by Chamber Four
Heat
By Michael Henson
1.
Heavy snow covered the fields and made the back roads nigh impassible. The main roads and highways were clear, but Russel Road, because there was nothing on it but a string of isolated farms and a junkyard, had not been even nicked by a plow.
JD could feel his tires spinning over the ruts. But he felt no fear of slipping into the ditches. He had driven such roads before. He could handle this. His feet were chilled from the drafts in the floorboards, and every few minutes he had to brush the fog from the windshield with his glove. Under the dash, the guts of his heater were exposed so that other drafts spun around his kneecaps. His legs felt like cold glass.
But he had been through worse. He could handle this.
Black stands of trees stood in the distance. Blacker stands bent closer to the road. Stubble broke out of the snow-covered furrows like notes on a page of music.
He saw the thick band of black trees that lined the creek bank and he readied himself. He knew what was coming: the sudden dip of the road toward the bridge and the space before the bridge where the shoulders of the road, guarded by flimsy, gray, wooden guardrails, fell away on each side just before the abutment. To make it, and to stay clear of the falling shoulders, he gunned his motor, steered hard to the left as he felt the rear end shift that direction, then gunned the motor again as the car righted itself and took the bridge. “Come on, you bitch,” he whispered. He held the pedal right to the carpet as he fishtailed over the floor of the bridge and started up the opposite bank. He prayed no one was coming the other way.
No one was. He crested the hill with his pistons crackling and the windshield full of sky. The rush of making it warmed him so that he forgot the brittle cold in his feet and legs.
Flanagan’s was just ahead. The gray, fallen-in fences of the yard rose up out of the snow like wounded men on a battlefield. Beyond the fences, rows of junkers fanned out into the field, dark bodies against the white. Unlike other junkers, Flanagan kept his cars in neat, semi-circular rows, like cars at a drive-in movie.
The junkyard had once been a farm. The barn, buckled under from rot, leaned to the rear. The old farmhouse was boarded up. Flanagan used it now to store parts. The office was a low cinder-block box with a tar paper roof.
Woodsmoke poured from the chimney; he knew Flanagan was there. JD was glad of it; he could not afford to make this trip for nothing. He began to slow for the turn, for the space between the fences.
The snow in the yard had been tracked and pressed down and shoved into heaps by other customers. A pickup truck was parked by the door. A motor, half-covered by a tarp, lay in the bed of the truck. JD pulled up beside the truck and snapped off his ignition. The pistons rattled and settled.
He grabbed the heating core he wanted to replace and got out of the car. A crow called through the empty air from its perch beyond the fences, in one of the black trees.
2.
Light from the yard swept into the office when he opened the door. Flanagan, in coveralls and a ball cap, stood at the counter. With him was another man, the driver of the pickup truck, JD guessed. Together, they were studying a dismantled carburetor.
A wood stove crackled in the middle of the floor. A kettle for coffee water steamed on top of it. Behind the counter, and on all the walls, shelves were packed with parts that had been mined out of the wrecks out back. Sections of the floor were given over to a pile of bell housings, a pyramid of generators, radiators stacked like waffles, a pride of motors ranked like stuffed lions. A pool of melted slush lay near the door. The place smelled of used oil and wood smoke.
Flanagan raised an eye from the carburetor and looked from JD to the door then back to JD. He kicked the door shut and stepped to the counter.
“What can I do you for?” said Flanagan, his screwdriver still probing the inside of the carburetor.
JD laid the core on the counter.
“Heater core,” said Flanagan. “Chevy II.”
JD nodded. “You got it,” he said. Flanagan could tell nearly any part by sight and could tell you intimate histories of most of the parts on his shelves or in the heaps on his floor.
“You picked the right season for it.” Flanagan had only briefly turned his eye from his work. The man at the counter grinned. JD did not. He was in no mood.
“I reckon,” JD said.
Flanagan nodded toward a cotter pin that lay among the parts on the counter. The other man picked it up, handed it to him, and watched as Flanagan inserted the pin and splayed its points.
“You think we got it now?” Flanagan asked the man.
“Aint but one way to find out.”
Flanagan turned to JD. “So I reckon you want to get you a heater core.”
JD nodded, thinking, No, I just drove out here in this snow for the pleasure of it.
“How’s the kids?”
“They’re just fine.”
“I reckon Michelle’s none too happy about ridin around with no heat.”
JD hesitated. Just for a moment. “No she sure aint,” he said.
“Not with the kids anyway.”
JD said nothing to this, so Flanagan picked up the heater core, a radiator the size of a textbook or a family Bible. “It sure enough looks shot,” he said, fingering the green salts that had formed on the copper honeycomb. He pointed to the center of the salts. “Looks like your leak’s right there.”
“So you got another one to match?”
Flanagan drummed the counter with the tips of his fingers. “Not in here,” he said. He nodded in the direction of the field. “I aint got time to pull you one right now. There’s about fifteen little little screws holds that in place, aint they?”
JD nodded. “Plus that many more just to get the cover off.”
“They’re a real pain in the ass to get out or to put in either one. Awkward to get at.” Flanagan placed his hands wide on the counter. He looked from one man to the other. “You got to bend yourself into all kinds of shapes to get in there.” He looked for confirmation to the man with the pickup. The man nodded. “But it’s all in how bad you want the heat.”
Flanagan looked to JD. “You got any tools with you?”
JD nodded again. He had figured this would happen.
“You want to pull it yourself, I’ll sell it to you couple dollars off.”
“I reckon I aint got much choice.”
“Well you do if you want to pull you up a chair and set there and wait. Got plenty of wood. You won’t freeze.”
JD felt a sting in the words. He could not quite read Flanagan, whether he was mocking him or making a genuine offer. Anyway, he had no time. “Naw,” he said. “Where’s it at?”
“Wait a little bit. Get yourself warmed up fore you go out there into that snow. I don‘t reckon you got a lot of heat on the way out here.”
“Naw, it’s all right.”
“That wind cuts right through these wrecks like a knife.”
JD paused, just for a moment. The heat of the wood stove had just begun to affect him. He could just feel his muscles warming. For just a moment, a blink, he leaned toward the stove. Just long enough for a bead of resin to pop in the fire. But he caught himself short. He said, “Where’d you say it was at?”
“They’re scattered all through here. Three or four. Maybe half a dozen.”
“I’ll find em.”
“Make sure you get a good core. None of that corrosion on it.”
JD headed for the door to get his tools.
“You get cold,” Flanagan said, “Come on back in and warm up. Get a cup of coffee.”
JD nodded. He was not worried. He had been through worse. He could handle this.
3.
Flanagan opened the door of the stove, broke up the embers with the tie-rod he used for a poker, shook the cinders through the grate, and placed another chunk of maple on the fire. He heard the pickup grumble out of the lot, and limped back to the counter where his tools still lay spr
ead out. He began to place them in their drawers. He was hoping no none else would be in and he could close up early. He had an engine that needed rebuilding. But it could wait. He was in no hurry.
The wind swept against the building, and though the cinderblocks were solid, he could sense the lean it put to the trees, the woodframe buildings, and the fences. In this part of Ohio, where the land was mostly flat and unbroken, the wind had only the scattered woodlots, farmhouses, and barns to slow it, only barbwire fences and the branches of trees to string it back. He thought about JD out on the lot in that wind. It had been half an hour at least. He looked out through the small block windows and, though his eyes were not so clear any more for that distance, he thought he could see JD in his blue jacket and bandy-legged swagger stalking among the wrecks.
“That boy’s got a lot on his mind,” Pollard the man with the carburetor had said. And he was right. Flanagan, not one to talk about someone else’s business, merely nodded, and neither said another word about it.
Now, watching JD’s blue coat weave in and out among the neat rows of wrecked automobiles, he thought again. JD’s movements were jerky, abrupt, almost as if someone had wound him up and sent him spinning.
At first, his impulse was to throw on his coat, now that his business with Pollard was finished, and go out and help him. But he decided there was not that much he could do for JD that JD could not do for himself. If he don’t freeze, he thought.
He threw the last of his tools into its bin and he listened as the wind swept again, carrying with it a sound of crows and of shifting snow.
4.
JD threw open the door of the car, ran out into a clear space, swung back his arm, and flung the heater core—the third he had pulled—with a motion so full of force that he was nearly pulled over face first into the snow. He staggered forward to keep from falling, then caught himself on the severed body of a pickup truck. He heard the core clatter and smash against one of the wrecks a few rows down. The wind spat snow in his eyes.
5.
The first core he had pulled had been a match for his own, crusted in the same spots and same colors. To pull it, he had to lay across the front seat with his head suspended, looking up into the underdash case and frame that held the core in place. He bloodied his cold knuckles trying to ratchet out the small screws. Eventually, he had to shift and slide downward so that his head and shoulders rested against the floorboards. It was a cramped, suffocating position. But he knew what he was doing. He could handle it.
He had to pull the core all the way out, free of the brackets and hoses, all the way into his lap before he could tell it was corroded. He dropped that one behind him and looked for the next one. Later, he thought he should have saved it for the copper, but now it was lost in the snow.
The second heater case was an empty shell. The core was gone. Somebody got to it before me, he thought, so why in hell did they go to all the trouble of puttin all them screws back in? He figured Flanagan would have a history on it, if he wanted to ask.
6.
What a heater core does:
A second, smaller radiator. It waits, encased under the dashboard of your car. Water from the engine system, warmed from the fires in the pistons, is pumped along a hose, across the fire wall, and through the core, then back along another hose. A fan blows air across the heated core. The heated air warms you.
7.
Having flung that third, corroded core, JD stood fixed in his spot in the snow. He wiped the snow out of his eyes with his cold, stiff hand. A nagging crow called over and over from somewhere near the edge of the yard. A feeling, useless and heavy as a blown motor, rose up in his belly.
8.
All through the pulling of this third core, he had heard nothing but her voice. Through the loosening of thirty small screws and the unfastening of two hose clamps and the slitting and the peeling back of the two heater hoses, he heard her, bitching and bitching, endlessly bitching about the lack of heat.
“I’ve had it,” she had said.
I’ve had it, he mocked her as he lay on his back with his head on the floor reaching up into the underparts of the dashboard for the hex-headed screws that held the case. The cold had settled in him, bone by bone. He noticed that, more and more often, his ratchet slipped, and he cursed the tool, the tiny heads of the screws, his scuffed knuckles, and the woman. She aint the only one who’s had it, he thought.
“I’ve had it with you and your damn cars,” she had said. “You’ve got six of em out there and aint but one runnin and you’ve known since July it didn’t have no heater in it.
“Just as long as you get to play with your toys, it don’t matter to you if the kids turn blue from the cold.”
That was when he raised his hand to hit her. She never knew it; she was turned toward the sink and he was behind her with his fist balled up and raised back like an axe. He checked himself; he held back without swinging. But it was hard. He wanted to beat her down. He wanted to silence her.
He had never yet hit her. He hoped he never would.
Instead, he doubled his fists together and ground them one against the other. When she started up again, he did not intend to hear any more. “Okay, goddammit,” he shouted to keep from knowing what else she would pile on his head. He jerked up his tool box and pulled open the door. Amy, the oldest, stood watching him and chewing on the fingers of a doll. He stopped for a moment, struck by something merciful and fearful in the child’s crow-black eyes.
“And you don’t need to stand there givin away what little bit of heat we’ve got in the house,” Michelle had shouted from the sink.
“All right! All right!” He slammed the door shut and stamped through the snow to the car. He threw his tools into the seat, started up the engine with a roar, and slithered down the street toward the edge of town where Russel Road led out to Flanagan’s and the farm country.
It took a mile of slickness and risk before his rage settled enough that he could concentrate on snow driving. By that time he was out on Russel Road with its dips and contortions.
He figured: he had six dollars left until he got paid for the overhaul job he had done last week. There was no way he could pay for a new core, even if he could find one in a parts store, even if they had one in stock. Five or six dollars is what a junker would charge.
If he used the whole six dollars to pay for a core, he would have no cigarette money for a good three days. Something in the notion satisfied him, as if he had just proved a point to her.
9.
The heater case came free and fell against his face. He jerked it away and threw it over the seats. He attacked the frame screws, conscious only of his driven muscles. Each screw started with a sharp noise like a bite.
She could sit there and complain when I been workin my ass off just to keep the rent paid and food in the house, he thought. I could be layin up drunk of a night and day like her ex-old-man. She don’t think of that.
The screws dropped, one by one, onto the floor.
She aint got enough to complain about, that’s what it is.
Two more screws. The head of the first refused to break loose. He pulled back his ratchet and looked. Rust, like a collar of lace, lay around the head of the screw. He put the ratchet back to it and tried the turn. He felt it give and realized, too late, that he was rounding the head of the screw. He knew if he rounded it anymore, he would face drilling or hammering to get it out: more time hanging suspended in the cold. But he did not allow the fear to come up in him. He placed the socket back on the screw, tapped once on the back of the ratchet to make a snug fit, then turned. It snapped and loosened. He ratcheted it the rest of the way out, then drew the last screw. The frame fell loose. He tossed it too into the back seat, turned the clamps loose with a screwdriver, and went to work on the hoses with his pocketknife.
He was confident from the way his luck had gone with the rounded head. He worked the hoses loose and angled the heater core out of the box. He hesitated, just for a moment,
before he turned it over. He wanted to savor the moment.
He turned it over as if he were turning a page.
The core was covered with grey-green salts.
10.
Having flung the corroded core as far as he could, and having cursed and fumed until he was breathless, he stood in the clear space long enough, finally, to have argued it out with her in his head. He had not a shred of righteousness left. He was beaten. He had known even before he left the house that he was beaten.
The rage poured out of him like water. He felt riddled with defeat, with shame.
He heard the wind pick up again and felt it shift against him. Beyond the field of wrecks, he heard a flock of crows; he saw them gather along the fenceline and in the shattered corn.
Waiting for Home
by Ron Koppelberger
It was an expedition into Baku’s reckless incense and vigor, an uncultivated scramble of liberty; he handled the TV dinner tray as he dropped it to the floor, he scooped up the last bit of meatloaf from his gray socks, he liked the way the juice squished between his toes. Spatters of gravy had sprayed across the floor in a fan pattern of sauce.
Baku Upsilon: Baku from his native tribal designation and Upsilon because he had been the twentieth warrior in the tribal hierarchy. Potato chip bags and other trash padded the mosaic tiles of the tenth story high-rise. Baku considered the view from the penthouse window, a profusion of uproarious wanting, of dashing squirming squabble on the streets below. They move in circles, he thought, from one corner to the next. Baku touched the window, dragging his gravy coated fingers across the glass.