“Suit yourself,” he said. “These dogs won’t trouble you no more. Unless you trouble them. Or me.”
Benjy resisted my pushing him. “I’m okay,” he said. I turned and looked him in the eye. The purple in his face had softened to beet red.
“We can order seat belts from Clark’s,” I told him.
He looked to the man in his chair, and his resolve stiffened. “I’m okay,” he repeated.
We cautiously resumed our tiptoeing between puddles to reach the barn, and the dogs didn’t stir. I introduced ourselves and explained, “Benjy’s not a dog person.”
“Kenny Dettor,” he spit out at us, not offering his hand to shake. “These dogs wouldn’t hurt a fly unless I told them to. They’s well-trained.” He seemed put out by the commotion. From underneath his “What’s Saddam Funny?” cap, his long, jet-black hair fell over his shoulders. He couldn’t have been more than a few years older than Benjy, yet his gaunt, bearded face was wrinkled and worn. Abruptly spinning his chair around, he wheeled himself to a John Deere Gator, adroitly swung his body from the chair to the seat and spun the vehicle around, showering our pants with mud. “Hop on,” he ordered.
I sat beside Kenny in the center of the bench seat and Benjy squeezed in beside me. Kenny punched the Gator’s gas, rooster-tailing muddy water while seemingly aiming for the deepest potholes on the way to the field behind the barn. I threw my arm around Benjy’s shoulder and braced myself to keep from flying out. Then I begged Kenny to slow down.
“We’re here,” he replied gruffly. But all I could see were overgrown weeds and brush.
“It’s Corvairs,” said Benjy. Camouflaged within the overgrowth, nose to bumper and door to door, their tires flattened by time, were the hundred dead Corvairs that Kenny had advertised for sale.
“You’ve got quite an unusual crop,” I joked lamely. Kenny didn’t crack a smile. “How did you get all these?” I asked.
“I didn’t,” Kenny grunted. “My father did. People gave ’em to him if he’d haul ’em away. Then we’d fix ’em up and sell ’em, whole or parts. Had a pretty good business. But he’s gone now over a year. And since I’m now gonna be in this chair awhile, like the rest of my life, I ain’t real interested in carryin’ it on.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “May I ask what happened?”
“Iraq happened,” he said, then spit into the mud. “An I.E.D. happened.” Kenny saw Benjy’s blank look and explained. “Improvised Explosive Device. It blew up under our Humvee, which then rolled over on me, and that was all she wrote for my spine.” He spit into the mud again. “Take whatever you want before they go to the crusher. I’ll be in the barn. We’ll settle up there.”
“There were supposed to be weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” Benjy said, “but it turned out there weren’t any.”
“Hell, yes, there were,” Kenny fired back. “They was called I.E.D.s and Humvees.”
“Thank you for your service and sacrifice,” I said as we slid out of the Gator.
“You’re so very welcome,” he muttered bitterly, then punched the Gator’s pedal, again rooster-tailing mud as he drove off.
I explained to Benjy that many American soldiers serving in Iraq had been injured when I.E.D.s exploded under their Humvees and other military vehicles. He nodded, and we walked on in silence among the rusting Corvairs. To break the silence, I told him what I knew of them. There were Early Models from the 1960 to 1964 model years, Late Models from 1965 to 1969, two-doors, four-doors, convertibles, and turbocharged coupes. There were rare Corvair models such as the Lakewood station wagon, with the air-cooled engine under the rear cargo floor, and the Greenbrier window van, America’s first minivan. There was even a telephone company’s old Corvair pickup truck, the Ramp-side; a passenger side’s drop-down ramp allowed cargo to be rolled up from the ground into the bed.
“This is a treasure trove of Corvair history,” I told Benjy. “I saw a YouTube video where an elephant walked up a Rampside’s ramp. It was amazing.” Unfortunately, all the vehicles were crammed full of motors, wheels, axles, differentials, and other Corvair detritus—everything except seat belts. The weather seals I found were rotted worse than the ones already on our car.
I noticed Benjy kept looking back at the barn. “Do you think Kenny lives independently?” he finally asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “But he’s so unfriendly, it’s hard to picture anyone living with him.”
We returned to the barn, empty-handed, and found Kenny drinking a beer beside a hot red Late Model two-door coupe, up on jack stands with all its trim and wheels on the dirt floor.
“A hundred Corvairs and you didn’t find nothin’?” Kenny growled, then spit. “You come down here and kick tires, wastin’ my time? It ain’t easy for me to get around, in case you ain’t noticed.” As his voice became angrier, Manny, Moe, and Jack perked their heads up from the floor and glared at us.
“I was looking for rear seat belts and the cars were so full of stuff, I didn’t see any,” I explained. As Benjy eyed the dogs warily, I put my hand around his shoulder.
“Look in the boxes against the back wall. Over there.” Kenny slung his can in the direction he wanted us to go and beer splashed into his lap. He cursed, guzzled what remained, crumpled up the can, and tossed it into a tall pile of other empties.
I didn’t want Benjy to be left with this picture of a bitter and angry man with a disability, so I tried to draw Kenny out. “You look like you’re restoring that one,” I said pointing to the red Corvair. “It’s gorgeous.”
“My father started it. Every now and then I put a wrench to it. You want it? Make me an offer, it’s all for sale. And no lowballs. I’ll put the dogs to anyone tries to lowball me.”
“I don’t think you should crush those cars out there,” blurted out Benjy. “Corvairs were different from other cars. They—”
“Save it!” Kenny loudly interrupted. “I’ve heard it, okay? From my dad and all his lame Corvair buddies. You pay me two hundred each, haul ’em away, and you can open your museum. I don’t want ’em. I need the money.”
Shocked by Kenny’s hostility, Benjy, for the first time I could remember, did not finish making his point. I quickly led him away to search the boxes at the back. Hopefully, we’d find a few things to buy to make Kenny happy, then flee as fast as the Corvair could take us. Burrowing into the first box among the bulbs, belts, gaskets, and other parts, I soon struck pay dirt: weather seals for the doors, new in the package. I dug further and found new seat belts, plus the hardware to anchor them. In another box, I found oil and air filters. Then I struck the mother lode: a new set of hard-to-find weather seals for my convertible top. Now, when I drove the Corvair with the top up, I wouldn’t need ear plugs. We hadn’t wasted Kenny’s time after all, or ours.
“Dad?” I heard Benjy call, tremblingly, from around a corner. Assuming the dogs were menacing him, I dropped everything and ran over, but they weren’t there. Instead, I found him staring at a Late Model Corvair with the legs of two men and a woman sticking out from its closed front end trunk. The car had been painted as a man-eating shark, with its jaws clamped down on the waists of its victims, its huge teeth biting them in two, as if swallowing their heads and torsos while leaving their legs dangling.
Benjy gasped for breath and I held him, assuring him, “It’s a joke! A prank! It’s not real!”
Now, Manny, Moe, and Jack came over, growling and with bared teeth, to investigate his hyperventilating. “GET THEM AWAY!” Benjy screamed. It was all too much; he was suffering a full-blown meltdown.
The three howling hounds stopped at Benjy’s feet, snarling, until Kenny commanded “SHUSH!” He slowly rolled his chair over, as if he could scarcely be bothered. The dogs lay down at Benjy’s feet and glared at him, waiting for him to make one wrong move.
Benjy whimpered. Terror had turned his face bright purple again.
“Get a grip, will ya?” demanded Kenny. He wheeled to the shark Corvair’s trunk,
lifted the lid, and the bottom halves of the three mannequins dropped to the dirt floor. “It’s a gag my Dad and I did. To make it look like the Vair ate the people. They’re dummies!”
Benjy nodded over and over, but couldn’t stop gasping.
“It’s just a joke,” I said, trying to soothe him. “The Corvair’s a Killer Car. It’s like a man-eating shark, it eats people. Get it? It’s funny.”
Benjy gobbled air deep into his lungs, trying to calm himself. But it didn’t come quickly enough for Kenny. He rolled his eyes in exasperation. “Hey, Kid, I mean, first it’s the dogs, then it’s the dummies. Maybe you should join the Army? I did when I was your age. You get to serve yer country. And you might lose your legs, but you’ll sure grow some balls.”
Now I was the one who turned purple. “Hey!” I exploded. “Don’t you ever speak to my son that way! You don’t know him!”
“I know him to be one weird pussy,” Kenny sneered.
“If you weren’t in that chair,” I seethed, my finger in Kenny’s face, “and hadn’t served this country, I would punch your lights out. You think you’re superior? At least he doesn’t let his disability make him bitter and angry. You should learn from him, not mock him.”
“You gonna buy those parts or not?” Kenny demanded unapologetically.
“You sonova—!” As the dogs stood and growled at me, I bit my tongue and counted to five. “I sincerely hope you get the help you need,” I finally said in the most dog-soothing voice I could manage, “because you really, really need help.” I dropped the parts in Kenny’s lap and, praying he wouldn’t command his dogs to follow us, hustled Benjy out to the car.
CHAPTER 8
“You shouldn’t have yelled at Kenny,” Benjy said as we pitched back and forth while I sped the Corvair down the driveway and into one mud crater after another, fleeing Kenny’s house as fast as I could without breaking the car’s suspension. “Maybe he can’t help being like that.”
“I’m sure he can help it, and I don’t want to talk about him ever again,” I sputtered. “The only good thing I can say about him is that he didn’t order his dogs to attack us.”
“OWWW,” cried Benjy, after a huge pothole caused our heads to bounce against the metal superstructure of the Corvair’s rag top. “Slow down! I hit my head! It might be broken!”
Seeing there wasn’t anyone following us, I throttled back. “Sorry,” I said.
Finally, the car reached the gravel road and I accelerated again. We had made our getaway and I could relax. Instead, I choked up. “I’m just so sorry for bringing you down here. I admire your forgiving him, Benjy, but I can’t. No one has the right to speak to you or anyone else that way, disability or not.”
“You should say difference, Dad, not disability.” Benjy stared out the window as usual, as if nothing had just happened.
“I know you know this already,” I said, “but there are people in this world who will tease you because they don’t understand you and make no effort to understand you. Like the bullies on the long bus. And that’s Kenny—he’s a bully. It’s not your fault, it’s his. Not everyone can be good.” I looked over at Benjy; he still stared out the window.
When we finally reached the main highway, I punched the gas pedal, and the Corvair lurched forward.
“You’re speeding, Dad,” Benjy warned as he was pushed back into his seat. “Slow down.”
“You’re right,” I admitted. I let up on the gas. I hadn’t floored the Corvair before. Pretty impressive acceleration, I thought.
“I’m glad we came here,” Benjy said. “It wasn’t so bad. We saw a lot of Corvairs.”
After the debacle with Kenny, I ordered the seat belts and other parts from Clark’s Corvair Parts (“world’s largest Corvair parts supplier, over 15,000 Corvair parts in stock!”). The service was friendly, the package arrived quickly, the instructions seemed straightforward, and, best of all, there was no Kenny. Never again would I try to save a buck on Corvair parts.
The following Saturday, after Benjy finished his NASCAR game, I recruited him to help install the seat belts. “I could use an assistant. Interested?”
I had no illusions that he’d join me. Nearly every weekend for the past decade, I had invited Benjy to assist me with household and yard chores. More than the help he might provide, however, I’d hoped it would be time when we could yak and joke and talk father-son talk; if he actually helped me, it would be a bonus. I had learned over all the years I’d tried to recruit him, however, that he did not like chores that involved dirty, yucky, sharp, or smelly stuff, getting into uncomfortable positions, or using metal objects like screwdrivers that raised any possibility of an injury or bleeding—in other words, nearly all household chores. He always politely declined my invitation, saying, “No, thank you.”
“Sure,” he said this time.
Wow! Okay! I rushed us both into work clothes before he changed his mind, then gave him the installation instructions to review.
Benjy read the directions and had second thoughts. “Maybe we ought to have a professional do this, Dad?” he asked in his usual flat tone.
“I thought we were going to do it together. What happened?”
“It looks too hard for you.”
“It looks easy to me,” I said, only mildly offended. “Clark’s said it was easy.”
“You have to drill. Drills are sharp and can cut people so they bleed.”
“Don’t worry about the drilling,” I assured him. “I can handle the drilling.”
He was un-persuaded. “Seat belts are for safety. If we don’t do it right, they might not be safe.”
“We have instructions,” I protested. “A diagram. I feel confident. People on the Corvair Forum on the Internet say this is not hard. If you read the instructions to me as I work, I think we’ll be fine.”
“You’re not mechanical, Dad. You say that all the time. If you bleed on the car, it could rust. Corvairs are prone to rust.” He was digging in.
“I know. But part of the fun of owning an old car is working on it and improving it. It’s the satisfaction of solving problems with your mind and your own two hands as you bring a classic vehicle back to life. It’s becoming one with the machine.”
He looked at me quizzically. “If it’s a machine, Dad, you can’t become one with it, because you are not a machine.”
“It’s just a metaphor,” I said. “It’s sort of a Zen thing—by fixing and rehabilitating a car, you become spiritually one with it.”
“It’s a car, Dad,” Benjy insisted. “It’s an inanimate object. It doesn’t have a spirit.”
“Look,” I said firmly, “I’m doing this. I want to learn to become more mechanical. And this is an easy job. It’s a good way to begin. Okay? So I’m starting. I’m using my new hydraulic jack to lift the car up onto my new jack stands so I can work underneath it.”
“You’re going under the car?” Benjy wasn’t often incredulous; this was an exception. “What if it falls on you?”
“It won’t fall on me,” I said, jacking quickly.
“Are you sure you’re not just being cheap?”
“I’m sure,” I replied testily, jacking faster, venting my frustration with his lack of confidence in my mechanical talents. “I did work at a service station once, you know. When I was your age.”
“You only pumped gas, Dad.”
“I also did some light mechanical work, okay? Can we just get started, please?” I locked the last two jack stands under the car and released the jack. The car dropped with a thud onto the stands. “See?” I said proudly. “We’re jacked up and ready to go. First instruction, please.”
Benjy relented and read the first instruction: “Remove the rear seat.”
“Okay,” I said, pleased. “Now we’re off and running. This will be a first. I’ve never removed the rear seat of a car before.” With the Corvair now secure atop four jack stands, I climbed into the elevated rear of the car, bent down, took a deep breath, grunted, and mightil
y yanked up on the rear seat cushion. It turned out to be light as a feather and unsecured, causing me to lose my balance and crash against the back of the driver’s seat, which in turn crashed against the steering wheel, which caused the horn to honk, long and loud.
“DAD!” Benjy yelled, covering his ears.
I stood up and the horn stopped honking. “Everything’s fine,” I said unsteadily.
“Maybe we ought to have a professional do this, Dad,” Benjy again suggested, a bit more insistently.
Even though I’d wrenched my back painfully, I again refused, and, with the seat cushion out, examined 45 years of accumulated dirt and gunk. “Maybe we should call a professional—a professional archaeologist, ha ha,” I joked.
“I meant a different kind of professional, Dad,” Benjy said. “A professional automobile mechanic,” he added, in case I hadn’t understood.
We’d come to the tricky part: drilling the holes through the rear metal panel of the passenger compartment into where the engine, transmission, differential, and lots of other important things lived. As Benjy started to suggest going to a professional again, he accurately read my social cue—a penetrating glare that unmistakably said, “Do not even think about asking me that question again!”—and stopped himself. Instead, he reread the instructions to me, and I successfully located four slight nail punches in the panel—tiny marks that a worker on GM’s Body by Fisher assembly line had punched decades earlier to guide someone like me in the event he someday decided to install the then-optional rear seat belts. Ever so cautiously, I drilled the first hole for the seat belt anchor bolts, silently praying that the Body by Fisher man would not lead me astray and I would not cut anything useful like, say, a brake or fuel line. After what seemed an eternity, the drill broke through and the bit suddenly lunged toward the engine. I stopped the drill and slowly reversed the bit back, hoping to avoid an explosion. It didn’t come. We had survived long enough to drill a second hole. But I needed a minute; my hand clutching the drill was trembling.
Lifemobile Page 7