PEACE

“You’re soft!” The half-wit was chewing her gum contentedly, surveying the work I’d just done. This included breaking the sidewalk into chunks with a twelve-pound hammer, digging out a substantial area to widen the existing pavement, cutting the black asphalt with a special saw to get the concrete and driveway to meet up precisely. Also, I’d demolished the front steps, tightly held together with mortar and bricks. No easy task, that; I’d thought the steps would come away easily—a cake-walk. This was not the case. Then I’d jacked up the cab of the truck, fooled with the steering linkage, got the machine in good enough shape to cover a few more miles. Lastly, I’d mixed and poured concrete piers for the new porch stairs I’ll soon build. Along the way, I’d talked to a man from a local excavating company about digging out the back patio area. He’d stopped by and given me an estimate.
“Yore gonna get blisters!” she took a break from her chewing, bovine-like, leaning against the white car she used to get back and forth to the Burger Palace. “You best wear TWO pairs of gloves, else’n yore gonna get sores!”
I changed the subject, weary of talking about the constant work I’m engaged in, no patience for the inane talk of gloves and sores.
“They’re buying pretty good at the burger joint?” I asked.
“Oh! Them peoples is always buying burgers! They don’t never stop!” This was delivered with a combination of satisfaction and wonder—wonder at all those people who come in to buy hamburgers.
“You’ve gotta be ready for all those folks, I imagine,” I said.
“Whoo-ee! There’s some come in, twelve, fourteen, seventeen dollar of hamburgers!” This took me a little by surprise, wondering who in the world needed that many burgers. By and large, I didn’t really care, just so long as we weren’t talking about the house.
“Mmm..that’s a lot of burgers,” I said.
“They was a big scare, ‘count of folks thought maybe we wasn’t gonna make no more hamburgers,” she said.
I thought it unlikely that the customers came in to buy record numbers of burgers because they thought the char-broiled delicacy would no longer be available. I just figured they needed a lot of hamburgers. I was finished work for the day, didn’t mind the pointless conversation so much.
“Hmm, so they came in to stock up, huh?”
“Yessiree!” Yessiree, yep. Ok, gotta go—I’m finshed for the day.
She paused in mid-chew. “So you didn’t work today?”

J.O. should come over tomorrow, help move some bags of cement from the colosso-hardware and building supply. I’m not convinced that this is the best way to go, given my experience today with the cement mixer I bought some time ago. I’d brought it out today to mix up the material for the steps, found the thing fairly underpowered and struggling to get one bag mixed up. It was, however, much easier than mixing it by hand; if the machine lasts the duration of my house project, I’ll be happy. Then I can discard it.

Since the excavator man said that he’d be able to come out fairly soon to do my patio demolition, I started dismantling the hideous aluminum landing and stairs that jut out from the backside of the house. This involved cutting neatly through the railings with the Sawzall, throwing the things into a pile at the end of the driveway. Then I backed off some of the long screws that hold the side of the structure to the house, left them in place until I have help to safely topple the whole thing. There were two pieces of wood that someone had added as a kind of decorative trim piece to the metal installation. I kicked at one, freeing it up immediately from its unlikely marriage to the metal stairway. The other one didn’t want to be divorced so readily. One blow with the heavy six-pound hammer sent it flying. I’ll build a small deck of roughly the same proportions as the metal landing, with the area underneath perhaps a small brick patio bordered by lawn. I must remember to go in the house, fasten a piece of lumber across the back door, and leave it there until the deck is built. I don’t need anyone stepping outside into the void.

Yesterday I picked up a piece of equipment from a friend north of town. He lives in one of those communities that is always described as “quiet.” Unfortunately, this description is usually applied on the evening news, in the wake of a rampage by some irate neighbor, or some other ghastly event that takes the quiet community by surprise. The houses date back to maybe the late-fifties, are all ranchers, and most have a garage or carport. A house in the big development ran probably six thousand dollars when first built. The calm is overwhelming when you drive through such a place at midday. The homeowners there are at work mostly, one of their two cars maybe still in the carport. Lawns are manicured with a precision rarely seen even in a high-priced salon. Sunlight casts sharp angles of shadow from the low-pitched, understated roofs, porches, and fences. You don’t even hear dogs barking. Where are the dogs? Everyone has a dog these days, so where are they? I picked up the item—some incomprehensible piece of equipment that is a puzzle to use—and drove the deserted streets back to the main road. On the way out I took a photo of my friend’s banner hanging in the warm March air. “PEACE,” it said.

At the parts counter the Ford man was telling me the only difference between the two spare tire “winches” was that one had a male end, the other a female.
“I’ll take the female one,” I said. It was the only one he had, and this would save me the trouble of having to order the one that was supposed to be installed on the work truck. The winch is one of those ingenious devices that cranks up and down, uses a piece of sturdy cable with a special end on it to secure the spare tire under the back of the truck. I may have written in these pages that I’d wanted to modify some other gadget I’d found for the purpose, but my friend King recently reported to me that the original equipment device could be had for a modest sum of money. I decided to spare myself the additional time and aggravation, just go and buy the damn thing from the Ford dealer.

Later, when I pulled the truck into King’s shop, exited my new winch from its box, and slid underneath to install it, I found immediately that it would not work. Thinking initially that it was simply another puzzle I had to work through, I visited a similar truck in the garage, peeked underneath, and saw that my recently-purchased part was of a different design. So, the only difference was NOT one of female or male connectors; this was an issue of having a device that was inverted in its design for whatever application it was intended for. It was like the other one in ever respect, except that it was built upside-down. It wouldn’t work for my truck—not now, not ever. The fascinating thing about this is that the parts man’s job is pretty simple: Get the right part to the customer—whether it is someone like me, or a mechanic in the shop that needs to get a car fixed and back on the road. He deals with everyone who needs parts; it’s all he does. And this part, quite frankly, was an exceedingly simple one to identify and sell. Had he not bothered to say that the only difference was that the two parts had different types of connectors, I would have simply told him to order the correct one, since he didn’t have the one for my truck. But, since he’d volunteered more information, information that I hadn’t even asked for, I was out on the road on a late Tuesday afternoon, using up gas and time, running a fool’s errand. King will order the correct part, it will cost about half of what I paid, and I’ll drive back to the dealer tomorrow or the next day to return this one. Yes, I am pissed off.