by Jeff Tapia
We said we were, even though we really weren’t.
“Good. Now, you ain’t so knuckleheaded as to think that a spark plug’s made o’ plastic, is you?”
“We ain’t no knuckleheads!” we said.
And Pops said, “Good. That means you take after me.”
“Pops, come on!”
“You come on. You know your Grandma Pearl is Wymore’s Lady Metal.”
And we shouted, “Her metal detector!”
“Vwah lah!”1 Pops said. “You go back out there tomorrow with Grandma Pearl and see what you can find. I’ll give you a buzz tomorrow night, and if you unearth a dingsbums, then we’ll see about getting this plan of yours up and runnin’.”
“You really think?” we asked.
“First you find, then I’ll think,” Pops answered.
That made us happier than a lizard in the sun.
Then Pops had to go and say, “And speakin’ of thinkin’, how are them presidents of yours comin’ along?”
THE NEXT MORNING THERE we were again, on our way back down to Gottfried Schuh’s plot of weeds. This time we weren’t pushing no wheelbarrow. In fact, we weren’t even walking. Grandma Winnie had offered to take us down there herself on her golf cart.1
You never needed to twist Grandma Winnie’s arm much to have her take you out for a ride. If she wasn’t in Mabel’s flipping through an old wrinkly copy of a car magazine, you could find her out tinkering on her golf cart in a pair of gray overalls that had her name stitched on them in red just like a real mechanic. Sometimes there’d be a smear of grease stretching across her forehead, though some of our grandmas and grandpas said she put that there just for looks. She also wore racing goggles and had red flames on the sides of her golf cart, but it didn’t go no faster than honey dripping from a spoon.
Once we got on, Grandma Winnie said, “So, kids, let’s lay some rubber!” And off we rolled, smooth, silent, and slow, to the other end of the square to pick up Grandma Pearl. She was easy to spot in her wide safari hat and that vest that had more pockets than we had fingers and toes. Plus, she was the only one standing on the corner holding a Pioneer 505 metal detector.
Earlier that morning at Mabel’s over a plate of cluck and grunts,2 we had talked to Grandma Pearl about helping us find something rare and exquisite. And before we even had a chance to explain, she held up her hand and said, “Say no more. Know all about it.”
“You do?” we asked.
“Course I do.”
“How’d you find out?”
“Take one guess.”3
“Well, can you help us any?”
“Kids, I ain’t never passed up the opportunity to find a dingsbums. Meet me at the corner of Main and Market in ten.”
So there we were, ten minutes later, scrunched in between Grandma Winnie in her racing goggles and Grandma Pearl in her safari hat. Back behind us where the golf clubs were supposed to go was the metal detector. That’s what we wanted to talk all about, but Grandma Winnie and Grandma Pearl got to stirring the breeze4 quite good without us. While they recalled weather events like the Giant Drought of ’93 and the Huge Gales of ’94 and the Blazing Sun of ’95 and the Muggy Nights of ’96, alls we could do was sit still and watch all the old, empty, and crumbling houses go by.
Once we finally got to Gottfried Schuh’s property and the golf cart came to a complete stop, we tore off our helmets and jumped right off the back and yelled, “C’mon, Grandma Pearl, let’s metal detect!”
That’s when we got our first lesson on the subject. Grandma Pearl told us that true metal detectors didn’t even call it metal detecting.
“Well, it ain’t plastic detectin’,” we said.
“Kids, it ain’t called detectin’ at all,” Grandma Pearl informed us. “We experts call it prospecting.”5
“Prospecting? Ain’t that what Gottfried Schuh did out in Alaska?” we asked.
“Indeed, he did,” she said.
Well, that was the cat’s meow! Because we’d had no idea we were gonna get to be just like Gottfried Schuh.
“Now, be so kind and help pull me to my feet,” Grandma Pearl said. “My knee ain’t what it used to be.” So we each took one of her hands and tugged her up into a standing position, and once she got there, she was good as grits. “Now then, let’s get to work,” she said.
We followed her around to the back of the golf cart, where she put on a set of headphones that were bigger than cream-filled donuts. She plugged them into her Pioneer and turned it on, and the whole display panel lighted up like a Christmas tree. It had more buttons on it than a Sunday shirt, plus two knobs besides.6 Grandma Pearl also concerned herself with “Ground Balance” and something called “No-Motion All-Metal Mode.” She was an expert, all right.
Meanwhile we went and grabbed the supplies we’d left down there the day before. After some debating, we decided we’d be best off with that claw thing and the bent screwdriver. By the time we got back, Grandma Pearl was ready to go.
“Quiet, now, and follow me,” she said. “And no talkin’, neither.”
Then off we went on our very own prospecting expedition. It was even better than we’d been hoping for. At least at first. We maybe weren’t climbing up through snowy mountains, and we weren’t sipping ice-worm cocktails, and we didn’t get to have dirty beards and smell bad, but we were stalking through weeds that came up over our ears, and bugs and insects were buzzing all around us, and we had tools with us that we were hoping we could utilize real soon.
Grandma Pearl was in the lead, gently swinging her Pioneer 505 back and forth over the ground. Right behind her came Grandma Winnie, still wearing her racing goggles. Then right behind them was us.
We were willing and prepared to spend half the morning or more pacing slow up and down through the weeds in search of a dingsbums that no one quite knew what it would even look like. So we were knocked clean out of our socks when after no more than three minutes Grandma Pearl stopped walking and held her 505 over one and the same spot and consulted her display and announced, “I got somethin’ here!”
Which was our clue to get to work. So we scrambled up front and got down on our prayer bones and started scraping furious at the ground right where the Pioneer was pointing at. Grandma Pearl had told us we’d never have to dig more than three or four inches, and we thought that three or four inches weren’t nothing. And besides, we couldn’t believe we’d already found it!
Except for two things. One was that three to four inches ain’t as little as you think. And the other thing was that we hadn’t found it. Alls it was, was a stinking old rusty nail.
“Crud!” we said.
And Grandma Winnie said, “Watch your mouths!”
“‘Crud’ ain’t a bad word,” we said.
“It’s got four letters, don’t it?” Grandma Winnie replied.
“That’s all part of prospectin’, kids,” Grandma Pearl said. “You gotta learn to see the beauty in everything. That’s a good lesson in life.” She grabbed the nail from out of our hands and stuck it in one of them vest pockets. “I tag, record, and conserve everything I find,” she said. She didn’t even sound disappointed at all.
Well, a rusty nail might’ve toasted her bread all right, but not ours. And that was just the beginning, too. As the morning wore on, our enthusiasm for the prospecting life wore off. Here’s just some of the worthless stuff we dug up: a nail, a tin can lid, a nail, a flattened-out bottle cap, a nail, some wire mesh, a screw, a nail, a small hoop,7 a piece of wire, a nail, a nut, a washer, a spring, a nail, a nail, a bolt, a nail, a nail, a nail, a nail, a nail, and another cruddy nail.
Each time Grandma Pearl’s Pioneer 505 beeped or buzzed, she gave us the word, and we came around and dropped down to the ground and started digging. Until finally we were close to telling her to dig it up herself if she wanted it so bad. But we knew that kind of mouthing off would get us grounded for the rest of the summer, and so we bit our tongues and just kept on digging, one nail after the next.<
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“I got something here,” said Grandma Pearl for the gazillionth time. “Pretty strong signal, too.” She sounded as focused and untired and excited as she had at the out-set.
Whereas we thought, Strong signal. How exciting! But we got down and began to scrape and dig. Soon, at least, the tip of something came to light, and we rubbed at it a bit with our thumbs and got the dirt off and were relieved it wasn’t another stupid nail. Then we dug and scraped a bit more and saw it wasn’t a bottle cap, neither. Then we saw it wasn’t a spring, and it wasn’t a hoop, and it wasn’t a washer. When we were finally able to pull it out of the earth, we gave it a solid rubdown and blew on it hard and placed it in the palm of our hands. Then we stood up, and Grandma Pearl and Grandma Winnie bent down, and all four of us stayed there like that just staring at this funny-looking piece of metal.
“You think this is it?” we asked.
“YOU THINK THIS IS IT?”
That’s what everybody was asking everybody else that whole afternoon at Mabel’s. And then they’d go passing it around careful as caution from one palm to the next, with everyone getting a good look at it before handing it on. “You think this is it?”
And the whole thing was that ain’t no one had a clue. Alls we did know was that it was an odd-looking critter, something like a cross between a caterpillar, a corkscrew, and a fishing hook. And we also knew that we ain’t ever seen nothing like it before, neither. But that was about all we knew. That, and that Pops would be the only one who could supply us with a definitive answer, since Grandpa Buster, who used to own the auto parts store, was no longer with us. But Pops hadn’t called yet, so everybody at Mabel’s was left to speculating. We listened close to what our grandmas and grandpas had to say on the matter while we sat in our booth sucking on the double black cows1 that Grandma Ida had been nice enough to supply us with.
“This really could be it.”
“Heck, could be.”
“It ain’t no hairpin, that’s for sure.”
“Just think if that hippomobile gets up ’n’ runnin’ again.”
“Sure would be somethin’, wouldn’t it?”
“Sure would.”
“Heck, maybe it really could save Mabel’s.”
“Would be nice. Been eatin’ here my livelong days, after all.”
“Don’t I knows it.”
“Sure would hate to see Mabel’s go.”
“If Mabel’s goes, so does Wymore.”
“Can’t let that happen.”
“We just need more people comin’ to town, is what we need.”
“The more people come, the more people’ll eat at Mabel’s.”
“We done know that much. That’s what them kids was talkin’ about yesterday.”
“I guess they was, wasn’t they?”
“Maybe we just wasn’t listenin’ that good.”
“Well, then, listen now. ’Cause if we’re fixin’ the hippomobile, why not fix up Wymore with it?”
“Now we’re thinkin’!”
“Don’t know about you, but I been thinkin’ for over seventy years now.”
“I for one wouldn’t mind takin’ a wet rag to them clunkers out there. Put some shine back in ’em.”
“I guess I could pump up a tire or two.”
“And how about fixin’ the sign up on the Any while we’re at it? Have it spell out ‘Stanley’ again?”
“I still got the T somewheres.”
“I got the L. Little rusty. But I gots it.”
And so on and so on. They were getting so excited that they didn’t even tell us not to slurp our black cows. All it had taken was some dogged determination and a little old dingsbums. If indeed that’s what it was. We were still waiting impatient for Pops to call.
Then sudden as a rooster crow, the pay phone on the wall rang, and everyone at Mabel’s hushed as though a preacher just stood up. We left our booth fast as jackrabbits and ran to the phone and climbed up on a chair and picked it up and said, “Mabel’s Café. How may we help you?”
“SO, YOU TURKEYS, what’d you find?”
“Well, we found somethin’,” we said. “But it’s pretty weird-lookin’.”
“Weird? How weird?”
“Hold on,” we said.
We asked for the dingsbums, and our grandparents started passing it down from one grandma and grandpa to the next like they were playing hot potato. Then it got to Grandma Ida, and she brought it over to us high on a tray like she was serving a black-and-blue1 on a silver platter.
“Okay, we’re lookin’ at it,” we told Pops.
“Then lay it on me.”
We laid it on him best we could and told him what we thought it kinda resembled like.
And Pops just said back to us, “A cross between a caterpillar, a corkscrew, and a fishing hook? You sure about that?”
“Well . . .”
So Pops put a number of questions to us, like how much we thought it weighed, and if it was heavier on one end than it was on the other, and what color it was, and if it looked like it was put together with different kinds of metal, and a host of other questions that didn’t make no sense to us.
Finally Pops had to admit, “I can’t be for sure if that’s the dingsbums we’re lookin’ for or not.”
That made our hearts sink like stones.
Pops must’ve heard them go plop, too, because he said, “Now, just hold on a sec.”
So we held on and listened to Pops scratching his beard and making other thinking kinds of noises. And while he did that, we looked at all the stuff people’d scribbled there on the wall next to the phone over the years. There was lots of three-digit telephone numbers, and sometimes a name to go with it, like Cecilia or Harvey. And somebody wrote “By milk.” There was also some hearts there too, with initials in them and an arrow going through. But what we liked most was the train times scribbled there, like “Arr. 8:04”2 and “Arr. 2:37” and one in military time that said “Dep. 17:01.”3 And looking at them train times like that, all smeared and fading out, tickled our traveling bones something awful.
Pops pulled us back from our thoughts. “You turkeys still there?”
We said we were.
“Ain’t tomorrow Train Day?” Pops asked.
And we said, “Yeah.”
“Then, I tell you what. I’ll do some callin’ around and see if I can’t get that train to stop in town and have the engineer pick up what you found and bring it on down the line to where Mr. Buzzard can pick it up. And then I’ll ask Mr. Buzzard to deliver it out to Dixie’s.4 And from there a buddy of mine’ll truck it out my way so I can have a good look-see at it with my own two eyes. And if I reckon it’s the dingsbums we need to get that hippomobile on its feet again, then I’ll see about making a pit stop through town so I can fix her up. How’s that sound?”
And we said, “Better than a root beer float!”
Then Pops said, “Good deal.”
We were about to hang up, but somehow that “Dep. 17:01” was still gnawing on us hard. And so we said, “Hey, Pops?”
“Hey, what?”
“We’ve got even a better idea . . .”
THE COAL TRAIN PASSED through town at exactly 9:54 a.m. unless it was late like always. From our window that morning, we saw our grandmas already bustling like bees back and forth across the square. They had tablecloths draped over their arms and were carrying trays topped with party hats and napkins folded into pyramids and arrows and cones and rosebuds and candlesticks.1 Every week they somehow managed to decorate everything together in just the right way so as to make things look festive as fireworks.
We hurried and changed into our clothes and licked our hair down into place and rubbed the remaining sand out of our eyes and gave our teeth a good finger polish.2 Then we grabbed our school bag that was waiting for us right by the door and left our room like we had wings.
Mabel’s didn’t serve food on Train Day since we all ate a picnic over at the train station. The café got turned over to
whatever grandmas were in charge of the cooking that week, and that gave Grandma Mabel and Grandma Ida some well-deserved time off sitting on their backsides. Everybody agreed that it was the least we could do to repay them for the hard work they did for us all week long. However, we still stopped by Mabel’s to pick up our birdseed3 because even birdseed was something special on Train Day. It was always a whole tray of life preservers4 spread out up on the lunch counter for you to pick and choose.
Mabel’s was empty when we walked in, and the lights were off, and the chairs were all up on the tables. We guessed that meant ain’t no one had started preparing the picnic food yet. You couldn’t hear nothing but a fly or two against a windowpane. It always shivered us like a winter day to see Mabel’s all deserted like that, and even more so that morning.
“If our plan doesn’t work, Jimmy James, Mabel’s is gonna look like this all the time.”
“Mabel’s and Wymore, too.”
We didn’t feel like spending any extra time in there. We just went straight up to the counter and grabbed off our two life preservers. They were easy to spot because they were the ones covered in rainbow sprinkles and stuck on a stick. Then we returned back outside quicker than you can say “You betcha.”
We caught up with Grandpa Homer and Grandpa Virgil, who were on their way over to the train station. Grandpa Homer was tapping along with his long white cane, and Grandpa Virgil had his box of teeth5 strapped over his shoulder because him and Grandpa Homer were responsible for the day’s musical entertainment. That always consisted of old barbershop standards and the traditional Wymore Train Day ballad they thought up all by themselves. Plus they had on those funny-looking singing hats we done described you about.
“You two must be right anxious,” Grandpa Homer said.
And we told him we were.
“You ain’t forgot the dingsbums, I hope,” Grandpa Virgil said.
We showed him our school bag with the billy goat decal on it, which is our school mascot. “Right in here,” we said. Inside our school bag was our school box, and inside our school box was the dingsbums, or at least what we hoped was the dingsbums. We had it wrapped up in a little piece of sheepskin we once brought home from the state fair and which was the softest thing we owned.6