Jim was there to meet him at the Union Depot in a Ford truck. They stopped at the freight station and Charley had to help load a lot of heavy packages of spare parts shipped from Detroit and marked “Vogel’s Garage.” Charley tried to look as if he’d lived in a big city all his life, but the clanging trolleycars and the roughshod hoofs of truckhorses striking sparks out of the cobbles and the goodlooking blond girls and the stores and the big German beersaloons and the hum that came from mills and machineshops went to his head. Jim looked tall and thin in his overalls and had a new curt way of talking. “Kid, you see you mind yourself a little up to the house; the old man’s an old German, Hedwig’s old man, an’ a little pernickety, like all old Germans are,” said Jim when they’d filled the truck and were moving slowly through the heavy traffic. “Sure, Jim,” said Charley and he began to feel a little uneasy about what it ’ud be like living in Minneapolis. He wished Jim ’ud smile a little more.
Old man Vogel was a stocky redfaced man with untidy gray hair and a potbelly, fond of dumpling and stews with plenty of rich sauce on them and beer, and Jim’s wife Hedwig was his only daughter. His wife was dead but he had a middleaged German woman everybody addressed as Aunt Hartmann to keep house for him. She followed the men around all the time with a mop and between her and Hedwig, whose blue eyes had a peevish look because she was going to have a baby in the fall, the house was so spotless that you could have eaten a fried egg off the linoleum anywhere. They never let the windows be opened for fear of the dust coming in. The house was right on the street and the livery stable was in the yard behind, entered through an alley beyond which was the old saddler’s shop that had just been done over as a garage. When Jim and Charley drove up the signpainters were on a stepladder out front putting up the new shiny red and white sign that read “vogel’s garage.” “The old bastard,” muttered Jim. “He said he’d call it Vogel and Anderson’s, but what the hell!” Everything smelt of stables and a colored man was leading a skinny horse around with a blanket over him.
All that summer Charley washed cars and drained transmissions and relined brakes. He was always dirty and greasy in greasy overalls, in the garage by seven every morning and not through till late in the evening when he was too tired to do anything but drop into the cot that had been fixed for him in the attic over the garage. Jim gave him a dollar a week for pocket money and explained that he was mighty generous to do it as it was to Charley’s advantage to learn the business. Saturday nights he was the last one to get a bath and there usually wasn’t anything but lukewarm water left so that he’d have a hard time getting cleaned up. Old man Vogel was a socialist and no churchgoer and spent all day Sunday drinking beer with his cronies. At Sunday dinner everybody talked German, and Jim and Charley sat at the table glumly without saying anything, but old Vogel plied them with beer and made jokes at which Hedwig and Aunt Hartmann always laughed uproariously, and after dinner Charley’s head would be swimming from the beer that tasted awful bitter to him, but he felt he had to drink it, and old man Vogel would tease him to smoke a cigar and then tell him to go out and see the town. He’d walk out feeling overfed and a little dizzy and take the streetcar to St. Paul to see the new state capitol or to Lake Harriet or go out to Big Island Park and ride on the rollercoaster or walk around the Parkway until his feet felt like they’d drop off. He didn’t know any kids his own age at first, so he took to reading for company. He’d buy every number of Popular Mechanics and The Scientific American and Adventure and The Wide World Magazine. He had it all planned to start building a yawlboat from the plans in The Scientific American and to take a trip down to the Mississippi River to the Gulf. He’d live by shooting ducks and fishing for catfish. He started saving up his dollars to buy himself a shotgun.
He liked it all right at old man Vogel’s, though, on account of not having to read the Bible or go to church, and he liked tinkering with motors and learned to drive the Ford truck. After a while he got to know Buck and Slim Jones, two brothers about his age who lived down the block. He was a pretty big guy to them on account of working in a garage. Buck sold newspapers and had a system of getting into movingpicture shows by the exit doors and knew all the best fences to see ballgames from. Once Charley got to know the Jones boys he’d run round to their place as soon as he was through dinner Sundays and they’d have a whale of a time getting hitches all over the place on graintrucks, riding on the back bumpers of streetcars and getting chased by cops and going out on the lumber booms and going swimming and climbing round above the falls and he’d get back all sweaty and with his good suit dirty and be bawled out by Hedwig for being late for supper. Whenever old Vogel found the Jones boys hanging round the garage he’d chase them out, but when he and Jim were away, Gus the colored stableman would come over smelling of horses and tell them stories about horseraces and fast women and whiskydrinking down at Louisville and the proper way to take a girl the first time and how he and his steady girl just did it all night without stopping not even for a minute.
Labor Day old man Vogel took Jim and his daughter and Aunt Hartmann out driving in the surrey behind a fine pair of bays that had been left with him to sell and Charley was left to take care of the garage in case somebody came along who wanted gas or oil. Buck and Slim came round and they all talked about how it was Labor Day and wasn’t it hell to pay that they weren’t going out anywhere. There was a doubleheader out at the Fair Grounds and lots of other ballgames around. The trouble started by Charley showing Buck how to drive the truck, then to show him better he had to crank her up, then before he knew it he was telling them he’d take them for a ride round the block. After they’d ridden round the block he went back and closed up the garage and they went joyriding out towards Minnehaha. Charley said to himself he’d drive very carefully and be home hours before the folks got back, but somehow he found himself speeding down an asphalt boulevard and almost ran into a ponycart full of little girls that turned in suddenly from a side road. Then on the way home they were drinking sarsaparilla out of the bottles and having a fine time when Buck suddenly said there was a cop on a motorcycle following them. Charley speeded up to get away from the cop, made a turn too sharp and stopped with a crash against a telegraph pole. Buck and Slim beat it as fast as they could run and there was Charley left to face the cop.
The cop was a Swede and cursed and swore and bawled him out and said he’d take him to the hoosegow for driving without a license, but Charley found his brother Jim’s license under the seat and said his brother had told him to take the car back to the garage after they’d delivered a load of apples out at Minnehaha and the cop let him off and said to drive more carefully another time. The car ran all right except one fender was crumpled up and the steering wheel was a little funny. Charley drove home so slow that the radiator was boiling over when he got back and there was the surrey standing in front of the house and Gus holding the bays by the head and all the family just getting out.