American Salvage

WORLD OF GAS

Propane tanks reclined like rows of swollen white bellies behind the chain link, each tank emblazoned with the Pur-Gas smiling cat logo, one of the boss’s idiotic conceptions—he’d apparently forgotten that the “p-u-r” was meant to be pronounced “pure.” At the tire-repair shop next door, the compressors rattled and droned, and if the noise didn’t actually kill brain cells, then it certainly prevented anyone in the vicinity from thinking clearly. As the PurGas office manager, Susan, talked on the workroom phone, she noticed that she was wadding up her lunch bag so tightly that her knuckles were white. According to the vice principal on the other end of the phone, her oldest son, Josh, was being kicked out of school for fighting. “Give him some kind of in-school suspension,” Susan said. “Otherwise he’s going to sit home watching TV all day. He should be learning something.” The vice principal said,“We don’t have the personnel to monitor problem students all day.” “Well, I’m at work all day. I can’t watch him.” “What about his father?” “What about his father?” “Somebody’s asking for you,”whispered Darcy,Susan’s assistant. Darcy crossed her eyes and signaled “nutcase” by tracing a little circle in the air. “We’ll see what we can do,” said the vice principal, sounding annoyed. “Yeah, thanks a lot.”Susan hung up the phone, tossed her lunch World of Gas  bag into the garbage can and returned to the front counter, where she found her brother-in-law Mack, dressed as usual in a camou- flage jacket and army cap. For the benefit of her sister Holly and their two kids, Susan always gave Mack her employee’s discount. Susan retrieved his paperwork from a file under Holly’s name. “You’re sure that’s the biggest one I can get?” Mack asked. “This is a three-thousand-cubic-foot tank, Mack. It’s half as big as your trailer. Try not to let any of your drunk buddies drive a truck into it.”Propane was apparently the fuel of choice this month for the Y2K crowd, whose members all thought that the flow of natural gas would be compromised at the stroke of midnight December 31, 1999, along with civilization as they knew it. Mack and his militia pals were by no means the only pain-inthe -ass alarmists in town these days. Susan had ordered survival appliances for fidgeting paper-company executives,two city council members, and, last week, the very vice principal with whom she’d just been speaking—maybe she should call him back and threaten to lose his order for the super-efficient, lightweight propane heat source if he didn’t keep Josh at school. All these men thought that the big collapse was coming, and they were cocksure enough to think that through clever planning and by purchasing the right machines they would survive, huddling in their basements or manning their guard towers. “Them delivery trucks run on propane or gasoline?”asked Mack, who was not a bad-looking guy when he wasn’t done up like an idiot commando. “Propane.” “Good.That means the trucks’ll have fuel to make deliveries.” “Don’t worry, the trucks’ll be running.” It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic—love or war or a giant asteroid. Every man wanted to be a hot-headed Bruce Willis character, fighting against the evil foreign enemy while despising the domestic bureaucracy. Men wanted to focus on just one big thing, leaving the thousands american salvage  of smaller messes for the women around them to clean up. “You’re too negative,too cynical,”Susan’s husband (now ex-husband ) had told her. “And you don’t love me the way you used to. That’s why I had to find somebody else.” “Tell it to your kids,” Susan had said. “Tell it to Josh and Andy and Tommy.” Men didn’t understand that you couldn’t let yourself be consumed with passion when there were so many people needing your attention, when there was so much work to do. Men didn’t understand that there was nothing big enough to exempt you from your obligations, which began as soon as the sun rose over the paper company and ended only after you’d finished the...