"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.

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