Heavy Equipment Talk Podcast
Looking for the Smith Place - Chapter 3
It’s a Delicate Moment When a Black Man Calls Himself a Nigger.
May 1977
“Jack? I’m on the phone with Mother. Could you take the boys to school?”
She was always on the phone with her mother. Every damned morning. I wouldn’t ordinarily care except that these conversations tended to ruin her day. So why put yourself through it? Mother/daughter relationships were unholy.
“No problem.”
“Thanks, Jack.”
It was Aug. Billy was there with him ready to go.
“You fella’s saddle up, I’m going to say goodbye to your sister.”
“You mean now?”
“When do you think I mean? C’mon, get moving I’ll be in the truck in zero-two and if you’re not there I’ll leave you behind.”
The boys were ready to go by the time I said goodbye to their sister.
“This a luxury, Jack.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Mom always gets us there late. We’re going to be twenty minutes early.”
Among many other things, AM constantly making the kids late for school was becoming another point of contention. The boys complained to me about it, the school would send letters home with them demanding they be on school on time, and we’d have blazing arguments over the issue, and all for naught. She’d promise to get them there on time and would promptly start to do so…for about three days, and then back to her old habits. She had had a shit school experience when she was a child and this was one way of protesting that. She could be self-centered to the point of neuroses. To her it was unimportant and irrelevant that there is nothing more mortifying when you’re a kid than to come in late and have to walk into assembly in front of the whole school.
“It’s always a good idea to be a little early, for school, for work, for an appointment. I thought she’d been getting you here on time?”
“She’s good for about three days.”
“I’ll talk to her again.”
“Thanks Jack.”
“You guys have a good time. I’ll see you tonight.”
I watched as they walked down the path into the school, put the truck back in gear, drove around the circular driveway and pulled over to the side into an ambush position. I scanned the teacher’s parking lot but didn’t see McClonchie’s Volvo. Why did all of the liberals drive Volvos? Two minutes later he pulled in the driveway and parked. He opened his door about the same time as I did mine.
He was gathering things and didn’t see me cross the driveway at almost a lope. He had just closed his door and was about to turn to head toward the school building.
“McClonchie!”
He was startled just a little by my voice but quickly regained his composure.
“What can I do for you Mister Ghost.”
The smarmy cock-sucker. Let’s see if he still has that arrogant, condescending smirk on his face when I’m done with him.
“History expert, I want to talk to you about the bull shit you’re putting out in class, asshole.”
“Who’re you calling an asshole? What’re you talking about?”
He was a little unbalanced by my assault. He was going to be falling over before I was done with him.
“If the boys ever come home again and ask me if I killed any babies in the Nam, you and I are going to have words, asshole.”
“Stop calling me an asshole! It’s the truth. You bastards did kill babies and civilians over there. That’s why you lost the war.”
“Don’t like being called an asshole, huh? OK fuck face. We didn’t lose the war - you cowards and pussies back here did. And we didn’t kill babies. Stick to history, pal, not your shit-hole interpretation of it.”
A couple of kids who’d just been dropped off could hear our voices and watched us as they walked toward their classroom.
“And what are you going to do Mister Ghost, if I don’t?”
Man, was I going to enjoy hurting this creep.
He was a big guy, but soft. Though I was short, I was heavily muscled and the Army had made those muscles granite hard. I had kept that physical hardness even into my early thirties. I spent all day out in the weather, climbing around construction sites and onto big tractors. This pussie spent his days indoors.
“Fuck face, I’ll tell you what. If the kids ever tell me again that you’ve said anything negative about the war, or the guys who fought there, I’ll hurt you so bad that you’ll remember it the rest of your life.”
“You can’t threaten me. The war’s over! You guys lost! What do you think you’re going to do to me?”
“Korean enema.”
His eyes narrowed as he contemplated the two words. He couldn’t figure out what I meant, but he couldn’t let it drop.
“What’s that?”
“We operated with the Koreans east of the Bong Son Plain. They captured four mainline VC out of an ambush that chewed up one of their units. They decided to make an object lesson out of one of them so they strung him up by his hands in front of the other three, took a turkey baster and squirted eight ounces of battery acid up his ass. His screams were so bad they taped his mouth shut. It took about a day-and-a-half for him to shit his insides out. They turned the other three loose to go back to their units and tell the other VC how they’d be treated if they messed with the Koreans again. Don’t mess with me, fuck face.”
I thought his knees were going to buckle. He looked a white.
“You don’t look so good, fuck face. You’d better go to the teacher’s lounge and sit down for awhile.”
“That’s the sickest thing I ever heard. You were a bunch of sadistic killers. How could they do that to another human being?”
This was a logical summation on his part that I hadn’t anticipated. I guess my threats did confirm his left-wing fantasies of us raping, pillaging, and burning. Fuck him.
“And I’ll tell you one more thing fuck face: the war’s not over. It’ll never be over until you pussies pay for what you did.”
“Mr. McClonchie? Jack?”
Father Tiller had come up behind us without me noticing. McClonchie was too shocked to notice.
“Mr. McClocnchie? Are you all right? Assembly is about to start.”
“I’ll be…right there…Father Tiller.”
The fucker was having a hard time getting his words out.
“Jack, may I ask what you and Mr. McClonchie were discussing?”
“It was history, Father Tiller, history.”
I had to get over to the gravel pit near Hollister to meet Bob Shaw and see the tractors he wanted me to sell. Setting McClonchie straight had taken longer than I thought. Anytime you’re enjoying yourself, time flies.
I turned the big Chevy out of the driveway and left onto the Carmel Valley Road. As I started down the road I could see father Tiller and McClonchie by the trees on the edge of the teacher’s parking lot and McClonchie seemed to have his head down.
It was about four miles to Highway 1, turn right, and over the top of Carmel Hill. I was heading down toward the Monterey Bay and it was glorious morning. There were Monterey pines along the hillside cuts that we had supplied to the project ten years before when my family was in the nursery business. They were thirty feet or taller now.
Down through Seaside, the big V-eight was purring and then onto Fort Ord, where I had been stationed once almost ten years before. As I drove past the rifle ranges on my left I could hear the cap-like pop of the M-16’s as the trainees were learning basic marksmanship. The gunfire was music. The staccato rattle of small arms fire evoked memories of jungle fighting.
I’m a big bore man myself. When I had first gone in the Army, we had trained with the M-14. This was a full size main battle rifle that was the successor to the fabled M-1 Garand of WWII and Korea fame. The major differences were a detachable twenty-round magazine, (as opposed to the eight-round ‘clip’ of the M-1) the adoption of the medium powered 7.62 NATO cartridge as a replacement for the high-powered 30.06 round, and a fully automatic fire mode. Though the M-14 round was shorter, and therefore lighter (theoretically enabling a rifleman to carry more ammo) ballistic efficiency meant that the 7.62 was a very effective killer out to 600 meters.
Compared to the smaller, lighter M-16, the M-14 was a load. But it was the most magnificent and accurate killing device ever made for an Infantryman. It was also rugged and reliable, a fact not lost on the Marines who died during the border battles of 1967 when their M-16’s jammed during heavy action. The Marines had given up their M-14’s in a rapid replacement without adequate training and orientation with the new weapon. The M-14’s action was like that of a brutal rock crusher. The M-16 was like a precision watch movement in comparison. Army units, who’d had a head start with the transition to the ‘plastic fantastic’, as the M-16 was referred to by the troops, had already learned that the weapon had to be kept fastidiously clean.
So why did so many Marines have to learn the hard way with cartridge case heads braking off, thereby jamming their weapon as their position were being assaulted by Commie hordes? Why were so many of them later found dead with a cleaning rod jammed down the barrel of their weapon in a futile attempt to punch a broken cartridge case out of the chamber.
Well, you could put the blood of these troops on the hands of Robert Strange McNamara, the Secretary of Defense. He was one of the ‘whiz kids’ who’d turned around Ford Motor Company and was brought into the cabinet by Jack Kennedy. McNamara thought he could run the Defense Department by accounting statements much the way he ran FoMoCo. The M16 had a radically new design for using the gas from the propellant charge to cycle the action of the rifle. It meant that the gasses ended up actually in the moving parts of the rifle. It was recognized from the start that cleanliness could be a problem with this approach and a very clean burning powder was specified for loading the 5.56mm cartridges. The powder used for the 7.62 NATO cartridge was dirty by comparison. Yet millions could be saved by the simple expedient of using one powder. I wonder how many lives of how many troops were lost by this one decision?
This was another example of why Democrats should be kept away from anything to do with waging war or defending the country.
I had now cleared the sand dunes of Marina and was getting into the artichoke-covered hills around Castroville. Then the short chute up to Prunedale junction, onto one-o-one, and then the 156 turnoff past the old mission town of San Juan Bautista. I pulled into the road to the gravel quarry about a hundred yards behind Shaw.
“Ghost, how’re you doing”, said Shaw sticking out his hand.
He was about six foot tall with sandy-brown, curly hair and a face that most women thought was raffishly attractive. Tall and lanky in a cowboy way. He had inherited one of the prime cattle ranches in this part of California. His father had bought the spread near Paicines in 1944, the year Bob was born. The cattle business had been good so that with the income off of it and some other investments, their life had been comfortable, bordering on wealthy.
As the decades passed, it became harder and harder to make a go off of cattle alone. When his father fell off his horse one day in 1973 of a heart attack, he and Bob were well on their way in trying to diversify into other activities. They were already row-cropping on a joint venture basis with Paul Bertolaro when Bob decided to get into the gravel business by pulling rock out of the portion of the San Benito River that ran through the ranch.
Sitting in front of us were four old beasts of burden. The faded decals on the side of the fuel tanks proclaimed them to be International Harvester Model TD25B bulldozers. They were huge, each weighing in the neighborhood of forty tons with their blades and rippers. Dormant yellow beasts waiting for the life force of charged batteries to make them snort and rattle.
“How did you end up with these?”
“I bought out the gravel operation here about four years ago and moved all of the crushing gear up to our place. We already owned a couple of Cats and so decided to leave these here until we needed ‘em or not. I guess now it’s not.”
“How do they run?”
“You’d probably have to do a little cleaning up and put some TLC into them, but they were fine when we bought ‘em.”
“How much?”
“Twenty-five hundred a piece. I don’t care what you make on top of that. Remember, I’m selling them ‘as-is’.”
“OK. You want an agreement or anything?”
“Nah, your handshake’s good.”
I stayed behind to make some notes. They were rusty as hell but that wasn’t unusual for tractors when they sat outside in the weather, but these were rustier than usual. The tracks looked to be in excellent condition, and all of the pieces, such as guards and covers seemed to be in place.
As I wrote down my notes for each tractor my mind wondered to when I was a kid and you could tell the manufacture of a tractor just by their color. Caterpillars were yellow, John Deere were green. Allis-Chalmers were orange, while Terex’s were a different green from that of the Deeres. And Internationals were cherry red. Nowadays, every bit of industrial equipment was some shade of industrial yellow.
I wrapped up quickly, jumped in the truck and headed for Watsonville. Jimmy Cox at C&N Tractor wanted to see me about a trade they’d just taken. He said it was right up my alley. Why did I have a feeling the joke was on me.
When I walked in, Jim was on the phone. That meant I was easy pickings for his asshole partner, Hod Nylandssen. "If you buy anything its cash!" his voice boomed across the show room, causing heads of customers and employees to look first at him and then at me.
“If I don’t owe C&N any money Hod, you don’t have any reason being here. You sure as hell don’t know a damned thing about equipment.”
This brought a few laughs from some of the customers and a suppressed giggle or two from a couple of the employees.
“I see you’re sowing hate and dissension again.” Jimmy had hung up and had walked up behind me. “C’mon let’s go outside.”
“Do me a favor, I know he’s an asshole, but he’s my partner. He’s a real shit bird when he doesn’t like someone and he doesn’t like you. He’ll try to shit on you just to let you know he doesn’t like you. The trouble for him, and for me, is you always end up humiliating him and then he’s a real asshole for the next few days with everyone including me. So when you come over the next time, call me from the payphone up the street and I’ll meet you outside.”
"JC, he ever serve?"
“Naval officer.”
“That explains everything.”
“It truly does.”
We were walking across C&N’s yard past the long rows of red Massey-Ferguson tractors and the bright orange Kubotas. MF was a revered old name in farm equipment, while Kubota had only been imported for the last few years and was still regarded as 'Jap Crap' by the farmers. But the quality of the product was good and the brand was catching on. Jimmy was walking with a limp.
“Leg bothering you again?”
“Yeah, every change of the seasons. Only it’s my foot. My big toe, to be exact.”
“How’d you screw up your big toe? Punji stake? Toe popper?” Jim had been a Marine.
“Nah, we were operating around the Rock Pile and the gooks let us have some 122mm artie from across the DMZ. Got us with air bursts. You know how we did that to them when we’d catch them in the open? It’d really fuck ‘em up. Well, they did it to us that day. We lost a bunch. I got a major fragment right through the toe of my jungle boot and out the sole. They had a hell of a time trying to cut the shoe loose. In the end they just gave up, gave me a lot of painkiller, got hold of the end of the shard with some vice-grips they brought up from the motor pool and pulled it out. There wasn’t enough pain-killer in the world to deaden it. They put a rubber band through the hole so it would drain. I’m sure it was a surgical rubber band, nothing but the best for the green machine. It got infected anyway and they almost had to take my foot off. Three months later I was out on a medical.
We rounded the back corner of the shop and there it was. The most ungainly, awkward looking three-axel paddle wheel scraper I had yet seen in my short career as a tractor trader.
“JC, what the hell is it?”
“How long you been in this business? You don’t recognize fine Caterpillar machinery when you see it?”
I hadn’t been in the business long enough apparently. Before us was an old, WWII vintage, Caterpillar model DW10 scraper. These machines made major contributions to the war effort by building any number of roads and airfields in the Pacific and European theatres. A scraper simply has a bowl that can be lowered, with a scraper blade across the front opening that scrapes dirt up as it’s pulled along by the driven tires, and pushes it up into the bowl until it’s filled. Then the front of the bowl is closed, the entire assembly is lifted up off the ground, and the dirt in the bowl is tranported by the machine to an area where it’s needed as fill. If the material is really loose like sand, the normal action of filling the bowl doesn’t work as well and so a type of scraper called a paddle wheel was developed in which paddles, pulled along by chains, would push the loose material up, into the bowl.
The trouble was, there was never a DW10 paddle wheel. This was some sort of home- made contraption built by someone and driven by a six-cylinder Chevrolet gas engine that was hanging off the front bumper.
“Jim what do you want me to do with this?”
“Buy it from us. Fifteen-hundred and you’ll be able to sell it to one of the strawberry growers for twenty-five hundred.”
“Why don’t you sell it yourself if there’s that much profit.”
“Hod doesn’t see the potential in some of this old iron. That’s why it’s parked back here out of sight. Besides, you helped us out with those Ford Select-o-Matics. I don’t know where you find the buyers for that stuff. You’re apparently a hell of a salesman. Why don’t you go to work for us.”
“And make you an accessory to Murder One? Nyllandssen and I would last one week. Besides, I’ve got a shitty work ethic. Fifteen hundred, huh? Jim, I won’t shit you. I don’t have the cash right now. Give me a week or two.”
“Nah, you’ve got 30 days to pay. Just get it off the property today. I don’t want to hear him moaning about it anymore.”
“Nylladnssen’s not going to agree to that. He’s pissed ‘cause I was late on my account a couple of months ago.”
“You leave him to me. Can you make it go away today? I’m tired of him complaining like a menopausal old woman.”
“If I can leave my truck here without Nylandssen sending me an invoice for storage, I’ll get it out of here right now. It run?”
“Try it, if it doesn’t I’ll get one of the mechanics over here.”
I checked the oil and water, which were up. I adjusted the choke and throttle on the pony motor, turned the magneto switch on, opened the fuel petcock from the tank, and pushed the starter switch. I heard the familiar whine of a Cat starter, there were a few pops and puffs of gas-rich exhaust from the two-cylinder starting engine, too much choke, a quick adjustment, and the pony started to run on its own. These motors didn’t exactly purr. The sound was more like putting a trash can over your head and having four or five people beat on it with baseball bats.
When the pony had warmed up (this was ascertained by putting the back of your fingers on a cylinder head…if you could hold your fingers on it…too cold…if your fingers were almost burned…just right) I opened the clutch, slipped the gear into place, eased the clutch to the main motor in, which started to turn over the big diesel, damned …forgot to check to see if the transmission was in gear, let the main motor turn over for a bit to warm the cylinders, opened the fuel injection pump a notch, slammed the compression release shut, and, blam, the old diesel fired off. This was a lot more work than jumping in your pickup and twisting the key.
I shut the pony down, let the diesel idle to warm up and jumped down off the machine.
“When can I get the paper work from you?”
It was hard to hear each other over the un-muffled engine.
“I’ll put it in an envelope under your windshield wiper. The gate’ll be open until seven tonight. You OK for a ride back?”
“Yeah, I’ll be good Jimmy. Say, I’m still a little pissed that Nylandssen sold that D4 out from under me. I don’t mind taking your step-children off your hands but I need some good gear once in a while.”
“Good point. I’ll take care of you. Thanks for helping me out with this.”
I climbed back up. The needle on the water temperature guage was just starting to move off its stop, and the oil pressure looked good. I put the clutch in, eased the non-synchro gear box into first, and then I remembered.
“What are the brakes like?”
“What?”
“What are the brakes like?” I said, yelling above the exhaust noise.
“They’re a little weak. If you have trouble, use the big brake.”
“Where's that?”
The wind had shifted and the noise was coming right over us. I’d figure out how to activate the big brake, whatever that was, later.
I eased the clutch out and the old girl started to lumber along. At the gate, I turned right onto the Pajaro road and headed west toward Highway 1. About two miles down the road I signaled for a left hand turn onto Hall Road. My plan was to get to A.G. Cox’s place about three miles further on and see if I could park my new acquisition there and bum a ride back to C&N.
I made the left turn all right, no power steering takes upper body strength…a lot of upper body strength, and started on the ramp down when the old girl started to pick up speed. A tap of the brakes produced a slight retarding effect. More pressure produced a little more. The last stab of the brake pedal yielded a little pressure and then it went dead along with the brakes. There’s a sudden exhilaration when the expected result isn’t what you expect. It’s a ‘your balls in your throat' feeling. A field truck carrying artichokes to Castroville was about to turn left in front of me…he had the right-of-way…but my frantic hand waving got his attention at the last minute as I went rumbling through the stop sign. I was picking up speed at a rapid pace and as I glanced down at the tachometer I could see that I was going to over speed the engine. Where the hell was the big brake Jim had mentioned? The tach was right on the red line, the wind was whipping around the windshield so hard my eyes were watering, and I couldn’t see any handle that appeared to operate the big brake. What the…you idiot!
The road straightened out, I wrestled the old girl onto the shoulder and lowered the bowl. The cutting edge started to scrape soil and I started to slow down. Now if my heart would only do the same. Another hundred yards and we would be back on the level but it didn’t matter ‘cause she was almost to a stop now. So I lifted the bowl up to gather a little more speed. A long line of cars had formed behind me and they cautiously passed.
As I pulled up in front of AG’s place, with a cloud of dust from the big brake, AG looked out from his garage and Mrs. Cox looked out from the living room window. He was smiling and waving. Her look was less welcoming. AG had been a railroad engineer and had driven trains. He was retired now and was dabbling buying, repairing, and selling small agricultural tractors that were used in the strawberry fields that dominated the hills around this part of the country. It wasn’t that Mrs. Cox was rude or anything like that; she was just a very stern person.
I left the beast idling because I didn’t want to go through the starting procedure again. AG was half way to me as I jumped down. And Mrs. AG was watching intently from the window.
“Ghost, he said with a grin that was always on his face. What’s the hell is that?”
“A man-killer, almost. Lost the brakes over by the Grange hall. Brought about a quarter of a mile of the shoulder with me.”
“That’s an hermophadite-looking contraption for sure. Is that a stovebolt Chevy hanging off the front bumper? I swear I’ve never seen such a lashup”. He was almost giggling. Mrs. AG, standing on the front porch was not.
“Glenn, I’ve got to get into town!”
“Ghost, come on over to the garage. I’m tuning up the missus’ car.”
We had our heads under the hood when Mrs. Cox walked up, purse in hand.
“Ghost”, she said with a little dip of her head as acknowledgement of my presence. Man she came across as tough. “Glenn, how much longer?”
“Got it right now. There you go. Have a good time. I’m going to visit with Ghost. I’ve got to hear all about who passed that heap of junk off on him. Heh, heh.”
“I was starting to feel a little ridiculous about the scraper. I glanced over at it and had to admit it was a ridiculous-looking piece if rusty iron.
“Glenn, remember, you promised!”
Off she went backing down the driveway. The Buick didn’t quite sound right. It was a V-six though and they had a different sound from the V-eights I was used to.
“C’mon let’s have a cup of coffee and I want to look that lashup.”
We were hardly up the back steps when Mrs. AG came rattling, banging, and smoking back into the driveway.
“Glenn! she yelled from the open window, What did you do to my car? It barely runs and I’m late.”
We attacked the under hood of the Buick like an Indy 500 pit crew. The engine was indeed barely running, and misfiring so badly it was about to pop free of the motor mounts. I spotted it first, a loose vacuum line. I pointed it out to AG, he popped it onto its fitting, and the old girl settled right down to a purr. He slammed the hood down and Mrs. AG made a second try at getting into town.
“I know what you’re thinking. She can be pretty hard and demanding, but she’s been a good wife, raised me three sons, and she’s protective of what we’ve built. The house is always clean and the food’s good. Besides, when we’re alone, she’s a different person. Remember that old song? If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, make an ugly woman your wife? Bev and I are kinda’ like that.”
“She doesn’t think much of my tractor friends. Thinks you fella’s are a bunch of gypsies, con men, and outright bandits. She finds you the least unattractive of all of them.” he said with a roaring laugh. “What do you intend to do with that pile of junk?”
“I was wondering if I could park it here and get a ride from you back to C&N. I’m going to see if Bertolaro will carry it on his low-bed over to Hollister. So you think I got taken.”
“Goodness gracious, no. But I can’t let you park it here. That promise the missus referred to is that I don’t let my friends park their junk on the property any more. They never come to pick their machines up and she thinks it makes the place look like a junkyard. She was way ahead of you. Back up and pull it over to the other side of the road in that large empty place. That’s Sanchez’s property and he’ll do me a favor. Every berry grower around here will drive past it. It will of course mess up my missus’ view out the front window, but we’re living up to the letter of the promise I made.” A mischievous grin came across his face.
“C’mon, let’s get that cup of coffee. How much you want for it?”
“JC thought it should sell for twenty-five hundred. I honestly don’t know what its worth. It’s got no brakes. I’m paying C&N fifteen-hundred.”
“Tell you what Ghost, I’ll sell that to one of these berry growers for thirty-five hundred. I’ll keep five hundred for myself. What do you think? Besides, scrapers never have brakes; you just use the big brake.”
So, everybody knew the joke about the big brake but me. Life could be humiliating at times.
We started for the fourth time to go for coffee when a horn honk from a ’68 Cadillac El Dorado startled us. The car pulled into the driveway and shut down. It sounded like a NASCAR stocker. The doors opened and out climbed two black guys. The passenger looked as big as an NFL lineman, which I later found out he had been, and the driver was tall, lanky to the point of being skinny, who had on an Hawaiian made out of silk, black pants, and black, high-top US Keds basketball shoes that had gone out of style years before.
“Hey! Mr. Cox. What you say?”
“Henry. Ellis. I’m just fine. We were just going to have a cup of coffee. Want to join us? This here’s Ghost.”
“Howdy, Ghost. This is Ellis McComber and I’m Nigger Robinson. What you say?”
“I’d say it’s a delicate moment when a black gentleman calls himself a nigger.”
Henry and Ellis thought this was uproariously funny.
“Ellis, we got us here another person feeling white man’s guilt for slaves they never owned.”
Out of the corner of my eye, AG was looking down at the ground and barely suppressing a grin. This was probably some sort of routine they put on at the expense of any whites.
“All right” AG said, probably feeling my discomfort, “Henry, you and Ellis lay off Ghost. Damn! Let’s get that coffee.”
Henry was the only black tractor trader I ever ran into. He was one of the biggest traders in the Bay Area. He also ran one of the loosest operations I ever encountered. He was, finally, the most optimistic, upbeat man I ever met.
“Ellis and me are going over to Hollister to look at a D7. So we thought we’d come by for a visit and see if you had anything for sale Mr. Cox. None of that farm shit, but if you had a nice dozer or two, we’d be interested.”
“Henry, I’ve got nothing today. Check back with me in a week. One of the Messican berry growers says he’s going to trade me a D4. Maybe you could take it off my hands.”
I got in the truck after AG had dropped me off, opened the envelope to make sure the paperwork was there, and just got to the gate when, in my mirror, I saw Nylandssen waving at me to come back. Fuck him.
It took me about twenty-five minutes to get over to Santa Rita. This was a little town in the lettuce fields just north of Salinas on the old concrete portion of one-o-one that had been built back in the twenties. There were a few old clapboard houses, a few more trailer homes, a truck stop, and the Nite Owl Café.The Nite Owl was where some of the farmers, a few of the old truckers, some of the field workers, and a smattering of locals would hang out. One of the locals I was looking for was Matthew Kaptatanisc, who everyone called Cap.
“Hey, Cholly.”
“Cap my name's Jack, not Charlie.”
“Hell, Ghost, everyone’s Cholly to me. Cup of coffee?”
I drank more coffee in this business. I’ll bet my insides were brown.
“Cap? Where can I sell some big dozers?”
“How big.”
“TD25 big. They got blades and rippers and the undercarriages look real good.”
“They run?”
“I didn’t hear ‘em, they’ve been sitting a while. But they were running when they were parked.”
How much?
“Eighty-five hundred a piece. There’s five hundred a tractor for you if you bring me a deal.”
“That’s pretty cheap, Cholly. You sure they’re OK? I think I know who’ll buy them. I’ll call you tonight.”
Back in the truck. One of the farmers I had met during one of my Smith Place forays had told me about a D6 for sale. Perpetual motion seemed to be its own reward in this business. I mad a call to Johhny K and he agreed to buy it. By this time, it was getting late and as I pulled into the driveway to the house it was almost early evening. I crested the top of the driveway and a Monterey County Sheriff’s car came into view. That car had brought Deputy Patrick Devoir to the house and he was talking to AM at the back door. We’d known Pat for years. He was a tall black man who had been gaining weight at an alarming rate. He had an incredibly powerful singing voice and was much in demand for weddings and such. He was a very charismatic figure and Clint Eastwood used him for bit parts in any movies he did locally. Pat used to come over when the boys were little and let them turn on the lights and siren in his cruiser. He wasn’t here to entertain the boys. He and AM turned when they heard me. The look on her face told me I was in deep Kim Chi.
The back door almost came off its hinges, she’d slammed it so hard. Pat had the sort of grin on his face that one gets when they’ve just witnessed marital discord.
“Ghost, I need to talk to you.”
“Mind walking down to the barn with me. I’ve got to check on that bull calf.”
“You caused quite a scene at the school this morning. My boss thought, since I knew you and all, that it’d be best if I handled this. The school doesn’t want to make a big deal out of it, but they can’t have you going in and threatening the teachers.”
Best to try a little dumbness.
“Pat, what’re you talking about? Who’d I threaten?”
“Ghost, don’t make this hard on me. McClonchie almost had a heart attack by the time you were done with him. They had to send him home early. What the hell is a Korean enema?”
“Pat, he’s an old burned out hippie. Those guys have done so much dope their reality’s warped. A Korean enema sound like some faggot fantasy he had. I’ve got no idea what he’s talking about.”
“He said it’s some sick torture you witnessed fighting with the Koreans in the Nam. He says you’re mad at him because he was anti-war. He said you’re mad over a history lesson that Aug told you about. He said you scared the shit out of him.”
“He’s a pussie. Anybody could scare the shit out of him. We talked about the lesson plan and that I’d volunteer to come in and do a session with the kids about the war from the perspective of someone who had been there. That’s all.”
Pat wasn’t buying it entirely.
“Ghost, the war’s over. Yah got to forget about it. It’s done.” This was the second time I heard this today. Don’t react.
“You serve?”
“Yeah, Air Force.”
“How long?”
“Six months.”
“Six months?”
“Got out on a medical. Blood pressure, some heart problems.”
“Pat, if you couldn’t serve in the Air Force, how can you be a deputy sheriff?”
“Heh, heh, sheriffing is ninety-five percent mental. I work over here on the Peninsula and in Carmel Valley. A drunk driver is about all I ever encounter. Petty crime, that sort of thing. You know, I spoke with McClonchie over the phone, and then I went out to the school and spoke with Father Tiller. He didn’t hear what the two of you were talking about, he only said that McClonchie was real upset. I kinda wondered around by the teacher’s parking lot. Guess what I found out? McClonchie had scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast. Whatever was in the lesson plan you discussed with him wasn’t very agreeable, heh.” Pat was impressed with his own wit.
“Pat, look at how big I am, and look at how big McClonchie is. I couldn’t hurt him.”
“Ghost, I think you could hurt him. You’re pretty intense. You’re a hardass. I’ve seen you at baseball games and at the rodeo. You’re tough. You got a mean streak, too, for all of the hippies and anybody you don’t think represents America as the way you want it. Ghost those people have right to be here, too. Chill out. You don’t like to be criticized either. You’re wound tighter than a spring. You give me the creeps just looking at you and I’m three times bigger.”
“As I said, this is mostly a mental job. I think the coversation with McClonchie went pretty much as he described it. I think you’re pissed off at him because of what he told the kids about the war. If you made up the part about a battery acid enema, that was damned creative and it worked. That guy’s probably having nightmares about his guts running out his ass. But you’ve put me and my boss in a really bad situation. My boss is wondering if you’re some psycho back from the war that’s going to go nuts and start killing people. McClonchie wants you under psychiatric observation. I’m looking at a combat vet whose body language suggests he’s always about to launch an attack. So I’m stuck with the responsibility of recommending to my boss whether some sort of referral should be made to the DA or the situation was blown out of proportion by some hysterical nancy-boy of a teacher. What do I do Ghost?”
“I won’t have anybody talking bad about the war or the troops. I’ll set the record straight every time I hear us called baby-killers. I won’t tolerate any disrespect of the guys who fought there. But, I’ll stay away from McClonchie. School’s almost out anyway. Besides he won’t be there next year.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s a lot of shit going on at that school that you don’t know about. There’s a group of parents who’ve gotten together to demand Father Tiller’s resignation along with that of the teaching staff.”
The slight look of doubt and skepticism in Pat’s eyes told me that I’d probably introduced enough questions as to undermine the moral certainty of what McClonchie had told him.
“Ghost, I hope you’re not lying to me. It’d be a good idea if you stayed away from McClonchie, and the school for that matter. I’ll tell my boss that things are blown out of proportion and that I’ll keep an eye on you. Did the Koreans really do that sort of thing to their prisoners?”
“Pat, where do you think they’d get a turkey baster in the middle of the jungle?”
“What was that all about with Pat and what the hell happened at the school today? You, shit! They’re threatening not to let the Billy back in next year because they think you’re going to go psycho and kill all the teachers. Don’t you ever think of anybody or anything but that damned war? The war’s over. Jack, get over it!”
Three times today I’d been told to get over a war that was over. That’s it.
“You’re wrong AM. The war’s not over. It’ll never be over. There are fifty-eight thousand ghosts out there asking for revenge. Not to mention all of the amputees, quadriplegics, mental cases, and other guys who’ll never be right. The war won’t be over until every last commie-pinko, dope-smoking, sex drugs rock and roll good time liberal shithead is made to pay for what they did. That’s when the war’ll be over.”
“Jack, sometimes you scare me. You’re so angry about things. Your hatred for anybody you don’t consider to be American…I don’t know how to put it. Jim McClonchie is really upset. He had to go home early. There’s that much hatred in you that you scared the devil out of him. And yet, I never see this with me or the kids. You’ve been a good husband and father. But what you threatened McClonchie with is perverted. It’s sick. It’s disgusting. Is it true? Is that what they did?”
“Who? What?”
“The Koreans are who” her voice rising “and a turkey baster full of battery acid is what!”
Might was well try it a second time. “AM, where do you think they’d get a turkey baster in the middle of the jungle?”
The light of recognition came on in her eyes and her body un-tensed. Things would be all right for the moment. I was going to have to deal with the fact that lying to my wife was becoming easier and easier. I was, by my own actions, becoming a one-man show. If I couldn’t make things work out it wouldn’t be good for me in the end.
“I didn’t think so.”
“Are they really threatening not to let the Billy back in?”
“Father Tiller hinted at it. I hinted in return that my mother might reconsider the fifty thousand she pledged for the building fund for the multi-purpose room. Father Tiller can be a real shit at times. But we’ve still got to pay the tuition by the end of this school year.”
AM could be real tough in her own way. Father Tiller thought he could work a threat on AM. But she’d served his ass up to him on a platter. She was good in a clinch. Too bad she and I couldn’t seem to function as a team.
“We’ll get it done AM. I got the house paid up on a deal I did this afternoon. I’m going to go see the kids. How’s dinner coming?”
When she told she hadn’t started it yet I decided it wasn’t the time to get into an argument with her. Coward. We’d had enough drama for one night.
“I’ll be back out in a bit.”
“Jack? A guy name Cap called. He said it’s important for you to call him tonight. Here’s his number.”
“Daddy!”
“Alex! What’re you doing?”
“I’m reading Green Eggs and Ham. Can you help me? Mommy’s really mad at you. She said you scared Mr.McClonchie. You did something really bad to him? Was it because he said you kill babies?”
Smart girl.
“Alex, your mother and I are going to be all right. I’m going to see the boys. You keep reading and then I’ll be back down and you can read to me.” Kids hate it when their parents fight. Our kids were hating it more than most had to lately.
“Aug, Billy, you guys up here?”
“Hey, Jack” in chorus.
“Boy, did you mess up Mr. McClonchie today. The whole school’s talking about it. Is it true what he said you did?”
“First, what about homework?”
“I’ve got a math test tomorrow. Can you test me?”
“Sure, Billy, what about you Aug?”
“Nothing. Mr. MacClonchie went home early. You scared him pretty bad. Father Tiller took over but didn’t have any idea what to do about homework and so we don’t have any.”
“You guys getting any heat over this?”
“Nah, everybody thinks you’re cool. Except for Father Tiller and some of the teachers. Are they going to throw us out of school? I’m a little worried about that.”
“Your mother took care of that. You’ve heard about us not paying the tuition but you let me take care of that. You just have to finish off the year with good grades and Aug you have to graduate. You two take care of your end and I’ll take care of mine.”
“Mom took care of it?”
“Yeah, she can be pretty good when she wants to be.” The boys had come increasingly to resent their mother over things like making dinner late every night and not getting them to school on time. This was a chance for them to see her in a positive light.
“Mr. McClonchie’s a jerk. None of the kids like him except for Susie. He spends all of class talking about when he was a hippie. When anything happens, that he doesn’t want anybody to know about, he tells us that if we tell our parents it’ll our word against his and nobody would believe a kid’s word over a teacher’s.”
“Like what, Aug? What’s happened he doesn’t want anybody to know about?”
“Eddie Flood found a cellophane bag on the floor under Mr. McClonchie’s desk. It was full of dried grass. Sam Heartly said his older brother had something like that and it was marijuana. Mr. McClonchie went bananas and said we weren’t supposed to talk about it.”
So, old habits died hard. Once a pot-head, always a pot-head.
“I’m glad you told me. There are going to be some things going on at the school that are going to be nasty. I want you two to keep your heads down, OK. You just concentrate on getting good grades and the rest of this will work itself out.”
“Aug, put this time to good use by going over your history. Bill let’s look at those test questions. Hey, Aug: go down stairs and see if your mother has any ground round thawed. Tell her to make some patties and I’ll throw ‘em on the grill. If she does, put some charcoal in the Weber and start it going. That is, if you want to eat before midnight.”
“You got it, Jack.”
“Cap? You wanted me to call?”
“Cholly, my friend wants to buy the TD25’s. He wants to look at them tomorrow. He’s going to bring his inspector and if they’re any good they’ll take them. Now, don’t you forget your old friend Cap.”
“Don’t worry Cap. I’ll take care of you. What time?”
“Nine o’clock.”
“Cap, did you tell them they haven’t run in awhile?”
“Cholly, they said they would do whatever it took and you don’t have to worry. They just want you to meet them.”
“They got names?”
“Ernie Tavernetti and the inspector’s Gene Reilly.”
“Ernie was a slightly-built older guy of about fifty who stood about five foot five. The inspector, Gene was about six foot tall, beefy, and about the same age. He had on white overalls that seemed to be the hallmark of equipment supervisors who worked for large companies.”
“When was the last time these things ran?”
“Couple of years ago.”
“You going to guarantee them or anything.”
“Nope. They’re being sold as-is right where they sit.”
“They kind of walked around them, giving them a once over.”
“Did you guys bring any batteries and jumper cables? We can try to get them going off my truck if you want.”
“Tell you what, you leave me and Gene to it. We’ve got what we need. Where can we meet later.”
“I’m going into Hollister. What don’t we meet at Sambos? How long?”
“An hour. See you there.”
“I didn’t think an hour was long enough to inspect four large dozers, but they knew their business.”
“How’s it going Mr. Bertalero?”
“Fine Ghost. Your wife tell you I wanted to see you?”
“Yeah, but I was coming over anyway this morning.”
“You got business here?”
“I’ve got some customers looking at Shaw’s dozers over at the old quarry.”
.He grinned in a way that I sensed wasn’t complimentary toward me.
“So that’s the equipment he wanted you to sell for him?”
“Anything wrong?”
“Bob’s got a strange sense of humor at times, that’s all. Those tractors are junk. It’s his way of saying that he doesn’t think much of you as a tractor trader, that’s all. He went to fancy schools and all as a kid, and so be can be a little high-falutin’ at times. I’ve seen him do this sort of thing before.”
Bertalero must have seen a reaction from me that alarmed him.
“Anyway, relax. We’re all the butt of a joke at one time or the other. You’re new at this and so you aren’t able to see the insults coming yet. Anyway, I’ve got some real business for you to do. There’s an auction down in San Diego. Want to go down there and bid on some equipment for me? I’ll make it worth your time.”
“Sure.”
He gave me the auction brochure and we worked out how we’d pay for the equipment if we were the successful bidders.
“Your wife, does she cook?” Cooking was one of AM’s stellar accomplishments. She was absolutely inspired at it. Meals were a true pleasure if you didn’t eating like Mexicans…at ten-thirty at night. “She’s a good cook.”
“We’re running onions down at the shed. Go get yourself a sack. Tell her to go easy on them. I grow a hot onion.”
Mutt and Jeff were sitting in a booth when I got to Sambo’s. They’d already had a cup of coffee and so they had made one of the fastest equipment inspections or record.
“How’d it go?”
“I think they’re going to be all right for us. Cap said you want eighty-five hundred a piece for them, can you do anything about the price?”
I’m absolutely desperate for cash. Here are two guys asking me how much of six thousand dollars of profit per tractor I want to give up. I could blow the sale here. I needed to make a sale and make it quick. They might tell me they needed to think about it. I could overplay my hand.
“Sorry Ernie, I’m hard on the price.”
“They’re not in that good of shape but they’ll work for what we’ve got in mind. We want to move them starting tomorrow. Can you meet me at the Nite Owl at two o’clock. I’ll pay you then. Bring an invoice and bills of sale?”
“How’re you going to pay?”
“Cash.”
Ernie was by himself when I walked into the Nite Owl. I gave him the invoices I’d made and the bills of sale. He questioned why I had written the words ‘as-is’ on the invoices.
“I told you Ernie, that’s the way I’m selling them.”
“Oh, yeah, I remember, anyway, it’s not important. Let’s go out to my car so I can pay you.”
There were 260 one-hundred dollar bills. I counted them twice, shook hands with him and headed for Paicines.
Shaw was in his office.
“Bob, how much do you want for those junk tractors at the quarry?” I could see him tense up a little and his eyes had narrowed. Go slowly.
“I told you. Twenty-five hundred a piece.”
“You and I know they’re junk. I’ll give you a thou each.” You always had to be careful with wealthy people. Even more careful with people who were wealthy once. Money didn’t always have the same value t them as it has for ordinary people. Sometimes, if pushed the wrong way, they’ll fuck with you because they can afford to.
“What do you want them for?”
“I’m going to do a rebuild on them. You know fix ‘em up and paint them. Figure I can sell them for five thousand each.”
I almost saw a faint smile on his face. What was that about?
“I told you. Twenty-five hundred.”
“That’s OK, Bob, I’m not interested. I’ll be seeing you.” Please, oh please.
“Ghost! Come on back here. Fifteen hundred each and not a penny less. How’re you paying?”
The joke’s on you, fucker.
I stopped by the Nite Owl on the way home but there was no Cap. I wanted to pay him for putting me together with Ernie. I’d have to find him in the morning. You always want to promptly reward your bird dogs.
Her eyes went wide when I gave her the nine-hundred dollars to take to the school to pay the tuition in the morning. I gave her another grand for other expenses and then lied about how much I made on the deal. I had cut a fat hog. Even with giving Cap a couple of grand, there was eighteen thousand left over after paying Shaw off. If I told AM how much I’d actually made she’d figure out real fast how to spend it.
All in all, it was not a bad day’s work.
May 1977
“Jack? I’m on the phone with Mother. Could you take the boys to school?”
She was always on the phone with her mother. Every damned morning. I wouldn’t ordinarily care except that these conversations tended to ruin her day. So why put yourself through it? Mother/daughter relationships were unholy.
“No problem.”
“Thanks, Jack.”
It was Aug. Billy was there with him ready to go.
“You fella’s saddle up, I’m going to say goodbye to your sister.”
“You mean now?”
“When do you think I mean? C’mon, get moving I’ll be in the truck in zero-two and if you’re not there I’ll leave you behind.”
The boys were ready to go by the time I said goodbye to their sister.
“This a luxury, Jack.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Mom always gets us there late. We’re going to be twenty minutes early.”
Among many other things, AM constantly making the kids late for school was becoming another point of contention. The boys complained to me about it, the school would send letters home with them demanding they be on school on time, and we’d have blazing arguments over the issue, and all for naught. She’d promise to get them there on time and would promptly start to do so…for about three days, and then back to her old habits. She had had a shit school experience when she was a child and this was one way of protesting that. She could be self-centered to the point of neuroses. To her it was unimportant and irrelevant that there is nothing more mortifying when you’re a kid than to come in late and have to walk into assembly in front of the whole school.
“It’s always a good idea to be a little early, for school, for work, for an appointment. I thought she’d been getting you here on time?”
“She’s good for about three days.”
“I’ll talk to her again.”
“Thanks Jack.”
“You guys have a good time. I’ll see you tonight.”
I watched as they walked down the path into the school, put the truck back in gear, drove around the circular driveway and pulled over to the side into an ambush position. I scanned the teacher’s parking lot but didn’t see McClonchie’s Volvo. Why did all of the liberals drive Volvos? Two minutes later he pulled in the driveway and parked. He opened his door about the same time as I did mine.
He was gathering things and didn’t see me cross the driveway at almost a lope. He had just closed his door and was about to turn to head toward the school building.
“McClonchie!”
He was startled just a little by my voice but quickly regained his composure.
“What can I do for you Mister Ghost.”
The smarmy cock-sucker. Let’s see if he still has that arrogant, condescending smirk on his face when I’m done with him.
“History expert, I want to talk to you about the bull shit you’re putting out in class, asshole.”
“Who’re you calling an asshole? What’re you talking about?”
He was a little unbalanced by my assault. He was going to be falling over before I was done with him.
“If the boys ever come home again and ask me if I killed any babies in the Nam, you and I are going to have words, asshole.”
“Stop calling me an asshole! It’s the truth. You bastards did kill babies and civilians over there. That’s why you lost the war.”
“Don’t like being called an asshole, huh? OK fuck face. We didn’t lose the war - you cowards and pussies back here did. And we didn’t kill babies. Stick to history, pal, not your shit-hole interpretation of it.”
A couple of kids who’d just been dropped off could hear our voices and watched us as they walked toward their classroom.
“And what are you going to do Mister Ghost, if I don’t?”
Man, was I going to enjoy hurting this creep.
He was a big guy, but soft. Though I was short, I was heavily muscled and the Army had made those muscles granite hard. I had kept that physical hardness even into my early thirties. I spent all day out in the weather, climbing around construction sites and onto big tractors. This pussie spent his days indoors.
“Fuck face, I’ll tell you what. If the kids ever tell me again that you’ve said anything negative about the war, or the guys who fought there, I’ll hurt you so bad that you’ll remember it the rest of your life.”
“You can’t threaten me. The war’s over! You guys lost! What do you think you’re going to do to me?”
“Korean enema.”
His eyes narrowed as he contemplated the two words. He couldn’t figure out what I meant, but he couldn’t let it drop.
“What’s that?”
“We operated with the Koreans east of the Bong Son Plain. They captured four mainline VC out of an ambush that chewed up one of their units. They decided to make an object lesson out of one of them so they strung him up by his hands in front of the other three, took a turkey baster and squirted eight ounces of battery acid up his ass. His screams were so bad they taped his mouth shut. It took about a day-and-a-half for him to shit his insides out. They turned the other three loose to go back to their units and tell the other VC how they’d be treated if they messed with the Koreans again. Don’t mess with me, fuck face.”
I thought his knees were going to buckle. He looked a white.
“You don’t look so good, fuck face. You’d better go to the teacher’s lounge and sit down for awhile.”
“That’s the sickest thing I ever heard. You were a bunch of sadistic killers. How could they do that to another human being?”
This was a logical summation on his part that I hadn’t anticipated. I guess my threats did confirm his left-wing fantasies of us raping, pillaging, and burning. Fuck him.
“And I’ll tell you one more thing fuck face: the war’s not over. It’ll never be over until you pussies pay for what you did.”
“Mr. McClonchie? Jack?”
Father Tiller had come up behind us without me noticing. McClonchie was too shocked to notice.
“Mr. McClocnchie? Are you all right? Assembly is about to start.”
“I’ll be…right there…Father Tiller.”
The fucker was having a hard time getting his words out.
“Jack, may I ask what you and Mr. McClonchie were discussing?”
“It was history, Father Tiller, history.”
I had to get over to the gravel pit near Hollister to meet Bob Shaw and see the tractors he wanted me to sell. Setting McClonchie straight had taken longer than I thought. Anytime you’re enjoying yourself, time flies.
I turned the big Chevy out of the driveway and left onto the Carmel Valley Road. As I started down the road I could see father Tiller and McClonchie by the trees on the edge of the teacher’s parking lot and McClonchie seemed to have his head down.
It was about four miles to Highway 1, turn right, and over the top of Carmel Hill. I was heading down toward the Monterey Bay and it was glorious morning. There were Monterey pines along the hillside cuts that we had supplied to the project ten years before when my family was in the nursery business. They were thirty feet or taller now.
Down through Seaside, the big V-eight was purring and then onto Fort Ord, where I had been stationed once almost ten years before. As I drove past the rifle ranges on my left I could hear the cap-like pop of the M-16’s as the trainees were learning basic marksmanship. The gunfire was music. The staccato rattle of small arms fire evoked memories of jungle fighting.
I’m a big bore man myself. When I had first gone in the Army, we had trained with the M-14. This was a full size main battle rifle that was the successor to the fabled M-1 Garand of WWII and Korea fame. The major differences were a detachable twenty-round magazine, (as opposed to the eight-round ‘clip’ of the M-1) the adoption of the medium powered 7.62 NATO cartridge as a replacement for the high-powered 30.06 round, and a fully automatic fire mode. Though the M-14 round was shorter, and therefore lighter (theoretically enabling a rifleman to carry more ammo) ballistic efficiency meant that the 7.62 was a very effective killer out to 600 meters.
Compared to the smaller, lighter M-16, the M-14 was a load. But it was the most magnificent and accurate killing device ever made for an Infantryman. It was also rugged and reliable, a fact not lost on the Marines who died during the border battles of 1967 when their M-16’s jammed during heavy action. The Marines had given up their M-14’s in a rapid replacement without adequate training and orientation with the new weapon. The M-14’s action was like that of a brutal rock crusher. The M-16 was like a precision watch movement in comparison. Army units, who’d had a head start with the transition to the ‘plastic fantastic’, as the M-16 was referred to by the troops, had already learned that the weapon had to be kept fastidiously clean.So why did so many Marines have to learn the hard way with cartridge case heads braking off, thereby jamming their weapon as their position were being assaulted by Commie hordes? Why were so many of them later found dead with a cleaning rod jammed down the barrel of their weapon in a futile attempt to punch a broken cartridge case out of the chamber.
Well, you could put the blood of these troops on the hands of Robert Strange McNamara, the Secretary of Defense. He was one of the ‘whiz kids’ who’d turned around Ford Motor Company and was brought into the cabinet by Jack Kennedy. McNamara thought he could run the Defense Department by accounting statements much the way he ran FoMoCo. The M16 had a radically new design for using the gas from the propellant charge to cycle the action of the rifle. It meant that the gasses ended up actually in the moving parts of the rifle. It was recognized from the start that cleanliness could be a problem with this approach and a very clean burning powder was specified for loading the 5.56mm cartridges. The powder used for the 7.62 NATO cartridge was dirty by comparison. Yet millions could be saved by the simple expedient of using one powder. I wonder how many lives of how many troops were lost by this one decision?
This was another example of why Democrats should be kept away from anything to do with waging war or defending the country.
I had now cleared the sand dunes of Marina and was getting into the artichoke-covered hills around Castroville. Then the short chute up to Prunedale junction, onto one-o-one, and then the 156 turnoff past the old mission town of San Juan Bautista. I pulled into the road to the gravel quarry about a hundred yards behind Shaw.“Ghost, how’re you doing”, said Shaw sticking out his hand.
He was about six foot tall with sandy-brown, curly hair and a face that most women thought was raffishly attractive. Tall and lanky in a cowboy way. He had inherited one of the prime cattle ranches in this part of California. His father had bought the spread near Paicines in 1944, the year Bob was born. The cattle business had been good so that with the income off of it and some other investments, their life had been comfortable, bordering on wealthy.
As the decades passed, it became harder and harder to make a go off of cattle alone. When his father fell off his horse one day in 1973 of a heart attack, he and Bob were well on their way in trying to diversify into other activities. They were already row-cropping on a joint venture basis with Paul Bertolaro when Bob decided to get into the gravel business by pulling rock out of the portion of the San Benito River that ran through the ranch.
Sitting in front of us were four old beasts of burden. The faded decals on the side of the fuel tanks proclaimed them to be International Harvester Model TD25B bulldozers. They were huge, each weighing in the neighborhood of forty tons with their blades and rippers. Dormant yellow beasts waiting for the life force of charged batteries to make them snort and rattle.
“How did you end up with these?”
“I bought out the gravel operation here about four years ago and moved all of the crushing gear up to our place. We already owned a couple of Cats and so decided to leave these here until we needed ‘em or not. I guess now it’s not.”
“How do they run?”
“You’d probably have to do a little cleaning up and put some TLC into them, but they were fine when we bought ‘em.”
“How much?”
“Twenty-five hundred a piece. I don’t care what you make on top of that. Remember, I’m selling them ‘as-is’.”
“OK. You want an agreement or anything?”
“Nah, your handshake’s good.”
I stayed behind to make some notes. They were rusty as hell but that wasn’t unusual for tractors when they sat outside in the weather, but these were rustier than usual. The tracks looked to be in excellent condition, and all of the pieces, such as guards and covers seemed to be in place.
As I wrote down my notes for each tractor my mind wondered to when I was a kid and you could tell the manufacture of a tractor just by their color. Caterpillars were yellow, John Deere were green. Allis-Chalmers were orange, while Terex’s were a different green from that of the Deeres. And Internationals were cherry red. Nowadays, every bit of industrial equipment was some shade of industrial yellow.
I wrapped up quickly, jumped in the truck and headed for Watsonville. Jimmy Cox at C&N Tractor wanted to see me about a trade they’d just taken. He said it was right up my alley. Why did I have a feeling the joke was on me.When I walked in, Jim was on the phone. That meant I was easy pickings for his asshole partner, Hod Nylandssen. "If you buy anything its cash!" his voice boomed across the show room, causing heads of customers and employees to look first at him and then at me.
“If I don’t owe C&N any money Hod, you don’t have any reason being here. You sure as hell don’t know a damned thing about equipment.”
This brought a few laughs from some of the customers and a suppressed giggle or two from a couple of the employees.
“I see you’re sowing hate and dissension again.” Jimmy had hung up and had walked up behind me. “C’mon let’s go outside.”
“Do me a favor, I know he’s an asshole, but he’s my partner. He’s a real shit bird when he doesn’t like someone and he doesn’t like you. He’ll try to shit on you just to let you know he doesn’t like you. The trouble for him, and for me, is you always end up humiliating him and then he’s a real asshole for the next few days with everyone including me. So when you come over the next time, call me from the payphone up the street and I’ll meet you outside.”
"JC, he ever serve?"
“Naval officer.”
“That explains everything.”
“It truly does.”
We were walking across C&N’s yard past the long rows of red Massey-Ferguson tractors and the bright orange Kubotas. MF was a revered old name in farm equipment, while Kubota had only been imported for the last few years and was still regarded as 'Jap Crap' by the farmers. But the quality of the product was good and the brand was catching on. Jimmy was walking with a limp.
“Leg bothering you again?”
“Yeah, every change of the seasons. Only it’s my foot. My big toe, to be exact.”
“How’d you screw up your big toe? Punji stake? Toe popper?” Jim had been a Marine.
“Nah, we were operating around the Rock Pile and the gooks let us have some 122mm artie from across the DMZ. Got us with air bursts. You know how we did that to them when we’d catch them in the open? It’d really fuck ‘em up. Well, they did it to us that day. We lost a bunch. I got a major fragment right through the toe of my jungle boot and out the sole. They had a hell of a time trying to cut the shoe loose. In the end they just gave up, gave me a lot of painkiller, got hold of the end of the shard with some vice-grips they brought up from the motor pool and pulled it out. There wasn’t enough pain-killer in the world to deaden it. They put a rubber band through the hole so it would drain. I’m sure it was a surgical rubber band, nothing but the best for the green machine. It got infected anyway and they almost had to take my foot off. Three months later I was out on a medical.
We rounded the back corner of the shop and there it was. The most ungainly, awkward looking three-axel paddle wheel scraper I had yet seen in my short career as a tractor trader.
“JC, what the hell is it?”
“How long you been in this business? You don’t recognize fine Caterpillar machinery when you see it?”
I hadn’t been in the business long enough apparently. Before us was an old, WWII vintage, Caterpillar model DW10 scraper. These machines made major contributions to the war effort by building any number of roads and airfields in the Pacific and European theatres. A scraper simply has a bowl that can be lowered, with a scraper blade across the front opening that scrapes dirt up as it’s pulled along by the driven tires, and pushes it up into the bowl until it’s filled. Then the front of the bowl is closed, the entire assembly is lifted up off the ground, and the dirt in the bowl is tranported by the machine to an area where it’s needed as fill. If the material is really loose like sand, the normal action of filling the bowl doesn’t work as well and so a type of scraper called a paddle wheel was developed in which paddles, pulled along by chains, would push the loose material up, into the bowl.
The trouble was, there was never a DW10 paddle wheel. This was some sort of home- made contraption built by someone and driven by a six-cylinder Chevrolet gas engine that was hanging off the front bumper.
“Jim what do you want me to do with this?”
“Buy it from us. Fifteen-hundred and you’ll be able to sell it to one of the strawberry growers for twenty-five hundred.”
“Why don’t you sell it yourself if there’s that much profit.”
“Hod doesn’t see the potential in some of this old iron. That’s why it’s parked back here out of sight. Besides, you helped us out with those Ford Select-o-Matics. I don’t know where you find the buyers for that stuff. You’re apparently a hell of a salesman. Why don’t you go to work for us.”
“And make you an accessory to Murder One? Nyllandssen and I would last one week. Besides, I’ve got a shitty work ethic. Fifteen hundred, huh? Jim, I won’t shit you. I don’t have the cash right now. Give me a week or two.”
“Nah, you’ve got 30 days to pay. Just get it off the property today. I don’t want to hear him moaning about it anymore.”
“Nylladnssen’s not going to agree to that. He’s pissed ‘cause I was late on my account a couple of months ago.”
“You leave him to me. Can you make it go away today? I’m tired of him complaining like a menopausal old woman.”
“If I can leave my truck here without Nylandssen sending me an invoice for storage, I’ll get it out of here right now. It run?”
“Try it, if it doesn’t I’ll get one of the mechanics over here.”
I checked the oil and water, which were up. I adjusted the choke and throttle on the pony motor, turned the magneto switch on, opened the fuel petcock from the tank, and pushed the starter switch. I heard the familiar whine of a Cat starter, there were a few pops and puffs of gas-rich exhaust from the two-cylinder starting engine, too much choke, a quick adjustment, and the pony started to run on its own. These motors didn’t exactly purr. The sound was more like putting a trash can over your head and having four or five people beat on it with baseball bats.
When the pony had warmed up (this was ascertained by putting the back of your fingers on a cylinder head…if you could hold your fingers on it…too cold…if your fingers were almost burned…just right) I opened the clutch, slipped the gear into place, eased the clutch to the main motor in, which started to turn over the big diesel, damned …forgot to check to see if the transmission was in gear, let the main motor turn over for a bit to warm the cylinders, opened the fuel injection pump a notch, slammed the compression release shut, and, blam, the old diesel fired off. This was a lot more work than jumping in your pickup and twisting the key.
I shut the pony down, let the diesel idle to warm up and jumped down off the machine.
“When can I get the paper work from you?”
It was hard to hear each other over the un-muffled engine.
“I’ll put it in an envelope under your windshield wiper. The gate’ll be open until seven tonight. You OK for a ride back?”
“Yeah, I’ll be good Jimmy. Say, I’m still a little pissed that Nylandssen sold that D4 out from under me. I don’t mind taking your step-children off your hands but I need some good gear once in a while.”
“Good point. I’ll take care of you. Thanks for helping me out with this.”
I climbed back up. The needle on the water temperature guage was just starting to move off its stop, and the oil pressure looked good. I put the clutch in, eased the non-synchro gear box into first, and then I remembered.
“What are the brakes like?”
“What?”
“What are the brakes like?” I said, yelling above the exhaust noise.
“They’re a little weak. If you have trouble, use the big brake.”
“Where's that?”
The wind had shifted and the noise was coming right over us. I’d figure out how to activate the big brake, whatever that was, later.
I eased the clutch out and the old girl started to lumber along. At the gate, I turned right onto the Pajaro road and headed west toward Highway 1. About two miles down the road I signaled for a left hand turn onto Hall Road. My plan was to get to A.G. Cox’s place about three miles further on and see if I could park my new acquisition there and bum a ride back to C&N.
I made the left turn all right, no power steering takes upper body strength…a lot of upper body strength, and started on the ramp down when the old girl started to pick up speed. A tap of the brakes produced a slight retarding effect. More pressure produced a little more. The last stab of the brake pedal yielded a little pressure and then it went dead along with the brakes. There’s a sudden exhilaration when the expected result isn’t what you expect. It’s a ‘your balls in your throat' feeling. A field truck carrying artichokes to Castroville was about to turn left in front of me…he had the right-of-way…but my frantic hand waving got his attention at the last minute as I went rumbling through the stop sign. I was picking up speed at a rapid pace and as I glanced down at the tachometer I could see that I was going to over speed the engine. Where the hell was the big brake Jim had mentioned? The tach was right on the red line, the wind was whipping around the windshield so hard my eyes were watering, and I couldn’t see any handle that appeared to operate the big brake. What the…you idiot!
The road straightened out, I wrestled the old girl onto the shoulder and lowered the bowl. The cutting edge started to scrape soil and I started to slow down. Now if my heart would only do the same. Another hundred yards and we would be back on the level but it didn’t matter ‘cause she was almost to a stop now. So I lifted the bowl up to gather a little more speed. A long line of cars had formed behind me and they cautiously passed.
As I pulled up in front of AG’s place, with a cloud of dust from the big brake, AG looked out from his garage and Mrs. Cox looked out from the living room window. He was smiling and waving. Her look was less welcoming. AG had been a railroad engineer and had driven trains. He was retired now and was dabbling buying, repairing, and selling small agricultural tractors that were used in the strawberry fields that dominated the hills around this part of the country. It wasn’t that Mrs. Cox was rude or anything like that; she was just a very stern person.
I left the beast idling because I didn’t want to go through the starting procedure again. AG was half way to me as I jumped down. And Mrs. AG was watching intently from the window.
“Ghost, he said with a grin that was always on his face. What’s the hell is that?”
“A man-killer, almost. Lost the brakes over by the Grange hall. Brought about a quarter of a mile of the shoulder with me.”
“That’s an hermophadite-looking contraption for sure. Is that a stovebolt Chevy hanging off the front bumper? I swear I’ve never seen such a lashup”. He was almost giggling. Mrs. AG, standing on the front porch was not.
“Glenn, I’ve got to get into town!”
“Ghost, come on over to the garage. I’m tuning up the missus’ car.”
We had our heads under the hood when Mrs. Cox walked up, purse in hand.
“Ghost”, she said with a little dip of her head as acknowledgement of my presence. Man she came across as tough. “Glenn, how much longer?”
“Got it right now. There you go. Have a good time. I’m going to visit with Ghost. I’ve got to hear all about who passed that heap of junk off on him. Heh, heh.”
“I was starting to feel a little ridiculous about the scraper. I glanced over at it and had to admit it was a ridiculous-looking piece if rusty iron.
“Glenn, remember, you promised!”
Off she went backing down the driveway. The Buick didn’t quite sound right. It was a V-six though and they had a different sound from the V-eights I was used to.
“C’mon let’s have a cup of coffee and I want to look that lashup.”
We were hardly up the back steps when Mrs. AG came rattling, banging, and smoking back into the driveway.
“Glenn! she yelled from the open window, What did you do to my car? It barely runs and I’m late.”
We attacked the under hood of the Buick like an Indy 500 pit crew. The engine was indeed barely running, and misfiring so badly it was about to pop free of the motor mounts. I spotted it first, a loose vacuum line. I pointed it out to AG, he popped it onto its fitting, and the old girl settled right down to a purr. He slammed the hood down and Mrs. AG made a second try at getting into town.
“I know what you’re thinking. She can be pretty hard and demanding, but she’s been a good wife, raised me three sons, and she’s protective of what we’ve built. The house is always clean and the food’s good. Besides, when we’re alone, she’s a different person. Remember that old song? If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, make an ugly woman your wife? Bev and I are kinda’ like that.”
“She doesn’t think much of my tractor friends. Thinks you fella’s are a bunch of gypsies, con men, and outright bandits. She finds you the least unattractive of all of them.” he said with a roaring laugh. “What do you intend to do with that pile of junk?”
“I was wondering if I could park it here and get a ride from you back to C&N. I’m going to see if Bertolaro will carry it on his low-bed over to Hollister. So you think I got taken.”
“Goodness gracious, no. But I can’t let you park it here. That promise the missus referred to is that I don’t let my friends park their junk on the property any more. They never come to pick their machines up and she thinks it makes the place look like a junkyard. She was way ahead of you. Back up and pull it over to the other side of the road in that large empty place. That’s Sanchez’s property and he’ll do me a favor. Every berry grower around here will drive past it. It will of course mess up my missus’ view out the front window, but we’re living up to the letter of the promise I made.” A mischievous grin came across his face.
“C’mon, let’s get that cup of coffee. How much you want for it?”
“JC thought it should sell for twenty-five hundred. I honestly don’t know what its worth. It’s got no brakes. I’m paying C&N fifteen-hundred.”
“Tell you what Ghost, I’ll sell that to one of these berry growers for thirty-five hundred. I’ll keep five hundred for myself. What do you think? Besides, scrapers never have brakes; you just use the big brake.”
So, everybody knew the joke about the big brake but me. Life could be humiliating at times.
We started for the fourth time to go for coffee when a horn honk from a ’68 Cadillac El Dorado startled us. The car pulled into the driveway and shut down. It sounded like a NASCAR stocker. The doors opened and out climbed two black guys. The passenger looked as big as an NFL lineman, which I later found out he had been, and the driver was tall, lanky to the point of being skinny, who had on an Hawaiian made out of silk, black pants, and black, high-top US Keds basketball shoes that had gone out of style years before.“Hey! Mr. Cox. What you say?”
“Henry. Ellis. I’m just fine. We were just going to have a cup of coffee. Want to join us? This here’s Ghost.”
“Howdy, Ghost. This is Ellis McComber and I’m Nigger Robinson. What you say?”
“I’d say it’s a delicate moment when a black gentleman calls himself a nigger.”
Henry and Ellis thought this was uproariously funny.
“Ellis, we got us here another person feeling white man’s guilt for slaves they never owned.”
Out of the corner of my eye, AG was looking down at the ground and barely suppressing a grin. This was probably some sort of routine they put on at the expense of any whites.
“All right” AG said, probably feeling my discomfort, “Henry, you and Ellis lay off Ghost. Damn! Let’s get that coffee.”
Henry was the only black tractor trader I ever ran into. He was one of the biggest traders in the Bay Area. He also ran one of the loosest operations I ever encountered. He was, finally, the most optimistic, upbeat man I ever met.
“Ellis and me are going over to Hollister to look at a D7. So we thought we’d come by for a visit and see if you had anything for sale Mr. Cox. None of that farm shit, but if you had a nice dozer or two, we’d be interested.”
“Henry, I’ve got nothing today. Check back with me in a week. One of the Messican berry growers says he’s going to trade me a D4. Maybe you could take it off my hands.”
I got in the truck after AG had dropped me off, opened the envelope to make sure the paperwork was there, and just got to the gate when, in my mirror, I saw Nylandssen waving at me to come back. Fuck him.
It took me about twenty-five minutes to get over to Santa Rita. This was a little town in the lettuce fields just north of Salinas on the old concrete portion of one-o-one that had been built back in the twenties. There were a few old clapboard houses, a few more trailer homes, a truck stop, and the Nite Owl Café.The Nite Owl was where some of the farmers, a few of the old truckers, some of the field workers, and a smattering of locals would hang out. One of the locals I was looking for was Matthew Kaptatanisc, who everyone called Cap.
“Hey, Cholly.”
“Cap my name's Jack, not Charlie.”
“Hell, Ghost, everyone’s Cholly to me. Cup of coffee?”
I drank more coffee in this business. I’ll bet my insides were brown.
“Cap? Where can I sell some big dozers?”
“How big.”
“TD25 big. They got blades and rippers and the undercarriages look real good.”
“They run?”
“I didn’t hear ‘em, they’ve been sitting a while. But they were running when they were parked.”
How much?
“Eighty-five hundred a piece. There’s five hundred a tractor for you if you bring me a deal.”
“That’s pretty cheap, Cholly. You sure they’re OK? I think I know who’ll buy them. I’ll call you tonight.”
Back in the truck. One of the farmers I had met during one of my Smith Place forays had told me about a D6 for sale. Perpetual motion seemed to be its own reward in this business. I mad a call to Johhny K and he agreed to buy it. By this time, it was getting late and as I pulled into the driveway to the house it was almost early evening. I crested the top of the driveway and a Monterey County Sheriff’s car came into view. That car had brought Deputy Patrick Devoir to the house and he was talking to AM at the back door. We’d known Pat for years. He was a tall black man who had been gaining weight at an alarming rate. He had an incredibly powerful singing voice and was much in demand for weddings and such. He was a very charismatic figure and Clint Eastwood used him for bit parts in any movies he did locally. Pat used to come over when the boys were little and let them turn on the lights and siren in his cruiser. He wasn’t here to entertain the boys. He and AM turned when they heard me. The look on her face told me I was in deep Kim Chi.
The back door almost came off its hinges, she’d slammed it so hard. Pat had the sort of grin on his face that one gets when they’ve just witnessed marital discord.
“Ghost, I need to talk to you.”
“Mind walking down to the barn with me. I’ve got to check on that bull calf.”
“You caused quite a scene at the school this morning. My boss thought, since I knew you and all, that it’d be best if I handled this. The school doesn’t want to make a big deal out of it, but they can’t have you going in and threatening the teachers.”
Best to try a little dumbness.
“Pat, what’re you talking about? Who’d I threaten?”
“Ghost, don’t make this hard on me. McClonchie almost had a heart attack by the time you were done with him. They had to send him home early. What the hell is a Korean enema?”
“Pat, he’s an old burned out hippie. Those guys have done so much dope their reality’s warped. A Korean enema sound like some faggot fantasy he had. I’ve got no idea what he’s talking about.”
“He said it’s some sick torture you witnessed fighting with the Koreans in the Nam. He says you’re mad at him because he was anti-war. He said you’re mad over a history lesson that Aug told you about. He said you scared the shit out of him.”
“He’s a pussie. Anybody could scare the shit out of him. We talked about the lesson plan and that I’d volunteer to come in and do a session with the kids about the war from the perspective of someone who had been there. That’s all.”
Pat wasn’t buying it entirely.
“Ghost, the war’s over. Yah got to forget about it. It’s done.” This was the second time I heard this today. Don’t react.
“You serve?”
“Yeah, Air Force.”
“How long?”
“Six months.”
“Six months?”
“Got out on a medical. Blood pressure, some heart problems.”
“Pat, if you couldn’t serve in the Air Force, how can you be a deputy sheriff?”
“Heh, heh, sheriffing is ninety-five percent mental. I work over here on the Peninsula and in Carmel Valley. A drunk driver is about all I ever encounter. Petty crime, that sort of thing. You know, I spoke with McClonchie over the phone, and then I went out to the school and spoke with Father Tiller. He didn’t hear what the two of you were talking about, he only said that McClonchie was real upset. I kinda wondered around by the teacher’s parking lot. Guess what I found out? McClonchie had scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast. Whatever was in the lesson plan you discussed with him wasn’t very agreeable, heh.” Pat was impressed with his own wit.
“Pat, look at how big I am, and look at how big McClonchie is. I couldn’t hurt him.”
“Ghost, I think you could hurt him. You’re pretty intense. You’re a hardass. I’ve seen you at baseball games and at the rodeo. You’re tough. You got a mean streak, too, for all of the hippies and anybody you don’t think represents America as the way you want it. Ghost those people have right to be here, too. Chill out. You don’t like to be criticized either. You’re wound tighter than a spring. You give me the creeps just looking at you and I’m three times bigger.”
“As I said, this is mostly a mental job. I think the coversation with McClonchie went pretty much as he described it. I think you’re pissed off at him because of what he told the kids about the war. If you made up the part about a battery acid enema, that was damned creative and it worked. That guy’s probably having nightmares about his guts running out his ass. But you’ve put me and my boss in a really bad situation. My boss is wondering if you’re some psycho back from the war that’s going to go nuts and start killing people. McClonchie wants you under psychiatric observation. I’m looking at a combat vet whose body language suggests he’s always about to launch an attack. So I’m stuck with the responsibility of recommending to my boss whether some sort of referral should be made to the DA or the situation was blown out of proportion by some hysterical nancy-boy of a teacher. What do I do Ghost?”
“I won’t have anybody talking bad about the war or the troops. I’ll set the record straight every time I hear us called baby-killers. I won’t tolerate any disrespect of the guys who fought there. But, I’ll stay away from McClonchie. School’s almost out anyway. Besides he won’t be there next year.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s a lot of shit going on at that school that you don’t know about. There’s a group of parents who’ve gotten together to demand Father Tiller’s resignation along with that of the teaching staff.”
The slight look of doubt and skepticism in Pat’s eyes told me that I’d probably introduced enough questions as to undermine the moral certainty of what McClonchie had told him.
“Ghost, I hope you’re not lying to me. It’d be a good idea if you stayed away from McClonchie, and the school for that matter. I’ll tell my boss that things are blown out of proportion and that I’ll keep an eye on you. Did the Koreans really do that sort of thing to their prisoners?”
“Pat, where do you think they’d get a turkey baster in the middle of the jungle?”
“What was that all about with Pat and what the hell happened at the school today? You, shit! They’re threatening not to let the Billy back in next year because they think you’re going to go psycho and kill all the teachers. Don’t you ever think of anybody or anything but that damned war? The war’s over. Jack, get over it!”
Three times today I’d been told to get over a war that was over. That’s it.
“You’re wrong AM. The war’s not over. It’ll never be over. There are fifty-eight thousand ghosts out there asking for revenge. Not to mention all of the amputees, quadriplegics, mental cases, and other guys who’ll never be right. The war won’t be over until every last commie-pinko, dope-smoking, sex drugs rock and roll good time liberal shithead is made to pay for what they did. That’s when the war’ll be over.”
“Jack, sometimes you scare me. You’re so angry about things. Your hatred for anybody you don’t consider to be American…I don’t know how to put it. Jim McClonchie is really upset. He had to go home early. There’s that much hatred in you that you scared the devil out of him. And yet, I never see this with me or the kids. You’ve been a good husband and father. But what you threatened McClonchie with is perverted. It’s sick. It’s disgusting. Is it true? Is that what they did?”
“Who? What?”
“The Koreans are who” her voice rising “and a turkey baster full of battery acid is what!”
Might was well try it a second time. “AM, where do you think they’d get a turkey baster in the middle of the jungle?”
The light of recognition came on in her eyes and her body un-tensed. Things would be all right for the moment. I was going to have to deal with the fact that lying to my wife was becoming easier and easier. I was, by my own actions, becoming a one-man show. If I couldn’t make things work out it wouldn’t be good for me in the end.
“I didn’t think so.”
“Are they really threatening not to let the Billy back in?”
“Father Tiller hinted at it. I hinted in return that my mother might reconsider the fifty thousand she pledged for the building fund for the multi-purpose room. Father Tiller can be a real shit at times. But we’ve still got to pay the tuition by the end of this school year.”
AM could be real tough in her own way. Father Tiller thought he could work a threat on AM. But she’d served his ass up to him on a platter. She was good in a clinch. Too bad she and I couldn’t seem to function as a team.
“We’ll get it done AM. I got the house paid up on a deal I did this afternoon. I’m going to go see the kids. How’s dinner coming?”
When she told she hadn’t started it yet I decided it wasn’t the time to get into an argument with her. Coward. We’d had enough drama for one night.
“I’ll be back out in a bit.”
“Jack? A guy name Cap called. He said it’s important for you to call him tonight. Here’s his number.”
“Daddy!”
“Alex! What’re you doing?”
“I’m reading Green Eggs and Ham. Can you help me? Mommy’s really mad at you. She said you scared Mr.McClonchie. You did something really bad to him? Was it because he said you kill babies?”
Smart girl.
“Alex, your mother and I are going to be all right. I’m going to see the boys. You keep reading and then I’ll be back down and you can read to me.” Kids hate it when their parents fight. Our kids were hating it more than most had to lately.
“Aug, Billy, you guys up here?”
“Hey, Jack” in chorus.
“Boy, did you mess up Mr. McClonchie today. The whole school’s talking about it. Is it true what he said you did?”
“First, what about homework?”
“I’ve got a math test tomorrow. Can you test me?”
“Sure, Billy, what about you Aug?”
“Nothing. Mr. MacClonchie went home early. You scared him pretty bad. Father Tiller took over but didn’t have any idea what to do about homework and so we don’t have any.”
“You guys getting any heat over this?”
“Nah, everybody thinks you’re cool. Except for Father Tiller and some of the teachers. Are they going to throw us out of school? I’m a little worried about that.”
“Your mother took care of that. You’ve heard about us not paying the tuition but you let me take care of that. You just have to finish off the year with good grades and Aug you have to graduate. You two take care of your end and I’ll take care of mine.”
“Mom took care of it?”
“Yeah, she can be pretty good when she wants to be.” The boys had come increasingly to resent their mother over things like making dinner late every night and not getting them to school on time. This was a chance for them to see her in a positive light.
“Mr. McClonchie’s a jerk. None of the kids like him except for Susie. He spends all of class talking about when he was a hippie. When anything happens, that he doesn’t want anybody to know about, he tells us that if we tell our parents it’ll our word against his and nobody would believe a kid’s word over a teacher’s.”
“Like what, Aug? What’s happened he doesn’t want anybody to know about?”
“Eddie Flood found a cellophane bag on the floor under Mr. McClonchie’s desk. It was full of dried grass. Sam Heartly said his older brother had something like that and it was marijuana. Mr. McClonchie went bananas and said we weren’t supposed to talk about it.”
So, old habits died hard. Once a pot-head, always a pot-head.
“I’m glad you told me. There are going to be some things going on at the school that are going to be nasty. I want you two to keep your heads down, OK. You just concentrate on getting good grades and the rest of this will work itself out.”
“Aug, put this time to good use by going over your history. Bill let’s look at those test questions. Hey, Aug: go down stairs and see if your mother has any ground round thawed. Tell her to make some patties and I’ll throw ‘em on the grill. If she does, put some charcoal in the Weber and start it going. That is, if you want to eat before midnight.”
“You got it, Jack.”
“Cap? You wanted me to call?”
“Cholly, my friend wants to buy the TD25’s. He wants to look at them tomorrow. He’s going to bring his inspector and if they’re any good they’ll take them. Now, don’t you forget your old friend Cap.”
“Don’t worry Cap. I’ll take care of you. What time?”
“Nine o’clock.”
“Cap, did you tell them they haven’t run in awhile?”
“Cholly, they said they would do whatever it took and you don’t have to worry. They just want you to meet them.”
“They got names?”
“Ernie Tavernetti and the inspector’s Gene Reilly.”
“Ernie was a slightly-built older guy of about fifty who stood about five foot five. The inspector, Gene was about six foot tall, beefy, and about the same age. He had on white overalls that seemed to be the hallmark of equipment supervisors who worked for large companies.”
“When was the last time these things ran?”
“Couple of years ago.”
“You going to guarantee them or anything.”
“Nope. They’re being sold as-is right where they sit.”
“They kind of walked around them, giving them a once over.”
“Did you guys bring any batteries and jumper cables? We can try to get them going off my truck if you want.”
“Tell you what, you leave me and Gene to it. We’ve got what we need. Where can we meet later.”
“I’m going into Hollister. What don’t we meet at Sambos? How long?”
“An hour. See you there.”
“I didn’t think an hour was long enough to inspect four large dozers, but they knew their business.”
“How’s it going Mr. Bertalero?”
“Fine Ghost. Your wife tell you I wanted to see you?”
“Yeah, but I was coming over anyway this morning.”
“You got business here?”
“I’ve got some customers looking at Shaw’s dozers over at the old quarry.”
.He grinned in a way that I sensed wasn’t complimentary toward me.
“So that’s the equipment he wanted you to sell for him?”
“Anything wrong?”
“Bob’s got a strange sense of humor at times, that’s all. Those tractors are junk. It’s his way of saying that he doesn’t think much of you as a tractor trader, that’s all. He went to fancy schools and all as a kid, and so be can be a little high-falutin’ at times. I’ve seen him do this sort of thing before.”
Bertalero must have seen a reaction from me that alarmed him.
“Anyway, relax. We’re all the butt of a joke at one time or the other. You’re new at this and so you aren’t able to see the insults coming yet. Anyway, I’ve got some real business for you to do. There’s an auction down in San Diego. Want to go down there and bid on some equipment for me? I’ll make it worth your time.”
“Sure.”
He gave me the auction brochure and we worked out how we’d pay for the equipment if we were the successful bidders.
“Your wife, does she cook?” Cooking was one of AM’s stellar accomplishments. She was absolutely inspired at it. Meals were a true pleasure if you didn’t eating like Mexicans…at ten-thirty at night. “She’s a good cook.”
“We’re running onions down at the shed. Go get yourself a sack. Tell her to go easy on them. I grow a hot onion.”
Mutt and Jeff were sitting in a booth when I got to Sambo’s. They’d already had a cup of coffee and so they had made one of the fastest equipment inspections or record.
“How’d it go?”
“I think they’re going to be all right for us. Cap said you want eighty-five hundred a piece for them, can you do anything about the price?”
I’m absolutely desperate for cash. Here are two guys asking me how much of six thousand dollars of profit per tractor I want to give up. I could blow the sale here. I needed to make a sale and make it quick. They might tell me they needed to think about it. I could overplay my hand.
“Sorry Ernie, I’m hard on the price.”
“They’re not in that good of shape but they’ll work for what we’ve got in mind. We want to move them starting tomorrow. Can you meet me at the Nite Owl at two o’clock. I’ll pay you then. Bring an invoice and bills of sale?”
“How’re you going to pay?”
“Cash.”
Ernie was by himself when I walked into the Nite Owl. I gave him the invoices I’d made and the bills of sale. He questioned why I had written the words ‘as-is’ on the invoices.
“I told you Ernie, that’s the way I’m selling them.”
“Oh, yeah, I remember, anyway, it’s not important. Let’s go out to my car so I can pay you.”
There were 260 one-hundred dollar bills. I counted them twice, shook hands with him and headed for Paicines.
Shaw was in his office.
“Bob, how much do you want for those junk tractors at the quarry?” I could see him tense up a little and his eyes had narrowed. Go slowly.
“I told you. Twenty-five hundred a piece.”
“You and I know they’re junk. I’ll give you a thou each.” You always had to be careful with wealthy people. Even more careful with people who were wealthy once. Money didn’t always have the same value t them as it has for ordinary people. Sometimes, if pushed the wrong way, they’ll fuck with you because they can afford to.
“What do you want them for?”
“I’m going to do a rebuild on them. You know fix ‘em up and paint them. Figure I can sell them for five thousand each.”
I almost saw a faint smile on his face. What was that about?
“I told you. Twenty-five hundred.”
“That’s OK, Bob, I’m not interested. I’ll be seeing you.” Please, oh please.
“Ghost! Come on back here. Fifteen hundred each and not a penny less. How’re you paying?”
The joke’s on you, fucker.
I stopped by the Nite Owl on the way home but there was no Cap. I wanted to pay him for putting me together with Ernie. I’d have to find him in the morning. You always want to promptly reward your bird dogs.
Her eyes went wide when I gave her the nine-hundred dollars to take to the school to pay the tuition in the morning. I gave her another grand for other expenses and then lied about how much I made on the deal. I had cut a fat hog. Even with giving Cap a couple of grand, there was eighteen thousand left over after paying Shaw off. If I told AM how much I’d actually made she’d figure out real fast how to spend it.
All in all, it was not a bad day’s work.
posted by Ghost | 4/02/2006 11:00:00 AM
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