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Swallow Press Ohio University Press Athens

Contents vii

Acknowledgments ix

Prologue 1

Part I: The Town 11

House on Wheels 13

In the Land of Crashed Cars and Junkyard Dogs 33

The Identity Factory 57

Dragging Wyatt Earp 76

Part II: The Country 91

The Greatest Game Country on Earth 93

Sisyphus of the Plains 109

A Most Romantic Spot 123

The Search for Quivira 137

Part III: Of Horses, Cattle, and Men 151

Horse Latitudes 153

Wild Horses 164

Feedlot Cowboy 177

How to Ride a Bronc 201

Epilogue 216

Acknowledgments

Many people helped and encouraged me as I wrote this modest volume, and I would like to take a moment to thank a few of them.

My family: Bill and Patricia Rebein, David Rebein, Alan Rebein, Tom Rebein, Joe Rebein, Steve Rebein, Paul Rebein; my wife, Alyssa Chase, and my children, Ria and Jake Rebein; my mother-in-law, Andra Chase.

Friends and fellow writers: Mary Obropta, Anne Williams, Susan Shepherd, Karen Kovacik, Terry Kirts, Jacob Nichols, Joshua Green, Meagan Lacy, Christopher Schumerth, Kimberly Metzger, Joe Croker, Tim Cook, Benjamin Clay Jones, Nick Gillespie, Charlie Jones, Bryan Furuness.

Editors and former teachers: Kevin Haworth, David Gessner, Mark Lewandowski, Brendan Corcoran, Lauren Kessler, Randy Bates, Sarah Smarsh, Amber Lee, Lindsay Milgroom, Hillary Wentworth, Alys Culhane, Liz Dorn, Robert Stapleton, Mark Shechner, Bruce Jackson, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Wayne Fields.

Dodge City people past and present: Marilyn Rebein, Kim and Beth Goodnight, John Rebein, Shane Bangerter, Kent Crouch, Tyrone Crouch, Bill Hommertzheim, Cathy Reeves, Jim Sherer, Charles and Laura Tague George, Pat George, Bob George, Trina Triplett Rausch, Regina Hardin Eubank, Heather Fraley Schultz, Gina McElgunn Tenbrink.

To all of you I owe my heartfelt thanks.

Several of the essays in this collection have appeared, in somewhat different form, in the following publications: “Return to Dodge City” in The Cream City Review (Fall 1994); “The Identity Factory” in Inscape (2010); “Dragging Wyatt Earp” in Ecotone: Reimagining Place (Fall 2007); “The Greatest Game Country on Earth” in Grasslands Review (2009); “Sisyphus of the Plains” in Redivider (Fall 2010); “A Most Romantic Spot” in Bayou (2008); “The Search for Quivira” in Umbrella Factory (December 2010); “Horse Latitudes” in Booth (Summer 2012); “How to Ride a Bronc” in Etude: New Voices in Literary Nonfiction (Summer 2010).

Prologue

Return to Dodge City

Christmas Eve 1990. I’m in a car on my way west across Kansas, the heart of it all, the prairie-bound stomach of the country, headed for a white-frame farmhouse where I know one light still burns in the kitchen. Outside, a cold, dry winter has set in. The Flint Hills are brown. Six states lay stretched out behind me. And I’m thinking, Here comes full circle, here comes the loop the ropers say you rebuild every time it gets tangled. From the horse’s back you rebuild it, hand over hand, loop upon loop, until all the rope is in.

The road is dark, with just the white lines threading a path across the prairie. I squint my eyes, lean forward, switch back and forth between low and high beam, and for a moment it almost seems like the road itself is just a blurred projection thrown out by the headlights.

I see again the roughshod progression of my life, so many snapshots strung together like pearls: the early years in town, working with my father on the farm, school days, the time spent abroad, the coming back again. Returning home is like that. The future gets left behind, a piano dumped on a stark prairie. Suddenly you’re left with nothing but your life and the past. You have returned. Full circle. Everything else is just a blur.

* * *

There is one memory I will always associate with my father. It is early winter, 1978 or 1979, and he is standing in his work clothes before the doorway of the Knoeber place, a ramshackle farmhouse, hatless, his legs thrown wide, motioning to me with the back of his hand in the rearview mirror of a wheat truck: Back—and back—and back—and whoa! Without pause, his gloved hand turns palm up and stops. I set the parking brake, check the mirror again, and he’s already raking his index finger across his throat, a signal for me to kill the engine and join him inside. Another old farmhouse. Another relic from the age of one farmer for every square mile instead of one aging caretaker for every five. Like a lot of other contemporary farmers, my father acquired land the way some people acquire memories; and many times, the land came with a house, gratis.

Some of these places had been abandoned for years. Maybe an aging widow had lived there in the lingering aura of 1965, the year her husband died and she rented the land to neighbors. Or maybe the husband was the one who had survived, a widowed farmer who somewhere along the line stopped wiping his feet at the door, rebuilt carburetors at the kitchen table, and gradually let all housekeeping go to the dogs. Or maybe it was a long series of nobodies who stayed there—railroad men, pheasant hunters, bikers, what have you. The basements of such places would be filled to the floor joists with everything from prayer books to pornography: rusty knives, golf clubs, warped photographs and records, calendars and almanacs, canned vegetables grown murky in their ancient Kerr jars, bicycle parts, garden tools, children’s books. In the basement of the Knoeber place, for example, we found three thousand Dr. Pepper bottles stacked neatly in crates. In the overgrown yard, a mountain of Alpo cans and their jagged, rusted lids. The mountain extended downward past ground level, where we found the dull, discarded can openers. At a deeper level, the bones of two medium-sized dogs. For years afterward, every time we mowed the grass, another of the phantom lids would emerge, sharpened and propelled through the air like some weapon in the martial arts.

All of these things my father took in stride as the not-so-heavy burden of his inheritance. Anything without immediate use we burned or hauled away. He liked to keep the earth turned, the pastures mowed, and the ditches sprayed with 2,4-D. Wichita pheasant hunters would drive by our fields and marvel at the absence of cover. Only later, after he traded farming for ranching, did he and my mother take to roaming country auctions and roadside antique stores. By then he’d bought a horse buggy from the Amish in Yoder, liked to drive out through his acres behind the steady clip of a pacer. This was the man who at one time had embraced every advancement in modern agriculture. The man who in his prime had nine center-pivot irrigation systems draining the local aquifer at the rate of seven or eight thousand gallons of water a minute, who drove cheap Japanese pickups because they got better mileage, who took his worn-out horses to the slaughterhouse instead of putting them out to pasture.

Over the years he’d grayed, softened. The fierceness with which he’d once looked upon his life was replaced with a kind of awe. On the day he finally bought the ranch he’d had his eye on for years, he took my mother to the top of its highest bluff. Look down at that, he said. All my life I’ve wondered what Jesus must have been looking at when Satan tempted him the third time. Now I know. The land. All the kingdoms of the world.

* * *

By the winter of 1990, Dodge City was again an open town. You could sense it driving in from the east. The population had grown by a third since I’d left, most of it made up of young men come north from Texas and Mexico to work in the newly built packing plants. Like the cowboys of old, they are mercurial and often well armed. Roughly a million cattle a year are slaughtered at Dodge City. The Roundup Rodeo, which headlines the annual Dodge City Days celebration, has grown from a small, local affair to one of the richest on the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association circuit. It is as if the Old West, that brief period in the town’s storied past, has returned, big as life in the twentieth century.

Of course the Old West always was about blood and money. The town got its start, after all, as a group of tents straddling a muddy lane, five easy miles from the army outpost to whose soldiers it sold whiskey, women, and the small hope of a world away from Indian fighting and the rolling monotony of the high plains. When the railroad arrived in 1872, the tents were replaced by false-fronted wooden shanties. Buffalo hunters, greased with blood, rolled into town aboard wagonloads of wooly black hides, the likes of which were already stacked ten and twenty feet high next to the depot. There’s a picture of a man, Charles Rath, sitting atop a stack of forty thousand such hides that appears in all histories of Dodge. Behind him, just out of the picture, is the depot, and across from that is the Long Branch Saloon. Evidently there was something about a day spent in killing that required a shot of whiskey come nightfall; the founders of Dodge City understood this and built a big part of their business plan around it.

When the Indians were contained and the buffalo killed off, a new source of income, a second boom, rumbled on the southern horizon. Giant herds of Texas longhorns, banned by the bigger railroad towns to the east, began to replace the scalp-and-hide business as the town’s chief bad smell and most recent reason-to-be. Like the soldiers and the buffalo hunters before them, the pimpled, adolescent cowboys who came north with the herds were bored, thirsty, and easily separated from their money. Hence the sharks—the professional gamblers, pimps, and hired guns—who also appeared, like horseflies on the stacked buffalo hides of old.

In the first year of its existence, Dodge City buried seventeen men, all of whom died “with their boots on.” Probably three-quarters of its women were prostitutes, or “soiled doves,” as the frontier papers called them; more than half of its buildings, saloons. Dubbed The Queen of the Cowtowns by its first class of merchant-citizens, the town went by a different name in the eastern papers: The Wickedest Little City in the West. Drive into town today and there’s a sign that offers yet another moniker: Dodge City, Kansas—Cowboy Capital of the World.

It didn’t last, of course. Even as the “better folk” in the town—the farmers, the merchants, and their wives—were busy crying out for the end of lawlessness, the boom, like all things, was ending of its own accord. In time, the false-fronted wooden shanties of old were replaced, first by brick buildings and finally by gleaming white grain elevators. These were what Truman Capote noticed above all else when he rolled into town to research In Cold Blood. Grain elevators rising like Greek temples on the plains. Prairie skyscrapers. Big white pencils busily erasing the Old West of yore.

Yet many would be the times when in the safety of their hard, honest work, the farmer-merchants of Dodge would look back with longing on a past their ancestors had deplored. They were helped along in their nostalgia by the Great Depression, several Hollywood films, and a radio and television drama that twisted the truth beyond recognition, making them the heroes and putting the town’s name once again on the lips of strangers.

That was the first omen of things to come. The second was when the town, seeing money to be made, had a replica of old Front Street put up for the tourist trade, causing some to believe that this newly built facade was the real Front Street, that the past was not gone, and that the West still lived in the red brick streets of a little farming burg. They didn’t realize that when the West came again it would not be here, but on the kill floors of Excel Corporation and National Beef.

Ironically, these modern packing plants were built five miles east of town, just west of where the old fort stood during Indian fighting days. It is here the herds come to, in trucks now instead of by hoof. It is here where the hides pile up, waiting to be turned into baseball gloves and patent leather shoes. And it is here where the young men arrive (young women, too), in beat-up cars with Texas plates, seeking work on a butcher’s assembly line.

If the Old West was about blood and money, the New West is about return. Prodigal son comes home to save the ranch, discover his ancestry, spark an old flame. In the process, he finds himself, who he is in the here and now. As I pull into town, I note all of the changes like paragraphs on a page. The widened streets, the cattle trucks, the bars along Wyatt Earp Boulevard with names like Las Palmas, La Lampara, Nuestra Familia.

A New West has come to Old Dodge City, I think with a laugh. Am I the only one who likes this one better?

* * *

Of my six brothers, four became lawyers, one a day trader, and one a general contractor—not a farmer or rancher among us. If you’re thinking this is a source of disappointment for our father, think again. From the first, he actively discouraged us from seeking a future in farming or ranching. Not that he had to try too hard. The truth was, most of us hated farming. We’d seen too many wheat fields ruined by hail or drought, too many years taken off the old man’s life by work and worry. Ranching was just as bad—a babysitting job that never ended, cattle out at midnight or in a deadly winter storm. And yet, as happens to many who leave the farming life behind, there was something in all of us that felt lost, in exile, vaguely end-of-the-line. Sitting behind desks in Dodge City or Kansas City or Buffalo, New York, we might find ourselves, at odd moments, staring at summer fields still visible beyond the highway. In conversation with one another, we would lapse into the old way of talking. Remember when you almost ran over me with the sweep plow? What were we—twelve or fourteen? Remember the time all the cattle got out in the blizzard? How cold it was? With a mixture of self-regard and scorn, we’d look at our own children and remark how easy they had it, how soft they were.

To our father, we must have seemed more soft still. Born during the Great Depression to parents he never knew, he was saved from the orphanage by the Sisters of St. Joseph, who kept him in their hospital dormitory until he was adopted by a German-Catholic farm family. His childhood consisted of long days of hard work, nights spent listening to radio reports of World War II. And yet, to hear him talk, these were days of glory and heaven. “We used to shovel wheat into the granary by hand,” he’d say. “Of course, it was four dollars a bushel back then . . .”

Our mother, by contrast, grew up in the city with a mother and stepfather who knew nothing of farm life. Her biological father, it was said, had come from ranching people, but that was neither here nor there. Her parents divorced when she was still a baby, and she didn’t meet the man until many years later, when she was married and had a family of her own. When asked about him today, all she will say is, “We were better off without him.”

Of these things our parents never spoke. Family meant mostly what they had built on their own. Our childhood was designed to prove the past wrong, and in large part, it did just that. We were happy, prosperous, destined for bigger things. In our kitchen hung a painting of the family tree: a real tree, healthy and young, with a different branch for each of us and on each branch a child, his birthday, the color of his hair and eyes. As the family grew, so did the web of our belonging. The oldest paved the way for the youngest in a world alive to the sound of our name. At school it would be, “Ah, yes, I had your brother for math,” or, “You know, your father went here as a boy,” an aged nun smiling down on us as if she were somehow part of the family, too. Years later, I recall being in my parents’ house over the holidays when a stranger, one of my older brother’s friends, walked in the door. One of my nephews, Ben or Adam, ran forward and stopped the intruder in his tracks. “We’re Rebeins,” the boy said. “Who are you?” That is exactly how we were raised.

My younger brother and I didn’t learn of our father’s adoption until we were in college. At first, it didn’t seem to touch our world. But as time went on, the questions grew. Who were we really, if not Germans? Later, when we discovered the truth about our mother’s maiden name, we wondered again, Who, then? At such times, it helped to feel rooted in the land, to know that there was section after section in Ford County, Kansas, that had the family name printed across them in bold type.

The land.

All the kingdoms of the world.

We’re Rebeins. Who are you?

* * *

Fourteen miles northeast of Dodge City is the ranch my parents bought in 1989 and named, in a moment of unintended irony, the Lazy R. The ranch house, built in the 1920s, is a repository for their collection of antiques, which includes a wind-up Victrola and a black, wood-burning stove of the kind that once heated the basement in my father’s childhood home. Before they remodeled the place, it had been home to various down-on-their-luck renters and not a few squatters, at least one of whom lived on deer killed along Sawlog Creek and cooked over a spit in the living room fireplace.

On Christmas Day, my father and I ride out to the ranch in his white Ford pickup. I’ve been out of the country for the better part of three years, and he wants to show me what he has planned for the place. The previous owner and his tenants left behind the usual junk—rusted-out cars and tractors and farm implements of every vintage, to say nothing of old windmills and mile upon mile of petrified posts and brittle barbed wire.

“We’ll take and move all this junk out of here and get the grass back in shape,” my father tells me with his usual optimism. “I think we’ll put the corrals over there, and eventually I want to build a new shop and machine shed and replace all of this old fence, but for now we’ll take it a couple of miles a year.”

He pauses, looks around. “You know, this place was really something at one time.”

“It still is,” I say.

He smiles. “Maybe someday you’ll have a place just like it.”

“Maybe.”

“Thing about it is,” he says, “when you do, you’ll know it’s yours.”

The land, all the kingdoms of the world, stretches out before us as we drive away.

Part I: The Town

House on Wheels

The house I grew up in was a sprawling brick affair with a four-car garage, a fenced-in patio, and wide lawns of fescue that stretched off on either side of a concrete driveway that more than one neighbor half-jokingly described as “a parking lot.” It was an impressive house, to be sure, but also a little odd. That oddity had to do, at least in part, with the neighborhood where the house was located, which was full of much smaller, two- and three-bedroom bungalows compared to which our five-bedroom house looked like a bloated mansion. But even more than this, the essential strangeness of the house had to do with the fact that it was built piecemeal, with additions and other renovations coming along every three or four years, whenever my mother had managed to put money aside or my father happened to be seized by some new idea he would sketch on the back of an envelope before committing the entire family to its execution.

“Remodeling”—that’s how my parents referred to these seasons of furious activity, which required the family to huddle, refugee-like, in some semifinished part of the house (usually the basement) while the parts undergoing renovation were sealed off with plastic sheeting or blankets tacked into place with framing nails. In some respects, the years of my childhood were filled with little else but these fantastical and interminable “remodeling projects”—or at least that’s the way it felt to me at the time. With few exceptions, all of the work involved in these projects was done by my father and older brothers, although sometimes a too-curious neighbor who stopped by to remark on our progress would be pressed into service for an hour or two, maybe even an entire weekend. In this way, my father silenced any potential outcry against the use of power tools late at night or in the predawn hours of Saturday and Sunday mornings. To complain too loudly was to risk being swept up in the madness that defined and set us apart as a family.

The house I have described as a bloated mansion (and I can already hear both of my parents’ objections to this description) began its life as a three-room shack without electricity or running water in the high wheat country twenty miles north of Dodge City. That’s where it sat, in the corner of an enormous wheat field, when my uncle Harold bought it in the late 1940s. Of course, Harold being Harold, the house didn’t remain that way for long. During the decade or so he and my aunt Marilyn lived there, they doubled its size, adding two new bedrooms and a kitchen, as well as electricity and modern plumbing. By the time my parents acquired the house in the late 1950s, it had the look and feel of your average single-story, three-bedroom, clapboard-sided farmhouse—nothing fancy, perhaps, but clean and serviceable enough. That’s pretty much where things stood when I was brought home from Dodge City’s St. Anthony’s Hospital in the late summer of 1964.

Not long after this, in 1965 or 1966, my mother, who had grown up three hours away in Wichita, began to complain about the eighty-mile-a-day, round-trip commute she made on bad country roads taking my older brothers to and from Sacred Heart Cathedral School in Dodge City. As more than one neighbor pointed out, a bus would have picked the boys up and carried them the twenty miles to a public school on the north side of Dodge, but this my mother, a Catholic convert, would not hear of. So long as there was a God in heaven looking down on her, she was determined to remain blameless in His eyes in all matters relating to the exercise of her faith. If she had to drive eighty miles a day to accomplish that, then so be it. However, if she didn’t have to make that terrible and wasteful drive, well then, all the better. As it happened, my father had reasons of his own to move to town; he and Harold had just bought a salvage yard on the south side of Dodge City, and running this business would soon be a part of my father’s daily routine.

As always happened once my parents decided something, it wasn’t long before they took definitive action. Surveying the available properties in a five-block radius of Sacred Heart, they settled on a red brick house my mother pronounced her “dream house.” “Oh, how I loved that house!” she tells me now, thinking back past fifty years. “I loved everything about it—the yard, the porch, the fireplace, the kitchen and living room. I would lay awake at night, planning where I was going to put every piece of furniture I owned, and even some I didn’t own. I couldn’t sleep for thinking about it. That’s how excited I was.”

They made an offer on the dream house the same day they walked through it, and that offer was promptly accepted. However, a few days later, the seller called my father to say he had another, higher offer, and did my father care to match it?

Here my father paused ominously. “Another offer,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I wasn’t aware that this was an auction.”

“Pardon?” the seller asked, confused and perhaps a little intimidated by my father’s tone.

“I made you an offer, and you accepted,” my father said. “We shook hands on the deal. Where I come from, that brings the bargaining part to a close.”

“Ah, well, yes,” the seller stammered. “But you see, now there’s this second offer, and, well, it’s considerably higher than yours . . .”

Here the story breaks into a couple of different variants. According to one version, at this point my father slammed the wall phone into its receiver and turned to my mother, who was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, a horrified look on her face. “Deal’s off, Pat,” he told her. “I’m sorry, but we’re just going to have to figure out something else to do.” According to another, more detailed version, the plot thickened a month or so after this, when the seller called back to inform my father that the second, higher offer had fallen through, and the house was on the market once again, and did my father care to make a repeat offer? At which point my father is said to have laughed and told the man exactly where he could put every last red brick of that so-called dream house. Even as a very small child, this was the version I liked best, and I refused to have the story told any other way.

Regardless of how or why it came to pass, in the fall of 1966, my father bought a pair of vacant lots on the north side of Dodge City where he dug and poured a basement of the same size and dimensions as the house in the country. When the basement was finished that spring, he hired a local mover to jack the house off its foundations, slide it onto a kind of massive cart, and drag the structure twenty miles cross-country to its new neighborhood in town. This was one of the few times in his life my father ever hired someone else to do a job he might have done himself just as easily, and he soon regretted the decision.

“I should have known something was wrong when I asked the guy what I had to get out of the house before the move,” my father remembers, “and he told me not a thing, just leave it all right where it was. Clothes in the closets, dishes in the cabinets, lamps sitting on end tables. Well, you can imagine how that turned out . . .”

As the story goes, my mother and a friend were sitting in the house drinking a cup of Earl Grey tea when the mover showed up with a sledgehammer he used to knock the brick chimney away from the side of the house the way a lumberjack might fell a tree. “I looked at my friend and said, ‘Well, I guess we’d better get out now,’” my mother remembers. “‘This house is headed to town!’” But things did not go so smoothly. Halfway in, the mover cut a corner too close, taking out a stop sign and a row of country mailboxes. A little farther on, the addition my uncle Harold had built on the house began to break away. (“The back bedroom fell off the dolly” is how my mother puts it.) By the time the movers succeeded in shoring up the house and dragging it the rest of the way to town, it was clear to everyone that they were far from being able to lower it onto the newly poured basement. And so the house sat in a field next to the VFW Hall while my mother, six months pregnant, waited anxiously, and my father considered what his next move would be.

What happened next was vintage Bill Rebein. Instead of cutting his losses and getting us into the house as soon as possible, he decided to escalate the matter even further, tearing the plaster out of the original part of the house and replacing it with Sheetrock. And since he was already committed to doing that, why not go ahead and change the floor plan of the house, too, adding an entryway off the back of the house and converting what had been an upstairs bedroom into a dining room? Briefed on these plans in the basement of her father-in-law’s house in the country, where half the family was staying while the other half was farmed out to various relatives and friends, my mother sighed exactly once and said, “I don’t care what you do so long as I’m back in my own house before the baby comes. Those are my terms. Take them or leave them.”

“Oh, we’ll be in long before that,” my father promised, his voice booming with confidence. “After all, it’s not like we’re tearing the whole thing down and starting from scratch, you know.”

All the while this was going on, a much bigger remodeling project, dubbed Urban Renewal, was taking place a few blocks away in downtown Dodge City. Front Street, arguably the most famous city block in all of the Old West, was being ripped out to make room for off-street parking and the widening of Chestnut Street, soon to be renamed Wyatt Earp Boulevard. However, before the wrecking ball arrived to perform this misguided task, all kinds of materials culled from the condemned buildings of Front Street went up for sale. Naturally, my father, a salvage man to his core, was there to pick through the offerings. Among the items he carried away from the auction was a pool table taken from a saloon, hundreds of square feet of suspended ceiling tiles, and a 4-by-8-foot glass door that had once served as the front entrance to the Nevins Hardware store. These and other salvaged materials he stored in an old granary at the farm while the house was lifted onto its new basement and the work of tearing out the old plaster commenced.

“You’d not believe the dirt that was in the walls of that house,” my father remembers, shaking his head. “We shoveled it straight out the front door to use as topsoil in the yard—that’s how much of it there was. You have to remember—that old house sat out there in the country, unprotected by trees or anything else, through the worst years of the Dust Bowl.”

After the new Sheetrock was in, the next step in the project was to finish out the new floor plan, including the new entry at the back of the house, where it was supposed we boys would do the bulk of our coming and going. Here my father was seized by an idea of such surpassing simplicity and brilliance he couldn’t believe no one had thought of it before. Why not use the big glass door that had once opened and closed on the patrons of Nevins Hardware as the house’s back door? With the door’s quiet, self-closing technology in place, there would be no more yelling at kids about slamming screens such as happened two hundred times a day at the farm. Instead, all you’d hear would be the quiet hiss of the door closing tightly on itself. Think of all the money you’d save on heating and cooling bills. And if you needed to look out the back of the house to see what the little devils were up to, all you had to do was walk to the glass door and look straight out. What could be easier or better than that?

While this work of my father’s dragged on from one week to the next, my mother’s pregnancy dragged on, too. It was her seventh pregnancy in a little under thirteen years of marriage, and with each one, the complications grew. The problem was her Rh-negative blood, which could lead to all kinds of potential problems when, as in this case, the baby’s blood was Rh-positive. By late May of that year, when she was thirty-four weeks along, the family doctor who delivered all of us boys was adamant that the time had come to induce labor and “get that baby out.”

“But we’re not in the new house yet,” my mother said. “Can’t we wait a little longer?”

“What’s a little longer?” the doctor asked, eyebrows raised doubtfully. “A couple of days? A week? Remember, this is Bill Rebein we’re talking about.”

Here my mother paused, biting her lower lip. “Maybe you’re right,” she said, laughing nervously. “Maybe it is time, after all.”

And so it happened that my little brother, Paul, was born while the great Move to Town was still under way. He spent a week in neonatal intensive care, then joined the rest of us in the basement of my grandparents’ farmhouse west of town. And still the work on the house dragged on—into its second and then its third month.

“We got very good at camping out down there,” my mother remembers. “Soup heated up on a Coleman stove, baths taken at the end of a garden hose. That’s just the way it was. Either you accepted it, or you risked going crazy. I had a little phrase I would repeat to myself, whenever some new delay or complication would arise. ‘And this, too, shall pass,’ I’d say. ‘And this, too, shall pass.’”

* * *

I was three years old when the Move to Town took place, and unlike my older brothers, who ranged in age from five to thirteen, I have no memory of the time when my family lived far from town in the corner of a gigantic wheat field, surrounded on all sides by mile upon mile of flat, windblown prairie. To me, that whole period is a series of strange, black-and-white photographs featuring skinny, shirtless farm kids riding 1950s-era bicycles or playing baseball in the corner of some dusty, God-forsaken pasture. When I appear at all in these photos, I am the babe in arms, the infant in swaddling clothes whose bald head barely sticks out above the top of his stroller. Nothing about the scene, from the crew cuts my brothers habitually sported to the fact that the pictures themselves were in black and white, resembled any part of my Technicolor childhood. Examining the two eras side by side in family photo albums was like comparing pictures of the Beatles circa 1964 to pictures of the band in its late-1960s incarnations. That same, perplexing leap forward obtained.

Pictures of the house taken during the early years in town show a rectangular structure, twenty feet across the front and forty-eight feet long, with green-and-white aluminum awnings over the windows and a small, sun-splashed front porch covered in indoor/outdoor carpeting the same color and texture as 1970s-era Astroturf. Aside from the strange back door and the fact that it sat in the middle of two wide lots—one of just two homes on that side of the street, while on the other side there were six homes crammed into an equal space—the house didn’t look all that different from other houses in the neighborhood. However, that would change soon enough.

Sometime during our first year in town, my brother Paul decided to ride his baby walker—one of those four-wheeled, legs-through-holes, baby runabouts that have since been banned worldwide—down an unfinished flight of stairs leading to an uncarpeted expanse of raw concrete. When he reached the bottom, the walker slammed forward, and Paul cracked his head on the concrete floor with what has always been described to me as “a sickening thud.” (This is how we discuss the event in my family, our sentences always beginning with Paul himself or else in the passive voice—The door was left open—so that all question of how this could have happened, or who could have left the door ajar, remain unasked.) In the aftermath of this terrible event, Paul was rushed to a small hospital in the middle of Dodge City and from there to a larger one three hours away in Wichita, where things got so bad for so long that my mother removed herself to the hospital chapel, where she remained on her knees, refusing to budge or even to talk, until news of a miracle was brought to her. Only Patricia Rebein and God Himself know what promises were made in that dark little chapel. However, they must have been sufficient, for against all odds, Paul pulled through with no permanent damage to his brain or any other part of him.

“It was a miracle, all right,” my mother insists to this day. “All of the doctors and nurses agreed. They had never seen a situation that bad turn around that completely. Think about that the next time you need God’s help.”

Soon after this my father moved the stairs from the center of the house to the back, between the bathroom and the big glass door, so that now the stairs did not descend in a single flight but instead turned twice on the way down. They were covered as well in a thick shag carpet, such that a newborn might have tumbled down them without coming to any harm. Indeed, in the course of our childhood in the house, Paul and I used to trip or hurl each other down these stairs on a regular basis. However, they were so padded and safe, the effort was mostly wasted.

This moving of the stairs signaled the beginning of a larger remodeling project that soon saw the entire basement finished. When I asked my father, years later, what had guided his thinking in finishing the basement, he paused a moment, then replied, “Well, I had all those materials from Urban Renewal I wanted to use. The other part of the plan was to make the basement nice enough that you kids would stay down there and leave the upstairs to your mother and me.”

He succeeded in both of these objectives. The new basement’s wood paneling, ceiling tiles, door to the outside, and the pool table that was its most prominent and (in my eyes) most important feature had all enjoyed previous lives on Front Street in the years before the demolition, and there was no question the basement was an attractive place to hang out. More than half the square footage was given over to a carpeted TV room and an adjoining rec room housing the pool table and the family’s new 8-track tape player. On the other side of the rec room were two dorm-like bedrooms, one green and one red, each featuring bunk beds along with built-in cabinets and desks. Rounding out the floor plan at the base of the stairs was a small bathroom with a tiled shower and the aforementioned door to the outside, a feature I came to appreciate fully only during my teenage years, when the ability to sneak in and out of the house without my parents knowing became such an all-important thing.

Once finished, the basement was ruled over by my older brothers, who soon instituted many arcane and (to my eyes) arbitrary rules concerning it. The first rule was that anytime an older brother wanted the use of a chair or any other piece of furniture being used by a younger brother, all the older brother had to do was to say the words “Pass down,” and the younger brother was required to move at once. As you might expect in a family of seven boys, the free exercise of this law created many a musical chairs–like moment, as the oldest in the family kicked the next oldest out of his chair or couch, and that brother responded by invoking the pass down rule on the brother just beneath him in age, and so on, until finally all of the furniture in the room was occupied and those of us at the bottom of the pecking order had to lie on the carpeted floor to watch TV. Similar rules concerned the selection of TV shows (the oldest brother in the room always decided what we would watch), what music could be played on the 8-track and at what volume, and, most devastating to me, who was allowed to use the pool table.

“The felt on this table is brand new,” one of my brothers intoned. “Do you think we want you ripping it up, or spilling juice on it, or anything like that?”

Needless to say, I ignored the rule regarding the pool table every chance I got, dragging a chair next to the table to stand on while I practiced my shots. My one desire in life was to become a billiards expert on par with my heroes Minnesota Fats and Willie Mosconi, who later took part in the legendary $15,000 “Great Pool Shoot-Out” announced by Howard Cosell on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. However, short of this lofty goal, I would settle for beating any of my older brothers at a game of eight ball. I had noticed that as soon as one of my brothers got old enough to play in pool halls like the Golden Ace downtown or Duffy’s in South Dodge, they quickly lost all interest in our table, and this was a weakness I planned to exploit. Finally, I got good enough to beat the next brother above me, Steve, and I began to set my sights even higher. However, I was disappointed to find that none of my brothers older than Steve would play me.

“You’re all scared,” I taunted them.

“That’s not why,” my brother Tom said with a laugh.

“Why then?”

“You’ll find out, one of these days.”

“Yeah, sure,” I replied, thoroughly disgusted.

However, it turned out he was right after all. I did find out. As soon as I was old enough, I headed downtown and sneaked into the Golden Cue, where I challenged a middle-aged feedlot cowboy to a game of eight ball.

“How much you want to bet?” the cowboy asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “How much do you want to bet?”

“How about five dollars?”

This was far more than I had been expecting, but I had the money on me, and by now it was impossible to back down. “You’re on,” I said.

Nothing about the table on which we played felt remotely like our table. The ball rolled much more slowly, and the action off the cue ball felt different, too. None of my trick shots—or even my regular shots—worked. After taking a licking in that game and one more, I headed home, tail between my legs, and found my brother Tom in the TV room, eating popcorn and watching a rerun of Hawaii Five-O.

“What’s the deal with the pool table?” I asked.

“You’ve been playing at Duffy’s, haven’t you?” he observed with a smirk.

“The Golden Cue.”

“And let me guess,” Tom said, smiling broadly. “The table felt a little different.”

“That’s right. Why?”

Here Tom paused, obviously savoring the moment. “The tops on those tables are granite, fool.”

“And our table?” I asked.

“Plywood.”

“Plywood! What the hell! Why?”

“The top was broken when Dad bought it,” Tom answered, shrugging. “That shit’s expensive, so instead of granite, we used plywood and then had the whole thing covered with new felt so no one would notice.”

Why do we have to be so different from everyone else? I remember wondering. As always, no answer to this important question was forthcoming.

* * *

I had just started school at Sacred Heart Cathedral when my parents decided it was high time to remodel the upstairs of the house. The decision was made over dinner one Friday night, and by Saturday afternoon, my father and older brothers had ripped the kitchen cabinets off the wall and tossed them unceremoniously into the front yard. The violence and finality of the action shocked me deeply. It was as if some kind of madness had come over these people I thought I knew, and they were behaving now as men possessed—as zombies or something worse, not to be trusted. I remember sitting on my bicycle in the middle of Cedar Street, which was then little more than a dirt road, watching the chaos and destruction unfold. First the cabinets flew out the side door, then the sink, followed by huge chunks of linoleum flooring that sailed through the air like wounded Frisbees. Then one of my brothers—I think it was Alan, the second oldest—came outside, sledgehammer in hand, and started to break apart the wooden porch on the north side of the house.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Dad said to,” he answered in his zombie way. “We’re gonna get rid of this whole doorway and expand this side of the house into the yard and make a sitting room for Mom.”

“A sitting room?” I asked. “What’s that?”

“I don’t know,” Alan replied. “But that’s what Dad is calling it, so I guess that’s what it’s going to be.”

Unlike the Move to Town and the finishing of the basement, neither of which I was old enough to remember in any detail, this round of remodeling was something I experienced directly, the way refugees in a war-torn country experience war. It was my turn now to understand what it meant to “camp” in the basement, sleeping on fold-out cots and cooking dinners of macaroni and cheese on a Coleman stove set up next to the pool table. For months, while the work dragged on and on, and ideas multiplied like flies, the family lived in a strange, almost surreal state in which everything that had once seemed “normal” was turned on its head, and even the strangest of circumstances provoked little more than a tired yawn. Was it “normal” to take your bath in a plastic baby pool, to think of a Styrofoam cooler as “the fridge,” to eat Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup over rice for fifteen days in a row? Well, who was to say it wasn’t normal when clearly it was the only reality going?

And so the zombies continued with their dubious enterprise, fitting the work in on evenings and weekends and holidays such as Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Watching the work take place, all I could do was shake my head and whisper my mother’s old mantra under my breath, so no one else could hear, “And this, too, shall pass. And this, too, shall pass.”

It did pass. And in time life went back to “normal” again. However, having experienced life as a refugee, I no longer trusted the whole idea of normalcy. Deep down, I knew that the zombies could reappear at any moment, and when that happened, the world as I knew it would be laid to waste as if a flood or a tornado had raged through the neighborhood.

The older I got, the more adept I became at forecasting the squall on the horizon that in time would grow into a full-blown storm of remodeling. Usually it began in this way. My mother, whom I was beginning to recognize as a co-instigator of the madness, rather than a co-victim, would express in passing some dissatisfaction with the house as currently configured. The bathroom was too small or in the wrong part of the house; whenever it rained, water ran down the basement steps, flooding the laundry room; the front room lacked a fireplace, and wouldn’t it be grand to sit before a crackling fire, glass of wine in hand, kids exiled to the basement where they belonged? Hearing this, my father would remain quiet for a long time, his Rebein jaw thrust out before him. At first I thought this look was because he was mad at her; only later did I learn that the silence was a sign that the wheels in his mind had begun to turn, seeking answers to these riddles his mate had posed. Not long after the comments were made, the two of them would move on to the next inevitable stage in their process—driving around town to “look at houses.” How I hated this ritual! Invariably the houses they looked at were in upscale neighborhoods like the one surrounding the country club golf course, a part of town universally derided as Snob Hill.

“There’s no harm in looking,” my mother would say at the beginning of one of these interminable expeditions.

“No, looking is free,” my father would agree. “It’s buying that’s expensive.”

Sitting in the backseat of the family Buick, a car I considered not nearly nice enough to be driving down these particular streets, I would try to predict the future by paying attention to which houses my parents looked at and what they said about them. It wasn’t particularly hard.

mom [pointing to a two-story Tudor with a massive front lawn]: Oh, I like that one, Bill.

dad: The roof doesn’t have enough overhang. [Nodding at a single-story brick ranch with an open ceiling and massive windows across the front]: What do you think of that one over there? Now that’s a house.

mom: Nice. But what do you suppose a house like that costs?

dad [shrugging]: A lot. What do you think of that color of brick?

mom: I like it. A lot.

dad: So do I. See the way the chimney rises up on that side of the house . . .

Having heard this much, I knew it was just a matter of time before my father grabbed some piece of unopened mail and used the back of it to draw a rough sketch of his latest home improvement idea. But was that really so bad? I found myself wondering, as time went on. While part of me blamed both my parents for continually pulling the carpet out from under my childhood, another part of me was beginning to look at them with something like awe, maybe even admiration. They’re crazy as loons, I’d think to myself. But they certainly do know what they want, and they aren’t shy about going after it.

* * *

The biggest of my parents’ “remodeling projects” stretched across several years in the late 1970s, when I was twelve or thirteen years old, and my oldest brother David was in law school at the University of Kansas. After years of talking about it, my parents were going to remodel the house’s exterior, adding a shake shingle roof, a fireplace, and an exterior of new red brick. In essence, they were going to remake the house in the image of one of those sprawling ranches on Snob Hill they were always driving past and admiring. Of course, being Rebeins, they had their own way of going about this, one that only someone who knew their history and tendencies could have predicted.

During World War II, which coincided roughly with the later years of my father’s childhood, Dodge City was a veritable hive of military activity, particularly as regarded the testing of aircraft and the training of pilots. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, an army air base home to some forty thousand people was thrown up in wheat fields west of town. There were massive airplane hangars, hundreds of smaller Quonset huts, and row upon row of temporary barracks heated by tall chimneys of red brick. In the years after the war, however, the old air base quickly fell into disrepair. Finally it was closed altogether, the barracks torn down, the Quonset huts and other usable buildings dragged off to nearby farms and ranches to serve as machine shops or cowsheds. Grass grew up in the cracks in the old runways, the old brick chimneys fell to the ground, and what remained of the place was turned into a feedlot for finishing cattle. My father had grown up less than a mile from the old air base and was intimately familiar with every part of it. However, the massive old hangars and the majestic runways and even the utilitarian Quonset huts were not what drew his attention. No, what stoked his desire and got his imagination going was the thought of all those fallen-down barracks chimneys. All that brick just sitting there on the prairie waiting for someone with the desire and initiative to imagine a use for it! All that brick for free!

I remember the Saturday this desire of my father’s was translated into action. Two or three of my brothers and I were loaded into the back of my father’s snub-nosed 1969 Dodge pickup and driven out to the old air base. There we were issued tools and instructed to stand by and watch carefully as my father demonstrated the process we were to use in recycling the bricks for use on our house.

“First you find a cluster of three or four bricks that have already fallen from the chimney,” the old man told us, digging in the weeds until he came up with a representative chunk. “Then you carefully tap at the mortar between the bricks with your hammer and chisel until you get them separated from each other. Finally you chip away at the remaining mortar until . . .” But here, in the final part of his demonstration, the brick he was cleaning broke in half in his hands. “Well, you get the idea,” he said, tossing the broken brick back into the weeds and wiping the mortar dust from his hands. “As you get the bricks cleaned, just stack them in groups of a hundred or so, and we’ll load them in the pickup when I come back to get you.”

And with that, he drove off, leaving us to our work. I can’t recall how much we were to be paid for this job—a couple of cents a brick, I think. I know it was enough that I was vaguely excited by the prospect of making the money to buy whatever toy I had on my wish list in those days. However, this initial enthusiasm soon wore off, as brick after brick broke in half or disintegrated altogether in my chapped, red fingers. That old army cement was just too tough and clingy, the bricks too porous and fragile. In the four or five hours before my father returned to take us home for lunch that Saturday, I think my brother Steve and I managed to clean all of three or four bricks. The rest we had to toss back into the weeds from which we had gathered them, and soon enough the hurling of these bricks because the day’s chief activity, complete with side bets on accuracy, and so on. My brother Joe concentrated much harder on the work but did no better. In any case, the sight of our tiny stack of cleaned bricks must have been all the old man needed to abandon all thought of cleaning enough bricks to cover our house, because we never returned to the air base to clean another brick after that day—indeed, we didn’t even bother to take the bricks we had already cleaned home with us. For all I know, they’re still sitting out there today on the broken tarmac, waiting for sun and rain to pound them back into the ground from which they came.

Despite this initial setback, the idea of bricking the house on Cedar went ahead as planned. I vividly recall the day the pallets of new bricks were off-loaded into our front yard, creating yet another of those No-Looking-Back moments, like the time my father told the seller of the “dream house” what he could do with it, or the time he and my brothers knocked a hole in the side of the house and began to throw cabinets out of it. I guess it’s really going to happen, I thought, bracing myself for what I knew would be a difficult period of transition and toil. Was I myself becoming one of the zombies? I wondered. Yes and no, I decided. For even as I pulled on gloves and began moving the bricks to where the bricklayers could reach them, another part of me was already repeating the familiar words, “And this, too, shall pass. And this, too, shall pass.”

It was around this time of heady activity on the exterior of the house that my brother David brought one of his law school friends home to spend Thanksgiving with us. I believe the guy was from out of state and had no one else to spend the holiday with. He probably imagined the weekend would be a good break from the toil of law school, a time to kick back, stuff himself with turkey, and watch some football on TV. What he got instead is a subject of amusement in my family even to this day. For no sooner had the poor devil been introduced to the family that Wednesday evening than a trenching spade was thrust into his hand and he had to pitch in, along with the rest of us, and help to dig footings for the new brick siding. After all, that’s what evenings and weekends and holidays were for when a remodeling project was under way, and the work went on not just for an hour or two but for the entire weekend, including Thanksgiving Day.

“The poor bastard,” one of us will say, remembering those days. “He didn’t know what he was getting into. He thought we’d surely quit when it got dark. Imagine how shocked he must have been when Dad came out of the house with those floodlights, and we kept right on digging past ten o’clock.”

Similar scenes played themselves out across the next couple of years, as a new roof of shake shingles was put on, the aforementioned patio was added, and, finally, the house’s four-car garage was built. In many ways, this final project was my father’s masterpiece. I was old enough by then to see how he went about it, and like everyone else who witnessed the process, I was both amused and amazed. First the foundations were dug and the footings were poured, followed by the floor of the garage and the driveway. When that was done, we set about building the rafters, stacking each new rafter we built atop the others on the patio.

“What about the walls?” a curious neighbor asked. “Ain’t you gonna have walls on this gigantic thing?”

“Sure,” my father answered. “I already have some ready and waiting.”

“You already have some walls?” the man asked, his eyes bugging a little.

“Sure, at the farm,” my father said. “I’ve got all the walls I need out there.”

I remember standing there in my carpenter’s apron, trying to visualize what my father was talking about. From what I could remember about the place, the old farmstead was little more than an abandoned basement, a rusted-out swing set, and a couple of rows of dying elm trees. Where these “walls” were coming from, I could not imagine.

I found out the very next weekend, when we pulled into the gravel driveway of the old farmstead twenty miles from town, and there at the very back of the property was an old, tin-sided government granary I had all but forgotten about.

“There are those walls I was telling you about,” my father said to our dubious neighbor, who had accompanied us on the errand. “Pull that tin off and lift the roof, and those walls will come apart in sections, just like they were designed to do when the government put them up years ago.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” the neighbor said, a weak smile animating his face.

This time, everything came off just the way the old man said it would. Within a couple of hours of arriving, we were hauling our first load of walls to town. As we arrived with each load, a second crew got busy putting them up. It was like one of those Amish barn raisings, the massive garage seeming to grow out of thin air over the course of a single day, the walls rising first, followed by the rafters, followed by precut sheets of plywood we nailed into place before rolling out the tar paper and hammering on the shingles. That evening, we all stood around in the shadow of the thing we had built, drinking iced tea or beer and marveling at all we had witnessed and participated in that day.

When the house on Cedar was finally completed to my parents’ satisfaction, it boasted five bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a white-carpeted living room with a stone fireplace separated from the rest of the house by French doors. By then, several of my brothers were skilled carpenters; one of them, Tom, had even gone into business for himself. The work they did on that house was professional grade, and yet, no sooner was it definitively finished, during my first year away at college, than my parents sold it and moved into the three-bedroom farmhouse west of town that my father had grown up in. I remember how shocked I was when my mother called and told me about these developments.

“You’re selling the house?” I asked. “What on earth for?”

“It’s part of a land deal,” my mother said, sighing. “But the truth is, it’s too big for us now anyway, with just your dad and me and your brother Paul left.”

“Too big?” I asked. “Or too finished?”

Here my mother allowed herself a tiny laugh. “Ah, well, you know your father. He likes to have a project.”

“Really? Just him?”

Another laugh.

That was two houses and twenty-five years ago. Although my parents are in their late seventies now and have lived in their current home on Snob Hill for only eighteen months, already I have noticed them looking around the place, commenting on what my father likes to call “the possibilities.”

Hide the envelopes.

In the Land of Crashed Cars and Junkyard Dogs

When I was a boy growing up in western Kansas, my father and his older brother, Harold, owned an auto body salvage yard in the sand hills south of Dodge City. The place was called B & B Auto Parts, or, more simply, B & B. That was the name of the business when they bought it in 1966, and that’s the name it retains to this day, long after they sold it and my father returned to full-time farming and ranching. I remember, as a very small boy, asking my mother what the name stood for and why they never bothered to change it. “I don’t know,” she answered, continuing whatever chore she was doing at the time. “A, B, C—what does it matter? It’s just a junkyard.” Of course, she was right about that; my father himself would have agreed. And yet, to me, perhaps because of the age I was when I experienced it, the salvage yard was so much more than that. As Ishmael says of the whaling ships on which he grew to manhood, the salvage yard, with its forty-odd acres of mangled cars and trucks, was my Harvard and my Yale.

I was five or six years old when I started spending a lot of time at the salvage yard. I don’t know how or why this came to pass, but I have my suspicions. From my earliest days, I was a handful—a hyperactive motor mouth prone to accidents and mischief of a more or less mindless sort. From the moment I woke up until I dropped to sleep from exhaustion seventeen or eighteen hours later, I was constantly on the go, constantly “causing a racket” and “failing to listen,” constantly “into something.” Today, kids such as I was get a dose of Ritalin. But I was lucky. The only solution that offered itself in my case was to send me to work along with my father and older brothers.

Of course, I use the phrase to work in only the loosest of senses. While most of my older brothers were given jobs as apprentice welders or body men or were at least required to push a broom every once in a while, I was allowed to roam free across the entire expanse of the salvage yard so long as I didn’t maim myself or distract anyone else from his work. In this way, I came to know the different territories that made up the salvage yard, as well as the rogue’s gallery of men who ruled over them.

The nerve center of the place was the concrete-floored front office with its long counter littered with coffee cups, overflowing ashtrays, dog-eared lists of inventory. Here parts men took orders from the public and added their voices to a static-ridden frequency on which their colleagues from across the West and Midwest carried on a nonstop conversation. Guys, this is Bob at Apex in Tulsa still looking for that bumper, hood, and grill for a 1972 Buick Skylark. . . . The Front was the only part of the salvage yard that was air conditioned or heated in any conventional sense (the body and machine shops made do with jerry-rigged box fans and fifty-gallon drums converted into wood-burning stoves). It was where customers waited, gossiping and smoking, lounging about on bucket seats culled from wrecks. Most importantly to me, though, the Front was where the candy and pop machines were. How I loved to scavenge coins from under the seats of wrecked cars and then feed them, one by one, into the rows of globe-headed machines containing jelly beans, gumballs, salted cashews, Boston baked beans, Red Hots, regular and peanut M&M’s! This was my first real experience of the world of “getting and spending,” as Wordsworth had it, and how sweet it was!

Snack and drink in hand, I’d sit, legs dangling from one of the old car seats, and wait for something interesting to happen. It never took long. Someone was always arguing, telling an off-color joke, showing off a new gun or knife he’d just bought or otherwise “come into.” At first the parts guys, conscious of my presence, would nod toward me and quickly change the subject whenever someone ventured into R- or X-rated territory. Gradually, however, they forgot about me and went on with their business uncensored. Many an old-time country song could be fashioned out of the words and deeds of the men who turned up at the salvage yard looking to coax a few more miles out of their battered Chevys and Fords. After a while, it began to seem to me that every story worth telling involved, as if by prescription, an angry woman, a bout of drinking, a fistfight, and a night spent in the city or county jail.

parts man 1: Bob! Ain’t seen you in a coon’s age. How the hell is it hanging?

bob [smoking, looking a little haggard and hangdog]: Not so good. You heard the old lady threw me out on my ass, right?

pm 1: No! Why’d she go and do a thing like that?

bob: Be damned if I know.

parts man 2 [chuckling, taking a long drag of his cigarette and letting the smoke escape his lungs along with the words]: Didn’t have anything to do with you getting drunk and driving that Jeep of yours into that culvert off Comanche Street, did it?

bob [sheepishly]: Well, yeah. But can you believe the bitch wouldn’t even bail me out? I had to ask her cousin to do it!

pm 1 [winking at pm 2]: Which cousin would that be?

bob [smiling faintly, as if reliving it all over]: I think you know the one I’m talking about. Young and long-legged . . .

pm 2: Well, now. I do believe this picture is starting to come into focus . . .

Like bartenders and other people who deal with the public all day, the parts men could be gregarious, gruff, sympathetic, or downright mean, depending on what the situation appeared to call for. For this reason, I didn’t like them very much. Parts men were a little too slick, a little too shifty and hard to read. I hated it when they would treat a customer nice—We’ll be seeing you, Duane, take care now, you hear?—and then start in laughing as soon as he was safely out the door. That sumbitch gets any fatter he’s gonna need a goddamn mirror just to see his own pecker ha ha ha . . .

The Front was the place I first encountered the words fuck, cunt, and cocksucker, to say nothing of such tame elocutions as shit, goddamn, and sonofabitch. I remember once, having just overheard a sustained streak of animated cussing, I wandered out to the gravel parking lot and began to reenact the scene in a loud voice.

“And then I told that cocksucker that if he didn’t stop fucking with me I was gonna rip his motherfucking head off and take a shit down his neck . . .”

Even as I said the words, I could hear the door to the Front swing open behind me, and who did I see when I turned around but my father in his blue uniform, black eyes boring into me.

“What did you just say?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I answered.

“It didn’t sound like nothing.”

I hung my head a little, afraid to lie.

“What would your mother think if she heard you talking like that?”

“She wouldn’t like it,” I said.

“Have you ever heard me talk like that?”

“No.”

“Well, all right then. I better not hear you. Understand?”

And with that he walked away, shaking his head in that exasperated way he had, as if to comment on how amazingly stupid the world had become sometime while he wasn’t paying attention to it.

* * *

After the Front, my favorite part of the salvage yard was a long corridor that ran between the engine and body shops—a massive, Willy Wonka–like space filled with nothing but row upon row of chrome hubcaps. Hung on huge racks and lit up by columns of fluorescent lights, these hubcaps gleamed for me like the very gold of Cibola. Ford, Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick, Oldsmobile, Chrysler . . . every American make and model was represented. I loved to sit against the wall opposite the hubcaps and cast my eyes over them until one in particular drew my attention, at which point I would rise, climb the racks, and bring the hubcap down to inspect it. My favorites were the vintage chrome hubcaps favored by Chevrolet in the 1950s and ’60s. How sleek and perfect they were! Sitting on the ground, hubcap in my lap, my reflection bouncing mirror-like back to me, I could easily imagine the cap was. . . . a flying saucer . . . a cymbal on a drum set . . . a discus I was about to hurl in a bid to win the Olympics . . .

One day, as I lay on the floor amid a pile of caps, playing some game that existed only in my head, one of the parts men walked by and dropped a red shop rag in my lap.

“If you’re gonna drag those sumbitches down, you might as well shine them up,” he said.

I fell to this work without complaint or expectation of pay. Soon I created a special row on the racks just for the caps I had polished to an especially high luster. This was my hoard of gold, my kingdom of chrome.

Then one day I returned to my stash and found that my favorite hubcap of all was gone. I stood there, staring at the place on the rack it had occupied only the day before. Then, as the reality of the situation sank in, I rushed into the Front and demanded an explanation.

“That dog dish Chevy cap?” one of the parts men, a gruff, bear-like man named Kenny or Doug, said absently. “Sold it yesterday.”

“You sold my hubcap?” I asked, astonished and appalled.

“Well, what did you think we did around here?” Kenny asked, laughing. “Play with ourselves?”

Only when he noticed the tears running down my cheeks did the man stop teasing me. “Hey, I’ll tell you what,” he said, reaching into the front pocket of his jeans. “How about I buy the cap from you for a nickel?”

“To hell with your nickel!” I spat, turning and running away from there until my lungs burned and my legs ached. After that, I would have nothing at all to do with Kenny. He and I were enemies, even if he, in his gruff bearness, was oblivious to the fact.

Beyond the corridor where the hubcaps were stored was a large warehouse lined with heavy racks built to store engines, rear ends, transmissions, and large body parts like fenders and hoods. Hanging from each part was a tag with the wreck’s year, make, and model scrawled in bright yellow paint—“1969 GTO,” “1972 Gran Torino,” “1974 Nova.” As a young boy, I was fascinated by the names of these cars. I loved to say them out loud, feel the sound of them rolling off my tongue as I wandered the dimly lit rows of the warehouse, dodging the forklift that always seemed to appear out of nowhere, bearing down on me like some evil robot in a science fiction tale.

The parts themselves I found to be eerie and disturbing. Maybe it was the way they hung from their hooks like executed criminals. Or the way each figured as an orphan of sorts, separated by some terrible and tragic accident from all that had made it whole. As with most children who grow up in large families, I had a fascination with orphans and would often imagine what it would be like to be orphaned myself. Sometimes I would dream that a flood or a tornado would come and tear me away from my sprawling family, casting me out into the larger world like the main character in the TV show Kung Fu. What would I do if that happened? Where would I go? How would I survive? The prospect was terrifying, yet alluring, too.

One afternoon a wreck arrived at the salvage yard that seemed to encapsulate this notion of tragic and thrilling orphanhood perfectly. I vividly recall the moment the flatbed truck hauling the car pulled up before the Front, the way all of the parts men and mechanics and body men poured out as one to see it. The car on the flatbed was a bright orange Porsche 911—or rather half a Porsche 911.1 The other half of the car had been chopped off (so Kenny the parts man claimed) when the “drunkass fool” who was driving it “flooded the engine on some railroad tracks north of Oklahoma City.” Ordinarily, a car hit in the front and dragged for miles by a freight train would be worthless, but as my brother David quickly explained, Porsche 911s had their engines in the rear, and so, miraculously, this particular car was still worth quite a lot (“a mint,” was how my brother put it), provided, of course, that a usable front end could be found for it.

1 My brother Alan claims the car was a Spyder 550. My father remembers it, vaguely, as a Triumph Spitfire. In my mind, however, the car will always be a Porsche 911.

For years after this, the wrecked Porsche sat under a tarp on the back lot of the salvage yard, a lonely import amid a sea of automobiles made in Detroit, while my father and everyone else who worked at the salvage yard listened to the radio for the words we so longed to hear: Boys, listen up, we just come into some front end parts for a Porsche 911 . . . Whenever I caught a glimpse of the orange car beneath its bright blue tarpaulin, my mind would begin to race, imagining all of the 911s out there in the world, each of them perfect in its own way, and yet at least one of them destined to be involved in some terrible accident, its front end cut away and shipped over vast distances to become one with our 911. When, in college, I was assigned to write a paper on the Thomas Hardy poem “The Convergence of the Twain,” with its famous lines describing the building of the Titanic and the simultaneous growth of the iceberg that would sink it (“Alien they seemed to be; / No mortal eye could see / The intimate welding of their later history”), I could not help but think of the orange Porsche and the terrible desire and disappointment that engulfed it.

“When do you think we’ll find it?” I would ask my father at least once a week.

“Find what?” he’d ask absently.

“The other half of the 911.”

“Who knows?” he’d answer, shrugging. “It’s an import. Parts for those don’t come along every day of the week.”

“Maybe someone else will get stalled on a railroad track,” I speculated. “Only this time, he’ll get almost the whole way across, and when the train comes, it will smack the car in the rear, not the front.”

“Maybe,” my father said. “I wouldn’t hold my breath, though.”

* * *

Stretching off a quarter of a mile behind the main buildings was the Yard proper with its row upon row of wrecked Buicks, Cadillacs, Chevys, Chryslers, Dodges, Fords, Olds-mobiles, Plymouths, Pontiacs, and so on, some of the cars stacked one atop the other like layers in a wedding cake, each of them guarded by roving bands of junkyard dogs, chiefly German shepherds and Doberman pinschers, with a few angry mutts thrown in for good measure. Often the hoods, trunks, and front or back doors of these cars stood open, creating a bizarre, stopped-in-time, Pompeii-like atmosphere. Everywhere was the evidence of Fate in the form of head-on collisions, rollovers, fire, and flood. The Yard itself was littered with more signs of the apocalypse, everything from shattered window glass to twisted sheet metal to headless dolls and solitary shoes and other debris that had come into the place along with the wrecks. In this sense, the Yard more than earned its traditional moniker of “automobile graveyard.”

Looting this graveyard was my fondest occupation. Whenever a fresh wreck was dropped at the gate, I’d be the first to go through it, ransacking the glove compartment and truck for hidden treasure. I was rarely disappointed. On top of the usual horde of loose change, road maps, jumper cables, and tire tools, I found marbles, bats and baseballs, old paperbacks (Louis L’Amour was especially popular), secret stashes of Hustler and Penthouse magazines, costume jewelry of varying degrees of gaudiness, playing cards, pocket knives, Zippo lighters, sleeping bags, beach chairs, cigar boxes full of old photographs and diaries, fireworks, spent and unspent ammo. Unless it was deemed to be particularly valuable or dangerous, I was allowed to keep everything I found.

Some of the more mangled wrecks had bloodstains on the upholstery or even bits of human hair jutting from cracks in the windshield. At first, such sights gave me the creeps, but after a while they lost their power to scare me, and I treated them with the same air of professional detachment with which a forensic pathologist might view a fresh corpse. Only rarely did a new find make me feel the nearness of death. I remember one such instance with chilling clarity. For years, I had wanted a catcher’s glove of a particular make and model (a Rawlings K3-H, let’s call it), but since baseball was not one of my better sports and the rag-tag team I played on had an older glove I could use, I could never convince my parents to buy me one. Then one day I crawled into the back of a wrecked Corvair and there, wedged under the front passenger seat, was an almost brand new K3-H. Not believing my luck, I slipped the glove on my hand and held it out before me as though catching a pitch. It fit perfectly. Indeed, the mitt felt as if it had been made for my hand and no other. But then I noticed something that caused me to shake the glove off my hand as quickly as if I had felt a spider lurking in one of the finger holes. There, written in black permanent marker across the web of the glove, was the name ROBBY—my name, exactly as I spelled it. That the handwriting looked nothing like my own or my mother’s did not abate my alarm. Somewhere out there in the world beyond the salvage yard, a second me, a ghastly twin or doppelganger, waited to do me harm—of this I was thoroughly convinced.

* * *

That whole outer realm of the salvage yard was ruled over by a strange and fascinating creature known to denizens of the salvage yard as “Yard Man.” Unlike his more sophisticated cousins in the Front or the body shop, Yard Man worked outside the whole day through and in all kinds of weather—rain, sleet, snow, burning sun. To the parts guys, many of whom had finished high school and maybe even some college, Yard Man was a clumsy, unsophisticated brute. A vandal at heart, his stock-in-trade was force and speed, not precision. Ask a mechanic to pull a motor from a car, and he’d roll it into a bay in his shop and begin a careful disassembly process that included draining the radiator, unhooking the battery, loosening a dozen different clamps, belts, hoses, and mounts. Ask Yard Man to perform the same task, and he’d throw a chain around the motor, winch it up, and then cut everything holding the motor to the car with a blowtorch. Within minutes, the motor would lurch free and Yard Man would haul it, swinging on its chain like a pendulum, to the wash bay, where a grease-covered underling (often one of my teenaged brothers) would steam it off with a high-powered hose.

All day long, Yard Man roared up and down the narrow sand roads of the salvage yard atop a strange, homemade vehicle called a “goose.” A goose was usually a retired army truck with the cab torn off, a roll cage welded into its place, and a crane-like winch mounted on the front. Other tools of Yard Man’s trade—acetylene torch, sledgehammer, straight and angled crowbars—were mounted catch-as-catch-can along the sides and back. Whenever Yard Man took a coffee or bathroom break, I would climb into the high, still-warm seat of his abandoned goose and imagine myself rampaging through the world like a tank commander in a war movie. Pow! Boom! Ka-Bam! I would free all of the prisoners! Rain missiles on the enemy! Young women and girls would run alongside me in the rubble-strewn streets, blowing me kisses! Then, when Yard Man emerged from his break to reclaim his goose, I’d imagine that an enemy grenade had been lobbed into the tank and my only hope of survival was a daring leap to safety.

Five or six different Yard Men worked for my father during the years he owned the salvage yard, but the one I remember best was a baldheaded, pit bull–like man named Billy Dan. Billy Dan had a deep crease in the top of his forehead and an upper lip the size of a lemon, both of these abnormalities the result of an accident involving a truck bumper that swung back from the goose winch and caught Billy Dan full in the face. As far as I could tell, the man was mute. He communicated through grunts, high-pitched squeals, and terrible dark-eyed looks. Although I admired Billy Dan as a fellow man-of-action, I was also deeply terrified of him. All he had to do was look at me and I would run the other way as fast as my sneaker-clad feet would carry me. Part of this fear had to do with the fact that my older brothers used to tease me, saying, “Mom and Dad have finally decided what to do with you. They’re going to give you to Billy Dan. At first he wanted to buy you, but Dad wouldn’t hear of that . . .” Somehow I had got it into my head that Billy Dan was a veteran of the Vietnam War, and in my mind, Vietnam vets were addle-minded psychopaths never more than one “flashback” away from murdering everyone around them. Who was to say that Billy Dan hadn’t been tortured beyond limits in some faraway rice paddy and lived now only to exact his revenge on the innocent?

Even watching him smoke or eat was a scary thing. He always seemed to have a cigar jutting out beneath his lemon lip, and when he struck a match to relight the cigar, an action he performed hundreds of times a day, all of the terrible contours of his face would be illuminated. His favorite meal, which he took daily in a little break room just off the wash bay, was pickled eggs and pigs’ feet with a side of saltine crackers. The eggs he covered in salt and pepper before consuming them in a single bite. When these were gone he moved on to the pigs’ feet, sucking the meat from bone and tendon before spitting the white knuckles onto the floor before him, a terrible sight to behold. Once, when I was sitting in the break room with him, Billy Dan attempted to share his lunch with me, his hand jutting out into the space between us to reveal a pig’s foot resting atop a clean paper towel.

“No thanks,” I said.

But this only caused him to shake the tidbit before me, his terrible green eyes urging me to try it.

“Okay,” I said, afraid to give any other answer. But when I put the pig’s foot in my mouth, and felt the cold, rubbery flesh on my tongue, I immediately gagged, spitting the unclean thing out at Billy Dan’s feet.

He squealed with delight, holding his head back to reveal a single upper tooth, just to the right of his nose. Seeing that lonely tooth shook me even more than seeing the white pigs’ knuckles arrayed on the floor.

As terrified as I was of Billy, his mere presence in the Yard often made me feel safer and less alone. One day, he even saved my life—or at least I believed he did. I was lying on my back beneath a junker Impala, pretending to change the oil, when suddenly I heard a rattling sound just to the left of my ear. Slowly I rolled my eyes in that direction, and coiled next to me, just inside the car’s front tire, was a rattlesnake. I froze, my mouth going dry, heart beating wildly within my chest. I knew it was the end. Any second and the snake would bite me in the face or neck, and I’d be filled with poison and die. But then, just when I was about to give up the ghost, I heard the roar of Billy Dan’s goose coming down the sand road at my feet. Eyes still closed, I focused on that sound as it grew louder and louder. Finally Billy Dan’s goose shot past in a cloud of diesel smoke, and as the sound of it died away, I opened my eyes to see that the snake was gone, as vanished from this earth as if St. Patrick himself had appeared to banish it.

* * *

More terrifying than snakes and ogres were the junkyard dogs my father kept on the place to guard the parts from thieves. He always had a soft spot in his heart, a special love, for these terrible brutes, and they returned this love twentyfold. My father was the only person at the salvage yard who could go into their kennel near the racks of hubcaps to feed them, just as he was the only person who could fit their mouths with the leather muzzles they wore during the day so they wouldn’t bite customers. Theirs was a jealous, protective love. Woe be unto the customer who argued with or raised his voice around my father, for he would soon find a growling, low-slung German shepherd poised next to him, as if awaiting the command to kill. My father never bought, bred, or went out of his way to acquire any of these dogs. People brought them to him. A station wagon or pickup would roll to a stop in front of the office, a harried-looking man would get out and ask for my father, and the two of them would stand talking and looking through the windows of the car at the beast jailed within.

“He’s been biting people,” the man would begin. “I promised the neighbors I’d have him put down. But then a guy told me you sometimes take on dogs like this.”

“Does he bite you?” my father would ask.

And the man would answer with a yes or no, and the dog would be brought out of the car on a chain or leash, and my father would look it over, and if the vibe was good and he liked the dog, soon he would be scratching behind its ears and talking to it in a low voice. “Been biting people, huh, Shep? That’s no good. No good at all . . .”

A little longer and the dog would be licking his hand or burying its head in his lap.

“What do you think?” the man would ask.

“I can’t promise you I’ll keep him,” my father would say with a shrug. “But we can certainly give him a try.”

In this way, my father acquired a half dozen or more junkyard dogs, all of them troubled in some way, unmanageable by anyone but him. Almost without exception, they were “one person” dogs, saving all of their affection and trust for my father. Everyone else—including women, children, the elderly and infirm—they looked upon with distrust and hatred.

I first came into contact with these dogs when I was four or five years old, and from the beginning I was deeply afraid of them. Although my father kept the dogs muzzled during the day, that didn’t stop them from chasing me and knocking me down. I’d be playing in some remote part of the Yard, and out of nowhere the dogs would appear, their presence announced by a low growl from somewhere deep inside their throats. Once, I was playing twenty yards or so from their kennel when two of the dogs cornered me. I stood up, terrified, careful not to look the dogs in the eye. I’m done for, I thought. They’re gonna kill me for sure.

But then my father appeared and called the dogs off. “What were you doing to annoy them?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Well, I wouldn’t let them see you playing with those,” he said, nodding at the hubcaps scattered across the concrete floor. “They eat their dinner in those. They probably thought you were going to steal their food.”

Although I was happy to be rescued, I still held a special grudge against the dogs—and, in a way, against my father—that did not abate until the day I happened to see them in action.

It was a Sunday morning. We had been at Mass in town and still wore our church clothes when my father and I drove out to the salvage yard to give the dogs their breakfast. My father unlocked the door to the Front and switched on lights one by one as we walked down the long corridor past the hubcaps to the closet where the dog food was kept. Having filled a couple of hubcaps with kibble, we carried them outside to the wash bay, where my father whistled for the dogs to come get their breakfast. Usually when he did this, the dogs came bounding from two or three different parts of the Yard at once. On that day, however, none of the dogs came. All we got was a bark or two from some distant part of the Yard.

“Where are they?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” my father said. “You stay here and I’ll go and see.”

“No,” I answered, afraid. “I’m not staying here. What if they come back?”

He thought about this a moment, then said, “All right, you can come. But stay right by me, and if I tell you to stay back, you stay back. Got it?”

“Yes.” I took his hand in mine and held it tight. We began to zigzag across the Yard in the direction from which we had heard the barks.

The ground rose slightly in that direction, and wrecked cars were stacked high on either side of us. As a result, we couldn’t see more than a dozen yards ahead of us at any time. However, the closer we got, the louder the dogs barked. Finally we turned a corner, and there, high atop a wrecked van, sat a couple of long-haired men in dirty jeans and ripped T-shirts. Beneath them on all sides of the van were five or six drooling, howling yard dogs.

“What’s going on?” my father asked the men in an even voice.

“Not much,” one of the men offered sheepishly.

“Where did you come in?”

“Around back,” the other man said, pointing his chin in that direction.

“Did you cut the fence?”

“No. Climbed over.”

“What happened to your arm?” my father asked. Only then did I notice that one of the men was holding his arm a little funny, as if he had injured it.

“Dog bit it.”

“I see,” my father said, nodding his head. “Tell me this. If I let you boys down, are you coming over that fence again?”

“No, boss,” the first man said. “You can count on that.”

After the men were gone back over the fence and the dogs were greedily choking down their kibble, I asked my father who these men were, expecting him to answer with some generic term like “burglars” or “parts thieves.” Instead, he shrugged and rattled off their first and last names. “They’re brothers,” he added. “Their father and uncles used to come over that same fence twenty years ago. It’s kind of a family tradition, I guess you’d say.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. In my mind, he should have had the men thrown into jail. What was the point of catching them if you were only going to let them go? As for the dogs, although I had gained a newfound respect for the work they did at the salvage yard, I still didn’t trust or like them. I just knew that if they ever caught me in the Yard when my father wasn’t around, they’d tear me to pieces with the same jealous ferocity they used on thieves.

* * *

Of the dozen or so men who worked at the salvage yard at any one time, among them Yard Men, body men, engine specialists, and front office help, one of the most fascinating was a half-crippled mechanic named Speck. Of course, Speck wasn’t his real name, but it was the name sewn on the pocket of his light blue mechanic’s uniform. Speck talked with a slight lisp and walked with a limp, the result of a motorcycle accident that should have earned him a handsome settlement, had he not been cheated out of it by insurance company lawyers—so he claimed, at any rate, heaping terrible insults upon the heads of lawyers everywhere. In addition to his uniform, he wore ugly boots with thick, oil-resistant soles. His glasses were black and held together in the middle with electrical tape, the lenses thick and pitted with debris from the grinder and sandblaster.

Speck was an opinionated slanderer of everyone of a different race, color, or creed than himself, as well as anyone deemed by him to be “stupid.” His natural mode of discourse was the incoherent rant, the terribleness of which was compounded by his lisp and the fact that his mouth was always full of Redman chewing tobacco. To most people, all of this would have made Speck insufferable, but I thought he was the most interesting person I had ever met. Unlike everyone else in my life, Speck showed no sign of even realizing I was a child. He cussed freely before me, belched and farted, made dubious pronouncements about the world and the people in it. Taking out his tobacco for a chew, he would ask if I wanted some. When I said I didn’t, he just shrugged, as if to say, “Your loss.”

Speck’s specialty as a mechanic was the “stretching” of trucks. My father and Uncle Harold would fly down to the used truck auction in Oklahoma City and bring back ten or twelve Cain’s Coffee trucks. One by one, Speck would cut the trucks in half and lengthen their frames by seven or eight feet, so they could be fitted with hoists and resold as wheat trucks. Hanging out in Speck’s shop one summer, I came to know the stretching process inside out, and before long I was elevated to the status of gofer, running after whatever tool Speck might need at the time.

“Get me that hammer and punch,” Speck might say over his shoulder. When I brought them to him, he would snort his thanks and offer up some tidbit of Speck wisdom. “You know, don’t you, that you and your whole tribe are gonna roast in the fires of hell?”

“What tribe is that, Speck?” I’d ask, thrilled by such talk.

“Papists.”

“But I’m not a part of that tribe, Speck—or any, that I know of.”

“Sure you are. You’re Catholic, ain’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Baptized as a baby?”

“I guess so.”

“Well, there you go. You weren’t immersed. But that’s only the beginning of why you’re going to hell . . .”

And off he’d go on some new angle I thrilled to hear. I didn’t always understand, much less believe, the things Speck talked about. It was the free-flowing nature of his discourse I loved, the way he could just turn it on the way you might turn on a spigot, and here everything came spilling out in a gush. In another life, he might have been a shock jock, or maybe a radio preacher. I’m sure he could have thrilled a certain kind of audience with his impromptu rants.

Then one day, toward the end of the summer I spent hanging around his shop, something happened that caused me to revise my estimation of Speck. We had just installed a new radiator in one of the Cain’s trucks and were hunting around the shop for the red five-gallon can Speck kept water in. “Where the hell is it?” he raved. “The sumbitches! Don’t those Yard Men know to keep their filthy hands off my stuff?”

When we finally located the can, on a slab of greasy cement where the Yard Men parked their gooses, it was only to discover that someone had used it as a catch can for an oil change. “Fools! Idiots! I’ll kill them all—the worthless sumbitches!” Speck yelled, emptying the can into a sticker patch before limping angrily back into his shop.

It took ten minutes of scrubbing with soap and water to get the can back to its original condition. That done, we dried the top and sides with a shop rag, and Speck took some yellow paint we used to label parts and began to carefully mark the can in big block letters. W O T . . . Here he paused a moment, glancing over his shoulder at me as if he had just realized I was there. Then, shaking his head and muttering something under his breath, he finished by carefully painting the letter R followed by an exclamation mark.

I stood there, paralyzed by confusion. Why had Speck written W O T R ! when he clearly meant W A T E R !? Was this some kind of industry-wide alternative spelling? If so, why adopt it, when the result was a savings of only one letter? Then it hit me. He can’t spell.

Some part of the change sweeping over me must have communicated itself to Speck, because when I looked up, he was frowning at me.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said, unwilling to share my discovery with the man most affected by it.

Not long after, I switched my admiration to another salvage yard personality—Challo, the body man. While the other men who worked for my father all wore the same uniform of dark blue trousers along with a light blue shirt with a name tag—“Larry,” “Bill”—and an oval patch bearing the words “B & B Auto Parts” on each pocket (indeed, my father himself wore this uniform religiously), Challo could not be bothered. At best, he regarded the dress code as optional. If he wore the pants, it would be with an old football jersey or a black Harley-Davidson T-shirt. On days when he deigned to wear the uniform shirt, it would be with jeans or shorts, the shirt unbuttoned, its tail flopping behind him. Challo was a dark man with nearly black eyes and long black hair he covered with a bandana or a polka-dot beanie of the kind favored by welders. When he bothered to shave, he went in for long sideburns and a Fu Manchu mustache. Indeed, he claimed to have created the style himself. “Broadway Joe ain’t got nothing on me,” he would declare, smiling to show a gold cap on one of his front teeth.

It was this style of Challo’s that appealed so strongly to me—that and his sense of freedom. I remember asking my father how it was that Challo seemed to operate under a different code and different rules than the other men who worked for him at the salvage yard. He just shrugged the matter off the way a philosopher might shrug off a famous conundrum. “He’s a body man,” he explained. “They’re just a different breed, that’s all.”

When I asked what that meant, he went on to explain that an experienced body man was more like an independent contractor than a regular employee. “They’re like hairdressers,” he said, offering a comparison that stunned me to my core. “When they get tired of working in one shop, or don’t like the rules there, or have a falling-out with the boss, they just move down the street to the next shop, and then the next. Most of the body men in this town have worked at pretty much every shop in town, some of them more than once.”

When I pressed further, amazed that he would rehire someone who had quit on him months or years before, he made an even more startling comparison. “Body work isn’t something just anybody can do,” he said. “It takes a certain touch. An artist’s touch.”

Once the comparison had been made, I could see that it was so. The body shop itself, with its floodlights and pervasive odor of paint and bizarre tools for pounding dents out of sheet metal, was like nothing so much as an artist’s studio. An air of bohemian cool pervaded the place, surrounding all of the men who worked there. The act of smoothing out body putty or laying down a coat of lacquer with the paint gun required poise and precision. There was nothing of the grease monkey in it, no gasoline fumes or black dirt beneath the fingernails. The job was not to repair so much as to transform.

When I say Challo was an artist, I mean he was a man of ideas with the means to make those ideas a reality. Once he sent me to get him a cheeseburger and fries from his favorite burger joint down the road from the salvage yard. Because the place was more than a mile away, and I had to walk there and back, by the time I returned the food was lukewarm.

“What took you so long?” Challo asked, pulling a soggy fry from the bag and inspecting it with a grimace. “This shit is cold, man.”

“It’s a long walk,” I said.

“Well, take your bike next time.”

“I don’t have one,” I lied.

“Really?” Challo asked, raising his black eyebrows in a way that showed he was already entertaining some outlandish new idea.

Not long after this, he showed up at the salvage yard with an old Schwinn with rusted fenders and rims and an ugly faux leopard-skin banana seat. The bike looked suspiciously as if it had been lifted from a school playground or someone’s backyard, but I didn’t ask about that. For the next couple of days, while other projects he should have been working on sat waiting, Challo lavished his full attention on the Schwinn. First he stripped the bike down to its frame and sanded off all of the old yellow paint. Then he hung the frame on a wire and hit it with a coat of brown primer and two or three coats of candy apple red. The next morning, after the paint had dried, he replaced the bike’s original handlebars with a pair of chrome bars he took off a wrecked motorcycle. Then he cut the bike’s chrome sissy bar down so that the back of the banana seat rested, fender-like, an inch above the back tire. The seat itself he covered in some black leather upholstery cut out of the backseat of a wrecked Cadillac. By now, other guys at the salvage yard had taken an interest in the project as well, and they brought in new tires, wheels, and pedals. Finished, the red Schwinn gleamed in the sun like some extravagantly restored vehicle in a classic car show.

“Well, what do you think?” Challo asked.

“It’s great,” I said, fumbling for a way to express my gratitude.

“Shit, man, that bike ain’t great,” he returned. “That bike is bad-ass, you know what I’m saying? BAD-ASS!”

“Bad-ass,” I repeated.

“Now you’re talking.”

Reaching into his paint-splattered Levis, the body man pulled out a five-dollar bill and waved it in front of his nose. “Cheeseburger with extra mustard and onions, man. And this time, that shit better not be cold.”

The idea of the artist as renegade and rebel, as someone who marched to the beat of his own drum, a professional in every sense but bound to no man, answerable only to his art and his own internal agenda—the salvage yard was where that intoxicating idea first blossomed into life for me.

* * *

I was at school the morning Kenny and the other parts men finally located the other half of the wrecked Porsche 911 that had sat for such a long time beneath a tarp at the back of the salvage yard. Throughout the week or so it took for the car to be picked up in Georgia or California and hauled all the way back to Dodge City, I remained in a state of suspended animation, imagining over and over again the semimagical process by which the two cars would be fused into one. In my mind, the two wrecks were mirror images of one another—both the same color of orange with the same chocolate brown interior, the only real difference being the fact that one had been hit in the front, the other in the rear. My mother dropped me at the salvage yard after basketball practice the day the car arrived, and I ran through the Front and past the long corridor to a spot outside of Speck’s shop where both cars had been dragged. Sitting there next to the orange Porsche was not the clone I had imagined but rather a powder blue 911 that looked as if it had been put through the car crusher. I had never seen a car so destroyed. It had no windows or wheels, and the car’s roof was so crushed that it rested on the tops of the ruined bucket seats. I had heard from my father that the car had been “rolled,” but I didn’t expect it to look like this—as though someone had driven it off a cliff.

“Man, that car isn’t anything like the other one,” I said. “It’s destroyed.”

“Nah, man,” Challo said, smiling. “We’ll fix it up nice. You’ll see.”

I remained doubtful. As much time as I had spent around the salvage yard, as many project cars as I’d seen the guys take on, including two different late-model stock cars my brother Alan raced on a local dirt track, I had never witnessed a project this daunting. A Porsche 911 was in a different league entirely than the Cain’s Coffee trucks and run-of-the-mill Chevys and Fords the guys at the salvage yard were used to working on. And didn’t Speck live in a house one of my brothers described as a “cracker box”? Hadn’t Challo gone on a bender so huge that money had to be wired to El Paso, Texas, just so he could catch a Greyhound back to Dodge City?