Another Fine Mess Read online

  Trent had asked me to drive him around the block a couple of times in the T before I left, and while touring the dark streets he’d told me that his first wife had died fourteen years earlier, after a three-day illness that had set him back $38,000 in hospital fees. We also established that he was exactly two months younger than me. At once I had an empathetic hold on Trent’s embittered plight. First a tragedy that wrought emotional and financial ruin, then the twenty-first-century’s new midlife crisis: hit fifty, and you might well find your work is done. Half the jobs you want have disappeared, and the rest have gone to younger, hungrier men. People who will work harder for less. Who would up sticks and emigrate to follow the money. Who were still enthused by the pioneering determination that drew all those settlers west on wagon trails, and inspired the citizens of Ochiltree to tow their whole town 8 miles north. If Trent was so set on moving to Florida, why didn’t he just do it? For the same reason that I still haven’t painted over the stain in the sitting-room ceiling where the bath overflowed six years ago. We were baby boomers, a generation that came of age in an era of plentiful jobs and easy money, when determined application didn’t matter. Now that it did, we couldn’t be arsed.

  When a couple of Hispanic guys fixing their car waved at us, Trent had waved back. ‘It’s actually a pretty safe area,’ he murmured. ‘I only lock the door when I remember to.’ Poor Trent. He’d fallen out of love with life, and with Liberal, but still wanted to do right by the kindly-minded homesteader who gave it the name. Suddenly I was disgusted by my own disgust. What an ungrateful snob. I stared at the ceiling, impatient now for a surge of alcoholic forgiveness to bathe this traumatic evening in a kinder light. Then I picked up the empty can, inspected its small print, and established that in Kansas, Lime-a-Ritas carry an almost pointlessly feeble 3 per cent kick. ‘You’re not in Texas any more,’ I sighed, and switched off the light.

  CHAPTER 13

  Kansas went flat on me in every sense, a greyscale table-top under thick, low clouds. At length these exuded a thin, hanging drizzle that smudged everything into an incredibly basic Impressionist landscape that went on for ever. Such vistas irresistibly conjured up the fanatical, brain-boiling boredom of American rural life in the pre-T age. What a place to call home.

  On occasion the fuzzy cornfields were interrupted by a gigantic and malodorous feed lot, where thousands of unseen cattle lowed and crapped in the fog. Americans really are relentlessly carnivorous. The average consumption of meat equates to three quarter-pounders per head every single day. Even in farming towns nobody seemed to eat fresh produce: the fruit and veg section in the supermarkets was no more than a token rack or two of oversized apples and tomatoes, looking glossy and artificial in plastic boxes. The average American obtains just 1 per cent of their calories from vegetables, a proportion that continues to shrink. Even Icelanders eat more fruit. In such a fecund nation it seemed extraordinary.

  Every hour or so some vast agricultural machine festooned with rakes and blades trundled out of the gloom, easing me off the tarmac. Great mouldering stacks of baled hay were piled up like lost cities along the road. We were now close to 3,500 feet and the corn was giving away to bleak stretches of full-on prairie, a whole new level of prostrate, tussocky nothing. A lot of wagon-train pioneers died out here, most from thirst and cholera, though the roadside memorials naturally focused on more eventful bereavements: ‘In Commemoration of Jedediah Strong Smith, 1798–1831, a Great Plainsman Who Was Killed Near This Spot by Comanche Indians.’ Deep into the 1930s, the lonelier prairies were still strewn with shallow graves and the charred remains of wagons.

  The rain intensified, and without the curtains up, Mike and I took a number of proper Stan and Ollie drenchings as cattle trucks slooshed past. There are 15.5 million trucks in the US – more than in Europe, a continent twice as populous – and truck driving is the most common profession in almost every state I passed through, even Texas. It’s hard to believe because most American trucks appear to drive themselves. Everything about them – their steel-toothed radiator grilles; their shiny, belching dragon-breath exhaust chimneys; their implacable, thunderous progress and sheer enormity – seems consistent with gleaming, brutal automation. They are routinely burdened with outrageous loads, like a two-storey house or a blast furnace, that no sensible human would ever consider a suitable candidate for road transport. The cabs stand about 10 foot above the ground, so you never see a driver, and the top halves of their windshields are sheathed in a stainless-steel sun visor that perfectly tops off the RoboCop vibe.

  Mike, by contrast, was busily exploring his animal side. The warm, wet steam that rose up through the floor; the capricious bucks and whinnies; the cheeky squeaks. Cars aren’t supposed to dither. Either they work or they don’t. But Mike increasingly ran on his own terms, in a realm of gaiety and sulks that lay way beyond mechanical logic. He’d lumber along all morning like a malingering donkey, all fitful huffs and shudders. Then, without rhyme, reason or warning, I’d be thrown back in my seat and suddenly find us galloping smoothly across the plains for hours. He growled. He farted. He liked the wind in his face. Sometimes I’d plant my full weight on the brake and find a STOP sign approaching at undiminished speed; sometimes I’d dab the pedal and Mike would noisily dig his back hooves in. E. B. White, who as the author of Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web was well versed in zoomorphism, composed a delightful elegy to the Model T that makes fond and repeated reference to the car’s animal qualities. ‘The T trembled with a deep imperative and tended to inch forward,’ he wrote. ‘There was never a moment when the bands were not faintly egging the machine on. In this respect it was like a horse, rolling the bit on its tongue, and country people brought to it the same technique they used with draft animals.’ In the early Twenties, as a young writer fresh out of college, White had crossed the US in search of work, driving an old T that he dubbed Hotspur. This was a crank-started model that would roll gently forwards after he fired it up from the front: ‘I can still feel my old Ford nuzzling me at the curb, as though looking for an apple in my pocket.’ Poor Henry. He’d set out to make a machine that would render the beast of burden obsolete. But his horseless carriage was really horsey.

  Mike had cantered up northern Texas like a stallion, a very old stallion, but out on the prairies he’d begun to wheeze and toil, a pit pony fit for the glue works. On my last night in Kansas, a terrific small-hours thunderstorm blew so much sideways rain in through the bonnet vents that when I went to tip in the morning quart of oil, I found the spark-plug wells abrim. It took a dozen attempts before the engine fired, and something still wasn’t right: as I puttered across the peaty moorland into Nebraska, Mike laboured miserably, struggling up every rare and gentle incline. Deep in the usual tumult of progress I detected a persistent hiss, the sound of a steam locomotive coming to rest.

  I stuttered into Imperial, coaxed Mike to a motel at the windswept edge of town and phoned Ross. ‘Head gasket,’ he said as soon as I’d described the symptoms. ‘Piece of piss, you can do that.’ I could. Of course I could. I had a spare gasket. I had the required tools (all three of them – a flat-head screwdriver and two wrenches). The elderly manageress had taken a bit of a shine to me – ‘From Virginia? In that? Holy smoke!’ – and probably wouldn’t press charges when I spilt 24 pints of coolant across her immaculate forecourt. I would get out there at first light.

  It was probably second or even third light by the time I did get out there, and instead of pulling the bonnet off I threw my bags in the back and brought Mike to feeble, wheezy life. At breakfast it had suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t have any gasket sealant. Shortly afterwards, sweeping bagels from the buffet into my open backpack, I glanced over my shoulder and was met by the manageress’s disappointed gaze. The answer to both these issues was to cajole Mike to the auto parts store I’d passed half a mile down the road, buy the sealant and do the gasket job in their parking lot.

  ‘You don’t want to work on a car like that outside, ba
ck it into my shop.’

  A very old man had emerged from the parts store, and was waving his walking cane at me. ‘Casey won’t mind. Well, it’s my store and my shop, so he can’t.’

  As it had just begun to rain I wasted no time in accepting this splendid offer, though I can report that Casey did mind.

  ‘I run a tidy shop,’ said a stern young man with the requisite name embroidered on his crisp grey overalls, after I creaked to a halt in his commodious covered realm. Casey had a crew cut and tightly folded arms. ‘Don’t make a mess.’ With that he disappeared into the workshop shadows.

  I’d helped Peter remove the cylinder head in his sweltering Dearborn garage, and set about recreating the procedure as best I could. The first stage was to drain those 24 pints of coolant; I kicked my bucket under the radiator, dropped to the floor, and opened a filthy little brass drain tap. A single drop of green fluid slowly swelled, and after fifteen seconds plopped into the bucket. Fifteen seconds later so did another. I frowned, removed the radiator cap, then stooped down and rammed the tip of my smallest screwdriver into the drain hole. After much twisty probing with this tool and a length of wire I had raised the drainage rate to one drop every twelve seconds. This was hopeless. Something drastic had to be done. I surveyed the neighbouring equipment and saw exactly what that something was.

  ‘You makin’ a mess back there?’

  I was beneath the T, with the nozzle of an air hose in my fingers. A healthy stream of coolant was now tinkling from the drain hole I had just wedged this into. On the downside, the jet of compressed air that had unclogged the orifice had also sent forth a towering geyser of luminous fluid straight up through the opened radiator cap, the last spatters of which were still dropping on to the spotless concrete all around me.

  Well, it happened again. There was just something about Mike and I – his sad old eyes, my blithering incompetence – that seemed to melt even the hardest heart. When Casey clomped out of the shadows I prepared myself for fearsome retribution, perhaps combining that air jet and the hole in the ass of my pants. Instead, after sating his anger with a tut and a single shake of the head, he assumed executive control of the entire operation. How glad I was that he did so. Towards the end of what became a four-hour process, one of the head bolts stripped its thread; he went off into the darkness and returned with a replacement. Then one of the bolt holes did the same, a more complex fix that Casey remedied by screwing in a threaded insert. He even began to smile, and recoiled in offended horror when I tried to fold a couple of twenties into his embroidered pocket.

  I bumped out of Casey’s shop with a farewell ahoooga, but grateful relief soon gave way to very different emotions – the sort that came accompanied with this word: arsepipes. Mike wasn’t better. That sputter returned and so did the hiss. I was definitely missing a cylinder, maybe two. Heading out across the Colorado cornfields I slammed into a headwind so punishing that my enfeebled car struggled to make progress. The 50 miles that followed were brutal for all concerned. The road kept making right-angle turns, abruptly shifting the gale into a crosswind that whipped my neck about and blew that back-seat collection of empty cans and oil bottles to kingdom come. Sorry, Colorado. Oncoming trucks full of cattle and hay delivered a split-second of windless calm, then a terrifying rifle-crack storm-blast that flung Mike right into the verge. Ragged cries of alarm were blown back down my throat or torn half-formed from my flapping lips.

  Route 59 plunged under an interstate, over the South Platte River then topped a brow and lowered me mercifully into becalmed scrubland. My head hurt, my arms hurt and so, most of all, did my windward inner ear. I could tell, by touch alone, that my hair had been blown and set into a deranged Phil Spector afro. Mike was crawling along in a death-putter, The Little Engine That Couldn’t. The first town we inched into, Sedgwick, had three surviving commercial operations along its broad and desolate main street. One was a bed and breakfast. One was a bar. One was a marijuana dispensary. I pulled nose in to the kerb and climbed woodenly out.

  The Sedgwick Antique Inn B&B had begun life as the Farmers State Bank, a name picked out in smart blue tiles across a four-square 1920s facade.

  Its Hispanic proprietor, Lupe, was a voluble, hyperactive force of nature: a retired elementary school teacher who had almost single-handedly brought this town back from the dead. ‘If you see a white wall out there,’ she told me, ‘it’s because this woman put on her pants and painted it.’ Sedgwick, yet another rural settlement in decline since that T-era agricultural boom, was flat broke and down to its last 191 citizens when Lupe pitched up in 2002. She bought the old bank, converted it into a cheerily homespun guesthouse, and then acquired a derelict general store across the street. In 2012, following the controversial implementation of Colorado Amendment 64, she sold this to a pioneering entrepreneur. ‘I want you to know that I was raised Pentecostal, so I’m not down with those marijuanas,’ she told me next morning, pouring coffee in the sepulchral bank hall. ‘And this is a deeply conservative town. But we needed money, and that dispensary is now paying us $50,000 in tax every month.’

  The dankly herbal smell of success that wafted out through the net-curtained doors of Sedgwick Alternative Relief and all the way down Main Avenue would become very familiar to me. So too would the creaky boards and dusty chintz of the Antique Inn, the regulars who lined up at the bar of RD’s Tavern, and the 3.2 per cent beer that was all they were licensed to serve. But the bulk of my next three waking days was spent getting down and dirty with a bespectacled young man with a ginger beard.

  ‘Charles Toyne out of Sedgwick.’

  I don’t think I’ve ever heard a phone answered so appealingly. Lupe had given me Charles’s number after I showed her Mike and explained his malaise. She said he had an old car a little like that in a barn. She was half right. Charles had four, and they were exactly like that. Sedgwick, to remind you, was a town of 119 souls that I had pitched up in entirely at random. A century on, out in its rural heartlands, Henry Ford’s Model T remained the Universal Car.

  Charles was a farmer, as were his elder brother and his father. But Charles was a very particular sort of farmer. He had a llama, which he’d bought as a goatherd, and appeared to make most of his money selling hay on Facebook for five bucks a bale. He lived alone in a ramshackle farmhouse girdled with rusty machinery and cats named after the seven deadly sins. He largely expressed himself with a two-tone variant of the sound Bugs Bunny makes before he says, ‘What’s up, Doc?’ And of course he had a barn full of Ts. I kind of fell in love with Charles Toyne out of Sedgwick.

  ‘Ee-huh.’ Charles raised his head from the pitted, sooty surface of my engine block. ‘You burned a couple valves out real good there.’ In the hour that had elapsed since our first call, he’d trundled down Main Avenue in a decrepit pick-up, introduced me to his piebald mongrel Richard (‘He’s a bit of a dick’) and whipped off Mike’s cylinder head. Ross had already suggested this hypothesis: I now phoned him again, ordering four new exhaust valves and another sodding head gasket. ‘Should be with you in two days,’ he said. ‘Ever lapped a valve?’

  ‘Not since the court order.’

  ‘It’s a world of fun,’ said Ross, with leaden sarcasm.

  Charles drove away and presently returned at the wheel of an even more decrepit tow truck. ‘Blimey,’ I said, kicking cobwebs from a rust-ravaged arch, ‘you did well to get this through the test.’

  ‘Ee-huh,’ said Charles, meaning he hadn’t even tried to. I spent a lot of time decoding this gnomic utterance. Sometimes it was an obvious stand in for ‘yes’ or ‘no’. But quite often, in my case at least, it seemed a polite euphemism for ‘Please, please tell me you didn’t just say that.’ We winched Mike noisily aboard, drove a mile out to Charles’s farmyard, unloaded and pushed him into an earth-floored barn. Familiar silhouettes took shape in its depths, though it was a while since Charles had fired up any of his Ts.

  He asked me how I intended to occupy the next two days. I asked him how he d
id.

  ‘Farming.’

  ‘Um … can I come?’

  ‘Ee-huh.’

  So quite suddenly there I was, heaving hay on to the back of some old cowboy’s huge trailer, baling cord cutting deep into my dainty steering fingers. The cowboy’s three sons roared with laughter when a hurled bale knocked me clean off the side of the trailer, then whooped their approval when I hauled myself doughtily back on deck, white faced and straw haired, a winded scarecrow. We waved them off with a hundred bales aboard, then climbed into Charles’s pick-up and bumped around the perimeters of his parents’ shiny green cornfields, turning irrigation valves on and off, dragging big lengths of piping around silos in the ochre dust. Old Man Toyne’s corn largely ended up as ethanol vehicle fuel, I learned, which provided an excuse to delight Charles with some related history: it was Henry Ford who first proposed the use of corn-derived ethanol.

  Henry, always a rum character, went impressively dotty in his dotage. He developed a firm belief in reincarnation, and would regularly hold forth about a ‘queen cell’ that passed from body to body. He proposed setting fire to deep-seam coal mines so that heat could be piped across the land. He told a friend who fainted to stop drinking milk, and asked a severely sunburned guest if he’d eaten too many eggs. Doctors at the Ford Hospital came to dread him dropping in. One patient recovering from a heart attack was ordered to get out of bed, lie on the floor and eat celery until he felt better. But in the field of agricultural technology, old man Ford mustered some remarkably prescient proposals and insights, precisely none of which were appreciated in his lifetime.

  Everyone knew that the oil would someday run out, but Henry was one of the very few to propose a sustainable alternative: alcohol was both a menace to humanity and an unlimited man-made resource, a future fuel which could be distilled from almost any crop. In 1938, Ford gave researchers $1 million to refine motor fuel from potatoes and corn, but at the end of the project they regretfully reported that the process could never make economic sense. He gave another team of scientists another million to explore his deepest agricultural passion: the soybean. Soya thrived in poor soil and dry weather, yet was almost unknown in the US. Henry was thrilled by the crop’s potential: his scientists found that extracted soya oil made an excellent basis for car paint, and that soya meal could be processed into a Bakelite-type material. You could feed soya to livestock, make it into linoleum, soap and glue, even spin it into fabric. At the height of his fixation, Henry showed up at a trade fair wearing an entire outfit made from soya fibres – shirt, suit, socks, everything but his shoes. He invited his staff to a dinner party where every course – soup, bread, pie, ice cream, coffee – was made from soya beans. (The poor guests, of course, were in no position to volunteer an honest appraisal. Harold Cordell, one of Ford’s secretaries, later disclosed that the soya crackers were ‘particularly awful-tasting things’.) The negligible US soya crop inched gingerly upwards in the 1940s, but only exploded after Henry’s demise: America is now the world’s leading producer. And in defiance of his researchers’ verdict, corn-derived ethanol now has a 15 per cent share of the US gasoline market.