“Every problem has a sound,” Phil explained, hood up and the engine running, leaning down to sample the rattle and knock up close. The wheeze and thump. “And,” he added, “a feel.” Holding a heavy, wood handle screwdriver in the palm of his right hand, he lightly rested the tip here and there around the top of our struggling engine. “See that” he said, waving me in close. “Hops twice, stops, then hops twice again. There’s your problem. Easy fix. Nothing serious. Ten bucks out the door, labor and parts. You’ll be back on the road in an hour, hour and a half tops.”
The whole year we lived in that little New Hampshire town we were frequent customers of Kimball Brothers’ Garage. Lucky for us it was right across the street from our apartment. We’d wake, most mornings, hearing the two ancient doors banging, shrieking up. Soon after, we’d hear Art and Phil singing. Art, who was seventy-three, usually took lead in the duo. Phil, who was older but wouldn’t say by how much, liked to join in on harmony but never at the same place twice. Sometimes he’d hold off until the song was almost completely over. That always cracked them both up. They’d been running the place for more than forty years together. It was an old-fashioned bump shop. Dent a fender, a side panel, and they’d pop it off, coax it back into shape, then paint it to match. Parts that fell off and got too bunged up to be put right, they replaced with ones scrounged at a scrapyard, no extra charge for their time or trouble. They both wore snap-front, head-to-toe denim coveralls to work every day. Clean, worn thin, patched and faded uniforms of their trade. Phil had his name fat stitched in bright red block letters on the front of his. Art favored a looping cursive script in a strong green with yellow highlights.
We only had the one car, and it had to last us until I was finished with school.
I told them that every time something went wrong. That and how we were always broke, what with me going to grad school and Annie working a low-paying job in an office. Art figured we could probably drive it for a good six months. Phil said we’d be lucky to get four out of it. Each time they did another discount, stopgap fix for me. one of them would point to the sign up over their desk: “Father Time don’t lose many fights. Fix it right or get good walking shoes. You’ll need them. Art and Phil.”
Back then I wanted to be a high school English teacher. With Vietnam finally over, and all of a sudden free to do what I wanted, graduate school sounded like the ticket. I was admitted at the last minute and provisionally. “You have to start with the Milton Seminar,” a counselor explained. “Pass that and we can get you enrolled full time.” Milton? I wanted to read Mark Twain and William Faulkner, Ken Kesey and Kurt Vonnegut, not some long-dead Puritan poet. My goal was to teach kids coming up what my best teachers, all two of them, taught me: question authority and don’t let anybody else do your thinking for you. But, Milton it was.
“No grades until end of term,” the old guy told us on the first day of class. “Do your assignments, don’t be late, not for class, not with your work, and don’t ask me how you’re doing. I will meet with each of you privately once the semester is over. I will, at that time, tell you how you did, give you your grade, and let you know if you have what it takes to continue on in graduate school. To become a scholar.” Scholar?
He counted commas, this old man. That was his claim to fame. He counted the commas in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Ten thousand and some lines of comma counting. Tallied them up and wrote a book about it. What they meant, all those commas. How, if you didn’t get how Milton was using commas, you didn’t get what Paradise Lost was all about.
My first assignment was to lead a class discussion of a short verse play, an occasional piece. That meant Milton got paid to write it for a special occasion. In this case the sixteenth birthday of some rich guy’s daughter. There wasn’t much of a plot. A girl named something like Chastity or Virtue wanders off from her birthday party and gets lost in the deep dark woods. She chances on a bunch of Beast-Headed Revelers whooping it up around a bonfire. That’s what Milton called them, Beast-Headed Revelers. They talk and the girl listens. That’s pretty much all there is to the play. The Revelers take turns explaining why she ought to join in, let loose, get crazy. After each argument on the merits of living in the moment, enjoying the here and now with gusto, all of which sounded good to me, she just says “No.” No point for point rebuttals, just “No.”
After a two-year break from college, two years of hauling corpses around as a midnight shift orderly in a Detroit hospital, my required two years of civilian service as a conscientious objector, I wasn’t up on current trends in literary analysis. So, in prepping for the group discussion I took my lead from the old guy’s method. I counted stuff. Lines. Not commas, whole lines. All the lines spoken by the Beast-Headed Revelers and all the lines spoken by Virtue or Chastity or whatever her name was. The tally, by my lights, told the story. It wasn’t even close. The Revelers won hands down. They had the most lines and the most convincing arguments. Since “No” is a pretty sorry rebuttal, I concluded that Milton was championing the joys of all things sensual. Was mocking abstinence as unnatural and silly. Was, in fact, a party boy in Puritan’s clothing.
“You, sir,” the old man said, beginning my end-of-semester evaluation, “are deplorable.” I froze in the doorway of his dimly lit office. He rocked, in and out of shadow, on a squeaky, sprung seat chair. Mute and blinking, I tried to make things out. Many books, not much light. Walls of books eaten around the edges by the dark. Barricade stacks, two and three deep, all across the front of his enormous old wood desk. Sunk, in a suit, tobacco-ripe and much, much too big for him, he kept rocking and squeaking, squinting me to cinders through thick-lensed, blue-tinted glasses. The collar of his button-up shirt drooped, sagged inches out from his scrawny, unshaven, waffle- creased neck. His tie, limp and loosely knotted, was thin, dark, and patternless. “You have a second-rate mind,” he said then. “Nothing you could say, should you live to be one hundred, would ever be worth listening to.” He suggested I drop out “pronto.” Save us all a lot of trouble. Us?
By week’s end I got a blunt one-paragraph letter from the dean of the graduate school. The last line wished me “every success” in my “pursuit of career opportunities elsewhere.”
Sitting in the sun, eyes closed and tilted back on a foldable metal chair against the front wall of Kimball Brothers’ Garage, I waited for Phil to return from the scrapyard with a wheel part, the one with ball bearings in it, to replace our right front, the ancient ball bearings of which, as Phil explained, were “seized up and not worth a good goddamn.”
“Hey Deplorable,” Phil hollered, pulling up next to me and smiling out the cab window of his ancient, bulb-fender truck, “looks like it’s your lucky day.”
“Know him well,” Art told me the week before, just after I’d explained what happened. “Drives a straight-six two-tone Buick. Keeps it in good running order too. He has us do a once-over every seven, eight months or so. Always pays in cash. He keeps his money in a coin purse on a string down in his pocket. Tugs the string, snaps the coin purse open, and counts out what he owes us. Says what he’s counted out, asks us to check the total, then asks for a written receipt. Odd duck, the Professor. Odd duck and not long on conversation.”
“Years back when he and his wife first moved to town he was a different man,” Phil said. “Then his wife ran off with Monk Tinson. Big Italian guy, had these hands on him that meant business. That’s why people called him Monk, because he had these big hairy hands like an ape. Walked like one too, bowlegged and swinging his arms like he did. He delivered coal all over town. Back then we all heated with it. Twice a month Monk would pull up to your house, haul sacks of coal around back, and dump them down the chute into your basement. Sacks that would have bent a normal man double. Wonder what she saw in a guy like Monk anyway? She was an educated woman too. Professor just like her husband.”
“Ex-husband,” Art said, closing the subject. Their bulge-front, museum-piece Coke machine was right beside the desk where they did all their business. It hadn’t had soda in it for years. Something they let regulars like me in on. “You know where the key is,” Art said. “Get us all a beer. Sounds like you need one. What say Phil, should we have one too just to keep Deplorable here company?”
James Kelly writes: “At 75, I have been writing since I was a teenager. It is how I make sense of the world. I only write stories that, by my lights, need to be written. Moments that change us forever, that make us who we are. Those moments the prompts, the sources, the goads for all my writings.”
