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Tractor Boy

Robley Browne

    “Oh, quit feeling sorry for yourself,” said Mrs. Spurlock. “Out of all the kids we’ve had here, you’re the only one who’s had to deal with adversity. You’re the only one who ever got handed a raw deal.”
    “I was handed a raw deal,” I said to her.
    “Aw, poor baby,” she always said back.
    “Maybe you didn’t get the memo,” I used to tell her. “It turns out secondhand smoke kills.” And she’d just light up another Winston.
    “How was church,” sometimes I’d say. “Did you remember to mention all the Old Grand-Dad and off-track betting?”
    “And freeloading juvenile delinquents?” she’d ask.
    “Eat shit,” I’d say. And then she’d grab a TV Guide or ashtray and throw it at me.

* * *

    I was seventeen years old and living in a foster home in Sherman, Texas. It had all the warmth and coziness of a state penitentiary.
    “A penitentiary?” my roommate Spider said to me. “Bro, you don’t know how good you got it here.”
    Spider loved the place—acted like three hots and a cot were absolutely all there was to life.
    I made some comment about how much toilet paper was left, and he said, “Y’all ought to try seeing the roll as half full for once.”
    “Hurry up in there,” Mrs. Spurlock said, banging on the door. “You got Spider waiting out here.”
    Through the bathroom window I had a perfect view of a red Harvester Cub tractor cooling off under a tree. I tugged furiously at my cock as my eyes raced up and down that hot little body. When a butterfly landed on her shapely rear end, I lost it and blasted my load against the wall.
    “You need to get a girlfriend,” Spider said as I walked out.
    “You’re the one with all the Beyonce posters,” I said.
    At El Paso High School, the girls are all stuck up. I went to a Sadie Hawkins dance once in the school gymnasium. You had to stand against the wall like an idiot and wait to be asked if you didn’t have a dance partner. After about half an hour, two girls walked across the room to me. One was pretty, with strawberry-blond hair; the other had shoulders like Mike Tyson. The Mike Tyson one said, “We were just wondering, do you plan to murder one of the girls here tonight and then wear her skin around as a coat?”
    As lousy as things were, I kept reminding myself that they could always be worse. Spider’s brother had some sort of deal, a fucked-up immune system I think, and he had to stay inside this big room-sized incubator. Spider told me if his brother ever set foot outside the protective room, the unfiltered air would kill him.
    If there was some fucking place I hadn’t been sent yet, that’s where Mrs. Spurlock stuck me. I stood around in a crowded church. I sat all day in my room. I spent three months in summer school. I slept on a cement floor in a jail cell. When I went to jail, the guard kept calling me by my booking number. Whenever I’d say I was hungry or wanted to talk to someone in charge, he’d go, “I’ll get right on that, Mr. Five-Four-Two.”
    I wanted to bail on everything, hit the road. I mean it wasn’t like I had anyone dropping by or sending me mail, so I didn’t need an actual address. I’d drive across the goddamn country. See the heartland. I’d wash dishes here and there. Sleep out under the stars. Expand my horizons, unlike all the other shit-for-brains at this place.
    “How are you going to do that when you can’t even wash the ones you left in the sink?” Mrs. Spurlock said when she heard this.
    “Those would be your golden boy, Spider’s,” I said.
    “Spider’s?” she said.
    “Yeah,” I told her. “What’s so hard to believe about that?”
    “Why would Spider leave a stack of dirty dishes in the sink?” Mrs. Spurlock said.
    “Because he’s a lazy piece of shit, same as me,” I told her. “Because all he’s ever gonna be is a fucking burden on society.”
    “Okay, okay,” she said, “take it easy.”
    “Take it easy,” I said.
    “Take it easy,” she said. “Sit back down.”
    That was my last semester at El Paso. I was a few hours late driving the Spurlocks’ ’57 Chevy pickup around looking for my dog, and my teacher never stopped bringing it up. Days later, even if I did well on something, all I got was “You just rolled in here like it was no big deal. You completely disrupted my class. You need to have a parent call if you are going to be tardy.” I’m sitting there and the teacher’s just going off on me in front of the whole class. Eventually I told her that was absolutely fascinating, but the class would probably be better served if she shut her fat mouth and went back to teaching history.

* * *

    You get all lovesick is what happens.
    The first time I saw Chase, she was dripping wet in the middle of a high school car wash. I started talking to some dude waiting for her who seemed like a decent enough guy even if he didn’t appreciate her. The “for sale” sign in her window read best offer. I’d never had a thing for Ford Torinos, or Cobras, but this one was something special—I mean right away she just seemed like the one. Before you could say two eggs over easy, I was planning ways I could make her mine. I could get a part-time job—or talk to a bank. Take out a loan like a decent fucking member of society.
    He gave me his phone number and address. Of course this Dave Santos lived in the Double Diamond district, a gated community. From what I gathered though, it was someplace I’d never been before.
    There were a couple of neighborhoods in El Paso where I wasn’t supposed to go. If I accidentally trespassed on one of them, I was basically screwed.
    Mrs. Spurlock and Spider noticed me acting differently. They started making little comments and asking me what was new.
    One of the times I went over, Chase was sitting out front in the rain when Mr. Santos came out of his house. “Small world,” I said, “My grandmother lives right up the street.” And he said that was an interesting coincidence. I asked why he didn’t keep her garaged, and he said I shouldn’t worry about it. I told him I would definitely be coming by with some money soon, and he said to be sure I gave him a call first.
    I rode my bike by there twice late at night and wasn’t able to come either time. The second time I had my dick in her gas tank when a light came on over the porch. I had to crouch down behind her while Mr. Santos stood on the edge of his steps looking up and down the block.

* * *

    I’ve changed homes a thousand times, and somehow I’ve always wound up on the bottom bunk. Under my bed against the wall, behind some boxes, I kept a backpack containing a ski mask, a jar of Vaseline, some hydrogen peroxide, gauze, bandages, styptic pencils, a police scanner, a bunch of Auto Trader printouts, a flashlight, and an old T-shirt. The police scanner was just a tiny thing with a long antenna.
    I got the book bag from my counselor at Child Protective Services after I left home. I put a change of clothes in there, and some bathroom shit too.
    When I was like ten, I used to have this video game where you had to kill off all the zombies in a shopping mall with a machine gun. My neighbor Carlos and I used to play each other, and we’d stay up late seeing who could get the highest score. I had to hit my joystick over and over until my palm got this painful red bump on it. This one disgusting hot weekend, it must have been during summer vacation, I had finally gone ahead. All I had to do was run my guy up to the roof to finish the game. But I couldn’t stop pounding the controller. I remember Carlos running to call his brother as the sun was coming up. And his older brother’s mouth fell open when he saw my bloody hand, and he pleaded with me to stop. Carlos and his brother were yelling to each other in Spanish and then it was like they both just ran out of words, and they didn’t know me. I felt like Zippy the Pinhead. One of them unplugged the TV, and the other one yanked the controller out of my hand. Then Carlos started bawling, and they both climbed in his shit-brown Toyota Corolla and drove off.
    Freshman year I began getting in a lot of trouble at school. Ditching classes. Getting in fights. The story goes that I was such a handful, Mrs. Green called the parents and asked them if they’d ever considered homeschooling. I guess she figured I could just study our monthly eviction notices and tally up the old man’s beer cans. That was the summer the parents deposited me in the summer drama program. We had to put on a production of Frankenstein’s Monster. Somehow, I wound up with the privilege of playing the monster.
    I had class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights and three-hour rehearsals every Tuesday and Thursday. It’s about the last time I can ever remember us all in the same car together. It was a three-door Hyundai Excel my father had gotten from a friend of his. The back door was broken, and I’d have to get out through the hatchback. They’d always say, “Just be yourself,” as I was climbing out of the car. I guess that was supposed to be funny.
    There was this one part I loved to rehearse, where this impossible bitch Candy, who plays a little girl, is tossing daisies into a lake and watching them float. She decides to give me a thrill and gives me some of her precious flowers. She pretends she likes me. Then when I find out it’s all bullshit, I get to toss her ass into the lake.

* * *

    After the night Mr. Santos came out of his house, I stopped going by to see Chase. I gave him a call, finally, and left a message on his voice mail: “Have you thought any more about my offer?” I said. “Give me a call.” And then when I was making my lunch, I recalled I hadn’t left my name.
    Toward the end of that summer, a mouse finally got caught on one of my homemade glue traps down in the basement. I watched it struggle to pull its collapsed body from the paper for several minutes and then stepped on it. I brought it out to Mrs. Spurlock on the porch, and she said, “That’s disgusting.” And I said, “That’s all you’ve got to say? I solve your mouse problem, and you don’t even want to say thank you?” And she said, “My hero. Now get it the hell out of my face.” And took another pull from her mason jar. So I tossed it into the sunhat by her feet. Then as I was walking across the farm, I decided she didn’t deserve my help, so I went back down to the basement and picked up all the traps.

* * *

    The lady who showed me the bras at Kruger Auto Supply told me that vinyl was the hot thing right now and would be best for Chase’s measurements. Another guy told me later that that was all horseshit, and leather was the classy way to go. I got that, a chocolate-strawberry air freshener, and a CD called Seriously Cool Driving Music because I’d always liked the song “Radar Love.” After that I went by Open Road and picked up an old-fashioned picnic basket and some road maps. The salesman at the store kept calling me “a real Don Juan.” I joined a car club that met each Wednesday at this Retro Burger just to talk cars and have someplace to go. I had to take the bus to get out there, and somebody trying to get my goat asked if I ever planned to get a car, and I said, “Well, what do you think?” I talked to a couple guys who seemed all right who said there was nothing wrong with me. This old guy, Artie, was living in his T-Bird and said he had since he was seventeen. He even said we should get together and cruise Main Street sometime, but it never happened. This woman was going on about how she liked to get her GTO up to one hundred miles an hour while her girlfriend got her off with a vibrator. She advocated this sort of thing for everyone who owned a classic car. She said once a cop even chased them through the hills, but that the flashing lights and sirens only added to the whole experience.
    I got a tribute tattoo for my grandma Elsie at the House of Pain in Vista Hills when I was leaving. The guy used a photo from my wallet. It’s one of those photo booth pictures, and my grandmother is wearing my dark sunglasses with a big cigar in her mouth. The work cost me two hundred and twenty dollars and came with a little bottle of lotion for my arm.
    I stayed in my room for a few hours after the whole mouse thing, and when the Spurlocks started watching their idiotic TV shows, I went out back and began greasing up their tractor in the dark. I was just beginning to work up a lather when I heard the screen door squeak open and Mr. Spurlock ask me what I was doing. He was at the top of the steps in his wheelchair under the porch light.
    “My chores,” I told him.
    “Well, when you’re done fooling around, I need you to help me over to the barn.”
    “What’s Mrs. Spurlock doing?” I said. She claimed she couldn’t budge the old fart, but I’d seen her lift whole bags of potatoes plenty of times.
    “Mrs. Spurlock is taking a nap,” he said. “Are we going to debate this or are you going to come help me?”
    I wheeled him into the barn and up to a shelf of thick blankets. “We’ll need to get these things up on top of Roscoe and Pete,” he said.
    I kept changing my Facebook status while he was in the stables with the horses. Finally I settled on what my mother used to sarcastically call my parents’ song: Love will tear us apart. “Are we almost done?” I said to him after a couple minutes.
    “Why, you got someplace you’re supposed to be?” he said, pushing himself out of the stable.
    “What if I do?” I said, looking at the crumpled blankets in his lap. “I thought you were going to put those on the horses.”
    “I gave up,” he said. His glasses were crooked, and little beads of sweat were dripping down his forehead.
    “Listen, I was talking to some guys over at the Flytrap,” he said as I pushed him back toward the house. “I think maybe you got a problem, one of them fetishes. You could probably do with some professional help.”
    “Not this again,” I said.
    “It isn’t normal,” he said. “It isn’t good for you.”
    “And you’re going to tell me what’s good for me,” I told him.
    “One of the fellas, Beefy, he used to have a thing with rubber dolls. He goes to meetings now. He ain’t touched one in, oh—”
    “—Can we just drop it? Can we?” I said.
    When I wheeled him back to the living room, Mrs. Spurlock was asleep on the couch with her mouth open. For an instant I thought the stupid bitch was dead.
    “Please try to keep the noise to a minimum,” Mr. Spurlock said before I slammed the door to my bedroom.
    He wheeled by later that night when I was playing High Speed Chase on my phone. “There are places we can send you,” he said. “Treatment centers.”
    “Wouldn’t that be convenient,” I said.
    “What’s that supposed to mean?” he said.
    “Don’t worry, you’ll be rid of me soon enough,” I told him. “I’ve about had it with living in this goddamn Bates Motel.” And that got the two of them to finally go down to their room.
    When I heard them milling around the house in the morning, I went and got my bike and rode it out to Big Al’s scrap yard. I left so fast I forgot to bring my phone. Sitting at the top of Grant Hill, I watched the giant crane picking up stripped-down sedans and topless coupes. I began to feel guilty looking at other cars. I wished that I had my phone so that I could at least play High Speed Chase.
    A year ago my counselor got the bright idea to put me in this scared straight program in Fort Worth. Death row inmates in federal prison cursed me up and down all afternoon, but I just tuned them out. When that didn’t seem to click, the guard said not to be so cocky, that I hadn’t seen anything yet. I ended up locked in the morgue with a bunch of stiffs. “It’s okay if you feel like crying,” my counselor said when I came out. I remember he was holding a book called <>IIntroduction to Teen Counseling. “About what?” I asked him.
    I couldn’t eat. I would sit in front of a bowl of cereal and just stare at it. Couldn’t sleep. I started having strange thoughts too, snapping at people. I had a pretty good idea of why. Not that I expected anyone to give a rat’s ass.
    I came out of my room after lying in bed until noon and unplugged my phone from the charger. Mrs. Spurlock had the door to the refrigerator open, and her olive-green kitchen stunk like Pine-Sol. She was digging through a drawer at the bottom with a yellow piece of masking tape across it labeled “guest” in black cursive.
    “Is there something wrong with this charger?” I asked.
    “How should I know?” she said back. “I’m assuming you’re done with this.” She was wearing her floral bathrobe, holding something wrapped in Saran Wrap over her head.
    “That’s not mine,” I told her.
    “Well, it was in your drawer,” she said. I left her and went into the garage. Mrs. Spurlock said, “He probably found somebody who made him a real offer. Anyway, I don’t see what you love about that car so much,” she added, once she had closed the drawer and shut the fridge.
    I found an outlet and checked through my messages. Nothing new. Just an old one from Mr. Santos saying that he would give my offer some real thought. He would get back to me. His distorted voice said, “The thing about this one is, she’s got a lot of people interested in her—we may want to play the field a bit, you know?”
    Suddenly it dawned on me I was not going to hear back from him. Everything went out of me like a blown-out tire. “Fuck!” I yelled, slamming the phone onto the workbench. I stood there holding the jack in the outlet. The garage was dark except for some reflections across Mr. Spurlock’s stupid jars of bolts and shit.
    “Oh, calm down,” Mrs. Spurlock said. “You couldn’t have afforded her anyway.”
    “Don’t tell me to calm down,” I said.
    “Please,” she said, shutting off the faucet. “You’re acting like a damn fool—” When I came into the kitchen and stood behind her, she said, “—not that it isn’t understandable.”
    I kept thinking how Chase and I were meant to be together, picturing all these guys putting their hands on her. I pushed by Mrs. Spurlock and threw my phone in the garbage.
    “What are you doing?” she yelled.
    I’d about had it with listening to her run her ignorant mouth and went out to the porch to think. I was considering riding my bike over to see Chase, but my heart was pounding too hard. My shoulders were hot and I couldn’t catch my breath. I decided to wait until I felt my body calm down. After a few minutes Spider woke up on the swing. He rubbed his eyes and said, “Dude, seriously, you’re going to wear a hole in the porch.” Meaning I was pacing a lot, so I went around back and sat down against the barn. I watched Mrs. Spurlock’s gray head bobbing around over the sink until she must have noticed me because she wiped some steam from the window.
    Then I started to feel so anxious that I figured I had to do something, so I grabbed the bag from my room and got my bike from the porch and rode it down to Brownie’s Hardware. It was colder than shit, but I couldn’t stop sweating. I looked at the flathead screwdrivers and the power drills while some Iranian guy at the cash register kept giving me dirty looks. I didn’t even know if I was buying the right shit, but I paid for it and put it in my bag. When I got back my caseworker, Miss Jaffe, was standing on the porch talking to Mr. and Mrs. Spurlock. I hid behind a hedge at the end of the driveway and waited for her to get in her brown Volvo GLT Wagon, with its 2.4-liter engine, automated climate control, and five-speed manual transmission.
    I knew it, I knew it, I knew it! I was saying to myself. Just seeing her with that stupid clipboard again had me freaking out. My mind was racing. I felt outside of myself. I could see my body from above, crouched behind the swaying bushes.
    When she drove away I walked in the front door like everything was damn Skippy. There was a green pamphlet on the entrance table that read, Texas Treatment Centers. A band of light lay across the living room couch. I could hear Mr. and Mrs. Spurlock talking in the kitchen. I cleared my throat and started in past them toward my bedroom.
    “Miss Jaffe was here,” said Mr. Spurlock. He was looking across the table at his wife, who had her face pinched tight like she smelled a turd.
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “Yeah, so, we had a talk,” he said. “She seems to think you’d do better in a controlled environment.”
    “And what do you guys think?” I asked them.
    “We agreed,” said Mrs. Spurlock, turning the bowl of plastic fruit in front of her.
    I went out the back door and sat down on the steps. They’d probably called Miss Jaffe when Mrs. Spurlock walked in on me with all those car magazines. Or it might have been when I cut myself up on the gas tank of their tractor. There wasn’t anything to stop the bleeding, and I’d left a trail of blood leading from the porch to the bathroom. Either way this was their doing.
    “I’m going out,” I told them when I came back in.
    “We’re only looking out for your best interests,” Mr. Spurlock said.
    “You guys are all heart,” I said.
    I changed into a silk shirt and slacks and combed my hair and sprayed myself with some of Spider’s cologne and got the fuck out of there.
    It took me longer than usual to get across town because I was trying not to sweat. When I got close to the main entrance at Double Diamond, it was just getting dark. I got off my bike and walked it over behind the mailboxes. When I was sure nobody could see me, I opened my bag and went through it to make sure I had everything and to go over what I was going to do in my head.
    Every five minutes or so, someone would pull up the flowery driveway and open the metal fence. It was an arched gate with a diamond on either side, and whenever it jerked to life, you could hear the chain rumbling along the bottom. Beside the entrance was a community bulletin board. There was a Thanksgiving turkey made out of construction paper behind the locked glass, and I remembered a commercial on TV advertising a getaway for young people called Art Camp for Teens.
    I thought, Jesus, if I’m actually going to do this, I want to start out completely fresh, so I took the driver’s license and social security card from my wallet and ditched them behind some bushes. The air was thick with the smell of lilac. Nearby, I could hear someone hosing down a driveway and a little farther off the gentle clatter of crockery as someone else was making dinner. And the whole time I’m watching, I’m thinking, If I mess this up, if I get caught, the Spurlocks will make it their life’s mission to make sure the whole lousy world knows my personal business. So I put on my ski mask and got ready.
    But no one came down the driveway. I sat on my heels and listened as a streetlight buzzed away over the gate. I untied and retied my boots. My face started to itch. I took off the wool mask and shook it out and put it back on. Finally a snow-white Town and Country pulled around the corner. Two kids were in back with their dog watching something on the drop-down Blu-ray DVD system. When it drove in I waited until it was a good ways down the block and then ran in and crouched down behind a fire hydrant. In the beginning of Frankenstein’s Monster, the hunchback has to hide behind a cardboard tombstone with his lantern in the graveyard. I just remembered that.
    The monster that the town goes after is supposed to be made out of spare pieces of regular people that the hunchback collects. When they chase me into an old mill, I climb all the way to the very top. Then there is nowhere for me to go. I grunt and growl and throw the guy who created me out the window into the windmill.
    I ran along the sidewalk until I came to his neighbor’s place, where I crawled under a camper shell in the driveway. I was breathing so hard I thought I was going to hyperventilate. Chase was still there, her crimson-red body sprawled out like a seductress lying in wait. Cupping my hands over my mouth and nose, I tried to control my breath. Dew was falling quickly, settling on the camper window and giving everything a surreal look.
    By the time the light finally went off in the Santos’ place, my legs had gone numb. I dragged myself out from under the camper and stood up by a pile of firewood covered in a plastic tarp. It was windy and the covering kept flicking up against itself. Somewhere behind me a wind chime was playing a maniacal symphony. I threw the backpack over my shoulder and hurried over to Chase. I crouched down and touched her with my fingertips. She was wet. I looked her up and down. She’d had her entire body waxed. I began to giggle and then covered my mouth.
    Taking the Slim Jim from my bag, I noticed the weight of it. The goddamn thing felt like a dagger in my hand. I thought: I’m sorry to have to do this to you, baby. Plunging my tool into her, I began jabbing away frantically. Suddenly I felt a release. My head became light and I could feel the blood surging through me. I opened the door and tossed my bag on her Milano leather seat. Taking out my penlight I checked under her steering column. They were right there; a bundle of multicolored wires bound by a plastic band. Pulling out the red ones, I put the penlight in my mouth. I snipped off the plastic band. I began stripping away the thin plastic coating. Putting the two wires together, I felt her roar to life.
    I sat up and took the wheel. The warmth of Chase’s 428 Cobra Jet engine entered my shoulders and back like a hit of Jack Daniel’s. I put her in gear and let up slowly on the clutch. She rumbled and began to move. The porch light came on. The front door flew open, and Mr. Santos came running out in his boxer shorts followed by some fat mess in a Disney T-shirt. Chase was shaking so violently, I worried she was going to seize out. The fat mess had her phone out and was trying to tape me. “Kick his ass,” she yelled from the middle of the lawn. “Kick his ass!” Mr. Santos was tugging at the door and punching her window. I shifted into second and tried not to look at him. He ran along beside us for a half block or more before he finally disappeared from the window.
    I fishtailed around the corner and was headed toward the gate when I saw a young couple jogging together up ahead. I pulled Chase up onto the sidewalk and caught them just as they were turning around. The way they went under the car, I’m not sure anything even happened to them. Chase was hiked up so high, she was like a low-flying plane.
    I must have caught the edge of a wet lawn or something because when I tried to turn the wheel, I spun out into the side of a house. I could hear sirens getting closer, and I thought my heart was going to pound right out of my chest. Something was banging underneath me, but I couldn’t tell what it was. And while I was lying there with my head split open on the steering wheel, every looky-loo in the neighborhood had walked out front of their place to watch a free show.
    My head was getting lighter, and I felt I’d melded right into Chase. They’re going to have a bitch of a time separating us, I thought. Then I started to laugh and coughed up blood all over the speedometer. “Sorry about that,” I said.
    I could hear trucks pulling up and doors slamming. Radios. Guys were gathering around, dragging things across the cement.

* * *

    Everyone is always saying, Well, that dude’s a pothead or that guy has a gambling problem or whatever, and I always come back with, Well, wait, can he still function; can he stop if he wants to? That always makes people uncomfortable. That’s because it’s all relative. Because everybody does stuff that is unhealthy. Everybody has a few bad habits. Everybody says reach out to your family or reach out to your friends, but ninety-nine percent of them will never know what it’s like to pick up the phone and have no one to talk to. You’d think people would quit doling out advice about shit they’ve never experienced.
    I can feel something clamping down into Chase, next to my head. The rescue guy close to me stinks like he hasn’t showered in a week. He’s saying something to someone behind him about black smoke. They don’t have much time. I push my head harder into Chase, trying to bleed. I don’t know what I’ll do if they separate us. I don’t know what I’ll do if I live. There is this one part of Frankenstein that always stayed with me. The entire class is crowded around the burning mill. I am trapped under this giant Styrofoam beam. Naturally, all the townsfolk are pissed off and waving their torches like nuts. It is then that the monster realizes he loves his creator. He reaches out and howls for Dr. Frankenstein. But it is too late. A voice says, “And soon the monster was borne away by smoke and lost in darkness and distance.” And Dr. Frankenstein looks up from his stretcher and says, “Good riddance, you twisted soul,” which the audience always ate up. And I remember thinking, Who’s the real monster here?

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