The Car Wash Redemption

“Seriously?” gasped Randy, “You want to borrow my rifle to shoot what?” “Sorry man, but that does not compute. Besides, I’m out of bullets and the hardware store is closed now and nobody else around has the same gun as I do and, and, and, a million other reasons and excuses why you shouldn’t be thinking about doing what you are thinking about doing. What the fuck’s the matter with you anyway? This isn’t the wild west you know. You can’t just go around, shooting shit up because some guy pissed you off . . . ”

About two hours earlier, Mo had finished his farm chores and made his way into town to go to the bar and have a few beers with some of his pals. Before heading to the pub, he thought he would stop in at the Car Wash and suds some of the dirt and grime off of his truck. Just in case he was able to hook up with some sweetheart that night, he wanted the Ford to look nice. He stopped at Red Rooster to change some bills into coins for the spray hose and the vacuum. He came out with about 10 bucks worth of change and figured it would be plenty to give his ride a good vacuum and a washing before going to the bar to play some pool and see if there were any new women in town. He pulled up in front of the larger of the two washing bays at the Car Wash. No other patrons were around so he decided to do the vacuuming first. He spent two dollars on cleaning out the cab of his half-ton and when that was done he drove around to the back entrance of the bay and drove in. He had just nicely started to apply a first spray wash when a semi tractor pulled up behind him at the back door. He kind of nodded to the guy behind the wheel and continued with a round or two of the scrub brush. As he was finishing with the scrub brush, the guy in the semi, got out of his truck and walked toward Mo.

“Are you gonna take all fuckin’ day washing this piece o’ shit truck or what?” questioned the semi driver.

Sort of shocked by this guy’s rudeness, yet still trying to be polite himself, Mo answered, “Well, I’m just about finished with the scrub brush then I’m gonna spend my last two bucks rinsing it off. Then I’m done. I’ll be gone in five minutes.”

Actually Mo debated with himself, whether he should just drop the brush right then and there and kick the living shit out of this guy where he stood. But, he looked like he was from out of town and maybe had to get going somewhere important so he let his rudeness ride, giving the stranger the benefit of the doubt. Mo had just put his final dollar in the coin box and started the last rinse when the semi driver started up his rig and began to move forward.

“Oh shit,” Mo thought to himself, “This fucker means business.”

Mo jumped back when the front bumper of the semi nudged into the tail-gate of his half-ton. The guy didn’t stop there. He kept driving forward until he had pushed Mo’s truck right out of the wash bay’s front door. Luckily, Mo always left his truck in neutral when he wasn’t in it so there was no serious damage done. Mo ran after his escaping vehicle, jumped in behind the wheel and stepped on the brakes to stop his truck before it rolled onto the street.

Now feeling a little like punching this guy in the face, he jumped out, slammed the door, walked back to the cab of the semi and called at the driver to step out of the truck, “Get out of that motherfuckin’ truck you goddam asshole, or are you too chickenshit to fight me fair and square. Your truck may be able to push my truck around but I can sure as hell kick your ass, you prick.”

Mo was probably standing a little too close to the door of the semi as he spouted all of these explicative requests to his adversary, because when the driver shot his door open, he caught Mo smack in the middle of the forehead, knocking him back into the cinder-brick wall on the interior of the car-wash bay. Mo got up just in time to put his face in the way of a left hook and, for good measure, one more right cross from the semi-driver.

The driver stood over Mo and sneered down at him, in a most Muhammad Ali-like pose, exclaiming, “Get the fuck out of here before I really beat the hell out of you, you little shit. I need to wash my truck and I don’t have time to babysit your scrawny little ass.”

And then, just to add insult to injury, he jumped forward at Mo with a menacing glare and a threatening hand gesture. Mo pulled himself up and limped toward his own truck.

He opened the driver side door, gingerly climbed in, did up his seat-belt and then rolled down his window and yelled at the guy, now holding the sprayer hose, “Fear the fuckin’ reaper you fuckin’ fuck.”

Then he sped off, sending a cloud of dust and a shower of pebbles and loose gravel in the direction of his oppressor. In his understandable rage, Mo forgot about the bar for the time being and headed home so that he could remove the blood on his face and arms. He ran into the house, showered, put on a change of clothes, came back out just as quickly and jumped in the truck and darted back into town.

As he came into town and drove toward the bar, he looked over to his left, and there, parked alongside a couple of other semi trailers, settled in for the night, was the truck – the truck driven by the prick – the prick who pushed him out of the Car Wash and then punched him in the face.

“This guy was in a hurry? – For what? Just so he could park his ugly fuckin' yellow rig and go to sleep for the night? Fuck me man. How does suck my dick sound you bastard?” shaking his fist through his open window and then continuing, “Your truck doesn’t even look that clean, asshole.” Mo ranted on, “I gotta get Randy’s gun and shoot that fucker!”

He thought he might run into his friend Randy at the bar, but he wasn’t there so he went into the lobby and gave him a ring on the pay phone.

“Randy, this is Mo. I need your hunting rifle. I gotta shoot some motherfuckin’ semi driver who rammed my truck out of the Car Wash and then used my last dollar to wash his truck. And . . . then he beat me up. I need to fuck this guy up really good.”

Randy did his best to calm his buddy down and then finally advised, “OK, don’t do anything stupid. Where the hell are you right now?”

“At the bar,” answered Mo “Get down here. I’ll wait for you.”

By the time Randy finally arrived at the pub, Mo was well into his second beer and he was playing pool with a couple of the local women.

“Makin’ any money there bud?”, joked Randy, toward Mo.

“He’s tryin’ to make time, more like,” answered one of the girls.

“Sounds about right,” said Randy, “let’s talk old friend.”

Mo handed the pool cue to another guy watching the game and then sat down at a table in the corner with his friend. Mo started in on what had happened earlier in the evening at the car-wash. Randy listened attentively, trying his best not to laugh out loud at the misfortunes of his friend.

When Mo finished his tale of woe, he looked straight at Randy and, now having calmed down several notches, said, “OK, let’s go drag this guy out of the sleeper in his truck and beat the shit out of him.”

Randy chuckled, “By the look of your eye there, that didn’t really work for you, the first time you tried, did it now?” Randy went on, “C’mon now bud, you’re not a fighter – you’re a lover . . . er, well maybe not a lover either, but you are for sure not a fighter. You’re more of a sinister-type, joker kinda guy. Think hard now, what trick could you play on this guy to get back at him that would be really fun to watch from a distance?”

Mo thought for a moment and said with a sudden flash of brilliance, “I could let the air out of all his tires!”

Randy clapped his hands, “Now you’re firing on all eight bud. The only problem with that one is, that he probably has anywhere from eight to ten wheels on his tractor and that would take a bit of time and he would probably wake up and catch us in the act when he heard the air hissing out. It’d be hard to get to the inside duals on the back too. We can try it if you want, but I know you can come up with something better.”

The two of them offered and presented several other options for attack, each of which may have done the trick, but eventually discounted all of them.

Mo thought for a couple of minutes more, and then jumped to his feet, “I've got it. I've got it. It’s gonna be great.”

“Spit it out bud. What’ya got?”, asked Randy.

Mo went on, “I’ve got about 200 feet of steel cable at home that I picked up at the garbage dump last week. I thought I could use it for something but I know now I never will. It’s got loops at both ends too. We could wind one end around the guy’s rear end and then run the cable about a hundred and fifty feet toward the railway tracks and hook the other end to the underside of one of those train cars that have been sittin’ on the side tracks for the last 50 years. I think I’ve seen that on ‘Smokey and the Bandit’ or ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’ or something – I think it’ll work.”

“My boy, I think you are truly an evil-minded genius. I am indeed most proud. All those many hours of high-culture television you watch, are really starting to pay off. Do you have any of those big old padlocks you used to own, still hangin’ around?”, asked Randy.

“Yeh, quite a few. But, I don’t have the keys for most of them,” stated Mo.

“Even better. As long as they are still open to start with,” finished Randy.

Mo reconsidered a moment and asked, “What if he checks around his truck in the morning when he wakes up and sees the cable before he takes off?”

Randy was quick to answer, “It won't be quite as much fun then, but it doesn’t matter because he still has to find some way to get it unlocked and off his truck before he can go anywhere. We can be sitting across the street watching the whole thing. We could maybe even sell tickets. I know a couple of guys that would pay good money to watch that sort of thing.”

The boys left the bar and drove out to Mo’s farm. They loaded the cable into the back of Randy’s truck, found a couple of open padlocks and took off back to town to start the mission. They located the semi truck. It was still parked between two other units so it was easy to hide their own truck from sight. Under cover of darkness and hooded faces, they unloaded the cable, which was a lot heavier than when they had loaded it earlier, using the front-end loader on Mo’s John Deere. With great effort, they dragged the coil toward the train car nearest the semi in question. They wrapped the cable a couple of times around the undercarriage frame of the railroad car and secured it tightly with the padlock, then locked it up. They pulled the free end of the cable in the direction of the semi tractor and, as quietly as possible, wrapped it around the housing for the rear-end differential of the truck. Again, they secured and locked the loose end with the padlock. As it turned out they had about 20 feet of slack cable to spare so they were able to flatten it next to the ground, hiding it from view in the tall grass at the back of the truck. They stealthily scrambled back to Randy’s truck and executed an obligatory ‘High Five’. All that was left now was to go get some binoculars and find a nice overnight parking spot on the other side of the highway – a spot from which to view the spectacle which would no doubt take place sometime early the next day.

Just after sunrise the next morning, our boys were rewarded for their efforts put forth the night before. As Mo and Randy peered through the windshield of Randy’s truck, with their binoculars tracked on the semi tractor across the highway, the driver started his vehicle. Grey exhaust puffed out of the stacks on either side of the cab. He popped out of the driver-side door and walked around the front of the truck stretching and yawning as he went. He seemed to be checking tires along the way. The boys removed their eyes from the field glasses, looked at each other and nodded, then laughed.

“That could’ve been it right there!” chuckled Randy.

Back on the lookout, they watched as he made his way to the rear of the truck.

“This is going to be the moment of truth,” said Mo.

The driver stopped at the rear passenger’s corner and turned away from the highway and toward the train car. He unzipped his trousers and began urinating in the direction of the railway tracks.

At this point, let’s pause to reflect on what could well have been a moment to lessen the impact of Mo and Randy’s hard work. Depending on the scenery and the ambience of the morning, a man could look at a lot of things in his immediate surroundings while taking an early-morning piss in the great outdoors, and, not really see anything. Or, he could observe with great scrutiny and comprehend all that is within his field of view. The boys were lucky this time, as the driver did not notice the steel cable originating from the train and inserting on the rear of his truck. He finished his business, rezipped his fly, and continued his inspection of the rig. Once around to the driver’s door, he climbed back in. The engine revved up a couple of times and more smoke billowed from the stacks into the cool morning sky. The windshield wipers cleared the fog off of his front windows and this signaled to Mo and Randy that take-off would surely happen within minutes. The held their breath collectively as the truck shivered into gear. The wheels began to roll and the truck moved forward.

“Any second now,” one of them shrieked . . .

As the driver’s forehead bounced once off of the steering wheel and then instantly whipped back into the headrest of his captain’s chair, Mo and Randy whimpered and squealed in delight. Almost as instantly, the semi tractor bent forward, dug into the ground and stalled. The columns of white exhaust were no more. Even the truck itself emanated an air of surprise as it ground to a definitive halt. The morning regained its silence. Birds could again be heard chirping their greetings to the world. A rooster crowed in the distance.

“This is fuckin’ beautiful man,” cried Mo as he adjusted the focus on his binoculars. High five time.

The driver literally somersaulted out of his cab and scurried in sheer frenzy to the front of the truck. Nothing there. The boys rolled around inside the cab of their own truck, gasping for air and hooting in sheer ecstasy. The semi driver ran around to the back of his truck and kicked at the taught, out-stretched steel cable connecting his ride to the abandoned railway car a couple hundred feet away.

“I bet right about now, that guy’s thinking, like, ‘WHAT THE FUCK?’ ” laughed Randy.

The boys howled and then they howled again. And then, they took a minute to recover. And then, they howled some more.

“Should we drive over there and laugh at him?” queried Mo.

“No fuckin’ way,” replied Randy, “Have you ever walked up to a live badger that’s caught in a leg-hold trap? Same fuckin’ thing, except that guy’s not trapped. His adrenaline level is so high right now – he would spring on us like a velociraptor and devour us in one bite. Let’s let him cool down a little and just watch. I want to see what he does next.”

The two semis that had been parked on either side of him during the night had both departed, so there was no help to be had from them. It was 5:48 in the morning so there were no service stations in town open either. This guy was basically fucked where he stood. He got into his truck and started the engine. He backed up, got out again and went around to examine the now-slackened cable. The two boys howled again as the driver appeared to throw a bit of a tantrum. He pulled a cellphone out of his jacket pocket and punched in a few numbers. After a minute or two, of what was presumed by Mo and Randy to be a conversation with someone (maybe a towing company??), he threw another fit. The boys sank into uncontrollable bouts of seizure-like snorts. They were in tears. After about 15 minutes of this, they could take no more. They felt that it was time to leave. When Randy’s truck started up, the semi-driver’s head snapped up and around like that of a sleeping cat hearing a bird smack into the window by which he slept. The silence of the morning had been broken by the 427 cubic inches of cylinder displacement in the engine of Randy’s truck. Our villain ran out on the opposite side, toward the highway, waving his arms and screaming for them to come and give him a hand. Needless to say, the boys were well aware of nature's ways of warning against blatantly stupid behaviors. Anyway, they had also seen all they wanted to see, so they pretended not to notice his pleas for help and turned onto the highway and screeched away into the early morning. The rest, they thought, would be sort of anticlimactic at that point. So, they went to the coffee shop and had a breakfast and a coffee and wallowed in their self-admiration for about an hour. They basically analyzed and recapped all of the details of the event from the night before and, they also had to work very hard at containing themselves regarding the ultimate result of their efforts on that very morning.

After they left the diner, Randy and Mo couldn't resist so they drove past the scene of the crime one last time. The semi driver was still propped up against the front grill of his truck, still on his phone and still exhibiting intermittent spells of animated rage.

“That guy reminds me of Yosemite Sam,” Randy pointed out as they left him to his well-deserved predicament, "I paid two bits to get my rig washed and I'ma gonna get my rig washed alright!!"

The guys howled some more as they drove past.

It was then that Mo suggested to Randy, “Hey bud, why don’t you take THIS truck of yours to the Car Wash, and clean it up a little. It could use a little TLC – treat’s on me!!” High five!