Well, the Chev’ got stuck and the Ford got stuck,
Got the Chev’ unstuck when the Dodge showed up,
But the Dodge got stuck in the tractor rut,
Which eventually pulled out the Ford…
-Corb Lund
Do you ever hear a song on the radio and wonder how, exactly, a songwriter who, to the best of your knowledge, has no connection to you whatsoever manages to write a song that was lifted, with frightening fidelity, from your own past?
Yeah, happens every day, right?
So, I was headed to the local home-improvement warehouse maybe two, three days ago to pick up some lumber and hardware, maybe a little paint, and possibly look at some new kitchen cabinets and a new mailbox. And pick up some bug spray.
Oh, and a can of, uh, PVC cement.
Okay, actually, my wife and I had been cooped up in the house together for a week and I was just desperate to get.. the… fuck… out.
For a couple of hours, anyway.
So, I’m driving down the road and this great little classic country lick starts playing. I’m a sucker for a great little classic country lick, so I cranked it up. Turns out it was this goofy little novelty song from some Canadian kid, about getting trucks stuck in the mud and the hilarity that ensues.
I almost had to pull over to the side of the road. I was frantic. “How the hell did….?” It was picture perfect. I mean, the names were different, but otherwise…
I held my breath as the end of the song got closer. Was the little Canuck bastard going to tell the whole sordid tale?
He didn’t, much to my relief. That was probably for the best. Otherwise, it probably wouldn’t be playable on commercial radio.
***
A word of advice: do not ever let anyone know that you own tools and are proficient in their use. As soon as your friends and family find out that you know your way around a table saw, torque wrench, soldering iron, or pipe cutter, you will spend the rest of your natural days helping them rewire the flux capacitors on their Mr. Fusions.
If you’re handy, man, keep that shit to yourself.
I hadn’t learned that lesson, so on the Saturday in question, I found myself out in the middle of a south Georgia peanut field, underneath a hastily-constructed pole barn, trying to resurrect an Army-surplus generator that my friend Reg had purchased online from some lunatic prepper.
It was at times like this when I was so glad that I’d spent my youth helping my old man out in his workshop instead of picking up girls, drinking illicit booze, and holding up drug stores. Who needs to have fun in their youth when they could be learning how to rebuild a lawnmower engine?
Reg intended to use the generator to run tools for his attempt to build a cabin on this sad little plot of dirt. With aspirations of becoming a certified-organic farmer, he was planning to build a small cabin down here, raise high-priced produce, and retire young amongst the gnats and mosquitos.
Of course, I knew Reg – the cabin would be abandoned after it was no more than a foundation in a couple years’ time, and the only thing that would ever be planted on this land would be a few sad little tomatoes and possibly a bell pepper or two.
But, in the meantime, I’d use my considerable skill in repairing useless junk to at least give him some light to not work by.
I’d gotten there at about 8:30, about twenty minutes ahead of a rain shower that parked itself overhead and looked as though it was planning to stay for the rest of the day. We stayed under the only-slightly-leaky roof of the pole barn and proceeded to dismantle the gennie.
It wasn’t a bad morning; I wasn’t terribly well-versed in diesel engines, but it didn’t seem all that complicated. By eleven, I had the motor running pretty well, but the generator was, disappointingly, not generating. We talked and joked around while I tinkered, drinking beer and telling lies. About noon, our buddy Charles showed up, bearing a fresh sixer and his neverending supply of filthy jokes.
I was just thinking that I had figured out the problem and was trying to figure out a way to fix said problem when the day got suddenly much, much worse.
I’d love to say that it was because I’d accidentally shorted two wires together and we’d all been horribly injured in a freak explosion, but it was actually much worse than that.
Mandy showed up.
Mandy was Reg’s sister, and she and I had roughly the same relationship that a mongoose has with a cobra – bitter animosity, tempered with a strong dose of mutual disdain.
I looked up to see her ridiculous little Audi coming up the path leading through the pine trees. She pulled it into the shade at the edge of the clearing and got out, opening an umbrella as she made her way towards the pole barn.
I rolled my eyes and gave a small internal groan before turning my attention back to the part I was trying – unsuccessfully – to remove.
“Hey, sis,” said Reg, as she walked up to where he and Charles were standing, watching me fight with the balky piece of equipment.
“Hey, Reg. Charles.” She gave each of them a small hug and they hugged her back. Reg, I understood – she was his sister, there’s a certain level of familial obligation at play. Charles, I could not understand. I’d given him unequivocal proof that Mandy was a hellspawn brought to Earth solely for the purpose of destroying the last remnants of civilization – and somehow my theory had gained little-to-no traction with him.
Of course, Charles might also have been motivated by the fact that Mandy, despite being a horrid bitch, was also a not-unattractive woman.
Okay, she was pretty.
Okay, okay. She was a stone hottie.
She looked over to where I knelt behind the olive-drab cowling of the generator. She nodded slightly. “Shithead,” she said in greeting.
“Hell-beast,” I responded.
We at least had a firm grasp on where we stood with one another.
“What are you doing out here?” Reg asked.
“Are you planning to, at any point between now and the heat death of the Universe, call our mother?” She started poking around on the makeshift workbench where I’d been placing pieces of the generator, casually disarranging everything that I’d organized (piled) so carefully (haphazardly).
“Aw, man, what does she want now?” Reg’s relationship with his parents was… complicated.
“How the hell would I know? I’m not the parent whisperer. Call Mom so she’ll leave me the fuck alone.” Mandy stepped away from the bench, and found a place to roost on a camp chair leaned up against one of the columns.
Wait, do I have that right? Do harpies roost? Perch? Brood?
Reggie sighed theatrically. “I’ll call her tonight.”
“You better. What the hell is that?” she asked, pointing at the generator.
“It’s a generator,” I said, my tone indicating that any 26-year-old recent graduate in psychology should be able to identify on sight a thirty-year-old piece of surplus military power equipment, obviously.
“What’s it for?”
I slammed the access hatch shut and stood up. “It’s for generating electricity,” I said snidely. “You know, some of these things are pretty self-explanatory.”
She looked daggers at me. “I wasn’t talking to you, asshole, I was asking my brother.”
I shrugged and walked over to the bench, taking just a moment to indulge myself with a quick look over my adversary. It was the only good thing I ever got out of our infrequent and unwelcome interactions, and so I allowed my admiration of her form to last for only a few seconds each time. I certainly didn’t want to start associating her with any concepts such as “attraction” or “appeal.”
Keeping those ideas separate was admittedly difficult. She had a cute little nose, big, pretty blue eyes, and a mouth that looked like the sculptor had kissing in mind when he put it all together. In the rare moments when she wasn’t actively working towards the corruption of all things good and proper in the world, she could look either fun and innocent or sultry and mysterious. Both looks were not entirely unpleasant to behold. Her pale blonde hair typically framed her face, but today she had it tied up in a ponytail which was, I shuddered to admit, quite fetching.
Her body wasn’t at all bad, either – slender waist, with deliciously curvy hips, a great ass, and what even I had to admit were a very impressive pair of boobs – perfectly shaped and just slightly larger than a nice, ripe Georgia peach. She had on a tight pair of jeans and an orange strappy tank top that fit just well enough to be distracting.
All-in-all, a very nice package for a complete shitshow of a human being.
I finally managed to pull the armature free of the generator and started cleaning it, hoping that would get this thing running so I could get out of here before she started summoning and devouring human souls.
The other three chatted aimlessly, talking about…. I have no idea. I was furiously realigning a copper core and cleaning the windings and praying for a miracle, or – at the very least – that the family reunion would end.
Apparently, God was none-too-pleased with something I’d done recently, and my prayers got sent to voicemail. The rain showed no sign of stopping, the generator was still stubbornly not generating, and Mandy seemed to be making no effort to leave. I toiled on.
After another couple of hours, I reached the core of the problem – the generator wasn’t “broken” so much as it was “incomplete.” Before making the sale, the previous owner had robbed the unit of a couple of necessary parts. I called Reg over and gave him the bad news.
A torrent of creative profanity hit my ears, but I really didn’t care. There was nothing left for me to do, so I could get the hell out and maybe salvage a little of my day.
At least the rain had stopped.
I started packing up my tools. “Aww, leaving so soon?” cooed Mandy. I flipped her the bird and closed up my toolbox.
“Fellas, it’s been fun,” I said, waving at Reg and Charles. “Devil-whore, always a pleasure,” I said, nodding towards Mandy.
After tossing my toolbox in the back, I climbed into the cab of my ancient Chevy pickup, keyed the motor into life, dropped it into first and eased down on the gas.
And went…. nowhere.
When I’d parked that morning, I’d forgotten about the four days of rain that we’d had earlier in the week. Added to that, a day’s worth of soaking rain had turned the Georgia red clay into something resembling a particularly unpleasant soup. I felt the sinking sensation – literally, the sinking sensation – of the rear wheels of my truck digging themselves into Reg’s now-saturated field.
“No,” I said, easing off the gas. “No, no, no, no, this is not happening,” I muttered, realizing I’d failed to put my pickup in four-wheel-drive mode. I hastily reached down and moved the lever on the floor, engaging the two front wheels. I let the clutch out slowly, carefully, and eased down on the gas. For a second, I felt the truck start to move forward, and then traction on the front wheels failed. I felt the nose start to dip. “No, no, no, no, no!” I said again.
My vocabulary had, apparently, been reduced to one word.
I shifted into reverse and gave it a little gas. It rocked back on the springs, but didn’t move – but the front wheels did dig themselves a couple inches deeper into the mud, so I guess that was something.
I fell back on a skill handed down to me by my beloved father – I began to swear, fluently. I cursed with a vehemence normally reserved for Marine drill instructors or owners of Yugos. I cursed in English. I cursed in German. I cursed in languages that hadn’t been invented yet. It was impressive.
The truck was not impressed.
I switched off the engine and climbed out. By now, all three of them were watching.
I kicked a rear tire, doing considerably more damage to my foot than to the tire. “Either of you got a chain?” I hollered.
Reg laughed, nodded. “Yeah, man, I got you.” He walked over to his truck and pulled out a short logging chain. He slowly and cautiously backed his old Ford up to the front of my pickup and we hooked his trailer hitch to the tow hook under my front bumper. I got into position and gave him a thumbs-up.
He crept forward, carefully taking up the slack, then gave it some gas. I eased off the clutch, ready to roll out of the hole, and then watched with growing dismay as Reg’s truck spun an avalanche of mud onto my windshield – and it, too, buried its back wheels in the muck.
“Whoa!” I shouted out the window, over the roar of the old V8, waving frantically for him to stop. He shifted into reverse, trying to rock himself out, and succeeded only in sinking all the way down the rear end.
We cut off both engines and stood there, looking – as men do when confronted with a difficult situation – as though we were deep in thought.
We weren’t actually in deep thought; we were mostly just swearing inside our heads because we didn’t have the right words in our vocabularies to swear aloud.
Charles and Mandy wandered over. Charles was clearly amused; Mandy looked like, yes, this was exactly what she expected out of the two of us. She opened her mouth to say something, and I just held up one finger.
“Nope,” I said. “Not one fucking word out of you, okay? Just…. no.”
She held up her hands, palms out, as if to say, “I wouldn’t dream of it,” and walked back towards a high patch of relatively-dry dirt.
Charles slapped us both on the back. “Looks like I gotta do everything, huh? When a Ford and a Chevy can’t get it done, I guess you gotta bring in a real truck, huh?”
Charles was one of those guys who was really proud to own a Dodge, and never once let anyone forget it, as though the very concept of “truck” had been invented by the Dodge brothers and all others were mere pretenders to the throne.
Charles jockeyed his Ram into position and snugged up the chain between his truck and Reg’s. He cranked up and, crowing gleefully, eased forward, pulling Reg free. They gradually picked up a little speed, heading for higher, dryer ground. Charles, window down and voice triumphant, kept up a running commentary on the overall superiority of Chrysler products named after male sheep – essentially, acting like a true and complete cockhead.
Of course, he was so busy giving free advertising to the company to which he’d just paid $32,000 that he did not notice the deep, old tractor rut which intersected his course a few yards ahead, nor the enormous puddle that he was gleefully dragging Reg’s Ford into. Reg and I both saw what was about to happen and started yelling for him to go around, but he couldn’t hear us over his own boisterous bellowings… and we suddenly had three pickups buried to the axles in sticky red Georgia mud.
They climbed out, and I walked over to where they stood. We stared at our trucks and said absolutely nothing.
Male intellect is a truly wonderful thing.
***
For the next two and a half hours, we tried everything we could think of to get the trucks out of the mud. We jacked up the rear ends, trying to get enough clearance to shovel some less-soupy mud under the tires – the jacks sank into the mud. We shoved scrap wood under the wheels – it either sank itself into the muck, or became whirling projectiles as the wheels flung it out towards the rest of us at terrifying velocities. We called everyone we knew in a ten-mile radius with a four-wheel drive pickup – nobody answered. We wandered the periphery of the field, hoping that Providence had perhaps graced us with a pile of sand.
Mandy watched from the sidelines, tossing out mostly-useless ideas, adding a few choice insults in my direction, blaming me for starting the whole sad debacle.
Well, I hated to admit, she wasn’t entirely wrong.
Finally, about six o’clock, Charles looked at his watch. “Shit, man, I gotta be at work in an hour,” he said. He was a nurse at a local hospital, and frequently worked the swing shift.
We gathered back under the pole barn and discussed the problem. Mandy’s Audi was clear – she’d parked on a small rise and wasn’t bogged down at all. But it was only a two-seater.
Reg knew a guy not far away who had a tractor we might borrow. I saw what was coming, and my heart sank.
“Okay,” I heard Reg say. “Mandy, let me take Charles into town with your car. I’ll come back, stop off at Holtzman’s and get his tractor, and bring it back here. We’ll pull all three trucks out – Dave, you can head home; Mandy, you follow me back over to Holtzman’s in my truck and get your car, and then I’ll run Charles back out here in the morning to get his.”
“Sure,” said Charles.
“Wait,” said Mandy and I at the same time.
“Why don’t I take Charles to work and go back by… who was it? Holtzman?” I heard her ask.
Reg rolled his eyes. “Mandy, have you ever met Gus Holtzman? For that matter, have you ever driven a tractor?”
“Well, no…”
“Then how the fuck do you plan to convince a 90-year-old stranger who doesn’t think women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, let along drive, to let you borrow his $18,000 farm tractor, and then drive a tractor – that you don’t know how to drive – back over here in the dark?”
I grabbed a notepad and a pen off the workbench and handed it to Reg. “You can send her with a note explaining our predicament.” I turned to Mandy. “And driving a tractor is easy, just push the throttle up, let off the brake and clutch, and turn the wheel. I’m sure you can invoke some dark ritual…”
Reg threw the pad down and whirled on me. “Wait here with her,” he growled. He spun on his sister, “Wait here with him.” He held out his hand for Mandy’s keys. Sighing with hurricane force, she dropped them into his hand. “And both of you grow the fuck up. I’ll be back in an hour.”
We watched as they both piled into the tiny roadster and vanished into the trees.
She pulled out her phone and wandered off towards the trucks. I heard her bitching to someone as I started one more fruitless search for something that would get me out of this situation – or at least provide a painless means of suicide.
Alas, it was not to be. Resigned to my fate, I retreated back to my truck, dialed my friend Tony.
“Hey, brother,” I said. “I’ve got a little problem, I’m not gonna make it tonight.” In addition to being a generator repairman and world-class mud-bogger, I was also rhythm guitarist for a little C&W act that played around in local bars. I was going to miss “band practice” – 30 minutes of half-assed dicking around with a couple songs, followed by an hour and a half of serious boozing.
“What kind of little problem, man?”
I explained, cautiously avoiding any mention of the fact that I was patient-zero for this particular pandemic.
Tony laughed. “Stuck out there with Mandy, huh? I can think of worse ladies to be stranded….”
I flipped the phone shut and dropped it on the seat next to me, looking around to see if I had a book or something I could use to pass the time. All I found was the instruction manual for a Milwaukee reciprocating saw and an empty Funyuns pack. I sighed and put my head against the headrest, thinking I might grab a nap in the warm summer evening.