“I don’t cut,” the oiler shouted over the saw.
“You cut,” Mr. Irony bellowed back. “Cut that billboard down.” Mr. Irony allowed the saw to idle.
“Taint gone fuck hisself all up,” Rooster said.
“Mr. Rooster,” Mr. Irony said, “shut the fuck up. Taint ain’t.”
The oiler, carrying the saw somewhat apprehensively, at arm’s length, addressed the billboard on which a candidate for sheriff promised to restore law and order to Dillon County, and cut through the first creosote pole with a clean, flexed, low turn of his body, one with the saw, and stepped to the next pole in the same crouch, and to the next and the next, and the candidate for sheriff fell on his face into the parking lot, blowing full beers off the log truck and crushing the insurance salesman’s Blazer.
“Oh shit,” the salesman said. The parking lot began to smell of perfume. “Oh God.”
“Oh boy,” Borger said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Pampa said.
“No event is unplanned for the intelligent purveyor of insurance, is it, sir?” Mr. Irony said to the insurance salesman.
“What?”
“The readiness, I believe, is all, sir?”
“Not — not cars. I sell life insurance.”
“Receive your gratuity, sir.” Mr. Irony handed the salesman a boxed leisure suit the color of green mint dinner candies and a gun-style hair dryer. The suit had contrasting yellow stitching and the blower a barrel the size and shape of a grenade mortar, the opening of which the salesman was measuring with his spread hand. “Damn! I can get another car!” he suddenly said. “No problem! Hey!” He passed his fist into the hair dryer.
The oiler dropped the chain saw on the truck bed and opened two beers, taking a sip from each. He sat on the truck bed beside the saw and crossed his legs with an odd, pensive, pursed-lip expression on his face. Mr. Irony addressed him.
“You do cut, sir, and with élan.”
“My knee start to give out on me.”
“Understandable. You were configured as low and sturdy as Johnny Bench.”
“Down there, wudden I?”
“Yessir.”
“Got to fish sometime, right?”
“Right on.”
“Can’t cut bait all your life.”
“No sir.”
“Can’t cut bait all your life, right?”
“You are right.”
“Taint gone mess up,” Rooster said.
“I ain’t teether,” Taint said.
“Mr. Rooster,” Mr. Irony said, “Mr. Taint is in a rehabilitative power drive that needs no gainsaying.”
“That his saw?”
“’Tis.”
“Gone give me them boots, homeboy?”
“Gone give you a boom box, mother.”
From Bill’s Dollar Store, a credenza-style home entertainment center is wheeled out on a four-wheel furniture dolly by two men who struggle over curbing to keep the dolly under it.
“That thing is seven foot long,” Rooster said.
“Big enough for a boog like you,” Taint said.
“You put that affair on your shoulder and it is yours. I have had it converted to 12 volts. Batteries included.”
“Batteries?”
“Two Die Hards in the TV compartment, wired in parallel.”
“You trazee.”
“Hoist it up, Mr. Rooster.”
“This some kind of race joke.”
“Might be.”
“Hey, Rooster. So what?” the oiler said to Rooster. “So fucking what?”
“You done mess that boy up,” Rooster said to Mr. Irony.
Mr. Irony and the two Bill’s Dollar employees and the oiler got under one end of the home entertainment center and, like the Marines on the flagpole at Iwo Jima, shouldered it up to a 60-degree angle. The oiler waved impatiently at Rooster to get under the giant radio.
Rooster obliged, shaking his head, and lifted the machine without noticeable strain. He took a step backwards, kicking the dolly free, and hefted the home entertainment center an inch or two forwards and backwards for balance. He swung it, like a sail boom, through an arc, looking for the others.
“I’ll say this to his face,” the oiler said to Mr. Irony. “You are one buck nigger, Rooster.”
“You right, Daddydied. Turn this thing on.”
From the truck bed, the oiler leaned over and reached inside the long box, and suddenly the lot was overwhelmed with a booming radio broadcast. Rooster started to jive. He got clear of the truck, clear of the billboard, everyone backed off to give him room, and he began a blaster walk, a walk of total indifference to the world, a series of steps and half steps and backsteps, around the parking lot of the closed convenience store in Dillon, S.C.
He circled back by the group, now holding its ears. “Don’t want your boots now, homeboy. This all right,” he shouted. To the oiler: “Okay, Taint. Don’t call me a nigger ever again. You earn that first one.”
“Ladies,” he said, bowing slightly to the Available Traveling Women, the entertainment center tipping as slowly and heavily as a ship on a swell. “I’m going to go see some of the brothers.” He left the lot in the gliding, halting, butt-clenching locomotion required of a proper dude beneath a seven-foot-long, 200-pound, 80-watt-per-channel, fake-walnut-veneer, credenza-style home entertainment center.
Grease and oil — and that’s not all, I do hydraulic and seals and packing leathers — grease and oil is very important. It is not just, as far as a lubricant. I believe it is like the blood of machines. Not the energy — that’s your gas — but the blood, as far as life. Machine life. Saw life. Splitter life. Truck life. Backhoe life. And tools make men’s life easier. Oil is the blood of the dirt. We buried Lumpy’s Daddy Saddy. I’m okay now.
I was not for a spot there. Then we carried a fellow on the log boom thew might all Georgia that said shape up and Rooster fucked with me and I just, I don’t know, got right over it. He was, special to me, as far as almost being my own father, I thought sometimes.
My real daddy a preacher. But Lumpy daddy, before we even got married, one day he explained to me what viscosity means. That is a word I deal with. One day he give me a beer and a bowl of hot chili and he say, That — pointing to the beer — is not viscosity, and that — pointing to the chili — is viscosity. That might sound obvious to me now, but it was not obvious to me then. It was a hot chili, too. Lumpy daddy make a good chili.
I’m okay now.
Mr. Irony came to see me later that afternoon in Pampa’s and my suite — Pepe’s El Presidente Suite at South of the Border, where Duke recommends Men at Their Best recuperate from log-truck carriage — came to me and asked that I not make myself so scarce, explaining that “things” need me. I asked him what that was intended to mean. He said again: “Well, things need you, son.
I pondered this a moment, and it occurred to me that he somehow knew of my decision to remove myself from this account of our world tour — I had not informed him of that decision; nor, for that matter, was he, I thought at the time, aware that there was an account. A character in a sombrero and serape jingled on spurs into the room where we sat and announced, “The senõritas expect youse for margaritas at the Acapulco Pulquería Número Three-a.” We said okay. Mr. Irony handed him a fifty-dollar bill and he left with a flourish of his serape and a jingle of spurs.
“I was at risk as your student, I thought. The oiler guy looked like he was better raw material.”