#39 - Roaring, Fire-breathing Monsters
You don't see them all that often, but there usually is one around nearly every country place, lying in wait. When one of these roaring, fire-breathing monsters wakes up, there’s no question it’s alive; its prehistoric presence quickens the step of everyone around. The monster at my place sleeps in a sagging, old shed. It's a green, 1948 Willys Jeep. Like a ghost, it came with the place.
You usually see only one of these monsters at a time, which would suggest they might be a threatened species. But I know that can't be, because they are immortal. Besides, each is distinctly unlike any other, each being one of a kind. The only common thread of likeness is their peculiar, mutant makeup - the tell-tale protrusion where nothing ought to be, or the lack all together of what ought to be expected. That or a complete, Picasso-like rearrangement of the most ordinary features.
Some think of their monster as just a woods buggy; others, nothing more than just the old wreck of a truck down back. It might not even be that elaborate, taking the form of a rusty, old hand tractor. Whatever the case, most folks seem to have a monster hiding away somewhere, and, except for a few memorable hours every now and then, it mostly sighs its way through the years in a hibernating state.
My roaring fire-breather must certainly have had a full-on and lustrous career as a Jeep. The last owner told me a few things about her, how she kept the road open in winter and scraped the pond clean for skating. For a while, she even hauled gravel in her little dump body. Judging from the big, bent chain hook affixed on her back floor and all the iron reinforcing bolted everywhere, she served admirably in the regular quest for pulling action in the woods around here. He, the last owner, said he bought the Jeep as junk, and that was at least 25 years before I bought her (for a dollar), or more. No exhaust pipe, no brakes at all, and a quart of oil every three hundred yards describes her pretty well.
I have kept this monster mostly retired for 15 years myself, and it's been a very lazy, "out to pasture" kind of retirement. The old girl bides away her time as a mouse hotel and has a proven capacity to store acorns and old mattress stuffing in every available nook and cranny.
It's usually a cool September morning when daylight floods her faded green complexion for another time. I open the shed doors, prop them open, with presumptuous thoughts of hauling firewood. I lift up her bonnet to see what sorts of things are going on in her cold, oily mind, and that generally initiates a rude awakening for both of us.
Handfuls and gobs of acorns and mouse stuff, from all appearances, must be the essence of sweet dreams, and, like all dreams, they fly out the door. Then begins my alchemy, a great ritual of checking and rechecking the dipstick as I pour old crankcase oil down the girl, and then, taking the rag out of the gas filler pipe, I optimistically pour in fresh gas to dilute the tar in her tank to create a mixture that will burn in her guts. I pump up the ancient, cracked tires, charge the amazing battery (now 12 years old) and give her radiator a long, cold drink of well water from a watering can. All this done, I prime her fuel system and plop the rag back into the gas cap hole and pray out loud, in pleading tones, that she serve me well after all this attention. If nothing else, I tell her, she’ll make a damned good Molotov cocktail with that rag in her tank.
I flick the ON switch, pump the accelerator and push the starter button for all I'm worth. The monster turns over in her sleep, uninterested. In a desperately religious frame of mind, I pump and press and pray. And we go on this way in the gloom of the shed till suddenly there is a hopeful little pop. The next try, she fires, maybe a couple of cylinders, and then the monster roars to life with such horrendous fervor that, for a moment, I entertained thoughts of getting the hell out of that shed while the getting’s good. Renewed visions of firewood, however, keep me working her pedal, and with an expression of amazement on my face and upward looks of gratitude, the shed fills with a cloud so blue it would choke a workhorse.
I reacquaint myself with the gears and ride the clutch until I have eased the old monster out in the daylight where we can breathe. One more time, 15 years now for me, she comes to life, sparks and all. My wife comes cheering out of the house. Kids come running across the lawn. Even the dog, with a rare expenditure of energy, leaps onto the rusty springs and horsehair of the seat beside me.
Nothing can quite describe this moment; it's a confusing combination of recovering from choking to death, bursting pride and a feeling of "What do I do now?" Like the mouse nests of her dreams, though, it doesn't last forever, and our roaring, fire-breathing monster knuckles down just once more to earn her keep.