Al looks like Woody Hayes in Hayes’ hay day. He’s big and his husky build speaks of muscle replaced by fat. His white hair is buzzed, Marine style, and when he talks he stares right at you.

“You’ve got the right key, it’s the only one I have for the truck,” I said.

“But you use your clicker instead of the key. The key’s been frozen out. I’ll show you.”

We walked to my truck and Al squeezed by my rear view mirror to show me how the key would no longer fit in the lock. He turned to me, kinda trapped by my mirror and the truck next to mine, and told me the recall would replace both the fuel sensor valve and the fuel tank. “The tank’s on order and due in any time. “ He also told me he’d had a death in the family and that I’d have to call Dan, not him, to check on the repair status.

“If you don’t mind my asking, who died?”

“My wife’s aunt but she was also her godmother. They were very close and … .”

“It doesn’t matter who it is, at our age ( I figured Al was maybe sixty-five) everyone we lose is like losing family.”

“I’ve been on the other side, so it all means something different to me.”

“The other side?”

“I had a heart attack and died. Gone on my living room floor. The paramedics revived me, and then I was operated on for seventeen hours at the Mass General.”

“From resuscitation straight to the operating room. That’s unusual.”

“They had my heart out here (Al placed his fist on his sternum).”

“Bypasses? I asked. ”

“Five of them. That’s rare. They did the fifth one on the back side of the heart. That’s why it was flopping around on my chest.”

“How long ago?”

“Nine years. I was forty-eight.”

“Heart disease must run in the family.”

“My father had seven heart attacks. He died on the operating table at seventy-two.”

“I’m surprised he lived that long.”

“I lost three uncles. One at thirty-six, one at forty two and another at fifty-two. I have heart disease on both sides of my family.”

“And you should have been dead at forty-eight, ” i said.

Al stopped for a moment and reached into his breast pocket for a pack of Marlboro’s. He shook one out and lit it. As he exhaled he said, “And when I was in the hospital they discovered I had leukemia. They gave me two months to live.”

“That was nine years ago? You’re way past your due date.”

“I was one of one hundred people on an experimental drug. Because it was new and untested, I had to pay out-of-pocket for it for the first year and half.Thirty-two hundred a month.”

“You’ve been through a lot.”

“My life has been holy hell. I was a prisoner of war in Vietnam at twenty, but I escaped. I walked eighty miles through enemy territory before I found my guys.”

We bounced back and forth between his life, which he kept repeating had been holy hell, and when my truck might be ready. I needed it that night, but we both knew it wasn’t going to be.

We shook hands and as I walked away Al said, “Be sure to call Dan. If the gas tank comes in soon, and it should, we’ll have your truck ready late today.

“I’m a contractor, Al, I live in a world of shoulds. They don’t mean shit.”

He smiled.

“Al, I have one more question. How did you escape? In Vietnam. You had no weapons.”

“I was young, all muscle and mean.” Al paused and looked down. “I snapped the guard’s neck.”

******************

(click)

(click)
The other end of yesterday’s rainbow.

As it fades away.