Brenda The Clunker

After saving for several years, I bought my very own hunting vehicle: an old Ford Bronco. Even though my lifelong best friend and mentor Jaybird shook his head disapprovingly when I showed her to him, I was totally in love with the four-wheel-drive beauty that I called Brenda the Bronco, named after my significant other at the time.

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“Mud puddles is more than it can git out of,” Jaybird mumbled. “You call her Brenda the Bronco; I call her Brenda the clunker.” “Aw, come on, Jaybird. Don’t be so critical of my baby. Look what’s sitting on the front bumper — a winch. On the off chance she gets stuck and trees are nearby, the winch will pull her out.” Duck hunting was my passion, and on opening day, I talked Jaybird into going with me to a mallard hotspot: Po’ Boy Brake. Against his better judgment, the old black man agreed. Upon reaching Po’ Boy, we heard thousands of mallards quacking in a flooded rice field, separated from us by a slough. Firewalling Brenda and plunging into the quagmire, I shouted, “Jaybird, you’re about to see what Brenda can do.” Slush swished by as the straining motor roared. Manhandling the naked lady steering knob, I plowed through the slough. Suddenly the world went from slurry to silence. Brenda bottomed out and her engine stalled. “Don’t worry,” I said, pointing to trees on the other side.

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After wrapping the cable around a clump of willows, I yelled, “Kick the winch in gear and pull ’er over.” The winch worked fine — pulled the willow clump straight to the Bronco. In the silence we heard only distant quacks, now sounding like laughter. Hours later, we trudged up to a farmstead. Hopefully, the owner would loan us the old green John Deere tractor sitting in his barn. “That tractor is my livelihood, but go ’head and use it,” he said. “Refill the radiator before you crank it.” The tractors on Dad’s Mississippi Delta farm were red, but we didn’t think green and red ones were different. Standing on the hood, I loosened what I thought was the radiator cap as Jaybird passed up jugs of water. In those days radiators were in front of fuel tanks on red tractors; on green ones they were behind. Ignorant of this, I poured water in the fuel tank and plopped into the seat to crank it. Crank it did, but the engine’s fibrillating clack indicated something was bad wrong. Hearing the Deere’s death rattle, the farmer appeared instantly on his front porch, dancing barefoot in the cold, foaming at the mouth like a grizzly, and screaming, “Ethel, bring the shotgun quick.” Off we galumphed in our waders. Trekking back toward civilization, I hoped Dad would let us borrow one of his tractors to retrieve Brenda. “You think he will, Jaybird?” “If he does, you’ll have to git somebody else to go with you to Po’ Boy. I don’t want nuttin’ else to do with Brenda the clunker.”

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