Chapter 11

Chapter Eleven.

To stay awake Danny and I kept up a vigil of steady conversation. Danny was in the middle of telling me some story, but I wasn't listening, as I always preferred the sound of my own voice. Interrupting I began to tell a much better story, I was confident of that. I always thought other people wanted to hear my stories more than they wanted to tell theirs. What I knew for sure was that I wanted to tell my story more than I wanted to hear his. Besides, I was driving and it is easier to stay awake while telling a story than to try to stay awake while listening to one.
Danny had been telling some lame story of some cheesy practical joke he had been a part of, so this sparked me to tell the story of one of the best practical jokes that I ever heard of. So that’s when I interrupted him, knowing that he would be glad that I did once he had heard my story. It was a story of a longhaired one-eyed hippie guy who married my sister. Richard was one of the best practical jokers of all time, and he was even better when he teamed up with Doug; the longhaired hippie guy who married my other sister. So began to tell Danny about a joke they once played on my oldest sister Joy, my brother Dan and his wife Jan.
"My sister Joy had come to Yellowknife from Toronto, and it was arranged that she stay at Dan. Janet was new to our family at this time, since her and Dan had only recently married. Joy was going to stay at their apartment while they were gone, and during that time find her own place and get settled.
“Both Joy and Janet were hoping to meet each other for the first time before Dan and Jan had to leave, but this was not to be, for Dan and Jan had to leave a few days before Joys arrival in Yellowknife. For this reason the keys to Dan and Jan's apartment were left with my sister Kathy, Doug's wife. Richard stopped by to see Doug, and while they were sitting around the kitchen table it came up in conversation about the arrangement between Joy and Dan and Jan for the use of the apartment.
Handling the keys, dangling them like the sword of Damocles in his long leathered fingers Richard conceived of a plan to…”
"Damocles… Sword of Damocles? What is that?" Danny asked interrupting my story.
"The sword of Damocles, it’s a story about a guy who had to sit under a sword that was hanging from a single strand of hair." I explained,
"What guy?" he prodded.
"I think he was some ancient Greek guy who was the courtier to Dionysius the Elder.”
"Who was that?" Danny seemed to need to know.
"The tyrant of Syracuse, I think, but I am not sure, you'll have to look that one up."
"Why?" He asked.
"Why What?" I asked back.
"Why did he have to do that?"
"I don’t know; something about demonstrating how precarious the king’s fortunes were or some stupid ass thing like that" I explained.
"What happened to him?" Danny asked wanting to know more.
"I have no idea; my guess is that eventually he died." I submitted.
"So what has he got to do with your story?"
"Nothing! I was just trying to set the scene, you know the ambiance; paint a picture in your minds eye!" I shouted over the din of road noise and the whine of the heater fan. "And you had to ruin it!…I mean I slave over these stories trying to turn just the right phrase for your entertainment; to try to bring a glimmer of light to your otherwise pathetic grey existence and you just throw it all away!"
"Anyways… where was I?"
"Sword of Damocles" Danny offered.
"Yeah so anyways, he is dangling these keys see, and he says to Doug, "There has got to be something we can do with these!" he says with an evil snicker and a sly grin.
"I was thinking the same thing, but we have to be very quiet, don’t let Kathy know, she will blow the whole thing." Doug replied.
They both headed over to Dan and Jan's apartment, neither of them sure what it was they were going to do once they got there. They tried the key in the lock and like two kids who had found an unattended cookie jar they were so excited when it opened the door."
"Unattended cookie jar?" Danny asked, again interrupting me.
"Yes! An unattended cookie jar! You do know what that is? Don’t you? I mean I did dumb it down enough didn’t I?" I shouted back exasperatedly.
"How is a door like an unattended cookie jar?"
"Its not, it just how it made them feel! Now cut it out! You’re trying to ruin a perfectly good story!"
"Okay okay" Danny promised.
"Once inside they acted as if on instinct, like inspiration given from above, not a word was spoken, not a moment of indecisiveness existed, they knew what they had to do. Who knows how they knew, but who knows how a beaver knows to build a Damn, or a bee to build a hive, or how the posi-traction on a sixty-seven Dodge Coronet works? No one, they just do. What ever it was it was pure genius.
They rearranged all the furniture in the apartment. They moved the furniture in the master bedroom suite into the smallest bedroom. This bedroom was so small that once they got the bed into the small room the door would no longer open all the way, so that you had to squeeze your way in and out of the room through the narrow opening. Then they pushed the fancy dining room table set against the wall in the corner of the dinning room, and lined all the chairs up tight to the two remaining sides. Then they put the television set on the kitchen counter across from the refrigerator but beside the sink.
They then rearranged the living room furniture so that the couch was on a wall that was too short and so the couch jutted halfway into the hallway. Then they took the towels out of the hallway closet next to the bathroom and put them in the kitchen cupboard above the stove. Then they put the refrigerator in the living room and put a small rocking chair and reading lamp where the fridge was supposed to be in the kitchen. They put a bible and some magazines on the kitchen counter next to the reading lamp so that it looked like a favorite reading spot.
They put the stereo system on the coffee table and put them both in the bathroom and took the time to hook it all back up properly so that it worked. They took all their books and put them in the hallway closet where the towels were. They took all the pots and pans out of the kitchen and stored them in the vanity under the bathroom sink. They put all the bathroom supplies in the kitchen cupboard above where the fridge was supposed to be.
Then afraid they had gone too far, they put the pots and pans back in the kitchen and the bathroom supplies back into the bathroom, "We don’t want to be too obvious, it might tip them off" they decided.
Feeling very satisfied they awaited Joy’s arrival. No one noticed that Doug and Richard had shown a little extra interest in the arrival of Joy, offering to let her into the apartment and help her with her things to get settled. Richard escorted her to the apartment and let Joy in giving her a quick tour of the apartment before he left. Joy was immediately taken aback by the terrible furniture arrangement, but this was not her apartment so she would just live with it and be grateful she had any place at all. After all it will only be for a few weeks.
Over the next few weeks Joy would look for an apartment of her own, but she also took the time to visit with her sisters whom she had seen little of over the last ten or more years. Joy could not help but comment to Lynn and Kathy of how lousy a decorator this Janet was. That she had never seen an apartment so poorly decorated. Lynn and Kathy were not really sure why Joy was being so critical of Janet's apartment. They had been over several times and always thought it was nice, in fact, they told Joy that they thought Janet was an excellent decorator, that they thought she had quite a talent for it.
To this Joy would respond "Is every one gone nuts? She is the worst decorator in the world!"
"I don’t know about that, I have been over there plenty of times and she has it set up pretty nice" Lynn would say, defending Janet.
"I agree,” added Kathy, I don’t see anything wrong with her decorating ability, she seems to have a knack for it"
Joy, having had little contact with her sisters over the last several years begins to think that her sisters must have as bad a decorating sense as Janet. The confusing thing for her is that Lynn and Kathy's homes are at least reasonably decorated. She decides that it must be Doug and Richards decorating influence that is the reason Kathy and Lynn's house is okay. Over the next few weeks Joy lives with the furniture debacle until she finds her own place. Joy had entertained the idea of redecorating Janet's apartment for her, but she decided that it might offend Janet if she did such a thing without her permission.
With Joy all squared away in her new apartment across town from Dan and Jan's, Dan and Janet returned from their trip. When they saw the state of the apartment it was now Janet’s turn to be taken aback by it. She had never seen such weird arrangement of furniture in her life. Dan however enjoyed the new reading nook in the kitchen where the fridge was supposed to be, and having the fridge in the living room didn't seem like such a bad idea either. Over the next few days Janet busied herself with restoring the order and sanity to their apartment-decorating scheme.
At this point, both Dan and Janet were beginning to grow slightly upset with what they thought Joy had done. "The nerve of that women!" Janet exclaimed. "We let her stay at our apartment for free, no strings attached, we were glad to do it, but then she rearranges all our furniture…and in the stupidest way! The couch is sticking out into the hall; the TV is on the kitchen table the fridge in the living room! And she even changed our bedroom from the master bedroom with the on suite to the small kid sized room…it is just so unbelievable!"
It so happened that she made this statement to Richard and Doug who had been visiting much regularly than usual, a point that Dan and Jan had not noticed. They had obviously been coming over everyday to enjoy the fruits of their handy work, like a criminal returning to the scene of the crime. "Well I wouldn't change it back right away," Richard began. "Joy is in quite a touchy state right now and I think she would really be offended if she came over and saw that you just undid everything she did!"
"She's pretty proud of the job she did on your apartment; she has been very excited for you to return so she could see how much you liked it!" Doug said adding to Richards’s statement to give it more creditability.
"Yeah, I don’t know if you should do that…changing it back too quickly, you should probably just live with it for a while, or at least just slowly change it back. You could just change your bedroom back first, that way if she came over she wouldn’t have to see that." Richard continued.
"But don’t you think it is kind of nervy to stay at someone's apartment and rearrange all their furniture?" Janet asked indignantly. "I mean it would be nervy enough if she had rearranged it to make it better! But look at this!"
"Yeah, it's pretty bad all right…perhaps you should just go over to her and tell her so right now!" Richard encouraged her, reveling in the ripening of his plot.
A few days later Janet is over at Kathy's and of course she couldn't help but mention the state Joy had left her apartment in. Kathy was surprised Joy had changed anything; it didn’t seem like something Joy would do. "Joy had mentioned that she thought she could improve on the decorating style of your apartment, but I didn't think she would do anything" Kathy said, and then added; "Besides your apartment was decorated pretty nice, I don’t think there was much she could do to improve upon it."
"Improve upon it!" exclaimed Janet; "She must be the worst decorator in the world!"
"Well that’s funny" says Kathy, "She said the same thing about you; wow, you two must have completely opposite tastes!"
"Taste has nothing to do with it! Joy did things that don’t even make sense! And even so, the nerve of someone to completely rearrange your furniture behind your back! It is just too unbelievable!" Janet exclaimed acrimoniously. "I have a good mind to go over there and give her a piece of my mind!"
Before this could happen, Joy showed up over at Kathy's for a visit, and heard that Janet was upset at the way Joy had rearranged the all the furniture. "Well I only made it better!" Joy exclaimed loudly. "She had the TV right beside the sink! It was too dangerous! I was afraid I might get electrocuted every time I did the dishes! So I moved the TV to the kitchen table!" Joy said to defend herself.
Anyhow at this point everyone started to realize something was up, Lynn, Richards’s wife, had been staying out of the conversations, as she had become privy to the plot of her husband and Doug. Lynn was off to the side sporting a guilty grin. Kathy turned to Lynn, "Oooh! Wait a minute! Something's going on here! Lynn, do you know something?"
Lynn tightened her lips up to keep from laughing, but could not hide the fact that she knew what the truth of the situation was. Richard remained cool, as if he had no idea what Lynn was grinning about. "What? What is so funny?" Richard asked Lynn as dead pan as he could to try to prolong the charade as long as possible.
Lynn pushed away at Richard and says "Oh you know!"
To this Richard begins to laugh but manages to recover and say, "No, no I don’t know." (Still trying to preserve every last minute of his gag.)
To this Lynn could not stand it, she was unable to contain it any longer. "Richard and Doug went over and rearranged all the furniture for a joke before Joy got there!" She blurted out like a confession, releasing all the stress of holding it inside in one sentence.
"What? No we didn’t!" Richard tried one last attempt to prolong another moment from his gag. But the cat was out of the bag. No one could have guessed Joy’s reaction. We all knew Joy had a fiery temper built on indignant anger; she was well known to get very animated on any subject that she had formed an opinion on. If it were about the color to paint a wall of a house, or her stand on abortion, she would get just as fired up about it. Unsure of what was coming, Doug and Richard slowly backed away from the table.
Joy began to laugh, she was trying to suppress it, so it was coming out her nose, and she was laughing too hard that she could no longer contain it. In her mind she was replaying all the events of the last several weeks and realized that Richard and Doug had orchestrated the whole thing. Her mind could not help but appreciate the genius that it took to pull off such a diabolical plot. It worked on so many levels. In one act they had gotten Joy, Dan and Janet. The perfect timing of exploiting the fact that Janet and Joy had not yet met, and that Kathy and Lynn had seen very little of Joy since they were kids.
At this point they realized that Dan and Janet were still living with the debacle Richard and Doug had created, since Richard had convinced her and Dan that it might upset Joy if the changed it right away. "Don’t tell Jan and Dan!" Richard encouraged them wanting to see how far he could go with this thing. But the women would have nothing to do with it. And so the jig was up."
Danny enjoyed the story of the great practical joke and wanted to hear more. But it was a long drive and I did not feel like talking for a while. Through the darkness we drove, my headlight illuminating our path before us. The twist and turns of the Mackenzie highway stretched out before us. There is a certain kind of romanticism that driving through the night brings with it. The unseen, the unknown, lying just beyond the reach of the headlights inspires the imagination of limitless possibilities.
At this time it was about four or five in the morning, it was late November so there was no sign of the sun yet. We were making slower progress than I had thought; it seems twenty-eight miles an hour was as fast as we could average. At thirty five miles an hour my engine was revving too high so I would have to shift into high gear, but then this gear was too high so that I had to shift back into second gear right away. I had to slow down to a little less than thirty miles an hour in second gear so as not to over rev the engine.
Several hours later the first signs of the approaching dawn were upon us. It must be nearly ten o'clock in the morning, nine thirty at the earliest. The nights are long at this time of year. In the increasing daylight prairie chickens, grouse that still have not shed their summer colors, were gathering on the gravel highway in large flocks. I think they were eating the gravel, they’re pretty dumb birds, and much too dumb to get out of the way of a moving vehicle.
I would swerve to the left and right trying to miss them, but they would fly right in front of me anyway. There were thousands of them, and as hard as I tried to miss them I still was hitting hundreds of them. It was dangerous, that oversized trailer I was pulling did not respond well to my swerving maneuvers, and from time to time it would begin to whip back in forth and almost put us in the ditch. I said, "Whip" but actually it was a more deliberate slower pendulum type action, kind of like a whip, but in slow motion.
After a while the stress of trying to avoid the birds was too much. I mean if my efforts had been more successful I could have lived with it, but those stupid birds would thwart all my efforts to miss them and fly right into the truck, bouncing off the fenders, grill, hood or windshield; being killed instantly by the impact. I had to just give up, and drive straight as if they were not there, let the dead birds’ fall where they may.
After some time of this, watching the life being knocked out of hundreds of defenseless birds, something happens, something changes inside of you. It is hard to explain, first there is a hardening of the heart, a callousness that suddenly seems like an old sweater that fits you well and comforts you and shields oneself from the brutality that one might be part of. Then after a while, the randomness of the killing seems unfair, why would some be spared and others run down just because of what side of the road they happened to be on?
Before long the reign of chance was more than I could stand, I needed to take back control of what was happening. I had already tried to spare all their lives, but they were so stupid that my efforts were futile. I had no other choice; I could not let random chance dictate who lives and who dies, using me as a patsy to do its evil work. I would take full control of this situation I decided, and I would do it the only way I knew how.
It was completely logical what I did, I had no other choice, it was something that had to be done, maybe I wouldn’t like it, but it had to be done anyway. Instead of trying to avoid them, or trying to be indifferent and ignore them, my only remaining option was to run them down. Removing the element of chance put me in control, not chance. That’s right I ran them down, sometimes a man has got to do what a man must do! No it wasn’t pretty, but you don’t know, you weren't there!
Birds were bouncing off the windshield feathers were fluttering in our wake, floating in the air behind long after we passed. Splat! Thump! Bang: Hundreds of prairie chickens meeting their end at my hand. At first it is not a good feeling, I was doing what had to be done, but after a while it grows on you, you develop an appetite for their deaths; I found my self laughing maniacally at each group that I slaughtered. "Die! Die! Die!" I shouted enthusiastically as I plowed through another flock of more than a dozen foul.
"It’s too bad these aren't crows!" I shouted to Dan. Dan was speechless, wide-eyed and speechless. I could see by the look in his eyes that he was wondering why it was too bad they weren't crows. "Because if they were crows then we could say that this was a murder of murders!" I shouted to him. He still didn’t get it, so I explained; "A flock of crows is called a murder, and running them down killing them is like murdering them, so hence a murder of murders!" He still didn’t get it.
I continued the slaughter, but they just kept coming! I was killing them by the dozens and they would not stop! I was swerving dangerously to make sure I could get as many as I could. At first I thought there would be no quenching my blood lust, but now it had been long since satiated but the slaughter had to continue. It had reached the point of no return; I could not help but think of all the sorrow that I had caused the surviving birds. The only answer was to kill them all, no survivors, no sorrow; I had the power to make it all better.
At some point everyone knows when he or she has gone too far, the point of no return, when the consequences of ones actions overcome any possible benefit. This point came to me when I looked in the rear view mirror and saw a cloud of what looked like thick smoke behind me, in actuality it was steam, my radiator had let go. I pulled over to see what had happened. I walked around to the front of my truck and saw that the grill was smashed out of my truck. My once perfect grill completely smashed.
Exposed behind the grill was the radiator, and sticking out of it was the but end of the dead body of a prairie chicken. I opened the hood and saw that the head of this bird had gone right through the radiator and its beak was getting whacked by the fan blades as the whirled by. "Well that explains that noise,” I said thinking out loud. This was bad; breaking down on the Mackenzie highway in winter can be fatal.
"What did I do to deserve this?" I wailed in anguish, "Oh Lord why doth thou mock me so?" I cried.
There standing on the road in front of us was another flock of foul, pecking at the ground, mocking us with there jerky head gestures. "To think I felt pity for you" I mumbled. "Stupid birds!" I shouted. "You stupid birds!”
"Well it was kinda your fault, you were aiming for them with your truck!" Danny offered.
"Shut up Danny!" I snapped back at him. But Danny just laughed and started to say something about it being poetic justice or something. "Shut up Danny!" I repeated, "Stupid poetic justice" I mumbled.
Well there we were, stuck on the side of the highway; it was what I had feared most, we had no contingency for a blown radiator. How ironic it would be to freeze to death due to an overheated motor. In the cold morning air we used a pair of pliers to try to crimp off as many damaged radiator tubes as we could, but the old radiator was so brittle that they just cracked and kept leaking.
It looked like we were headed down hill, and we had been traveling for a long time, so I reasoned that it might not be that far to the river crossing. "I think it is down hill all the way to the river crossing and it might not be that far!" I told Danny, "I say we just go for it, there is a store at the river crossing we might be able to find something to fix this radiator with." So we got in the truck and made a run for the river crossing.
Rolling down the hill we were quite a site, steam and feathers floating in our wake, like the contrail of some giant rocket, well except for the feathers. It was a huge relief to see the store at the bottom of the hill; we rolled into the parking lot and got looks from the few patrons who were gathered in its quaint restaurant for a late breakfast.
I fueled the truck up in faith that we would be able to get it fixed and use the gas so that it would not be wasted. I went to the counter where they had a display filled with Silver Stallion radiator leak stopper. Radiator problems were not uncommon on the Mackenzie highway, since it was all gravel, and the flying stones would eventually find the weak spot of any radiator. I purchased the whole display, I don’t know how many stop leaks were in there, but I got them all. The storeowner was somewhat reluctant to sell them all, since it wiped out his stock, but I bought them anyway, along with a few gallons of antifreeze.
I pulled the dead bird out of the radiator, its beak long since worn down by the fan blades. This proved to be a mistake, as the bird was all that was plugging the rad leaks. I held the bird back in place and filled the rad with antifreeze and stop leak, and with the engine running I held the bird like a bandage over the leaks, until the stop leak did its job. I decided it was too risky to remove the bird a second time, and since it was stuck in there pretty good I decided to leave it in.
After having a quick breakfast, we left the store and made for the river crossing less than a mile or so away. The radiator held, but its condition weighed heavy on my mind, I of course was not confident that it would hold. The ferry got us across the river and we started up the hill on the other side, this would be a tough test for our rad repair, but it held. It took us a few hours but we made it to enterprise, a small settlement near the turn off to Hay River. There was a small restaurant there; I had been to this place once before, about five years earlier.
The last time I had been to this restaurant in enterprise was when I was riding shotgun in an old Hayes highway tractor. This thing was old; it was built before they kept records of such things, so I don’t know how old it was, perhaps mid fifties to early sixties vintage. Me and this guy Vern were on our way to Norman Wells; we were hauling what turned out to be a stolen end dump that Vern had got from somewhere. The end dump trailer was full of bags of concrete destined for some construction project in the "Wells".
Norman Wells is a small town on the Mackenzie River where oil exploration had been going in full swing at the time. There was no road to Norman wells, so the trip had to be made while there was still frost in the ground and ice on the rivers. It was late in the year and so this would be one of the last loads into Norman Wells.
It was a tough trip, off road for so many miles, driving through the night, crossing creeks and climbing steep inclines out of the valleys. At one point we broke the engine mounts and the engine rolled about under torque in its bay, the two shifters for the old five on four-transmission set up were thrashing back and fourth dangerously as they rolled with the engine. The last of what seemed like a thousand miles but was probably less than a hundred was through the open water of an early spring thaw. The terrain under our wheels must have been like a furrowed field; each rut pounded us relentlessly. It was the roughest ride I have ever had.
Anyway this Vern was a bit of a character, and when we stopped at this restaurant together years earlier, there was this waitress, she was about thirteen at the oldest, and her parents owned the place I think. Well she was kind of gimped up, she was bent over, limping around, and she looked like she was in pretty rough shape. I knew Vern, and I was worried he was going to say something. I just thought the polite thing to do was to not stare, to act like there was nothing out of the ordinary.
But not Vern, he had to ask; "So what happened to you?" she looked shocked, she was not prepared for such a question, she to had hoped everyone would act as if there was nothing out of the ordinary to notice.
"What do you mean?" she asked, as if daring him to say that he had noticed her condition, yet she was obviously terrified that he had.
"I mean you’re all gimped up like that, was it polio or something?" Vern boldly asked her, striking at the heart of her fears.
Obviously taken aback by Vern's forwardness she seemed to choke a little on it; then she said "car accident" and then turned to walk briskly away.
The whole time I am thinking; "Vern leave her alone!" but Vern reached out and grabbed her arm and halted her retreat, and said "Wait a minute, do want to stay this way or do you want to get better?"
"I want to get better" she answered and her eyes now shimmering with a fresh coat of tears.
"Okay then just sit down I want to show you something" he beckons her as he pulls over a chair for her to sit on. Kneeling in front of her Vern grabs her feat and pulls off her shoes, as he says to her; "I have this gift for you. Tell me if you feel anything, let's see if this works." He then grabs the calves of her legs, and he pulls them straight out and then he asks, "Can you feel anything? Do you feel that?"
"Yes, yes I do feel something!" she gasped, as a tear came from her eyes and rolled down her cheek. It was very distracting: Was she going to wipe away that tear or what? Doesn't it feel weird to just leave that tear trail untouched like that? How could she stand it? I don’t know why I thought that; it was all very awkward.
"Well that’s it, God has healed you!" Vern told her matter of factly while he was getting up and returning to his meal. She put her shoes back on and gave an embarrassed or shy look around the restaurant and got up to get back to work. She seemed to be walking around a little straighter looking, but I was not sure, if there was an improvement, I thought it might just be her trying her best to humor us. After paying our bill Vern and I hit the road and drove off into the night.
That was not the end of that story; I mean it used to be the end of it until one early morning at the Miners Mess in Yellowknife. I was having coffee that morning at the Miners Mess, a camp styled coffee shop restaurant in the Yellowknife Inn. It was customary for all the trades men and miners to meet there for an early coffee before starting their day. There were no individual tables or chairs, just long tables and benches; it gave it a communal atmosphere. This just really means that your ears are legitimate targets for anybody's BS, even people who don’t know you.
It was my turn to entertain; only my stories aren't BS, there all true. I told the story of me and Vern and the waitress in that restaurant. I was portraying Vern as an odd fellow, telling of how we couldn’t pass a restaurant, I mean we would just barely have grabbed high gear after leaving one restaurant when he was gearing down for the next. I told of what he did to the girl in the restaurant, how he embarrassed her so, how I thought it was so embarrassing for me, and sad for the girl.
As I told the story I notice two attractive young girls were hanging on my every word. I had not seen these two girls in there before, so I didn't know who they were. When I noticed that they were intently trying to hear what I was saying, I purposely spoke up to be sure they could hear. The way they were acting I knew something was up. I mean; I am a good-looking guy, it was not unusual for attractive women to notice me. But this was something more than that, there was something else, something that finally gave me pause. I stopped mid sentence and turned to the girls, and said "May I help you?"
"I was that girl!" she says, I could see that her friend was as excited as she was about the whole thing.
"Really?" I stammered uncomfortably, trying to remember which foot was in my mouth. "So how is that working out for ya?"
"Great, I totally recovered that very day, and I had lied, it was not a car accident, I was born that way."
"Are you still okay even now?" I asked like a doubting Thomas.
"Perfectly fine!" She says standing and giving a pirouette to display her fully whole and attractive figure and posture.
"Well I guess I can eat my words or something like that I don’t know, maybe ill just stop talking now, I don’t know what to say…what do ya know about that? …huh" Was all that I could mutter in response; I didn’t know what to make of it.
We rolled into the enterprise restaurant parking lot parked it in the same spot Vern and I had parked that old Hayes years earlier. At the time it seemed like so many years earlier, but it was less than five years I'm sure. Now so many years later that doesn’t seem like as long as I thought it did back then. But now, Heck! I leave my left blinker on for longer than that.
I don’t know where Danny's brother Bob lived, but at the time I thought it was at this restaurant, but I don’t actually know, but when we went inside Bob was there, he looked like a permanent fixture in the place. Bob was surprised to see us, and when he saw that we had a trailer and were headed to pick up the bombardier, he seemed to surrender. I don’t know what it was; perhaps brotherly love would not let him feel disappointed. But he seemed to abandon any plans of scooping the bombardier from Danny joyfully.
I say this because it became evident that Bob had planed to scoop it from Dan. Because once he was convinced that we were going to pick it up, he told us that we may as well head into Hay River and pick up a bunch of parts for it that he had collected, thinking that he might need them. He said he wouldn't need them since we were going to get it now. To me this was tantamount to a confession. I was shocked that Danny had been so astute concerning his brothers intentions. It was equally puzzling that his demeanor was not bitter. I had to reason out what kind of psyche reacted like this.
My first clue or rule I used to figure it out was the truth that every man feels justified in his own mind. Murders, rapists, liars, thieves, they have reasoned out an argument to justify themselves, to themselves, to any god that they may fear. Bob reasoned that if Danny was unable to pick up the bombardier within the time frame that the auction set, then it was no longer Danny's. So once he satisfied himself that Danny was not going to be able to pick it up, he would at the last minute go get it for himself.
In his mind, he was not stealing from his brother, for legally it no longer would belong to Danny. Picking it up on the last day the auction company was none the wiser, it was the auction company he was actually stealing from, and he could live with that, and besides, they already got their money, from Danny. The only thing he felt the slightest tinge of guilt about was that he would not go get it for his brother like he said he would. But he could live with that, he didn't have to go get it for Danny, he did not feel that he was morally obligated to do so.
He also convinced himself that even though he had waited till the last minute to tell Danny that he was not going to pick it up for him, he convinced himself it was pure innocent absent mindedness, an oversight, nothing diabolical. He could fool himself with this kind of reasoning and that was good enough for him.
But when we came to pick it up this meant that Danny had not forfeited ownership. So Bob who was not prepared to steal from his brother, for he had reasoned it out that it was not stealing from his brother, he gladly gave up his plan, for love of himself and his brother. Even to go so far as to give to Danny all the things he had gathered for himself should his plan have been successful. At least that is how I saw it.
As we drove around Hay River picking up the parts an pieces Bob had planned on using for the bombardier and loaded them on the trailer, I was worried about the bird stuck in the radiator, well, not the bird so much, but the radiator. But it seemed to hold, I was not feeling much better than that bird myself, I was wired on countless cups of coffee, and going on less than maybe three hours sleep in the last seventy two or more hours.
Back in Enterprise we had dinner, filled all my thermoses up once again with strong coffee and hit the highway. I had hit my second wind, I felt good, and at this point I was not feeling like I had missed so much sleep. The trailer was a bit heavier now; it was loaded with a bunch of suspension parts and bogie wheels and four complete sets of tracks. It was also uphill all the way out of Enterprise. This would be a test for our bird, I was not sure it would hold. It had dropped about twenty degrees in the last hours of the day while we were back at Hay River, and it was still getting colder.
I held the accelerator pedal on the floor and worked the old three hundred cubic inch six cylinder engine for every thing it had. Even with the roar of the truck drive-line straining against its load the romanticism of driving through the night was still not lost. The headlights’ casting a glow before us was the whole world to us, revealed as through a glass darkly smoked. I was enjoying the mystery of the unknown, the ambiguity of our path.
The contrast of the deadly cold night and the cozy cocoon sanctuary of the heated cab, yet precariously sustained, a fragile balance, feebly maintained. Our lives were at the mercy of dirty rusty, oily old machine parts that all had to perform their functions thousands of times every minute, men live in these moments. It was one of those times when you inhale the air just to taste it, at that moment you are there; right there, all of you, there is no where else you want to be. As if for that one moment you summoned your soul back after leaving it to wander, looking for a better place, and at this moment it was right where you are. I was not sure if Danny was awake or not, neither of us had said anything for some time. The roar of the road had soothed us into state of personal reflection and meditation.
Then at some point I thought I heard a slight change in the tone of the engine. Almost imperceptible, but it sounded different; it didn't "feel" right. To me, machinery noise is like a symphony, to those that don’t know the song, they could not know when the tune was wrong, when the melody had changed; they would think it was just part of the song. I knew this song, and the engine was no longer playing it correctly. In my minds eye I pictured the entire engine thrashing about its revolutions. I tried to picture what could be sending out the wrong notes.
It was a rattle, well not to the untrained ear, to the untrained ear it might sound more like a gargle, it was growing, and very slowly it was getting worse. I checked my gauges, all I had were warning lights, but none were on yet. I decided that it sounded like detonation or pre-ignition, I knew that it could be the engine overheating that was causing that. I checked my rear view mirrors and saw the glow of my tale lights reflecting off a cloud of steam that was billowing out behind us.
"Danny! We got trouble!" I shouted to awaken him.
"What is it?"
"I think that bird flew south!" was my attempt at witticism. "Look for a place we can turn around!” Getting back to Enterprise was our only hope as it was the closest town.
There was what looked like a turnout to some unused dead end trail. I backed into it with the big trailer, but the snow was too deep so I couldn’t back in too far. I had little room to maneuver. At one point there was the real danger of getting stuck with the highboy across the highway. It was dreadfully dark, and no, we did not have lights on the trailer. I could just see the possibility of someone driving right into the side of it and getting killed.
The overheating engine was rattling pretty badly now, and I had to keep her revving to build enough horsepower to move the trailer. I had to be careful not to jerk the tire patch when I engaged the clutch. If I did, it might spin on the icy road, and we would get stuck, I rode the clutch pretty good to get traction, and was able to back up over the crown of the road. Somehow I managed to get turned around, and as soon as I was as close to the side of the road as I dared to get; I shut the engine off because it had gotten too hot to continue. The engine would not shut down when I turned the key off, instead pre-ignition kept it running-on; so I put it in gear and held the brake to stall her.
When I got out of the truck to lift the hood I was shocked at how cold it was, it seemed to reach right through my parka, and it stung my cheeks with real pain. It was easily below minus forty, I would know, I had spent much time in the high arctic, I know cold. It seemed obviously ironic that in this lack of temperature, it would be too much temperature that would stop us. The exhaust manifold was still glowing red, I held my hand over it to warm them, but the cold was no match for the radiating heat, and it didn’t feel as warm as it looked.
I still had some antifreeze in the back of the truck so we tried pouring some in, but it just ran out onto the ground as fast as we could pour it in. Defeated we both jumped back into the cab of the truck. We were already very cold, sitting sweating in a hot truck and then going out in to minus forty or colder weather is a deadly combination. We both new that our lives were in danger; we knew this was bad, real bad.