Callisto Read Free

the yard to the driveway.
    â€œHot day to get car trouble,” he says.
    â€œI know it. The engine’s been sounding bad for three hundred miles. I’m lucky I got this far.”
    â€œWhere you headed?”
    â€œCallisto. Signing up with Uncle Sam.”
    â€œHuh?”
    â€œThe Army. They’ve got a recruiting office there.”
    â€œThe Army?” He made it sound like something bad.
    â€œI tried other work. It all goes nowhere.”
    â€œThe Army’ll send you to Iraq. You want to go up against those jihadis?”
    â€œSomeone has to.”
    â€œIt’s Iraq’s business, not ours. They don’t need no outside interference. We should keep our nose out of it.”
    I heard the exact same line many times before. It’s what most people were thinking, and I could see why, but when you need to be making decisions about where to go in your life, that kind of argument doesn’t stack up so high against serving the nation and making life better for people outside America.
    â€œYou’re crazy if you do it,” he says.
    â€œI want a regular paycheck and a career. That’s what they’re offering.”
    â€œSomeone big as you, you should get on a football team. Are you fast?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œI bet you could block pretty good, though.”
    â€œI never cared for football that much.”
    It’s true, I never did join the team in school, even when the coach kept on at me to be part of something proud. It’s hard to be proud of something when you’re from Yoder, Wyoming, population 2774. And my old man, he wanted me to be on the team so he could have something to brag about. Maybe I didn’t want to do it because of that. Me and the old man never did see eye to eye about a single thing, which is why I left home after school was all over and done with. He told me good riddance, said those very words to me. It hurt when he told me that, but I never did let it show. I paid him back by leaving without saying another word, just got on a bus down to Colorado and worked there awhile in a Denver car wash with a bunch of drop-outs going nowhere. I have never oncesent a letter home to him or called on the phone. If my mother was still alive I would have, but not for him, that washed-up son of a bitch. He had no call to look down on me. All he ever was, after he got busted out of the police force down in Cheyenne for reasons he never disclosed, was come home to Yoder and work at the gas station out on the interstate ringing up change. Some big achievement.
    We got to the car and he looked under the hood, then said to turn the ignition. The engine rattled to life, then quit again, then restarted. “Sounds like shit,” he said. “Why don’t you drive it on up to the barn. I can’t work on it out in this sun.”
    â€œOkay.”
    I kept it firing all the way up the driveway to the yard, where it quit again. He come walking up behind me, shaking his head. Together we pushed it inside the barn next to his truck. On the Dodge’s door it said
Dean’s Lawnmowing
with a telephone number.
    â€œThat you?”
    â€œThat’s me, Dean Lowry. Get the hood up again.”
    He got a set of tools and started poking around in the engine bay, every now and then telling me to start it up, which it never did. After about twenty minutes he says, “I can’t see where the problem is. You might need a complete overhaul on something old as this, engine rebuild, the works. Probably cost you more than the car’s worth. What’d you pay for it?”
    â€œSeven hundred.”
    â€œHey, take it to the scrapyard and they’ll give you fifty bucks for the parts, that’s my advice to you.”
    â€œGetting it there’s the problem.”
    I looked at the rear of his truck and saw the towbar. He sawme looking and says, “I’ll haul you in tomorrow, it’s too late today.”
    â€œThanks,