The kid had a face like gravel, roughed up and angry-looking, especially high up on the cheekbones where the sere blonde scatterings of his beard did not reach. Munson thought of the rocks and the dead grass of what passed for a front lawn where he had parked. To reach the bone yard, he had driven a gravel township road until he saw C.J. Chester, the bold lettering bringing him down the lane to where the first tractors appeared—mostly worn and rusty, some grill-less and grinning as he drove in.
“You sure you know what you’re lookin’ for, Mister?”
They were in the middle of the field, now, and the lanky form of his guide was half hidden by the clumps of Canada thistle, the angular protrusions of Goldenrod and the curled dead stalks of Queen Anne’s lace that he parted as he led the way. The boy looked familiar.
“WD and not a C was what you said?”
“Yeah that’s right—WD radiator, grille and battery box, if there’s one out here that still has the top.”
The bone yard spread out over a good three acres—most of it in the faded orange of the Allis Chalmers brand which rose up—islands, skeletons, torsos—out of the weeds. He passed an axle sticking up like a femur from the weeds and not much farther along skirted a swirl of bees emanating from the large rotting presence of a rear tractor tire—13.6 x 28 probably—their scant, rising forms making him think of the almost random of electron cloud probabilities orbiting, covering the positive attracting charge of an atomic nucleus in one of his general science textbooks. Dr. Bohr’s neat atomic model—orbitals instead of probabilities—is being revised before my very eyes, Munson thought, looking at the bees, but then he remembered that school was just a week away and that he was still out in the open air and away from the closed, humid palm of his classroom; still privileged to be looking for tractor parts.
The face and form of the Chester boy stopped and half-turned in his direction. Munson dutifully followed. He rounded a particularly thick, sickly-green clump of thistle and came upon the first almost-complete corpse of an Allis WD against which the teen was now leaning, eyeing him in his approach.
“Something here might work for you,” he said, still watching with his sometimes languid eyes, heavy-lidded like a lizard in the building heat, now falling, pressing upon Munson’s form as he looked things over.
The tractor had a narrow-front with the AC decal still visible on the tin as he moved front to rear in his examination. Below the curve of the engine cover, Munson saw the familiar mix of grease, dust and oil where the main head gasket had been leaking. He traced the rivulet of flaked paint where the coolant had cleaned things up by the number four cylinder and below the bright metal track of its flow noted that the crankcase was still securely bolted in place.
“I’m also looking for a bearing,” he told the boy, “if there’s an engine with the pan still on it out here like this one.”
“Help yourself,” the kid said carelessly, “or we might have some back at the shop.” Perhaps he had caught Munson’s sudden vision of a long, hot afternoon, wrenches and sockets settling into the thick brittle carpet of the weeds as he worked the bolts free and eased the pan on down, just for one damn bearing.
“Yeah,” he said, tiredly, “maybe we should take a look later.”
Where had all this come from? He was disking, asking the tractor to take just an eight-foot snap-coupler disk across one of his garden strips when it started slowing, got increasingly rough sounding. He moved the throttle up to no avail and then he heard this metallic sound beneath the firing of the engine. It was coming from down low, from where the bearing would be.
And that was that.
In the heat of his shed in the late mornings and into the long afternoons, Munson had sweated over that tractor. He had pulled off the radiator to get at the engine—to just pull it off and take it into the shop—when he had discovered radiator rot in the bottom portion of the radiator. He hauled the pulled engine to Smiley’s and got the bad news about the possibility of replacing the rings as long as the block was out and that little event—once it was fully priced out—had got Munson’s dander up, bringing him out in the heat for whatever he could scrounge in the way of used parts. Cheap parts, make-do parts. After all, he reasoned, this was not some kind of a prissy, baby-doll cream-puff restoration that he was doing; he just wanted a usable tractor.
Trevor was the name, but—somewhere in the course of things—Munson remembered that the name had been transmuted to Trivet and then often shortened to Triv. That’s where he had seen the boy, he thought, going back four years or so to the mesh of the backstop at the middle school, the shrill cry, “good job, Triv,” coming to his mind as the opposing team’s catcher came away, after bouncing off the metal, holding the caught foul ball over his head. Yep, he thought, that was the kid, less lanky then, and no foul pustules of acne, a kid new to the area.
“Still play any ball?” he said, from somewhere down near the crankcase.
“Oh yeah,” the voice brightened, “a little.”
“Home Town League?” Munson offered.
“Yup. Blue River Team.”
Munson stood up, eyeing the radiator that seemed perfectly sound and usable.
“Where do we go from here? I’d like the radiator off’n this one.”
“Well, fine,” the kid said, “I’m not afraid of wrenches. Good for the wrists. I’ll pull it off for you, Mr. Munson.” He was coming clearer now; coming into focus.
“It’s been about four years or so, hasn’t it?”
“Yeah, I guess that.”
“And Blue River’s two and three…”
“Yup. We made a bad start.”
“Catchin’?”
“Oh yeah.”
The shop was cool as they walked in. A little breeze was coming up from the West, rattling the big metal door. Triv slipped it open farther and took Munson into the dark quiet of the guts of the place. Along the walls and in two columns wooden shelves held an enormous variety of parts securely in well-marked boxes—a shocking contrast to the front yard, the bone yard, and even the front of the building itself were tools were lying randomly on the ground and parts from two half-disassembled tractors were scattered about.
“See anything?”
“Oh sure. The bearing for that WD engine were pretty-much standard through the WD, the ’45 and the early D-17s, so we’ve got plenty of ’em.”
He held one up to the light, dim as it was, and Munson saw the shiny surface of the metal around which the rod would go.
“Fine” he said.
“If you want to wander the yard, Mr. Munson, and give me a half an hour, I’ll have that radiator for you. And the grille and battery box.”
He wandered the yard. Al Chester kept a couple of black steers in there to keep the grass down and they watched Munson’s progress from the shade of two oak trees along the western border. He found a couple of Farmall As back in the far reaches of the place, complete with cultivators, noted the teeth of several sickle-bar mowers standing at attention in the travel position, spotted a potato digger (three point) and an old pull-type mower conditioner with chunks of rubber missing from both rollers and tires before it was all over.
Triv worked fast. Dark blue islands of sweat had formed on the front and back of his light blue T shirt as he carried Munson’s trophies back to the car—now suddenly the hunting guide just from the kill after gutting out the carcass, the quartered meat in hand, carrying it back to camp.
He placed the rump and flank of Munson’s radiator and grille on the flatbed of his old truck and said, as though he owned the place, “Come on in to the office so we can settle up.”
The office was just a corner of the shop, not far from the door, with a window above the oily wood of a workbench serving as desk where you could see out on to a small pen where calves once had been. Or hogs, Munson thought as he wrote out the check.
“Just make it out to C. J. Chester & Son,” the boy offered and Munson wondered about that even as he w
ondered how C.J. could have ever been transmuted into Al. But Al it was. Al had been leaning on the bar just two days ago when Munson came in for his drink.
“The usual” he had said to Julie and she poured out a screw-driver, topping it off with a little extra vodka and, for some strange reason a cherry, when, with eyes properly adjusted in the dim light, he saw Chester sitting half-way down the bar.
“Well if it isn’t the Klondike Middle School baseball coach,” the voice said in the darkness, “how are you, Munson?” And so he and “Al” Chester spent an hour. Three screw-drivers later, screwballs he called them by the end of the series, he had discovered that Chester owned a junk yard.
“I’m not much there, though, these days,” Chester offered. “On the road a lot doin’over the road driving. My boy sees to the place.” And so he did, taking Munson’s check and filing it away carefully in the worn cash box that served their needs. Even walked him back to the car.
Turned out, though, that the boy had a purpose.
“So you need a hand with that radiator? You need a hand, I could come on down and get it all settled in. And there’s that bearing problem.”
He’d had sized things up right, Munson thought. Got them figured out pretty good. He eyed the boy. Below the blonde tassel of hair and the downy gravel of the face and the heavy-lidded eyes were two strong, supple-looking arms.
“Sure” he said, somewhat surprised at himself. “That would be fine, Triv. Come down on Tuesday.”