Scrap

            We were already in the next little town, north up toward Chillicothe, and all we had for our trouble was a puke green refrigerator from back in the ‘70s somebody’d managed to drag out to the curb. And I’d just wrestled a shopping cart out of the dumpster behind a Dollar General, one of the old wire ones, from back before they went to that yellow plastic. This one looked like maybe an old lady pinned it up against a light post with her Buick. After I threw it in the bed of my pickup and pulled out of the parking lot, I slowed down to look at a standing dead oak sticking up high above the tree line behind a tumble-down house. It was filled with more buzzards than I’d ever seen in one place, maybe twenty or more, all perched with their black wings spread wide, catching the early morning sun.

            I pointed and said, “Look at the big birdies.”

            But Ruby Lynn heard him before I did, pointing with her sippy-cup and flipping her legs against the booster seat strapped down next to me. A short, heavy guy was struggling through the overgrown front yard of that tumble-down house, waving at me yelling, “Hey, Junk Man! Hey, Junk Man!” The legs of his sagging dungarees where wet from dew-damp grass gone to seed.

Ruby Lynn’s my granddaughter, and her mom’s in a rehab over in Cincinnati—at least she still was last Saturday when we went to visit. Every morning before she goes off to work at Wally World, Betty clips two plastic red ribbons in Ruby Lynn’s blond hair, and it makes her look just like the little girl in that old Christmas TV show about the Grinch. We bought the booster seat after her mom sold the first one for drugs, and it’s got two cup holders and nicer armrests than my truck.

            I made a U-turn and pulled into the gravel drive, next to an old Suburban. This side of the house was covered up with split firewood, and all the pieces along the bottom had little shelves of fungus. We watched him puffing up to the truck, and Ruby Lynn turned her left hand palm up, with its thick pink pad of scar tissue, and said, “Who dat?” Like I might know the guy, or she still thinks I know everybody in the world, because she just don’t know how big the world is yet, not even our little shitty corner of it.

            The short guy was sucking air. He held up one finger and bent over to catch his breath. When he stood back up, he leaned on the door and said, “You want some scrap? I got yer scrap. Hell, I got all the damn scrap you want.” He had a high, fast twang, probably Tennessee or north Alabama, and “want” sounded like “won’t.” Then he smiled and waved his stubby fingers at Ruby Lynn and said, “Hey, there, Sweetheart! I bet yer name’s Cindy, ‘cause damn if you don’t look just like Cindy Lou Who!”

            She gave him a shy smile and he said, “What’re you drankin’ there, Mountain Dew?” It was kiwi and apple juice that Betty makes fresh for her every morning, but I didn’t say so. He laughed and said, “I was weaned on it myself, and I be-lieve it stunted my growth.”

            He reached in to shake my hand and said, “Ronnie.”

            I shook and said, “Everybody calls me Cash, but not ‘cause I got any.”

            He laughed, “This here’s my Aunt Jo’s place. My mom’s sister. She’s living with her south of Knoxville now. It’s a tear down. The meth heads’ve already stripped out all the copper line and Romex.”

            I nodded and said, “Copper is king.”

            And he said, “Yeah, who’d’ve ever figured a penny’d be worth more than a penny. But they pooped out ‘fore they could drag that woodstove halfway across the living room. Too dumb to pull the fire bricks out first.” Then he pointed to a rotted out-building leaning like a drunk, “But that there’s full of shit.”

            It had barn doors and might have been a one-car garage or just a big shed.

            He said, “They’s a mower, a stack of old brake rotors and some drums, just all kinds of crap. And the t’other two wheels like them chained to that tree.”

            He pointed to a sugar maple, and there, snuggled down in the high grass, the redline tires flat and dry-rotted, were two original Cragar S/S Super Sport wheels from back in the ‘60s. And even if they were bent all to hell, each one was 20 pounds of aluminum centers and steel rims, easy.

            He eyeballed the wheels, and said, “Iffen you got a bolt-cutter, them’s is yers too.”

            I said, “I got a bolt-cutter.” It was cheap Chinese junk from Harbor Freight, and while it wasn’t good for much, I figured it might be up to some rusted chain. Hell, for two more Cragars, I’d chew the tree down myself.

            Ronnie slapped the hood of my truck and said, “Cash, you back this bad boy up to the front porch and we’ll wrastle that pig of a woodstove right in. Then I’ll leave you to it. I still got to get me to the bank and the real-tor ‘fore I hit the road.”

            He headed back to the house through the high grass, then stopped to consider the tree full of buzzards. He turned back and yelled, “Just keep moving and don’t stay still too long.” He jerked his squat body back and forth, laughed a high, thin laugh, and kept walking.

            After I backed up through the yard to the edge of the porch, I gave Ruby Lynn her goldfish-shaped yellow box full of goldfish crackers. Betty gets them 2 pounds at a time at work, in a big box like a milk carton, just with no missing children on the side, and I fill it up before we leave in the mornings.

            I rubbed her head and said, “I’ll be just inside that door,” but she was already eating her goldfish, hooking them, like she always does, by the tail with her thumb and forefinger.

            Ronnie was on his knees in the dim living room, reaching into a woodstove and tossing soot-stained fire bricks out onto the floor behind him. There were rough slots hammered in the sheetrock, and when he saw me looking at them, he said, “Now, that there is your fine craftsmanship! But I guess you can’t steal plumbing and wire without punching you a few holes.”

            He was right about that woodstove, but after we wrestled it over the door jamb, it slid across the slick planks of the mildewed porch like buttered glass. Before we flipped it on its back into the truck, I yelled to Ruby Lynn, “It’s going to be loud!”

            It was. The truck creaked on its springs and the stove coughed a fine cloud of sparkling creosote.

            Ruby Lynn yelled, “Wheee!”

            And Ronnie yelled, “Wheee!” He watched the buzzards settle back down while he dusted off his hands and said, “Them old boys ain’t leaving for nothin’!”

            I said, “I need a key for that shed?”

            He said, “Hit ain’t locked, just stuck good. Hold on.” He went back in the house and came out with an armload of homemade pickles in Ball jars. He said, “Aunt Joe, now, she makes a mean pickle. And I ain’t never met the pickle I didn’t like. Put ‘em up in yer cab so they don’t get broke. “

            He made faces at Ruby Lynn while I lined the dusty jars up along the passenger side of the bench seat, then he patted her on the head and said, “Cindy Lou, you share some with ole Cash now.”

            And then he was gone.

            I backed up to the shed, and before I got out to start loading, I popped in a cassette for her. It was “Camelot,” one of Betty’s collection of original cast recordings of Broadway shows. Me, I’d just as soon somebody shit in my ear, but Ruby Lynn loves it, even the part when the crowd is yelling to burn the queen. She’d be asleep before then anyway. I reached behind the seat for my bolt-cutters so I didn’t have to ratchet her booster down again.

            I propped open the shed doors, and just grabbed the first thing to hand, which was the mower. In my line of work, it doesn’t much pay to stand around and think about it—just start at the front and work your way back, or start at the top and work your way down. I threw the gas cap and the oil dipstick back in the shed, then I flipped it upside down to bleed out on the gravel because the scrap yard is picky about that. I loaded the old rotors and brake drums, the two rusting engine heads and a bedframe while Ruby Lynn sang along with something I couldn’t make out.

            I grabbed six coffee cans of nails, some threaded gas pipe, a big galvanized tub, three axe heads and a 12 lb. sledge hammer with a broken handle. There was two splitting wedges, and one of those gold ones they call a “wood grenade” that hadn’t seen much use. And, behind a piece of damp and flaking strand board, were the other two Cragars. Even curtained with old spider webs, sagging under years of sawdust and grease, they were 5-spoked things of beauty. I loaded the first one in the truck, and when I was grunting back out with the second, I saw the clothes iron up on a shelf above the doors. I clipped the cord and threw it in the bed of the truck, and I wondered what Ruby Lynn’s mom was doing with that other clothes iron, what she was doing with that iron the day she left it on and nodded off, the day Ruby Lynn got a hold of it, and we had to drive clear to Cincinnati, to the Shriner’s Hospital, just to find out there wasn’t a shit thing to do. I don’t know what she was doing, but it sure as hell wasn’t laundry.

            I checked on Ruby Lynn and she was fast asleep, so I walked back through the grass, letting my arm swing with the weight of the bolt-cutter, and looked up at the dead tree full of buzzards behind the sugar maple. One turned its bald black head to watch me, then looked away.

The chain and lock were both thicker than I thought, and I followed the links down, looking for the low point where the rust had done its work. I was grunting against that cheap bolt-cutter when somebody behind me said, “That must be some Harbor Freight junk.”

            I looked up at him and said, “It is. Where’d you come from?”

            He was a young guy, and big, wearing army pants and a three-button blue golf shirt tight as Saran Wrap. There was a flaming baseball tattoo on one arm, just peeking out from under the cuff of his short sleeve.

            He shifted a plug of tobacco from one cheek to the other and said, “You stealing those wheels?”

            I stood up and got a better grip on one handle, “Who are you, the fucking junk police?”

            He smiled and said, “County Deputy. Off duty.” He turned his hips and lifted his shirt to show me the pistol tucked in the small of his back, “Or I’d be packing my nine.”

            I looked at him close, trying to imagine him in uniform with his Smokey-the-Bear hat on, wondering if he’d ever been by the house, pounding on the door in the wee hours, looking for Ruby Lynn’s mom. Probably. There couldn’t be that many deputies.

            I said, “That guy told me I could take all this stuff.”

            And he said, “What guy?”

            And I said, “Ronnie. Short little fast-talker from Tennessee.”

            He smiled to himself, “Yeah, I know Ronnie. Jimmy’s cousin. If it’s alright with him, I got nothing to say.” He pointed a thick finger at the wheels and said, “Let me try.”

            He clipped the chain like a loose thread and carried those two Cragars to the truck like they were nothing.

            I said, “Just set them down and I’ll load ‘em up. My grandbaby’s sleeping.” But he eased them into the bed like they were flowers on his mother’s grave. He pointed to an engine head and said, “Those are off Jimmy’s old Pontiac too. Hell, it was 20 years old when we were born. Damn if we didn’t tear it up in that!” He laughed and shook his big head, “That last night before we deployed…Oh shit! He broke his nose on the bathroom door at the bar, so he was bleeding like a bitch and I thought I was puking out the car window, but I puked right down the window slot, inside the door.” He smiled at the gravel behind my truck and said, “Prob’ly right here. Jimmy covered in blood and me covered in puke, laughing our asses off. And Jimmy’s dad running the hose down inside the door.”

            He squinted at me, “You know Jimmy?” I shook my head and he said, “You prob’ly do and just don’t know it. He got blown up by a I.E.D. and some Kentucky pigfucker behind us caught it on his cellphone.”

            So I guess I did know Jimmy, because he was from around here, and because that few seconds of shaky footage at the edge of some field in Afghanistan was everywhere for a long while. There wasn’t any sound, just some kid in his uniform, all armored up, disappearing in a flash of light and dust. You couldn’t get away from it. Like the towers falling. After awhile, you just didn’t need to see it again.

            I just said, “Yeah, I guess I do. I remember when they brought him home from the airport. Yellow ribbons everywhere and all those folks lining the road.”

            He said, “Yep, big coffin and a big flag.” He reached in the bed of my truck and palmed a coffee can full of nails, “Truth is, all we found could have fit in here. At least it was fast. Not like some others…” His voice trailed off and he tried to blink something away. Then he said, “That’s going on six years. His dad finally killed himself a couple of months back, with his old cat curled up in his lap. I liked Mister Elkins, always did, even when we were kids and I was over here all the damn time. Coached our Little League team. A good guy, quiet. Could let you know when you fucked up without making you feel small, and that’s a rare gift. Just fired up his truck and let the fumes bleed in. Him and that old cat both went to sleep and woke up dead. He had a rubber mat over a hole in the floor right over a leaky exhaust pipe. That mat was rolled back when I found him, and I just rolled it down flat and wrote it up as an accident. Jimmy’s mom didn’t…” He looked at the house, “She moved down to her sister’s. I believe it was the first time she’d left the house in five years, since the funeral. When we towed the truck away, there was a burnt up corner of one of Jimmy’s letters, but not enough to read.”

            He drug a finger through the dirt on one of the Cragars and said, “You know why they call them mags, don’t you?”

            I said, “I thought it was on account of them having five spokes.” And I’m not sure why I thought that because it didn’t seem to make much sense.

            He shook his head, “No. It’s ‘cause the early ones was made out of magnesium. No shit, magnesium. But they were brittle, cracked if you looked at them wrong, and if one ever caught fire you could throw it in the river and never put it out. The same shit as in the flares over there. And the tracer rounds.”

            I nodded and he said, “Well, I got to get going. If anybody stops by and asks what you’re doing, tell them you already talked to Deputy Duane and he says it okay.”

            And I said, “No, I got all this old truck can handle.”

            I eased open the door trying not wake Ruby Lynn.

            Duane watched her sleep, then pointed at the buzzards and whispered, “They’re waiting for the air to warm up enough so they can get up and ride the thermals, circle around, look for something dead in the fields. Something hurt. Maybe a baby separated from its momma.”

            He looked at the sky like they were already up there, “They ain’t buzzards, you know. Folks miscall them that, most everybody ‘round here does. Like the way we say Canadian geese when they’re rightly called Canada geese. Those are vultures, black vultures. Working their way north from West Virginia. Mean fuckers too. They’d just as soon kill a live calf as eat a dead deer. Peck out its eyes and take it down like a pack of wolves.”

            The deputy rested his thick, freckled arm on my window frame and rubbed absently at the flaming baseball tattoo. He pointed at the tree full of vultures and said, “You know what they call a bunch of vultures?”

            I thought about it, finding the memory, and said, “We always called them a hex. But them were turkey vultures.”

            He nodded, “A hex. That’s right. But that’s just when they’re settin’ in a tree, or on top of a barn. They call them different things, depending on what they’re doing.” He pursed his mouth for a moment, then said, “A wake.”

            Ruby Lynn jerked upright and said, “No nap. Awake.”

            Duane smiled a sad smile, “No, not ‘awake.’” He watched their shadows up in the trees for a minute before he leaned forward to spit a stream of tobacco juice, “A wake of vultures. That’s what they call them, when they’re eating. A wake of vultures.”

            Ruby Lynn said, “Eat!” but not like she was hungry.

            He said, “They’re carrion eaters. You know what that means? It means they’ll eat anything. And I mean anything. Even if it ain’t all the way dead yet.”

            I offered Ruby Lynn a little box of raisins but she just shook her head and kept shaking it to fight off sleep.

            He made his hand into a pistol and pointed a two-fingered barrel at the tree. After he drew his bead, he said, “Catch one pulling his head out of your buddy,” he dropped the hammer of his thumb, “Just a red cloud raining black feathers.”

---

            The guy at the scrap yard couldn’t believe I wasn’t selling him those Cragars, and just kept saying, “You’re leaving money on the table, Cash. Money on the table.”

            We stopped by Harbor Freight on the way home to buy a new buff bob for my drill, and I had to change Ruby Lynn’s diaper in the parking lot because neither one of us could stand it anymore. Then she talked me into a string of 10 little solar-powered LED dragonflies for the yard. She didn’t have to do much talking, just pointed her sippy-cup from her seat in the cart and looked at me with her big blue eyes, just like her mom’s before they turned to glass, and said, “Light bugs?” Betty’ll love them. The yard’s snowed over with all kinds of crap, like bird bath fountains that flash different colors, and little plastic statues of elves and fairies and mushrooms, and a little Dutch boy and a little Dutch girl in yellow wooden shoes kissing. It seems like that started about the time Ruby Lynn was on the way, right when we found out how far off the rails her mom had run. And even after the fountains stop working and the lights go out, and the statues get broken by the deer or cracked by the cold, and the bright wooden shoes fade like old newspaper, they never ever leave.

            That night, Ruby Lynn finally fell fast asleep in the same crib her mom slept in, but not until the last dragonfly winked out. And with Betty filling up a cardboard box full of thrift store clothes and toiletries, puzzle books and individually-wrapped candies in a factory-sealed bag, I hauled the Cragars into the garage. I cut the dry-rotted Firestone redlines off with an old steak knife, and washed off the worst of the dirt. I used steel wool and red polishing compound from an old blue and white can, squares of leather and an old toothbrush. I worked my way down, through the red rust on the steel rims, through the black rust on the aluminum spokes, down through pits and scratches, working away at the years and neglect. I snugged the new buff bob in my drill, and slowly, like ice turning to water on some early spring morning, brought them to the way things were, brought back the nights of the drinking dead.

            And finally, with the dim light of false dawn leaking in through the dusty windows, I saw myself in the funhouse mirrors of those Cragars, old and young, both at the very same time. And Ruby Lynn, all grown up, looking just like her mom used to before, holding hands with a boy just happy to be holding her hand, and that palm didn’t matter at all. And I saw what Duane would see, that he’d never put them on a car, just sit and gaze into their past, at that chromed youth when blood was only fun, when vomit reeked of beer and not fear, before the terrible gift of knowledge that friends and everyone you care about will be taken away from you, that we’re carrion all along, even before we wander off into that open field, wounded and alone, to lie in cold comfort beneath a wake of vultures.

---

---