In Good Hands

“You hurled me into the deep, into the very heart of the seas, and the currents swirled about me; all your waves and breakers swept over me.” – Jnh. 2:3


His bleeding knuckles reminded him of his father’s hands. How they would work as the day silenced, and then further as the coyotes would congregate and yammer like spoiled children consumed with their own importance, painting the night with arrogance. Often, his father would work until his hands would waver in exhaustion, slip and strike something solid, gashing wounds in worn flesh. Neil’s father was a mechanic by trade, and a saint by reputation. In hard work he had found a place in people’s hearts, and became the hero that was somehow forgotten in the arid wind of the Texas panhandle. His son had grown up believing that in good work lies the hand of God.

It was his son, Neil Everling’s knuckles now, bleeding, but unlike his sure handed father; Neil’s bled in incompetence, and coyotes stalked the daylight. It had been a week, and he was far from the little church where he had been pastor, far from the hard work of ten years, far from understanding where he had failed. They had been good people, they had liked him. His hands hadn’t been idle for a moment in ten years, wasn’t that supposed to matter? Neil stared at the cuts on his hand that had just begun that dull throb heralding a later, bitter ache. His old truck had thrown a belt and leaning over to check it out Neil had slipped and crushed his knuckles into unyielding steel.

Despite his father’s constant tutelage, mechanics had not come as naturally to Neil. The only thing he learned to do and do well, was repair tires. His talents were with people, his desire – his calling – was with people. But the people had cast him out. He hadn’t worked hard enough, and he couldn’t try again. His training, his colleagues, his mind all told him that he should pick up the pieces and move on. Instead, he ran. He had been running for a week, and the day was wearing long, his strength was wearing thin, and about a hundred yards away was a sign simply reading, “Sunset 1 Mile.”

~†~

Neil wasn’t sure how, but he found a new beginning in Sunset, and it started with a graying rancher. A mile is a long way, and Neil was far more than grateful that he didn’t have to walk the whole thing. He probably hadn’t gone two hundred yards before he heard the low purr of a chevy pickup that had seen better days. As it came closer he could see it had been beaten, it had been scratched, and every so often the engine would miss, or backfire…but it ran. That fact alone spoke worlds to Neil of the older man driving it. There was something about a man that could keep such a pile of junk together basically by will alone. It is no easy task, enough to keep a man’s hands full all of its own accord, to say nothing of the work that puts food on the table. More than anything though, it was the tires that caught Neil’s eye – thick mudgrip tread and the obvious signs of making it through every type of surface, rough, smooth, slick, and rugged.

The man pulled over, and got out to introduce himself with a firm handshake and an open smile.

“The name’s Jack Laitner. Seems you’ve had some trouble. What seems to be the problem?”

“The truck threw a belt. Decided I’d hoof it to town to see if I could come across another,” Neil replied.

Jack smiled a knowing smile. “That’s sure a long walk. I was headed into town myself from waterin’ the cows, I’m more than willing to take you into town. That is, unless you’re out to get a good work out from the deal.”

Neil took the ride, and somehow in that short space of time he found himself telling the amiable Jack that he was out of work, and looking for hire although his hands-on skills were limited to the work he’d done with his father. Before he knew it, Jack had pulled into a dilapidated old building surrounded by old tires, and dropped the keys to a less-than lucrative profession in tire repair into Neil’s puzzled hands.

“I don’t understand,” Neil began, “you’ve no reason to trust me. Everything I own is in that old truck sitting a mile outside of town.”

Jack gave him a disturbingly knowing look. “One time a group of us were branding, cutting, and dehorning young steers down at the corral. We’d been at it all day, and we’d been watching the clouds steadily build. They got to a point that one of the younger fellas called out over the chute that he figured it’d not be an hour before the rain broke upon us. We weren’t anywhere near through though, so the rest of us just laughed him down, after-all it hadn’t rained in a month. Well, to make a long story short, cows don’t smell too good wet, and the branding irons tend to sizzle like bacon in the pan when rained on. We all went home wet that day. Since then, I learned to call a spade a spade.”

Neil never did understand what Jack saw in him that day, but the two came to be fast friends. When Neil asked about the rent on the building, Jack just smiled with that crooked smirk, telling Neil that if he’d fix any tires Jack brought by for free they’d call it even. Sometimes he’d come by with a tire that seemed to be perfectly fine save a suspicious and mysterious hole. Neil never questioned, he needed only look at the black smears on Jack’s hands. The hands rarely lied.

And so it went. People began to come by in a steady stream, small tires, big tires, blown tires, flat tires…they’d bring them all in and place them like round offerings into the waiting hands, that almost smiled to feel the smooth rubber, or rough tread. Neil couldn’t be certain, but he was almost sure Jack could have had a nice career in advertising. Neil would thank him, and Jack would just nod and go on talking about random things: the weather, the crops, and old stories about ranching. Jack would talk of cows as if he were a general on a constant battlefield, and the very fate of his troops lie solely in his diligent hands.

For the first time in a very long time, Neil was happy - not that giddy school-boy happiness of finding a puppy had followed him home from school, but the happiness of becoming a new person, and leaving his shadow in some distant land. The work was tedious, but not difficult. His hands were busy, but not strained. He was a somebody-nobody at last. Neil began to understand Jack’s stories of his troops. In the shop he was a king, and the tires were his subjects.

~†~

We aren’t that different from tires. Neil Everling mused to himself, brandishing the tire iron in quick strokes upon the doughnut spare of a ‘94 Mustang. Take, for example, this one here… Still on the ground from where Neil had dumped it laid the frayed remains of a once proud tire. It obviously had developed an abscess, which quickly burst, bringing the rest of the tire into a quick explosion. He chuckled humorlessly at his own pseudo-philosophical speculation, leaning up at the same time to notice a bright purple dress and a wizened head of silvery-blue-grey swimming through the rain outside toward his door. God have mercy, it must be Sunday again, he thought.

Neil couldn’t even remember her name, but she’d been coming to his shop for near on a month now. Every Sunday, and often on Wednesday she would come bearing a Ziploc bag full of cookies or brownies and the same overzealous ambition to see his poor soul saved. Saving the soul of one who had spent the last ten years in a pulpit seeing souls saved struck Neil as ironic in the least. Maybe someday he’d tell her, just to see the look on her face. Of course, then again, it would probably be better to let sleeping ghosts lie.

“Neil, honey, we missed you in church today.” It was the same thing she’d said the past five times she’d come over. She didn’t even make all the way in the door this time, Neil commented to himself. As she came in Neil faced the older woman. Her face was wrinkled and drawn up, almost in reflection to her diminutive frame and aged features. She still has a lot of spunk in her though, Neil reminded himself in preparation to the rest of the conversation that he knew would be following shortly.

“I believe that in order to be missed, a guy’d have to show up at least once.” Neil’s answer came out a bit more sarcastic than he’d liked, but her persistence was beginning to wear.

“Well, sugar, you know how to fix that. You know, the doors are always open, especially to folks new to the town like you. You’ve not been here but three months. How do you expect to make friends and settle in if you don’t get out and meet some people?”

Neil softly rolled his eyes, “Is there something in particular I can help you with?”

“You can start by taking these cookies I brought for you,” she replied, “the ladies from our Monday night prayer meeting baked them. Maybe you could stop by sometime…”

Neil sighed one of those deep internal sighs. She’s not listening, he realized. Annoyance began to scratch at the back of his spine, crawling up his back towards his brain. She prattled on, but Neil found it difficult to care, found it difficult to keep giving the meaningless feedback that had become instinctive to him in the past ten years. When will she stop? he found himself thinking, then, Just go home. It’s raining. Just go home. I have work to do. Just go home. I’m through with the church. Just go home.

“…you know, the good book says, ‘Idleness is the mother of evil,’ you need to keep yourself busy as long as you have good hands, you know. So I try to keep at work sowing seeds for his kingdom.”

Neil almost laughed aloud. He would have if it were possible to laugh aloud while crying inside. It was somehow very tragic.

“Sorry, but that’s not from the bible. At least, it isn’t unless Ben Franklin had a hand in writing the bible, or the good lord has taken to plagiarizing aphorisms.”

She didn’t even seem shocked, and didn’t even miss a beat. “You’ve read the bible then? Well, then you know the truth. Acts 20:28 says, ‘Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood.’”

Somehow that made no sense, but Neil was far past fed up with sparring with her. He glanced longingly at the Mustang awaiting new tires. All he wanted was to go to work, to thoughtlessly use his hands for something…to run. The lug wrench in his hand was pulling at him like a dog on a leash. Why wouldn’t she just go home?

He told her, “Romans also says to greet each other with a holy kiss, but I’m sure that you don’t go around kissing everyone you meet in greeting. Look, I really have a lot of work to do, could you maybe come back later?” Or just leave me alone, he thought.

“You really do know the bible. Did you grow up in a church? Why don’t you go now?”

Neil couldn’t take it any longer, he was getting nowhere with her, and she was just going to keep coming back. He hadn’t been raised to be rude, and he realized that at heart she had good intentions, maybe the truth would help. “I spent some time as a pastor,” he whispered. Somehow admitting that was harder than it should have been, his failure welled up in his throat threatening to choke him.

“A pastor? Why that’s wonderful! With that black hair and steely eyes, I bet you look dashing in a suit. If you’re looking for a place to serve, all you have to do is swing by…”

“I’ve told you many times, I don’t want to have anything to do with your church. I don’t want to go to your prayer meetings, I don’t want to lead your bible studies, I don’t want to help the needy, I don’t want to sing your songs…I just want to get some tires changed. Tires throw tread and I replace them, they spring leaks and I patch them, they blow out and I change them. Tires are what I do now, so if you’ll excuse me I have work to do.” Neil quickly turned his back and headed towards the Mustang, hoping she’d find her own way out, but not really caring.
Something stirred beneath the surface of his skin. Her pleas always awakened that part of him that had been conditioned into feeling guilty for giving up. He wanted to believe that such things could be useful, that people hadn’t corrupted the only thing he’d known as good for most of his life. Then again, though, here she was spouting off the same things that he himself had spouted off for years almost word for word. How useless it all seemed. It had been a while since anything had felt useful…since he had felt useful.

He glanced up out the small window in the closed garage door to see her car turn into the street and continue away through countless puddles, tires shedding water, oblivious to the water around them. He stepped outside feeling the anger and frustration seep away as the raindrops chilled his skin in cold passionless kisses. He felt old, well beyond his thirty years, old and frail. The water around him began to feel like a cage. Tiny fingers pulling down on his clothes, dragging him further and further down. It was a sensation akin to drowning, like being thrown into the sea, a helpless martyr, and left for dead.

~†~

Neil noticed there was something different the moment he walked into the Dairy Queen. People began to murmur in hushed tones, they glanced his direction then looked away as he drug his eyes to meet theirs. He had almost forgotten about the conversation the day before, but apparently word had gotten around. The last thing he wanted was to be in the spotlight again, yet here he was attempting to meet the accusatory and querying stares with his own steely gaze. Neil felt like running again. The depressing realization that came, though, was that he had become swallowed down the maw of a monster he had, himself, created. He couldn’t run. He didn’t have the strength.

There was a black man at a booth along the back wall that merely glanced up at his arrival and went back to eating. Neil took the indifference as a refuge and took up a seat at the table next to him. The waitress came, asking if the man wanted anything more, and he replied in a thick accent blurring his words. The woman then came to place a menu in front of Neil asking if he’d like any coffee. She had been so friendly before when he’d come in, but now she hardly said a word, instead glancing at him with an almost hunted expression, as if he was trying to pry into some secret she had. She took his order, and quickly found something else to occupy her time.

What do these people want from me? Neil thought. I am the same person that has come in here fifty times before. He looked at his hands. There was grease beneath his fingernails and the tire grime seemed to permanently stain the crevasses in his fingerprint. Everything he touched was left tainted with the stuff. Everything he held was marred and painted. Neil was struck by a sudden and sickeningly relevant parallel to the story of Midas that came to his mind, but he couldn’t remember exactly how it ended. It isn’t the tires. He thought. I chose the tires. I chose to start over, I chose to become something different…why then will they not leave me alone? They are my hands, it is my work…why can they not understand who I am. Losing the desire to meet the townsfolk’s stares, instead, Neil stared at his hands as if they had betrayed him.

It wasn’t long, before one of the diners got up the nerve to voice the question that was probably on every other mind in the room. An older man that had been staring at him from across the room stood up and sauntered his way over the tile floor towards Neil. The clomp of his cowboy boots seemed to echo in Neil’s mind as if the man were walking down death row to present a final statement to the condemned. Finally, he made it, looming over Neil like a raptor swooping at some prey on the ground.

“You’re Neil Everling right?”

“Yes.” Neil replied

“Word is that you’re a bit of a preacher. I’m a deacon at the Baptist church here, what kind a preacher are you? You Baptist?”

“I was a Baptist preacher – was – sir., but I gave up on preaching, or preaching gave up on me, I’m still not sure which.”

“You looking for a pulpit then? It’s just that sometimes the pastor has problems he has to take care of, and we really don’t have any folks to fill in…”

“You’ve got people in the church, have them fill in.” Neil replied.

“Well, sometimes they do…but they ain’t preachers. Not everybody likes to get up there and speak. You’ve got experience. We could really use your help.” The aged deacon really didn’t seem to be listening.

“Listen, I told you. I’m not preaching, not anymore...” He’s deaf. Like all of them. The realization came amid that agonizingly cold chill of being starkly alone despite the people that filled the room. They must be trying to get rid of the pastor, Neil suddenly realized. He knew it, because he had seen it before. A few people were probably irritated at the poor man, now that group must have taken it upon themselves to pursue other options. Neil was such an option. People are like tires…it’s the same circle here. He wanted no part of it.

“We’ll be sure and set up a good fellowship if you come down. I know you wouldn’t want to miss that. We’re known for our fellowship. You’d really get to know folks, let them get to know you. We’d pay ya better than that tire shop does on Sunday that’s for sure. The Lord blesses willing hands.”

At that point everything seemed to go red in Neil’s mind. He’d never been so enraged, so frustrated, so lost. He didn’t know who he was angrier at, the deacon, or himself for putting himself in this position. He should have kept his mouth shut. He should have kept his hands working and his mouth shut. That is what he really wanted, was just to keep busy and forget. To fade into work and out of this world, out of who he was, what’d he’d seen. He had good hands, and in good hands was good work, good work to balance what’d he’d seen, good work to silence what’d he’d been through. Yet, still there was that lingering need to serve, to belong, to be useful.
Looking in the deacon’s eyes, though, imagining the shady thoughts behind them, gave hints at such a future. Would he be another casualty? It was only a matter of time before he let someone down, then what? Neil knew what…he’d seen it before. When your hands failed, other’s hands cast you out.

He ran again, telling himself it was because he didn’t want involved, but somehow knowing it was much more than that. Out the door, without saying another word, he fled.

~†~

Back at the garage, the only option Neil felt he had left was to leave. He couldn’t face their questions, couldn’t explain the answers…couldn’t bear to fail again. These people didn’t know what they asked, they hadn’t been there. He wondered what the present pastor was thinking, if he knew there was a faction against him, and Neil wondered if that poor man knew what was coming. At the thought of Jack, Neil had to choke back tears. It was an unsupportable position, stuck between fearing failure and knowing he had failed Jack, who had put so much trust in him. Perhaps Jack would understand, but he didn’t hold out hope. Most of all, though, Neil prayed that Jack wouldn’t come by. He didn’t.

Neil had fixed the few tires that still awaited his attention, and their owners had come and gone with endearing comments about how they’d love to hear him preach, or how they hoped they would see him come Sunday. They were all as deaf to his protestations as the old woman had been. Neil had begun to wonder if the air around here had become so stale and stagnant that it wouldn’t carry any words but those that had been uttered a hundred times before.

The rain continued to fall outside and the clouds had covered the sky blocking out all light from the moon and stars. Everything was wet to varying degrees in the shop. The ceiling and walls had become so cracked through the years that it was almost impossible to keep out the water. The shop’s lone fluorescent light flickered in protest of the drops of rain water that had found their way through the roof and onto its metal back painted white. It gave the room an eerie feeling of being inside a great beast swimming through uncharted seas.

Neil gathered up what few tools and possessions he had, placing them in their respective cases and bags, remembering the last time he had packed up and left. Something was wrong, Neil wasn’t a runner by nature. What choice did he have, though? It was like being a criminal, only he’d done nothing. Nothing, that is, other than refusing to be forced into a life that had already blown up in his face like so many of the old tires that’d he’d thrown behind his shop. Why couldn’t they understand? Every person that came to his door struck Neil as another torch bearing villager come to track the beast, only they didn’t want to kill him…only trap him in a cage like a little pet to be stared at and petted. That’s how it had been at the church in the end. He’d been caged, caged by his own inadequacies.

Neil loaded his things underneath a tarp in the back of his truck. Feeling sorry for himself he backed out of the open garage door, and into the rain, stopping only for a second to lock up the shop and turn out the lights.

It was fun, in a way, to speculate about the reactions that the townsfolk would have when they discovered his sudden departure. Sadly, though, most would probably just chalk it up to God’s work and never really get the point. They wouldn’t think about the hard work his hands had put into repairing their tires and replacing them, they wouldn’t think about how he’d often found motorists stranded on the road and brought their tires up to the shop to fix for free, they wouldn’t think of him as Neil the tire-monkey, they’d only think of him as Neil the fallen preacher. It shouldn’t bother him, but it did. In a way he wanted them to look up to him, he wanted to be someone that people could admire, but he wanted to be admired for what he was now, not what he could have been or once was.

He hadn’t driven for five or ten minutes when he suddenly felt the weight in his truck shift to the driver’s side, so he pulled to a stop and stepped out in the rain to see what was wrong. His inspection discovered that the front driver-side tire was as flat as the West Texas high plains, and that he had forgotten to pack up a spare and put it in his truck.

Neil laughed, he laughed at the irony of the situation, he laughed at the rain all around him, he laughed at the truck, he laughed at the tire…he laughed hysterically as if he had just escaped from a mental institution.

“Alright, now I can see you at least have a sense of humor!” Neil screamed raising his head toward the dark sky and falling rain. “You’re welcome, for all those years of service and thanks for costing me the ability to be anything else in the world.”

“So here I am standing in the rain, stranded and alone, thanks again. It is pretty obvious to me that you would rather your people be like those in that town, so let me save you the trouble by leaving. The least you could do would be to let me have my dignity. Thanks for nothing. Have mercy on me! I’d be better off dead and forgotten.”

Neil stood out in the rain dissolving into tears and sliding down to sit in the mud next to the flat tire. Running his hand down the tread he was surprised to find the head of a nail protruding about a quarter of an inch out of the tire. Well, at least he had found the problem, but it was useless, the tire had all the air ripped from its lungs and sat dejectedly in the mud next to the road looking old, old and frail.

Neil didn’t know how long he sat with his head between his knees feeling dwarfed and swallowed by the shear immensity of the failure of his life, but directly he noticed the air around him begin to lighten. Lifting his head he saw a set of car lights coming slowly up the road in his direction. The truck slowed even further when it caught sight of Neil and his truck, pulling over behind Neil and turning on its hazard lights. The window rolled down and a face poked out, but the headlights were too bright to distinguish who it was. The voice however, was the same light he’d heard in the darkness that had lead him into Sunset.

“Hey, what seems to be the problem?” Jack called out through the darkness at Neil.

“Tire’s flat, must’ve got a nail.” Neil felt caught, guilty, and hopeless all in the same breath. How would he explain?

“Got a spare?”

Neil sighed, wiping his running nose on the sleeve of his jacket. “Nope, I was fool enough to make off without one.”

Jack laughed. “The tire guy made off without a spare? You must have been in a hurry.”

“I’m glad you see the irony in that. And yes…I was in a hurry.”

The older man looked at him with a timeless expression in his face and wisdom in his eyes. “I seen the keys to the shop in my mail box…you leaving for good? It don’t rain like this all the time. Sometimes the wind gets up all wild and free, it’s like a stallion! You wouldn’t want to miss that. Of course, word is that you’ve seen quite a bit of wind in the past couple of days…wild and free wind, that ain’t much more than windbags blowing off steam. It ain’t always that way, Neil.”

“…But Jack, it is with me. That’s what you don’t understand. I can’t go back to preaching. It is my lot to fail in life…I’m just sorry that you had to be one I let down.”

“Ain’t nobody here asking you to go back to preachin. Hell, I ain’t been in the church house in years. My daddy nailed some of the first nails into that building, but that never kept him from pitchin a tent outside with only the cows and the Good Lord.”

Neil couldn’t answer. He stared at the tire for what seemed for an eternity in frustration wishing that it had kept him from avoiding this confrontation. He hated what he was; where he was. He kicked the tire.

“You’d think that as a tire-guy I’d have better tires myself.” Neil commented.

“You remember what you told me a couple of weeks ago? I had brought in my old 57’s tire telling you that I didn’t know how it got so wore out as little as I drive it. You remember what you told me? You said, ‘That’s kinda what they’re supposed to do,’ and fitted my rim with a new one.”

“What are you saying, Jack?”

“Well, I was just feeling a bit sorry for that poor old tire you’re kicking…doing its job like you told me it was, working hard, then getting kicked when it was down.”

Neil looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. It had been so long since anything had cut so swiftly and cleanly through to the core of his being. Had he been so blind? It wasn’t about the tire; it was much bigger than that. This wily old rancher felt sorry for him. After all Neil had done, after walking out on Jack’s trust…Jack still felt pity on him.  

What had seemed so important to him a moment before had faded. Neil could run no more. It was if his whole life had been heaved up out of his soul carrying him along with it to be spit out onto a warm sunny beach. The past three months seemed to coalesce around him and somehow, quietly they had dissolved into the air around him. He was stunned at how foolish he had been, how childlike and spoiled...  

“I’m more than willing to take you into town. That is, unless you think this rain is good for your skin.”

Neil chuckled. “God have mercy, you’re persistent…thanks.”

“I don’t know about God’s mercy, but while we’re waiting let me give you a hand getting that flat off,” Jack quipped walking towards the truck.

The uneven ground, slick with rain, grasped but couldn’t hold the mud stained grip of Jack’s truck tires as they made their way onto the road back into town. Neil’s answer came later, silently, as both a burden and a relief.

“Thanks…I could certainly use a couple of good hands.”