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“I’ve got something for you.”
He almost didn’t hear it. The kid’s voice was soft, dampened in the quiet of the shed on Tuesday evening with the sunset coming on. It was coming from under the rails of the tractor frame where the boy was putting the pan on. His legs were splayed apart, and Munson could see one elbow and bicep as the boy struggled with the oil pan bolts, grease from the frame now a black smudge on his arm.
“What is it?” he finally responded. The light was bad in the place and he was by the window trying to light a propane lamp to bring over so that the boy could see things better. The mantels popped to the match flame; he turned towards the boy who was sliding out from under his work.
He stood up, his left hand reaching into his back pocket.
“Got it finished. I think the gaskets will hold real good,” he said, coming into the circle of the light. He unfolded the paper carefully, and Munson saw newsprint. Newsprint and grease. He handed the kid a towel and the two of them stood in the circle of light reading.
The boy’s hand was trembling, though not at first. The story was long enough to spill onto two pages. Munson’s eyes traveled down page one; the paper was from Lawrence, Kansas. He did not see the date, but the paper was faded.
“My mom left two years ago,” the voice said, soft tones in the hiss of the lamp. Munson shifted position, his standing suddenly awkward, as the boy brought up the second page.
“We moved here a few months after,” he said. “She came with, of course, but even then, I kinda knew.” Family wreckage, Munson thought. Pieces, fragments, old rusty parts like a tractor being parted out. He wondered what to do. The silence was a blanket. The boy helped him out. “He liked math, engines; ran the shop program. Boys from the school, freshmen, sophomores mostly, would hang out down there.” Munson finally registered why there suddenly was an “Al.” Charles James Chester was a name with too many miles, a name worn out, worn thin. “He said nothing really happened, but there was this association. People started making things up.”
They stood there, together, in the quiet of the evening, the hissing of the lamp, each with his own thoughts drifting up into the dark recesses of the building.
There was no sobbing sound, just the sound of air going in and then a rending pop of breath released in a half-cough, half-shout—grief and pain coming out of the form that would grow rigid and then soft in an alternating fashion; grief and pain like oil and coolant finding the places now where the gasket of years finally was wearing thin, giving way, while his voice made the sound, the sputter of an engine coughing.
They stood there in the quiet, his arm around the shoulder of the boy, until Munson finally thought enough to thoughtlessly say, “Perhaps this is enough work for tonight.” Triv nodded and moved a few steps away. He wanted to put two hands on the boy’s shoulders and look deep into his eyes. He wanted to say, “You can get clear of this,” but he did not.
Louise always put pop into the cooler that he left by the door. The boy stood, carefully folding the paper, while Munson got out two cold bottles of Coke, opening them on the bottle opener along the side of the workbench. He always got the old kind, glass bottles, whenever he could find them. And now he placed the cold surface of the glass into the palm of the boy’s waiting hand.
“Come on out back,” he said, and the two of them walked to the far end of the shed. Munson slid the old door open to the backyard where the garden patches stretched out into the dim light and the two of them stood and drank quietly, working the cool fluid down into their bodies with the sounds of swallowing making the only ripples upon the air to be heard.
“You come here for dinner tomorrow night.”
The boy looked at him.
“No, I don’t think so. It wouldn’t be right.”
“You come,” he said into the quiet air. “You’re expected.”
He didn’t know where all of this would go, but he knew that they had an extra bedroom. He also knew Louise would love to cook for three. He figured the tractor repair easily could become a restoration project. After all, the boy needed someone. And even if he didn’t stay down here with them on a permanent basis, he needed a place to go. It was lonely down there in the yard with just the junk, the old wasted skeletons to talk to. And when Al came back, the two of them would talk.
Voral took another drink. He would lay it all out; articulate the pieces together, proximal to distal elements, and he knew that the father would not object. The boy could go up there whenever the dad came off the road—if the boy really wanted to. That and Saturdays: Triv could run the business of the bone yard Saturdays and take calls right here at the house.
As the two of them stood together, Munson got the rest of the vision, the part that would cement the deal with a boy who wanted no favors. Then and there he decided that the WD would indeed need a full restoration: new rubber, overhauled brakes, new clutch. His mind stretched until he saw that old tractor sitting in the shed fully orange. New paint, it would have.
He smiled to himself: it would even be a little prissy. Not just a skeleton, some vestige of its former self. No-sir! It would take on flesh, get its color back. Yup. Drinking the last of his coke, he saw it in its full glory. The engine would purr, start on the first crank. And there would be no leaks, no traces of coolant running down the engine block. All the gaskets would be tight.
Putting his bottle down into the antique box squared off for empties, Munson could see the WD sitting on the front yard in the long light of an early summer afternoon. He was getting nuts about this tractor. It would take a lot of hours—the two of them, together.
He smiled into the darkness with all these notions of a finished product. He wouldn’t say anything about it all now. He would talk with Louise later tonight. For now, however, all he could see and seemingly think about was a baby doll tractor in bright orange: a real cream puff.
TROTTER CREEK