The freezer full of meat in Goose’s garage bothered Tuck.
The meat went untouched year after year. Hunks of freezer-burned venison, flanks of beef, filets of lake trout. All packed tight, wrapped in plastic wrap, covered in tin foil. Properly labeled. Stacked according to date.
Tuck’s friend Goose liked to hunt and fish. There was always excess.
That afternoon, while drinking beer from the can – the crisp metallic taste lingering on their lips – Goose worked on his 1972 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am as Tuck sat on that warm meat freezer and watched and drank and listened.
Tuck was a good listener. He had honest eyes, the color of laundry detergent.
Goose groused about his wife. “I know she has ADD, but she can’t even keep the house straight.”
It was a nice afternoon. A hazy dusk settled around the neighborhood. Goose was hunched over the car. The hood open like a hungry mouth. Hands deep inside the bowels of the engine. Twisting and turning.
“That bad?”
“Been in there lately?”
Tuck looked at his friend, his tall frame slouching with gravity, work pants worn, ragged with swirls of grease. “Not lately.”
“There’s a reason for that.” Goose found a pair of pliers that pleased him and pointed them at Tuck. “I want a divorce. I need to move out of this town.”
“Move where?”
Goose whisked at his beer. He often told Tuck his dreams of waking up alone in Washington State, or building a log cabin in the woods of Oregon, feeding off the land.
“I hear Oregon is beautiful.”
“You always say Oregon.”
“Yet here I am.”
That’s the way it was. Ryan Tuck–with his ungainly feet crossed over one another, his face darkened with a shadow of stubble–would sit on that warm freezer of meat, Indian style, listening to David Goose spew, his face laggard and bored by evening’s end.
Tuck couldn’t understand why Goose disliked his wife. Nancy was pretty in a burned-out way. Blonde hair, dark roots; a chalky face with pink glossy lips. In high school, Tuck had asked her to the Fall Harvest dance, but she’d already accepted Goose’s invitation.
What stuck with Tuck is how Nancy refused; touching his arm, pouting, her lips curled as if to say, “I feel sorry for you.”
“I can’t stand the relationship,” Goose said. “It’s deteriorated.”
“Women.” Tuck wiped his mouth. “They’re a different breed.”
Goose encouraged his friend. “Tell me more, preacher-man.”
Tuck waved his beer can like he was at a podium giving a lecture. “Once you accept the differences between men and women, your life will become more manageable.”
Both men were buzzed. Not drunk, but light in the head, wordy. They talked about quitting their jobs, leaving their wives, buying cars, and, lit by the cruel desperation that someday their life would be simple, what it’d be like to win the lottery.
“I’d get out of Detroit. I’m sick of these winters. I’d go to Hawaii and send alimony checks to Nance and the kids.”
Tuck glanced at Goose.
“I’m not a degenerate, Tuck.”
“Never said you were.”
“I’d buy a bigger house, too. I hate to see my boys cramped in that bedroom.” Goose paused. “I’d still be their Daddy. Decent schooling. Decent clothes. Something my father never gave me.”
Goose looked to the streets. The neighborhood was called Ecorse, a blue-collar collection of misfits and miscreants. Ecorse sat on the cusp of Detroit’s city limits. There was trash in the streets near his house. A junkyard sat at the end of the road and made everything greasy and oily when it rained.
Then it was Tuck’s turn to fantasize.
“I’d quit the grocery store.” Tuck had a swishing glow in his eyes. “I’d march into the Shop-N-Save, turn my keys over to Hastings, and spit right in that fucker’s face.”
“Come on,” Goose teased. “You love that job.”
Quitting was difficult for Tuck to imagine. Changing his life would be akin to racing down the highway and suddenly throwing the gearshift into reverse. He imagined the transmission dumping into the street, coasting to the ditch, the car on fire.
“I’d buy a ’62 ‘Vette and drive to the end of the world: California. I’d stop at the water’s edge. Stay on that beach until the water sucked me down.”
On the way home, instead of driving aimlessly the rest of the night, avoiding his wife, Tuck hit the grocery store and got a different brand of whisky and a road map.
***
Next morning, Tuck got to work on time. Always to work on time as his wife drove him out early with her questions:
“Did you pack your lunch?”
“Did you send the electricity bill?”
“Did you wash your teeth?”
Wash your teeth. Tuck never heard it put that way. He didn’t hate Elizabeth, but he didn’t like her, either. She was too religious. He didn’t know how she became this way. He’d look up and she’d be dashing off to a church function or Sunday mass. She must’ve repressed this fanaticism while they were dating, making love in the backseat of his car or on the swing set of their old school playground. She wasn’t so religious with her panties hitting the dirt, telling her future husband to “Fuck me there, fuck me right there!”
After they married, Elizabeth started seeing the face of Jesus Christ in a bowl of spaghetti or the Virgin Mary on a Pizza Hut billboard.
“There she is again!” she’d scream as they whizzed down I-75 toward the Bingo hall. Elizabeth played every Wednesday night. She never won. Proceeds went to the church. Tuck could never see these clandestine figures, though he genuinely tried.
“I don’t see anything!” Tuck would squint.
“She’s beautiful!”
“Looks like a motor oil stain to me!”
Elizabeth preached about piety, the word of God; she quoted passages from the good book, and answered questions aloud with, “What would a good Christian do?”
With Elizabeth, Tuck could not have the same conversations he had with Goose.
“What would you do if you won the lotto?” he asked Elizabeth that night. He never asked such questions of her, and, immediately, he wished he hadn’t.
Elizabeth had the face of a cabbage. Round, pale, but oddly shaped, bumpy. “I’d take care of the kid’s future. Pay off the mortgage—then give some to charity, the church.”
“Wouldn’t you have any fun with it?”
“Fun?”
“Travel the world? Clothes, fur coats, fancy cars?”
“But isn’t it more blessed to give than to receive?”
“You’re missing the point.” Tuck stopped in mid-bite of a bland meatloaf.
“You know what the bible says, dear.”
“Why would I know what the bible says?”
“It says: Every man according as he purposeth in his heart, so let him give; not grudgingly, or of necessity: for God loveth a cheerful giver.”
After the kids were born, Elizabeth lost interest in Tuck. She had long ago lost interest in sex. She didn’t need sex. She had God.
Thus, Tuck always got to work on time.
The Shop-N-Save opened at 8 am. Tuck was there early to open the doors for the butchers and stock boys. They’d enter through the back door with white aprons and leave a bloody mess; gristle in their fingernails, smelling like copper. Tuck’s pockets jingled with keys. He made deposits and the schedules for the checkout clerks.
He complained but enjoyed the responsibility.
Tuck often found himself alone in the Shop-N-Save. He would stare into the meat section, losing himself in swirling daydreams. The meat was healthy, red. The cellophane sealed tight, keeping everything fresh. Today he had more thoughts of leaving his wife, driving to California, dying on the beach while the tide licked his feet.
During lunch, Tuck sat alone at a wooden picnic table and studied the road map. By the end of the break, a smudge of peanut butter was smeared across Nebraska. A dusky ring of vending machine coffee hovered around the expanse of Wyoming.
With a red highlighter, Tuck colored a route across the country. At the other end, he darkened a spot near the coast. The red ink soaked through the paper and stained the wooden table like blood. Place was called Eureka. Near the Redwood National Park.
***
That afternoon, Goose excused himself from Tuck and the garage and the Trans Am and made a special trip into his house. He was exceptionally drunk and Tuck could hear him stumble through the lava rock near the front walkway. The front storm door opened and slammed shut. All afternoon Goose had been distant, his mind wandering.
Tuck feared something terrible about to happen.
He sat on the meat freezer and waited for Goose to return.
Moments later, Nancy screamed from the front door. “Get out of here!” Her voice obnoxious, full of hate. She never wanted Goose inside the house until dinner time. She had a hard time concentrating on the kids and dinner and the soaps and the phone ringing and Jesus Christ did I leave the stove on?
Then the ‘slap’ came. Distinct, loud. Shattering the silence of an otherwise quiet neighborhood. Tuck’s stomach turned like he had ingested curdled milk. Goose had never hit his wife before. At least not in front of Tuck.
Tuck wanted to get off the meat freezer and hide.
When Goose returned, his face red, his eyes glassy, he didn’t say a word. Just went back to work and ignored Tuck, who was sitting and waiting.
Always waiting for Goose to return.
“Everything all right?”
Goose tinkered with the carburetor and then threw his wrench across the garage, the metal end clanking into a garden trowel.
“Thing never gets fixed! The engine idles too damned high!”
“Take it easy.”
“Car never leaves the garage, man!”
Tuck waited for everything to subside. After the episode, Goose continued to get drunk. Tuck watched him drink beer after beer, his Adam’s apple constricting, jumping, the thirst never ending. Goose finally passed out in one of the lawn chairs they’d set up in front of the garage, the cooler of beer between them.
Half sober, Tuck watched the neighborhood come and go.
Charlie, the black mailman with the purple tongue, delivered mail like any other day. Herbie, a 40-year-old mentally challenged paperboy–who never really delivered papers because he wasn’t really a paperboy, just carried old flyers and inserts from the garbage and dropped them on random porches–sailed down the street on his bicycle, the tires warped, his bell ringing in the summer day behind him.
At 7 p.m. Floyd Jackson arrived home from the line at the Cadillac plant. Floyd slammed the car door and stood, stretching after a hard day’s work. He was tall, lanky, with gray hairs on top, almost glittery with its sheen. His nose sharp like a shark’s fin.
Floyd waved to Tuck from across the street and yelled, “Trans Am start yet?”
Tuck jumped from his slouch, surprised. Floyd maybe waved or nodded but normally gave Tuck and Goose the high hat.
“She starts, but idles too high.” Tuck tipped his beer in Floyd’s direction. “Waiting for Goose to wake up so we can adjust the carburetor.”
Floyd snorted and shook his head.
“What’s so funny?”
Tuck thought this an honest question. Maybe Floyd knew something he didn’t?
“You need a professional mechanic to look at that thing.”
“Think so?”
“Car’s been in that garage for years now.”
Tuck bobbed his head like he agreed with Floyd. But he didn’t. He just realized Floyd was patronizing him and didn’t know what to do about it.
“Think we’ll manage.”
Floyd chuckled, his tone thick with mockery. “Good luck.”
That made Tuck’s chest burn, so he called to him sweetly, “Oh Floyd?”
Floyd turned around.
“Go fuck yourself!”
Tuck stared hard at Floyd. Excitement welled up into his throat. He wanted Floyd to say something. Anything. One peep and he’d race across the street and throttle the fucker.
Floyd chuckled, shifted his weight, uneasy in the situation. He then turned and went into the house to his wife, Charlotte, a stocky bulldog-like woman who barked orders at her husband with incisive malice. Deep down, Floyd’s wife was a lesbian.
Everyone liked Floyd and Tuck couldn’t understand it. He was the guy that always gave someone like Goose and Tuck a hard time, whether in high-school or the local bar or the playground. At the block party last year, Tuck overheard Floyd telling his kids, “They’re just a couple of grease monkeys.”
Tuck was the only one who heard him make the remark, and he didn’t have the courage to do anything. He didn’t want to make a scene. People were in a festive mood.
***
Half hour later, Nancy opened the garage door. Tuck waved at her like a passing conductor in a freight train. Dinner was still an hour away. Tuck inspected his friend’s wife. She was confident, brimming with hope, wore cut-off jeans and a shirt that said ‘Bitch’ on it. Her chest was round, perky. She had a weird smile pasted across her puss. “Tuck?” she said.
Tuck got up from the lawn chair, the metal scraping the ground like a claw. He spilled beer on his wrist and sucked it off his skin, the hairs salty and fizzy.
“David sleeping?” Nancy stood in the doorway, uninterested, aloof. She leaned out into the garage, hanging onto the doorjamb, clinging on for fear of getting her feet oily.
“He’s taking a break.”
“How’s the car?”
“We had her purring today.”
The car would never run right, even Goose and Tuck knew that. What else would they do if it did? What purpose did they have except work on a car that never got fixed?
Tuck moved closer. “If we get her running, we’ll take you and the boys out for ice cream.” Nancy wasn’t enthused with ice cream. Something was rolling around in her head. Focusing on the distance. She then refocused on Tuck, a bent curl around her teeth.
“Listen, Tuck.” She put her finger on his chest and twirled, the nail scraping his thin Def Leppard t-shirt. Tuck remembered that pout. “I need help turning on the shower.”
***
The next day, Tuck found himself staring at the meat section at work. Nancy had seduced him, and he didn’t do anything to stop it. Never even saw it coming. Following her upstairs, looking at her behind, Tuck felt sick, crooked on the inside.
He’d seen this kind of stuff on cable television, even pornographic movies. Tuck had once rented Fucking Your Best Friend’s Wife, Part II. He enjoyed the movie, but never thought he’d be doing this to Nancy. Maybe he fantasized, but never pined.
And unlike the skinflick, Tuck was sure Goose wouldn’t like seeing his wife screwing his best friend, nor would Goose jump out of the closet and join in after catching them. That would be unnatural. Still, Tuck expected to hear soundtrack music pumped from the vents of the house. Music he could keep time to.
“The pin on the faucet is stripped.” He said this to Nancy calmly, addressing the situation like a rational human being. But who acts normal when their penis is stiffening?
“David’s neglected it for weeks. Can you turn it on for me?”
Tuck removed the plastic knob. Turned on the water with a pair of pliers. In the next room, Nancy was singing “A Groovy Kind of Love” by Phil Collins. He moved quick to get back outside. Back to that carburetor. And Goose.
“See if this is warm enough,” he yelled over the din of falling water. Nancy came back and Tuck tried not to notice she had returned in a bathrobe, half open. The floor of his stomach dropped. Mist from the shower curled.
Nancy fingered the tepid sprays and said, “Little warmer, please.” Tuck bent over, twisted the pin. The steam cleared his nostrils. When he stood back up, Nancy was naked. Nips a bit warped and sad, but the rest taut and shapely. Her skin white like a wedding cake.
“That should be good,” she whispered.
Tuck’s mind went black with lust.
Next thing he knew, Nancy was perched on top of the sink, his balls swaying against the cool porcelain. They fucked quickly, furiously, not looking at each other. The act was over before they could really enjoy themselves.
“Tuck? Tuck?”
Tuck looked up from his gaze of the meat section. Clutching the keys in his hands. Tony Hastings, the regional supervisor, was screaming at him. Prick had a bushy moustache and looked like a bloated walrus.
“Did you know the back door was open?”
“No, I–”
“Jesus Christ! Anybody could have walked in here!” Hastings’ breath smelled like cheap coffee and soggy cigarettes. A sewer mouth.
“But–”
“Remember the last time you left the back door open?”
Few weeks ago, some street bums that usually slept on the back dock entered through the unlocked door and raided the place. Hastings showed Tuck the surveillance tapes the next morning. In fuzzy black and white, the bums scurried through the super market grabbing hams, sacks of potatoes, a few cases of beer. Except for the loaf of shit near the cookie display, not much harm was done. An honest mistake.
“I should have done this weeks ago,” Hastings said. “You’re fired!”
“But–”
“Give me your keys.”
“But what am I going to do?”
“I don’t care! Give me your keys and get the hell out of here!”
Tuck unclipped the keys from his belt loop. He’d practiced this moment over and over while staring into that meat section. He was supposed to throw the keys at Hastings, spit in his face and drive off to California in a ’62 Corvette.
Instead, Tuck handed the keys over with a dead tinkle.
***
Tuck had time to kill before he went to Goose’s that afternoon. Wandering into the mall, he saw a bookstore and entered. The store smelled like wood pulp, strong glue. He didn’t know how to tell Elizabeth he lost his job.
There was also the Nancy incident. But she was not his biggest problem. Losing his job would get Tuck into much more trouble with Elizabeth. The church needed its donations. The kids needed to be fed. The electricity bill wouldn’t wait.
Tuck walked the aisles, skipped over authors like Shakespeare and Balzac, names he’d heard in high school but never read—all those words hurt his eyes. He came upon the self-help section and began flipping through Auto Repair for Dummies.
Tuck raced to the section that dealt with carburetors.
“Can I help you?” It was a clerk of sixteen. The kid had pimples and a coarse goatee that looked like steel wires from a marionette.
“No, thanks.”
The clerk noticed what he was reading. “You need help, just ask.”
Tuck waved his hand. Lost in circuits and reservoirs.
The puberty-stricken boy went back and joined another clerk behind the register, then whispered loud enough so Tuck could hear, “Must be a fucking dummy!”
Both clerks snickered.
Tuck ignored them and sat at one of the tables in the café, thumbing though the pages. He drank bad coffee and read about the inner workings of the carburetor.
The concept seemed simple enough.
***
At Goose’s, Tuck drank more beers than usual. He was nervous, dyspeptic. Nancy couldn’t hold secrets. She told everyone about Tuck asking her to Fall Harvest. She looked guilty and had a serpentine tongue. Eyes smirched with a tint of disgrace.
“Tuck? Tuck?”
Goose stood above his friend. Tuck was in the driver’s seat of the Trans Am, watching Goose fumble with the carburetor, lost in daydreams.
Tuck wanted to suggest what he’d read in the Auto Repair for Dummies: that the secondaries needed to be closed during an idle condition to tune the carburetor. But he kept his mouth full of beer; the warm, steamy burps rising through his nose like a heating duct.
Tuck was also tempted to suggest they take off for Eureka. Wind their way up north, skirting along the craggy coast of Oregon. Tuck could watch Goose build his log cabin. Live off the fat of the land.
Near the end of the evening, Nancy poked her head out from the garage door.
“Dinner’s ready!”
A stinging sweat beaded in Tuck’s palms. She had a flirtatious grin, but Nancy didn’t even look at Tuck.
Goose waved her off. “Want to eat with us buddy? You’re always complaining about Elizabeth’s cooking.”
Dinnertime was when Tuck split but he couldn’t face Elizabeth now. Couldn’t stand the disappointment on his wife’s face; the crying, the constant pleas to God.
Tuck drifted while Goose spoke.
“Tuck? Tuck?”
The windshield of the Trans Am was dirty.
“Tuck? Tuck?”
***
A constant barrage of bugs slammed into the windshield and left a chunky green residue that slid down the glass and hardened into black knots.
The sludge was impossible to get off with the wipers.
Tuck was in Iowa. Coasting along I-80. Just passed Altoona. He looked at the map on the passenger seat next to the beer and meat, his eyes following the red snake to the end.
He was years away from California, a lifetime from Detroit.
While Tuck raced through those blinding cornfields, the swaying stalks lulled him, and he re-lived dinner with Goose’s family hours ago.
It happened after soup. Tuck could see, clearly, almost euphorically, Nancy spilling the blotchy brown gravy into Goose’s lap like a dirty waterfall, the excess cascading down onto the carpet and forming a gelatinous puddle.
It was an accident. General clumsiness.
But Goose jumped up and screamed, the hot liquid surely penetrating his work pants, scalding his thighs, chapping his crotch. Wide-eyed, Nancy backed away from the table, her dirty blonde hair pulled back with a red velvet scrunchee.
She dropped the ladle and it pointed northeast.
Goose seethed. Towering over the scene. A swirl of fury in his eyes. Rage ready to burst from his lips. Nancy stumbled toward the china cabinet to escape Goose’s wrath. Pressed her back up against the panels of glass. Hands clutching the wooden sides of the cabinet. She waited. Splinters clawing into her fingers.
The cabinet—a stunning cherry-wooded enclosure with glass doors, nary a distress mark, passed down from generation to generation in the Goose family—wavered for a single moment, then lurched toward the ground.
Before Goose could make an instinctual grab to stop it, Nancy was pinned underneath the cabinet. The crash muted and dull. Nancy’s body absorbing the impact. Tuck thought it would’ve been more animated, like the cartoons when a piano falls from the sky and crushes the coyote.
Goose’s boys (both known to be a bit skittish) ran wildly from the room. Goose scrambled to the lip of the cabinet and lifted, his old hernia straining deep within. He got the enclosure a foot off his wife before it slipped and slammed back onto her.
There was a muffled yelp underneath.
“Shit!” Goose said.
Tuck stood back and waited. There was shattered glass on the floor. Odd pieces of silverware clinked in the hollow depths of the cabinet. A soup ladle banged. A lasagna server tinkled. Tuck watched the commotion, helpless.
“Call 911!” Goose yelled. “Tuck? Help me get this off her!”
Tuck grabbed one end of the cabinet, snagging strands of Nancy’s dyed hair in the process. The two pulled the cabinet back to its upright position. Salt shakers and teacups fell to the ground and plunked Nancy’s backside. She was wearing jeans. Some brand cowgirls wear. She remained still on the floor. A crumpled heap of flesh. Blood drooling from her mouth, collecting on the carpet like the gravy a few feet away. Next week Goose would receive a hefty bill from the carpet cleaners he’d pick out of the Yellow Pages.
Tuck stepped back again. Watched as Nancy’s fingers twitched. Goose kneeled to touch her, to caress her, to pull her hair back, but stopped—he didn’t want to injure his wife further. He gripped his hands, the tips of his fingernails turning purple and then white.
“Jesus,” he kept saying, wracking his brain. “Jesus.”
Tuck thought about his wife and the prayers she’d often recite when one of the kids scraped their knee or fell out of a tree. How useless those prayers were.
“We can’t move her, we can’t mover her,” Goose kept saying.
At the sound of her husband’s voice, Nancy began to struggle. Her palms flat on the floor, she pushed herself upward.
“No! She’s trying to move! Tuck? Do something!”
Tuck’s best trait was standing and watching, so that’s what he did, his heart spastic, his friend pleading. Every minute an eternity. Sweat boiled in his armpits.
“Come on Tuck! Do something!”
Tuck burst at the seams and bellowed some sort of war cry. Frustration emptying from his conscience. He got down on all fours and talked into Nancy’s ear, “Don’t move, Nancy! Please don’t move!”
Goose winced at the genuine sentimentality that suddenly possessed Tuck.
Nancy continued to wriggle. Tuck adopted a more soothing tone. Gently peeled back Nancy’s hair and whispered in her dainty ear, “Please. Please stop moving.” Tuck sobbed. Stroked her cheek. Patted her back.
Nancy’s eyes twitched and found Tuck. Darted back to Goose.
“Please! Don’t move!”
Nancy went stiff and stopped struggling. Tuck stood again and backed away from Goose’s wife. He didn’t look at Goose. Kept his eyes on the half-dead woman on the floor.
The two men watched Nancy moaning in pain.
Then Tuck could feel Goose’s eyes inspect him, like he had caught wind of Nancy’s scent lingering on his fingers.
The silence was unbearable.
After what seemed like hours, the paramedics busted through the front door. More abrasively than Tuck would’ve imagined, they fashioned a neck brace around Nancy’s neck and moved her clumsily to the gurney. Her dead weight making the wheels squeak.
The paramedics moved fast. Shouted to each other in a coded language only the educated understood. While Goose signed the paperwork, Tuck leaned over and checked Nancy’s eyes. They were open and roving. Moving between Tuck and Goose.
“Is she going to be all right?” Goose begged the paramedics, tugging at one’s shirttail. He followed the team out the front door and to the ambulance, explaining the situation, yammering on and on.
Tuck stayed in the house. The storm door quieting the discussion. Goose stood at the back-end of the ambulance and bit his lips. Fidgeting as the paramedics explained. The lights whirled. Tuck could feel dusk approaching, though the night would never end.
The paramedics closed the ambulance doors and Goose moved toward the house. Slow and injured, he opened the storm door. “They’re taking her to Oakwood. They won’t let me ride in the ambulance. I have to follow in my own car. You’ll have to watch the kids.”
Goose hesitated, crimped his mouth shut. Fought tears.
“Thank you,” he said. “Thanks for all your help.” He reached over, put his hand on Tuck’s shoulder and breathed in his friend’s face. It smelled like moss and potting soil.
Tuck choked back his confession.
Goose tapped Tuck again and headed down the walk, kicking through the lava rock. Tuck watched all parties drive away to the hospital. The siren fading in the distance.
***
Tuck retreated into the house, drained. The quiet startled him. He began to search for Goose’s boys. “Kyle? Trevor?” he yelled upstairs. No one stirred.
Tuck checked the bathrooms and basement. Checked their rooms, the pantry. He found them underneath the bed in Goose and Nancy’s room, whimpering.
“Your mother is going to be fine. I promise you. You guys want some milk?” Both boys remained. Four eyes staring out at Tuck like scared cats.
Tuck headed downstairs and grabbed a beer out of the fridge. He paced the room, the kitchen, walked around the china cabinet and went to the window. He pulled the curtain aside and choked on his mouthful of suds.
The entire neighborhood was out there staring at him. At the head of the crowd was Floyd Jackson. Shaking his head in shame. Floyd put his arm around his lesbian wife, scoffed, and walked to his house. The others lingered but soon followed.
When the last of the neighbors trickled away, Tuck opened the garage door and popped the hood of the Trans Am. Wafts of grease and oil lifted into his face. With a pair of needle nose pliers, he opened the secondaries and started the engine, revving it until it idled smooth. Tuck came back around, reached under the hood and made the final adjustments to the carburetor. The engine sounded perfect, even.
He scrambled to the fridge and grabbed more beers. He then reached into the freezer and took a few hunks of meat, too. Tuck tossed everything into the passenger seat and backed his car out of the driveway.
The car was Tuck’s now.
He hit the freeway and thought about a rest area later. The ones with a barbeque pit. It was going to be a long trip to California, and he hated to see that meat go to waste.
Photo Source: Magic Tricks
