Del and the Cairn

It took about two hours—the fitting of the new tank I’d recently bought. With the day’s light dimming, the sun set on my efforts and I left everything out next the tractor: The tools, the nuts and bolts, the fuel lines, everything I would need to finish up the job the next day. As these things go, the tank doesn’t look so bad there, would not attract the least bit of notice from someone inspecting the tractor, wanting to look under the hood to see what was in there. It fit like it belonged. I super-heated some scrap iron I had around, bent it this way and that, and finally came away with a passable bracket to attach the tank to the machine. I treated myself to a new fuel filter at the mower supply place, since I’d saved the enormous sum of sixty dollars on a new tank—and since the fuel filter only cost about four bucks. I assembled it all, put the new fuel line and filter and tank in place, and fired up the tractor. No leaks. At the end of the work I noticed the machines arranged in a spontaneous still-life: The two riding mowers, a push mower, and the open doors of the shed providing a backdrop. It was so beautiful I wanted to cry.

The next day I took care of some errands, told King Oort that I had some money for him, having sold a vintage motorcycle that someone had given him a while back. He was greatly excited about this, and I had to feel that his level of excitement was inversely proportional to the degree of confidence he had in my ability to sell the thing. He’d no doubt expected the old bike to molder in my shed indefinitely, while I went about my life and eventually forgot about it. It fetched a little under two-thousand dollars.
With the thought of old motorcycles fresh in my mind, I turned my attention to the old Honda I had stored away in the shed. It’s now in riding condition, and needed only the attaching of some license plates and a new registration. With the outside temperature hovering right around a hundred degrees, I drove to the department of motor vehicles.

“Oh, my goodness! I haven’t seen one of those in a long, long time!” The elderly clerk at the MVA knew of what she spoke. In front of her was the original vehicle title for the old Honda, dated from the beginning part of the 1970s.
“I believe that’s the original title, ma’am,” I said. “I’m only the second owner.”
She turned the document this way and that, looked for a place for me to sign it.
“I guess you didn’t have to sign it back then,” she said. “They just trusted you.” She looked at me, the years of her recollecting slowly rolling forward to this instant: “Nowadays you can’t trust people,” she said.
“Well, it’s a great bike,” I replied, “And it runs just fine.” I wanted to keep the conversation—which was rare enough in this place—on a more upbeat note, having decided to spend some money to get the bike legally on the road.
“I’ll be applying for historic motorcycle tags,” I said. I felt that engaging in some small pleasantries was a major coup there, where hostility and obstinacy are often the rule. She got together the necessary forms and assigned a computer-generated number that would come up by and by over on the other side of the room.

1972. It was the same year as the big flood that washed away many parts of the state, beached cars and large trucks along the riverbanks, uprooted trees and houses and demolished many businesses. I thought to those days, when the department of motor vehicles was in the nascent stages of computer technology—the large, hulking machines being carted into the facility by specialists with black, horn-rimmed glasses. Outside were Ford Falcons and Chevy Novas and larger LTDs and maybe a Chrysler Imperial for an upper-level official. The terrible paperwork generated by the people and their vehicles would be handled by the lowest of the low—the data-entry clerks. They would be handed stacks of titles and other documents, told to enter the information into the new system so that everything could be stored electronically. Someone had to do it. In the warm summer offices, mostly lacking air-conditioning, they would plod through the stacks of papers, trying to make out the incomprehensible scribble on many of the titles and insurance certificates, setting some hopeless cases aside, to be referred to their supervisor later on for a determination as to their fate. They were teenagers, working the summer away, maybe later getting a permanent job, many going off to college and then getting married. Now they come here, to this place of efficiency and modernity, and remember when they were stuffed into cramped offices and assigned endless piles of vehicle titles and documents they didn’t care about. Now they hand over their money, get a fine new car on the road, and leave. The woman over there—the old title clerk with the memories of how the documents used to look—is one of the few they remember. The others have all gone.

I returned from my weekend work, my clothes sticking to me in the blistering and sodden heat. I told the man interested in Oort’s bike that I would need a little time to get myself together, so maybe we could meet in the afternoon—in an hour or two. He’d agreed to this on the phone. To my surprise, he arrived at my house about thirty seconds after I pulled into the driveway. Great. We exited the bike from the shed, got it fired up, saw that something was amiss, fixed a dead cylinder, which turned out to be a bad plug, and got the Kawasaki loaded into the back of my Dodge truck. I’d told the man on the phone that I would not be swayed from the asking price, but that I would help him get the machine back to his place. He agreed to this, and we were soon on the road, headed up to an area north of Baltimore.

We drove and drove and drove. I thought I’d heard mention of Bel Air, but knew that this town wasn’t THAT far. Now in farm country, the roads were absolutely beautiful, with everything taking on the hue of a steamy deep-south tableau. There was a lot of stillness, as not many people wanted to be out and about in the extreme heat. I followed the man in his Volvo, with the bike strapped securely into the back of my truck. Recently I’d made the salvage-yard radio work, and had connected it and fitted it into the dash of the old dirt-truck, so I had a nice stereo system to while away the time. This radio was made specifically for this truck, had come out of a similar vehicle, so it was an exact match. The man who’d driven the old Dodge for many years before me had installed a CB radio, had ripped it out unceremoniously from the dash, and had left only a gaping hole with some dangling wires where it used to be. It looks much better now.

In a town called Whiteford, about sixty miles from my house, we finally drove down the deserted main street. The heat and the buzz of insects was all that cut through the thick air, and I did not linger. We got the bike unloaded, said our good-byes, and I was off. At the next crossroads I stopped for gas and a hot-dog and chips, eating the warm bun and its unusually good meat while the hot countryside of Harford County passed by. Secretly, I was pleased to be putting the old Dodge into service, because I felt that every mile I extracted from the old truck was like driving for free. And it doesn’t get awful mileage, either.

At home I looked out back, saw the little wren perched just outside the birdhouse I’d built last year. Her small home was filled with the sticks of her mate’s bringing, making the insides furnished to her taste, and now she was out front, taking in the day. The heavy air thundered with the sound of distant rumblings, and the sky—recently clear—gathered together the makings of a storm. She stood on the peg, just in front of the hole that served as the entrance, and looked skyward, blinked, made no move to leave, and looked at the sky again. Her house was sturdy and safe, would be dry inside when the storm hit. She could weather the wind and rain, and she knew it.

Just across the weedy patio are the stairs I built a few years back. So proud of them at the time, they are completely overtaken with poison ivy. I’ve never seen such a vicious infestation of this weed, can’t help but take it a little personally. It is so severe that the noxious greenery edged out any other weed that might want to make its life there. I look at the place where the wooden steps should be, am seized with thoughts of extreme bumpiness and itching. It’s just all too much. I’ll wade into it with long pants and gloves and clippers and hack away at it all—will eradicate everything that grows there, and replace it with something that likes to cling to hillsides, wants to thrive with as little care and attention as possible. This juniper plant that people put around seems to fit the bill. Everyone I have talked to suggests hitting the hillside with “Roundup,” a chemical that kills weeds. As usual, being resistant to conventional thinking and techniques, I’ll avoid the chemical treatment and simply chop away at the overgrowth, chop chop chop some more, and eventually have things under control. For a while, anyway.

I returned from my weekend work, heard music at the biker bar next door to where I park the truck, recognized a band of some talent playing over there. I wandered over to have a look, see if I recognized them. Under a cheap white canopy played a threesome, with a talented guitarist in cowboy boots and long black braided hair. Atop his head was a white cowboy hat, and it seemed likely that he was from Texas. They played a mix of music, including some selections from Jimi Hendrix, which the booted guitarist covered well, but the young drummer was not familiar with. The three of them pulled it off, however. They played to an asphalt parking lot with maybe a dozen people scattered here and there, some of them standing at enormous tables that had been made of the giant rolls that power cables come spooled on. These huge spools were bigger than the ones you usually see, and weighed probably a few hundred pounds each. The people who run that place had plopped them down for the customers to use, and I went to one that had no one standing next to it. It was actually a convenient mark on the landscape for me to appear less conspicuous, owing to the lack of people appreciating the music. I listened for a few songs, saw that the little trio’s talent was wasted here, and moved on. Out front, most of the business was centered around the roadside bar, where the bikers could sit and drink and look at their machines and discuss them—a source of endless fascination for this group.

At the house I have made great progress—not from my own sweat and efforts, but from the freeing up of thousands of dollar bills to pay someone to do it. King Oort recommended a fellow of his acquaintance, skilled in this kind of work, and with many contacts to get the job done. We went over a few things together, looked at the house and what I had in mind, and a few days later he arrived with a helper and got started. In the space of one day, the bathroom floor is in place, the framework for the wall between the bathroom and the kitchen is erected, and many of the pipes that will serve that little room are already installed. “When we’re done, you will have a working bathroom,” said the man, who’s name is Del Rio.
“Thank you, Del,” I said. “Much obliged.”
“There are a few things we have to get out of the way before we start work,” he added.
“Such as…?” I asked.
Del squinted into the afternoon sun, setting over the green and closely clipped lawns of the neighboring houses, looked past the weeds and long-reaching grasses of my own yard, said this:
“Do you have faith in this house?”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” I said, after considering his question for a moment.
“The work you’ve done, the end that you see—can you believe in these things?” I had to admit that I wasn’t entirely happy with the house or much of what I’d done in the way of improvements. Since the bulk of my work had entailed ripping the place apart, I had to tell him that I was resigned to whatever end result came to be—good or bad.
“You need more than that,” said Del.
“Ok,” I said.
“The ancients used a stone cairn to gather around, to cement their beliefs by focusing on this object. And they said things around the cairn, things that helped them to believe, to focus their efforts.”
“The ancients?” I asked. “Where are we going to get a stone cairn?” I added, hoping this would put an end to the discussion.
“I have one in the truck,” he said.

Del went to his work truck, opened one of the side compartments, took out a cairn that looked pretty authentic, except that it was made of some modern material, like those artificial fireplace logs you see in peoples’ houses. These were imitation stones. He edged it out sideways, where it had been lodged against a power saw and some hand-tools.
“Here, hold this,” he said, handing the cairn to me. “Set it over there in the middle of the lawn. Do you have an extension cord?” He asked.
“You have to plug it in?” I said.
“Yep, this one has a simulated fire that glows inside.” He explained that the ancients liked that. “They don’t all have that—I paid extra, but you have to plug it in so it lights up.”
I brought around the extension cord, the one that had been powering up my demolition tools, handed him the end. He plugged in the black power cord from the cairn, and the little simulated stone pile glowed faintly from within. The sun, although setting over the horizon, was still pretty bright. This diminished the overall effect of the cairn and its light.
“Now we kneel before it,” said Del. I didn’t think too highly of the idea, wanted mostly to watch my evening television stories, but guessed that this was part of Del’s overall approach to home improvement. Further, I hadn’t thought to ask how long our activities with the cairn would last. I looked over at his helper, a man named Ryan.
“Doesn’t he have to kneel, too?” I asked, indicating the man with the large gut, peeling back the wrapper from a pack of Marlboros, and resting his foot nonchalantly on the front steps. He appeared to take no notice of us there on the front lawn. I felt, however, that he should have to join in as well.
“Sometimes Ryan ignores the ways of the ancients, takes another path,” replied Del. Ryan’s path at this moment included taking huge gulps from a green bottle of Gatorade and lighting one of the fresh cigarettes. He sat down on the first step and turned his gaze towards Del and me. Raising the green bottle, he offered this: “Might as well get it over with.”
“All right,” I said, and continued to explain that I felt rather foolish, couldn’t we maybe do this out back—where it was a little more private?
Del looked at me blankly: “The cairn’s already plugged in,” he said.
We held hands around the faintly glowing cairn, with Ryan swilling Gatorade on the front steps and idly pulling on the freshly-lit smoke. It would have been preferable to have a third man to round things out, as the two of us—Del and I—didn’t seem to impart much importance to the proceedings. While Del mumbled some incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo that he said originated from the ancients who came even before the regular ancients, I looked up towards the road. A bus was passing at that moment—one of the shuttles that carries the aged around the neighborhood. This bus was marked “Sunshine Acres Retirement Community.” Most seats were empty, but those windows that showed a person displayed mostly drooped heads, with chins resting on frail chests. A few of these windows rolled by, then one with a wild-haired man, his expression one of sudden electrocution, and his white hair jutting out at all angles as if excited by great jolts of current, came into view. His face was pressed against the glass, and the unexpected appearance of this unsettling visage made me jump and almost upset the cairn. Del took this as a sign that I was moved by the little ceremony.
“The ancients have spoken through you—to you?”
“Huh? Oh, yes…yes, I think they have.”
“Good. Go ahead and unplug the cairn,” said Del. “Put it back in the truck with the other tools; I need to go over some things in the house with Ryan.”

In a little less than three days, Del and Ryan have fixed up the bathroom so that you can almost use it. The floor and tub are in place, the pipes that lead to the different fixtures are also ready to be hooked up, and there is some preparation for adding another bathroom upstairs. During their work I have continued to demolish more of the house, take away pieces that are no longer needed, return the basement to something of a clean slate. I also cart away the debris that their efforts have generated. Overall, I am very pleased with the results so far. Three days. This is easy—I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.