Another Fine Mess Page 28

  Tom had a lovely blue Hudson and a container full of Ts, but his spare crank was too big. Dave showed us through four cavernous outbuildings piled with Model Ts, traction engines, pianos, bicycles, hurricane lamps and church bells, but none of the dozen-odd cranks he hauled out were quite the right size. And so it went on until we arrived at a neat farmhouse fronted by a municipal-grade circular flower bed, at the centre of which sat the oxidised wreck of a Model T tourer.

  Chuck kept eleven Ts in working order, but he’d been breaking down a little himself of late. ‘Got two new knees put in, and I’ve just been given the all-clear from throat cancer,’ he said, showing us into a well-ordered workshop. ‘When I first got that cancer diagnosis, I went in with my wife and the doc says he’d like to talk to me alone.’ Chuck scratched a red cheek. ‘I said, “Come on, Doc, we can both hear this,” and he says, “Well, OK, we’ve tested you, and you got your cancer from HPV.” My wife asks what that was. Doc says it’s a virus you contract from oral sex with women.’ He pulled down a very shiny crankshaft from a parts shelf and laid it on the workbench before us, then turned with a winning beam. ‘So I stand up and say, “Told y’all I was a horn dog!”’

  Three of us added uncertain chortles to Chuck’s gale of hooting laughter. But Mike stayed silent, clamping his micrometer around bits of glinting steel with an air of focused portent. After a while he stood up straight, removed his tinted spectacles and murmured, ‘That’ll work.’

  Installing this burnished miracle to Mike’s exacting standards would require a solid week of assiduous toil, and several more deliveries of connecting rods and gaskets from Lilleker Antique Restorations. Mike politely rebuffed all offers of assistance during this technical phase – yes, even mine – so I hired a car, booked into the cheapest motel I could find and spent many happy, idle days honing an appreciation of Bend and its environs.

  America’s panoramic wealth really is extraordinary. The landscape of Greater Bend had seemed unarrestingly flat and sandy as I’d tootled around it in Don’s Jeep and Mike’s Model A, but a fistful of free brochures from the motel reception directed me to scenes of breathtaking grandeur that would be national attractions in any other country. Rivers hurled themselves off pine-clad bluffs and meandered through mighty canyons. Huge bare outcrops, 500 feet tall, sprouted from the desert plain, like flint hand tools cast aside by some caveman deity. The region’s volcanic legacies ran through the full and fabulous spectrum: sprawling lava fields, lofty cinder cones, broad craters filled with glassy lakes and a whole mountain built entirely of lustrous black obsidian. It was like driving through a full-colour anthology of Ansel Adams’s boldest photographic landscapes. Then I’d go back to a bleak and careworn motel room, flick a Bakelite switch and trudge into an Edward Hopper.

  One night the wind changed and the wildfire smoke blew in. By dawn there weren’t any sights to see, so I spent a weekend wandering around the town centre, watching haze redden the sun and expelling black snot into a load of napkins I pinched from a table outside Starbucks. Downtown Bend was very different from anywhere I’d been. It was prosperous and pretty, the old streets thoughtfully re-gentrified, their bustling sidewalks lined with espresso bars and day spas, the art deco movie theatre reinvented as ‘a hub for culture, connections, and artistic experiences’. A gift shop, handily encapsulating the mood, had a sign in its window advertising ‘Up-Cycled Copper Cool Stuff’. Many of the craft-ale taverns, including two that had done their best to hide Sullied Tim, were graced with delightful gardens that stretched down to a curve in the Deschutes River – the very meander that had given Bend its splendidly half-arsed name. There were tattooed skateboarders, marijuana dispensaries, roundabouts, even a bike-sharing scheme: every trapping, in short, of a liberal metropolitan lifestyle I hadn’t expected to encounter this far inland.

  My old boys had given me the skinny. Bend’s recent surge in wealth and size was down to an influx of Californians, lured north by cheaper real estate and a familiar climate. They’d brought along their lifestyle and values, and turned Central Bend into a dab of Democrat blue amid the Central Oregon redlands. In an act of charity that I might remember to thank him for one day, Car-Mike had stranded me on the front line of the great American culture war.

  ‘We don’t really go downtown these days,’ Don told me. ‘Too expensive, not our people, not our place.’ It was a ne’er-the-twain divide, cowboy vs liberal, Prius vs pick-up, Bud Lite vs IPA. Don was a folksy, genial fellow, a dialled-down Jimmy Stewart who said things like ‘You bet!’ and ‘Gee willickers!’– without question the loveliest person you’ll ever meet with a ‘TRUMP–PENCE’ sticker on his rear windshield. Everyone I met out in Bend’s ‘howdy belt’ was a committed Republican. The solitary exception: a Model A collector who’d moved in from the west coast a few years previously, and was universally ribbed as ‘the Democrat’. The rest chuntered mildly about damn pot shops, about Kim Pong Poo, about Oregon’s openly bisexual governor (‘guess she stands a 100 per cent chance of getting a date on Friday night’). Everyone’s car radio was tuned to Fox News.

  Yet my boys weren’t natural Trumpites as I’d come to know them. There was no bitterness or desperation. No outbursts about Obama’s open love for Islamic extremism or other manifestations of paranoid delusion. Nobody mentioned an impending apocalypse. I didn’t see a single gun, though I’m sure most of them had one. These men had worked hard in largely humble careers – erecting electrical signs, managing auto spares shops, um, machining bullets – and were enjoying comfortable retirements focused on mechanical pottering. It was just that those carefree final chapters had been abruptly defaced by a bewildering invasion of urbanite liberals, and the weird west-coast shit they’d transplanted out in the Great Sandy Desert: the bike lanes and jogging, the quinoa and gender fluidity and up-cycled copper cool stuff.

  Bend had been fully Californicated, and my mild-mannered traditionalists found themselves under siege in their own town, their way of life mocked and marginalised. ‘They think we’re all dinosaurs and racists,’ Ron told me. It was people like him whose toil and determination had brought Bend to life out in the hot sand, and now they were outcasts, a besieged minority, banished to the boondocks by snowflake software engineers and baristas who’d never got their hands dirty or known a world without air-con. Their Bend was broken.

  If one single factor propelled these old boys Trumpwards in the election campaign, it wasn’t anything he’d said, but something Hillary Clinton had. In dumping half of Trump’s supporters in a ‘basket of deplorables’, she inadvertently confirmed a suspicion that held right across white Middle America: that the Democratic establishment wasn’t just ignoring them, it actively despised them. That single phrase must have seemed a perfect articulation of their resentment, of the chasm of mutual mistrust and loathing that separated cityfolk from their country cousins. A Millwall FC mentality kicked in: no one likes us, we don’t care. To hell with Hillary. To hell with everything. Vote Trump.

  Man-Mike had left town to go to a funeral; Car-Mike stood where we’d left him late the night before, squeezed into a sliver of cleared floor-space just inside the workshop’s roll-up door. What a fight he’d put up that day. It had taken five of us as many hours to force-feed the reassembled engine back through his pursed lips. At the halfway point, it transpired through a series of faltering admissions that nobody present had ever performed such an operation on a Model T, or for that matter done much of anything else to one. In the end we’d literally stretched Mike on the rack, heaving his lower jaw forward with a massive winch. After a bolt dropped into the transmission, we had to extract it under the guidance of a 1920s service manual, and the busy little men in baker-boy caps and bib overalls who graced its illustrations. That was another two hours right there. And all the while that angry red sun bore down, sapping the will, lubricating palms, audibly buckling the derelict tractors strewn about in the sand.

  When the whole punishing procedure was ostensibly completed, we had failed to
find homes for a good two dozen bolts, pins and springs.

  I sent a photo of the most important-looking leftovers to Ross, who pithily advised me that they supported the steering column. Nobody could even remember removing the five dice-sized cubes of wood that also wound up in our leftover tray. (A sixth fell on to the bedroom floor when I pulled my trousers down that night.) As the day had worn on, people kept dropping things, tripping over, repeating themselves. I was told five times in an hour that 120,000 acres were ablaze out west of town. There were moments, I confess, when I’d said a silent prayer for these old fellers just to hold it all together long enough to get me back on the road. It felt as if a century of practical know-how, an entire folk memory of fixes, was draining away into the sand beneath us. ‘I’ve got four daughters,’ Chuck had told me, ‘and not one of their husbands knows one end of a hammer from the other.’ These self-taught ninja mechanics, working by eye to a thousandth of an inch, fixing con rods with bacon rind, were the T era’s last samurai.

  Darkness had been almost upon us when I climbed in, winked at six old faces and jabbed the starter. Ker-dug-a-dug-a-dug-a-dug-a-dug-a-dug-a-wheeeeeeck. Oh. Don sped into town and came back with a new set of points. We put them in: nothing. Mike decided we had a ‘weak spark’, and spent an obsessive hour running cables around the engine bay, muttering irritably. No difference. Then, in the dying light of another crimson sunset, I glanced down at the board-less floor beneath me and saw a tiny brass lever sticking 90 degrees north of its usual position. Several afternoons earlier, I had flicked it there under my own obscure initiative.

  ‘Um, should I try opening the fuel shut-off?’

  I suppose I could have surreptitiously switched it back. With fewer heads leaning into the cabin I fear I might have done so. Instead, I saw those heads rise up as one, and heard Mike lose his cool for the first and last time.

  ‘WHAT. FUEL. SHUT-OFF?’

  In two seconds Car-Mike was roaring his transplanted heart out. How fitting that the final, crowning imbecility was mine and mine alone.

  ‘Seems to me,’ Ron drawled sardonically, ‘the only weak spark we got here is the one sitting behind the damn wheel.’

  For long days the Model T keys had clinked uselessly in my pocket. Now, on my tenth morning in Deschutes County, I slipped them in the ignition, started Mike up and reversed out into the sun. Fordus interruptus was at an end. My first mission: to follow Ron back to the house he shared with his wife Marlene in Culver, some 40 miles away up US-97, where at his humbling insistence I’d been accommodated for three days.

  ‘See, I’d rather you spent money on the motor than giving it to some motel guy,’ he’d said. Ron was my wallet’s moral compass in Deschutes County, always on hand to put a fair price on the extraordinary mechanical favours that were being dispensed, and by men who batted away all offers of payment. ‘You’re only coming through here once in your life, Tim, so you want to be remembered right.’ Even then, avoiding an awkward scene had meant surreptitiously stuffing wads of banknotes into tool chests, and leaving cryptic clues in thank-you notes.

  Taking the juddery, wandering wheel after such a prolonged break, I was awed all over again by this endeavour’s suicidal irresponsibility. When we stopped off en route at T expert Tom’s place to have my transmission bands adjusted, even he expressed reservations. ‘Just watching you drive in there, your car’s looking all caddywhompus on the left side.’ (I immediately banked this appealing idiom, cataloguing it beside Mike’s related catchphrase: ‘Like a saddle on a sow.’) In all the excitement of the previous fortnight I’d forgotten all about my welded tie rod. As Ron turned down an undulating gravel road, I remembered.

  Ron’s house, a long bungalow perched atop a thousand-foot cleft in the Crooked River, was the extraordinary home of an extraordinary man. No matter how early I got up, Ron beat me. I once stumbled out of the spare room for a pee at 4.45 a.m. and there he was on his exercise bike out in the hall, in jeans, vest and a Stetson. ‘Got to hit the ground running,’ he puffed. ‘Who are you ripping off if you sleep in?’ Later he told me he’d never been in bed later than 5 a.m. in his whole life.

  Somehow Ron sustained this restless intensity all day, driving me back and forth to Mike’s workshop, an 80-mile round trip, attacking my car with spanners, hammers and an arc welder, terminating any snatch of downtime with a clap of those horny hands and the words: ‘Come on, we’re burning daylight here.’ When the day was done, he drove Marlene and me down to the Round Butte Inn in Culver, nodded at three guys who seemed to live on their bar stools, and ordered us burgers and iced tea. Back home, I’d leave Ron and Marlene chatting brightly in their parlour and weave wearily off to the guest room, lured by plump feather pillows and a cocooning hand-stitched quilt. ‘Don’t let the bedbugs bite,’ Marlene would always call out. Her eyes were failing, and she spent a lot of time out in the yard, weeding by feel.

  Ron talked from dawn to dusk, a stream of reminiscence and philosophy delivered with a playful glint in his eye and a ready chuckle. Every chapter began with the same three words. ‘Well, so, anyways, when I was a boy I rode to school bareback, one day the damn horse bucked me off and fell on my leg, and when he gets up, he-he, my damn foot’s pointing backwards … Well, so, anyways, the government wants us all to live in cities so they can control us … I don’t need to go to no church, I don’t need to confess to no sins, I don’t commit any damn sins.’

  Only two topics dulled that playful glint. The first was ‘the year Jimmy Carter stole the farm’, which Ron brought up at least three times a day. In 1981, undone by spiralling interest rates and a huge tax bill, Ron had lost the 990 acres of corn and ranchland that he’d been working all his life. Left with nothing, at the age of forty-nine he’d had to start all over again. Luckily, he was Ron, which allowed him to pick up two burned-out bulldozers at a salvage auction, rebuild them singlehandedly in six weeks flat, and start up a construction business that soon prospered. But the trauma still haunted him, and surely informed Ron’s deep hatred for politicians of all stripes.

  The second cropped up after we drove past a farmhouse a mile from his own. ‘One of my sons lives there, but we don’t see him no more because of his wife.’ I tuned out as Ron described the humdrum background to this longstanding feud, and was brought up short when he moved on to its rather more dramatic recent developments. ‘Well, so, anyways, she comes at me with the tractor, and I somehow get caught up in the rake behind it, and she’s dragged me around her property a while.’ Ron lifted a finger off the wheel to salute a passing pick-up, whose driver responded in kind. ‘Then she comes round to my property, and, well, I never did point the rifle at her, just kind of had the barrel resting on my arm, but of course she gets the authorities involved and now I’ve got a court case coming up.’ He shook his head. ‘You just can’t pick your relatives.’

  Well, so, anyways, we backed the T into Ron’s workshop and embarked on our final remedial fiddles, tightening bolts and checking fluids. I went off to collect my bags from the guest bedroom, and when I emerged a small farewell T party had gathered outside the workshop doors. All were familiar faces from that Cinderella crankshaft hunt: Jim, who’d bolted the back end of a boat to his Tin Lizzie and dubbed it the T-Tanic; Dave, he of the pianos and church bells; and Dennis, who’d driven them all here in his favourite T, a shabby-chic roadster whose grille-mounted Ford logo had been tweaked to read ‘Turd’. When Jim asked if they could take my car for a quick trial run before I set off, I readily agreed, hoping at the very least to have Mike’s caddywhompusness assessed.

  Ron drew up a couple of battered plastic chairs and we sat down in the workshop’s gaping threshold. ‘Funny,’ I said, watching Mike disappear over a sandy brow, ‘but that’s the first time in almost 6,000 miles that car has driven anywhere without me in it.’

  Presently the workshop phone rang. Ron went into the back office to answer it, and took a while to reappear. When he did he was bearing a twenty-four-can slab of Bud Lite: an unexpe
cted burden, as I had never once previously seen him near alcohol. He tore the plastic covering off, withdrew a can, popped it open and placed it firmly in my hand. ‘That was Jim on the phone,’ he said. ‘Well, so, anyways, your car’s on fire.’

  Half an hour later Mike appeared on the back of a tow truck driven by Ron’s nephew Randy. Three wide-eyed men climbed woodenly from the cab, and described their ordeal in tones of disbelief as we winched Mike down to earth. They’d just pulled off the road to make a U-turn when smoke had poured out of the dash, followed by fingers of flame. Experience and quick-thinking spared a more total disaster: the 2-gallon jerrycan of fuel and all my other kit were flung out of the back, the rear floorboards yanked up, the battery beneath it swiftly disconnected. Had this conflagration occurred on my watch, as the dictates of probability demanded, I would have legged it into the desert and watched everything go up in flames: my journey, my pride, my cousin-in-law Miles’s no-claims bonus.

  Relief was tempered, however, by what we saw with the bonnet up. Mike’s entire wiring system, a rather more extensive network than one might suppose, had been reduced to carbonised spaghetti. I tried very hard to greet this discovery with stoic restraint, but clearly failed.

  ‘Why, see, Tim, I’m gonna have to chew up your rectum a little here.’ Oh, go on then, Ron. Just a nibble between friends. ‘You take it too hard when things go wrong, and get too excited when they go well. You just need to accept that if you keep your head, things will just kind of work out.’