Trevor and Barry Get Lucky (1)

At ten to seven Trevor Mott's elbow took the toast off the plate on his way to the kettle, as it did most mornings, and the toast landed butter side down on the lino, as it did most mornings, and Barry had eaten it before Trevor had finished turning round.

Trevor looked at the floor where it had been.

"You're welcome," he said.

He put two more slices in and got the milk out. He poured it into his tea and it went in all at once, in a single piece, and sat on the top like a raft. The date on the carton was tomorrow's. He held the carton up and read the date again, in case tomorrow had been and gone without his noticing, and then he poured the tea down the sink and made another one, black, and drank it standing up.

The phone rang before he'd finished it.

It was a dead battery outside the dollar store. It was always a dead battery outside the dollar store at this time of the morning; something about the car park held the cold. The woman was in a hi-vis vest and already late for the early shift at the feedlot, and there were two small boys in the back seat in their pyjamas with toast of their own, eating it and watching Barry through the window. Barry watched the toast.

Trevor clipped the leads on and the car started at the first turn of the key, which it would have done for anybody.

"How much?" the woman said.

He told her.

"For two minutes?"

"The two minutes are free," said Trevor. "It's the driving over."

She paid him out of the cup holder, in coins, counting them into his hand one at a time so that he would understand exactly what each one had cost her. The boys waved at Barry through the back window as she pulled out. Barry did not wave back, being a dog, but he watched them out of sight, and then he watched the place where the toast had been.

There were three sets of traffic lights in town, and on his way back along Main every one of them went red as he came up to it. He sat at each of them with nobody in front of him and nobody behind him and nobody coming the other way, in the middle of a town where you could see a car coming for a mile and a half in any direction, and waited for permission. He came back the other way to get diesel, and they did it again.

"Just us, then," he told Barry.

The second call was a couple from out of state who had followed their sat nav down a field road, and then, when the field road ran out, into the field. It was a small hire car with the front wheels well into a bean field that had been cut the week before, and the two of them were standing beside it on the stubble looking at their phones, as if the phones might yet apologise.

Trevor got the car out. It took forty minutes and most of the mud in the county, and by the end of it he was wet to the knee on one side and not at all on the other, which was somehow worse. The man stood beside him the whole time with his hands in his jacket pockets and asked him questions.

"Where's that accent from? Australia?"

"No."

"New Zealand?"

"England."

"Huh," said the man, and looked at him as though England were a mistake Trevor had made personally. When it was done the woman said she would leave him a review, and held her phone up and took a picture of him that he had not agreed to, standing in a bean field holding a muddy strop.

On the way back into town a single cloud came over. There was nothing else in the sky in any direction, from one edge of the world to the other, and the cloud came over the truck and stayed with it for a mile and a half, raining. Most of the rain went on the windscreen. A good deal of it came in through the seal on the passenger side and went on Barry.

Barry didn't move. He sat in it, looking straight ahead through the windscreen, and let it rain on him in the way of a dog who has been rained on in this exact seat before and expects to be again. When the cloud moved off he shook himself once, thoroughly, in Trevor's direction.

"That's fair," said Trevor.

He got to the café at half ten.

The three of them at the end of the counter turned round on their stools when the bell went. Marlys had a mug in front of the empty stool before he'd got his coat off.

"Well?" said Lloyd. "What'd it do to you today, Trev?"

Trevor sat down. He took his time with it. He told them about the milk first, the milk coming out in one piece and sitting on top of the tea, and Arvid started laughing there and then, and Trevor waited for him, because you didn't step on a laugh. Then he did the bean field. He did the man from out of state. He did "Australia?" in the man's voice, and "New Zealand?" and the look on the man's face when he said England, and by then Lloyd had his cup down and was wiping his eyes with the back of his wrist.

"And then," Trevor said, and took his phone out, because he had checked on the way, "she left me a review."

He read it out. Three stars. Driver was very helpful but we could not understand a word he said.

That was the best of it, and he knew it, and he let it sit.

"Three stars," said Arvid, when he could.

"Out of five," said Trevor.

Lloyd reached under the counter and brought out the county paper, folded back to the letters page, and slid it along to him. Somebody had written in about the towing. The letter did not mention Trevor by name, but it did mention a so-called towing service in this town that charged like a London cab and did about as much for you, and it was signed Name Withheld, Concerned Motorist. Arvid read it out loud, all of it, in what he believed was an English accent, which was in fact a sort of Irish, and the three of them laughed until Marlys came down the counter to see what was the matter.

"They've spelled Mott with one T," Trevor said, "in the bit where they don't mention me."

That set them off again.

He drank his coffee. The phone rang before he'd finished it. Lloyd raised his cup to him as he went.

"Same time tomorrow, Trev."

The afternoon was a stock trailer with a flat out on the section road, and a farmer called Merle who stood beside it and told Trevor how to change a tyre on a stock trailer, in some detail, from the beginning. Trevor listened, and nodded, and got the jack under. Halfway through, Merle took the wheel brace off him, finished the job himself, and stood up.

"There," said Merle. "What do I owe you?"

"Call-out," said Trevor.

"I did it myself."

"You did," Trevor agreed. "I came all this way to watch."

Merle paid, eventually, and told him he'd be writing to the paper, and Trevor said he thought he might have done already, and Merle said what was that supposed to mean, and Trevor said nothing at all, and drove back into town with the window down to let some of Merle out of the cab.

He stopped at the co-op just before it closed, to get milk.

There was a board by the door for notices: lost cats, lawn mowers for sale, a Bible study on Wednesdays, a man offering to sharpen anything. His own notice was in the bottom corner, where it had been for years. Pinned next to it this week, on a sheet of orange paper so bright it seemed to make a noise, was a new one: GRANGE HARVEST SUPPER. TUESDAY 6 P.M. ALL WELCOME. BRING A DISH.

Trevor read the ALL WELCOME and bought his milk.

He reversed out of the co-op car park in the dusk, with one hand on the wheel and his mind on the milk, and backed into the yellow bollard at the corner with a sound he would have known in his sleep.

He got out and looked at it. The bumper was fine. The bumper was always fine. The bollard had a fresh stripe of his paint across it, laid neatly over the old stripe, at exactly the height of his rear bumper.

"Once a month," he told Barry, through the window. "Give or take."

Barry looked at him the way he had looked at the rain.

The last call came at twenty to ten. A pickup was parked across the front doors of the Grange hall, right across them, and the Grange were inside having a meeting, and they could not get out, or could get out only by the side door, which several of them felt was beneath them. Somebody had rung the sheriff, and the sheriff had rung Trevor, and the sheriff had then sensibly gone home.

The Grange came out onto the steps to watch. There were perhaps fifteen of them, with their coats on and their arms folded, under the light over the door. Trevor hooked the pickup up while they watched. Halfway through, its owner came out of the bar across the road and told Trevor what he thought of him, at length, and without leaving anything out, and some of the Grange nodded. A woman at the front, in a quilted coat, with her reading glasses pushed up on her head and a clipboard held against her chest, watched him the whole time and did not say anything at all.

He towed the pickup to the yard. He got home at ten to eleven.

He towelled Barry down in the kitchen with the old towel kept for it, and Barry stood for it the way he always did, with his eyes shut and his good ear flat. Trevor put the new milk in the fridge, and looked at the date on it, and shut the fridge door. He sat down at the kitchen table in his coat with the phone in front of him, face up, with the ringer all the way up.

At eleven the furnace banged twice in the basement, the way it did every night. Upstairs the tap in the bathroom dripped. Trevor sat and listened to it.

In the corner Barry turned round three times on his bed and lay down facing the wall, which was his opinion of the day.

 

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