you ever heard me talk like that?”
“No.”
“Well, all right then. I better not hear you. Understand?”
And with that he walked away, shaking his head in that exasperated way he had, as if to comment on how amazingly stupid the world had become sometime while he wasn’t paying attention to it.
* * *
After the Front, my favorite part of the salvage yard was a long corridor that ran between the engine and body shops—a massive, Willy Wonka–like space filled with nothing but row upon row of chrome hubcaps. Hung on huge racks and lit up by columns of fluorescent lights, these hubcaps gleamed for me like the very gold of Cibola. Ford, Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick, Oldsmobile, Chrysler . . . every American make and model was represented. I loved to sit against the wall opposite the hubcaps and cast my eyes over them until one in particular drew my attention, at which point I would rise, climb the racks, and bring the hubcap down to inspect it. My favorites were the vintage chrome hubcaps favored by Chevrolet in the 1950s and ’60s. How sleek and perfect they were! Sitting on the ground, hubcap in my lap, my reflection bouncing mirror-like back to me, I could easily imagine the cap was. . . . a flying saucer . . . a cymbal on a drum set . . . a discus I was about to hurl in a bid to win the Olympics . . .
One day, as I lay on the floor amid a pile of caps, playing some game that existed only in my head, one of the parts men walked by and dropped a red shop rag in my lap.
“If you’re gonna drag those sumbitches down, you might as well shine them up,” he said.
I fell to this work without complaint or expectation of pay. Soon I created a special row on the racks just for the caps I had polished to an especially high luster. This was my hoard of gold, my kingdom of chrome.
Then one day I returned to my stash and found that my favorite hubcap of all was gone. I stood there, staring at the place on the rack it had occupied only the day before. Then, as the reality of the situation sank in, I rushed into the Front and demanded an explanation.
“That dog dish Chevy cap?” one of the parts men, a gruff, bear-like man named Kenny or Doug, said absently. “Sold it yesterday.”
“You sold my hubcap?” I asked, astonished and appalled.
“Well, what did you think we did around here?” Kenny asked, laughing. “Play with ourselves?”
Only when he noticed the tears running down my cheeks did the man stop teasing me. “Hey, I’ll tell you what,” he said, reaching into the front pocket of his jeans. “How about I buy the cap from you for a nickel?”
“To hell with your nickel!” I spat, turning and running away from there until my lungs burned and my legs ached. After that, I would have nothing at all to do with Kenny. He and I were enemies, even if he, in his gruff bearness, was oblivious to the fact.
Beyond the corridor where the hubcaps were stored was a large warehouse lined with heavy racks built to store engines, rear ends, transmissions, and large body parts like fenders and hoods. Hanging from each part was a tag with the wreck’s year, make, and model scrawled in bright yellow paint—“1969 GTO,” “1972 Gran Torino,” “1974 Nova.” As a young boy, I was fascinated by the names of these cars. I loved to say them out loud, feel the sound of them rolling off my tongue as I wandered the dimly lit rows of the warehouse, dodging the forklift that always seemed to appear out of nowhere, bearing down on me like some evil robot in a science fiction tale.
The parts themselves I found to be eerie and disturbing. Maybe it was the way they hung from their hooks like executed criminals. Or the way each figured as an orphan of sorts, separated by some terrible and tragic accident from all that had made it whole. As with most children who grow up in large families, I had a fascination with orphans and would often imagine what it would be like to be orphaned myself. Sometimes I would dream that a flood or a tornado would come and tear me away from my sprawling family, casting me out into the larger world like the main character in the TV show Kung Fu. What would I do if that happened? Where would I go? How would I survive? The prospect was terrifying, yet alluring, too.
One afternoon a wreck arrived at the salvage yard that seemed to encapsulate this notion of tragic and thrilling orphanhood perfectly. I vividly recall the moment the flatbed truck hauling the car pulled up before the Front, the way all of the parts men and mechanics and body men poured out as one to see it. The car on the flatbed was a bright orange Porsche 911—or rather half a Porsche 911.1 The other half of the car had been chopped off (so Kenny the parts man claimed) when the “drunkass fool” who was driving it “flooded the engine on some railroad tracks north of Oklahoma City.” Ordinarily, a car hit in the front and dragged for miles by a freight train would be worthless, but as my brother David quickly explained, Porsche 911s had their engines in the rear, and so, miraculously, this particular car was still worth quite a lot (“a mint,” was how my brother put it), provided, of course, that a usable front end could be found for it.
1 My brother Alan claims the car was a Spyder 550. My father remembers it, vaguely, as a Triumph Spitfire. In my mind, however, the car will always be a Porsche 911.
For years after this, the wrecked Porsche sat under a tarp on the back lot of the salvage yard, a lonely import amid a sea of automobiles made in Detroit, while my father and everyone else who worked at the salvage yard listened to the radio for the words we so longed to hear: Boys, listen up, we just come into some front end parts for a Porsche 911 . . . Whenever I caught a glimpse of the orange car beneath its bright blue tarpaulin, my mind would begin to race, imagining all of the 911s out there in the world, each of them perfect in its own way, and yet at least one of them destined to be involved in some terrible accident, its front end cut away and shipped over vast distances to become one with our 911. When, in college, I was assigned to write a paper on the Thomas Hardy poem “The Convergence of the Twain,” with its famous lines describing the building of the Titanic and the simultaneous growth of the iceberg that would sink it (“Alien they seemed to be; / No mortal eye could see / The intimate welding of their later history”), I could not help but think of the orange Porsche and the terrible desire and disappointment that engulfed it.
“When do you think we’ll find it?” I would ask my father at least once a week.
“Find what?” he’d ask absently.
“The other half of the 911.”
“Who knows?” he’d answer, shrugging. “It’s an import. Parts for those don’t come along every day of the week.”
“Maybe someone else will get stalled on a railroad track,” I speculated. “Only this time, he’ll get almost the whole way across, and when the train comes, it will smack the car in the rear, not the front.”
“Maybe,” my father said. “I wouldn’t hold my breath, though.”
* * *
Stretching off a quarter of a mile behind the main buildings was the Yard proper with its row upon row of wrecked Buicks, Cadillacs, Chevys, Chryslers, Dodges, Fords, Olds-mobiles, Plymouths, Pontiacs, and so on, some of the cars stacked one atop the other like layers in a wedding cake, each of them guarded by roving bands of junkyard dogs, chiefly German shepherds and Doberman pinschers, with a few angry mutts thrown in for good measure. Often the hoods, trunks, and front or back doors of these cars stood open, creating a bizarre, stopped-in-time, Pompeii-like atmosphere. Everywhere was the evidence of Fate
