by Daniel Perry
Dad parked our brown Buick, the paint so salt-worn it looked like chocolate with the nibs in, and left my sister Nancy and me inside with the windows rolled down. It was a Saturday in May and already hot.
We heard a sputtering small engine and then, “John Carrion!”
Donlon appeared from behind the brick house, shirt open, reclining on a green lawn tractor with a beer can between his thighs. He reached down and shut the blades off before the gravel laneway, and when he got to us he reefed on the handbrake.
“What brings you here?” he yelled over the engine. Leaning forward, he turned off the key, smiling as he reclaimed his sweaty beer. He swiped it under the brim of his fishing hat. “You wouldn’t be looking for a previously enjoyed ve-hick-le, would you?”
Dad said, “Well, yeah. That’s exactly what I’m here for.”
As he and Donlon talked the car’s interior heated up. Nancy opened her door, like always. I was ten, she was seven, and when she let in more air I thought she looked stupid — especially when she did it on Main Street in Currie while we waited for Mom to run errands. I told her to shut it but she pretended not to hear me, like we pretended not to hear Dad and Ed.
“That asshole Hank Mueller was out,” Donlon said, referring to the Owner and Proprietor emblazoned on the doors of the one tow truck in Waubnakee. “He thinks she needs a new motor. Says he’s got one in the back of the shop, too.”
He lit a cigarette.
“Offered me five hundred bucks.”
“What’d you tell him?” Dad asked.
“I told that sonofabitch to get the fuck off my property.”
Donlon laughed at himself, proud and wistful at the same time. He took a swig from his can.
“This old truck’s been going good fifteen years now,” he said. “She deserves more respect than that.”
Dad furrowed his brow and looked over his safety glasses. In his best Hard Man Voice he said, “Is eight respect enough?”
Donlon shook his head.
“Thousand safetied,” he said.
“Eight hundred,” Dad countered. “I’ll get the road test myself.”
Donlon looked back at the house. His new Silverado series was parked in front of the garage.
“Well, you need her more than I do,” he said. “Sure. We got a deal.”
Donlon and Dad shook on it. Nancy shut her door. It blew our cover but it closed the transaction. Dad said we’d be back later and we drove off.
After work at the bakery Mom was tired that night, but she got in the car with us, floury clothes and all. Donlon was drunk when he answered the door, but he took the money and handed over the keys. Dad opened his door and I climbed in, scooting across the bench seat before he lowered the shifter and let out the clutch.
FOUR MONTHS PASSED before Dad got started. By then, the rust holes were as big as my fists, but the truck was the second job that summer; first, we had to clear the garage so he’d have somewhere to work. We did it on a Saturday and left just enough for Sunday to avoid going to church with Mom and Nancy.
In the debris was a piece of plywood Dad claimed he’d long been looking for. We painted a red square on it and attached my hoop from two Christmases ago, mounting it finally to the front of the garage. I was years from making any three-pointers, four feet tall and sixtythree pounds, but still I took one side of the chest freezer that hadn’t run in years and helped Dad hump it out to the road. We dropped it next to old bottles that had been on the windowsills when we moved in, and the tricycle Nancy was too old for, and the cage for Mom’s budgie that died the week I was born. We hadn’t used these things in years but we inexplicably clung to them.
Waubnakee wasn’t — still isn’t — like Toronto, where my Aunt Claire says salvageable garbage disappears from the curb in the time it takes to make coffee. Our heap waited all week for Thursday night pick up, and thanks to Currie Township’s arcane bylaws it was still there the next weekend. The truck’s last trip before it came off the road was to the dump, to toss the junk.
When we returned Dad reversed up the laneway. I got out and stood at the back of the garage, waving in his mirror, leaving him three feet so he could get around the truck when he worked on it. He grazed the side wall when he opened his door and then he edged past the hood. In the laneway we looked back at the vehicle’s nose. It protruded from the doorway like the toes out Dad’s sock holes. We put paper in the orbital sander, his own unused Christmas gift, and he led the fight against the rust’s ragged fringes. I followed with a sheet of extra-fine, buffing the gristly steel into naked, toothless planes.
DAD HAD WORKED at Ritter three years, sorting fan belt pulleys in Quality Assurance. One whole paycheque covered the truck, and once he bought it, a bank loan covered us. To pay it off he switched to graveyard for the premium — fifty more cents an hour, like it would have made a difference. He picked me up in the Buick one day after school and took me to the plant to show me around. Day Shift Leon sat on the stool at Dad’s work station, and when Dad tapped his shoulder the beefy man shrugged and grunted, taking a pack of smokes from his rolled-up blue sleeve and wandering off.
Dad bent and lifted an empty bin from the floor. On the tabletop he started filling it with to-standard parts, flinging bent or burred ones in a receptacle at his feet. I couldn’t hear them clunk through my earplugs when they landed, but under borrowed steel-toed shoe covers I felt the concrete floor vibrate. I watched for an hour. New pulleys came every seven minutes.
Night shifts should have given Dad more time for the truck. When he woke in the afternoon he could have cranked classic rock and spent the day sanding in the garage. But not long after we took the licence plates off, Dad found he couldn’t keep up at work. He came home in the mornings with his right wrist swelling and met me and Nancy in the kitchen, where we’d be making lunches. Squeezing in beside us he’d take an icepack from the freezer then retire to the bedroom for the day.
Later, when he was on Workers’ Comp, he could have even slept nights and worked days on the truck if not for the orbital, which sent shockwaves through his ulna like a cracked bat and a foul ball. He endured it for a weekend to show me how the tool worked, and after pointing out the kill switch he asked me to lead, following with a sanding block in his good hand.
In a month we had all the rust smoothed. Dad beamed as he explained that Bondo was the next step. We mixed the putty and the hardener in a cut-off bleach bottle and the acrid smell stung in my nose. Dad trowelled the compound over the holes on the back fender but conceded before he reached the tailgate. Fine movements were too much now, too.
From then on, there the truck sat. Snow drifted around it and into the garage, piling up along the side walls while outside, the stripped front end grinned like a skull with headlight eye sockets, a bottom lip bumper and a nasal cavity where the bowtie had been. It stared me and Nancy down every afternoon when we got home from school and taunted Dad deep into the winter.
IN MARCH, AFTER months of meetings and hearings, Ritter paid Dad a settlement. Sixty days’ wages. Not quite three thousand dollars.
Even Nancy and I knew it was an insult. It was also the most money our family had ever seen at once. A chunk of it went down on the mortgage, I hope, and Nancy and I got some new clothes. But the money didn’t solve our problems, it made them worse. Mom and Dad fought for a week straight, deep into the night, and though I could barely make out words from my bedroom, I knew it was about the money. Lately it always was. Short of staying in Waubnakee and pumping at ValuGas, the one workplace in town, Dad couldn’t get a job without a vehicle. He wasn’t thirty yet, but when he yelled “It’s my fucking arm, so it’s my fucking money!” I knew he felt too old to go back to being a pump monkey.
That Saturday, he asked me to help him put the truck’s lightbulbs back in. The four-ways clicked the whole way to the drive shed at Grandpa Ralph’s, where we met Dad’s brother Richard, who had won his high school auto shop award every year and who didn’t like to come to Ralph’s u
nless he absolutely had to. Dad offered some of the money, though, maybe the last of it, and Richard accepted.
BY SUMMER’S END Richard had the truck back on the road, pale blue and minus the topper. Dad was so proud. On weekends he took it out “just for a drive,” he helped friends move when they didn’t even need it, and though we never had more than would fit in the cab, he always put our groceries in the back. We got a lot of attention around town, especially from our closest neighbours, Steve and Dana, the young couple across the tracks with three kids of their own.
“I see your Dad got his truck back,” Dana said, prying subtly at me and Nancy at the ValuGas where the school bus stopped. She waited for us to fill the silence: to hear that Dad’s licence suspension was over or the repo hadn’t gone through or something. Kids say the darnedest things.
Hank Mueller noticed, too, and made sure to tell his daughter Jessie, who was the same age as me and already growing breasts. On the school bus she’d play with a strand of long black hair and say, straight-faced, “My Dad’s going to buy your Dad’s truck.” Not knowing it was hopeless, I’d snap back, “It’s not for sale, you bitch!”
And it wasn’t. For once we were doing fine. Comp had cleared Dad to take a new job in London that started with three weeks of seminars about life insurance. He came home after dark those nights and we had dinner so late that Nancy and I had to go straight to bed afterward — and because her shifts started so early, so did Mom. Dad stayed awake at the kitchen table and practiced his pitch with his new tape recorder.
DAD’S CREDIBILITY WAS instant, so much so that his sales were sixth in Canada that November. He set his appointments weeks in advance, and instead of gliding up in a Japanese city coupe, he bumbled around in the baby blue pickup, now almost officially a classic. Sceptical, and seeing Dad on ultimatums from their wives, husbands were immediately impressed; in an hour, chit-chat about the rare seventy-four short-box turned into another sold policy.
At the time there were fifteen thousand people in Currie Township. A few were long-term farmers with no plan to speak of — crop insurance, sure, but life? — and the rest were retirees from the city, who had graduated back when Western students stuck around and had paid into London Life since.
Of course, London Life wasn’t who Dad worked for. His company was American Life Insurance Inc., whose TV ads sang “We spell ally A-L-I-I” at night when the Cleveland stations fuzzed in across Lake Erie. Dad’s job was to make people switch.
Before long our new answering machine was overloaded with messages. It was bad enough to learn that an acquaintance had died, but what was worse was that the calls weren’t about that. Caller after caller told of unpaid claims and begged, “Jesus, John. Isn’t there something you can do?”
There wasn’t. And once it got around that Dad was part of a scam — a scam he hadn’t recognized, and still didn’t — ALII gave him a new territory called Pill Hill: Highway 4 north of London, where the city’s doctors lived in mansions.
Dad was excited, at first. There was money to be had. But instead of meeting quarry in the laneway like he had in the township, in London Dad had to ring doorbells. When they answered, if they answered, clients took one look at his ve-hick-le — the old truck that he drove — and right away the sale was off.
Thankfully, Nancy and I had our new school clothes, because that winter even Dad’s yearly deer hunt didn’t fill the freezer. A lot of nights we praised the versatility of Kraft Dinner — it wasn’t even KD, it was Price-Mart store brand, but it really did go with everything.
EASTBOUND ON 401, a Friday morning in the spring, the truck began to clatter. Dad was in the fast lane and pushing too hard, rushing to make his first appointment. Lately he always was. By then he’d started smoking again, which Mom and Nancy didn’t know at the time. I imagine he tossed his butt out the window and weaved urgently to the centre, the right, the shoulder, stopping then resting his head on the steering wheel. And though I don’t want to think it, he probably cried. From there he walked the three miles to J’s Truckstop and called the one wrecker he knew. Hank Mueller stopped his orange tow truck an hour later and readied the winch on the yellow boom.
“Shit, John. What happened?”
“Well, first it ticked ... then it whirred, faster and faster ... and then ... it kind of clunked,” Dad said.
Hank popped the hood for a look. He closed it right away.
“You’re in trouble,” he said, complete with a head shake and a look to the ground. “You threw a rod. She’ll never run again.” Dad says Hank’s eyes gleamed like a wolf’s: teeth bared and bloodthirsty, claw at the ready. “Hundred bucks for ‘er, John. On the hook,” he said. “Won’t even charge you the tow.”
I want to say Dad just glared back and spat, but he probably sighed and said nothing. They took the slow way home, crammed onto Old 22 westbound, and when they got back to Waubnakee, Dad paid with the last bit of room on his credit card. He asked to use the phone with the grimy receiver.
Nancy and I had our lunches made and were nearly out the door when we heard the ring. I told her to turn down the black-and-white TV in the kitchen. She insisted on leaving it blaring when we left, so burglars would think we were in.
“Is your mother there?” Dad asked. He never used mother.
“She went to work,” I said.
“In the car?”
“She walked. She said she’d save the gas.”
He breathed in.
“Okay,” he said. Exhaled. “The truck broke down.”
He paused a moment, and then he hung up.
I WAS SHOOTING baskets the next Saturday when Hank’s wrecker growled behind me. He blew the horn and I forgot about my ball, letting it plonk off the Buick’s side door.
Hank’s hands were oily and he hadn’t shaved. He had to have just come from a job. He took the cap off his head and ran two fingers through his comb-over. He spat in the laneway.
Dad had slept late. He emerged in an old T-shirt and sweatpants.
“You drive a hard bargain,” Hank said. “Not returning my calls.”
Dad flinched, but then he stared back. Right into Hank’s eyes.
“I told you. It’s not for sale.”
“Fine, John,” Hank grunted. “Five hundred. As is.”
I looked up at Dad, gaping. He looked down and his eyes begged.
I nodded.
I was twelve now.
Dad raised his head and whooshed.
“Deal.”
Tabaco Babies
TOWNIES’ LITTLE BROTHERS get it first. That’s why I scurry into the room panting, late for my first Grade Nine class. Everyone stares as I skulk to the back, where I take a seat between two boys. On my right, one whispers an introduction.
“Mike Carrion.”
“Brian Callaghan,” I mumble back, looking up at my gangly new friend. Way up. Mike’s from a township school, but just like in prison — where they’ll be in three years — the seniors picked him because he’s tall. His left eye is swollen and already turning purple, and his forehead reads looser in faded blue marker. The skin is still red from scrubbing.
Boys know what to expect from Currie High School. And though Mike got it bad, initiation’s even worse for girls; most of them think they’re safe because they’re nice, or in figure skating, or their dad owns a big tobacco farm, but it just makes them bigger targets. Senior girls have skank and whore and slut at their disposal, and when they catch a Ninerette they pen them all on her in looping, perfectly-spelled cursive. A ball-point hurts more than a marker, and for some girls it never wears off.
On my other side is a short boy named Ben. I know him from fastball. He’s not bruised like Mike, but his knapsack is torn — a casualty of his getaway, no doubt. On his T-shirt, a yellow stain is still wet.
They egged him. Until now I thought that one was made-up.
Mrs. Kulich clears her throat. She taught my parents Grade Nine math, and already, I can tell: she’d rather be our mother than our tea
cher. It’s like the first day of kindergarten but worse. She asks, “Did anyone have trouble finding the classroom?” and peers out the red frames under her grey bob. I think she expects us to answer.
Yes, me. I was running from these seniors, see, and I wound up in the shop hall, and these guys with mullets and backwards ball caps with pot leaves on them —
No. No one’s going to say that, on the first day or any other.
“Well, then. Let’s get started. The first thing I have is the seating plan.”
Everyone groans. We thought we had left those in Grade Eight.
Mrs. Kulich backpedals.
“It’s only for the first month,” she says. “Just until I learn your names.”
She looks around the room. No one admits to caring. She points to the front left corner and the desk face-toface with hers.
“So ... in alphabetical order. Can I have Benson Allen here, please?”
Front row, centre, two girls gasp. One’s a blonde in pigtails and the other has a long brown braid. They clearly chose these seats thinking grades make you popular. Pig-Tails’ braces flash. She’s going to need a couple of years.
“Hello, Benson,” Mrs. Kulich says when Ben sits down. “And behind him, can I have ... Kimberly Andrews?”
The brunette looks at Pig-Tails and hesitates before getting up. For a moment I expect them to touch hands, like inmate and visitor through glass on a cheesy TV show.
“Come on, Kimberly,” the teacher says. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Everyone in the room cringes. We know what she’s going to say next.
“He’s not the same as us, that’s all. No better or worse, just ... different.”
Kimberly gathers her pink pencil case and knapsack. She shuffles to the desk behind Ben, which her brother Pat’s burly best friend Ryan Tern has staked out. When Ryan stands he says to Kimberly, “Better you than me,” louder than even he thinks. His steel toes clomp to the desk beside Pig-Tails. Ryan has two years and thirty pounds on all of us. No one says a word. Not even Mrs. Kulich.