The Jack

by Drew Banton



  The Jack

  by

  Drew Banton

  The Industrial Strength Press

  ©Copyright 2014 Drew Banton

  All Rights reserved

  Also by Drew Banton:

  A Dangerous Job

  The Gurry Room (novella)

  The Mascot (short story)

  e-mail: industrialstrengthpr@gmail.com

  Web: https://dbanton77.wix.com/industrialstrengthpr#

  Blog: https://theindustrialstrengthpress.wordpress.com/

  Authors Note: This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people or events is purely coincidental.

  The sausages spit at Sheila as she pushed them to one side of the skillet to make room for her single egg. She sighed as the clear circle surrounding the yellow hub quickly was transformed to white. One lousy egg, one piece of goddamn toast, she couldn’t even put jelly on it without having to give up something else later on. After all the insane running around she did, as hard as she worked keeping things together, she still couldn’t burn off enough calories to have a decent meal. The injustice of it made her want to scream.

  “Sheila, oh Sheila honey, dear, you think you could hurry those extra sausages along? Me an’ Denny got a whole lot of work to do today, you know, and we’re two big hungry fellas.”

  “Oh, and I suppose you think I’m gonna sit on my fat butt all day and watch the soaps?” The sausages were almost done.

  Barry sprang from his seat. She didn’t see him coming and squealed as he lifted her three inches from the floor and kissed her at the base of her neck. He was back at the kitchen table before she could swing her fork at him.

  “That’s disgusting,” said Denny, not looking up from the newspaper he’d been reading.

  Barry sat with his elbows on the table. His form was dense and solid, seeming squared off as if plotted on graph paper. His neck was a profligate waste of material since it only had to support the lively head that sat upon it. A nose like a small root vegetable sat above a full-lipped mouth that could be seen smiling through a tangled growth of dark beard, trimmed back in the spring and allowed to grow thick in the fall, like a hedge in reverse.

  Sheila was rounder than she would’ve liked but not fat, despite her words. Her skin was light compared to Barry’s baked bread coloration. Freckles spread across broad, smooth cheeks. Her hair was a shade of red close to that of potter’s clay but with a luster and life, as if it had been glazed without losing its softness. Her mouth was now pursed as she examined the sausages. Another minute at most.

  Two pairs of eyes, each a striking shade of blue, connected briefly as Sheila moved towards the table with the frying pan. She served as the men ripped off fresh chunks of bread to sop up the grease. She poured more coffee, not having to ask if they wanted more. Work to be done, coffee to drink.

  “Christ, Sheila.” Denny took another mouthful. “Sure you can eat all that?”

  “How'd you like to eat this frying pan, mush mouth?”

  “C’mon Denny, leave off. Sheila’s tryin’ to stick to her diet.” Barry would tease her when they were alone but never in front of another person, not even Denny.

  “What’s the Diet of the Month Club got for you this time, Sheila hon? The Watermelon and Raw Garden Snail Diet? Or is it seaweed pills again?”

  She pointed a fork, with menace. “One more word..”

  Denny held up his hands in surrender. If he’d been a dog, he would’ve rolled over with his legs up. “Sorry, Babe. I know it’s tough. You should come swap engines with us. You could have a big lunch then.”

  “And who’d make this big lunch, could you tell me that?”

  Denny laughed and shook his head. He should’ve known better than to argue with Sheila.

  Sheila used the last corner of her toast to clear the viscous yellow fluid from her plate. She chewed slowly. She had found she could no longer eat the eggs they served her when she went home to visit her parents on Long Island. Supermarket eggs. They might as well have been manufactured by egg machines for all they tasted like these eggs. Fresh laid this morning. Or maybe it had been last night. She realized she didn’t know just when the chickens did lay their eggs. She started to ask Barry but he was standing and stretching and yawning loudly.

  “Let’s go get ‘em, Denny boy. Those engines ain’t gonna swap themselves, that’s for damn sure.” Barry had already done a full day’s work by most people’s standards before breakfast and he would do another when he got home later but the rest of the morning had been set aside for helping his friend. Winter was never far from the mind of a Vermont farmer, not even with the bugs whining on this July morning. The haying had to be done. Denny would render payment with the best sort of currency, his own labor, as soon as his pickup truck was healthy again.

  Denny stood in the kitchen doorway squinting out into the sun-filled driveway. He was taller and leaner than Barry, a sharp crease marking each of his cheeks. The extraordinary brightness of the outdoor light gave his outline a certain vagueness when viewed from inside the room. His hand almost seemed to separate from his wrist as he reached out and rested it on the jamb.

  Barry had pressed Sheila against the sink and their arms were wrapped around each others shoulders. Their noses almost touched.

  Denny spoke without turning. “The way you two carry on. I’ll go get the jack while you play kissy-face. Is it in the shed?”

  “Mmmm.” Barry kissed Sheila lightly on the lips.

  She answered with considerably greater energy and began exploring for his tongue.

  Denny went outside and around back, his face unsmiling. He had to wait for a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the dimness in the shed. A lawnmower, kid’s bikes and garden tools began to coalesce out of the gloom. A long yellow handle pointed at him from one corner. The jack. He rolled it out into the shimmering glare without noticing the puddle of oil that had formed beneath it. The steel wheels were too small for the gravel driveway and they kept digging in as he tried to roll the jack along. He dragged it over to his brother’s old Ford that he was borrowing while his truck was being fixed. He was muscling the substantial piece of equipment into the trunk when friend finally appeared next to him.

  “You found it.”

  “Yeah. Let’s go before you decide you gotta kiss your wife some more.”

  “Believe it or not, some married men actually like their wives.”

  “You’re the only one I know.”

  Barry slid behind the wheel. He shook his head but didn’t dispute the last statement. It just might be true. Dust followed them as they bounced along the familiar dirt roads.

  They pulled up the long driveway to Denny’s old house. He’d grown up there, moved away, moved back when his parents had died. He earned his living as a plumber, servicing the needs of summer vacationers and winter skiers to keep his wallet full. For the locals, the people he’d grown up with, his work was usually repaid with wood or eggs or other tangible products of hard work that hadn’t made the transmutation to cash. The used motor sitting against the wall in his garage represented the promise of a new shower before Christmas. With some luck- and Barry’s strength- he’d be working again by the afternoon. The jobs were lined up for weeks. He’d had to stop answering the phone.

  A form rose in the shadows of the garage and stepped forward to the open double doorway. The young man stood in the shade but the two men had recognized him as soon as he moved. John’s face was shadowed, dark eyebrows seeking a meeting place over eyes that might have been black, lips that were drawn inward to a thin, pale line that did not so much form an expression as provide the potential for one, a stationary line on a screen waiting for a trace of voltage to give it shape. He was rangy and slim and stood silently as the two f
riends approached.

  “Been waiting long?”

  John shrugged. “Half-hour or so.”

  Denny moved into the garage past his younger brother. He stopped and waited a moment for his eyes to adjust. “Sorry. You had breakfast?”

  “Yep. At Granma’s.”

  “Well, I know she stuffed you good. I’ll make you earn it today.”

  But John didn’t hear the end of the sentence. He was locked arm in arm with Barry who was trying to push him backwards into the garage. Barry had weight and strength on his side but John had superior leverage as well as the dead earnestness of his youth and nature, these allowing him to hold his ground but just barely. Barry gave one last surge that lifted John’s forward leg from the ground but John strained and refused to yield. Barry relented and relaxed. He smiled and patted John on the shoulder. John straightened and appeared ready to produce a smile of his own. “Well, I-”

  Barry suddenly dipped a shoulder into John’s stomach and carried him ten feet into the garage where he set him down easily.

  “Hey, no fair. I’d let up.”

  Barry put an arm around John’s shoulder. “Ah, I saved you the walk. This brother of yours is one strong son of a gun, Denny. I don’t know what you needed me for today.”

  John did smile then despite his best efforts to hold back.

  Denny looked out from under the hood of the pickup. One temple was already marked by a smear of grease. “Hell, I’m gonna let you two do all the heavy stuff while I supervise.”

  They set to work severing the engine’s network of connections. Wires were tagged with bits of masking tape, hoses plugged with appropriate sized bolts, a drain pan filled with coolant green like a sugary kids’ drink and smelling almost as sweet.

  Denny rested a hand on the fender, paying no attention to the clear fingerprints he was leaving there. “I guess it’s time to crawl underneath.”

  John went to fetch the jack. He squinted in the sunlight as he lifted it from the trunk. The few drops of oil that dripped as he rolled the clattering wheels across the concrete floor went unnoticed. Denny positioned the jack under a frame cross-member, twisted the long handle to shut the control valve and began to pump. Nothing happened.

  “What the fuck’s with this thing, Barr?” The shortened name came out somewhere between “bear” and “bar”.

  “Aah, the damn seal’s got a slow leak. I keep forgettin’ to order the part. I filled it up yesterday. It’ll work. You just gotta pump it up.”

  Denny pumped with belief in his friend’s word. The truck’s front wheels slowly began to lift from the garage floor. “Okay, so you were right.”

  “Let’s block it up before we get under there. John, grab that other side.”

  Two sections of an adult oak’s trunk, chain-sawed long ago for this sort of work, were placed under the frame rails. Denny released the jack and the Chevy, looking distressed, settled onto the wooden supports.

  Barry pushed heavily on the fender but there was no movement. Solid.

  John sat above, feet in the engine bay, waiting for instructions should a linkage have to be jiggled loose or a line pulled clear. He could see two pairs of work-booted legs sticking out from beneath as if the beast had found it couldn’t swallow two at once. The friends finally slid themselves clear.

  Denny now took John’s place and straddled the engine bay, a foot on each fender, the hood having previously been propped against the garage wall. He rocked the motor on its mounts. “She’s free. Let’s hook up the chain fall and get this sucker outta here.”

  Denny leaned a ladder against a thick, rough-sawn overhead beam. A loop of chain already hung from a point on the beam directly over the engine compartment of the truck. Barry cradled the chain fall in one arm and ascended the ladder. The device he carried was the size of a large melon but weighed as much as a cartload of them. The iron age improvement on the block and tackle, it had the capacity to lift several complete trucks so the engine would not strain it. But it had to be positioned overhead and Barry was the one to do it. The ladder creaked under the combined weight of the man and his burden. Barry grunted as he made certain that the hook attached to the chain fall’s housing mated with one of the suspended links. John began pulling hand over hand and a second hook dropped slowly towards the engine. Barry descended the ladder.

  “You know, you could get a smaller hoist that would do most everything you need and wouldn’t be such a pain to muscle around.”

  “Yeah, but this one didn’t cost anything and I got you to do the muscling.”

  They’d had this conversation numerous times before. It was part of the ritual.

  A short length of chain had been bolted at two points on the engine. The lowered hook engaged one of these links. John ran chain through his hands until all slack was gone. He extended the chain towards Denny as if the honor of actually extricating the engine by rights fell to the senior family member.

  “Nah, you pull, John. Me an’ Barry’ll guide ‘er out.”

  A slow ballet of starts and stops, shifting and moving began, a sequence of actions they did neither often nor for fun but yet was not altogether unfamiliar nor unpleasant. The three worked in concert with the briefest of words; “Hold it,” “Comin’ up,” “Pull,” but most frequently, gestures of hand and head. At last, the engine sat on the floor, a massive dense object, ungracefully hewn by vast machines, now appearing somewhat distended, like an organ extracted from its host.

  “Let’s pull it a little ways over here to give us some room to work.”

  Barry could have moved it himself but he allowed John to do a full measure of the pushing. Every movement seemed to have significance to John, seemed to be some sort of test. The only form of approval he needed was to be allowed to work along with the men, as a man, with no special notice being taken of that fact.

  The three of them stood and gazed into the now vacant engine compartment, a cavernous expanse seemingly large enough for two or three of the objects they had just removed.

  “So much for the fun. Now let’s do some work.”

  The tarp was pulled back to reveal the “new” engine. To any pair of eyes, even trained ones, there was no difference between old and new, good and bad. Both were encrusted in seeping lubricants that had formed a perfect media for the culturing of layers of road grime. Both looked equally tired and well-used. But one engine had died before its truck, one truck had died before its engine. One healthy vehicle would be created where two sickly ones had been. Each of the ailing ones could have been revived but only at great cost for new parts and skilled hands for the work. Waste became thrift. They dragged the good engine from its resting place at the front wall of the garage. It was soon suspended over the waiting open space. Logic would seem to dictate that such a straight-forward mechanical process should be exactly reversible. Identical objects, manipulated by identical means should be no more difficult to install than remove, the only difference being the direction in time. Yet somehow, in a fashion none of the three could have explained yet all intuitively understood, putting the engine in was significantly more difficult than pulling it out. They sweated and swore, shifted and jockeyed, freed a jam here and a twisted line there, thought they had it settled in place only to have to lift it again to loosen an engine mount, until finally the hulking mass did sit as it should, although they each had to check one last time to convince themselves this was so.

  Denny rested a hand on Barry’s shoulder. “Nothin to it.” The tracks that beads of sweat had formed on his cheeks were broken as his face creased in a smile. “Thanks, big guy.”

  “Thank your brother here. He did all the heavy work.”

  “Oh, I’m not gonna thank him yet. Not until this thing runs again. But I’m not gonna keep you anymore. John can run you home and then help me finish when he gets back."

  “Sure now?”

  “Oh yeah. The rest is easy. We got it knocked.”

  Barry nodded, patted
his friend once on the back of the shoulder and moved out into the sunlight. From the front seat of the car he called out, though Denny was now invisible to him in the shade. “Come on over Friday. We’ll get a barbecue goin’.”

  “You got it. I’ll bring the beer.”

  The dust swirled as John backed and turned the car. At this stage of the operation, Barry would no longer have been much help. He was comfortable in persuading large objects to do as he wished but the subtler touch required for connecting and adjusting was alien to him. Denny’s hands would not have been out of place on the finest machinery. To see a bundle of wires wrapped together and routed where they would least offend the eye and, not coincidentally, be least likely to suffer harm, gave him pleasure. When he soldered pipes together, he never left a teardrop of excess solder at the bottom of the joint. The structural integrity of the joint would not have suffered in the least and no one except himself would ever have noticed, but his dissatisfaction with sloppy work was such a basic part of his nature that he never hesitated to put forth the small amount of extra effort required to do the job right.

  The engine compartment’s connections were nearing completion. He crawled under the truck to secure the shift linkage and attach some wires. The phone on the back wall began ringing. He started to crawl out from under, muttered, “Hell with it,” and continued his work. They’d call back.

  Finished, he slid out from under and rolled the jack into position. He pumped for awhile until the jack finally consented to lift the truck off the oak blocks. He pulled the blocks out of the way and lowered the truck back to the floor where it stood square-shouldered and proud on its four wheels again, no longer resembling some forlorn beached sea creature.

  Denny slid behind the wheel and turned the ignition key. Lights glowed red on the dashboard but the engine sat mute, unmoving. He had connected the wires to the starter. He clearly remembered that. What else? The neutral safety switch. Damn. He had to go under the truck again.

  The jack was in position in a few seconds and he pumped it up quickly, now accustomed to the routine. He slid under without bothering to place the blocks. It would only take a second. He could see the forgotten wire dangling. Slip it in place and the job was done.

  Denny didn’t have enough time to shout even if there had been anyone to hear. The truck descended instantly. Where he lay, directly under the transmission, was the lowest point of the under-carriage. Had there been more air in the tires, or newer suspension springs, or fewer plumbing supplies in the bed, perhaps he would have had enough space to squeeze himself free. As it was, the transmission now rested squarely on his chest. What he felt was not pain but an immense, insistent pressure that he was compelled to resist with all the strength in his upper body. Movement of his arms or any other form of struggle was impossible because if he relaxed his concentration, even in the slightest, he knew he was gone. He had to hold himself together. John would be back soon and he’d be all right. Sore as hell, sure, but all right. Nothing badly damaged. Not as long as he didn’t relax.

  A few inches from his face, just far enough for his eyes to focus, was the u-joint at the beginning of the driveshaft, a brown rusted object like two gnarled fists meeting at the knuckles. He could study the forged and machined surfaces with surpassing clarity. His eyes were small spotlights illuminating as they scanned. He studied the strange device, comprehending its complexities for the first time. He could sense that one of the component bearings was wearing out and would fail soon. He would replace it and avoid a breakdown on the road.

  The pressure seemed to increase but he was not afraid. The steel and iron was relentless, impassive, but his bone and sinew would not yield. He was strong enough.

  Embarrassment at having to be freed like a dog who’d caught his nose in a discarded tin can would be his strongest feeling when John arrived. He had a moment of regret for Barry. His friend would feel terrible for the trouble his jack had caused. Denny wouldn’t tell him until the soreness and bruises had faded. He’d kid him then and be kidded in turn for having trusted a leaking jack with blocks near at hand.

  He felt more than heard the car pull into the driveway in front of the garage. The slam of the door and each of John’s steps vibrated through his chest.

  “Denny? Where the hell are you?”

  He had saved a portion of breath for the few words he knew would be needed to help John act quickly and calmly. “I’m stuck under here, Johnny. Lift the jack and help me out.”

  “What the-”. John pumped the handle and the jack lifted. Whatever words he had started to say were caught in his throat.

  The pressure was gone and Denny felt John pulling him out from under the truck. As if to demonstrate that it had acted from malicious intent, the jack now supported the truck’s front wheels in the air without slipping.

  Denny stood as John held his arm tightly and searched his face. Denny began to smile at his younger brother but a filter of doubt closed down over his features. His chest had expanded with relief as the pressure had been eased but now it seemed like it was continuing to expand. He’d held himself together by resisting the pressure from without but now felt himself failing as he couldn’t resist the pressure from within, almost as if it had been the weight of the truck holding him together against his body’s irresistible urge to break apart. He sagged and John held an arm as he lowered himself slowly to one knee.

  Denny looked at John now with sadness and love as he understood. “Thanks for the help, brother. You’re a good man.”

  John began helping Denny towards the car. He could get him to the hospital faster than an ambulance.

  The older brother leaned his head on the shoulder of the younger. Red liquid formed in a teardrop shape at the corner of his mouth. “A good man.”