vituperation

Robyn and I pulled up the upstairs carpet and padding Friday night, thinking it prudent since a man was dropping off a dump truck Saturday morning for us to fill with all the trash we’ve collected in Smallville. Here’s what the rooms looked like when we were finished.

Before and now, no ghosts added.

I tried to wriggle the edge of the pry bar under the tack strip, grunting with the effort. Tack strip (the stuff that holds your carpet down and tight) is easy to get up, once you can get a little leverage on it. It’s that first little bit that’s the hardest. Behind me, Robyn worked with a screwdriver and pliers to pull up all the staples that had been used to attach carpet padding to the hardwood floor.

The squeal-whoosh of hydraulic brakes outside caught my attention. It sounded as though the dump truck guy had arrived. I put down the pry bar and went outside to meet him.

The dump truck guy was in his mid-forties, with salt and pepper hair and a neatly trimmed goatee and moustache. He wore the same sort of same outdoor clothes as I, jeans and a flannel shirt, and he carried a man purse, like Jack Bauer. We exchanged pleasantries. He didn’t have a southern accent at all, sounding more like a midwesterner than an Alabama native.

I told him far more than he probably wanted to hear about the house and all the junk we’d collected. I told him about the roofer who had been going to bring his dump truck for a month but could never get it repaired. We talked about guy stuff, tractors and backhoes and loaders and trucks, and we walked down to the pond so I could get a quote from him on having it dug out bigger and deeper. Turns out it’s not as much as I expected.

“Do you mind lowering the gate for me? I’d hate to screw up your truck because I don’t know what I’m doing,” I said as he prepared to go.

“Lower the gate?” he asked, looking at me as if re-evaluating his opinion of me.

“Yeah, on the back.”

“It doesn’t lower.”

I looked up at the dump truck, which towered over us.

“I didn’t know that,” I said. “The roof guy said could be raised or lowered, depending on where he put the linch pins. I thought they were all like that.”

“I can unlatch the bottom, but mine’s bolted at the top. It doesn’t really raise or lower, but you could use your loader to swing the gate out and then prop it open with something like a 4×4.”

He climbed into the cab and did something. With a hiss of air, the latches at the bottom of the gate released. He demonstrated raising the gate by grabbing a loop of chain hanging off the bottom, bracing his feet on the bumper, and straining with all his might. The gate swung out about eight inches. When he let go, it dropped back to the bed with a loud boom.

I imagined that gate propped up with a 4×4 and what would happen if that 4×4 popped out or broke or got bumped. Imagined what would happen if Robyn or I happened to be standing there when it happened. I kept my mouth shut, though, because to say something like that would violate one of the cardinal rules of man-talk: never admit fear.

“Just hook your loader here with a chain,” he said, pointing at the loop of chain he’d pulled. “You should be able to raise it with that.”

You really can do anything with a tractor and a piece of chain, I thought.

The dump truck guy left with his daughter, who had followed him and waited in her car up by the garage.

Robyn was less than pleased when I told her what we needed to do to load the dump truck.

I fired the tractor up and positioned it behind the dump truck. With some careful maneuvering, I chained the loader to the gate of the dump truck. By “careful maneuvering” I mean “trying to chain things up without getting under the loader”. My front end loader is hydraulic-powered, and any time it’s in use there’s a very slight chance the hydraulics can fail, which would bring the loader crashing down. I’d hate to be under it should that happen. It wouldn’t be as bad as getting smooshed by the dump truck gate, but it wouldn’t be a walk in the park either.

My first attempt at pulling the gate up failed miserably. The loader was too far back and I couldn’t get leverage. I succeeded in only pulling the gate out about two feet. Time for another positioning, another chaining, another try.

I backed away from the dump truck and raised the loader at the same time. The gate swung slowly out, going higher and higher.

Tractor and chain, baby, I thought. Kick ass.

There was no pause, no warning. At some magical point leverage changed and physics took center stage. The gate stopped lifting and the back end of the tractor started. In the time it took the message to get to my head that something was going terribly wrong, the rear tires raised a foot off the ground and the whole tractor started tipping to the right. A dawning horror overtook me as I realized what was happening—and what was going to happen if I didn’t ease up on the lever.

Situations like this always take on a dreamy slow quality for me. I knew the tractor was tipping, knew it was going to roll over if I didn’t do something, and yet it felt to me like I just sat there stupidly. My mind shrieked for my hand to reverse, to let go, to something or I was about to get hurt badly. After what felt like an eternity my hand obeyed and the rear tires lowered to the ground. I took a deep breath and looked over at Robyn.

She stood there staring at me with a horrified look on her face. And her hands over her ears.

I lowered the gate all the way back down and reduced the tractor to idle speed. I won’t lie. I was shaken, pretty bad. The same thing happened once before, when I was trying to pull up a fence post, and it scared the hell out of me then, too. I have a healthy love of life and limb. In retrospect, I realize I could have probably hooked the mower up to the hitch so I could get more weight back there and get the gate higher, but at that moment in time I knew I was done with the dump truck.

“Fuck this,” I said to Robyn as I unhooked the chain. “I’ll call the dump truck guy back and hire him to use his equipment. It’s big enough to reach over the top of the truck.”

When I’d gotten the tractor out of the way and shut down, I called the dump truck guy. He wasn’t home, so I left a message. Robyn and I went to sit on the front porch and talk for a bit. We talked about the junk pile, about how we’d been waiting to get rid of it for a month. Talked about how we had the truck here and had to pay for it whether we used it or not.

And I had a flash of brilliance, all at once.

“OF COURSE!” I said.

“What?”

“The corner store! Surely one of those old men who sits around the front talking all day will know someone with equipment big enough to do this. Hell, they probably know TEN people! This is the country, right? Everybody and their brother out here has big equipment.”

I took Robyn for moral support, and together we drove down to the corner grocery. The parking lot was nearly full. At the front door, through the glass I could see more old men gathered inside than I’d ever seen before.

Feeling like the city boy I am, I took a deep breath and opened the door.

to be continued…