Automatic Transmission - 2

by Warren Buckles

Big Joe had cut trees for fifty years, converting the vertical and round into the horizontal and flat. He had used axes, saws, chains, drags, booms, cranes, grabs, dolly axles, trucks, tractors, donkey engines and bulldozers. He was gone. The trees were gone. Only the machines remained, and every one, from the first axe to the last piece of chain, lay outside my door.

Old trucks were everywhere, tilted hulks with rotted tires and missing wheels, engines partly dismantled, doors hanging open, windows broken or cannibalized, upholstery rotted to little more than rusted springs and frayed cloth. There were some Dodge Power Wagons, grey-green paint and strings of black numbers showing they had once belonged to the Army. There was an International utility truck with a double cab and a hydraulic hoist mounted in the bed. There was a Diamond Reo six by six that looked like it could go straight up a mountain. Pieces of logging equipment were scattered between the trucks: donkey engines, drags, hoists, spikes and chains. I wandered through it all, smelling grease and gear oil mixed with pine and sage while I collected a few odd parts for later study.

Compared to the yard, the repair shed was uncluttered, the equipment in good shape, as if the workers had gone home and never come back. One had even left his denim overalls on the floor, where dust and time had solidified the wrinkles. I pried them up. They didn’t fit but I could use the cloth for rags. The shed was big enough for two large vehicles plus my own truck, with a hydraulic lift built into the floor and a chain hoist mounted on a roof beam. I swept the floor, scrubbed the workbenches and set up my toolboxes. One of the workbenches was made of solid maple and the top, almost four inches thick, had been painted bright blue. I parked my tall red toolbox nearby.

The essentials attended to, I thought about my own comfort. I used some of the plentiful lumber to make a table and bed then set up my old camp stove and put my box of canned food nearby. All I needed was a sign that read 'Home Sweet Home.' That is, until the groceries ran out: there weren’t any campgrounds to pilfer and I knew from experience that junkyard rattlesnakes didn’t taste like chicken, just rattlesnake.

But the groceries weren’t a problem. Word of my presence spread quickly and a few customers showed up the day I moved in. Some were regulars from the old filling station; others had heard of me through the mechanical grapevine. Their cars began to fill the open spaces of the yard. Soon I was busy and beginning to feel happy for the first time in months.

Jerry came often: the Jag made sure of that. It had the electrical problems endemic to its kind, compounded by several generations of insulation-eating mice. I told Jerry his car liked being towed by my old truck but he didn’t get the joke.

But it wasn’t just Jerry who came by, and it wasn’t just Jerry’s Jag that seemed out of place. People brought me their expensive cars but the lumberyard didn’t inspire confidence. I didn’t care; they could like me or not, just as long as I got to look at their cars.

As the months went by more vehicles crowded the yard. Most belonged to paying customers but a few were my own, hobby projects I hoped to get running some day. The rest were hopeless cases with blown engines, ruined transmissions or the creeping malaise of old age. They seemed to gather of their own volition, as if anticipating a miraculous recovery.

I worked alone. It was easier that way. A few guys stopped by and asked for work, and I even hired one, but he didn’t last more than a week. It took me too long to tell him what to do, then he took too long doing it, so I did most things myself while he stood around. I hardly noticed when he stopped showing up.

The junkyard exerted a constant attraction. I preferred the unfamiliar, often abandoning a job half done for a walk among the old trucks. It was an addiction. I needed my fix, another piece of unknown machinery. My favorite part was an isolated area where tall weeds hid objects of indeterminate purpose. Some were crude assemblies that disintegrated when I picked them up, leaving nothing but a few flakes of rust on my skin. Others showed no signs of corrosion or wear, and their elegant shapes were unmarked by manufacturer’s names or identification plates. One of these was a lopsided cone about two feet tall. Shafts stuck out both ends and a flat plate was bolted to one side. It was heavy for its size and I thought it might be an early automatic transmission, one of those often cursed conveniences that whined and leaked oil, slipped out of gear on steep hills and failed with amazing frequency, leaving the owner miles from nowhere. I carried it back to the shop and put it in a cardboard box that I pushed under my workbench. I looked at it from time to time, even put it up on the bench once, only to find I didn’t have the right sized wrench to loosen the main shaft. It would have been easy to cut open with my torch but that seemed too crude, so I put it back and planned to get the right size wrench on my next visit to the surplus tool man.

That winter seemed long. Cold weather made the shed a bad place to work and an even worse place to sleep, but it was better than living out of my truck. I made a stove from an oil drum, improvising a leaky chimney that stuck out the side of the shed. There was plenty of scrap lumber so I had as much heat as I wanted, provided I could put up with the smoke.

The cold weather didn’t last. The sun returned, moving farther north and rising earlier each morning. I marked its rising and setting, using familiar items as reference points. A logging crane, its boom frozen by rust, marked due West while the International’s stubby hoist was due East. The midpoint of this East-West line was an oxygen cylinder planted upright in the ground. Autumn began a week after I moved in and all three shadows overlapped. They had moved apart until the Winter Solstice, then edged closer together as the sun returned. I checked the shadows each day, until, one morning, they merged again.

It was a cool, clear day and I realized I had been living at Big Joe’s for six months, longer, by far, than any other place besides my family home. That was long gone, sold by my parents when they retired and moved to an old folks storage area, some place with a Spanish-sounding name where they grew a lawn in the desert and complained about the animals it fed. My brothers were well settled, too, with wives and kids in homes not too far away. They came by looking for free service when their cars broke down, but they seemed less ready for me to meet their families, as if nieces and nephews were better off without an odd uncle. I decided they wouldn’t be impressed by my six-month anniversary, pushed the sliding doors open and went back inside.

The big doors faced east and the low sun quickly drove out any lingering chill as I walked toward my workbench. A rag, centered on the shiny blue top, held the pieces of a carburetor I had dismantled the previous day. They smelled of solvent but there wasn’t a trace of carbon or gas residue. Except for a few wear marks the parts could have been freshly made, ready to ration fuel and air to a car’s engine. There were more than twenty separate pieces: throttle body, float bowl, float bowl cover, float valve, float lever, idle jet, running jet, needle valve, balance piston, balance chamber, damper, throttle butterfly, choke butterfly, jet adjustment nut, two float bowl gaskets, two springs, three 'o' rings and five screws.

The last piece, the float bowl cover, was held on by five screws. The tall slotted heads turned easily between my thumb and forefinger, the sharp-edged slot where the screwdriver would fit marking each half turn as it passed over my skin. When they were finger tight I picked up a screwdriver, held the assembly toward the sun and tightened the screws, gradually extinguishing the light that leaked between the closely matched parts.

I checked the choke and throttle plates then put the finished carburetor on the bench and wrapped a clean rag around it, closing the seam with a double fold.

That was when I heard the noise, a faint scratching like the claws of a small animal. I stood still, mouth open to hear better, and waited for the noise to return. It didn’t. I began to clear my bench of tools, putting the wrenches and screwdrivers in my red, wheeled toolbox. The last screwdriver was in my hand when the sound returned: two brief scrapes, then silence. It seemed to be coming from the area of my toolbox.

I opened the toolbox drawers and looked carefully at their contents. There were no small animals and everything was where it should be. The drawers ran smoothly, their slides clean and well oiled. The noise did not return.

I stepped back from the toolbox and looked around the shop. Nothing moved. Then I heard the noise again, this time followed by a metallic ping as if a washer had dropped on the concrete floor. It echoed inside the metal walls, defying my ears to locate a source. I walked around the shop, looked under my truck, into the box where I kept my canned food, opened the side door, looked outside, stepped back in, closed the door and looked up toward the roof. All was quiet and nothing moved. I walked back toward my workbench, then stopped when I saw a shadow moving under its blue top.

There wasn’t much under the bench, just a couple of burned-out starter motors, a bag of sawdust and the cardboard box that held the automatic transmission I had found in the yard. I edged closer. The box was moving. Something was inside it, a rabbit or a litter of kittens left by one of the junkyard cats.

I squatted down and looked at the box. The side moved again and a pointed snout poked over the top. Soon another one, the same dull silver color but a little smaller, appeared bedside it. They both moved as if sniffing the air but I hesitated to touch them, thinking of teeth controlled by a feral mind. The screwdriver was still in my hand and I poked the larger snout with the flat steel blade. There was a clink of metal on metal and both snouts disappeared, dropping back into the box with muffled thumps. After a brief pause the box moved again and the scratching resumed. I bent closer to look inside as the first, larger, snout reappeared. It rose higher, revealing a tapered, silvery body not much bigger than a beer can. The thing teetered on the edge of the box then fell to the floor with a clunk where it struggled like a legless beetle, rocking from side to side until it rolled onto a flat spot that I guessed was its belly. I looked up as two more of the silvery things climbed out of the box, tipped over the edge and fell to the floor. As the second two struggled to right themselves the first one began turning like a faulty compass. After a couple of full circles it slowed and reversed direction, swinging back and forth until it stopped with its snout pointing right between my shoes. The other two, now upright, turned around a couple of times then joined the first, one on each side in a 'V' formation.

They hummed, a faint noise more felt than heard, then started moving toward me. There was something odd about the way they moved, as if they didn’t touch the floor at all. The hairs on my arms and neck stood up and a feeling of uneasiness spread through me. I shuffled backward slowly, afraid of making a sudden move. Then I remembered someone telling me how ducklings followed the first movement they saw, regardless of whether it was a duck or a rubber glove or, perhaps, a pair of leather boots. I stopped moving, but it was too late. They gathered around my feet and pressed their snouts against my shoes, moving around, poking into my heels and arches before settling on my toes. I felt a gentle vibration where they touched, as if being licked by a tiny, fast moving tongue.

They seemed hungry, but I didn’t know what they ate. The cabinet behind me was stocked with motor oil, antifreeze, transmission fluid and dozens of other liquids favored by cars and trucks.

The little things followed as I moved around the shop, catching up and pressing against my shoes whenever I stood still. They weren’t the same size: the first one that came out was the largest and the smallest one had a light green spot it the middle of its back. Still, their similarities outweighed their differences.

I chose a can of transmission fluid, the pink kind used in Fords, and put a large, shallow hubcap on the floor.

"Here’s something for you," I said, using my screwdriver to punch holes in the can, "good transmission fluid, just what you need."

I poured a little of the oily liquid in the hubcap. The things stopped crowding around my feet and headed toward the oil. The larger one got ahead of its mates and bumped the improvised dish, bouncing off and hitting it again, still not getting to the oil inside. The other two came up and did the same. Their snouts went blurry, vibrating like a plucked string moving too fast to see. I dipped my finger in the oil, and smeared a line to the edge where they crowded together.

They still didn’t get the idea, so I dipped again, this time touching each snout with my oily finger, saying, "Drink this," and feeling a numbness in my finger with each tap.

One after the other they crawled into the hubcap, making straight for the pool of oil. Their snouts touched the fluid and ripples spread across the surface. The pool shrank. I felt a sudden relief and remembered watching my one of my brothers feed a puppy with an eye dropper. It had grown into a loyal mutt that only came when he called and bit the mailman one too many times.

"I knew you would like that," I said. The old hubcap vibrated with their humming.

They drank quickly. I kept pouring more transmission fluid into their dish. Soon the whole quart was gone and they cleaned the hubcap, bumping into each other and pushing to get at the last drops. They settled into the center of the empty hubcap with their snouts overlapping in a single, blurry point.

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