FATTY'S JUNKYARD by Tommy LeVrier
Fatty knew all the tricks of the salvage trade by now. How to stuff your trailer truck full so that the “Higway Patrolum,” as he called them, wouldn’t catch him on the way to the bigger salvage centers. If he had too much they would make him drive to the scales, weigh, and if it was too much they would make him throw his scrap metal off the truck to the side of the road and make him drive back clean across Texas the next day to pick it up or be cited for littering too. He always pushed his luck though anyway. How to pay off the guy in Houston at the scales by slipping him an extra five dollars so he wouldn’t put his finger on the scale as he weighed it. How to slip a little bit of steel in the aluminum barrel to make it weigh more.
Fatty took pride in his junk business. Oilfield salvage he liked to call it. It wasn’t junk by him. He wasn’t like others, he didn’t buy hubcaps and mount them on the wall like so many others did along the highway. He was a picky artist in his own way. He would only buy hubcaps if they were to be thrown in the barrel and sold for scrap. He didn’t buy aluminum foil, and definitely no junk cars. Salvage is not the same as junk. Some people like rich people and people up North don’t understand that salvage is not the same as junk. He had a field full of junk cars already anyway and wasn’t about to have anything to do with them ever again. They were too much trouble to haul off.
Fatty was a specialist in oilfield salvage. Salvage of the oil fields; used pipe, used sucker rods, tools, nuts and bolts, and miscellaneous parts, some of them even rare. Fatty had once worked these old oil fields himself for six years as a roustabout and knew the business from the bottom up.
It was hard, hot work, yes, but there were definitely perks in the job. Today hadn’t been such a bad day, he’d found two good batteries that others had thrown away out of ignorance. He added them to the whole warehouse he had of them. People threw him away far too soon. Hell, all you had to do usually, according to Fatty, was to just clean off the cable connections with a wire brush and they would be good as new. Plus add water to the battery, distilled water was best. Fatty had a whole warehouse full of batteries. In there was also one of his prize finds; a diver’s suit with a diver’s helmet for deep water diving and welding. Fatty’s kids were crazy about the suit and would insist on seeing it whenever they were down at the yard.
He had also found a nice cast-iron pot which he would give to his wife for her garden. She would sand it, wash it, paint it black, and it would look good as new. Nobody understood Fatty, least of all his wife, who Carl Young’s retarded boy called “Mrs. Fatty,” much to her regret. “He made an enemy there,” Fatty used to say.
Fatty was happy, however, whether anybody understood him or not.
There were plenty of perks in the job. He often found stuff for his kids; toys, wagons—all they needed was paint and a little sanding. Once he found them a real P.T. boat from World War Two for his kids to play on. He found a half track also from World War Two for them to play army, a Model T, even a merry-go-round, and he could be creative too. He had Carl cut out some steel plates and a steel bar, and fashioned a set of weights for his oldest boy who was on the football team. By moving the round steel discs, they could be made heavier or lighter at will.
For himself? No, Fatty wasn’t left out. He kept a few things for himself in the field behind his garage—a fire truck, not the kind with the motor but the kind you pull by horse, and some old generators, remnants from the beginnings of the industrial age. Fatty was fascinated by anything like that, any old machinery. “When we retire, we’ll go to the Smithsonian and see the real machinery,” he told his wife.
He had two antique bulldozers as well, and even got one to run, and an antique tractor.
But his wife didn’t understand him. “You overunnin’ us with that ole junk,” she shouted when she couldn’t stand it no more.
Not that she didn’t have her collecting ways too. But she liked small items, feminine stuff, little glass prisms that reflected like rainbows in the light, dolls, glass paperweights, which she kept next to Fatty’s collection of antique marbles. She so liked cast iron Christmas toys, and odds and ends for her garden and kitchen. But she was different. “When you bring something in the house you have to throw something away.” That was her motto and she stuck by it, for the most part. But she did love a lot of things, and little by little, the house started to fill up on the shelves and windowsills and in the cabinets and in the closets. When Fatty tried to bring stuff home though she’d tell him, “If you bring something in you must throw something away.”
But Fatty said, “Well you didn’t say that when I brought you cast iron antiques for your kitchen and garden.” And she would have to shush…and there was nothing she could say. He loved to indulge her interests no matter what the reason. And indulged her so much that the papers came from miles around and do stories on her kitchen and all the kitchen ware she had collected and her Christmas every year when she brought out all her antique toys, including a four foot high plaster Christmas Santa Claus wearing cowboy hat, spurs, and belt. Fatty had found that in a Godwill somewheres around Dallas. There are at least three or four different articles in the papers about Mrs. Fatty’s Christmas collection, although they didn’t call her Mrs. Fatty in the papers.
When she wasn’t looking, Fatty sneaked things into the closets like an ashtray shaped like a tire from Las Vegas or a street sign that said something like “Python” or “Sole” street. His kids loved it, but his wife didn’t appreciate it much.
“Where am I supposed to put all that ole stuff?,” she would say. She was tired of the back yard being full of junk cars and stuff that he had collected. To her it was just junk but to Fatty it was pure gold. All the vehicles were going to be fixed up and sold at ten times their current value—someday.
It didn’t do no good to yell at him. He would just sulk, slam the door behind him, get in his winch truck, and go back to work. Finally her love for her husband would always win out. She knew he didn’t ever plan to sell them or even fix them up for that matter. He just liked to collect them. She had grown to accept it. “He just likes to look at them,” she said. And they would sit in the back yard until they became like old friends.
Once he found a horse from a carousel that he placed on the back porch. Another time he made a bet to his kids on something he found. Finally they couldn’t guess it and he had to tell them. It was a bell off a street car! Where he got it nobody knew. But he gave them all a dollar just for guessing anyway.
Fatty was content in the small town of Daisetta and hardly need to go anywhere, much to his wife’s chagrin. Occasionally, usually Sundays, he finally gave in, and take her out of Daisetta to Beaumont to eat. But even then Fatty always had some business around it. Like one time on her day to Beaumont, going down some back oilfield road in the middle of nowhere to find some used pipe that someone had abandoned from a rig.
After they found the pipe, they dined at Luby’s Cafeteria, where she could get foods she couldn’t at home. But it would have to be economical. “Over five dollars, and I lose my appetite,” joked Fatty.
The missus loved Fatty but the collecting had to stop somewhere. She was angry that her trip to Beaumont ended up in more junk. Always more junk. She sucked it in for two weeks. Even though she got over it, Fatty knew he had to change if he planned to stay married.
He couldn’t stop collecting so he tried to keep a tab on it the best he could.
Life went on for him in this routine, not being able to stop collecting things. His kids grew up and left for college, and when they came home he showed them what he’d found while they were away.
Fatty planned to expand his work yard. He bought the land from Texaco and started to construct a building on the site. Then he changed his mind, and he and the missus decided to retire instead. They planned to travel to the Smithsonian to see the big machinery there, and even planned to go to London to see the museums. Fatty had been stationed there in World War Two and had always wanted to return.
But their plans were foiled when Mrs. Fatty unexpectedly died. Everybody thought he would go first, with his bad diet and all, but he didn’t; she did.
Fatty was sad at first, of course. In fact, he was devastated and couldn’t be comforted. He said he wanted to die with her. Eventually though he settled into a new routine and found he was liking his retirement years. He missed her awfully and never got over her death. On the other hand he really began for the first time to live the way he wanted to.
He began to eat exactly the way he wanted to—all the foods she forbade him to eat before—cans of salted nuts, root beer and strawberry soda, macaroni and cheese. He could have scrambled eggs and Spam for dinner, t.v. dinners, canned chili and soup. He would never have to eat vegetables again.
He began spending most of his time in the back dining area with the t.v. He started to subscribe to his favorite magazines; Readers Digest, National Geographic, and Texas Highways, and bought all those Time-Life books on the American West and World War Two. He subscribed to two newspapers. They began to stack up in piles around him. “I can’t keep up with them,” he said. Nor could he keep up with the books or magazines or the National Geographic still bundled and wrapped in the brown paper they were sent in.
But he didn’t care about that, about reading them so much. He just liked being surrounded by them. That’s what he liked best. The stacks grew until they began to reach the ceiling around him. The house was so full of things that if he put something down like a bill, he could never find it again.
Fatty rearranged the house to meet his needs. He took all the canned goods out of the hall cabinets and placed them in the kitchen next to the plates. “I can see them better in here,” he said. “I can put the rest of the cans on top of the refrigerator.”
He couldn’t stand to throw anything of Mrs. Fatty’s away. In fact, everything in their bedroom remained untouched. He wouldn’t even dust the tiny fragile objects that she had collected over the years. It was the only room that was safe from ever encroaching piles that were filling the rest of the house.
The world finally caught up with Fatty. Recycling, swap meets, and the like were now in fashion and they were paying sky high prices for stuff that Fatty had simply sold for scrap. After reading an article in Readers Digest called “How to Make Your Hobby Your Business,” Fatty took on this new field with a vengeance.
Fatty began collecting everything he could find. He scoured the countryside for old gasoline station signs, billboards, Texas collectibles, bottles, art deco stuff—everything he could find. He read as he went. He bought antique lamps, porcelain black panther sculptures from the fifties, Hollywood photos, stamps, postcards, sports cards, comic books, records, books, plates and glasses, anything that looked like it would turn a substantial buck for him at the swap meet held every weekend in Winnie. But the problem is Fatty couldn’t stand to let anything go so he never arranged to get around to the selling part. It added to the collection in his house.
It was amazing the things he found; a huge plastic cow that he got from an old dairy, a Kid Cisco doll, driftwood shaped like a cowboy boot, a gasoline pump. You name it, Fatty could find it.
Fatty had five antique rockers in the living room. He collected so much stuff that he had to stand the couch end on end to fit everything in the room with the rockers. He took the bed out of the spare bedroom and put it in the garage so he could make room for all his magazines, books, and collectibles.
The room in the back where he kept his western collection of cowboy and Indian memorabilia was so crowded that he found he couldn’t get the door open. Stuffed animals, old bottles of hair tonic, Mamie’s Cure for Mange, razor straps, you name it, he had it. He finally got the door open but then he couldn’t walk around in it because the junk was literally up to his waist. It was like a garbage pile but it wasn’t garbage.
Fatty planned to take the stuff to the swap meets in Houston and Winnie, but he could never get around to it.
Fatty began collecting cars again, too, and filled the back yard with cars to fix up someday. He bought a forties Ford like he had always wanted, a Mustang Sprint, and even a power speed boat from the fifties. He liked it so much that he bought another of the wooden boats. He imagined them polished, gleaming, and worth ten times the five-hundred dollars he paid for them. He also had an old Indy race car from the early sixties, which he planned to sell for 250,000 dollars once he found a 35,000 dollar engine. These were not frivolous buys, but “investments,” according to Fatty. Security for his later years.
His grown up son also caught the collecting bug and began to acquire collectibles for swap meets. He filled up the attic in no time. His damned wife wouldn’t let him keep everything at his house so he started using Fatty’s attic. The back yard was ever more cluttered with cars, boats, and fire trucks.
To relieve stress from the collecting, Fatty took up a hobby. He pulled out his welding machine and cutting torch from the junk yard days and began to create sculptures out of metal. He had to cut down Mrs. Fatty’s garden with the bulldozer in order to make room. He sculpted huge geese-like monsters, dinosaurs, falcons from car bumpers, and windmills that actually worked. As he grew more sophisticated in his work, he began a series of surrealistic pieces that Fatty considered his “satire on contemporary commentary.” His thoughts about the decadence of modern American society; Marilyn Monroe on a cross surrounded by the Kennedys, or Jesus looking over a freeway, or studies of sado-masochism, or devil worship, all ills of modern day man, who has lost the sight of God and meaning.
Fatty finally had it out with his son. He finally couldn’t have it and told him not to bring no more stuff to his attic. “I ain’t got room for it,” he told him. So that son was mad at him.
As for the youngest, he had done up and married a city girl. She wouldn’t buy nothing unless it was disposable. Not unless it was turquoise. Lives up there in one of those cardboard apartments up there in Houston, made out of nothing but sheetrock. “Hell, I wouldn’t trust one in no hurricane,” said Fatty. “Everything’s disposable these days. They throw it away if its good or not. In my day, things used to last.”
The wife, Charlotte, didn’t like Fatty to come and visit because he always brought them presents of things he had found on his hunts. Nor did she want her husband to start collecting like his brother did. It got to where they didn’t almost ever ask Fatty to visit, and they never came down here to visit him in Daisetta, unless it was a holiday.
Fatty ignored the fact that he was losing contact with his children and continued to work on his sculptures. He was too busy to notice that actually there was almost no human contact at all left in his life. “Yeah these sculptures will be worth a fortune someday, along with the Indy car, that is as soon as I find a engine for it,” he said absentmindedly to Mrs. Fatty. Then he realized that she wasn’t there. That he was speaking to silence. That he was only surrounded by his things. He had been talking to silence.
Suddenly Fatty felt all alone. He sat motionless and stared into space. He felt like one of those discarded scraps of metal that people had been throwing away all those years. One of those pieces of metal that he had spent his whole life trying to save. The things that some people think junk, they think it’s not worth anything, not worth saving but they’re wrong. If you just scraped off the rust. Salvage is not the same as junk. He was waiting for somebody to say it. But nobody did.
//ww
Fatty took pride in his junk business. Oilfield salvage he liked to call it. It wasn’t junk by him. He wasn’t like others, he didn’t buy hubcaps and mount them on the wall like so many others did along the highway. He was a picky artist in his own way. He would only buy hubcaps if they were to be thrown in the barrel and sold for scrap. He didn’t buy aluminum foil, and definitely no junk cars. Salvage is not the same as junk. Some people like rich people and people up North don’t understand that salvage is not the same as junk. He had a field full of junk cars already anyway and wasn’t about to have anything to do with them ever again. They were too much trouble to haul off.
Fatty was a specialist in oilfield salvage. Salvage of the oil fields; used pipe, used sucker rods, tools, nuts and bolts, and miscellaneous parts, some of them even rare. Fatty had once worked these old oil fields himself for six years as a roustabout and knew the business from the bottom up.
It was hard, hot work, yes, but there were definitely perks in the job. Today hadn’t been such a bad day, he’d found two good batteries that others had thrown away out of ignorance. He added them to the whole warehouse he had of them. People threw him away far too soon. Hell, all you had to do usually, according to Fatty, was to just clean off the cable connections with a wire brush and they would be good as new. Plus add water to the battery, distilled water was best. Fatty had a whole warehouse full of batteries. In there was also one of his prize finds; a diver’s suit with a diver’s helmet for deep water diving and welding. Fatty’s kids were crazy about the suit and would insist on seeing it whenever they were down at the yard.
He had also found a nice cast-iron pot which he would give to his wife for her garden. She would sand it, wash it, paint it black, and it would look good as new. Nobody understood Fatty, least of all his wife, who Carl Young’s retarded boy called “Mrs. Fatty,” much to her regret. “He made an enemy there,” Fatty used to say.
Fatty was happy, however, whether anybody understood him or not.
There were plenty of perks in the job. He often found stuff for his kids; toys, wagons—all they needed was paint and a little sanding. Once he found them a real P.T. boat from World War Two for his kids to play on. He found a half track also from World War Two for them to play army, a Model T, even a merry-go-round, and he could be creative too. He had Carl cut out some steel plates and a steel bar, and fashioned a set of weights for his oldest boy who was on the football team. By moving the round steel discs, they could be made heavier or lighter at will.
For himself? No, Fatty wasn’t left out. He kept a few things for himself in the field behind his garage—a fire truck, not the kind with the motor but the kind you pull by horse, and some old generators, remnants from the beginnings of the industrial age. Fatty was fascinated by anything like that, any old machinery. “When we retire, we’ll go to the Smithsonian and see the real machinery,” he told his wife.
He had two antique bulldozers as well, and even got one to run, and an antique tractor.
But his wife didn’t understand him. “You overunnin’ us with that ole junk,” she shouted when she couldn’t stand it no more.
Not that she didn’t have her collecting ways too. But she liked small items, feminine stuff, little glass prisms that reflected like rainbows in the light, dolls, glass paperweights, which she kept next to Fatty’s collection of antique marbles. She so liked cast iron Christmas toys, and odds and ends for her garden and kitchen. But she was different. “When you bring something in the house you have to throw something away.” That was her motto and she stuck by it, for the most part. But she did love a lot of things, and little by little, the house started to fill up on the shelves and windowsills and in the cabinets and in the closets. When Fatty tried to bring stuff home though she’d tell him, “If you bring something in you must throw something away.”
But Fatty said, “Well you didn’t say that when I brought you cast iron antiques for your kitchen and garden.” And she would have to shush…and there was nothing she could say. He loved to indulge her interests no matter what the reason. And indulged her so much that the papers came from miles around and do stories on her kitchen and all the kitchen ware she had collected and her Christmas every year when she brought out all her antique toys, including a four foot high plaster Christmas Santa Claus wearing cowboy hat, spurs, and belt. Fatty had found that in a Godwill somewheres around Dallas. There are at least three or four different articles in the papers about Mrs. Fatty’s Christmas collection, although they didn’t call her Mrs. Fatty in the papers.
When she wasn’t looking, Fatty sneaked things into the closets like an ashtray shaped like a tire from Las Vegas or a street sign that said something like “Python” or “Sole” street. His kids loved it, but his wife didn’t appreciate it much.
“Where am I supposed to put all that ole stuff?,” she would say. She was tired of the back yard being full of junk cars and stuff that he had collected. To her it was just junk but to Fatty it was pure gold. All the vehicles were going to be fixed up and sold at ten times their current value—someday.
It didn’t do no good to yell at him. He would just sulk, slam the door behind him, get in his winch truck, and go back to work. Finally her love for her husband would always win out. She knew he didn’t ever plan to sell them or even fix them up for that matter. He just liked to collect them. She had grown to accept it. “He just likes to look at them,” she said. And they would sit in the back yard until they became like old friends.
Once he found a horse from a carousel that he placed on the back porch. Another time he made a bet to his kids on something he found. Finally they couldn’t guess it and he had to tell them. It was a bell off a street car! Where he got it nobody knew. But he gave them all a dollar just for guessing anyway.
Fatty was content in the small town of Daisetta and hardly need to go anywhere, much to his wife’s chagrin. Occasionally, usually Sundays, he finally gave in, and take her out of Daisetta to Beaumont to eat. But even then Fatty always had some business around it. Like one time on her day to Beaumont, going down some back oilfield road in the middle of nowhere to find some used pipe that someone had abandoned from a rig.
After they found the pipe, they dined at Luby’s Cafeteria, where she could get foods she couldn’t at home. But it would have to be economical. “Over five dollars, and I lose my appetite,” joked Fatty.
The missus loved Fatty but the collecting had to stop somewhere. She was angry that her trip to Beaumont ended up in more junk. Always more junk. She sucked it in for two weeks. Even though she got over it, Fatty knew he had to change if he planned to stay married.
He couldn’t stop collecting so he tried to keep a tab on it the best he could.
Life went on for him in this routine, not being able to stop collecting things. His kids grew up and left for college, and when they came home he showed them what he’d found while they were away.
Fatty planned to expand his work yard. He bought the land from Texaco and started to construct a building on the site. Then he changed his mind, and he and the missus decided to retire instead. They planned to travel to the Smithsonian to see the big machinery there, and even planned to go to London to see the museums. Fatty had been stationed there in World War Two and had always wanted to return.
But their plans were foiled when Mrs. Fatty unexpectedly died. Everybody thought he would go first, with his bad diet and all, but he didn’t; she did.
Fatty was sad at first, of course. In fact, he was devastated and couldn’t be comforted. He said he wanted to die with her. Eventually though he settled into a new routine and found he was liking his retirement years. He missed her awfully and never got over her death. On the other hand he really began for the first time to live the way he wanted to.
He began to eat exactly the way he wanted to—all the foods she forbade him to eat before—cans of salted nuts, root beer and strawberry soda, macaroni and cheese. He could have scrambled eggs and Spam for dinner, t.v. dinners, canned chili and soup. He would never have to eat vegetables again.
He began spending most of his time in the back dining area with the t.v. He started to subscribe to his favorite magazines; Readers Digest, National Geographic, and Texas Highways, and bought all those Time-Life books on the American West and World War Two. He subscribed to two newspapers. They began to stack up in piles around him. “I can’t keep up with them,” he said. Nor could he keep up with the books or magazines or the National Geographic still bundled and wrapped in the brown paper they were sent in.
But he didn’t care about that, about reading them so much. He just liked being surrounded by them. That’s what he liked best. The stacks grew until they began to reach the ceiling around him. The house was so full of things that if he put something down like a bill, he could never find it again.
Fatty rearranged the house to meet his needs. He took all the canned goods out of the hall cabinets and placed them in the kitchen next to the plates. “I can see them better in here,” he said. “I can put the rest of the cans on top of the refrigerator.”
He couldn’t stand to throw anything of Mrs. Fatty’s away. In fact, everything in their bedroom remained untouched. He wouldn’t even dust the tiny fragile objects that she had collected over the years. It was the only room that was safe from ever encroaching piles that were filling the rest of the house.
The world finally caught up with Fatty. Recycling, swap meets, and the like were now in fashion and they were paying sky high prices for stuff that Fatty had simply sold for scrap. After reading an article in Readers Digest called “How to Make Your Hobby Your Business,” Fatty took on this new field with a vengeance.
Fatty began collecting everything he could find. He scoured the countryside for old gasoline station signs, billboards, Texas collectibles, bottles, art deco stuff—everything he could find. He read as he went. He bought antique lamps, porcelain black panther sculptures from the fifties, Hollywood photos, stamps, postcards, sports cards, comic books, records, books, plates and glasses, anything that looked like it would turn a substantial buck for him at the swap meet held every weekend in Winnie. But the problem is Fatty couldn’t stand to let anything go so he never arranged to get around to the selling part. It added to the collection in his house.
It was amazing the things he found; a huge plastic cow that he got from an old dairy, a Kid Cisco doll, driftwood shaped like a cowboy boot, a gasoline pump. You name it, Fatty could find it.
Fatty had five antique rockers in the living room. He collected so much stuff that he had to stand the couch end on end to fit everything in the room with the rockers. He took the bed out of the spare bedroom and put it in the garage so he could make room for all his magazines, books, and collectibles.
The room in the back where he kept his western collection of cowboy and Indian memorabilia was so crowded that he found he couldn’t get the door open. Stuffed animals, old bottles of hair tonic, Mamie’s Cure for Mange, razor straps, you name it, he had it. He finally got the door open but then he couldn’t walk around in it because the junk was literally up to his waist. It was like a garbage pile but it wasn’t garbage.
Fatty planned to take the stuff to the swap meets in Houston and Winnie, but he could never get around to it.
Fatty began collecting cars again, too, and filled the back yard with cars to fix up someday. He bought a forties Ford like he had always wanted, a Mustang Sprint, and even a power speed boat from the fifties. He liked it so much that he bought another of the wooden boats. He imagined them polished, gleaming, and worth ten times the five-hundred dollars he paid for them. He also had an old Indy race car from the early sixties, which he planned to sell for 250,000 dollars once he found a 35,000 dollar engine. These were not frivolous buys, but “investments,” according to Fatty. Security for his later years.
His grown up son also caught the collecting bug and began to acquire collectibles for swap meets. He filled up the attic in no time. His damned wife wouldn’t let him keep everything at his house so he started using Fatty’s attic. The back yard was ever more cluttered with cars, boats, and fire trucks.
To relieve stress from the collecting, Fatty took up a hobby. He pulled out his welding machine and cutting torch from the junk yard days and began to create sculptures out of metal. He had to cut down Mrs. Fatty’s garden with the bulldozer in order to make room. He sculpted huge geese-like monsters, dinosaurs, falcons from car bumpers, and windmills that actually worked. As he grew more sophisticated in his work, he began a series of surrealistic pieces that Fatty considered his “satire on contemporary commentary.” His thoughts about the decadence of modern American society; Marilyn Monroe on a cross surrounded by the Kennedys, or Jesus looking over a freeway, or studies of sado-masochism, or devil worship, all ills of modern day man, who has lost the sight of God and meaning.
Fatty finally had it out with his son. He finally couldn’t have it and told him not to bring no more stuff to his attic. “I ain’t got room for it,” he told him. So that son was mad at him.
As for the youngest, he had done up and married a city girl. She wouldn’t buy nothing unless it was disposable. Not unless it was turquoise. Lives up there in one of those cardboard apartments up there in Houston, made out of nothing but sheetrock. “Hell, I wouldn’t trust one in no hurricane,” said Fatty. “Everything’s disposable these days. They throw it away if its good or not. In my day, things used to last.”
The wife, Charlotte, didn’t like Fatty to come and visit because he always brought them presents of things he had found on his hunts. Nor did she want her husband to start collecting like his brother did. It got to where they didn’t almost ever ask Fatty to visit, and they never came down here to visit him in Daisetta, unless it was a holiday.
Fatty ignored the fact that he was losing contact with his children and continued to work on his sculptures. He was too busy to notice that actually there was almost no human contact at all left in his life. “Yeah these sculptures will be worth a fortune someday, along with the Indy car, that is as soon as I find a engine for it,” he said absentmindedly to Mrs. Fatty. Then he realized that she wasn’t there. That he was speaking to silence. That he was only surrounded by his things. He had been talking to silence.
Suddenly Fatty felt all alone. He sat motionless and stared into space. He felt like one of those discarded scraps of metal that people had been throwing away all those years. One of those pieces of metal that he had spent his whole life trying to save. The things that some people think junk, they think it’s not worth anything, not worth saving but they’re wrong. If you just scraped off the rust. Salvage is not the same as junk. He was waiting for somebody to say it. But nobody did.
//ww