with more signs of the apocalypse, everything from shattered window glass to twisted sheet metal to headless dolls and solitary shoes and other debris that had come into the place along with the wrecks. In this sense, the Yard more than earned its traditional moniker of “automobile graveyard.”
Looting this graveyard was my fondest occupation. Whenever a fresh wreck was dropped at the gate, I’d be the first to go through it, ransacking the glove compartment and truck for hidden treasure. I was rarely disappointed. On top of the usual horde of loose change, road maps, jumper cables, and tire tools, I found marbles, bats and baseballs, old paperbacks (Louis L’Amour was especially popular), secret stashes of Hustler and Penthouse magazines, costume jewelry of varying degrees of gaudiness, playing cards, pocket knives, Zippo lighters, sleeping bags, beach chairs, cigar boxes full of old photographs and diaries, fireworks, spent and unspent ammo. Unless it was deemed to be particularly valuable or dangerous, I was allowed to keep everything I found.
Some of the more mangled wrecks had bloodstains on the upholstery or even bits of human hair jutting from cracks in the windshield. At first, such sights gave me the creeps, but after a while they lost their power to scare me, and I treated them with the same air of professional detachment with which a forensic pathologist might view a fresh corpse. Only rarely did a new find make me feel the nearness of death. I remember one such instance with chilling clarity. For years, I had wanted a catcher’s glove of a particular make and model (a Rawlings K3-H, let’s call it), but since baseball was not one of my better sports and the rag-tag team I played on had an older glove I could use, I could never convince my parents to buy me one. Then one day I crawled into the back of a wrecked Corvair and there, wedged under the front passenger seat, was an almost brand new K3-H. Not believing my luck, I slipped the glove on my hand and held it out before me as though catching a pitch. It fit perfectly. Indeed, the mitt felt as if it had been made for my hand and no other. But then I noticed something that caused me to shake the glove off my hand as quickly as if I had felt a spider lurking in one of the finger holes. There, written in black permanent marker across the web of the glove, was the name ROBBY—my name, exactly as I spelled it. That the handwriting looked nothing like my own or my mother’s did not abate my alarm. Somewhere out there in the world beyond the salvage yard, a second me, a ghastly twin or doppelganger, waited to do me harm—of this I was thoroughly convinced.
* * *
That whole outer realm of the salvage yard was ruled over by a strange and fascinating creature known to denizens of the salvage yard as “Yard Man.” Unlike his more sophisticated cousins in the Front or the body shop, Yard Man worked outside the whole day through and in all kinds of weather—rain, sleet, snow, burning sun. To the parts guys, many of whom had finished high school and maybe even some college, Yard Man was a clumsy, unsophisticated brute. A vandal at heart, his stock-in-trade was force and speed, not precision. Ask a mechanic to pull a motor from a car, and he’d roll it into a bay in his shop and begin a careful disassembly process that included draining the radiator, unhooking the battery, loosening a dozen different clamps, belts, hoses, and mounts. Ask Yard Man to perform the same task, and he’d throw a chain around the motor, winch it up, and then cut everything holding the motor to the car with a blowtorch. Within minutes, the motor would lurch free and Yard Man would haul it, swinging on its chain like a pendulum, to the wash bay, where a grease-covered underling (often one of my teenaged brothers) would steam it off with a high-powered hose.
All day long, Yard Man roared up and down the narrow sand roads of the salvage yard atop a strange, homemade vehicle called a “goose.” A goose was usually a retired army truck with the cab torn off, a roll cage welded into its place, and a crane-like winch mounted on the front. Other tools of Yard Man’s trade—acetylene torch, sledgehammer, straight and angled crowbars—were mounted catch-as-catch-can along the sides and back. Whenever Yard Man took a coffee or bathroom break, I would climb into the high, still-warm seat of his abandoned goose and imagine myself rampaging through the world like a tank commander in a war movie. Pow! Boom! Ka-Bam! I would free all of the prisoners! Rain missiles on the enemy! Young women and girls would run alongside me in the rubble-strewn streets, blowing me kisses! Then, when Yard Man emerged from his break to reclaim his goose, I’d imagine that an enemy grenade had been lobbed into the tank and my only hope of survival was a daring leap to safety.
Five or six different Yard Men worked for my father during the years he owned the salvage yard, but the one I remember best was a baldheaded, pit bull–like man named Billy Dan. Billy Dan had a deep crease in the top of his forehead and an upper lip the size of a lemon, both of these abnormalities the result of an accident involving a truck bumper that swung back from the goose winch and caught Billy Dan full in the face. As far as I could tell, the man was mute. He communicated through grunts, high-pitched squeals, and terrible dark-eyed looks. Although I admired Billy Dan as a fellow man-of-action, I was also deeply terrified of him. All he had to do was look at me and I would run the other way as fast as my sneaker-clad feet would carry me. Part of this fear had to do with the fact that my older brothers used to tease me, saying, “Mom and Dad have finally decided what to do with you. They’re going to give you to Billy Dan. At first he wanted to buy you, but Dad wouldn’t hear of that . . .” Somehow I had got it into my head that Billy Dan was a veteran of the Vietnam War, and in my mind, Vietnam vets were addle-minded psychopaths never more than one “flashback” away from murdering everyone around them. Who was to say that Billy Dan hadn’t been tortured beyond limits in some faraway rice paddy and lived now only to exact his revenge on the innocent?
Even watching him smoke or eat was a scary thing. He always seemed to have a cigar jutting out beneath his lemon lip, and when he struck a match to relight the cigar, an action he performed hundreds of times a day, all of the terrible contours of his face would be illuminated. His favorite meal, which he took daily in a little break room just off the wash bay, was pickled eggs and pigs’ feet with a side of saltine crackers. The eggs he covered in salt and pepper before consuming them in a single bite. When these were gone he moved on to the pigs’ feet, sucking the meat from bone and tendon before spitting the white knuckles onto the floor before him, a terrible sight to behold. Once, when I was sitting in the break room with him, Billy Dan attempted to share his lunch with me, his hand jutting out into the space between us to reveal a pig’s foot resting atop a clean paper towel.
“No thanks,” I said.
But this only caused him to shake the tidbit before me, his terrible green eyes urging me to try it.
“Okay,” I said, afraid to give any other answer. But when I put the pig’s foot in my mouth, and felt the cold, rubbery flesh on my tongue, I immediately gagged, spitting the unclean thing out at Billy Dan’s feet.
He squealed with delight, holding his head back to reveal a single upper tooth, just to the right of his nose. Seeing that lonely tooth shook me even more than seeing the white pigs’ knuckles arrayed on the floor.
As terrified as I was of Billy, his mere presence in the Yard often made me feel safer and less alone. One day, he even saved my life—or at least I believed he did. I was lying on my back beneath a junker Impala, pretending to change the oil, when suddenly I heard a rattling sound just to the left of my ear. Slowly I rolled my eyes in that direction, and coiled next to me, just inside the car’s front tire, was a rattlesnake. I froze, my mouth going dry, heart beating wildly within my chest. I knew it was the end. Any second and the snake would bite me in the face or neck, and I’d be filled with poison and die. But then, just when I was about to give up the ghost, I heard the roar of Billy Dan’s goose coming down the sand road at my feet. Eyes still closed, I focused on that sound as it grew louder and louder. Finally Billy Dan’s goose shot past in a cloud of diesel smoke, and as the sound of it died away, I opened my eyes to see that the snake was gone, as vanished from this earth as if St. Patrick himself had appeared to banish it.
* * *
More terrifying than snakes and ogres were the junkyard dogs my father kept on the place to guard the parts from thieves. He
