BIG BANG THEORY II: THE EPILOGUE

(continued from BIG BANG THEORY I...)

Now here is a moment I will never forget as long as I live. Rather than get out, I just opened my door, hung my head and upper torso down off over the edge of the seat, bracing myself with my two hands in the gravel to keep from falling on my head. And took me a look-see. After a moment I pushed myself back up in onto the car seat again. I let out a long sigh. And then I said it.

“What muffler?”

Now please don’t think I didn’t feel a miasma of guilt swamping my panicking heart at the same time both Wayne and I burst into hysterical, snot-nose-giggling laughter. Because I did. Honest. I was seasick with guilt. Made all the worse by my responsible brother, Denny, fuming at us in the back seat. And who could blame him? (Writing this now, I find myself ashamed of my little turd, past self. Again.) But it was just one of those crazy Gene Wilder/Marty Feldman, “What hump?” moments.

“We’re gonna need a new muffler,” Wayne said.

“Right,” I said. Brainlessly.

“Oh yeah and just how the heck we gonna do that!? On a Sunday? And everything closed?” Denny was pissed.

“Whatta we have for money?” asked Wayne.

I dug deep in my jeans. Pocket change! “We’re screwed.”

It was the same with Denny.

“Well, I do have a little bread in my wallet,” said Wayne. “So… I mean, come on, there’s gotta be a junkyard open on a Sunday. Somewhere. Right? Somewhere around here?”

I hadn’t been thinking about junkyards. I’d only been thinking of the closed-on-Sundays auto parts stores. So there was a glimmer of hope. Then I remembered. “There’s one on the Guilford Road. Half way. About five miles or so.”

Wayne looked from me to over his shoulder at Denny. “Whatta ya say?”

Still glaring, all Denny could do was shrug.

Then, “Well, let’s get these wheels turned around.” He twisted the ignition key in its socket. The engine erupted back to life. A constant explosive assault on the eardrums. Fibrillating our hearts and diaphrams! It was deafening! Inhumane! All those things! I mean, try to imagine you’re standing out on the tarmac with your head just inches below the roaring engine and whirling props of a vintage B-29 bomber! Well, it was worse , I swear. More like having your head embedded inside the engine block itself!

Wayne rolled the big black Plymouth in a wide u-turn, got her pointed back up Mile Hill, and hit the accelerator. Despite my thinking that nothing could increase the hellishness of the volume, it turned out that accelerating could, and did. So. Uphill we roared. And almost simultaneously, two strange and forever unforgettable phenomena occurred.

First, even though you never could’ve expected such a thing possible without somebody consciously willing it so, my ears (on their very own, mind you) activated their Emergency-Self-Protection switch! You know how eardrums will bulge with the thinning air pressure when you’re barreling up a pretty big hill and then just pop when you swallow? Well, my ears never popped.

Instead, it honestly felt like my earlobes autonomically just went right ahead and tucked their own selves up into their respective ear canals! Battening down the hatches, so to speak Plugging the entrances as quick as an endangered armadillo rolling itself up into a protected hard-shell ball. And then, just try to imagine sticking your fingers in your ears to drown out a racket, only you’re wearing a pair of mittens. And then your mittened-fingers somehow get stuck in there and can’t be pulled back out.

Because in other words, I instantly lost a good 75% of my hearing, just like THAT! 

Now, you know those hip-hop/rapper “super-bass freaks” that somehow manage to get a pair of 50-gallon-drum-size stereo speakers installed on the rear seats of their tiny little cars? The ones you can hear ka-boom-ka-booming closer and closer to you from a mile or so away? We had that beat. Think three miles away! Which brings us to the second unforgettable phenomenon that was just as, if not more, bizarre as the first.

Our Plymouth was now broadcasting a pulsating Richter-scale impact equal to a 2000-Timpani-drum Drumroll-of-the-Apocalypse, a drumroll accompanied by 76 Farting Trombones of the Hit Parade! And Mile Hill was crowded on both sides of the road by numerous homes and summer cottages, all the way to the top. So as we began our ascent, the shimmer and quaking of everybody’s front cottage window panes flickering off to our sides in the sunlight, courtesy of our now muffler-less exhaust pipe, looked and felt impossibly surreal.

So OK. Here it is. It began with us noticing just a single family of four, simply standing on the roadside way up ahead and gawking down at our uproarious approach. But then, a man and woman across the road from them, scurrying across a lawn to position themselves for an equally commanding view. And after that, of course, other families and individuals, all drawn outside by the growing Joshua-Fit-the-Battle-Jericho ruckus to line up, and crowd the roadsides for our unannounced, one-clown-car “parade.”

They actually kind of closed in on us from both sides at one point as we rumbled through. Adults waving, reaching out, leering and jeering. The little ones clapping their hands over their ears. Almost a carnival atmosphere. Of course, we couldn’t hear even what we were trying to say to each other, let alone hear the voices outside the rattletrap.And it just felt so embarrassing, being such a spectacle and being stared at like that, like we were just some awful joke! We couldn’t get out of there fast enough but, long story short, we made it through without running over anybody.

And then we were barreling our way through the woods and back toward town.

Words can’t adequately explain how insane, crazed, and bizarre it felt– being so handicapped, so claustrophobic, so… well, like our heads were stuffed inside with cotton batting or something. So hard and nerve wracking as time dragged on to have to endure that deafening onslaught entombing us in that nightmare on wheels.

We stuck to side roads on the outskirts of town to avoid garnering too much unwanted attention. And with the clock ticking, we tooled up the Guilford Road.

The junkyard did have a Sunday-closed look about it. Just a little shack of a rundown garage out front, next to a house nestled up to it on the side. We banged on the front door and finally someone opened it. A little old man of around sixty.

As politlely as we could, we apologized for bothering him on a Sunday but explained what a fix we were in. And asked, Did he have and used mufflers for sale? He said he did, and escorted us into the garage. There hanging up on a wall were three. The only one we could afford was something he called a” cherry bomb.” He advised that our dad probably wouldn’t approve of that one though, as it was one very popular with teens that were into… hot rodding. “Kinda makes your car sound like a motorcycle: loud,” is what he said.

So we’d struck out. And not only that, but the half hour Dad had allotted us had already passed about ten minutes earlier, so we were in trouble. It was either go home right now and face the awful music, or try to think up some Plan B. We discussed this and decided that since we were going to face merry-old-hell anyway, what did it matter if we tried another town first. It was worth a shot.

So we buzzed the outskirts of Dover-Foxcroft again like a low-flying crop-duster, and headed for Dexter, fifteen miles away. And once again we all became deaf as posts.

In Dexter we rolled into the first gas station we came across. The owner there got quite a kick out of our tale of woe, which we no longer saw as funny. He took us into the bay area and showed us another three mufflers. Only one would possibly work for us at all, and it was a muffler taken off a 1955 Chevrolet truck. You could tell because he’d painted “55 CHEV TRUCK” on it in white paint.

There was some haggling with Wayne on the price, concerning what “we” could afford, and then finally the guy put our car up on the lift. I can’t tell you how promising that felt, and the sense of relief it gave me.

The place was going to close at 5:00 and it was already right around 4:30. Denny and I paced, while Wayne and the owner worked away with their heads stuck up under the trunk of the car. Then, after ten minutes or so, like some surgeon who’d been striving to save the life of one of your loved ones in the O.R., he joined us in the front office with a very grim look on his face. The kind of look that makes you dread hearing the words, “I’m sorry, but we did everything we possibly could for her.” What he said instead was, “We got a bit of a problem. See, the diameter of your exhaust pipe is just a tad larger than that of the muffler.”

Our hearts sank. Crap! It wasn’t a fit! So we were dead! D-e-a-d, DEAD!

“However… I do have some flex-pipe. For a couple more bucks, I could make that fit…”

We looked to Wayne, and nodded desperately. “OK,” he said. “Do it.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

We pulled into the driveway around 5:30. And damnit, there was Dad sitting on the front steps, waiting. He got up and met us as we tumbled out of the car, gave us a long dark stare, and muttered something like, “I guess punctuality’s not exactly your thing, is it.”  

I can’t remember exactly what I said, but it was probably some bald-faced little lie like, “Uhmmm, see, we ran outta gas.”

Whatever the actual exchange, I know it helped that Wayne was there. Wayne wasn’t Dad’s son, so he wasn’t about to blow a gasket that included our guest, his nephew. Thank goodness. And honestly? Dad was never the type to blow his gasket anyway. I’ve gotta say, I’d already given Dad so many opportunites and reasons to really read me the riot act over time (some particularly bad ones, in my own estimation). And he always did it calmly, thoughtfully, reasonably, and with much grace.

Dad was a gentleman, and such a gentle man. And on top of that, he was a saint.

So we watched on eggshells as Dad doggedly opened the car door, climbed in behind the wheel, closed the door, started her up, and put her in reverse. He began to back up. But then, suddenly, he stepped on the brake and slowed her to a stop. Shifting her into neutral, tilting his head out the window, and cocking an ear, he stepped lightly on the accelerator a couple of times, revving the engine just a bit, and (oh no!)… listening.

Spooked, the three of us were frozen, surreptitiously eying one another. And maybe their hair was also standing up on the back of their necks. I don’t know. But mine was. I do know I was holding my breath.

“Huh!” he said with furrowed brow. Like he’d come to some conclusion. Then, with a shaking of his head we heard him mutter to himself, “This ol’ crate’s sounding more like a truck every day.”

The three of us did a triple double-take!

And then he backed on out of the driveway and just… went trucking it away up Pleasant Street

“Oh. My. GOD!” somebody said.

“Does he KNOW?” somebody else asked.

“But how COULD he?!”

“I don’t think he does…”

“He couldn’t!”

“But he just MIGHT. Somehow.”

With adults you just never knew. Did you. Most of the time, they knew everything…

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So we let about a dozen years slip by before we finally mustered up the courage to tell Dad our whole story. He surprised us by obviously getting a big kick out of it. And although we pressed him about it several times, he swore up and down he’d never had a clue.

Anyway. Finally. It was over.