‘He was in France with the Army Engineers in the war. Then he studied mechanical engineering. Anything with wheels, he loved.’
‘I’m going to be an engineer,’ said the young man. He’d become used to thinking this, now that the childhood dreams were all gone.
The old lady smiled. ‘Well, you’re more than welcome to anything you find,’ she said. ‘Just a bunch of old junk in here. Could never bear to part with anything, my Emerson. I kept meaning to clean it out, but the years went by – I don’t rightly know just where – and, well, I never quite got around to it.’
The old lady reached for a light switch. It was one of the old kind, with a big circular housing and toggle switch and the old insulated wiring he’d seen in his grandfather’s cottage on the lake, as a boy. To his surprise, the light came on.
The garage was full of junk. Every square inch of floor space was covered. A vehicle of some kind hulked in the middle of the floor under a dust-covered tarpaulin. There were at least two motorbikes that he could see, tucked away at the back, similarly draped in old canvas tarpaulins. Machine parts scattered the floor, along with stacks of car tyres and what looked to be a big-block V8 engine up on a trestle. Wooden shelving trellised the walls, floor to rafters, stuffed with junk. A workbench ran all along one side, heaped with tools and jars and mouse-eaten cardboard.
‘Thank you for offering to do the garden,’ said the old lady. ‘I expect I’ve let the place run down a bit. After David was killed, my Emerson spent more and more time in here, and less and less looking after the place. Never knew what he got up to. Just sat here, I reckon, smoking himself to death.’
‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ said the young man, meaning it, and thinking that this old lady would understand that he meant it and that he was not just being polite.
‘There’s a mower in here somewhere,’ she said. ‘You’ll just have to do some looking around.’ The old lady smiled and touched his shoulder, then turned and walked away. She walked slowly, befitting her age, but he thought there was a certain grace to the way she moved, an echo.
After rummaging for a while, the young man found some old shears, a box of rusty files and an old-fashioned oil can. He went outside and sat in one of the old wooden garden chairs, where he got the shears working and sharpened the blades. The tallest grass was too much for any mower, so he set to it with the shears, stacking the sheaves of dry grass in bundles by the fence as he went. It was hot work and he didn’t have gloves, and after a while his thumbs were blistered on the inside near the big knuckles. At lunchtime, the old lady brought him a sandwich and a glass of ice-cold lemonade.
After eating, he returned to the garage. He found the old gasoline-powered mower near the back, covered by one of the canvas tarps. To his surprise, it looked in good condition – there was no rust and it appeared to have been stored with care. It didn’t take him long to get it running, roughly at first, with big puffs of blue smoke, and then gradually more cleanly. By sunset, he’d finished cutting the front lawn, raked up the cut grass, and swept the now-visible front path.
He showered and was lying on his bed reading War and Peace when he heard a car horn blare. He kept reading. Again, the same horn, three times. A jacked-up orange Dodge Charger was idling out on the street. Earl Lawson was at the wheel, Rodney next to him in the passenger seat.
‘Come on down, iceback,’ shouted Earl. ‘It’s Saturday night. We’s goin’ cruisin’.’
The young man, recognising this as one of those times when he needed to overcome his natural desire for solitude, gave the thumbs up and closed the window. He pulled on jeans and a collared shirt, checked his appearance in the mirror above the sink and walked down to the waiting car. As he approached, Rodney got out of the car, and without looking up, opened the back door and sat in the back seat.
‘Nice car,’ said the young man.
‘Big block 440 with dual hemi carbs,’ said Earl, gunning the engine. ‘Fastest in town.’ With an opened beer in hand, he started the car rumbling down the street. ‘Place looks different,’ he said.
‘They should tear that old place down,’ said Rodney. ‘They say it’s haunted.’
‘Now who says it’s haunted, Rodney?’
‘People.’
‘Who?’
‘People, is all.’
‘Well I been livin’ in this town my entire life and I reckon you is plain makin’ that up, Rodney.’
‘I ain’t makin’ nothin’ up, Earl. Old Mister Parkins, for one. He reckons the old lady talks to ghosts. He says he goes on past there sometimes and he can hear her in there talkin’ to ’em.’
‘Missin’ a few planks on the front porch, I reckon. You and him both.’ Earl glanced at the young man and flashed a grin. ‘Now just pass up a Lone Star, Rodney, and stop talkin’ shit.’ He said it she-it.
Rodney rummaged and passed a can to Earl.
‘Not for me,’ Earl said, pushing it away. ‘For him, stupid.’
The young man took the beer. It was ice cold.
At the lights, Earl nudged up to the white line, stopped the car and took a swig of beer. He revved the big V8. The car torqued, settled.
‘Well you gonna open it?’ said Earl.
The young man looked at the can of beer. ‘What if the police stop us?’
Earl laughed. ‘What if they do? This is Texas. I ain’t drunk. Not as yet, anyhow. You drunk, Rodney?’
‘I reckon I is, Earl.’
The lights changed and Earl gunned the engine. The tyres screamed and the young man was slammed back into his seat as the car fishtailed in a cloud of smoke. Rodney whooped as they accelerated down the street. Earl looked over and grinned. Unlike his father, he had great teeth. The young man opened his beer and took a long drink. Soon, they were cruising down the main strip. They passed a group of girls in tight jeans and halter tops standing outside the movie theatre. Earl gave the horn a blast and the girls flashed white smiles. One of them waved. Earl finished his beer and tossed the can into the back seat. Rodney passed him up another.
‘How you likin’ it so far?’ said Earl, opening the beer. ‘Texas, I mean.’
‘Good. I like the work.’
Rodney puffed in the back seat.
‘Y’all married?’ said Earl.
‘No. Are you?’
Earl nodded. ‘Four kids.’
‘That’s great,’ said the young man.
‘Got hitched the year I dropped outta school. Becky-May was sixteen, I was seventeen.’
The young man turned and hooked his arm over the seat back. ‘What about you, Rodney, you married?’
Rodney tucked his chin to his chest the way he did and puffed out his cheeks.
‘Don’t mind him,’ said Earl. ‘He’s sore on account of he can’t find hisself a woman.’
‘I had me plenty of women,’ said Rodney, cracking another beer.
‘Yeah, when?’
‘In the navy, that’s when.’
Earl looked over at the young man. ‘Two years at Dee, Texas, in the spare-parts department. Bet the girls were fallin’ all over you, Rodney.’
‘They sure was, Earl.’
‘Sure, Rodney,’ said Earl.
They left the main drag and rumbled through a neighbourhood of run-down houses. After a while, Earl slowed the car and turned into a dirt driveway in front of a small wood-frame house. There was a screened veranda out front and a couple of trees shading the driveway. Lights shone inside. A Texas flag hung in one of the windows, lone star up.
‘Y’all’s invited for supper,’ said Earl, getting out of the car. ‘Becky-May’s especting y’all.’
Earl’s wife was petite and pretty. She had long dark hair that she wore pulled back, and lovely dark eyes. She couldn’t have been much older than twenty-one, but there were blue half-moons under her eyes and the first lines had started to take hold around the corners. They shook hands and she said ‘hi’ to Rodney as if she’d known him all her life. The young man and Earl and Rodney sat down
at the table. Becky-May set a casserole dish in the middle, brought four cold beers and sat down.
‘We is awful glad you could join us,’ she said. ‘You bein’ new here in Brownwood ‘n’ all. We don’t get many visitors.’
The young man thanked her and wished Earl had told him he was invited for dinner, so he could have brought something – a bottle of wine or flowers for the house.
‘The kids are all in bed, so we should have some peace.’ She served him first, then Rodney and her husband and then herself. ‘So Earl tells me y’all is educated.’
The young man, who was fluent in two languages, competent in two others and had excelled in high-school physics and math and chemistry and was two years into an engineering degree, shook his head and said: ‘No, ma’am but I’m trying.’
‘He’s here workin’ illegal,’ said Rodney.
‘Shut up, Rodney,’ said Earl.
Becky-May glanced at her husband. ‘Myself, I never got the chance to finish my schoolin’ on account of my kids comin’ along a little earlier than I would’a hoped for.’ She reached for the casserole dish. ‘When my littlest gets a bit older, I’m fixin’ to do a secretarial course down at the college, maybe part time. Would ya’ll like seconds?’
‘Please,’ said the young man.
She helped him to more. ‘I reckon you must have travelled some, then?’ she said.
‘A little.’
‘Tell me some of the places you’ve been,’ she said.
‘I went to Europe with my parents when I was eleven. France and England and Denmark.’
‘You hear that, Earl? He’s been to Europe. Ain’t he lucky?’
The young man paused, unsure whether to continue.
Becky-May smiled at him, sipped her beer.
‘My old man always used to say, we don’t have a lot of money, but what we have, we spend on doing things, not having things.’
‘I like that,’ said Becky-May. ‘Doin’ things, not having things. You hear that, Earl?’ She took another, longer swig of her beer. ‘Where else you been?’
‘My old man took us to Panama one year, for Christmas, to visit his best friend.’
‘Panama. Where’s that, exactly?’
‘It’s in Central America.’
She thought about this a while and then said: ‘I ain’t never been outside of Texas. Neither has Earl. What do you think about that?’
‘I been outside Texas,’ said Rodney before the young man could begin thinking of an answer.
‘Yeah, where?’ said Earl.
‘El Paso.’
‘El Paso is in Texas, stupid,’ said Earl.
‘Earl,’ said Becky-May.
Earl took a long drink, crushed the can and threw it into the kitchen. ‘Well he is.’
‘Earl,’ said Becky-May.
‘Iceback here is lodgin’ over at the old Jackson place,’ said Earl, forking a mouthful of macaroni and ground beef into his mouth. He held his fork in a reverse grip with the knuckles facing the table and the stub of his missing baby finger pointing up.
Becky-May shook her head. ‘Sad what happened to that family. Losin’ three sons like they did. Mind you, it was a long time ago now.’
‘Does she have anyone left?’ said the young man.
‘None that I know of,’ said Becky-May, a deep frown creasing her face. ‘The first one died when he was small. They say he drowned in the river not far from the bridge. He never got a chance to go anywhere, either.’
She was staring right at him. The young man looked away.
‘Davey was the youngest,’ said Earl. ‘He was killed over in Vietnam.’ He put down his fork and wiped the corner of his mouth with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.
The young man said nothing.
‘I remember going to the funeral,’ said Becky-May. ‘The whole town showed up. Fifteen boys we lost over there from Brownwood. I remember feeling so sad for their mothers.’
‘Was ya’ll’s country in the war?’ said Earl.
‘No, we were opposed to it.’
Rodney grunted, glanced at Becky-May.
‘A few Canadians volunteered, though, went to fight.’
Earl cleaned his plate and stood. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you my guns.’
The next day, Sunday, the young man finished cutting the grass around the house. In the evening, he walked into the centre of town, where he found the Vietnam cenotaph and read the name of David S. Jackson carved into the red granite. In the east buttress of the Main Street bridge, he found a small brass plaque that read: Joseph S. Jackson, born 1946, died 1950.
That week they did workovers on two wells west of town. Foy told the young man to replace Rodney on the power tongs for a spell, so he could learn. Rodney puffed out his cheeks and protested that after all, he’d been roustabout for over six months before he’d been given a chance to work the tongs. Foy told him to shut up, and Rodney spent the rest of the day sulking.
The next day, when they arrived at the site and got ready to trip in, Rodney had resumed his position on the tongs. The young man took station near the pipe rack to continue his role as low man on the team, laying down pipe.
‘What you doin’ boy?’ said Foy.
Rodney looked perplexed. ‘You talking to me, Foy?’
‘Well I’m lookin’ right at ya, ain’t I, Rodney?’
‘I’m gettin’ ready to trip, Foy. Like you said.’
‘Now, I don’t recall tellin’ you to shift back on to them tongs, Rodney.’
Rodney pulled in his neck so that his shoulders almost met his ears. ‘The iceback done had his go at it yesterday,’ he said.
‘Well he’s gonna have another go at it today,’ said Foy. ‘And he’ll keep doin’ it till I says he stops. You got that, Rodney?’
Rodney thought this through a while. ‘Well it just ain’t fair, Foy,’ he puffed. ‘Me bein’ Texan, born and bred, and him, well, not.’
Foy took a couple of deep breaths, then stepped down from the control platform and stood glaring at Rodney. ‘Born and bred stupid is what you is,’ he said.
Rodney hung his head.
Foy frowned. ‘Now be a good boy, Rodney, and do as I say, would ya? We got a lot a work to do.’
Rodney shrugged, pursed his lips and puffed out his cheeks again, but he stepped away from the tongs, walked over to where the young man was standing and grabbed the stub wrench from his hand.
Each morning, Rodney would stand at the tongs, ready to work, and each time he and Foy would repeat a new version of the same conversation, always with the same result, the young man taking the higher place in the rig’s hierarchy. Their work rate as a crew had improved, Foy said, as they drove home. He kept everyone in the same roles for the rest of the week.
That weekend, the young man asked the old lady if he could paint the house. She seemed surprised, but agreed, giving him two dollars for paint. He walked into town and bought two ten-gallon pails of Cape Cod grey, two gallons of white for the trim and two brushes and a roller and tray at the local hardware store for twenty-eight fifty. He worked through the day, scraping away the old, thickly layered paint, the peelings falling to the ground like years. By evening, the front and one side of the house were scraped clean. The sun set, and a cool breeze blew in from the high country to the north. The young man sat outside and ate some leftover cold chicken and drank a beer. As he was eating, the old lady appeared from the side door with a tray. He jumped up and put on his shirt and went to help her.
He set the tray on a small garden table and pulled up a chair for her. She was wearing a dark dress and had her hair up in some kind of scarf. She had applied lipstick, too, but it looked as if she’d done it without using a mirror.
‘There is a letter for you,’ she said, handing him an envelope. ‘It wasn’t posted. Someone must have slipped it through the slot last night.’ His name was typed on the front using an old typewriter. There was no return address.
He thanked her and stashed th
e letter in his pocket.
She poured lemonade and handed him a slice of watermelon. ‘It’s so nice to have a young man around the house,’ she said. ‘It makes me feel quite alive again.’
The young man drank. The lemonade was ice cold and not too sweet. He wanted to ask her about her sons, about her husband and their life together, the places she’d seen and the things she’d done, about what she liked to read, who her favourite authors were. But none of it seemed right or respectful. What he said was: ‘I’ll paint this side tomorrow. And next weekend I should be able to do the front.’
She looked up at the house, the bare wood showing through in big bone-grey patches. ‘I see your friends picking you up each morning,’ she said. ‘And you walking into town for groceries and the like. You don’t have a car?’
‘No, ma’am. Back home, I ride a motorcycle.’
‘My David rode a motorcycle. Emerson got them riding when they were young.’ Her voice sounded as if it had come over miles. ‘David’s motorbike is still in the garage, I think. You are welcome to it, if you want it.’
He took a breath, surprised. ‘That’s very kind of you, ma’am. But I’m just fine. I like walking.’
She stood and reached for his hand. ‘Let’s go and take a good look at it,’ she said. ‘I’d like to see it again. He always looked so dashing on it, so manly.’
He followed her to the garage. She switched on the light.
‘That one, at the back,’ she said, pointing.
The young man worked his way to the back of the garage towards the dark shape. ‘This one?’
She nodded. He pulled the tarp away.
The young man stood for a moment, unable to speak. It was if he had pushed open the slab on a burial chamber, a Pharaoh’s tomb. There, in the half light, up on blocks, was an immaculately preserved vintage Harley Davidson. It had one of the big twin-V Shovelhead engines, the old bicycle-style seat and big maroon square-cut fenders. He looked up at the old lady. Pride glowed in her eyes.
‘I would be most heartily gratified if you would make use of it,’ she said. ‘I think David would be pleased.’
The young man cleared a path along one side of the garage and wheeled the bike outside into the night. He put it up on its kickstand. The tyres were deflated, but otherwise the bike looked in perfect condition. They stood and admired it in the dim light coming from the open garage.
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