Never the Same #46 Kirk put in his Time

The fact remained about Kirk: He wasn’t afraid of work; he could sit down right beside it.

            Well, weeks passed. Kirk, working at the Georgia Pacific gypsum drywall plant, learned all sorts of manual labor-type skills like industrial sweeping, precise shoveling, maneuver wheelbarrowing, correct lifting, team moving equipment, and so on. He really didn’t mind the brainless labor; he was kind of a physically active guy after all and had all that time he had to ponder things like the meaning of life. No, not really, but his meaning of life didn’t include manual labor but then again, there he was. So, he pondered things that he could, should, would do in his time off. He didn’t mind the regular bigger paycheck one bit. He could now pay his father’s required rent, a sore subject with Kirk, but he could understand it and accept it at the same time especially seeing he made more money than he had at his other job.

            Kirk decided to take up seeing Sarah Elizabeth again. As usual, Sarah E. still attended high school, rode her and other horses in all her free time. She worked around the high-dollar stables just for the opportunity to ride the high-dollar thoroughbred horses. She rode at a high level because of her skill and enthusiasm well enough to show occasionally at horse shows in the city. She rubbed elbows with moneyed women and hoity-toity riders who thought they were the best in the world which they were not. Anyway, Kirk and Sarah hooked up often and spent a lot of time together at low-dollar venues. 

            Despite spending time with Sarah E., Kirk had time on his hands without the constant racing schedule. With the season now being late autumn there were no crops to work on the farm and his father working at the plant as well, Kirk just didn’t know how to kill time.

There his stock car sat in the ramshackle open garage. He had already removed the offensive faux vinyl top that his brother-in-law had installed for some inane reason, but that silver metal flake? That was not a stock car paint job which usually tended more to be in bright primary colors. On a warm-ish Saturday afternoon he huffed and puffed to push the car out onto the driveway. One of his deep-rooted automotive training pet peeves remained ingrained that an engine should not under any circumstances be started up for only a couple minutes and shut off. The problem he perceived was that all the internal engine moisture doesn’t have time to burn out of the combustion chambers, manifolds and exhaust system and so potentially causing gum, corrosion, and rust. Hence, he strained and pushed the car out by hand rather than a short run and risk damage to his junkyard engine. 

            Anyway, he had an urgent reason, so he pushed the car out to the yard. In preparation, he dragged the fifty-foot extension cord out, got his body grinder, and installed a new grinding disk. He went to work. That work being grinding all that clear coat and metalflake off his car. There was a glittering in the air as the flake and clearcoat finish was launched into the air. It ended up being harder work than Kirk imagined. The clear coat gummed up the abrasive disk, but luckily, because he hadn’t planned ahead, he just happened to have a few extras. Going through that thick paint took time because it wasn’t easy. He wanted to leave the primer coat on the car and whatever paint remained underneath, but it didn’t end up so cut and dried. He ground all the way down to bare medal in spots something he wanted to avoid because in the old garage the car, more or less, stood out in the weather. He thought as he worked along, the metal flake spraying and flying, that sooner or later if he raced again, he’d grind all the paint off to bare metal. He had no real plans along those lines as of yet, at that very moment.   

            A cool wind blew through the yard blowing his longish hair around his neck and making the grinding dust blow in his eyes. Since being left out of his brother-in-law’s garage literally out in the cold, but not actually thrown out, Kirk was left with nowhere to comfortably work inside. He thought it would be nice to be out of this cool wind as it was getting late in the year. He suddenly had a notion. He stopped grinding and set the tool down.

Kirk looked around. The old garage remained too airy and the rotten plaster falling off the walls made an awful mess. Kirk could not deal with that. He had worked on his van’ bodywork in the tractor shed but that had gaps everywhere in the siding boards and the ceiling. Yeah, the roof was sound, but to make the large area wind proof? Utterly impossible. He studied the barn. The large red barn. The capacious barn floors and lofts where his father stored the hay was so expansive so the there’d be no warming it even though the big, huge sliding doors pretty much closed it up. The wood plank floors might be okay, but Kirk couldn’t see that as a garage of sorts.  His gaze moved to the end of the big red barn. He paused at the smaller weathered double doors of the stable.

            Kirk experienced a sudden flashback associated with those doors. Back when he was a preteen, he always thought it would be cool to have a BB gun. His cousins always bragged about having air rifles or air pistols. Kirk never had any preconceived notions of shooting defenseless birds or small animals with such a gun, but he wanted one anyway. Kirk’s father had been a big hunter shooting game birds and deer, but that never appealed to Kirk. Young Kirk asked for a BB gun on a couple Christmases, but he never got one. Eventually, he couldn’t take it any longer and bought a cheap spring-powered pistol with his own hard-earned money. Asked what he was going to shoot, he’d just shrug. His usual favorite answer.

            Just trying the pistol out, young preteen Kirk walked the backyard. He saw those old, weathered doors of the stable. Below the latch, there was a small gap, a hole actually. Kirk, the expert marksman in his own mind, thought he could put a BB right through the hole. (There were no animals inside the stable.) Taking careful aim, he held the heavy gun out at arm’s length and sighted down the sights. His arm wavered a bit, but he zeroed in on the hole. He didn’t know about slowly squeezing the trigger, so he just mashed the trigger. The gun fired.

PHHUUUUT! TINK! TICK! YEOW! #@$! The BB flew high with Kirk’s jerk, hit the metal latch, and struck him in the neck! No one had warned him about putting his eye out with the gun, but the ricochet had missed his eye and hit the side of his neck instead. Yeow! That stung like a vicious bee! Kirk dropped the gun, put his hand to his neck, and looked at it, sure that he had hit his jugular vein and blood was gushing out all over like a horror movie. But no, no blood-stained hand, though it really hurt. Young Kirk glanced around and of course no one was around to witness his painful blunder. He picked up the pistol and ran to the house, running into the bathroom without being seen. Afraid to look but he did, he saw the small red pockmark on his neck. No blood oozed out. That BB was not imbedded under the skin. Anyway, he wore turtleneck shirts or dickies for over a week. His mother finally asked why he wore them all the time. Kirk gave his usual shrug and his definitive, “I don’t know.”

             Kirk felt lucky for not putting his eye out not realizing that years later that a Christmas movie would make a central plotline with the likelihood of a young boy being warned over and over that he’d shoot his eye out with his Red Ryder BB gun.

Adult Kirk stood there glazed over with the flashback still feeling embarrassed over his minor injury that occurred so many years prior. He rubbed his hand across his neck.  He strode over to those doors, spun open the latch, and threw open the doors. The old stable looked a mess. There hadn’t been animals in there for years. Old hay, dust and cobwebs littered the floor, walls and ceiling. Actually, as Kirk stood in the doorway assessing the situation then recalled there were four doors in the stable. Off to the right, the chicken house, to the left the silo access door, and to the very rear, the door to the barnyard. The old wooden stanchions still stood with cobwebs covering, hanging, and stretching across the framework.

Kirk’s stomach flipped and fell. Could this be a stock car garage? Could he picture it as that? Could he work in there? Not to mention he’d have to do torch work and welding in there. Up above the ceiling were piles of old hay. The wood ceilings and walls were old tinder dry wood construction. It did have a good solid concrete floor albeit the manure gutter right up the center. One thing, Kirk surmised, the place would be relatively wind proof, that is, if he replaced the main entry doors. The old family freezer stood up against the left wall. It stood huge and hulking exhibiting those outlawed indestructible latches that could trap children inside, though this one had smaller compartments within which would prevent children from crawling inside.

Kirk considered. Of the possibilities on the farm, this was the only possible place he could work on his car through the colder part of the winter. Yeah, the fire in his belly still flickered a tiny flame to get back out there on the oval stock car tracks and mix it up with the other gearhead boys. Men.

He opened the back door. He retrieved the eight-pound sledgehammer and went to work swinging at those old stanchions. Knocking them down, pulling the anchors out of the concrete, and bumping the braces off the walls and ceilings, he made short work of destruction. He broke them down into sizes he could handle. He heaved them out the backdoor into a heap. From there he moved on to pieces of wood that he heaved out, metal he put in the junk pile, and relocated things that just took up space. In the old garage where the stockcar usually sat, a old heavy duty workbench rested. He tried to move it, but found it exceedingly heavy being only able to tip up on one side. Yeah, it’ll go in “his” garage later on.

As days passed, he’d work on his new space. The years of dust and mess went out the backdoor. He towed the workbench over with the tractor when he cleaned a space for it. He went to the lumberyard, bought a couple sheets of hefty plywood and fabricated new double doors. Kirk didn’t have much experience as a carpenter, but he managed to build the doors, hung them on new hinges. He made a spinning wooden bar as an inside door latch. Thinking about it after installing, Kirk stepped back to inspect his handiwork, and realized that he could lock himself in and not be bothered at all.  On an old west show he spotted a drop hinge similar with a string threaded through a hole in the door. If you’re outside pull on the string to lift the inside latch, if inside and don’t want visitors you pull the string inside. Simple but effective intruder protection. He made several trips to the rock, dirt, debris pile with the wheelbarrow to haul loads back and dump them into the gutter. He realized rather quickly that this was manual labor at its worse and used a week of evenings to fill the gutter. He leveled the dirt and stomped it down. In the lumber pile, the found some planks and put these on top. With some finagling, he got them leveled with the concrete especially after tapping, no! pounding them down into place with the sledgehammer. Seemed flat enough.

Well, we need to realize this job lasted a few weeks as the weather grew cooler. Snow hasn’t fallen yet, but it wasn’t far away. He swept the ceiling, walls, and floor more than once. As the cooler winds blew, the gusts came in the side and back doors, so Kirk realized that they needed to be blocked for him to have any kind of comfortable working environment. That would be resolved later on. One thing needed done right then. He fired off the old tractor, wrapped a chain around that big, ole workbench and dragged it as close as he could to his new garage doors. He got a long prybar, stuck it underneath the bench and rolled the bench over one side at a time. After that, about five rotations got it to where he could use it. He wiggled it into place and was not about to moving that bench ever again!

They already had an arc welder on the farm, so Kirk grabbed it and put it next to the bench. He struggled to carry his well-stocked toolbox into his so-called garage and hefted it up on the bench. Yeah, at least one small area looked like it belonged to a garage. Overall, Kirk thought his space could accept the stock car. It didn’t look like a racer’s garage, appearing still like a cow stable with its white-washed walls and ceiling, but then again, Kirk looked it over, shrugged and decided that it was “good enough.”

One thing Kirk had noticed but hadn’t done anything about was the fact that there was a double step to get inside. There was a low old sidewalk and then a half foot step up to the floor. Ramps would have to be made. He found a couple heavy duty eight-foot planks and some bricks to prop up into car ramps. Kirk eyed the ramps and then the stock car. Well, he had to do it sometime and that time was right then. He crawled in his stock car fired it up and warmed the engine. He backed it up and more or less lined up with the ramps.

With the strange oval track racing suspension and steering geometry, the way the car drove in reverse was wonky to say the least. He got close to the ramps and got out to eye it up. He repositioned the ramps, drove forward a couple lengths and backed up again. The back end of the car started up the ramps, but Kirk bulked with the clutch and the ramps shot out from their positions how he had set them up. He got out to put the ramps back in place. He did this twice more until he got annoyed. One more try! He revved up the engine, let the clutch out and in one bump, bump motion the car’s back wheels made it inside, but because of the weird steering the front wheels missed the ramps, so instead bounced up the double bump with a bang! Still going rather quickly the car went diagonally inside heading for the old chicken house wall fast. He slammed on the brakes. Hard. The tires skidded and stopped. He shut the engine off, took a deep breath, and got out. There it was in its new home though sitting a bit crooked.

Taking the ramps down so he could close the doors, he noticed a new scrape on the edge of the concrete floor. His heart leaped. Looking back underneath the car, he didn’t see any oil. He got down on his hands and knees and looked under the car. Sure enough, there was a shiny new dent in the oil pan. Oh well, that’s the way it goes!    

Still not sure what he was going to do with his now grubby gray primer stock car, he stepped out of the entrance and surveyed the car. He let out a sigh, recalling the summer of unsuccessful racing, though it he thought it was a fun time! He closed up the doors and noticed that a few wet snowflakes drifted by his vision.

Yeah, the long dreary winter approached and Kirk remained pretty much just the same.