Posted by nigel1 on June 18, 2002 at 12:50:54:
Mo stepped out of the barn into brilliant, blinding sunlight-- he couldn't see a thing! How much worse could it get? He felt like he was going to faint. He leaned against a fence rail and waited for the moment to pass. When the red spots drifted away and his head felt clearer he mopped his face with the big red bandana handkerchief he always carried in his right back pocket. The fields were in goddamn terrible shape. It was just too hot and too dry, week after week. It was the worst summer he could remember. The old chevy pickup needed a valve job at the very least, and new main bearings wouldn't hurt. The Ford sedan needed brakes. The tractor leaked oil onto the clutch, somehow, so it wouldn't pull worth a damn. Probably the rear main seal was out on it, or worse. As usual, bad luck clumped together and hit him at once. His daughter needed clothes for high school in the fall, and you couldn't please her. Everything she wanted cost so damned much! She wanted a car, too, but that was out of the question. He said to her once, losing it in a way he regreted, throwing his fork across the kitchen table, "Damn it, Chrissie, I got to work my butt off for the meat on your plate. You got every damn thing you need. You want a car, you want this, you want that, getting so damned high and mighty-- go get a job if you want that stuff!" And he meant it too. Her older brother Buzz joined the marines a few months earlier, and Mo was only sorry he didn't have two sons, instead of just one boy and a girl who thought she was the Queen of Siam or something. He let her have the Ford, though, because if she was going to get a summer job, she had to have something to drive. Within a week she wore out the brakes. And he could barely afford to carry her on his insurance! "Drive CAREFUL!" he pleaded. And her mother explained to her how short of cash they were going to be that year, and how terrible it would be if she tore up the car, or wrecked it, God forbid. Jody worried a lot anyway. "You never should have given her that beat-up car to drive," she accused. "Chrissie's not mature enough. It's not safe." On that occasion he'd taken another pull at his beer and said "I paid for that driver training. She's got her license. She needs a car if she's going to work, and I can't afford to buy her one." He considered a moment, looking cooly at his wife. "Period," he said.
"Well, shit," he muttered to himself. "Maybe I'm a hard man. Maybe I turned into a hard man." Not a damn thing he could do about it. And there wasn't anything he could do that day, with the farm he inherited from his Daddy, unless he could make it rain. He'd run his well long enough to fill the stock tank, so his few head of cattle wouldn't die of thirst. He was afraid to try any serious work, or he might keel over from heat stroke. He turned back to the pickup. He seemed to be getting a bad sun burn on his left arm, probably from hanging it out the car window all the time. It itched. Just as he pulled the igloo cooler out of the bed, he noticed the front end seemed to be sitting kind of low on the passenger side. Walking around, feeling his heart sinking, he was just in time to see the right front wheel rim settle slowly into the dust. The front suspension cracked and creaked as it settled. "God-DAMN!" He couldn't believe it. He slapped his damp forehead, letting his straw hat tumble backward. WHAM! His infuriated kick dented the fender, and the vibration was just enough to knock the precariously balanced igloo cooler off the edge of the tailgate. It splashed noisily when it hit. Its cheerily red-colored plastic lid rolled under the truck and emerged by Mo's foot, rimmed with mud. He'd really been thirsty, too. What made it bad, was that he'd driven two miles, almost, to his well near the stock tank, with no spare. Actually, he drove on the spare, and it was the spare that had gone flat. It looked like a good tire, too. It had even more tread on it than the tire that had gone flat the day before, that he hadn't gotten around to fixing. He hunkered down to collect the cooler lid, getting a slight dizzy feeling, and paused by the flat to inspect it. After a few minutes, he found it-- what looked to be the head of a big wood screw embedded in the rubber, right at the top of the tire. How the fuck could that happen? Screwed! Screwed! How could a wood screw stand up on end, in a dirt road, so that he could hit it at the exact angle with his tire and drive it inside? And even then, why would he have to hit it, unlikely as that alone was, with THAT particular tire? Because all of his other tires had inner tubes. The spare, however, was tubeless. Once flat, it could not be reinflated with the little Coleman pump he always carried. He could have plugged the thing in his cigarette lighter, run the hose out the door and in a few minutes he'd have enough air in it to be able to hightail it home before it got flat again. But no. He could see already that it would not be like that. The battery would go dead. Or it would BE dead. He could see it. Something hated him. "Pile it on, you bastard," was all he could say. And speaking of cigarettes, he could sure use one. Except Jody made him quit cold turkey because of the "bad influence" on Chrissie.