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In the Land of Crashed Cars and Junkyard Dogs When I was a boy growing up in western Kansas, my father and his older brother, Harold, owned an auto body salvage yard in the sand hills south of Dodge City. The place was called B & B Auto Parts, or, more simply, B & B. That was the name of the business when they bought it in 1966, and that’s the name it retains to this day, long after they sold it and my father returned to full-time farming and ranching. I remember, as a very small boy, asking my mother what the name stood for and why they never bothered to change it. “I don’t know,” she answered, continuing whatever chore she was doing at the time. “A, B, C—what does it matter? It’s just a junkyard.” Of course, she was right about that; my father himself would have agreed. And yet, to me, perhaps because of the age I was when I experienced it, the salvage yard was so much more than that. As Ishmael says of the whaling ships on which he grew to manhood , the salvage yard, with its forty-odd acres of mangled cars and trucks, was my Harvard and my Yale. I was five or six years old when I started spending a lot of time at the salvage yard. I don’t know how or why this came to pass, but I have my suspicions. From my earliest days, I was a handful—a hyperactive motor mouth prone to accidents and mischief of a more or less mindless sort. From the moment I woke up until I dropped to sleep from exhaustion seventeen or eighteen hours later, I was constantly on the go, constantly “causing a racket” and “failing to listen,” constantly “into something.” Today, kids such as I was get a dose of Ritalin. But I was lucky. The only solution that offered itself in my case was to send me to work along with my father and older brothers. 3 4 ❍ T h e T o w n Of course, I use the phrase to work in only the loosest of senses. While most of my older brothers were given jobs as apprentice welders or body men or were at least required to push a broom every once in a while, I was allowed to roam free across the entire expanse of the salvage yard so long as I didn’t maim myself or distract anyone else from his work. In this way, I came to know the different territories that made up the salvage yard, as well as the rogue’s gallery of men who ruled over them. The nerve center of the place was the concrete-floored front office with its long counter littered with coffee cups, overflowing ashtrays, dog-eared lists of inventory. Here parts men took orders from the public and added their voices to a staticridden frequency on which their colleagues from across the West and Midwest carried on a nonstop conversation. Guys, this is Bob at Apex in Tulsa still looking for that bumper, hood, and grill for a 1972 Buick Skylark. . . . The Front was the only part of the salvage yard that was air conditioned or heated in any conventional sense (the body and machine shops made do with jerry-rigged box fans and fifty-gallon drums converted into wood-burning stoves). It was where customers waited, gossiping and smoking, lounging about on bucket seats culled from wrecks. Most importantly to me, though, the Front was where the candy and pop machines were. How I loved to scavenge coins from under the seats of wrecked cars and then feed them, one by one, into the rows of globe-headed machines containing jelly beans, gumballs, salted cashews, Boston baked beans, Red Hots, regular and peanut M&M’s! This was my first real experience of the world of “getting and spending,” as Wordsworth had it, and how sweet it was! Snack and drink in hand, I’d sit, legs dangling from one of the old car seats, and wait for something interesting to happen. It never took long. Someone was always arguing, telling an offcolor joke, showing off a new gun or knife he’d just bought or otherwise “come into.” At first the parts guys, conscious of my presence, would nod toward me and quickly change the subject whenever someone ventured into R- or X-rated territory. [3.129.13.201] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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