selling the house?” I asked. “What on earth for?”
“It’s part of a land deal,” my mother said, sighing. “But the truth is, it’s too big for us now anyway, with just your dad and me and your brother Paul left.”
“Too big?” I asked. “Or too finished?”
Here my mother allowed herself a tiny laugh. “Ah, well, you know your father. He likes to have a project.”
“Really? Just him?”
Another laugh.
That was two houses and twenty-five years ago. Although my parents are in their late seventies now and have lived in their current home on Snob Hill for only eighteen months, already I have noticed them looking around the place, commenting on what my father likes to call “the possibilities.”
Hide the envelopes.
In the Land of Crashed Cars and Junkyard Dogs
When I was a boy growing up in western Kansas, my father and his older brother, Harold, owned an auto body salvage yard in the sand hills south of Dodge City. The place was called B & B Auto Parts, or, more simply, B & B. That was the name of the business when they bought it in 1966, and that’s the name it retains to this day, long after they sold it and my father returned to full-time farming and ranching. I remember, as a very small boy, asking my mother what the name stood for and why they never bothered to change it. “I don’t know,” she answered, continuing whatever chore she was doing at the time. “A, B, C—what does it matter? It’s just a junkyard.” Of course, she was right about that; my father himself would have agreed. And yet, to me, perhaps because of the age I was when I experienced it, the salvage yard was so much more than that. As Ishmael says of the whaling ships on which he grew to manhood, the salvage yard, with its forty-odd acres of mangled cars and trucks, was my Harvard and my Yale.
I was five or six years old when I started spending a lot of time at the salvage yard. I don’t know how or why this came to pass, but I have my suspicions. From my earliest days, I was a handful—a hyperactive motor mouth prone to accidents and mischief of a more or less mindless sort. From the moment I woke up until I dropped to sleep from exhaustion seventeen or eighteen hours later, I was constantly on the go, constantly “causing a racket” and “failing to listen,” constantly “into something.” Today, kids such as I was get a dose of Ritalin. But I was lucky. The only solution that offered itself in my case was to send me to work along with my father and older brothers.
Of course, I use the phrase to work in only the loosest of senses. While most of my older brothers were given jobs as apprentice welders or body men or were at least required to push a broom every once in a while, I was allowed to roam free across the entire expanse of the salvage yard so long as I didn’t maim myself or distract anyone else from his work. In this way, I came to know the different territories that made up the salvage yard, as well as the rogue’s gallery of men who ruled over them.
The nerve center of the place was the concrete-floored front office with its long counter littered with coffee cups, overflowing ashtrays, dog-eared lists of inventory. Here parts men took orders from the public and added their voices to a static-ridden frequency on which their colleagues from across the West and Midwest carried on a nonstop conversation. Guys, this is Bob at Apex in Tulsa still looking for that bumper, hood, and grill for a 1972 Buick Skylark. . . . The Front was the only part of the salvage yard that was air conditioned or heated in any conventional sense (the body and machine shops made do with jerry-rigged box fans and fifty-gallon drums converted into wood-burning stoves). It was where customers waited, gossiping and smoking, lounging about on bucket seats culled from wrecks. Most importantly to me, though, the Front was where the candy and pop machines were. How I loved to scavenge coins from under the seats of wrecked cars and then feed them, one by one, into the rows of globe-headed machines containing jelly beans, gumballs, salted cashews, Boston baked beans, Red Hots, regular and peanut M&M’s! This was my first real experience of the world of “getting and spending,” as Wordsworth had it, and how sweet it was!
Snack and drink in hand, I’d sit, legs dangling from one of the old car seats, and wait for something interesting to happen. It never took long. Someone was always arguing, telling an off-color joke, showing off a new gun or knife he’d just bought or otherwise “come into.” At first the parts guys, conscious of my presence, would nod toward me and quickly change the subject whenever someone ventured into R- or X-rated territory. Gradually, however, they forgot about me and went on with their business uncensored. Many an old-time country song could be fashioned out of the words and deeds of the men who turned up at the salvage yard looking to coax a few more miles out of their battered Chevys and Fords. After a while, it began to seem to me that every story worth telling involved, as if by prescription, an angry woman, a bout of drinking, a fistfight, and a night spent in the city or county jail.
parts man 1: Bob! Ain’t seen you in a coon’s age. How the hell is it hanging?
bob [smoking, looking a little haggard and hangdog]: Not so good. You heard the old lady threw me out on my ass, right?
pm 1: No! Why’d she go and do a thing like that?
bob: Be damned if I know.
parts man 2 [chuckling, taking a long drag of his cigarette and letting the smoke escape his lungs along with the words]: Didn’t have anything to do with you getting drunk and driving that Jeep of yours into that culvert off Comanche Street, did it?
bob [sheepishly]: Well, yeah. But can you believe the bitch wouldn’t even bail me out? I had to ask her cousin to do it!
pm 1 [winking at pm 2]: Which cousin would that be?
bob [smiling faintly, as if reliving it all over]: I think you know the one I’m talking about. Young and long-legged . . .
pm 2: Well, now. I do believe this picture is starting to come into focus . . .
Like bartenders and other people who deal with the public all day, the parts men could be gregarious, gruff, sympathetic, or downright mean, depending on what the situation appeared to call for. For this reason, I didn’t like them very much. Parts men were a little too slick, a little too shifty and hard to read. I hated it when they would treat a customer nice—We’ll be seeing you, Duane, take care now, you hear?—and then start in laughing as soon as he was safely out the door. That sumbitch gets any fatter he’s gonna need a goddamn mirror just to see his own pecker ha ha ha . . .
The Front was the place I first encountered the words fuck, cunt, and cocksucker, to say nothing of such tame elocutions as shit, goddamn, and sonofabitch. I remember once, having just overheard a sustained streak of animated cussing, I wandered out to the gravel parking lot and began to reenact the scene in a loud voice.
“And then I told that cocksucker that if he didn’t stop fucking with me I was gonna rip his motherfucking head off and take a shit down his neck . . .”
Even as I said the words, I could hear the door to the Front swing open behind me, and who did I see when I turned around but my father in his blue uniform, black eyes boring into me.
“What did you just say?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I answered.
“It didn’t sound like nothing.”
I hung my head a little, afraid to lie.
“What would your mother think if she heard you talking like that?”
