Just North of Nowhere (42 page)

“Uf-dah,” someone else would say, shaking his head and tooth stumps chewing his whiskers.

That covered it at the Sons.

Everyone remembered Pers Olafsohn, the old Swede who’d run the place most of the century (and died leaving an unpaid bar bill at the Sons of Norway). “Wasn’t
he
a grease jockey?!” everyone said of old Pers.

“That Swede!” they said at the Sons, shaking their heads. “Uf-dah!”

“Cripes, Pers Olafsohn’s Goddamn problem is he was dead, is what he was! I ain’t for Jesus Christ sake gonna die!” was what Einar said to all that.

Most figured it would just take time; Einar would bollix up and there’d be no more service in Bluffton, you mark those words! Almost a wish, see? Everyone knew Einar and everyone didn’t like him. He was a little funny. He twitched. He grumbled so you didn’t hear most of him. Every step – and being a sawed off runt, he took a lot of steps, little steps – so every step, he gave a hitch like his pants were going to drop from his ass. Every couple steps he sucked his nose like he was collecting a good hocker. Also, he shoved his head down and squinted out the side of his eye, like he was peering around a corner, never looking right at you. That’s right: “eye,” singular. He had two but mostly used them one at a time.

Those and other habits (adding 20 bucks to 40 bucks and coming up 80 bucks for a bills – that kind of habit) made folks think Einar was trying to pull one over. Word “weasel” comes to mind thinking about him, or “sunofabitch,” words like that.

“You gonna buy that no-name drip-gas that saw’d-off weasel’s selling?” they’d say. “I for one, ain’t! Sunofabitch is charging two nickels more a gallon than the WIGGLY out the way and they got good stuff... Well, I don’t know what kind! WIGGLY’s a big outfit; gotta be good, am I right? Damn right I am.”

People rolled into the
formerly Amoco
just to make the service bell ding. Einar would step out to see what was what. The customer would stare at the pump price, shake his head then yell he wasn’t buying Einar’s “cheap-ass gas at ten cents more than WIGGLY or Pik N Pek’s getting up the pike there! Cripes!” Then the customer would lay rubber driving off.

Einar didn’t give a crap. Pump a tank, top one off, gas was, whatchakallit, cake icing. Einar was there for service,
Einars Good Service,
like the sign said. Now, that is not as in “serve the customer” or “serve his fellow man,” that do-good crap. Content only when elbow-deep in crud, Einar just liked messing with gears, crankshafts, rods and struts.

See? He had the calling. Most folks didn’t know that. They knew he could fix shit – even if he did rob you for it, but, yeah, he fixed shit; a grease rag with an ass pocket attached, crap with a cap, stench on the hoof, that was Einar. He had a calling and he had an eye.

The service began at his eye. The eye just all to hell glowed seeing that organized sheen that slid down a turned metal shaft or the saw the many ways light slipped off a gas-washed gear and broke into a thousand pretty-colored wiggles. He went stupid in his bowels over the perfect miracle of a countersunk flat-head machine screw. By God, whenever he saw a surface patterned with them and buffed smooth, he just ran his fingertips over it all with something near the far side of happiness it was all so fucking beautiful!

So, what started at the eye, led elsewhere; the scent of things gone wrong, oil burning or not consumed enough, the little play in a bearing that led to clanks and garbles in the rear end. Where it ended was inside, where it filled him.

Where it ended was love. Love of how it all worked, how one thing moving just so, made all other things move in their turn, all polite, all of it happening a billion times over and over and all of it quicker than
THAT
.

Engines that didn’t work, would not work, just Goddamn stopped for no damn reason? He loved them more than dads love homely daughters, more than the Amish loved their shitting horses! He whispered busted engines, questioned them going in, got fair and filthy finding out. He poked, pushed, smacked and chewed over them; he shoved, wiggled, bit his tongue, profanely urging the sweet fit of clean, slicked shafts into greased bearings with new bushings. He ground cylinder heads in a state of ecstasy like unto the Hebrews of Old. He revived aged carbs, made them young with a gas bath and a tweak, flipping their butterfly’s springs till they sighed, sucked and blew like new.

Einar twitched less when he worked. He used both eyes tuning the dwell, or whatever was needed to made it all so fucking beautiful.

Service. That’s what Einar sold. So no one bought gas? So who cared?

But what did folks do when they had a flat, dead of winter, say, and didn’t feel like smashing their knuckles on frozen lug nuts? Or what when something funny was going on with the air-thing, top of the do-hickus on the whatchakallit, engine? What then? Or when the goddamn piece of crap just plain wouldn’t go, not turn over, even once, not make a sound, nothing! What did they do then?

Folks might get Bunch. He was okay.

Course, him living under Papoose Crick bridge, you couldn’t call him when you needed. You plain couldn’t! And even if, there you were, standing in the street, snow piling up on your ears and you scratching your head, the vehicle right in front of you, and here comes Bunch, hoofing along Commonwealth to the
Wagon Wheel
looking for a beer-job and you ask him nice, right there, if he’d have a look at the damn thing sitting at the curb; and even if Bunch said, “Yeah, sure,” you couldn’t count on him getting to it for, well, till he got to it.

So, what did folks do, automotive care being crucial in a cold small town like Bluffton, far from anywhere? Folks bit down and called Einar, is what. Charge an arm and most of your legs, but he’d come get it and make it work. And in a couple years, damn if it didn’t look like he was going to make a go.

Now who was the son of a bitch?

He was from Bluffton. No one remembered baby Einar, Einar the tyke, Einar, coming-of-age. The guy had been around sidewise to things. He went to school a little. Didn’t make a dent. Read a book?
Robinson Crusoe
, that was it. He was one of those guys who was born, had some troubles, went to the army and should have vanished.

Instead, Einar came back and there he was: an institution.

He had no folks. Once, but they were out of the way by the time he became a person.

His old man, Lewis, drove the stock auction truck before Andre Trois-Coeur LeMais took the job and held onto it forever. What happened was one day on the Interstate one of the steer Lewis was driving got the willies. Must have figured how the ride was going to end and said,
what the hell?
and reared up. The fuss probably put the smell of crazy to the other dumb animals which no doubt inspired the smart one to increased effort.

Even with ten or twelve hoofed-ton of terrified meat rampaging in back, the rig running twitchy with it, Einar’s pop didn’t notice. He still didn’t notice when the steer tore through the front slats of the trailer leaving himself hanging half-in, half-out, bellowing and pawing the air over the driver’s cab. It was only when other drivers – dads, moms and kids scooting by on the Interstate – started blowing horns and pointing that Clueless Lewis pulled over.

At which point everyone took a breather – the Steers and Lewis. Lewis figured he’d give it one half minute by his ticking watch then figure what he ought do. Lewis was not the brightest lamp under that bushel.

Twenty-seven seconds into Lewis’s half minute, the hanging steer battered two hoofs through the roof of the cab. One collapsed Lewis’s head, the second shoved Lewis’s hat into his brain. Lewis never woke up.

Einar was 4, maybe 5, at the time so he didn’t much care.

He still had his old lady. She died gracefully when Einar was 8, maybe 9. One of those things: heart, brain or some other female thing. She did go behind the wheel, attempting to park on Commonwealth – a one-way street back then. She must have been lousy at left side parallel parking because there she was, stuck, half-in, half-out, traffic going by, drivers wondering, “She pulling
out
or going
in
?” Aggravation must have hit her hard because she passed-on like/THAT.

Dead, she drifted back and nudged the Ford parked behind them. This was before diagonal parking on Commonwealth – which, in retrospect, might have saved her life and changed things for Einar.

Einar was riding shotgun, no idea the old lady had passed. When folks peered in to see what the hell, he was still looking back and forth, “Come on, ma, cripes, cut her harder, go on forward, you got room...”

After that he went to the County Home.

Couple years and he escaped.

Not that he was locked in and had to make a run for it, he just never came back from school one day.

The County people wondered for a bit, looked some, then stopped, figured the kid wasn’t going anywhere and who’d steal a homely runt like him, an orphan and not worth a damn, anyway? He’d come back when he finished whatever he was doing.

He didn’t go far, but he didn’t go back.

A few days of not being anywhere and he showed up in Bluffton. He walked around, slept in the gazebo at Elysium Park near the hydroelectric dam. Nobody paid heed. The weather was warm.

He tried fishing but had no head for it so he ate, stealing day-old and out-of-date mystery cans from the grocery. He didn’t have much head for theft either, but if anyone noticed they were polite enough to not say anything and, of course, Egil and Astrid Dorbler were running the Wurst Haus then and Karl Dorbler wasn’t. Karl would have noticed, Karl would have said.

One rainy day Einar found himself out by the Kiddorf Banks, past that damned closed-for-the-season Drive-In joint. No reason to be at that smelly bend of the river, no reason at all, just old devil fate, but there she was: crummy, battered, and busted: a ‘51 Kaiser Golden Dragon. Hadn’t been there day before, today she was. Some pissed off motorist ditched it, maybe. Joy-riding kids from the school Einar should have been in stole it, maybe, skidded off the road and ran when it stuck in the muck of the Banks. Maybe the old car belonged way upstream in the Driftless. Maybe a washout had carried her off. Night before had been a doozy, a summer’s-end storm that comes a sudden bang and flash down off the bluffs. That old Kaiser could, maybe, have washed off a bank and floated, who knew, from up the way, ridden over the dam, drifted right past him, sleeping in the gazebo at Elysium, through town, bobbing invisible in the roaring water and pouring night and, now, here she was, she couldn’t make the turn and washed onto the bend in the banks, got sucked into the muck, here, right in front of him.

A wild notion and whimsical! Even at 14, maybe 13, Einar was not given to that kind of crap! Suddenly, though, here he was, thinking whimsy crap like that.

That old Dragon might have been automotively dead but she was a corker under the muck, all chrome, curves and cuts, her sunscreen overhanging her two-lobed windshield.

And there he was, chilly and homeless, a rat in the wet.

Her high roomy interior beckoned.

Took some getting, getting in and Einar groused in the getting. She wasn’t locked, just settled to her chrome and enamel splashboard. He tried digging for about thirty seconds then said shit and took a rock and whacked out a side vent.

That whack! Felt like he had caved in his own skull! Figured he was going to die. Absolutely. That was it! His head had busted open, brains were oozing out, his eyeballs were going to roll away and his tongue would just dry up on the ground. That lasted a second or two then it passed. He reached in, rolled down the window and crawled inside, scrawny weasel that he was. Had a headache like he’d never felt, but once he settled and stuffed some rags where the vent had been, rolled the window back up and once he snugged down and went stupid listening to the water running nearby and the night coming on in sounds like it did by the banks, damn if he didn’t warm up and settle in pretty fast.

She was a tight old car and the headache was gone with next daylight.

Then nothing happened. Weeks of it. Nobody came for Einar. Nobody claimed the junker. Einar figured she was his. His home.

The son of a bitch had no idea, not about life, the world, people, work, nothing. He also knew squat about vehicular repair at that time and, what’s more, didn’t even care. That came later.

After a couple months of settling-in he figured to make the old place better.

He brushed it out, washed it down; dug out the muck around the front passenger side door so she’d open proper.

Nights were good. Days running, figuring, wheedling, stealing, they were shit. But nights, he came home. He snugged himself into the front seat, wrapped up to nibble whatever grub he’d found, wheedled, or stolen and, by God, he was welcomed. When the sun was gone it wasn’t pure black like it had been back at the County. Night in the Dragon was a smear of stars through safety glass. He watched the cold things turn overhead; he could almost hear the sky grind its gears as it rolled over him. Sometimes the moon rippled past and licked his eyes. Owl shadows swept a soft whoof of feathered air. The stink of the Banks filled the car along with rubble-bubble of the river’s passing and the crackling of the critters in the weeds around and trees above. That all filled the Dragon. After a while, all that was home to Einar.

By the time the Kaiser started singing, he’d begun to gauge the world, learning by nose and heart how high and far away the river was, how to read night like a clock, scent next day’s heat or cold in the river’s breath or in the wind off the bluffs. When she sang, then, the Dragon used the river, the critters and the stars, the wind and heat as her voice. She sang words, now. Not like folks saying “cripes sake, you ain’t buyin’ nothin’! Scram, why don’t ya!” He’d wake middle of the night needing a piss, say. Just as he was hanging hog out the door, ready to let fly, the Dragon would start in. He’d hear her inside him.