Fifty-gallon plastic drums of water were damn heavy, right at five hundred pounds, and I kept a manual forklift jack in the trailer for such loads. Maneuvering the drums onto the lift was a chore and his help was welcome. I stood on the raised lift gate and yanked at the sliding door strap and damn near tore my arm off. It didn’t budge. My first thought was ice on the interior door tracks. I kicked around the edges to loosen it up and pulled again. Same result.

At that moment I knew what the problem was. Before I could say anything Dan pointed to the offending shrapnel left by the semi and announced he saw the problem and went off to get a ladder. I took the opportunity to look in on my road crew and satisfied they were doing okay I went back and waited for Dan. As he hiked toward me I couldn’t help thinking that I wished the ladder covered up more of him.

He slapped the ladder against my trailer and scampered up. “What in the hell is this?”

“Just what it looks like,” I said.

He gave it a bit of thought and suggested he could knock it loose with a sledgehammer and drive it through to the inside. How the mirror got embedded in the side of my trailer was a matter of indifference to Dan. Indifference was a currency almost all my customers traded in, and so did I, though I chose to think of it as minding my own business which, in the Utah desert, greatly contributes to continued survival.

I gave Dan’s suggestion a minute of consideration. While I stood there with my hand on the ladder I looked up at his beefy legs and a breeze blew the robe aside and exposed his soiled, threadbare underwear. When I said, “Hell no,” I was commenting as much on the view as I was about his solution. “I’m not going to tear up my trailer.”

“I need my water. What’s your plan?”

The day was already headed for shot and I had two very valuable pieces of cargo. The jury was still out on the dog. If I couldn’t deliver to Dan it meant I couldn’t make any of my other deliveries either. My only choice was to drive straight to Rockmuse and see if I could get Toby, the elderly widower who owned the Rockmuse Collision Center, to pry the offending mirror out and get my sliding door working again, preferably with as little damage as possible and quickly. Toby had to have a more delicate approach and better tools than Dan and a sledgehammer. I wasn’t certain of this, but I was hopeful. Like most rigs, including trailer, mine was leased and a gaping hole in the side did not fall under the description of “normal wear,” meaning it would cost me plenty when my lease was up.

I offered Dan the two five-gallon water containers I kept behind the driver’s seat and told him my plan. “That should hold you until I get back this way later today.”

“Well, it won’t.”

I rarely had sharp discussions with my customers. I rarely had discussions at all. Silence joined with indifference to keep conversations to nods and shrugs. Sometimes it almost compensated for how long it took some of them to pay me. If Dan and I had words it wouldn’t be the first time. A couple years back when it was all I could do to eat and pay for diesel, Dan owed me several hundred dollars, which he kept promising to pay. Then one day I saw him driving a brand-new Chevrolet pickup with all the bells and whistles.