Speck insufferable, but I thought he was the most interesting person I had ever met. Unlike everyone else in my life, Speck showed no sign of even realizing I was a child. He cussed freely before me, belched and farted, made dubious pronouncements about the world and the people in it. Taking out his tobacco for a chew, he would ask if I wanted some. When I said I didn’t, he just shrugged, as if to say, “Your loss.”
Speck’s specialty as a mechanic was the “stretching” of trucks. My father and Uncle Harold would fly down to the used truck auction in Oklahoma City and bring back ten or twelve Cain’s Coffee trucks. One by one, Speck would cut the trucks in half and lengthen their frames by seven or eight feet, so they could be fitted with hoists and resold as wheat trucks. Hanging out in Speck’s shop one summer, I came to know the stretching process inside out, and before long I was elevated to the status of gofer, running after whatever tool Speck might need at the time.
“Get me that hammer and punch,” Speck might say over his shoulder. When I brought them to him, he would snort his thanks and offer up some tidbit of Speck wisdom. “You know, don’t you, that you and your whole tribe are gonna roast in the fires of hell?”
“What tribe is that, Speck?” I’d ask, thrilled by such talk.
“Papists.”
“But I’m not a part of that tribe, Speck—or any, that I know of.”
“Sure you are. You’re Catholic, ain’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Baptized as a baby?”
“I guess so.”
“Well, there you go. You weren’t immersed. But that’s only the beginning of why you’re going to hell . . .”
And off he’d go on some new angle I thrilled to hear. I didn’t always understand, much less believe, the things Speck talked about. It was the free-flowing nature of his discourse I loved, the way he could just turn it on the way you might turn on a spigot, and here everything came spilling out in a gush. In another life, he might have been a shock jock, or maybe a radio preacher. I’m sure he could have thrilled a certain kind of audience with his impromptu rants.
Then one day, toward the end of the summer I spent hanging around his shop, something happened that caused me to revise my estimation of Speck. We had just installed a new radiator in one of the Cain’s trucks and were hunting around the shop for the red five-gallon can Speck kept water in. “Where the hell is it?” he raved. “The sumbitches! Don’t those Yard Men know to keep their filthy hands off my stuff?”
When we finally located the can, on a slab of greasy cement where the Yard Men parked their gooses, it was only to discover that someone had used it as a catch can for an oil change. “Fools! Idiots! I’ll kill them all—the worthless sumbitches!” Speck yelled, emptying the can into a sticker patch before limping angrily back into his shop.
It took ten minutes of scrubbing with soap and water to get the can back to its original condition. That done, we dried the top and sides with a shop rag, and Speck took some yellow paint we used to label parts and began to carefully mark the can in big block letters. W O T . . . Here he paused a moment, glancing over his shoulder at me as if he had just realized I was there. Then, shaking his head and muttering something under his breath, he finished by carefully painting the letter R followed by an exclamation mark.
I stood there, paralyzed by confusion. Why had Speck written W O T R ! when he clearly meant W A T E R !? Was this some kind of industry-wide alternative spelling? If so, why adopt it, when the result was a savings of only one letter? Then it hit me. He can’t spell.
Some part of the change sweeping over me must have communicated itself to Speck, because when I looked up, he was frowning at me.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said, unwilling to share my discovery with the man most affected by it.
Not long after, I switched my admiration to another salvage yard personality—Challo, the body man. While the other men who worked for my father all wore the same uniform of dark blue trousers along with a light blue shirt with a name tag—“Larry,” “Bill”—and an oval patch bearing the words “B & B Auto Parts” on each pocket (indeed, my father himself wore this uniform religiously), Challo could not be bothered. At best, he regarded the dress code as optional. If he wore the pants, it would be with an old football jersey or a black Harley-Davidson T-shirt. On days when he deigned to wear the uniform shirt, it would be with jeans or shorts, the shirt unbuttoned, its tail flopping behind him. Challo was a dark man with nearly black eyes and long black hair he covered with a bandana or a polka-dot beanie of the kind favored by welders. When he bothered to shave, he went in for long sideburns and a Fu Manchu mustache. Indeed, he claimed to have created the style himself. “Broadway Joe ain’t got nothing on me,” he would declare, smiling to show a gold cap on one of his front teeth.
It was this style of Challo’s that appealed so strongly to me—that and his sense of freedom. I remember asking my father how it was that Challo seemed to operate under a different code and different rules than the other men who worked for him at the salvage yard. He just shrugged the matter off the way a philosopher might shrug off a famous conundrum. “He’s a body man,” he explained. “They’re just a different breed, that’s all.”
When I asked what that meant, he went on to explain that an experienced body man was more like an independent contractor than a regular employee. “They’re like hairdressers,” he said, offering a comparison that stunned me to my core. “When they get tired of working in one shop, or don’t like the rules there, or have a falling-out with the boss, they just move down the street to the next shop, and then the next. Most of the body men in this town have worked at pretty much every shop in town, some of them more than once.”
When I pressed further, amazed that he would rehire someone who had quit on him months or years before, he made an even more startling comparison. “Body work isn’t something just anybody can do,” he said. “It takes a certain touch. An artist’s touch.”
Once the comparison had been made, I could see that it was so. The body shop itself, with its floodlights and pervasive odor of paint and bizarre tools for pounding dents out of sheet metal, was like nothing so much as an artist’s studio. An air of bohemian cool pervaded the place, surrounding all of the men who worked there. The act of smoothing out body putty or laying down a coat of lacquer with the paint gun required poise and precision. There was nothing of the grease monkey in it, no gasoline fumes or black dirt beneath the fingernails. The job was not to repair so much as to transform.
When I say Challo was an artist, I mean he was a man of ideas with the means to make those ideas a reality. Once he sent me to get him a cheeseburger and fries from his favorite burger joint down the road from the salvage yard. Because the place was more than a mile away, and I had to walk there and back, by the time I returned the food was lukewarm.
“What took you so long?” Challo asked, pulling a soggy fry from the bag and inspecting it with a grimace. “This shit is cold, man.”
“It’s a long walk,” I said.
“Well, take your bike next time.”
“I don’t have one,” I lied.
“Really?” Challo asked, raising his black eyebrows in a way that showed he was already entertaining some outlandish new idea.
Not long after this, he showed up
