by Linda, Alan
The
Prairie
Spy:
Who Shot the Dryer?
And Other Stories
From the Home Front
By Alan “Lindy” Linda
Trellis Publishing, Inc.
P.O. Box 280
New York Mills, MN 56567
800-513-0115
www.trellispublishing.com
The Prairie Spy: Who Shot the Dryer? And Other Stories From the Home Front
Copyright © 2012 by Alan “Lindy” Linda
All rights reserved. Except for short excerpts for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information or storage system, without written permission from the Publisher.
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication
(Provided by Quality Books, Inc.)
Linda, Alan “Lindy”.
The prairie spy : who shot the dryer? : and other
stories from the home front / by Alan “Lindy” Linda
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-930650-40-4
1. City and town life--Humor.
2. Soldiers--Vietnam--Fiction.
3. Short stories, American. I. Title.
PS3612.I546P73 2012 813’.6
QBI12-600048
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Cover and Interior Design by Design Angler, Inc.
To the World Tribe of Girls,
and especially to my own.
Introduction
Once, a long time ago in a writing class, the instructor said to me, in an effort to convince me that journalism was an honorable undertaking, “What are you going to write about? You cannot just write writing!” Meaning, of course, that my life wasn’t as interesting as anyone else’s.
The sure cure for that is to live longer than everyone else. That’s my goal at the moment, because a lot of the content of the last twenty years of columns has been about other people.
Oh, sure, there’s a lot of autobiographical stuff in there, too, like growing up on a farm, being the last to graduate from the country school system in Iowa, being drafted out of college into the Army and sent to Vietnam, then trying to leave the USA and getting only as far as New York Mills on the way to Canada (A rather confused attempt at fleeing after Vietnam, rather than before.), farming a little, going into business for myself, being raised by My Tribe of Girls (One Old Girl; three Young Girls), buying a hardware store, learning to fly, and always, like a golden thread through all the silver lining, playing in weekend rock and roll bands.
Twenty-some years of weekly column writing is the diamond that reflects the shine from the silver and gold, sort of. This book contains parts and pieces of that diamond, the three biggest ones being my three daughters, The Young Girls.
Now, appliances: I first began to sense that appliances could communicate with me when, three days out of Vietnam, abruptly enrolled at Iowa State University, in the basement of the only place which I could find to live on such short notice, the large fat-boy furnace with the huge, round arms seemed able to protect me from the refrigerator, which I had concluded in a post-traumatic bout with reality, was trying to poison me. It was years later, after some years of striving to master repairing these appliances, that they first began to actually speak to me.
Of course, I had taken at that point several years of arduous training in communication with The Tribe of Girls, and had learned the hard way from them how to communicate wordlessly by subtle facial changes, minute shoulder movements, barely discernible posture adjustments, and once in a great while, impossible anatomical requests suggested by one or more human fingers. Appliances talking to me? Nothing after that. A thousand words in a glance from A Girl was more than adequate training for a few pages of a technical manual or a squeak and a rattle from a dryer or a furnace.
Words continue to be a wonder to me, have in fact been so ever since I can remember. I hope those here are as wonderful for you.
I specially thank My True Love, MaryBee, mostly for being in my life and gratefully for helping publish this book.
Chapter 1
Appliances
Ms. Frigidaire: Who Shot the Dryer?
Dave Lennox
Murray the Mower
Same Sex
Water Heaters
Annual Physical
General Has a Diaper
Who Shot Ms. Frigidaire the Dryer?
For those of you out there who are new readers, and have wondered which drugs I’m on currently, here comes more reason for concern.
As you know, I made a large part of my livelihood servicing home appliances, and there came a day, after puzzling over what was wrong with various washing machines, dryers, water heaters, furnaces, and so forth for many years, I realized that they were communicating with me.
I was surprised, let me tell you. There I was in a farm house, answering a call from the woman of the house that went like this: “I heard gun shots from the electric dryer! Can you come out right away, please? I’m afraid to even open the dryer door.”
Gun shots? Let me tell you something else: I answered the phone every day hoping and praying that someone would call and report the OK Corral in their electric dryer. I moved her to the top of the list, strapped on my tool holster, saddled up the service truck, and raced out there.
I plugged in a trouble light, and, holding the light before me as somewhat of a shield in case someone inside there was still alive and had bullets left, eased the door open with my lucky pliers. (I’m not into witchcraft or magic, but I won’t go anywhere without my lucky pliers.)
Such a tragedy I have never witnessed. Nor such a surprise, because it was then that Ms. Frigidaire The Dryer, of a family known for its cool repose in a clothing crisis, began to talk. “Gasp,” she said, “I’ve been shot.” Then silence while I opened the door further.
Who’s in there, I said, while for the first time wondering what was in that vitamin pill I had taken that morning. Then I thought back further. Maybe I shouldn’t have inhaled back in the sixties. I thought that I had heard a voi…..
“Please help me,” said a feminine voice.
Who are you, I asked?
“Don’t go stupid on me now,” said the she voice, “I’ve heard on the clothes line that you’re quite intelligent, and I’m dying from several gunshot wounds, so get on with it.”
Ummmm, let’s see, what were those three rules from the Red Cross first aid course. Three “A”s, I think. Or was it ABC. That would be air way for one, so I quickly raced outside and checked the dryer’s vent for restriction, and found a huge glob of wool fibers. I’d have to talk to these people about running wool rugs through their d…..
“Quit day dreaming,” said Ms. Frigidaire, “and get back in here.” She sounded a bit more breathy, now that she could breathe again. She also sounded bossier. The second A, the second B. Look, I told her, I’m having a little trouble remembering my triage triangle, so…
Ms. Frigidaire said: “Good grief! See all the holes in my drum lung? You have to plug them up or I’ll, I’ll…” I’ll what. Get more bossy?
It was then that I found out what had happened. Someone, probably one of the teenage sons, had left several rounds of ammunition in his pants pocket and when they made it to the heat of the electric dryer, they had corked off. Ms. Frigidaire had several slugs embedded in her. I whistled in admiration of the privilege of getting to do this kind of surgery, and grabbed my lucky pliers.
�
��Ouch,” she said, as I wriggled at the first lead slug and worked it out of her. “Are you a medical doctor or a veterinarian?”
Are you in pain, I asked her, because I can unplug you and put you under while I check out the rest of you.
“Don’t you dare,” she snorted. “I know your type. While I’m under, you’ll look under my up-top and at my down-there and who knows what.”
I yanked the next bullet out quite rudely. She grunted. I dropped this one from my pliers into a small magnetic dish I used. It went clank when it hit. I began to feel like Hawkeye on MASH.
This next one, I told her? It’s quite close to your temperature control?
“Yes,” she replied, “so what?” Boy. She swallows a bunch of bullets, which was her own fault, and goes all bitchy. Women! I’d show her.
Well, I said, the temperature control is close to your small framus, which itself lies upon your encabulator, which connects a secondary incandescent tubulus to the primary revolvaling. The revolvaling, I was going to say, looks like it’s had some hard wear on its rotalingual nervapling, but she interrupted me.
“Am I going to make it,” she meekly asked me.
Well, I said as I removed the last bullet, you’ve got more holes in you than a spaghetti strainer, but I think you’ll be ok.
I finished up and left her with a bottle of perfume—she wasn’t all that fresh, Frigidaire, that’s French, right? They don’t bathe so much, I think.
I’d be back, I told her, to give her a complete physical next month.
She slammed her lid shut and closed her service door.
“Not in this life,” she hissed.
Back when I couldn’t hear appliances talk, life was simpler.
§
Dave Lennox the Furnace
“I’m all stuffed up,” said the nasally voice of The Dave Lennox Series 3 oil furnace to me. “I can’t breathe.” When he said “breathe,” it sounded like “breed.” He was really plugged up.
I was out on a call, in an advisory role to some young folks who had just purchased a house. They wanted to know what was wrong, why the house wouldn’t heat, why it was costing an arm and a leg for fuel oil.
Truth to say, it’s fun to prowl around strange appliances, talk to the furnaces, and figure out how to make the whole HVAC (heating, ventilating, air conditioning) scenario work better. Figuring out furnaces is similar to the way doctors figure out people. Take some pressures, take some temperatures, give the customer the results and say: “We need to run some more tests.”
You run more tests: you practice your craft on the customer: you wait to see if they, or, in my case, it, gets better. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t.
Then you charge them several hundred bucks and hope you got it right.
“Am I dying?” asked The Dave Lennox Series 3, as I felt his forehead (hot air plenum) to see what his temperature was. I tried to keep my face from showing my alarm, either to Mr. Series 3, or to the customers, the young man and woman who were standing by, as concerned about their furnace as any new mother or father might be about their child.
In fact, he was burning up. And he was swelled up. His upper respiratory tract (hot air plenum to the layman) was bulged out with his attempts to breathe, and every time he came on, his lungs went “Bong!” And when he shut off, the same thing, “Bong!”
How long have you felt like this, I asked him.
“Well,” he replied, his throat husky with the effort, “ever since those idiot home owners ran out of money and decided they could hook me up themselves.”
When was that, I asked him, while I was palpating his esophageal passage. (Return air duct, what he inhaled through. A good air circulation system for a furnace is much more complex than the human throat, which inhales and exhales through just one simple passage. Furnace air systems can be restricted on either end.)
He said, “About 12 years ago.” And then he gasped, and the fire in him died. Suddenly, he was unconscious, although his lungs continued to attempt to force air through his restricted passageways.
I glanced over at the home owners, who hadn’t realized what they were seeing, which was good. Well, good for them. The Dave Lennox Series 3 was in extreme distress, and here I was without my medical tools.
I pulled his front cover, lifted the lifeless metal lid on his fan-limit control, and checked the amount of bimetal rotation on the temperature dial. Sure enough, it was hard over on the high temp side. He was going out on me.
Dave! Dave! Can you hear me? Don’t quit on me, you hear me? You’re tough enough to put up with this for 12 years, just hang on a few more minutes.
What was happening was attributable to the original owner-installers, who naively believed that a few pieces of trunk duct, a couple of round supply pipes, and hey! We’re done here. What that produced was a severe air restriction on both sides of the equation. Dave couldn’t get enough air to breathe, which didn’t much matter, because even if he had, he wouldn’t have been able to get rid of it anyway. Heat prostration, brought on by hypoxia.
To be honest, there was a moment there when I thought about simply letting him go. He’d had a rough life. He was about 65 in human years.
But then I realized I was about that old myself.
I turned to the young owners, and with enough urgency to carry the importance of my request, asked for a hammer and a screwdriver. I said, “Quick! He’s out cold.”
What I had to do was an emergency tracheotomy, open a hole in his throat so he could breathe. I took the screwdriver, momentarily hesitated as I searched for just the right spot, and used the hammer to pound the screwdriver sideways through the sheet metal. I opened a large flap there, which I pried open.
I was a bit surprised. He came back immediately. These Dave Lennox Series 3’s are tough customers.
“Thanks,” Dave said, in a nice clear voice. “I’ve been fainting several times a day for 12 years. I just didn’t realize how bad it was.”
I gave the owners a list of actions that were needed to permanently improve the situation, and hit the road.
§
Murray the Mower
“That gasoline you’re pouring into me looks funny,” said Murray the Mower to me yesterday, as I was filling his tank. It was time for the first mowing. Murray the Mower was tired of sitting in the corner of the shed all winter. Going for a drive excited him. All guy, that Murray.
“What do you mean, it looks funny?”
“It looks like water. Look at it. Are you sure that’s gas? I’ve never seen gas that water clear before?” I looked at it. It did look pretty clear. None of that usual darkness of color to it. I smelled it.
“It doesn’t have much of a smell,” I told Murray the Mower.
“Then don’t dump that stuff in,” he said. “Better test it. You know if the new ethanol gas sits around very long it will attract its weight in water,” Murray the Mower said. All guy. He likes to go fast. No watered down gas for him.
“Ah! That’s just a myth. I’ve had this can plugged up tight.” I’ve heard this one before, and I’ve had my share of trouble with water in stored gas, but usually, it’s been my fault. But it did look funny.
“Maybe you should go ask General Electric the Washing Machine,” Murray the M. said to me. General Electric is in charge of all household appliances. Like all good generals, it appears he has been spreading his command outward.
“Have you been talking to The General?” I asked Murray the Mower. Lately, The General has been all bent out of shape because The Speed Queen, my dryer, has been blaming him for her inability to quickly and efficiently dry clothes. She says he’s been forwarding damp laundry to her. She whispered to me one evening, in a stage voice that you could have heard one township over: “I don’t think he’s got any zing in his spin. Maybe you should get him some Laundry Viagra.”<
br />
That pretty much upset General Electric, who won’t put up with much hint of anything less than total respect from his troops. Like all good soldiers everywhere, if you rat out The General, you’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. Say The General tells you to tie some pants into knots, or to pose them in sexually lewd positions, or to try to torture information out of them, you’d better do it. At that moment, the Geneva Convention is far, far away, and The General is very, very close. Do what he says, and The Convention might punish you. Don’t do it, and The General certainly will. It’s an old story, but people still think soldiers can perform their jobs any old way they choose. Yeah, right.
So anyway, I went to ask General Electric if he thought this gasoline might not be up to snuff. “Pour some into me,” he said.
“Listen,” I said to him, “I came down here for an opinion, not for you to sniff and get high.”
“Pour it in,” he repeated. “I’ll just sample it and spin it down the drain.”
About then, Lady Kenmore the Electric Dryer piped up and said, “Oh good grief! Now I’m going to get laundry that’ll set me on fire.”
General Electric promptly retorted: “No one has been able to set your pants on fire in over twenty years, get a life!”
Lady Kenmore replied: “They haven’t been heated up since you decided you’re a woman living in a man’s body.”
“Wait!” I said to them both. “Will you two please settle down. Just because The General has decided he might be gay doesn’t mean he isn’t human. He deserves some respect.” I think it’s old battlefield stress confusing him. I turned to the dryer: “And just because you’re nearly into dryer menopause doesn’t mean you aren’t still attractive.”
I thought for a moment and added: “If you guys don’t start getting along, I’m going to unplug you both.”
They both harrumphed, but remained quiet. Finally, I’d found a threat that worked on them.