Into the Twilight, Endlessly Grousing (15 page)

“Our teacher, Miss Deets, well, she says we have to bring in our dad or another man to tell what he does for a living. And I picked you!”

“Nope, cain't do it. Ah'm tied up thet day.”

“I haven't told you the day yet!”

“Don't matter. Ah'm tied up thet day. Otherwise, Ah'd do it jist fer you. By the way, this teacher, this Miss Deets, what's she look like?”

“Oh, she's beautiful, Rance. And rich, too.”

“Rich, too. Sounds an awful lot like maw kinda woman.”

“And she smells good!”

“Smells good! This is gettin' better 'n' better. Wahl, gosh-dang, mebby Ah can shuffle maw schedule around on thet day. Ah thank Ah jist had a cancellation. Yes sirree, Ah reckon Ah'll be able to oblige you after all, Patrick.”

“Thanks, Rance. But I haven't told you the terrible part of the favor yet.”

“Tell me the tarrible part.”

“You'll have to take a bath!”

“A bath! Ah'll be gol-dang if thar ain't always a catch! Ah 'spect you wants me to shave, too, an' mebby even comb maw har!”

Over the next few weeks, the fathers came in one by one to tell what they did for a living. I have to admit, they were all pretty interesting.

Mr. Skaggs: “I work in the woods. Run a chain saw and fall trees. I suppose some of you kids is wondering why I only have three fingers on my left hand. Well, you ain't never seen so much blood. Just barely missed gettin' gutted by that saw. Way it happened …”

Mr. Carson: “I work in the woods. Run a skidder. Now, I suppose you kids are wondering what happened to my face. Well, one day …”

Mr. Haverstead: “I farm. Go to work at four in the morning and quit about ten at night, but it ain't always that easy. During calving time, I put in pretty long days.”

Mr. Kojak: “I work in the mines. Maybe some of you kids are thinking about working in the mines. In that case, you better study real hard and get good grades and go off to college.
Because you'd be dang fools to work in the mines!
”

And so on. Miss Deets didn't seem too happy with the reports from the fathers, but we kids found them very educational. Those lectures probably raised our grade average by several hundred percent.

Finally, the day arrived for Rancid to come in and give his report on what he did for a living. I have to admit I was more than a little nervous. I hoped he'd remembered about the bath. Then, right at the appointed time, the door to Delmore Blight third grade was flung open and in strode Rancid Crabtree. If anyone had had a feather handy, they could have knocked me flat on the floor with it.

Rancid had not only taken a bath—his face still appeared a bit raw from the scrubbing—but he had shaved and combed his hair, slicked it back with some bear grease, I imagine, and his sweeping mustache had not only been tamed but trained, and swept out expansively on both sides of his face. He wore a suit, a bit threadbare at the elbows, but clean and pressed. He was lean and tan and stood well over six feet tall in his gleaming cowboy boots. Far and away, Rancid was the most impressive and most handsome of the speakers so far. I couldn't have been more proud of him. And then he delivered his lecture.

“Yawl wants to know what Ah does fer work? Wahl, Ah'll tell you. Ah don't do none! Not a gol-dang bit! Ah fishes and Ah hunts whenever I wants to, goes to bed when Ah wants to, and gits up when Ah wants to. Ah even takes baths when Ah wants to, and Ah 'most never wants to. Ah ain't got nothin' agin honest work, nor dishonest work neither. It's work in general Ah'm agin. Fer as Ah can see, work jist uses up a man's life, when he could
jist as well be out huntin' and fishin' and enjoyin' hissef. And Ah'll tell you this …”

Rancid's lecture set the class grade average back where it had been before. Probably lower. I doubt there was a boy in the class who wasn't considering Rancid's lifestyle as a serious career option. I know I was.

Riding home with Rancid after school, I raised a few of my concerns about his lecture.

“I don't think not doing any work at all was what Miss Deets expected you to tell the third grade,” I said. “She looked pretty shocked.”

“Thet's okay. The brats seem to enjoy it. Clapped and cheered fer me afterwards, didn't they? Mebby Ah helped shape some of their miserable little lives. Thet's what teachin's fer, ain't it?”

“Yeah, I guess so, Rance. You certainly shaped my life. You did really well, no matter what Miss Deets might think. But then you did that awful thing right in front of the whole class!”

“Ah did? Must've jist slipped out without me noticin'. Gol-dang, Ah gots to be more mindful of thet whan Ah'm out in public.”

“Oh no, you know what you did! You asked Miss Deets would she go to the Saturday dance with you! I was horrified! She was too!”

“Ha! Kinder give her a shock, all right. Put a little color in her cheeks, too. But like Ah keeps tellin' you, boy, faint heart never won fair maiden. It don't hurt to try. All can happin is, you git turned down.”

“Yeah, I suppose you're right. But that isn't what horrified me.”

“It ain't?”

“No! What horrified me is, she
accepted!
”

Retch Sweeney and I were grounded during our freshman year in high school, not by parental decree but because our mountain car, Mrs. Peabody, had perished. We had named the car after our favorite high school teacher, an honor we were sure she cherished, although obviously not enough to show her appreciation in the form of higher grades. We weren't surprised by her failure to reciprocate, but it had been worth a shot.

Mrs. Peabody, the car, could not have been more lovely—something, by the way, that also could be said for the teacher after whom we'd named the vehicle. We had practically stolen the car from Budge Honeycut, owner of a local wrecking yard. Budge said so himself, wetting his thumb and counting out the wad of forty $1 bills we'd handed over. He even went so far as to say that he'd never
run into two sharpies as shrewd as Retch and I. “Shucks,” he said, “if every client was like you fellas, I'd likely go broke in no time at all.”

Three months after the purchase, Mrs. Peabody blew up, not something you'd expect from a $40 car. Budge Honeycut admitted as much. He said we must have forgotten to put oil in it. That wasn't true. When we mentioned to someone that we got twenty miles to the gallon, we were talking about oil, not gas. Retch suggested to Budge that he might want to give us a refund on the car, but that was a dangerous thing to suggest. When you make a man Budge's age laugh that hard, he could easily have a heart attack. But I've written about the Peabody tragedy in
Never Sniff a Gift Fish,
and it would make me too sad to dwell further on it here.

Six months later, we had scraped together another $40. A neighbor had an old junker out in his back lot, and he said he reckoned he might be able to let it go for $100. We told him we had only $40 and change. “How much change?” he asked. “Sold!”

For $40, of course, we didn't expect any of the usual automotive accessories, such as doors, fenders, headlights, taillights, a complete floor, or a backseat. But the car had all the essentials, like a motor and wheels and, uh, well, a motor and wheels. It did have brakes, too, which quite often actually worked. We always drove the car flat out, or about fifteen miles an hour. That may not seem like much in this speed-crazed age, but it was a lot better than pedaling a bike up into the mountains with all your camping gear tied on behind.

As soon as we'd made the purchase, we rushed into Mrs. Peabody's classroom and told her we were naming our new car after her, too. She said, “Be still, my heart.” So we knew she was pleased, although probably not enough to affect our grades.

As with our first car, naming the vehicle after our English teacher apparently resulted in a certain amount of confusion in our small town of Blight. The possibility of such confusion never occurred to Retch or me, of course. Otherwise, we'd probably have named the car something else.

A mechanic by the name of Heck Ramsey owned a little gas station and garage outside of town, and occasionally we'd wheedle him into diagnosing some malfunction of our car and, with a bit of luck on our part, fixing it. We stopped by Heck's garage one day for just such a purpose. He came out of the shop wiping his hands on an oily rag, taking care to conceal his joy over another visit from us.

“What you two want now?” he growled. “Don't you see I'm busy?”

“We don't want to bother you, Heck,” Retch said. “Just stopped by for a cold pop and to chew the rag a bit. Oh, by the way, here's something that will interest you. Mrs. Peabody's got a bad exhaust problem.”

“I got one myself,” Heck said, “but I can live with it. I expect she can, too.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but it's us we're worried about. We're afraid the fumes will kill us. Our eyes start to burn and get all watery, and we can hardly breathe.”

“Sounds like a real bad case all right, about the worst I ever heard of. Mrs. Peabody, you say?”

“Yep, Mrs. Peabody. Say, Heck,” I wheedled, “you don't happen to have an old tailpipe around that you could install on our car, do you?”

“What's wrong with the tailpipe you got?”

“Probably nothing. Except it's up on the Pack River road someplace.”

“I'd be glad to solve that little problem for you.”

“You would? That's great!”

“Yup. What I advise is, you drive with your heads out
the winders, 'cause I shore ain't installing a tailpipe on it.”

“She don't have windows,” Retch pointed out. “Doors neither. But the exhaust comes right up through the floor.”

“Oh, well, I suppose I could put on an old tailpipe. But I ain't doin' the job for free. How much money you got?”

“A dollar and fifteen cents.”

“Just enough. Drive her up on the rack.”

Retch and I hung around the garage picking up a few new swearwords while the greedy mechanic installed the tailpipe.

“You'd think he could've left us with at least enough change for a couple bottles of pop,” Retch muttered.

“You know mechanics,” I said. “Take every last dime you have.”

Mechanics weren't the only persons to give us problems over Mrs. Peabody II. Sheriff O'Reilly was always after us, too. We were tooling up the highway one day at fifteen miles an hour, minding our own business, when once again we noticed a red light blinking faintly through the cloud of black exhaust smoke boiling out of our new tailpipe. While we were discussing the possible source of the light, the faint sound of a siren rose above the roar and the periodic explosions emanating from Mrs. Peabody's engine.

We pulled over and drifted to a stop, not wanting to use up what was left of the brakes unnecessarily. Because I was the passenger, it was my job to stick my feet down through a hole in the floor and skid them along the ground to help with the braking. Retch had constructed an anchor we could drop through the hole, in case of an emergency, but we hadn't yet had an emergency.

Presently, the sheriff stuck his head through the window, or what would have been a window if Mrs. Peabody had possessed any. We tried to interest him in casual conversation, but he didn't appear in the mood, or so we judged
from his shouting into Retch's ear, which he had grasped between two fingers and pulled up close to his lips.

“I thought I was done with you two idiots after your last hazardous heap blew up,” he bellowed. “Listen to me, Retch Sweeney! If I catch you and Pat out on the highway one more time with this death trap of a monstrosity, I'm going to run both of you in! I'm going to lock you up in a cell and feed you nothing but bread and water for a year! You hear me?”

We laughed. Sheriff O'Reilly was such a kidder.

The sheriff gave Retch's ear a fierce little tug. “One more thing! You got to get a license for this pile of junk!”

Retch and I were deeply offended. It was one thing to hear Mrs. Peabody called a “death trap,” but “pile of junk” was downright insulting, particularly when you consider that I have purified the sheriff's vocabulary somewhat.

“What for we need a license?” Retch said.

“So the vehicle can be identified, that's what for!”

“You didn't have no trouble identifying it, did you, Sheriff? “Retch said.

It's always a bad idea to jest with a law officer when he has hold of your ear. Retch was still yelping as I tried to placate the sheriff with some good news about our car.

“Guess what, Sheriff?” I said. “Mrs. Peabody got her exhaust problem cured.”

“
Exhaust
problem? Oh yeah, Heck Ramsey mentioned it to me. Said it was the worst case he'd ever heard of. And by golly, if
Heck
says so, I got to believe it was downright terrible. Thank goodness she's cured. A thing like that can knock the devil out of your social life.”

“Yeah,” I said. I didn't mention that Retch and I had very little social life anyway.

“Well, you boys get this heap off the highway and don't let me catch you out here again.”

“Uh, one more thing, Sheriff,” Retch said, trying to work his ear back into its original shape. “How about giving us a boost to get started? That way we won't have to get out and crank her.”

One of the things I hated worst about the sheriff was that long, cold, silent stare. It could lift the hairs on the back of your neck.

We managed to avoid the sheriff most of the time. Fortunately, we had to drive only about three miles down the highway to get to a road that took us up into the mountains. No one ever bothered us or Mrs. Peabody when we were up in the mountains. That's one of the things I've always loved about the mountains. Oh, occasionally, when we had Mrs. Peabody parked alongside the road, a logging truck would stop and the driver would yell out the window, “You boys dang lucky you didn't get kilt. That's the worst accident I ever seen.”