“Watch out,” he said. There was this hairy spider about the size of a small farm animal making its way across the pavement. Its legs jerked up and down like the rubber spiders on a string that you get from a gumball machine.
“I’ve seen worse,” I said, although to tell you the truth I hadn’t. It looked like something that might have crawled out of the Midnight Creature Feature.
“That’s a tarantula,” he said. “You got to watch out for them suckers. They can jump four feet. If they get you, you go crazy. It’s a special kind of poison.”
This I didn’t believe. I never could figure out why men thought they could impress a woman by making the world out to be such a big dangerous deal. I mean, we’ve got to live in the exact same world every damn day of the week, don’t we?
“What’s it coming around here for?” I said. “Is it your pet, or your girlfriend?”
“Nah,” he said, squashing out his cigarette, and I decided he was dumber than he was mean.
There were a lot more bugs crawling up on the cement slab. A whole swarm of black ants came out of a crack and milled around the cigarette butt trying, for reasons I could not imagine, to take it apart. Some truck had carried that tobacco all the way from Kentucky maybe, from some Hardbine’s or Richey’s or Biddle’s farm, and now a bunch of ants were going to break it into little pieces to take back to their queen. You just never knew where something was going to end up.
“We had a lot of rain lately,” the guy said. “When the ground gets full of water, the critters drown out of their holes. They got to come up and dry off.” He reached out with his foot and squashed a large, shiny black bug with horns. Its wings split apart and white stuff oozed out between. It was the type that you wouldn’t have guessed had wings, although I knew from experience that just about every bug has wings of one kind or another. Not including spiders.
He lit another cigarette and threw the match at the tarantula, missing it by a couple of inches. The spider raised its two front legs toward the flame like a scared lady in an old movie.
“I got things to do,” I said. “So long.” I put Turtle in the car, then went around to the other side and put it in neutral and started to push.
He laughed. “What is that, a car or a skateboard?”
“Look, buster, you can help give me a push, or you can stand and watch, but either way I’m out of here. This car got me here from Kentucky, and I reckon she’s got a few thousand left in her.”
“Not on them tires, she don’t,” he said. I looked back to see the rear tire flapping empty on the wheel. “Shit,” I said, just as the engine caught and the car zoomed forward. In the rear-view mirror I could see broken glass glistening on the off ramp, dropping away behind me like a twinkly green lake.
I had no intention of asking the dumb guy for help. The tire looked like it was done-for anyway so I drove on it for a few blocks. There were a bank, some houses, and a park with palm trees and some sick-looking grass. Some men with rolled-up blankets tied around their waists were kicking at the dirt, probably looking for bugs to step on. Just beyond the park I could see a stack of tires. “Will you look at that,” I said. “I’m one lucky duck. We should have gone to Las Vegas.”
The stacked-up tires made a kind of wall on both sides of a big paved corner lot. Inside the walls a woman was using an air hose to chase bugs off the pavement, herding them along with little blasts of air. She was wearing blue jeans and cowboy boots and a red bandana on her head. A long gray braid hung down the middle of her back.
“How do,” I said. I noticed that the name of the place was Jesus Is Lord Used Tires. I remembered wanting to call 1-800-THE LORD, just to see who you’d get. Maybe this was it.
“Hi, darlin,” she said. “These bugs aggravate the dickens out of me after it rains, but I can’t see my way clear to squashing them. A bug’s just got one life to live, after all. Like us.”
“I know what you mean,” I said.
“Oh, bless your heart. Looks like you’ve got a couple of flats.”
I did. I hadn’t seen the rear on the right side.
“Drive it up onto the big jack,” she ordered. “We’ll get them off and have a look. We’ll fix your little wagon right up.”
I asked if Turtle could ride up on the jack, but she said it wasn’t safe, so I took her out of the car and looked for a place to put her down. All those tires around made me nervous. Just out of instinct, more or less, I looked up to see if there was anything tall overhead to get thrown up onto. There was nothing but clear blue sky.
Off to one side there were some old wheel rims and flat tires. An empty tire couldn’t possibly explode, I reasoned, so I sat Turtle down in one of those.
“What’s your little girl’s name?” the woman wanted to know, and when I told her she didn’t bat an eye. Usually people would either get embarrassed or give me a lecture. She told me her name was Mattie.
“She’s a cute little thing,” Mattie said.
“How do you know she’s a girl?” I wasn’t lipping off, for once. Just curious. It’s not as if I had her dressed in pink.
“Something about the face.”
We rolled the tires over to a tub of water. Mattie rubbed Ivory soap on the treads and then dunked them in like big doughnuts. Little threads of bubbles streamed up like strings of glass beads. Lots of them. It looked like a whole jewelry store in there.
“I’m sorry to tell you, hon, these are bad. I can tell you right now these aren’t going to hold a patch. They’re shot through.” She looked concerned. “See these places here along the rim? They’re sliced.” She ran her hand along the side of the tire under the water. She had a gold wedding band settled into the flesh of her finger, the way older women’s rings do when they never take them off.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, and I could tell she really was. “There’s a Goodyear place down the road about six blocks. If you want to roll them down there for a second opinion.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll take your word for it.” Turtle was slapping at the side of her flat whitewall with one hand. The other had caught hold of the doohickey where the air goes in. I tried to think what in the world we were going to do now. “How much for new ones?” I asked.
Mattie considered for a minute. “I could give you a pair of good retreads, five thousand miles guaranteed, put on and balanced for sixty-five.”
“I’ll have to think on that one,” I said. She was so nice I didn’t want to tell her flat out that I couldn’t afford new tires.
“It’s too early in the morning for bad news,” Mattie said. “I was just brewing up a pot of coffee. You want a cup of coffee? Come sit.”
“Okay,” I said. I collected Turtle out of the tire and carried her to the back of the shop. It was a big old two-story place, and there at the back of the garage was an area with a sink and some shelves, some folding chairs painted blue, a metal table, and a Mr. Coffee. I scooted another flat over next to the chairs and set Turtle down in it. I was glad to be away from that wall of tires, all of them bulging to burst. Hanging around here would be like living in a house made of bombs. The sound of the air hose alone gave me the willies.
“These come in pretty handy,” I said, trying to be cheerful. “I know what I can use those two flat tires for.”
“I’ve got some peanut-butter crackers,” Mattie said, leaning over Turtle. “Will she eat peanut butter?”
“She eats anything. Just don’t let her get hold of anything you don’t want to part with. Like your hair,” I said. Mattie’s braid was swinging into the danger zone.
She poured coffee into a mug that said “BILL with a capital B,” and handed it to me. She poured a cup for herself in a white mug with cartoon rabbits all over it. They were piled all over each other like the rocks in Texas Canyon. After a minute I realized that the rabbits were having sex in about a trillion different positions. I couldn’t figure this woman out. This was definitely not 1-800-THE LORD.