Cannery Row

Chapter XI

The Model T Ford truck of Lee Chong had a dignified history. In 1923 it had been a passenger car belonging to Dr. W. T. Waters. He used it for five years and sold it to an insurance man named Rattle. Mr. Rattle was not a careful man. The car he got in clean nice condition he drove like fury. Mr. Rattle drank on Saturday nights and the car suffered. The fenders were broken and bent. He was a pedal rider too and the bands had to be changed often. When Mr. Rattle embezzled a client’s money and ran away to San Jose, he was caught with a high-hair blonde and sent up within ten days.

The body of the car was so battered that its next owner cut it in two and added a little truck bed.

The next owner took off the front of the cab and the windshield. He used it to haul squids and he liked a fresh breeze to blow in his face. His name was Francis Almones and he had a sad life, for he always made just a fraction less than he needed to live. His father had left him a little money but year by year and month by month, no matter how hard Francis worked or how careful he was, his money grew less until he just dried up and blew away.

Lee Chong got the truck in payment of a grocery bill.

By this time the truck was little more than four wheels and an engine and the engine was so crotchety and sullen and senile that it required expert care and consideration. Lee Chong did not give it these things, with the result that the truck stood in the tallgrass back of the grocery most of the time with the mallows growing between its spokes. It had solid tires on its back wheels and blocks held its front wheels off the ground.

Probably any one of the boys from the Palace Flophouse could have made the truck run, for they were all competent practical mechanics, but Gay was an inspired mechanic. There is no term comparable to green thumbs to apply to such a mechanic, but there should be. For there are men who can look, listen, tap, make an adjustment, and a machine works. Indeed there are men near whom a car runs better. And such a one was Gay. His fingers on a timer or a carburetor adjustment screw were gentle and wise and sure. He could fix the delicate electric motors in the laboratory. He could have worked in the canneries all the time had he wished, for in that industry, which complains bitterly when it does not make back its total investment every year in profits, the machinery is much less important than the fiscal statement. Indeed, if you could can sardines with ledgers, the owners would have been very happy, As it was they used decrepit, struggling old horrors of machines that needed the constant attention of a man like Gay.

Mack got the boys up early. They had their coffee and immediately moved over to the truck where it lay among the weeds, Gay was in charge. He kicked the blocked-up front wheels. “Go borrow a pump and get those pumped up,” he said. Then he put a stick in the gasoline tank under the board which served as a seat. By some miracle there was a half inch of gasoline in the tank. Now Gay went over the most probable difficulties. He took out the coil boxes, scraped the points, adjusted the gap, and put them back. He opened the carburetor to see that gas came through. He pushed on the crank to see that the whole shaft wasn’t frozen and the pistons rusted in their cylinders.

Meanwhile the pump arrived and Eddie and Jones spelled each other on the tires.

Gay hummed, “Dum tiddy — dum tiddy,” as he worked. He removed the spark plugs and scraped the points and bored the carbon out. Then Gay drained a little gasoline into a can and poured some into each cylinder before he put the spark plugs back. He straightened up. “We’re going to need a couple of dry cells,” he said. “See if Lee Chong will let us have a couple.”

Math departed and returned almost immediately with a universal No which was designed by Lee Chong to cover all future requests.

Gay thought deeply. “I know where’s a couple — pretty good ones too, but I won’t go get them.”

“Where?” asked Mack.

“Down cellar at my house,” said Gay. “They run the front doorbell. If one of you fellas wants to kind of edge into my cellar without my wife seeing you, they’re on top of the side stringer on the left hand side as you go in. But for God’s sake, don’t let my wife catch you.”

A conference elected Eddie to go and he departed.

“If you get caught don’t mention me,” Gay called out after him. Meanwhile Gay tested the bands. The low-high pedal didn’t quite touch the floor so he knew there was a little band left. The brake pedal did touch the floor so there was no brake, but the reverse pedal had lots of band left. On a Model T Ford the reverse is your margin of safety. When your brake is gone, you can use reverse as a brake. And when the low gear band is worn too thin to pull up a steep hill, why you can turn around and back up it. Gay found there was plently of reverse and he knew everything was all right.

It was a good omen that Eddie came back with the dry cells without trouble. Mrs. Gay had been in the kitchen. Eddie could hear her walking about but she didn’t hear Eddie. He was very good at such things.

Gay connected the dry cells and he advanced the gas and retarded the spark lever. “Twist her tail,” he said.

He was such a wonder, Gay was — the little mechanic of God, the St. Francis of all things that turn and twist and explode, the St. Francis of coils and armatures and gears. And if at some time all the heaps of jalopies, cut-down Dusenbergs, Buicks, De Sotos and Plymouths, American Austins and Isotta Fraschinis praise God in a great chorus — it will be largely due to Gay and his brotherhood.

One twist — one little twist and the engine caught and labored and faltered and caught again. Gay advanced the spark and reduced the gas. He switched over to the magneto and the Ford of Lee Chong chuckled and jiggled and clattered happily as though it knew it was working for a man who loved and understood it.

There were two small technical legal difficulties with the truck — it had no recent license plates and it had no lights. But the boys hung a rag permanently and accidentally on the rear plate to conceal its vintage and they dabbed the front plate with good thick mud. The equipment of the expedition was slight: some long-handled frog nets and some gunny sacks. City hunters going out for sport load themselves with food and liquor, but not Mack. He presumed rightly that the country was where food came from. Two loaves of bread and what was left of Eddie’s wining jug was all the supply. The party clambered on the truck — Gay drove and Mack sat beside him; they bumped around the corner of Lee Chong’s and down through the lot, threading among the pipes. Mr. Malloy waved at them from his seat by the boiler. Gay eased across the sidewalk and down off the curb gently because the front tires showed fabric all the way around. With all their alacrity, it was afternoon when they got started.

The truck eased into Red Williams’ service station. Mack got out and gave his paper to Red. He said, “Doc was a little short of change. So if you put five gallons in and just give us a buck instead of the other five gallons, why that’s what Doc wants. He had to go south, you know. Had a big deal down there.”

Red smiled good-naturedly. “You know, Mack,” he said, “Doc got to figuring if there was some kind of loophole, and he put his finger on the same one you did. Doc’s a pretty bright fellow. So he phoned me last night.”

“Put in the whole ten gallons,” said Mack. “No — wait. It’ll slop around and spill. Put in five and give us five in a can — one of them sealed cans.”

Red smiled happily. “Doc kind of figured that one too,” he said.

“Put in ten gallons,” said Mack. “And don’t go leaving none in the hose.”

The little expedition did not go through the center of Monterey. A delicacy about the license plates and the lights made Gay choose back streets. There would be the time when they would go up Carmel Hill and down into the Valley, a good four miles on a main highway, exposed to any passing cop until they turned up the fairly unfrequented Carmel Valley road. Gay chose a back street that brought them out on the main highway at Peter’s Gate just before the steep Carmel Hill starts. Gay took a good noisy clattering run at the hill and in fifty yards he put the pedal down to low. He knew it wouldn’t work, the band was worn too thin. On the level it was all right but not on a hill. He stopped, let the truck back around and aimed it down the hill. Then he gave it the gas and the reverse pedal. And the reverse was not worn. The truck crawled steadily and slowly but backward up Carmel Hill.

And they very nearly made it. The radiator boiled, of course, but most Model T experts believed that it wasn’t working well if it wasn’t boiling.

Someone should write an erudite essay on the moral, physical, and esthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation. Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the solar system of stars. With the Model T, part of the concept of private property disappeared. Pliers ceased to be privately owned and a tire pump belonged to the last man who had picked it up. Most of the babies of the period were conceived in Model T Fords and not a few were born in them. The theory of the Anglo Saxon home become so warped that it never quite recovered.

The truck backed sturdily up Carmel Hill and it got past the Jack’s Peak road and was just going into the last and steepest pull when the motor’s breathing thickened, gulped, and strangled. It seemed very quiet when the motor was still. Gay, who was heading downhill anyway, ran down the fifty feet and turned into the Jack’s Peak road entrance.

“What is it?” Mack asked.

“Carburetor, I think,” said Gay. The engine sizzled and creaked with heat and the jet of steam that blew down the overflow pipe sounded like the hiss of an alligator.

The carburetor of a Model T is not complicated but it needs all of its parts to function. There is a needle valve, and the point must be on the needle and must sit in its hole or the carburetor does not work.

Gay held the needle in his hand and the point was broken off. “How in hell you s’pose that happened?” he asked.

“Magic,” said Mack, “just pure magic. Can you fix it?”

“Hell, no,” said Gay. “Got to get another one.”

“How much they cost?”

“About a buck if you buy one new — quarter at a wrecker’s.”

“You got a buck?” Mack asked.

“Yeah, but I won’t need it.”

“Well, get back as soon as you can, will you? We’ll just stay right here.”

“Anyways you won’t go running off without a needle valve,” said Gay. He stepped out to the road. He thumbed three cars before one stopped for him. The boys watched him climb in and start down the hill. They didn’t see him again for one hundred and eighty days.

Oh, the infinity of possibility! How could it happen that the car that picked up Gay broke down before it got into Monterey? If Gay had not been a mechanic, he would not have fixed the car. If he had not fixed it the owner wouldn’t have taken him to Jimmy Brucia’s for a drink. And why was it Jimmy’s birthday? Out of all the possibilities in the world — the millions of them — only events occurred that lead to the Salinas jail. Sparky Enea and Tiny Colletti had made up a quarrel and were helping Jimmy celebrate his birthday. The blonde came in. The musical argument in front of the juke box. Gay’s new friend who knew a judo hold and tried to show it to Sparky and got his wrist broken when the hold went wrong. The policeman with a bad stomach — all unrelated, irrelevant details and yet all running in one direction. Fate just didn’t intend Gay to go on that frog hunt and Fate took a hell of a lot of trouble and people and accidents to keep him from it. When the final dimax came with the front of Holman’s bootery broken out and the party trying on the shoes in the display window only Gay didn’t hear the fire whistle. Only Gay didn’t go to the fire and when the police came they found him sitting all alone in Holman’s window wearing one brown oxford and one patent leather dress shoe with a gray cloth top.

Back at the truck the boys built a little fire when it got dark and the chill crept up from the ocean. The pines above them soughed in the fresh sea wind. The boys lay in the pine needles and looked at the lonely sky through the pine branches. For a while they spoke of the difficulties Gay must be having getting a needle valve and then gradually as the time passed they didn’t mention him any more.

“Somebody should of gone with him,” said Mack.

About ten o’clock Eddie got up. “There’s a construction camp a piece up the hill,” he said, “I think I’ll go up and see if they got any Model T’s.”