Compulsion

T HE MUD WAS LIKE a dirty magnet, a “black hole” of clay that pulled everything into it. Out here in Llano, it had already driven me quite mad.

Day after day we drove through slop that only needed draining. I wanted to stand out in front of people’s houses and beat on pots and pans until they came out and told me why a minute with a hoe was such a hardship. Fortunately I didn’t, and no one shot me. One hole was too much for me, however. Not far from the house, someone had backed a huge lumbering truck out of a corral, leaving a perilous gouge in the public road. For three days I tried creeping along the rim of the abyss, only to slide down inside every time, slathering brown goo and rocks all over our shiny white new car. That ups the ante, right? It has to. On the evening of the fourth day, I stomped down the road with a shovel and filled the hole with dirt from the shoulder, crazy longhaired gringo flinging gravel in the dusk. It felt good, though: I was in a burying mood.

A month ago the timing belt on the Dodge Spirit let go and left my honey shaken and stranded in the middle of a muddy road. A sheriff’s deputy happened to come along right behind her and pushed the car off to one side so he could get by, which was the high point of the day. I got her out of there with my ’87 F-150, and we left the old car she’d inherited from her mother sitting in the mud for the AAA truck to tow to a garage. When we heard the estimate—reasonable enough, as it went—we decided to let the battered relic go. So much adventure, so little time.

The next week, the mesa melted. The big Ford churned through the slop with careless gusto, but the road was a disaster, and once I almost got stuck just 200 yards from the house. We missed a garbage pickup, then the paper. Our delivery lady just couldn’t make it, first through the mud and then the awful ruts, so she left the newspaper wrapped in plastic on the ground beside the nearest stop sign. My wife actually walked down the road in her bathrobe to retrieve it—early in the morning, while the mud was still frozen—but that only worked the first time. For the next four days, the neighborhood devil dog carried the papers away before she got there. Finally the plucky paper person tried hanging the wrapped paper from the stop sign, and this worked once. I would rather have hanged the dog, but right about then the road began to dry out a little, and everyone went home.

That’s when my wife and I looked at each other and decided to buy a new car. Brand-new, as in unused, straining tribal orthodoxy all around. (“Oh! You got a new car...” said a neighbor.) She’d already had her epiphany while sitting in the dead Spirit, waiting to be rescued. I had mine when the Friday Motors salesman told me we could finance the 2007 Vibe we were looking at for zero percent and no money down. Things were moving: I held a gun to the weather, but it made no difference, and a few days later we brought the white Pontiac home in the mud.

Last week I raided a neighbor’s sand pile to fill puddles in the only two places I could park. In this neck of the woods, dead cars are to burglars as garlic and crucifixes are to vampires (“so it looks like someone’s there”), and they occupy the high ground, so I figured I could just plead sanity if cornered. As it turned out, that didn’t work, much like, “Sorry, but I had to shoot your mule to feed my dogs.” Terrible, but who can quit? Now I stalk the road with my shovel, knocking the ridges into the ruts and piling stones in the low spots, me and a million other peons somewhere mucking in the dirt to fix a road…