“The Salvage Yard” by Emma Burcart
The highway cut through the center of town and continued out into the country, where
wide expanses of grass and trees were dotted with the occasional mobile home, gas station, or church. Not much to do or see and most people drove through fast on their way to somewhere else, without looking out their windows. When outsiders came, it wasn’t on purpose and they never stayed long. Directions, a tank of gas and a cup of coffee, and they were gone. That was how everyone in town liked it; not being on the map was a point of pride for most. José had been born and raised on the edge of town, at the trailer park on the highway. His father was one of the rare outsiders who stayed. He built his life on that highway and in the end the highway took it back.
_
José played hide and seek in the shadows of trailers and under the branches of giant oak
trees, with only the short white fence between home and the road. The sound of cars zooming past had been his lullabies and it was a natural progression to being some sort of professional driver himself. It was a car that took his mother away—a yellow taxi with a phone number painted on the doors—when she couldn’t stand being stuck anymore. Her voice was quiet but firm when she told them she was leaving, her suitcase by the door and her duffle bag in hand. She said she’d married an outsider to get away and that was what she was going to do—on her own now. José asked, “What about me?” His mother patted his head and said he belonged with his father. They were a package deal. José didn’t know what that meant until he was grown, until he lost his father and felt the weight of his own decision, and of hers. That day he just kissed his mother goodbye and held tight to his father’s hand. Then he watched the gravel drive as his mother drove away, getting smaller and smaller until she was just a yellow dot moving fast on the highway. And then she was gone too.
_
His father became his suspension system, took over the space left empty by his mother
and kept him grounded, safe, and on course. He read Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel every night before bed, sometimes twice, and helped José with his homework even if he was tired from a long day of working in the tobacco fields. He told him stories about the city he came from, a city filled with people and cars and tall buildings José could only imagine when they walked down Market Street and saw mostly sky. With his father standing next to him, José wasn’t an outsider; he had a past that extended far beyond the town of Brooksfield. He learned to steer on his father’s lap, making loops in the open gravel at the back of the trailer park, and he drove a tractor for the first time when he was eleven—the earliest his feet could reach the pedals. He bought his first car at fifteen, before he’d even started thinking about his future. Before his father died and he was left alone and directionless, the only outsider in a town full of native sons.
_
The tow truck sort of fell into his lap, but it felt like divine intervention. A high school
graduate with a few community college classes under his belt, including a certificate in
automobile maintenance, he was still floating along at a part time job and spending most of his days staring at the closed bedroom door that used to belong to his father. Never opening it, never going inside. And never looking for more in his life. He was stagnant like the water that collected in the potholes throughout the trailer park and he was probably going to start growing algae soon too if something didn’t change. Then just when he needed a direction or a plan, his boss had a stroke. Gerald Thompson didn’t die like his father had and there was some loophole in his insurance, so there wouldn’t be any money coming in unless someone kept the business running. Someone who knew a thing or two about cars, the almost-widow said, and someone who could keep family business inside the family. Mrs. Thompson had taken care of the behind-the-scenes aspects of her husband’s work as long as José had been around, but she didn’t know how to drive the truck or operate the lift. That part she needed him for, she said. So she promoted José to lead driver and manager, and left the business to him in her will—the sons of Thompson and Sons had long since left the fold, in search of a bigger, better life elsewhere. And like most who left, they never looked back.
_
José kept the name when the Thompsons both died, Gerald four months into his invalid
state and his wife shortly after. It wasn’t part of the agreement, he just didn’t see the point in changing anything. Everyone in town already associated him with the business and they waved and called out his name when they saw the big blue T on the side of the truck. It was the right thing to do. And it gave him a way in. He wasn’t the orphan José from who-knows-where anymore, he was the Thompson’s guy. He was almost one of them. The first girl he hired to answer the phone called him Mr. Thompson; she also couldn’t figure out how to put clients on hold so he had to let her go. Then, things settled into place when he found Roxana. She was smart, capable, a few years older than José, and had a big boyfriend who sold bail bonds in a rundown building next to the courthouse. It was a smart business decision to hire someone he wasn’t attracted to. And it paid off. Business was good.
_
He was the first number people called when they had a wreck or their car stalled out
away from home. He was thought of often but this time it wasn’t a fender bender or an absent-minded driver who ran out of gas. The car was totaled. José pulled up just as the EMTs were loading the driver into the back of the ambulance, blood soaking through the patches of gauze. He turned his head away. He couldn’t look without thinking of his father, wounded by the side of the highway, wondering why his son hadn’t shown up when he needed him. Blood draining onto the asphalt and essential parts scattered across two lanes and into the dirt. José shook the image from his memory and focused on the car in front of him. Shattered glass and chunks of metal covered the pavement with an uneasy kind of twinkle; the entire bumper sat in the road. Crumpled metal with no rust spots and chunks missing in the bright blue paint—the car had been well taken care of. So he took his time in collecting every piece. He loaded the crushed shell onto his truck, then picked up a few of the larger parts and strapped them to what used to be the hood; the smaller bits went into a bucket he kept in the cab, safest close to him. He didn’t climb into his truck until he had everything the police would let him take, and a promise they’d return any other pieces they found directly to him. Buck, the cop in charge at the scene, tapped the side of his door like he was giving José permission to leave.
_
“You don’t take ‘em to the salvage yard much, do you?”
_
“Just Christmas and New Year’s, mostly,” he said. “And Mr. T usually took care of
those.”
_
*
_
Like most places in town, the salvage yard was off the highway. José almost missed the
turn because the sign was back from the road, overshadowed by the cemetery just the other side of the gravel drive—the cemetery he hadn’t stepped foot in since the day of his father’s funeral. A line of full grown Oak trees cast one large shadow over the road in front of him and blocked out most of the view, but bursts of green grass and slices of head stones showed through between the trunks. It was strange that the sunlight and color came from the graveyard side. The driveway was long and narrow; he couldn’t see the end until he was there and the gravel widened and then the ground transitioned into soft dirt. A sprinkle of light brown dusted his windows like cinnamon. He let the truck idle until someone walked out of the small building off to the side of the open space. It was a man in coveralls and a cap that covered half his face in shadow. All that showed was a brown and gray beard and the pointy tip of his nose. The man walked part of the
distance to the truck and stopped.
_
“Put her anywhere,” he said, then turned and walked back into the building.
_
José found a spot for the remains of the car, next to the rounded top of what used to be a
Volkswagen Beetle before the bottom half was cut out from under it, and lowered it gently to the ground. It was his first total in all the years he’d been driving the truck, and there was something sad about giving up hope—even for a car. He waited a few minutes, in case there was something to sign or some protocol to follow. But the yard was still, quiet. Piles of steel and rubber scattered around the dirt, hunks of unrecognizable material. Nothing creaked or strained, there were no sounds of machinery in the background. At the end there was only silence. He brushed the sadness from his shoulders and headed back down the gravel drive the way he’d come in.
_
*
_
José had lunch at the diner off Main at least twice during the week. It was a good excuse
to get out of the office and sit on a bench that wasn’t inside his truck. Most people preferred the buffet restaurant by the highway, and the line out the door proved it was good, but he didn’t want to spend his lunch break trying one more way to fit in with the crowd. At the diner, he always got a table right away and his tea glass was never left empty for long. He liked that he didn’t need to read nametags to know anyone’s name and that the food was predictable—small town, like him.
_
After April set his plate of fried chicken in front of him and topped off his sweet tea, she
led a woman he’d never seen before to the table across from him. The woman clearly wasn’t from town; she was dressed in a dark gray pantsuit and her short hair was cut at an angle. She couldn’t have looked more city if she’d tried. José was too far away to hear her order, but he wasn’t surprised to see a salad when it arrived at her table, or the absence of tea. The woman must have felt him staring because she turned her head and looked right at him. Those eyes. A mix of brown and gold he recognized. Those eyes looked at him like they knew him too. The woman turned back to her food and no matter how he strained his neck or where he scooted in the booth, he couldn’t get another glimpse of her face.
_
He asked April if she knew her, if she was kin to someone local.
_
“The woman in the sunglasses?” April rested a hand on his shoulder and motioned
toward the woman’s table with her chin. “I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know a soul here, or someone’d have told her she could leave the suit at home.”
_
*
_
José got a call to pick up at the Food Lion. He found the car in the lot easily, smoke
pouring from the hood and the owner waving a newspaper at it as if that would solve the
problem.
_
“Thank goodness you’re here.” The woman stepped back from the car and spread her arms out wide, offering the car to José. “It’s my son’s.”
_
The car was old; the fat, low body of the 1970s in an orange-ish brown that had started to
rust at the corners. It likely wasn’t worth saving but the mother wasn’t the one to convince.
_
“Let’s get you out of here.” José put his friendly smile on his face and his hand on the woman’s shoulder. Driving a tow truck involved a lot more comforting than most people realized; part counselor, part technician. “Are your groceries in the car?”
_
“In the trunk,” she said. “I forgot about them.”
_
José moved the groceries into the cab of his truck and helped the woman up into the
passenger seat. It was more comfortable than it looked—enough for him to ride around in all day without a backache. She wouldn’t want to see the process of getting the car hooked up, anyway. Like watching your child get a shot at the doctor’s office, Gerald used to say. Best not to look.
_
He did the work quickly and attached at the back of the car so there’d be less chance of
drag or bounce noises, and less risk of the car falling apart completely on the way to the shop. He hooked the final safety chain in place and walked around to the side of the truck. A tall man stood a few feet ahead of him, pushing an empty cart back into the row with the “Return Carts Here” sign. The man turned, and José stopped. That profile, it froze him in place. The sloping nose with a bump on the bridge, the angular jaw covered in stubble and the top lip overshadowed by a mustache. José’s breath caught in his chest, his legs went shaky. His father was dead. He had been the one to make the funeral announcements, pick out the casket and flowers without any guidance. He hadn’t seen the body—too damaged to identify, the police had said—but they’d matched the DNA and he’d held the death certificate in his hands. It couldn’t be him. The man smiled at José, nodded a friendly greeting before he disappeared into the rows of cars around them. Definitely not him. It was just the nose and the story his father had told him about the one and only bar fight, before he’d moved to Brooksfield, that caused it. José shook off that old feeling of unexplained trouble and got in the truck. He was fine and he had a job to do. He didn’t have time to worry that he was losing his mind.
_
*
_
He started looking over his shoulder more, paying attention to the details and people
around him. The chins, the lips, the look that came from behind the eyes. A sign of recognition from either end; he didn’t know what he was looking for, not really. But he wanted to be ready when he saw it. He felt something changing inside him, breaking open and pushing at his ribs. And it wasn’t just him. The sky seemed closer, darker, and the air was thick and electrified—more than just humidity before a storm—and it was constant. The birds chirped louder, seemed to hover in the air, and the cicadas buzzed gentler as if the world was moving in slow motion and José was the only one at normal speed. The people he interacted with on a daily basis were unchanged, unaware even, that anything around them was different. No one else seemed to notice the reverberating clang of the church bells or look twice when strangers smiled at them. Roxana rolled her eyes when he asked if she’d noticed anything weird.
_
“Just you,” she said. “It wouldn’t hurt for you to date once in a while. I know a girl.”
_
José brushed her off—her friends were only interested in a “nice guy” in between large,
muscular jerks. José didn’t have time to be somebody’s palate cleanser. She shrugged and went back to her work, and he watched out the window for people passing by on the sidewalk. Everything seemed normal. People walking to the diner down the street, stopping at the bank, looking both ways before stepping into the crosswalk. Maybe it was just him, something off in the way he saw the world. Maybe it was all in his head.
_
*
_
He went to the doctor, but it turned out there was nothing physically wrong with him.
Body, eyes, hearing, reflexes all fine. “Grief works in different ways for everybody,” the doctor said, and looked at José like those words could right his world. Then he left him sitting in a flimsy gown, to find his own way out. In the hallway a nurse in teddy bear scrubs smiled at him as he passed. A faint pink line started behind her ear and ran down her neck—a scar, relatively fresh. Some people could be pieced back together, if the damage wasn’t beyond repair. If their loved ones showed up and got them to the hospital in time, if they’d done their duty and prevented the injury in the first place. He pushed the image from his head and the tingling feeling from his fingertips. He squeezed his hands in and out of fists, and focused on what he knew was real: the air on his face, the clouds drifting across the sky, the sound of the traffic on Market Street. He was the odd man out. He didn’t have to understand the world around him, but he had to function in it. He had to live.
_
*
_
José went back to ignorant bliss. He couldn’t stop himself from recognizing pieces of
people he didn’t know or seeing the scars and remnants of black thread in skin. But he stopped wondering about it, stopped paying attention. And he stopped looking around for someone else to see it with him. He moved through the moments of daily life as if he were on cruise control: work, church, laundry. He spent his spare time building model cars in the garage and practicing his strike at the county lanes so he’d be ready for the season. It was important to make his life look just like before. To fill up all the slots of time left open by the absence of his father. That was the way to make healing complete—something he wasn’t sure was possible but the brochures made it sound good. Complete, that’s what he wanted to be. So he took Bill up on his offer to join the weekly poker game in his basement. The routine was good for him; so was being around other people who had all of their original body parts—he checked them for scars at the first game. They were clean, exactly how he remembered them from high school. There was a limited list of topics allowed at the table—death and feelings weren’t among them—and José took the opportunity to get grounded in the restrictions. Life was the way it was supposed to be, and nothing else. José got comfortable again.
_
One evening, on the way home from the bowling alley, he stopped in at the bar off Old
Mill Road. He wanted a beer and didn’t feel like going to any of his regular places, or like sitting at home in front of the TV for yet another night. He needed people. He needed a distraction. So he picked a stool toward the end of the bar, close enough to the dart board to be a part of the action without stepping up. He put money on the game and chatted up the guys at the small table across from the bar. One was a mechanic he knew of, but didn’t really know, and the other was the older brother of a guy he went to high school with. There were only about three degrees of separation in a town as small as theirs; no one was a total stranger.
_
José was two beers in and deep in a conversation about horsepower and torque when a flash of light caught his eye. An older man stood at the bar, leaned over the gap in stools and said something to the bartender. The man held a wad of cash in his right hand, and when he moved light bounced off the silver money clip in the center. José shrugged away the stab of recognition in his gut. Many of the older generation could not be forced into the modern convenience of a wallet or joining Triple A. Old Timers Roxanne called them, but they helped pay the bills—usually in cash. José was about to turn his attention back to the dart board and his own growing pile of bills when the man reached his other hand out to grab his glass and there another flash, more recognition. José knew that watch. The accordion spring of the silver wrist band, the lines in place of numbers that had impressed him the first time he saw it. But it was the missing piece of silver in the center of the band, near the watch face, that made him sure. That watch belonged to his father. He remembered the moment that piece knocked loose on a pipe beneath the sink he had been working on, and how his father refused to get it fixed or buy a new one. It was the first thing he’d bought once he paid off the trailer, and he wasn’t going to replace it because of one crack. He’d worn it every day. And it had been buried with him.
_
José grabbed the man’s wrist. “Where did you get this?” He squeezed his fingers tight
around the bone so the man couldn’t pull free.
_
“What do you care for?” The man didn’t try to pull away, but he let go of his glass and
relaxed back against the bar.
_
“I know who it belongs to.”
_
“Maybe it used to, but it belongs to me now cuz I bought it in a pawn shop.”
_
José let go. It didn’t make sense but he couldn’t argue either. He saw the watch in the
plastic bag of his father’s belongings after the accident, streaked with blood but not a scratch on it. Then he saw it, cleaned, in the box of important things to go into the coffin with his father. He felt the tick of the time still passing after death when he leaned down and placed the picture of the two of them in the box, scooted the watch to the side and slid his copy of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel underneath. He knew what he knew even if it didn’t make sense and he couldn’t prove it. Even if the man at the bar had squat, meaty hands nothing at all like his father’s. Even if he was the only one who felt that something was not right in the world.
_
He couldn’t sit at the bar any longer and he didn’t want to go home. He knew he probably shouldn’t have driven, not because of the beer—two beers wasn’t much different than water—but because of how off-kilter he felt. How alone. There was only one place that would make him really feel better, so he drove to the shop, grabbed a couple more beers from the mini-fridge in his office, and climbed into his truck. Not into the cab with the cushioned seat and stereo. He hoisted himself up onto one of the big tires and over the side of the truck, where he landed in a heap. He scooted around the lift and leaned against the back of the cab, his head just under the window that looked inside to his usual spot. He was having a hard time feeling usual. He popped open a beer and tipped back his head, let the liquid wash over his tongue and rush down his throat, cold and bitter.
_
*
_
The sound of Roxana’s voice woke him. She was close, saying his name over and over. It
took him a moment to realize it was her hand on his shoulder, shaking him, that made his body slosh. He opened his eyes. “I’m awake.” He shook himself free and pushed away from the side of the truck, from slumping to sitting. He blinked and rubbed his eyes with the backs of his hands. His skin smelled like stale beer. Everything smelled like beer. Empty cans were scattered around him in the truck bed, some crushed like he might have tried smashing them against his forehead and one still half full with warm beer pooled beneath it.
_
“You’re a mess.” Roxana tossed a towel at him, one of the old ones they kept in the
garage for cleaning. Then she turned and walked back into the office.
_
It wasn’t the time to try and talk to her, to apologize and explain. She wouldn’t listen
while he was covered with beer and yesterday’s uniform. Nobody would. He had to get himself cleaned up and then clean the truck; a pot of coffee and a bucket of soapy water would set them both straight. He hosed down the truck, soaped it up, and rinsed off again. The work was quiet and there was a rhythm to it that sobered him up and steadied his sloshing mind. Physical labor was good for the body and the brain, his father used to say. It’s all one system. He felt restarted, like the hum of an engine after the jumper cables shock it back to life. He walked to the far edge of the yard, where the concrete ended and the shaggy grass began, stripped down to his underwear and turned the hose on himself. Cold but clean. And when he shut the water off and the sun warmed his skin, he was new again.
_
“Feel more like yourself?” Roxana handed him a cup of coffee when he walked into the
office in a clean jumpsuit.
_
“Thank you.” José nodded toward the cup. “I’m sorry you had to see me like that.”
_
“I’m glad it was just me and not someone who likes to spread the talk all over town.” She
sat down at her desk and took a swig from her own mug. “I was starting to get worried about you, there.”
_
He pulled a stool up a few feet in front of her desk and sat. “Me too,” he said. He wasn’t
going to let the opportunity pass; he had to talk to someone. “But there’s something going on here, in town, that I can’t ignore.”
_
She set her cup down and leaned toward him. “You have got to get a social life.”
_
He couldn’t argue with that, but it also didn’t explain away what he had seen. “I’m being
serious, Rox, last night I saw a guy wearing my father’s watch.”
_
“You’re sure?”
_
“I’m sure,” he said.
_
“Then you should call the police,” she said. “I saw a ‘60 Minutes’ once about a funeral
home that was selling the things people were supposed to be buried in—clothes and all.”
_
“It’s more than that. There are people with scars that don’t make sense, and,” he couldn’t
think of the right words to finish. She wasn’t understanding him. The phone rang on her desk and broke the silence between them, but he’d already seen it in her eyes—the disbelief. She answered the phone in her regular professional voice, with a slight tightness around the edge. She spoke in a low tone and wrote something on the notepad on her desk. Back to business as usual. He stood and went to where he’d set his coffee on the counter, took a sip and another and waited for her to finish her conversation, then prepared himself to go back to pretending.
_
She hung up and looked at him, blinked and tapped her pencil against her desk. “We have a pick up. Think you’re ready to get back out there?” She was talking about more than his sobriety, he knew that.
_
“I’m fine.” He took another gulp of coffee and set the cup down too hard. It made a loud
thwack against the counter. “What’s the address?”
_
“The salvage yard.”
_
*
_
He hadn’t been back on the narrow road since the night he dropped off the totaled car, the night he first felt something wrong in the air—the first time he’d been so near the cemetery since his father’s death. It seemed darker this time, even in the late morning as the sun was high in the sky. The light and warmth didn’t make it past the line of trees. His body went cold, his skin and hair tingled with chill. He couldn’t imagine why he’d have a pick up at the salvage yard—he wasn’t a damn taxi. The only explanation was someone who wanted to transfer their totaled car to a shop for repairs; someone who wasn’t ready to say goodbye and give up. He liked the sound of that.
_
The farther he drove, the less sure he became—about everything. The darkness appeared
to go on forever. And then the road opened up, out of nowhere. He remembered the gravel and dirt, the open circle in the center of the broken cars. Only this time there were no cars. No scraps of metal and no sounds. Open space and the figure of tree tops looming over from the graveyard side. That was all there was. Jose stopped his truck, but didn’t get out. He squinted and focused his vision in the distance, and surveyed the blankness in front of him. There was nothing except a shadow that moved in the building at the back of the yard.
_
He didn’t know what he expected, but all the way to his core he hoped it would be his
father who stepped out of the building. His heart beat his wish out to his limbs, which shook with hope. His father, pieced back together with stiches and scars. His father, alive somehow, and José here to reclaim him like the ending to a myth that didn’t send them all back to the underworld—although he’d gladly go if it meant he could see his father again. If it meant he could undo that night and make a different choice, a better one. If he could go back and pick up the phone the first time his father called him that night, from the side of the highway where his car had broken down. The car José had promised they’d fix together when he had time. Instead, he’d let his phone ring on the bar and focused on trying to fit in with the guys over the pool table. He’d had another beer and told another story, that wasn’t true, about picking up a woman along with her stalled out car and getting more than just a tip.
_
More than two years had passed and still that night played in his mind like it was
yesterday—when he let the memory in. Three missed calls from his father, more high fives at the table than he could count. He didn’t pick up a phone until it was the police calling, urgent, through the bar’s landline. By then it was too late—they were already scraping up the pieces of his father from the highway. A careless driver, they told him, not drunk but from out of town and going too fast when they saw something and swerved off the road, and right into his father’s car. The police told José it was over quick, that there wasn’t time for his father to feel any pain, there were too many pieces scattered too far for him to have felt anything beyond the impact—and then it didn’t matter. He didn’t have anything left to feel with.
_
His father had only left one message on José’s voice mail, to come pick him up or call
him back right away. It was unusually cold and dark that night. “You’re the damn tow truck, son,” his voice said. José had listened to that message at least a hundred times the first week, then saved it but didn’t play it again. His father had never much liked life by the highway—too far away to fit in, but close enough to feel the difference, to see the reminder that outsider is something they’d always be, he’d said. He told José he wanted more for him, wanted him to live inside the town lines someday, wanted him to be one of them. They could both prove his mother wrong. But that night he’d picked fitting in and given up his father—even though he didn’t make a conscious choice, it was a choice nonetheless. A choice he’d take back if he could.
_
José unbuckled his seatbelt and slid down from the truck. He stepped out into the open
space. “Dad?” He called to the shadows. “You there?”
_
“Sorry, just me.” A voice he didn’t recognize came from the building. Then a man
stepped out with it and walked toward José. It was the man he’d seen here before, no face visible under his hat. Now something shiny dangled from his hand. “I thought you might want your father’s car.” He opened his hand and it was keys he was holding. “It took some work and a whole lot of time, but I got it back mostly to good condition. I figured it was worth a shot.”
_
“My father’s car?”
_
The man nodded. “Gerald said it meant something to you, the night he brought it in.”
_
“I didn’t realize there was anything left.”
_
“There’s always something left, son.”
_
José nodded and took the keys before either of them could change their minds. “Thank
you,” he said, and followed the man a few short steps to where his father’s car sat.
_
It was just as he remembered from the day his father brought it home and parked it under the overhang next to the trailer. The car he’d always dreamed of, he’d told José, and they could work on it together. A classic was worth the effort. It was midnight blue, like the sky without any stars, and the silver edges gleamed as if they’d been recently polished. He stepped close and ran a hand along the hood, traced the line to the door and leaned his head into the open window. Leather bucket seats that smelled brand new and a steering wheel with a gouge missing that could only mean it was original to the car—a spot that had taken the impact. He opened the door and climbed inside, let the seat curve against his body. He put the key in the ignition and turned, listened to the loud rev lower into a purr. There was something left.
_
*
_
Emma Burcart holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles and was a fiction contributor at the 2017 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her work has been published in Gravel, Pembroke Magazine, The MacGuffin, and NonBinary Review.
