Ghost Trucks

Abandoned work trucks are sitting on the side of the road after ICE raids target the working class.

A truck on the side of 1-40 in North Carolina. Photo from Siembra NC.

There’s a black pickup on the side of the highway, and I hope the keys are in there. Ladders chained to the rack, a blue tarp starting to blow loose in the bed. It’s sitting there, unmoved since this morning, still like someone is holding their breath, and all I can think about is dreams.

Years ago, when my son was little, my sweetheart got his first work truck. It was an old and creaky 1984 Ranger, small but built like a dadgum tank. The night he got it, we went out on a “date.” We couldn’t afford a babysitter, so we sat in the truck in the driveway, Randy Travis on the radio, drinking wine. He lit a candle, and we laughed as it dripped onto the sun-faded dash.

That truck meant new beginnings. We just had one car between us that I used to get to and from work and drop my son off at daycare. He had been begging rides to his job sites. The truck meant he could take on his own jobs, jobs where he didn’t have someone breathing down his neck and where the boss couldn’t skim off the top.

The day he got that truck, everything felt more hopeful.

A few years ago I lent a friend, one of the hardest workers I know, my old Dodge pickup. His company said he’d make a great crew lead but he’d have to have his own truck. It was a poor man’s Catch-22: he couldn’t get a truck without the job or the job without a truck. So, he borrowed mine until he could buy himself a new one. In the end, he returned that old Dodge to me with a whole new engine built out, new brakes and everything. My son now drives it. We consider it one of our family’s most cherished possessions, next to my great-grammy’s china.

Because we know the meaning of a truck here.

My neighborhood is a work truck neighborhood. Trucks with ball hitches, Weatherguard tool boxes, and, if they are really nice, spray-in bedliners. Trucks with cement sprayed up the passenger side door, dried paint on the bumper, a dent where it rolled into the mixer. If I drink my morning coffee on the porch steps, I can watch my neighbors across the street load up their work truck six days a week. They tie down five-gallon drums and use ratchet straps to secure the pressure washer-- it’s an old ritual, the dance of 6 AM.

Trucks are precious things. American things. Working people things. They are how we leave our homes before day breaks and how we come home to catch cuddles from the kids before bed. They’re how we haul the things our hands will use to trim, build, blow, construct, paint, cut, measure, level, mortar, sand, and lay throughout the day. They are how we keep the lights on, how we plan for our future, how we help our best friend move across town to a new house, a house with more room for the kids, a yard for the dog.

Trucks are how we bring a new playset home for our children, a new grill for our neighbor, a load of mulch for the garden bed. Trucks are how we put in long hours, how we save up to send our children to college, how we dream of the days when we can sleep in a little, rest up a bit, maybe take a cruise, knowing we have worked hard, done well, and put in our time.

Trucks are honest things. They remind us there’s no real difference between a hard day’s work and a hard day’s work; no real difference between men.

But that truck on the side of the highway feels like a ghost; a ghost that will haunt us a long, long time.

I wonder if the family will find that truck; the truck that was pulled over this morning by ICE, an exit away from my exit, its driver taken away, now locked up somewhere.

I wonder what it will be like to get it, seeing those ladders and that tarp, knowing that the day’s work never did get done, that the man driving it never came home, that the idea of it all has been taken.

If it’s towed back to the family’s driveway, will the children dare play in its bed, honk its horn, and holler? Or will sit there, the ladders rusting and the tarp fraying, dark and quiet like a nightmare?

The truck sitting on the side of the highway won’t make me sleep better tonight; on the contrary, it will keep me awake. I know too much, driven too many. I’ve loved too deeply too many men who work with their hands and return home, still covered with the day’s dust, to tuck children in, to be able to rest easy knowing it is out there, abandoned like that.