The Lankville Daily News

Dick Oakes, Jr.

It was a garage made of unpainted concrete blocks. The foreman stood there with a clipboard. He was a little, good-looking man– probably chased a lot of tail. Probably caught a lot of it.

He pointed to the dishwasher. “Show me how to hook that up,” he said.

I walked around to the back of the machine. Drain lines and wires hung carelessly out the back. I had never owned a dishwasher, certainly never looked at the back of one.

“You hook up the lines there and then you hook up the wires,” I said feebly.

He thought about that and made a mark on the clipboard.

“Very good, Mr. Oates,” he said. “That was the correct answer!”

I couldn’t figure on any of it.

They gave me a tan jumpsuit and put me on a truck that day. There was a patch on the breast. It said “MR. OATS”. I didn’t correct it none.

Barn was the driver. He was trying to eat an ear of corn, trying to steer and shift at the same time. It was all hell ridiculous.

We stopped at an intersection in a suburban neighborhood. “Here’s where you get out,” Barn said. He spit some corn out the window. “You got these addresses.” He handed me a typed sheet of paper. “I’ll meet you over at Pondicherry Park on about five. There’s an area of the park where the land starts to shift gently upwards and then drops off into a series of hills and dells. I’ll be on in there somewheres.”

I didn’t say anything. Who knew what the hell to say? There was no merit to any of it.

I rang the bell of the first place. Little brick rancher, well-tended. There was a sprinkler on the lawn flying around erratically. Water was spraying all over the place. Some pinwheels in the garden spun in the wind.

It was a brunette that answered. She was wearing a little sleeveless number. There was a pin over her ample breast. It was a bear playing with some balloons.

“Do you like my pin?” she asked. She was a little coquette– there was no damned doubt on that one.

“I don’t understand it,” I said.

“Oh.” There was a pause. “Well, the dishwashing machine is in the kitchen.” She seemed disappointed.

“It won’t rinse,” she said. “It idles for a long time as though it’s waiting for…something to happen. You know what that’s like, when you’re…just waiting? Waiting all the time?”

I took her right there. Right on the dishwasher. Later, it was the staircase and then back down to the dishwasher and then upstairs in bed.

We were lying there. “You’re not like my husband,” she said. “He has an advanced degree in economics.”

“Yeah? Fuck that shit,” I said. I was getting a little cocky, I admit to it.

“You’re so…coarse,” she said. She leaned towards me and I got another good look at the cans. They were round and full. It was something.

“I guess the only economics we’re gonna’ need to worry about is how much it’s gonna’ cost to dry clean that blouse of yours.”

“I guess,” she said. “Though that isn’t the cleverest comeback I’ve ever heard.”

“Skip it.”

It was getting on towards five. Ol’ Barn would be standing around in those hills and dells, wondering where the hell Oats was. I didn’t even know where the park was– couldn’t even have guessed on the name of the town.

“Did you still want me to fix the dishwasher?” I asked. I started putting the jumpsuit back on. She tore the comforter off the bed and shoved it into a hamper. We had really worked the damn thing over.

“Can you come back?” she asked. She pulled her panties slowly up her legs. It was excruciating.

“I don’t know.” I thought about going back to the concrete garage. Thought about all the angry calls that had probably come in. I pictured the little foreman wandering around in a sedan, looking for Oats.

“I may have to keep going,” I said finally.

“Well, then…” she said. She was getting bent out of shape about it. “You can go out the back door. The kitchen door. Servicemen go out the kitchen door.” She stormed out. I didn’t see her again.

I walked across the yard and through some hedges and into another backyard. A guy was back there cooking a big ham over a grill. There were pinwheels all over his garden too. Who knew what to make of it?

“Hey! This is a private yard!” he whined.

“Work on your big ham, Joe, I’m leaving.”

He had some beers on a picnic table. I nicked one on the way out.

Then, I kept walking.

Dick Oakes, Jr.

Sammy Cummings was a big-time small motel girl wrestling promoter primarily working the Southern circuit. He was known as “the Cylinder”, I suppose because of his squat brick shithouse appearance though I never heard no account of the origins of the handle.

Sammy was going to be touring the Outlands for about a week, in search of the next great small motel girl wrestling star. “They always come from the Outlands,” he said. We were driving at a steady 90 MPH clip along a straight desert stretch; the air-conditioning was running and Sammy and I had tied a few on and were both feeling pretty good. “How do you account for them all coming from the Outlands?” I asked. Sammy seemed confused by the question and didn’t answer; I didn’t make nothing of it. Then he turned on the radio full blast and some loud, base-heavy nonsense filled up the car, burying the comfortable hum of the air-conditioning.

We were heading out to a parcel of land deep in the desert that Sammy had put a trailer on some years back. I was going to be staying there for a week, looking after the place. It was going to be nice, I thought, to have a regular place for awhile, if even for a week and to ditch that cardboard shitcase that passed for my luggage under a bed or in a closet.

About an hour passed, then Sammy turned off the main highway and onto a dirt road framed on either side by split-rail fences. After awhile, the fences disappeared and it was just open desert land. The trailer sat by itself on a flat barren parcel pounded by the sun. Off in the distance were the Sierra Pondicherry Mountains.

Sammy threw open the door of the sedan with the motor still running. He unlocked the trailer– a 44-footer set up on concrete pillars and battered and dented to hell.

“Just look after them cactuses in the back fields. See that they don’t lean,” he said. I couldn’t make no sense of the request but before I had a chance to clarify, he threw his stubby frame back into the driver’s set. I barely had time to grab my suitcase. “You’ll find everything,” he called through the window. “See you in a week.” And with that, he squealed off, kicking up dust and sand.

I walked inside. The place was surprisingly clean and spartan. A bedroom in the rear with one long window, covered by a curtain in floral patterns, a little kitchen, little breakfast nook and a small living room with a couch and a chair. Sammy had propped a portable television set on the chair and there was a note taped to the top, scrawled on a piece of scratch paper. This TV ain’t no good but you can get one or two stations. Open the box for a laugh. I looked around and found a little black plastic snap box that had fallen to the floor. It said The Golden Tool on the front in gilt letters and when you popped it open there was a plastic novelty wrench beneath which was printed– For the Man with Tight Nuts. I pictured Sammy getting a big kick out of that and showing it to just about damn near everybody but it didn’t appeal to me much. I closed it and put it back on the TV.

The days passed. I ate two meals– one in the mornings, another as the sun was setting, took long walks in the daytime, drank during the night, watched a couple of half-scrambled channels from the east, read a couple of Cust Shirley novels that I had picked up in a secondhand bookshop in some forgotten town and checked on the cacti (they weren’t leaning at all, so I figured Sammy’d be alright with it). The nights were long and silent– occasionally you could hear a Super Coyote off in the distance. There are no characters I thought and I realized how sick I was of the god damn characters. No assholes screaming down motel corridors at 2 AM, no crazy women, no scam artists, no hustlers. I began to feel some anxiety at the thought of Sammy’s return– I wanted to stay here awhile longer at least and maybe forever.

On the fifth day, I was sitting in a lawnchair out front near dusk, just staring off at the sky and the sunset. You’ve become some kind of nature nut, Oakes I thought. Indeed, I had passed many hours this way. I had found a pair of peepers in one of Sammy’s drawers and had been glassing the mountains and the distant strange fauna; not looking at anything in particular, just admiring it all generally and aimlessly.

I had gone inside for a minute– you had to get out of the sun occasionally, even at dusk. When I returned, armed with a mixed drink from Sammy’s bar, I saw some dust kicking up in the direction of the highway turn-off and was instantly gripped with the fear that the Cylinder was returning early from his Outland sojourn.

I put the glasses on the spot where the road sloped upward and waited. The sun had nearly disappeared behind the Pondicherries and it was growing dark.

A black pickup came into view. It wasn’t Sammy, I knew that right away. The truck was swerving all over the place, crushing the living Christ out of the road border scrub bushes and kicking up all hell in dust and dirt. I glassed the cab and the driver came into view. He was an old man with trimmed but wild white hair being thrown all over the place by the wind. He had a crazed expression on his face and seemed to be screaming out the window backwards at some helpless bush or creature he had just crushed on the way by. I glassed the passenger seat. There was a long leather case. It was either a pool cue or a shotgun and I was aiming on the latter.

I scurried inside and locked the door to the trailer. I seated myself quietly in the breakfast nook, where I could watch the man’s approach through the drawn curtains. I could hear him now– he was cursing maniacally– piercing the silence. I had been through Sammy’s closet and the couple of drawers in the bedroom and I knew he had left no weapon. It didn’t matter none anyway– I didn’t have no stomach for firearms, had always dodged them.

It was dark now and the man’s headlights lit up the land surrounding the trailer– passing right over me. But then they were gone– he had continued on towards the back field. He was on no road now– just driving by chance across open land. He came to a stop a hundred yards down. I tried to glass him from the living room. For a minute, I couldn’t see anything but then I found his headlights. He had stumbled out of the truck, leaving the motor running and the lights on. He had a shotgun across his shoulder.

YOU GOD DAMN SONOFAWHORE I heard him yell and the darkness was again pierced by the man unloading the shotgun into one of Sammy’s cacti. Still cursing madly, he returned to the cab and I glassed a box of shells in his hand.

LOUSY MOTHERFUCK JERKOFF DESERT SLUT he screamed and unloaded again. I could see the smoke off the gun. He was breathing heavily. FUCKING CRACKED BROWN BULLSHIT. His voice was now high-pitched and frenzied and he had torn off his western shirt revealing only a sweat-drenched tank underneath.

IN HELL, YOU ASSHOLE. IN HELL he screamed, firing off a couple more shots. But then, suddenly, he seemed to lose the heart for it. He dropped the shotgun in the dust and leaned, exhausted, against the running truck. A good fifteen minutes passed with him slumped there, his breathing eventually settling and his head slowly rising. And then he got back in the cab, leaving the shotgun.

He drove slowly by. Driving straight and with purpose. I watched him disappear over the slope towards the highway.

***

Sammy and I were standing out by the cacti. “He must have shot it about twenty times,” I said, pointing to the wounds.

“Who the hell was he?” Sammy asked. He couldn’t believe it none and I had nothing to tell him.

“Jesus H. Christ on a pig,” Sammy finally said, spitting off into the dust.

He drove me back to town later that day.