"The Wrench and the
Cap" by Victor
Rook No, this isn't a little kid's
fable. But it is a story about something
that happened to me as a kid.
My father was pretty much a very disciplined
man when it came to work, whether it was at his
job at a sheet metal machine shop, or at home
doing repairs and little side projects. And he
had a lot of side projects. If he wasn't working
outside, you could expect him to be down in the
basement working on some sort of useful
contraption.
He had transformed part of our basement into
his own personal workspace. There was a large
wooden surface that ran along one of the
sidewalls, just below the cobwebbed cellar
windows, that had three metal vise grips attached
to it. On the other side of the room, there were
floor-to-ceiling metal shelves. And in the
center, a large rotary saw machine. The ceiling
was an ingenious display of rows of glass jars
filled with nuts, bolts, and anything that could
be grouped together. It must have been something
he saw in some workshop magazine. He would nail
the metal lids of jam jars to the beams, and then
when he needed something in a jar, he would just
unscrew it to get at the contents. That part of
the workshop always fascinated me.
Every once in a while I would go down to see
what he was working on, but he mostly just
ignored me, so I left him alone. Occasionally we
would hear a saw running, or him swearing as we
went about our business upstairs. When he was
away at work, sometimes I would go down into the
shop to look around. I used to put one hand into
a vise and rotate the rusty metal handle with my
other hand until it clamped down hard. I liked to
see how much pressure I could take.
One word could best sum up the relationship we
had with our father: Fear. Picture Jack Nicholson
in "The Shining" after he beats down
the bathroom door with an ax and pokes his head
through, smiling at Shelley Duvall with that grisly grin. That
was my father after work, or should I say, after
he came home from the local bar after work. Drunk
and angry.
And so for most every day of our childhood, my
sister and brother and I feared his nightly
return. When his truck pulled up the driveway,
our insides would cave in. What did we do wrong,
what was he going to holler at us for, how could
we avoid him? But there was no avoiding my
father. He would shout out our names within
seconds of opening the door, and we knew we had
to comply and make ourselves present. As the
evening wore on and he had dinner, his
temperament slowly subsided.
Well, one morning as my brother and I were
preparing for school, my father called us into
the living room. He had lost a prized adjustable
wrench that he used a lot, as well as his
camouflage green cap. My brother and I were
assigned the task of finding them.
"Victor," he said, "You can find
my cap. And Danny, I want you to find my wrench.
And when I come home from work, you better have
them."
This was actually sort of an odd assignment,
because I don't ever recall our father asking us
to help him find anything. He would usually just
bitch and swear and throw things if he misplaced
something. So this task that he had given us
seemed like a bit of an adventure, though
slightly tarnished by the threat of punishment.
When we came home from school, my brother and
I went to work. We had probably only about two to
three hours before we expected my father to
return. We looked everywhere: under the couch, in
the garage, in his workshop, in the kitchen
cabinets, in the camper, in the attic. Since my
brother was assigned the wrench, he spent most of
his time down in the basement.
About an hour into our search, I took a break
to join him. My father's workshop, though
ingeniously designed, was a bit messy. The wooden
shelf was covered with all sorts of odds and
ends: metal pipe elbows, nails, screws, a few
tools, and lots of sawdust. As a matter of fact,
there were mounds of sawdust on the floor below
the rotary saw, even covering the exposed part of
the machine itself. I couldn't imagine finding
anything there, but it was obvious how something
could be easily lost.
Well, it wasn't much more than five minutes
later of watching my brother nervously searching,
when I reached down and brushed my hand over a
small pile of sawdust that had accumulated on the
rotary saw machine support beam. And what did it
reveal? My father's wrench.
We were ecstatic. I was so happy for my
brother, because being older, he always got the
brunt of any punishment from my father. I could
see his face light up with a sense of relief. In
my brother's eyes, I was now his little hero.
Almost immediately we went back upstairs to
look around for my father's missing cap. Time was
running out. Like sands through an hourglass, so
were the minutes before our punishment. Sitting
on the couch, I told my brother where I had
searched. As I was speaking, he reached down in
between the couch cushions towards the back of
the couch, and said he felt something. I had
already checked the couch several times, but it
seemed to be something that was really tucked in
there. When his hand finally got a good grasp on
it, he pulled it up. It was my father's missing
green cap.
We felt completely and utterly victorious. We
were the pre-Indiana Jones crusaders, having
found the buried treasures that would lead us to
salvation from our father's wrath. We laughed at
how he had found the cap I was assigned, and how
I had found his wrench. For once, my father was
going to come home and we were going to make him
happy. His sons had done what he asked for, and
the world could now rejoice. It was a great day.
We actually couldn't wait for our father to get
home to give him the news.
About an hour later his truck pulled into the
driveway, and my brother and I fidgeted around in
the living room waiting for the front door to
open. When you have good news to give to someone,
you want them to be ready to receive it, so you
have to give them a bit of time to settle in. But
then again, I was only about seven years old, so
I didn't really know that etiquette.
Still I managed to contain myself until my
father came over to us. "Did you find my
stuff?" he said, looking like he was ready
to bite our heads off and swallow us whole if we
said no. Almost like he was looking forward to
doing just that.
"Yes, Dad, we found them!" I said
with bright-eyed enthusiasm. "And this is
funny, I found the wrench, and Danny found your
cap!" I expected a cheerful response
regardless, because either way, he had his things
back. But this did not make my father happy.
"I told you to find my cap, and
Danny to find the wrench. You're both
punished."
I can't quite remember what the punishment was
that day. I would think it would have been too
harsh to beat us with a belt, or to make us take
a bite out of Lava soap. The soap was only
reserved for swear words. But I do know that I
learned that day that my father was someone even
nastier than I had previously thought. What
father would scold his children for actually
succeeding on a task?
To this day I think about that moment.
Sometimes I wonder if he purposely planted the
wrench and the cap and assigned us the job as a
test. I do know one thing it taught me, to shut
my mouth up if the ends are achieved by different
means than prescribed. Though in my father's
case, I don't think it would have made a bit of
difference.
He was out for blood.
(c) 2008 All Rights Reserved. Contact victorweb@aol.com
|