Unbearable Moss

by Trevor Wolf

While I am mechanic, it was never my dream job. Despite this it was always a logical job for someone in my situation and had always provided enough for Sarah and me to get by. I suppose the worst part of being a mechanic were the customers. Some of the stupid and mindless things they absolutely had to tell me about their boring or disappointing lives made the job almost unbearably. But other than that, I loved working cars. Sarah and I could work on our stockcar all day but without Sarah I never could have made it through woes and complaints of each customer that came through those doors.

“Hey, Ben, check this out!” Why was he so cheery? He must have just bought something. “I just bought myself one of those new John Deere combines for the alfalfa I got in the eastern fields. What you think Ben? Pretty cool right?” Why the hell do you have a combine? You’ll just end up hiring someone out to farm your crops anyway.

“Pretty sweet there Moss.” What a prick. Doesn’t he know that I don’t even have a car anymore? He’s the one who built that crap hospital with their elitist insurance policies.

“Ben, you know you can call me Brandon… Brando… even Brand. Moss is my last name, you know…?”

“Yeah,” he doesn’t get it. He still thinks I’m his friend.

“Glad you think so Ben! I’m about to take it out for a spin, but I was hopin’ you could check it out first.”

“Sure thing Moss.” I mean I admit it’s a cool combine, but why buy it? He spends his money in the most useless and thoughtless ways. I’m happy that stupid hospital is going bankrupt and closing down.

“SO, Benny boy, I’ve been thinking. With you out of racing and everything, I wasn’t sure if you cared anymore, but I thought I’d let you know that I have to close Bowman Gray.”

“Are you kidding me!?” Standing face to face with, him I stated the facts. “You are dead to this town if you do that. It can’t and won’t happen.”

“Ben, it’s a little late for that.” And as he pointed, a large yellow bulldozer started to roll across the grass fields, tearing up the wintered discolored grass. “Yea with the hospital doing so poorly, I didn’t have a choice. I just sold it to a group of investors down in Winston-Salem. They insisted that Bowman Gray be torn down. Believe me, I fought to have to stay, but they wanted to be sure that their new track and stadium is the only race site in the county. Sorry Bud. I tried.”

“The hell you tried! Stop giving all the bullshit in how you are a good guy. You didn’t help me and my wife when we were forced to stay in your failing hospital. It’s because of you that I had thousands of dollars in charges from hospital! Look at me! I have nothing except a roof over my head and the clothes on my back, and now you’ve taken away the best thing that ever happened to Bixby. Moss, you are the cancer. You think that your money and influence has helped Bixby, but you’ve just killed it.”

I remember Moss standing there motionless and blanked faced as if he were unable to compute the outcome of this conversation. “Moss! We’re not friends, and we never were. Get the hell out of my shop!”

***

My name is Benjamin Tarcher, and I live in Bixby, North Carolina where it is not pretty, large, or even pleasant. Having said this, it is the place in which I live and plan to stay. In the town, most everything can be measured by its proximity to Bowman Gray. The doublewide trailer I own is about a block away from the stadium, Greg’s Grocery Store is two blocks north and one block east of the stadium, and Brandon Moss’s house is fifteen blocks south of the stadium on the outskirts of town, overlooking his fields. While most cities and towns have a main street, in Bixby we had the stadium.

Bowman Gray Stadium used to be a stockcar-racing stadium with a capacity of more than 10,000 people and for as long as I can remember served as Bixby’s fun and livelihood. Just about everything worth doing or being apart of was either directly or indirectly linked Bowman Gray. In the fall, barbecues and end of summer picnics were held on its large grass infield. Throughout the winter, Bowman Gray stood essentially vacant but continued to serve as motivation for the coming months with its dependability and promise of excitement. In the spring chalk lines were drawn on the large grass field in the middle and soccer games were played on the infield. And finally, the greatest and most exciting time came when the summer brought the stockcar-racing season. While the racing atmosphere used to be an intricate part of the character of Bixby, the right to race was recently stripped from us and was moved a city more than three hours south by the name of Winston-Salem. This atrocity can be attributed to a man by the name of Brandon Moss. It was through his influence that Bixby lost its soul.

“Honey, fetch me a ¾ inch crescent wrench. The car’s sittin’ real high on the right side as it’s going into turn four. I’m gunna drop the suspension ½ an inch.” “Okay, but don’t drop it too much,” Sarah cautioned.

“Why not?”

“Turn Four has the least pitch to it. If you drop the car too much on the right side the bottom of the bumper may start scrapin’ on the other turns.”

“Well what should I do then?”

“I’d still drop it, just only ¼ of an inch. You know as well as I do that dropping it too much WILL end our day early.

“Got it honey, I’ll only drop it a ¼ of an inch.”

My wife Sarah and I were the ideal team. Not only did we love each other but also we had a passion for racing, worked well together, and were truly a force on the racetrack. While I drove and got all of the attention, she was the one who really won races for us. At Bowman Gray you won or lost the race based on your ability to fix your own car. Without Sarah, I never could have won a race because she was so meticulous with cars that she’d always make sure things were perfect on the car before race time. With so much of our time and money dedicated to racing, we couldn’t go on vacations, and we didn’t spend money on luxuries such as TV’s or luxury cars. We loved to race, so that’s what we did.

I first met Sarah spring of ’86. We were both prepping cars for the race at Bowman Gray Stadium. I had just started working as an auto sales man, the only thing I could do with my high school education. However, it gave me just enough to work to support my passion for racing. Sarah was helping her father out but took enough time out of her day to laugh at me as I completely botched unloading my car from its trailer, scraping the bottom of the bumper, leaving a trail of chipped paint on the ground until the bumper detached from the car completely.

“Nice!” she said, amidst a chuckle. “Trying to leave your mark on this track? I’d suggest winning a race to do that. Those paint chips will just wash away with the rain.” Then she helped me weld the bumper back on.

I laughed, but that’s the kind of girl she was. She could allow herself to laugh at your stupidity but never once did she forget to help the victim immediately, and I was no exception.

After meeting Sarah I quit my job selling cars and we started a shop out of the back of our garage fixing up cars and reselling them, which eventually grew to fixing just about anything people wanted to pay us to fix. While we undoubtedly worked hard, we always left enough to spend some time working, tuning, scheming, or driving our stockcar.

However, things have changed since she passed away two years ago. I’m not sure how to describe it, but how would you feel if the woman who you were supposed to love, support, and grow old with was taken? We had been racing partners for fifteen years, she had been Mrs. Tarcher for fourteen of those, and we had established a reputation for the being the team to beat. It was in the winter of 1998 that they found the brain tumor. While her speech had slowly been changing and her memory becoming less sharp, we didn’t have the option of going to the hospital that Moss had helped build because they required health insurance. As mechanics with only a small shop that got very little work, we had never been able to afford any. When we did get the CAT scan, it only confirmed our worst fear: the tumor was terminal and had spread. I didn’t know hardly any of the medical terms they used to describe her condition, but I don’t think it really mattered. The result was inevitable. They said that if we had gotten her checked out when the symptoms had started, almost four years previous, they could have stopped it early. But the fact remained that we hadn’t gotten it checked out. As it was, they allowed us to stay in the hospital.

She passed away later that spring. Amidst my misery and grief, the hospital had the audacity to send me the bill for her stay. Without insurance, the hospital took everything I had left, the worst of which was my stockcar.

And while my personal loss at the hands of a corrupt institution embarrassed me and hurt me, I can link my misfortune a single man Brandon Moss. For more than twenty years Moss was the only person in Bixby with any real money. He was the type of person who would buy a stock car so he could show it off. Somewhat fortunate for Sarah and I, he’d come into the shop about once a week usually with some excessive piece of farm equipment or a new dune buggy toy that he’d bought and messed up.

“Tune this up for me, wouldn’t ya, Ben?” he would holler through the big doors of the shop as he backed in his toy. I suppose one of his favorite things to do was to play farmer. Maybe it was an attempt to fit into a community that rejected everything about him except for his money, but the truth was that most people in Bixby actually were farmers or had a job that was somehow related to a farm. Moss, fat and falsely jolly, would have his fun, planting erotic seed in the fall using his big and fancy machines, but like clockwork he’d lose his desire and give up during the winter. In the end, he always paid someone to harvest the crops in addition to whatever he’d forgotten to do. And I think the worst part about his whole hobby was his charity. While charity sounds like a good thing, his giving out of massive amounts of crops for free meant people didn’t buy as much local produce. It seemed like each year Moss made himself a new enemy.

As much as Moss annoyed me, until the day he tore down Bowman Gray, I used to find it impossible to hate him. As fake as he was, he funded the vast majority of my business and at the same time, despite being excruciatingly annoying and incapable of fixing anything, he had never done anything to warrant hate. I merely disliked him.

Moss first moved to Bixby years ago so he could be more involved in Bowman Gray Stadium, which he owned. I assume some delusional business that told him shortly after he moved to Bixby that it was a prime location for him to make money. He’d already made his money by that point because a year later he sponsored the centerpiece of his money making scheme by constructing a new hospital. I’m positive that if Moss had done his research, he would have known to build the hospital elsewhere. But I guess that’s who he was. Not only did he fail to take into account that nobody had health insurance, but somehow him and his investors overlooked the simple fact that there just weren’t enough people within the county to support a hospital. Needless to say the hospital went bankrupt, Moss went bankrupt, therefore the Bowman Gray Stadium had a price and was sold.

It was two days ago that Moss ordered the bleachers to be torn down. While the racetrack has yet to be harmed, it’s undoubtedly not usable as evident from the large heaps of metal and concrete from the bulldozed bleachers. In addition, the yellow bulldozer is still parked next to it, small and insignificant compared to the symbolic remains of Bowman Gray.

So, with the livelihood of the town gone and Moss solely to blame, I have a plan. My father once told me “When there is a problem, fix it.” The words have stuck with me, and I can honestly say that I tried to live my life by this standard. How can success be measured when one has nothing to show for it? I can’t see a way to fix or even correct my problem because the woman I love is dead. And while I could be content living life as it is and leave things they way they are for the rest of my days, I cannot allow myself to stand by and watch as Moss escapes unchanged as Bixby is left in ruins.

I’m getting too old, and I have come to terms that I can’t fix the problem. With everything that I have worked and lived for taken away, I am left with little to keep me going. As a last wish, I merely plan to rid Bixby Moss.

I began my plan with the bulldozer. Perched in elevated seat of the bulldozer seat I rolled out of the stadium on a course to Moss’s house I thought how this was going to go happen. Moss had run this town. His money had bought and now nearly killed the life of it, and I knew that it had to be stopped.

It was easy to hotwire the bulldozer with all of the time in the world and nobody to see or distract me. It wasn’t long before I was rolling up the long street that led to Moss’s house. I powered through the gate that surrounded the property and watched the wood splinter underneath bulldozer as it made contact with treads. I maneuvered through a field of some poor crop that had been planted and forgotten about as evidence by the large weeds that surrounded each wilted plant. Clearing the last small hump and with a clear line of sight to the house, I lowered the yellow scoop of the bulldozer.

I began to strategically pick apart the house, plowing the scoop through the supports of the three-car garage. As I did this, I remembered back to the image of the bulldozer tearing down Bowman Gray. I’m positive that an onlooker would have found me bulldozing Moss’s house much more impressive. It didn’t take me long to finish the garage, but as I maneuvered over rubble for a clear shot into the kitchen, I was accosted by Moss who emerged from the house with his overweight and scantily dressed wife. “What are you doing Ben! Are you crazy? That’s my house! I’m calling the police!”

“Go ahead,” I shouted back. “They may be able to fix our situation here. You definitely have a crazy man bulldozing your house.” Separated by a large patch of rubble containing large pieces of pipe and rebar, he was unable to get anywhere near the bulldozer with his hefty build and lack of shoes. He was refined to listening to his shrieking wife as I rolled through their living room, four bedrooms, and a few bathrooms.

Of course the police came, and I was arrested and taken away. But as I sit here in my jail cell awaiting my certain conviction in the upcoming trial, I don’t deny what I did. Despite the destruction I caused and laws I’ve broken, I’m admit I’m a little surprised that I have a clean conscience and no regrets for what I’ve done. But guess some of that’s because I’m old. And reflecting back, I can honestly say now say I’m content with the way things turned out. I wasn’t able to resolve my problems, but through my actions I can only hope that I have fixed someone else’s.