer needs right." Desmond stepped closer and put one hand flat on the trailer nose, tapping it. "Feel that. That corner right there is what has to end up at the dock. Not the cab. The cab is just the thing that bullies the trailer into place."

Clark put his own hand on the nose, right beside where Desmond's had been. "It's lower than I pictured."

"It's thirty inches of steel that will cost your company four grand if you kiss a post with it. Now again, and this time when it starts going wrong, you freeze the wheel and let the trailer tell you."

Clark drove it again, better, then worse, then better, and on the fourth try the trailer lined up with the painted slot Arnie had chalked on the gravel, close enough to pass a lazy inspection. He sat in the cab grinning like he'd won something.

"That's a pass?" he called out the window.

"That's a C-minus. A pass is dead center." Desmond walked back to check the gap and found himself standing toe to toe with Clark, who had gotten out and come around the same side at the same time, and there was nothing between them but morning air and about four inches of disagreement about who was going to step back first.

"Your trailer's two feet off on the right side," Desmond said.

"Your slot is painted crooked."

"It is not crooked."

Clark didn't step back. He smelled like coffee and that soap that comes out of hotel dispensers. "Say I'm close."

"You're close to C-minus territory."

"That's not what I meant."

Desmond knew what he meant. He stayed where he was.

"You meant something else," Desmond said. "I know you did."

"Then answer it."

"Not at six in the morning in Arnie's lot, with the DOT yard staring at me over the fence like a