Dragging Wyatt Earp. Robert Rebein

they just move down the street to the next shop, and then the next. Most of the body men in this town have worked at pretty much every shop in town, some of them more than once.”

      When I pressed further, amazed that he would rehire someone who had quit on him months or years before, he made an even more startling comparison. “Body work isn’t something just anybody can do,” he said. “It takes a certain touch. An artist’s touch.”

      Once the comparison had been made, I could see that it was so. The body shop itself, with its floodlights and pervasive odor of paint and bizarre tools for pounding dents out of sheet metal, was like nothing so much as an artist’s studio. An air of bohemian cool pervaded the place, surrounding all of the men who worked there. The act of smoothing out body putty or laying down a coat of lacquer with the paint gun required poise and precision. There was nothing of the grease monkey in it, no gasoline fumes or black dirt beneath the fingernails. The job was not to repair so much as to transform.

      When I say Challo was an artist, I mean he was a man of ideas with the means to make those ideas a reality. Once he sent me to get him a cheeseburger and fries from his favorite burger joint down the road from the salvage yard. Because the place was more than a mile away, and I had to walk there and back, by the time I returned the food was lukewarm.

      “What took you so long?” Challo asked, pulling a soggy fry from the bag and inspecting it with a grimace. “This shit is cold, man.”

      “It’s a long walk,” I said.

      “Well, take your bike next time.”

      “I don’t have one,” I lied.

      “Really?” Challo asked, raising his black eyebrows in a way that showed he was already entertaining some outlandish new idea.

      Not long after this, he showed up at the salvage yard with an old Schwinn with rusted fenders and rims and an ugly faux leopard-skin banana seat. The bike looked suspiciously as if it had been lifted from a school playground or someone’s backyard, but I didn’t ask about that. For the next couple of days, while other projects he should have been working on sat waiting, Challo lavished his full attention on the Schwinn. First he stripped the bike down to its frame and sanded off all of the old yellow paint. Then he hung the frame on a wire and hit it with a coat of brown primer and two or three coats of candy apple red. The next morning, after the paint had dried, he replaced the bike’s original handlebars with a pair of chrome bars he took off a wrecked motorcycle. Then he cut the bike’s chrome sissy bar down so that the back of the banana seat rested, fender-like, an inch above the back tire. The seat itself he covered in some black leather upholstery cut out of the backseat of a wrecked Cadillac. By now, other guys at the salvage yard had taken an interest in the project as well, and they brought in new tires, wheels, and pedals. Finished, the red Schwinn gleamed in the sun like some extravagantly restored vehicle in a classic car show.

      “Well, what do you think?” Challo asked.

      “It’s great,” I said, fumbling for a way to express my gratitude.

      “Shit, man, that bike ain’t great,” he returned. “That bike is bad-ass, you know what I’m saying? BAD-ASS!”

      “Bad-ass,” I repeated.

      “Now you’re talking.”

      Reaching into his paint-splattered Levis, the body man pulled out a five-dollar bill and waved it in front of his nose. “Cheeseburger with extra mustard and onions, man. And this time, that shit better not be cold.”

      The idea of the artist as renegade and rebel, as someone who marched to the beat of his own drum, a professional in every sense but bound to no man, answerable only to his art and his own internal agenda—the salvage yard was where that intoxicating idea first blossomed into life for me.

      * * *

      I was at school the morning Kenny and the other parts men finally located the other half of the wrecked Porsche 911 that had sat for such a long time beneath a tarp at the back of the salvage yard. Throughout the week or so it took for the car to be picked up in Georgia or California and hauled all the way back to Dodge City, I remained in a state of suspended animation, imagining over and over again the semimagical process by which the two cars would be fused into one. In my mind, the two wrecks were mirror images of one another—both the same color of orange with the same chocolate brown interior, the only real difference being the fact that one had been hit in the front, the other in the rear. My mother dropped me at the salvage yard after basketball practice the day the car arrived, and I ran through the Front and past the long corridor to a spot outside of Speck’s shop where both cars had been dragged. Sitting there next to the orange Porsche was not the clone I had imagined but rather a powder blue 911 that looked as if it had been put through the car crusher. I had never seen a car so destroyed. It had no windows or wheels, and the car’s roof was so crushed that it rested on the tops of the ruined bucket seats. I had heard from my father that the car had been “rolled,” but I didn’t expect it to look like this—as though someone had driven it off a cliff.

      “Man, that car isn’t anything like the other one,” I said. “It’s destroyed.”

      “Nah, man,” Challo said, smiling. “We’ll fix it up nice. You’ll see.”

      I remained doubtful. As much time as I had spent around the salvage yard, as many project cars as I’d seen the guys take on, including two different late-model stock cars my brother Alan raced on a local dirt track, I had never witnessed a project this daunting. A Porsche 911 was in a different league entirely than the Cain’s Coffee trucks and run-of-the-mill Chevys and Fords the guys at the salvage yard were used to working on. And didn’t Speck live in a house one of my brothers described as a “cracker box”? Hadn’t Challo gone on a bender so huge that money had to be wired to El Paso, Texas, just so he could catch a Greyhound back to Dodge City?