Rubber Legs and White Tail-Hairs, page 13
At last the tube was patched, reinserted in the tire, and inflated with a hand pump. Inflating a tire by hand pump, I learned from my father, is made easier by chanting a mantra as you pump: “Hennnn—UFF! Henn-nn-nn-UFF! Hennn-nn-nn-nn-n-n-n-UFF!” It works!
Two hours after the intrusion of the flat into our Sunday drive, we were back in the car heading home, Dad slumped behind the wheel in dense silence.
“There, there,” Mom said consolingly, “that wasn’t so bad, was it? Still, if we’d had a spare and a jack …”
“Women!” Dad barked, his tone speaking volumes in explanation. I knew then once and for all that women are responsible for flat tires.
Even to this day I am alert to any suspicious movements in the vicinity of my tires by my wife and daughters. Still, they manage to sneak by me from time to time and cause a flat. I guess they can’t help themselves, and I try not to hold it against them.
“Hey,” Milt called, rudely awakening me from a peaceful slumber. “Guess what caused the flat. A nail! How do you suppose a nail got in that tire?”
“Your wife put it there,” I said.
“Wife? I’m not even married.”
“Oh, that’s right. It must have been your mother, then. Or your sister. If not her, possibly a neighbor lady. Women are responsible for all flat tires.”
“But why?”
“Nobody knows, Milt, but they are.”
I paused and shook my head for proper effect, just as my father had shown me so many decades ago, and then barked:
“Women!”
The Fine Art of Delay
Young Wally Whipple showed up at my house the other morning a whole hour late for the start of our hunting trip. The first thing he did was offer excuses.
“I’m sorry to be so late,” he said, “but Retch wasn’t ready when I got to his house.” Here he jerked a thumb over his shoulder to indicate Retch Sweeney, who was grinning broadly and shaking his head in disbelief. “Retch wasn’t even out of bed yet. Then, while he was making his lunch, he asked me if I would change a flat tire on his wife’s car so we could get started sooner. After I got the tire changed, he still had to oil his boots and put new laces in them. So he asked me to pick up after the dogs that had knocked over his garbage can. Next he had to look for his sleeping bag, while I changed the bulb in his porch light. Geez, if I hadn’t given him a hand, we wouldn’t have got started on the hunt until noon. Now I see you ain’t ready either.”
“I suppose you are referring to the fact that I’m still in my nightgown,” I replied. “It just happens you guys were so late I thought you weren’t coming, and I decided to go back to bed.”
“You wear a nightgown?” Retch said, a note of suspicion in his tone.
“Of course,” I replied. “Doesn’t everyone?”
During the course of Wally’s long harangue, I had scarcely been able to suppress a chuckle of appreciation at Retch’s skilled performance. The man was a master of delay. I happened to know that Ernestine Sweeney’s tire had been flat for three days, the garbage can had been the sport of dogs nearly a week earlier, and the porch light had been out for a year. Not bad, not bad at all. A delay of that quality and magnitude would be tough to top.
“I’ll be ready in a jiff,” I said. “Why don’t you fellows sit down and have a cup of coffee while I get dressed? Oh, I nearly forgot!”
At this, Retch turned and headed for the door, mumbling that he didn’t want any coffee and would wait in the car. As a master of delay, he can recognize one coming from a mile off.
“Hold it,” I said. “We want to get this hunt under way as soon as possible, right?” Retch stopped, his shoulders sagging in surrender. “As I was saying, I nearly forgot that my wife asked me to perform an organ transplant for her before I left.”
“Good grief!” Wally said.
“Yeah,” I said. “The organ is in the basement rec room and she wants it transplanted up to the living room.” I thought the joke pretty good, but it didn’t get so much as a smile. “Just so we can get started a little sooner on the hunt, why don’t you boys transplant the organ while I get dressed?”
As soon as they had disappeared into the basement, I whisked the nightgown off from over my hunting togs and started putting on my boots. A nightgown, for Pete’s sake! I limited myself to a couple of brief chuckles as I listened to them grunting out what sounded like an off-color Gregorian chant as they hauled the organ up the stairs. An organ transplant beats a flat tire, a spilled garbage can, and a blown-out light bulb any day of the week. And Retch knew it, too, even if Wally didn’t.
There are many reasons for hunting and fishing delays, other than getting help with a few chores around the house. Take, for example, my goose-hunting trip with two burly friends I’ll call Keith and Gary.
I had been all but paralyzed by cold for the past hour, a particularly grim circumstance, since we were still in the car on our way out to the goose pits. Soon I would be crouched in one of the muddy pits, with icy rain rattling down on me like machine-gun fire. All I could think about was curling up under a nice warm electric blanket and dreaming that I had never heard of goose hunting. I needed to come up with a delay, one that would last until the rain at least eased up to a downpour.
“I love mornings like this,” Keith said, throwing out his chest and beating on it with his fists. “It makes a man feel alive!”
“Yeah,” Gary said. “It’s invigorating. Grows hair on your chest. Some guys, all they could think about on a morning like this would be curling up under a nice warm electric blanket, the lily-livered sissies.”
“Pardon?” I said. “You say something to me?”
“No, I was talking about lily-livered sissies.”
“Oh,” I said. “Hey, we’re nearly to Greasy Gert’s Gas & Grub Truck Stop. Let’s whip in there for a quick cup of coffee before hitting the ol’ goose pits. Just take a couple of minutes. We can warm up a bit and give the hair follicles on our chest a rest. What say, guys?”
“I guess we got time for a quick cup,” Keith said. “But just one, no refills.”
It is important to note here the skill with which I eased my companions into the first stage of a delay. Both Gary and Keith are experts at delay themselves, and had neatly parried my utility delay back at my house, where I had tried a thrust at getting them to put the snow tires on my truck. Once on the road, however, they quickly relaxed their vigilance, and I was able to take advantage of the element of surprise.
As soon as we were seated in the restaurant, Gert herself came over to take our orders. “What’ll ya have, fellas?”
“Three coffees, Gert,” Gary said.
“And an order of French toast,” I blurted out.
“We don’t have time for French toast!” Keith snarled.
“French toast takes hardly any time at all,” I said. “Besides, on an empty stomach I can’t get the full enjoyment out of freezing off assorted parts of my anatomy in a flooded goose pit.”
Twenty minutes and three coffee refills later, Gert returned with my French toast. I glanced out the window. Icy rain still pounded down.
“What’s this white stuff on my French toast?” I asked Gert.
“Powdered sugar,” she snapped. “What’d ya think?”
“I can’t eat French toast with powdered sugar on it,” I said. “Cook me up a new batch, plain.”
“We don’t have time!” Gary screamed. He reached across the table, grabbed my slices of French toast, and wiped them across his pants leg. “There. Now your French toast doesn’t have any powdered sugar on it. Eat!”
“Those pants clean? Okay, okay, put down the knife! I’ll eat, I’ll eat. Uh, say, Gert, you forgot my bacon.”
“YOU DIDN’T ORDER BACON!”
“Did so!”
“Did not!”
I looked outside. The rain had stopped. Shafts of sunlight were breaking through the clouds. “Are we going to sit here and argue all morning, or are we going to hunt?” I said. “Let’s go. Sometimes I think you guys would do anything to stay out of a goose pit for a few extra minutes.”
Among the delaying tactics I’ve had pulled on me, the “roadside historical attraction” is the one I hate most, possibly because it is favored by my neighbor, Al Finley. We’ll drive by a sign announcing HISTORICAL SITE ONE MILE.
“Historical site one mile,” Finley says.
“I can read,” I say. “But we’re not stopping. Otherwise, we’ll miss the peak feeding time.”
“We’re not talking fish here, we’re talking history. Abe Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson …”
Knowing he’ll give me no peace and probably even accuse me of being unpatriotic, I swerve into the turnout, where a rustic board sign hangs by chains from two posts. The printing on the sign tells us that at this very spot 150 years ago, the first white man to enter the region probably camped for the night, although it may have been a spot eighteen miles away, but it was easier to dig the postholes for the sign here.
“Isn’t that interesting?” Finley says. “You can almost see him camped here, old Fletcher Malone. Hostile Indians finally did him in.”
“Small wonder,” I say. “I’ve never laid eyes on the man, and he’s already made me hostile.”
I have known many masters of the hunting and fishing delay, but none greater than Mr. Cranston, a tall, bald man who lived down the road from our place when Retch Sweeney and I were youngsters. Retch and I would be riding our bikes past his place and Mr. Cranston would call out, “Hey, you boys want to go fishing with me tomorrow? Be here at five in the morning sharp.”
Retch and I would be at his place at five sharp. Mr. Cranston would stick his head out of his garage. “Be with you in a minute, boys. I’ve got to do a little work on my outboard motor’s carburetor. Say, while you’re waiting, would you mind pulling those nails out of the pile of boards by the barn? We can get away a little faster that way.”
Mr. Cranston always had huge piles of old boards around his barn. Why the nails needed to be pulled out of them at this very moment, before we could go fishing, remained something of a mystery to us, but we never questioned him about it. About ten o’clock, Mr. Cranston would finish his carburetor work and relieve us of our five hours of free labor to go fishing with him.
We went fishing with Mr. Cranston several dozen times, but never once that he didn’t first have to spend four or five hours tinkering with his carburetor.
“I sure wish Mr. Cranston would get a new motor,” Retch would say, pulling his ten-thousandth rusty nail and tossing it into a coffee can. “Or at least a new carburetor.”
“Me too,” I would say. “He probably doesn’t realize how much time he wastes fooling with that old thing.”
After several years of pulling nails for Mr. Cranston, we finally caught on and found someone else with a boat to take us fishing. Mr. Cranston didn’t seem to mind. Every so often, we would go by his place and see a couple of little boys out by his barn, enthusiastically pulling nails.
“What you guys doin’?” Retch would yell.
“Goin’ fishin’ with Mr. Cranston,” one of them would yell back. “What does it look like?”
As I watched Retch and Wally stagger into the living room to complete the organ transplant, I thought once again of Mr. Cranston and what a fine old gentleman he had been, taking the time to teach Retch and me so much about fishing and, of course, the fine art of delay.
Gun-Trading
As my friends will be quick to tell you, I am normally this easygoing guy, practically brimming over with goodwill and love of humanity. It’s only when I trade guns that I turn into a shrewd, hardhearteo sharpie. Take last week, for example.
Gary Roedl called me up. “You want to go to the gun show tomorrow?” he asked. “Maybe we can trade a few guns.”
“Sure,” I said. “Sounds like fun.”
I’m learning gun-trading from Roedl. Fifteen years ago he started out trading with a rusty single-shot .22 and has turned it into 47,000 guns. Roedl is shrewd.
The next morning when he picked me up in his truck, I was carrying my .48-caliber bolt-action, silver-inlaid, custom-checkered Thumlicker rifle with the digital readout sights.
“You going to sell your Thumlicker?” Roedl asked.
“Nope,” I said. “This is my trading stock.”
“Wow,” Roedl said. “You’re starting out in a big way.’
“Right,” I said.
“But you’ve got to be shrewd,” Roedl said. “Let me see your shrewd look.”
I gave him my shrewd look. Roedl shook his head.
“You’ve got to practice more,” he said. “You still don’t have the eyes right. Your squint is too tight. Well, forget that for now. Let me see your dumb look.”
I gave him my dumb look. Roedl complimented me on it. He said it was so natural he would almost guess that I had been born with a dumb look, which pleased me. To trade guns successfully, you have to be able to do a good dumb look. Nobody wants to trade guns with somebody who looks smart.
Next, I did my yawn for Roedl, and he said that was pretty good, too. The yawn is one of the best weapons in the gun trader’s arsenal. It works like this. You see a trader who is offering a deal so absolutely fantastic you want to leap in the air, click your heels, and give a rebel yell. Instead, you study the offered item with your look of casual disinterest—have I mentioned the look of casual disinterest? —and then you do your yawn. It should be a wide, slow, gaping yawn, the kind of yawn that implies that the deal being offered is so ordinary and boring that it’s practically putting you to sleep on your feet.
Master gun traders like Roedl can even talk while yawning: “Hoooh-ah-you-ahh-hum-ever notice—yaaawph—that the barrel—ho—hummmm—on your gun there—unnnnh—ahhh—is badly warped—hummmm?”
I tried the talking-yawn once but it didn’t come off the way I expected. A 300-pound gun trader snatched me off my feet, wrapped his arms around me, and began performing the Heimlich maneuver, almost crushing my ribs in the process. He stopped when a piece of meat shot eight inches out of my mouth, not realizing it was my tongue.
“What are you using for trading stock?” I asked Roedl.
“Four empty .30-30 shell casings and a brass belt buckle,” he said. “I’m not in the mood to do any heavy trading today.” He yawned.
The gun show was at the fairgrounds. We bought our tickets, got our hands stamped, and went into one of the buildings housing the show. A hundred or so tables had been covered with blankets. Artistically arranged on the blankets was every kind of gun I’d ever heard or read about. Tiny derringers rested in the shade of antitank guns. There were rifles, shotguns, revolvers, automatics, knives, hatchets, bows, arrows, shells, bullets, cartridges, shot … In short, just about every conceivable thing even slightly related to weaponry covered every flat surface as far as the eye could see. Actually, the eye couldn’t see that far, because pressed shoulder-to-shoulder between the tables were hundreds of prospective gun traders, their trading stock in hand, all looking for that once-in-forever bargain. I jumped right in.
I stopped at a table where the trader, a grizzled old chap in a battered cowboy hat, had spread out his collection of fine old muzzle-loaders. He looked dumb.
“Is that an authentic Hawken rifle there?” I asked.
“Duh, I don’t know fer sure. One gun looks about like another to me. All I knows is my great, great, great-grandpap owned it. I found it up in the attic. Think it’s worth anything?”
The man obviously was so deficient I almost hated to take advantage of him. I yawned and stared off with my disinterested look. “Well, shucks, I don’t know. I suppose I could take a chance on it.” Then I put on my dumb look to set him up for the coup de grace. “I reckon I could trade you my Thumlicker here for it.”
The trader yawned so long I thought he had forgotten I was standing there. “Oh, all right,” he said. “I guess I could let you have this here gun, which might be an authentic Hawken for all I know, if you was to throw in a twenty-dollar bill with the Thumlicker.”
Well, I could scarcely pull out my wallet and get the twenty-dollar bill, my hands were so slippery from the sweat on them. All the time I was afraid the trader would catch on to me and back out of the deal, but he didn’t. He just sat there looking dumb and happy, without the slightest notion he was getting taken.
Shortly thereafter I made another fine swap, the Hawken for a knife once owned by Jim Bowie, with only one of the blades broken, and a nice little single-shot .22 rifle and a fine pump shot gun that some maniac had painted red, white, and blue. I calculated that a little paint remover would make it good as new, which is what I told the man I traded it to. By the end of the day, I’d made so many trades my jaws ached from yawning. But I felt exuberant and triumphant, and not a little shrewd. Gun-trading gets in a man’s blood.
When I met Roedl back at his truck late in the afternoon, he seemed a little depressed.
“How’d you do?” I asked him.
“Not too well,” he said. “I ended up with only three rifles, two shotguns, and a revolver. The stock on one of the shotguns has a small scratch on it, though. How’d you do?”
“Great!” I said. “I traded up from the Thumlicker to four empty .30-30 shell casings and a brass belt buckle!”
“Hey, all right!” Roedl said. “That’s a whole lot better than you did last time. You’re starting to get the hang of gun-trading.”
“No kidding? You really think so?”
“Sure,” Roedl said. “No doubt about it.”
Then he stared off at the horizon and yawned. Small wonder. Gun-trading can wear a person out.
Throwing Stuff
As far back as I can remember, I’ve had a compulsion to project objects through the air in the direction of a target of some sort. This compulsion peaked at about age eight and has been in slow decline ever since, although I still cannot pass up a good throwing rock.
