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Tow Trucks and
Snugglers and Snuff, Oh My!
by Elizabeth Bussey Sowdal
Part
III
Part
IV: Snuff’s Enough |
"Hey, there," it was a great comfort to me to hear this greeting from the tall,
handsome highway patrolman who now stood outside my car. The fact that I was sure
he had just saved us from some horrible experience at the grease-stained hands
of evil incarnate predisposed me in his favor anyway, but hearing that greeting,
"Hey, there," after living in New York and Pennsylvania for the past several years
was a great comfort to me. As was the sight of the pistol in his holster. "Do
you all know a Mrs. B.?" he asked, getting down to business and using the formal
"you all" rather than the informal "y’all." I guess they say "y’all" in Tennessee.
"She called and asked us to check on you. Looks like it was a good idea," he said,
glancing over his shoulder in the direction Old Saw had headed.
"Yes,
we know her and we’re so happy to see you!" I was happy.
"Well, I’ve called
a tow truck for you. He should be here soon and he’ll get you fixed up. I’m going
to wait here with you until he gets here."
And he did. We all got out
of the hot car to stretch and move around, get some air. He told me not to let
the kids get in the grass at the side of the road, because there might be snakes.
I shuddered under that hot Tennessee sun, thinking that if I had been right about
the snakes, I might have been right about Pennzoil Man too. It wasn’t long before
the tow truck got there, and my little David was pretty excited to see it, "Mama!
Twuck!" but was not so excited to get into it. It took a little convincing and
the promise of more Orange Crush sometime in the near future before he reluctantly
agreed. I wasn’t too sure about it either, but didn’t want to say so. I looked
into the highway patrolman’s face and he gave me a wink and said, "You’ll be alright.
You all have a safe trip, now." And off we went, down that county road deeper
and deeper into Tennessee.
We drove long enough, through deserted enough
countryside that I was beginning to get nervous again. The driver didn’t have
much to say after he’d asked where we were headed and what seemed to be wrong
with the car. Finally we came to a little town and stopped at a garage. After
some diagnostics and a big lecture on how it was going to be an awful lot of trouble
to get the parts this late on a Saturday and how this would take him away from
other work, the mechanic popped the Escort’s hood. I didn’t mind the lecture,
saw listening to it as part of the price of the work, just as long as he could
fix it and we could get back on the road. We sat in the little waiting area and
after the first hour or so I quit telling the kids not to touch anything because
they would get dirty. They were already dirty and everything in that waiting room
was dirty and there was no getting around it. There would, I trusted, be soap
and water somewhere in the not too distant future.
Despite the mechanic’s
initial grousing about being taken away from other important work, there were
no other cars in the garage. There were four or five men though who I thought
were not greasy enough to be mechanics, but were more like an advisory board.
One of the men was very elderly and frail looking. He had wispy white hair floating
on his scalp and the kind of delicate looking deep pink complexion that some old
men who have spent long years working in the sun, but don’t anymore, have. And
there was a very young girl with very blonde hair wearing clean, faded overalls
that I didn’t think were originally hers.
As the afternoon wore on she
came over to sit with us. She was shy at first, and so was I, but children are
a great ice breaker, and before long the five of us were laughing and talking
like old friends. She said that Davey was a fine big boy and that she hoped she
would have a nice boy too. At first I thought she meant someday. When she grew
up and got married. Because she looked like she was thirteen or fourteen. But
that’s not what she meant. She meant she hoped she had a boy when she had her
baby sometime in the next week or so. How could I have missed that she was pregnant?
Well, she was tiny, wiry. You might have thought she was a boy at first. And there
were those overalls. Her being pregnant explained why she was wearing overalls
that didn’t seem like they were hers. We chatted about her pregnancy and she took
out a can of snuff. She was explaining to me that she would go to the hospital
over in the next town when it was time, and as she spoke she licked her finger
and dipped it into the can of snuff. I watched, mystified, as she reached that
finger out toward my "fine boy" and daubed the snuff in his mouth.
"What
are you doing?" I shrieked, turning Davey to me and using my own finger to clean
the snuff out of his baby mouth. My shriek startled him and he began to cry. My
girls sat perched wide eyed and worried on the edge of the greasy chair they were
sharing. "Don’t fret," the girl said, kind of startled herself, "it’s good for
‘em. Makes their teeth white and strong." But I was worried and not at all happy.
I wondered what the symptoms of nicotine poisoning were and was trying to give
Dave water and trying to teach him to swish and spit. Something he became very
good at in later years, but could not master that afternoon.
The blonde
little girl watched me for a minute then shrugged and got up. She walked into
the garage and hollered, "Come on old man. Come buy me a beer." Then she and the
wispy haired old man climbed up into their battered old farm truck, waved, and
headed down the road. The mechanic came into the waiting area then, wiping his
hands on a red rag. "That’s kind of a funny way for her to talk to her Grandpa,"
I said with a little snip and snoot in my voice. I was not happy about the snuff.
"That ain’t her Grandpa," the mechanic laughed, "that’s her husband!"
We made it home to Oklahoma eventually, but oh! That was a long trip. I often
think about that day in Tennessee and when I remember it, it seems more like I
am remembering a dream. It is normal in dreams for weird things to happen, for
reality to shift and drift, melt and coalesce into something entirely different.
For bad guys to come and go and good guys too. I have never had a day like that
since, a dream-ish day like that. I don’t expect I ever will. |
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