Curtis Mayfield Boyd, no relation, gets to the Nucor yard in West Memphis at 04:55 on a Tuesday. The yard does not open until 05:00. He waits behind a black Peterbilt with a Louisiana tag.
Curtis is fifty-eight. He drives a 2019 Kenworth W900L with a 72-inch sleeper, paid off in March. The truck is dark green with gold pinstripes he had done in Tupelo for 1,400 dollars.
He pulls a forty-eight-foot Reitnouer flatbed. Today he is loading three steel coils, 48,000 pounds total, bound for a fabricator in Laredo.
"Three coils is easy," he says. "Three coils sits in the wells. Three coils don't move."
He climbs onto the deck in steel-toed boots and runs four-inch straps over each coil, then chains with binders. He throws tarps over them, two heavy black ones, and ties off the corners with bungees. The tarping takes him forty-one minutes.
He is an owner-operator leased to a small flatbed carrier out of Olive Branch, Mississippi. They take 12 percent. He pays his own fuel, his own insurance, his own tires.
He grossed 218,000 last year. After fuel, after the truck payment when he still had one, after insurance, after tires, after the IFTA, he netted around 92,000.
“After fuel, after the truck payment when he still had one, after insurance, after tires, after the IFTA, he netted around 92,000.”
"It's a living," he says. "It ain't what they tell you on YouTube."
He is rolling south on I-55 by 06:30. Cruise set at 65. He gets 6.8 miles to the gallon empty, 5.4 loaded. Diesel today is 3.89 at the Loves in Marion.
He listens to a Memphis sports radio show until the signal goes. Then a podcast about the Civil War. Then nothing.
"I like the quiet stretch through Arkansas," he says. "Rice fields. Nothing on the CB. You think your own thoughts."
He stops at the Pilot in Texarkana for the bathroom and a coffee. He does not eat. He keeps a soft cooler behind the passenger seat with three turkey sandwiches his wife Renita made, a bag of grapes, and four bottles of water.
Renita is a school secretary in Frayser. They have been married thirty-one years. Two grown sons, one a paramedic, one in the Navy.
"She knows the road as good as I do," he says. "She knows when I'm tired before I do."
He gets into Laredo at 17:48, eleven hours after leaving Marion, with one 30-minute break logged for the regulations. He sleeps in the truck at a TA on the north side of town.
He delivers at 07:00 Wednesday. The receiver is slow. He sits four hours in the yard.
He picks up a backhaul of oilfield pipe at a yard near Pleasanton at 14:30 and turns it back toward a rig site in west Texas. The dispatcher pays him 2.85 a mile loaded for that one. He thinks it should be 3.10. He takes it.
"The rate isn't what it was in 2022," he says. "Nothing is what it was in 2022."
He is back in West Memphis by Sunday morning. He will be in his own bed for two nights. Then the yard at 04:55 again.
