Goodbye, Old Friend
Bill Mauldin, the great newspaper cartoonist who traveled with the troops across Europe after D-Day, invented a couple of weary, unshaven GIs named Willy and Joe, who represented the average unwilling but gritty American draftee. One of his most famous drawings features Willy standing next to his wrecked Jeep. The vehicle’s hood is up, and Willy, his pistol in his right hand and his left hand covering his eyes, is preparing to put the Jeep out of its misery with a shot to the engine block, just as a cowboy might put down a foundered with a bullet to the brain with a shot to the engine block, just as a foundered horse is dispatched mercifully with a bullet through the brain.
Recently, I had the same sad experience as Mauldin’s Willy. After five years of faithful (if occasionally whimsical) service, my Ford Ranger pickup truck had to be put down. I bought it thoroughly used. It was black, except for the driver’s side door, which was green. And that door had to be slammed shut, or the “Door Ajar” light would pop on. From time to time the “Check Gauges” light went on, for no apparent reason. The truck’s power steering was moody: counterintuitively, in four-wheel drive it turned without a fuss, but in rear-wheel drive it juddered and lurched. There were patches of rust all over it. In cold weather the heater took a long, noisy time to warm up the cab. When I first got it, the radio only picked up a fundamentalist Christian station broadcasting a Bible-banger warning of the approach of the Last Days and urging his listeners to repent and accept Jesus as my personal savior. When I ignored the warning, the radio quit altogether, as though the truck were punishing me for remaining a pagan.
Still, I was fond of the truck. I named it “Chuck,” because it seemed male, and the name rhymes with “truck.” We rattled around together amicably for awhile, two old partners, or “pards,” as Will James’s cowboys put it, neither of us getting any younger. But there finally came a day when Chuck completely fell apart, like Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “Wonderful One-Hoss Shay.”
Joe McGregor, who owns the Bennington Garage here in southern New Hampshire, is a good friend who has been servicing and repairing my various trucks since my wife Patsy and I first got our house in Peterborough. All of the trucks have been elderly and a bit infirm, but he has managed to do the necessary repairs and replacements to make them pass inspection. But when I drove Chuck, clunking and clinking and making other expensive noises, over to his garage about two weeks ago, he told me I had already put more money into the old beater than it was worth. Patsy agreed. And as it happened, Joe had a used Oldsmobile 88 parked at one side of his garage. The woman who owned it had asked Joe to sell it, because she wanted to move up to an SUV, and because the 88 needed some work, Joe was willing to sign it over to us for only $2,200, which included parts and labor to replace a faulty windshield wiper pump, and his inspection fee. Patsy and I agreed, and we arranged to pick up the car as soon as the work was done.
Joe told us that Chuck was worthless. Because Ford had stopped making Rangers, his parts couldn’t be recycled. His rubber feet were too worn down to be swapped into another truck, the way Will James’s cowboy might have taken off his dead horse’s shoes and put them on another cow pony. A scrap metal dealer would haul him away to the automobile graveyard.
Just as Joe finished telling us that, his assistant came over and said that the Ranger’s key wouldn’t open the passenger-side door. I didn’t remember locking it, but the locks were as quirky as the rest of the vehicle. For a moment I thought that Chuck had heard us talking about the automobile graveyard, and, by locking the door, was trying to tell us he wasn’t dead yet. But Joe had no mercy. And when we returned the following day to pick up the Olds 88, there was no sign of Chuck. R.I.P. (Rest In Pieces).
The Olds 88 s a graceful vehicle, as female as Chuck was male. She’s smaller than the gas-guzzling land-yacht 88s of the 70s, but she has a powerful engine, and with front-wheel drive and snow tires (included in the deal we made with Joe), I don’t have to worry much about New Hampshire winters. Because she’s Detroit iron, I thought of Motown names, and considered calling her Aretha, after the Queen of Soul. But first, she’s white, and second, it would be the height of political incorrectness for a white man to name his car after a black woman. I thought a moment, and remembered that the car had belonged to an elderly lady. My great-aunt Agatha Boykin Allen was a South Carolinian with a sharp sense of humor, who did not suffer fools gladly. She might have been tickled to know that I had given a practical, no-nonsense car her name. So the 88 is Aggie. Long may she roll.