Tales from a Free-Range Childhood

by Donald Davis

  Mama had stopped arguing at all by now. She just turned her back and walked out of the room every time she heard anything about the second car.

  Daddy looked at me and offered, “Son, if we are going to win this battle, it is going to take an end run.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about.

  In the spring of that year, it happened. I had finished my time in driver’s training and looked forward to getting my license in a matter of weeks. One afternoon, Daddy had left work and picked up Mama at her school. He had then come by junior high and picked up Joe, and next door at the high school added me. We were on the double-back for home.

  We were passing a small used-car lot called Stan Henry’s Used Cars. Without even giving a turn signal, Daddy simply pulled off the road and into the front lot of Stan Henry’s Used Cars.

  “What do you think you are doing right now?” Mama did not have a pleasant look on her face.

  “Right now, I’m not doing anything. It is already done!” Daddy kept talking so she did not have a reasonable chance to interrupt. “I have already talked with Stan. He has these cars back in the back that he calls ‘go-to-work specials.’ They are not anything that you would want to drive a long way out of town, but they will easily get a person to work or to school and back. They are not over a hundred dollars. I am getting one to save us time and money. I will drive it to work while you drive the Plymouth. When Donald gets his license, it will be better to have him getting experience on an old clunker than on your good car. It is done!”

  Mama looked at me, and I could not believe the words that I heard coming out of her mouth: “You probably had something to do with this, too, mister! You just get out and stay with him. If you’re going to drive the thing, you might as well be in on it.”

  Daddy and I got out of the car. Mama drove off with Joe watching us out the window.

  As soon as she was out of sight, Daddy smiled. “End run! Well, now we are going to have to get a car. She has left us no choice. How else are we going to get home? Let’s go talk with Stan.”

  Stan Henry came out of a little house at the back of the lot and greeted Daddy. “What can I do for you, Joe? I don’t expect I can sell you a car, with your brother Harry in the car business.”

  “Today, you can,” Daddy was quick to declare. “This is a special day. We are not in the market for one of Harry’s new cars. We are in the mood to buy a second car, a ‘go-to-work special.’ ”

  Stan smiled. “I’ve got a lot of good choices for you. Come on back here to the back of the lot and you can look them all over.”

  We were led behind the little house to a part of the used-car lot that you did not even see when you pulled in from the street. This was an unpaved part of the lot that backed up against a wooden fence near some trees. There was a line of older cars parked with their back ends almost touching the fence.

  Stan smiled at both of us and pointed to the long line of cars. “Here you are, boys, ‘go-to-work specials’! You can have any car in this lineup for a hundred dollars or less!”

  There were old Hudsons and Studebakers, Packards and Kaisers. More standard brands—the kind you could easily find spare parts for—were long gone from the special lineup.

  I knew in a moment why these cars were on an unpaved part of the lot. You could almost hear the oil dripping from under some of them. Had they been out on the pavement, entire streams of leaking oil would have run out in the open, instead of being soaked up by the dirt and gravel on which they were parked.

  Daddy went down to the end of the line and sighted along the front of all the cars. He kept looking and studying.

  “What are you looking for?” I finally asked.

  “Well,” he sighed, “at a hundred dollars, I figured we might as well shop by the foot. I was looking to see what the longest car for a hundred dollars might be. Look there—one of them is sticking out farther than the others. Let’s go see what it is.”

  We walked past a half-dozen cars along the line and came to the long car. It was something to look at. It was a long, black Super Chieftain Pontiac.

  The Pontiac had a heavy chrome bumper and grille in front. There was a big hood ornament that looked like a plastic amber-colored Indian head. (I would later learn that it lighted up at night when the headlights were turned on.) A wide band of chrome stripes ran back the long engine hood from the ornament to the windshield. On the back of the car, the same chrome stripes ran down the trunk lid to the big back bumper.

  The car had a wide sun visor that I later would learn kept you from seeing whether a traffic light was red or green unless you hunkered way down in the seat. And some previous owner had recently painted the Pontiac with a brush. The paint job had been carefully done, with all of the brush strokes running from front to back on the car.

  “How much is the Pontiac?” Daddy asked.

  “That car is on sale today, Joe,” Stan smiled. “You can have that fine Pontiac today for only eighty-five dollars. It’s a steal. It is a four-speed Hydromatic straight eight.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about.

  We opened the engine hood and looked at the long, in-line eight-cylinder engine. I could see what “straight eight” meant without asking. It was a huge, long, flat-head, monstrous motor. I still had no idea what “four-speed Hydromatic” meant.

  Daddy queried Stan, “There is no oil dipstick in this car. It’s missing. How are you supposed to check the oil?”

  The answer was quick and seemed studied: “You never need to check the oil in this Pontiac. All you have to do is to put in a quart of thirty-weight each time you fill it up with gas, and you will come out exactly right.”

  Without any more questions being asked, Daddy handed over eighty-five dollars, filled out some paperwork, and we were a two-car family at last.

  I was terribly excited when we got into the big Pontiac to head home. It was a sure thing that I would get to drive this car when I got my license the coming year. Daddy started the engine, and we crept out onto the street and started for home.

  “This car sure does have a funny smell,” I commented.

  “New cars have a smell of their own,” Daddy smiled. “That’s partly why people like to get a new car, so they can have that new-car smell.”

  I countered, “This doesn’t smell like a new car. This car smells like a whole load of ripe babies got locked up in it on a hot day in the summer. It smells like maybe the babies got out but they all left something behind before they left.”

  “That’s called ‘old-car smell.’” Daddy never gave up. “You’ll get used to it.”

  I had more questions to ask. “I figured out what a ‘straight eight’ is when we looked at the engine. But what is a ‘four-speed Hydromatic’?”

  Daddy pointed to the floorboard of the Pontiac, down under his own feet. “Look down there, son. What do you see? An accelerator and a brake pedal but no clutch. You don’t have to even learn how to work the clutch to drive this fine car. It has a mind of its own when it comes to changing gears. It does the whole thing itself, and it has four gears to choose from.”

  Now, I began to watch and listen carefully. Daddy could stop and go using only one foot to drive, sure enough. The big Pontiac did have its own mind about changing gears, but it seemed like it couldn’t quite make up its mind. In the one block from Uncle Grover’s house to Frank and Kathryn Kirkpatrick’s house, the Super Chieftain changed gears fourteen times!

  Soon, we were nearing home, and Daddy put on the turn signal to head up the steep hill of our driveway. No traffic was coming, so he made a good, fast start up the hill. The Pontiac’s engine sounded like we were going full speed, but the big car got slower and slower. We barely made it to the top of the hill.

  When we got home, I was surprised that Stan Henry called Daddy to see if we made it. Daddy told him about the trouble the new car had pulling our hill. Stan had quick and simple advice: “Put a big cup of oatmeal down the hole where the transmission fluid goes.
That will help it a lot.” Daddy did, and it did!

  Within a couple of months of our getting the Pontiac, I got my driver’s license. I got to practice on the Plymouth. It was, after all, straight drive. Everyone knew that you did not really have a real driver’s license unless you took the test in a straight-drive car. Once I had the license, however, the only car they ever seemed to let me drive was the old Pontiac. It was a rare thing and a special event for me to get the other car.

  Daddy and I shared the Pontiac fairly well. He drove it to work and home each day. I got to drive it to Methodist Youth Fellowship at church, to band practice, and sometimes to take my friends David, Bill, and Doug bowling or to a movie.

  Less than three years later, my brother, Joe, got his driver’s license. Now, the old Pontiac had triple duty to do, and it was three more years older than it had been when we paid the eighty-five dollars for it to begin with.

  One evening, Daddy started a new conversation as we sat at the supper table. “Lucille,” he started calmly and slowly, “the tires are worn slick on the old Pontiac. It is going to cost me over eighty dollars to buy new tires and have them mounted and balanced and put on that car. That is the same, almost, as what I paid for it. It is time to replace the old thing and get a better car. Three of us are driving it now, and it is just about smack worn out. I think I’ll call Harry tonight and see what kind of idea he can come up with to get us in better shape for transportation.”

  Mama looked straight at him. “You picked out that car and were determined to get it. Now, I just guess that it is good enough for two boys if it is good enough for you. You can just keep it and drive it until the wheels fall off. Besides, every time Harry comes, I tell him that he better not talk with you about two new cars when one good car is all that anyone needs.”

  He did not argue. From the tone of her voice and the look on Mama’s face, he seemed to know that he had to do a little bit of thinking before he could go forward.

  I didn’t hear anything about the car for several days. Then, one day, he came to me and said, “Son, we are going to have to try another end run. Try to come up with an idea, would you?”

  I thought about it day and night, but I simply could not figure out a way to get past Mama so we could end up with a better second car than the old Pontiac.

  The following Sunday, we all went to Sunday school and church as usual. After Sunday dinner, I made a few phone calls, then headed out to the old Pontiac. I was going to pick up my three friends so we could all go bowling together at Mid-Way Lanes, three miles away in Clyde.

  As soon as all three of them were in the car, David, Bill, and Doug began to make fun of it. “This car smells worse than a bathroom.” “If we wanted to get there today, we should have walked.” “You sure couldn’t get hurt in this thing unless you fell out of it.”

  It was fine for me to bad-mouth the Pontiac, but the three of them had no business talking that way about “my” car. I had to defend it. “This is a good car! All of you have ridden a lot of times when you might have been walking if it hadn’t been for this car. There’s nothing wrong with this good Pontiac. Let me show you how fast it can get us there!”

  With that, I showered down on the accelerator pedal, and after the Pontiac made about a half-dozen mind changes about the gear in which it thought it ought to be, it took off with increasing speed out of town and on the three-mile trek to the bowling alley.

  “How about that?” Bill commented. “It really will go! Just look at the speedometer. Why, it’s over forty. Speed demon!”

  I was more annoyed than ever and kept the gas pedal stuck to the floor. The Pontiac got faster and faster. The needle on the crescent-shaped speedometer passed the midpoint. It left fifty-five and on to sixty miles an hour.

  Then it became impossible to tell how fast we were going. For some strange reason, the front tires of the Super Chieftain were bouncing, but not in rhythm with one another. As they bounced, the speedometer needle flopped wildly from side to side. You could have chosen any speed you wished, and the needle obliged by passing through it.

  All of a sudden, there was a terrific exploding sound that came from under the hood of the car. It was followed by a Whack-whack-whack noise that sounded like someone hitting a railroad rail with a sledgehammer. At the same time, a hissing combination of smoke and steam came up from the engine hood all the way around the perimeter. It was all I could do to get the car steered off the road and stopped on the gravel shoulder and see through the windshield at the same time.

  We got out in a cloud of dust, and I realized that I must have slid to a stop in the dirt. We all headed to the front of the car, and I opened the engine hood. When the smoke and steam cleared, we looked at the long, straight-eight flathead engine. In one side of the engine block, there was a big hole where a large piece of cast iron was missing. Something was hanging partially out of the hole that suddenly reminded me of a dog with its tongue sticking out. It was a piston rod! We had totally blown the engine.

  Being teenage boys, all we knew to do at a time like that was to burst out in raucous laughter. We did, and continued to laugh until the first tiny bits of reality hit us, the first one being the realization that we all had to walk nearly three miles back into town to get home.

  The four of us started walking and trying to hitch a ride at the same time. One of us might have had a chance to get picked up, but whenever a passing driver counted up to four, we watched the car actually speed up to get on past us more quickly. We walked all the way back to town and split up, each of us heading home in a slightly different direction.

  As I trudged up our steep driveway to the top of the hill, I was trying to work on the story that would need to be told when I got there. It would need to be especially good to get past Mama.

  There was good news as soon as I got to the front of the house. There was no car there. Now, I would have extra time to think.

  As soon as I opened the kitchen door to go into the house, the news got even better. I could hear the television running, with baseball sounds coming from the living room. And I could hear my daddy snoring. This meant that Mama was gone and I only needed a story for him. He would think of something to take care of her before she got back home.

  I walked into the living room, and Daddy suddenly sat up, blinking and rubbing his eyes. “Oh.” He looked surprised. “I didn’t know you were home. I didn’t hear the car come in.”

  “Actually”—I chose my words carefully—“the car didn’t come in. That’s why you didn’t hear it.”

  “What happened? Did you run out of gas?”

  “No, there was plenty of gas. The car just stopped for some reason.”

  He looked mystified. “Just stopped?”

  “Yep!” I was getting confident now. “I was taking the boys down to Clyde to the bowling alley, and all of a sudden, for no reason at all, it just stopped! It was past the tractor place right beside that new cemetery. It’s sitting right there on the side of the road.”

  “Well,” Daddy mused to the world at large, “maybe this is something we can take advantage of. Come on. Let’s go over to Lawrence Leatherwood’s house and see if we can borrow his Jeep truck. Your mama’s at the church at a circle meeting. Let’s try to get this done before she gets home.”

  I knew very well that he had something in mind. I just could not yet begin to figure out what it might be. At any rate, the afternoon promised to be an interesting one.

  We headed across the backyard and through the garden to the Leatherwoods’ house. Lawrence was out in his garage workshop piddling. He looked up as Daddy spoke while we entered: “Lawrence, we need to borrow something. Could we borrow your Jeep truck and a pretty long rope that’s strong enough to hang a dead Pontiac?”

  “Sure, Joe. What happened?” He was curious.

  Daddy grinned a grin familiar to us all. “Maybe it’s better that you don’t know anything about it. Then you won’t be able to answer any questions in court!”

  They b
oth laughed understanding laughs at that. I chuckled, pretending to know what was going on.

  With the big, coiled rope in the back of the dark green Jeep, I directed Daddy down to Clyde and to where he could see the Pontiac on the side of the road. “There it is!” I repeated uselessly.

  He drove just past the Pontiac and pulled off the road in front of it. Then he backed the Jeep up so we would be ready to pull the Pontiac home with the borrowed vehicle.

  “Let’s look at the engine before we take it to see if we can tell what happened.”

  I knew what he was going to see, but I had no idea what it would tell him or what was coming next. When the big engine hood went up, Daddy looked, and was I ever surprised at what I heard.

  “Oh, my! This is good! This is better than I could have planned it myself! It’s an end run for sure. We can use this. You get in and steer, and I’ll pull you home. You might want to keep one foot on the brake pedal so you won’t hit the back of Lawrence’s Jeep if I need to stop in a hurry.”

  I got into the Pontiac while he tied bowline knots in the rope connecting the back bumper of the Jeep with the front of the big car.

  “Here we go!” Daddy shouted out the window as we began to roll slowly out onto the empty pavement.

  He circled the new cemetery so we would have an easy way to turn around and head back toward town. We never went over about twenty miles an hour on the way back, and it seemed like it took forever to get home. The tricky part was the hard turn into the driveway and the steep pull up the hill to the house. We made it safely.

  Daddy got out of the Jeep and came back to where I was handling the Pontiac. “Let’s untie it, and then the two of us can push it right up into its parking place. We’re going to put it exactly where it would be if you had driven it home.”

  We did what he had said. He then took the keys to the dead Pontiac, carried them into the kitchen, and placed them on the cup hook where they always stayed when the car was at home.