girlfriend. But Mr. Dutrey was so old. So old and so… I looked at him.
He stood sweating and grunting over a particularly stubborn bolt. His
shirtless chest looked tired as it heaved, sagging, with each tug of the
wrench. I turned from him and went to rescue Olive, who had begun
choking on her metal snack.
“Say kids,” he said. “You’ll never guess where me and my
girlfriend went.”
“Where?” Pete asked, his eyes glued on Dutrey and completely
unaware of my struggle with Olive to wrest the bolt from her mouth.
“We had to go down to the jail and bail her dumbass brother
out,” he said. I had never known anyone who had ever been in or to a jail
and was therefore readily intrigued.
“What did he do?” I asked nervously, certain that I was speaking
to the boyfriend of the sister of a guy who had knifed a person or two in
the throat.
“Oh, he took a shit in his neighbor’s chimney and then passed out
on their roof. Poor old woman woke up with her whole house smelling
like feces and then found some drunk pissing all over her shingles in his
sleep.”
Shocked, I tried to imagine the horror of such a crime scene.
Olive began choking in earnest as I visualized. Mr. Dutrey walked over
and smacked her hard on the back. The bolt flew from her mouth and
into his waiting hand. He returned to the car, paused to look at the bolt,
and deciding it was actually necessary, stuck it back onto some knob or
another.
“Pete,” I said, looking at my watch. “We need to get going. Mom
said dinner was at 5.”
“Yeah,” he responded absentmindedly. “Yeah, we’ll go soon. I just
want to hear a bit more about this chimney shitter. Plus Mr. Dutrey is
gonna show me how to put a new engine in the car.”
“Well, son, I don’t know about that today.” Dutrey pulled out a
handful of wires that he had cut with a pair of plastic blue scissors. “I’m
not quite finished with this part yet. Soon, though,” he said. “Very soon
we’ll be ready for the new engine. Maybe if you come sometime next
week? Ya’ll think you’ll be back here next week?” he asked, pausing his
work as his eyes flicking back and forth between the two of us.
“Well, yeah,” I said. “We have to walk Olive every day.”
67