The grease on my knuckles never really came off after sixty years of turning wrenches in the back of the hardware store, no matter how much pumice soap I scrubbed with at the kitchen sink. I sat there on the vinyl bench seat of my old sedan at 7:14 in the morning, watching the second hand on the dashboard clock twitch its way toward eight. The engine had that familiar lifter tick that sounded like a dry pocket watch under the hood.
Back then, the world in our corner of the Ozarks moved at the speed of a John Deere in third gear, and folks usually had time to wave when they passed the post office. Arthur Henderson didn’t wave at anybody unless they were holding a ballot box or a bank ledger with three zeros at the end of the line. He came stomping across the gravel lot with his leather briefcase swinging against his knee like a pendulum of bad news.
He yanked the passenger door open before I could even finish wiping my palms on my shop rag. “Move over, or let’s go, Harlan, because I’ve got three zoning hearings before nine o’clock and the county commissioners aren’t known for waiting on small-town mechanics,” he barked, his face already red around the collar.
I didn’t rush myself. A man past seventy learns pretty quick that hurrying for a man like Arthur only means you get to your troubles ten minutes earlier. “Morning to you too, Arthur,” I said, putting the clutch down with my left toe. “The road’s plenty wide for the both of us.”
He slammed the door hard enough to rattle the loose trim around the vent window. “Take me to the airport as fast as you can! I’ll give you a hundred-dollar bill right now if we make it in fifteen minutes.”
I looked down at the crisp green corner sticking out of his wallet, then back up at the amber light blinking over the intersection of Maple and 5th. The engine gave a little shudder as I let out the clutch, and for a second I thought about the three thousand dollars I still owed the bank for the new lathe motor down at the shop.
“Deal,” I said, and I didn’t smile when I said it.
The next ten minutes were a blur of burnt rubber and raised dust along the shoulder of Route 4. I dropped the transmission into second and let the old girl howl past the grain elevator while Arthur grabbed the overhead handle so hard his knuckles turned the color of lard.
He kept leaning forward over the center console, checking his gold watch every twenty seconds like the world was going to stop spinning if he missed a municipal meeting.
“You must have been a race car driver in another life,” he snapped, his voice tight and rattling in his throat as we took the curve by the creek on two wheels.
“Nope,” I said, keeping my eyes fixed on the center stripe where the tar snakes had melted in the July heat.
“A police officer, then? Some kind of undercover work for the state?”
“No,” I told him, shifting up into third gear as we cleared the rise past the old feed mill.
“Then how in blazes are you driving this fast through a school zone without even looking at the speedometer?”
I finally pulled my foot off the accelerator just enough to let the engine whine settle down to a respectable roar.
I turned my head slow and looked right at him, letting the silence stretch out for three or four long seconds while the tires hummed against the asphalt.
“This isn’t a taxi, Arthur,” I said real quiet.
He froze with his hand still halfway to his breast pocket where the hundred-dollar bill was tucked. “What?!”
I reached out with my right hand and tapped the yellow plastic magnetic sign sitting right there in the middle of the dashboard where the defroster vents usually blew hot air. “It says Driving School,” I told him, pointing right at the bold black letters stenciled on the cardboard insert. “You’ve been taking your final driving test this whole time, and frankly, your language in the back seat isn’t going to look too good on the evaluation sheet.”
The blood drained right out of his face until he looked like a peeled turnip sitting in a crate. He looked down at the dual brake pedal mounted on the passenger floorboard, then over at the little cardboard box of cones rolling around near his wingtip shoes.
“You’re… you’re not a cab driver,” he whispered, and for the first time in twenty years, Arthur Henderson didn’t have anything sharp to say back.
“Vernon Miller’s boy couldn’t make it to run the state examiner out to the highway today because his tractor threw a rod,” I said, keeping my voice level as I pulled the car smoothly into the gravel turnout by the terminal gates. “So the county commissioner asked if I’d fill in the route and see how folks handle a little pressure on the road.”
He sat there for a full minute with his hand frozen on the door handle, looking out at the baggage carts rolling past the chain-link fence. The hundred-dollar bill was still clutched in his fist, but the corners were all crumpled up from how hard he’d been squeezing it while we took that last corner by the lumberyard.
“How long have you been sitting out there by the hardware store?” he asked, and his voice sounded thin, like dry corn husks blowing across an empty field in November.
“Since six-thirty,” I said. “Right about the time you told me my shop was an eyesore to the downtown beautification committee.”
He didn’t offer me the money. He just pushed the door open, stepped out onto the gravel with his polished shoes covered in gray dust from the shoulder, and slammed the door so hard the rearview mirror dropped three inches. He didn’t look back once as he hurried toward the automatic doors of the terminal with his briefcase swinging low against his trousers.
I sat there in the idling car for a long time, watching the dust settle back down onto the weeds by the fence line. I reached down and picked up the crumpled green bill he’d dropped on the rubber floor mat, smoothing out the corners against my knee before sliding it right into the pocket of my grease-stained work shirt.
The engine was still ticking away under the hood, steady and slow, the exact same rhythm it had kept every morning since I buried my brother back in ’94. I put the gearshift back into first, checked my side mirror, and turned the wheel around toward town to see who else might need a ride before noon.
