The Summer We Washed Cars

mean a few beetles would creep out of the woodwork; I mean overnight, the carpet would become so saturated with them – small, striped beetles of limited and erratic but definitely existing flight – that it would seethe, no centimeter free of them, layered up to ten thick, and they splashed up the walls and fell off, over and over. In my room, the very air went tsss-tsss-tsss as all those little feet scraped over surfaces.

     The first time I woke to them I screamed and an adult carried me out while exterminators came and failed to find a source. I slept on the sofa, my room sealed off with duct tape and plastic bags, for a couple of days… and then they were all dead. I was too young and too often outdoors to fully follow all the discussions about it, but I gather that it was deemed that my room had at some point accidentally become a breeding ground for them, in which they found upon hatching everything they needed to go full-cycle on this thing called life; that it would be prohibitively expensive to strip the room to its very foundations or fumigate to eliminate them; and that it may have had something to do with the house being for sale in the first place. Subsequent years I dealt with it better, eventually finding it to be no big deal. The wasps were another matter.

     My room was also under the attic, and there was a wasp’s nest in there somewhere but removing it would have been as costly as dealing properly with the beetles. We could see where they went out to daylight, and once one of the adults tried blocking that exit off, which is of course how they first figured out how to get into my room. Again I woke to them, because they got up at sunrise and I didn’t. There were about 20 of them and they were just… hanging there. I don’t have arthropodophobia but it was eerie the way they stayed suspended in space, glitteringly beautiful along a sunbeam, almost silent but generating a sort of pulsating near-subliminal hum. I’m also not allergic, but that doesn’t make any – let alone multiple high-powered – stings a happy thing, and I was afraid. These were that long kind of wasp, large, with the pendulous abdomen and elegant, deadly lines. I blithely sat up to get a better look at them. ZOOM! All of them oriented on me instantly and shot to around a meter from me resuming, as I froze, that creepy just hanging in the air. I yelled but they were attracted by that too and nobody heard me.

     In the end I made my way to the door for a very long time. I discovered the pace of movement – utterly glacial – to which their attention stopped being instinctively drawn. One limb at a time I got out of bed: sloooooowly bring one leg to the edge, then the other; oh so imperceptibly ooze my hip that way too; sit up with the speed of mold growing on a log; creep one hand into a good position for leverage; and so on. I don’t have the faintest idea how long it took me to get to, open, pass through, and close the door but I know I lay on the floor on the other side crying from stress and cramping muscles for quite a long time before I summoned the wherewithal to go get the adults. After that it was usual for one or two to get into my room every few months.

     That summer when I was 12, I needed more money. Sure, I got an allowance, but books, even second-hand paperbacks, cost money. Every Saturday saw me champing at the bit at opening time at the downtown used book store, carrying every book I could bear to part with for the bring-two-take-one paperback exchange. Obviously I needed new regular infusions of cash to keep the flow going. I cast about for chores and a neighbor suggested I perhaps wash his car for the amazing sum of five bucks (or to put it in far more relevant terms, five to ten books, so close to a week’s worth of new reading material). When I’d done so he allowed as to how I’d done an excellent job and suggested a way to make something of it, and the next day a friend and I went out door to door. The key to this being possible was that this friend, unlike myself, was not bullied, and was indeed even, for some reason or other, considered kind of cool by the neighborhood thugs, so because he was with me, I could go farther afield and still keep my money, dignity, and all of my skin.

     It went really well. We didn’t know what to charge but we hit on a formula pretty quickly (I don’t know which of us thought of it) which worked out well even later, when it was more than the two of us: we would show up at a door bearing our buckets and soaps and sponges and ask politely whether there were perhaps vehicles in need of washing, and if there were, ask the prospective employers what they thought it was worth. We figured out right away that we were encountering, over and over, two kinds of people: those who did not want or were unable to spend any money on this, and those who were charmed by our our enterprise and thus calculated the amount in their head per child. I don’t mean they thought, “Hey, I should give these kids five bucks each”, but they did think, “This is worth maybe six bucks to me... but then each kid gets three and that’s not much… What the hell, I’ll give them ten.”

     By the end of the first week we had four other kids with us, and it was taking so little time to do such a good job with each car that people were getting impressed and making with more and more dough. The last big money jackpot was a fun one: we made our pitch and then the guy just stared at the six of us for long enough to feel creepy before saying, “I have a truck around the side there. My damn kid took it riverbed racing. It’s been sitting there in the sun for a month. I have a proposal: if you guys can get it clean I’ll give you ten bucks each. If you can’t, no money and you just give up and go. OK?” We agreed to his terms and also to only bother him again if we could clean that truck, he pointed out where we would find it, and he went back inside.

     That truck, luckily with a bed shell instead of open, was clay. Two kids just up and left. I mean, it looked like a solid pickup-truck-sized lump of clay, formed as it dried into the giant hexagonal scutes of some ancient mammal, with weird cylindrical clay projections for wheels and a somehow shocking visual hole where the teenager had rolled the window down to lean out and drive home, rolling it back up when he parked and closed the door to leave the clay-rich soil, around 30 centimeters thick, to literally fire for a month. And that’s actually how we were able to ring the doorbell again around an hour later and tell him the truck was already clean.

      We’d been about to give up when I noticed the gap. It was a tiny space, maybe a couple of millimeters, between the mud right next to the clear glass window and the wall of the truck body. I tugged at it experimentally and a roughly 50 x 50 x 30 cm chunk of the encrusting mud just… fell off. Except for some chiseling under running water to break out the mirrors and suchlike, the whole thing turned out to be a matter of tugging gently at the earthen plates and then hurling them explosively into the canyon behind the house. Around 20 minutes or so of that and we were able to just wash the truck, like any not-so-filthy car, in no time at all. The man was so staggered (under no circumstances did we tell him how we did it) that he just forked over a $100 bill and waved us off.

     The next week, it was all over. It turned out we’d covered the width and breadth of the valley and washed every hopelessly befouled automobile that could be found. Only one person stuck with me that last day, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the same one I started out with (which would mean that by the end of this all, I had three friends!). Weary from hours of traipsing from place to place and house to house, we set foot for home again, but as we passed one homestead I saw that, where it had always seemed still and empty before and no-one had come to the door, there appeared to be someone moving around inside. Being 12, we were obviously deeply offended by making not one single cent from an entire day of prospecting for jobs, and here was One Last Chance, so we rang the doorbell.

     The man who answered was incredibly old. I’m not going to make any guesses how old but he seemed like something from another Century (which in the 1980’s meant something different than it does now, in 2020). He said he’d been alone for a long time, and that it was funny we’d come along just then because he’d been realizing how shabby the front of his house was looking. One element that had been bothering him, he said, was the car – he didn’t drive it anymore, not for a very long time, but it looked like crap there out front all filthy and he was thinking how he might try to find the strength to wash it but didn’t think he was going to be able to. And now here we were. BUT… he didn’t have any money.

     Now, I don’t know about that other kid, but I was opening my mouth to tell him I would just wash that car free of charge and it’d be a pleasure, but he spoke up again. “Tell you what”, he said. “Out back I have my wife’s blackberry bushes. She grew the best blackberries anyone’s ever had. Won at the fairs, gave her pies away for three counties around. If you kids can just spiff that car up a little, just get the top dust off, you can go back there and eat and pick as many as you want! Fill those buckets!”

     Now, where we lived blackberries grew wild. Good ones. Everywhere. We had passed enough to fill our buckets every hour as we tramped around the neighborhoods and outlying properties. We didn’t, therefore, care at all about the blackberries, but I said we’d be happy to take that deal; I don’t remember if my friend said it with me but I do remember we didn’t disagree about it. We got to work, and we did a really good job.

     I know nothing whatsoever about cars, so just now I did an image search on light-green-and-white classic cars, and from what I’m seeing it might've been a 1955 Fairlane. Anyway, it was one hell of a classic car, and in beautiful shape, and as it emerged from the grime we could see his smile growing and growing. When we were done and he delighted, we almost didn’t go for those berries. We were tired and soapy and we’d had, as I said, all the blackberries we could ever want every day of summer. We did go back there, though, for my part so as not to seem rude, and I’m so glad we did!

     These blackberries were like something from another world. Some were as long as my forefinger, as wide as my eyeball, and they were perfectly ripe – ALL of them! – poised to explode on impact with the faintest tart trace under the rich sweet juice. They were, in short, not only perfect but orders and orders above what I even now consider to be a perfect blackberry. It made me think of faerie gardens and pacts with the Gods of Nature and indeed, we didn’t think about anything but eating them for a long, indeterminate time. When eventually we emerged into sanity again, arms purple to the elbows and faces streaked and hilarious, we filled our buckets and took our leave, thanking him again and again, of the old gentleman and his property and his beautiful, foam green car.