In the Scales Shed we watch Mr. Schlanger tap the weights he never has to tap very far because he pretty much knows what our ’48 International grosses out at even with a load of junkers stacked two high, three rows of them chained down all proper with the boomers on the passenger side just the way the State Patrol likes loads.

But it’s our two drums of Number One copper – that’s where the money is for both of us, Mr. Schlanger pronouncing it, kupe-er, adding a z before the word up, when he smiles, “Kupe-er’s zup, my boys.” Like we didn’t know that already, like we’ve been crawling under old dashboards just for fun, poking our hands past wasp nests and worse, snipping wires, cables,

then burning off the insulation, what makes that blackest, rolling smoke, what ruins all blackberries in its path.

But we smile back to Mr. Schlanger, some because we’re both newcomers here – him a Jew from “the old country”, and we’re San Francisco hippies, founders of The Farm, America’s largest commune (though we insist on saying it’s a “spiritual community”).

And here we meet in Columbia, Tennessee, “Muletown” to all CB users, the town so historically known for its work-animal market even Faulkner sent Snopses here whenever they needed a mule.

Some days Mr. Schlanger explains the whole deal - why copper’s so high this summer – how Anaconda has been nationalized, run out by the new government of Chile.

He always tells us this very slowly, as though young men with long hair and beards don’t read newspapers. But every so often we surprise him with our old SDS opinions: “Salvador Allende was democratically elected by the people of his country, and he’s only doing what he thinks best for them.”
This makes Mr. Schlanger frown. This makes him say the word, “Communist,” as though he’s spitting out a seed, as though the word alone is enough, as though there could

be no defense.

But weren’t you rescued by the Communists?

This is a question we think but do not ask because he never mentions the tattoo, blue numbers under his forearm hair, what almost shines on these sweatiest days. Besides, why chance pissing him off? He might not give us the new best price, each morning’s boost in recycled copper, what makes for the bigger check that, since we hold all things in common, gets handed straight over to our ‘bank lady” so she can buy supplies for The Farm midwives who have published this invitation across the country:

Come to our land, and we wil deliver your baby for free, and if you’re scared or confused, we’ll give your baby a home, but you can always come back for it.

Roe v Wade has just become law this January, but for the most part those are still docket words only certain lawyers recognize, so women with advanced bellies continue to show up every day now, some with boyfriends or husbands, some alone, yet more than we ever thought possible - twelve, fifteen birthings a month becoming our normal load, a whole crew devoted to assembling sterile packs, shouts such as, “Joycelyn’s doing it!” and “Denise is 6 centimeters!” echoing through our woods, news that gets hollered in turn to the next ridge, our logged-out 2000 acres of scrub oak barely ten miles from the Natchez Trace inn where Meriwether Lewis killed himself. Or was shot in a robbery. They still argue about it.

Around mid-July we hit the scrapyard jackpot over near Linden where old man Tidwell’s back pasture is a sloping metal quilt of Hudsons, DeSotos and Packards, the cars turned this way and that (some with their radiators even!), and all with wiring, thick copper cable, World War II steel frames rails – heavy babies, good weight.
We figure we can get two loads a day back into Muletown, onto Mr. Schlanger’ scales, enough of the big checks to buy a better autoclave, and more oxygen tanks, baby-masks, even electronic parts for the doppler fetal-scopes that we make ourselves in the tin barn that came with the land.

But two loads a day turns out to be not so easy the way old man Tidwell dogs us around his field, the way he’s convinced he has to tell us the story of each wreck, what curve, what pike it happened on and who all died, and which Jamison boy, or was it one

of them Hendersons . . . anyways, he’ll trail off, “He got himself stove up a right smart.”
It’s like Tidwell thinks we should know each car’s lineage and how long it skidded before our yellow boom truck can winch it up on the trailer – as if its weight alone is not sufficient, as if we’re not there just for the copper, short steel, brass couplings, the occasional aluminum head.

Old man Tidwell’s mouth is framed by chaw trickles etched into his reddish-grey stubble, his breath a harsh wind in our faces, a test of our post-peyote politeness, yet we listen to each story, we nod along to how the Elrods got T-boned up on 31, as we pull the engine, remove the gas tank and yank the seats before slowly settling the ruined Pontiac on top of a Chevy.

Sometimes, just to try and shut him up, we tell Tidwell about Chile and Salvador Allende, which is why he’s getting so much this summer for his junked-out babies, this bottom-land of wrecked cars. And it works, the news does give him pause, as though he is suddenly complicit in world events.

“One man’s misery’s another man’s gain, I reckon,” he sighs. “Ain’t that what they say?” We nod, and he lets go with a stream of Red Man juice, what we always try not to look at, but we can never quite help ourselves. It’s part of our two worlds – sitting za-zen on Sundays, talking with Tidwell on Mondays, Buddha’s first noble truth, “All is Suffering” echoed by fundamentalist road signs, “Repent! The End Is Near.”

The week Salvador Allende gets killed or kills himself (CIA either way) is the week we’re working the dregs of Tidwell’s field. It’s the week we decide to start looking

for a used ambulance to station outside birthings just in case. Two of us have finished the state EMT course, and the idea is to gradually provide emergency services for our backwoods neighbors, a vision that, in the next few years, will become a free ambulance service for the south Bronx, the place where few NYC units would answer calls.

By now the guy who works the big magnet has told us Mr. Schlanger’s story – how he hid out in Amsterdam for years before getting hauled off to the camps. Perhaps he knew the Franks, but none of us want to ask. Why force him back, why remove him from his peace, these barrels of Number One, the musty Scales Shed, his wasp-nest domain where he waves flatbeds and trailers onto the ramp, where he taps weights, and, best of all, writes our new-best-price copper checks while sometimes asking, “You’re one, [a Jew] aren’t you?” He’s right some of the time but not always.

And occasionally he’ll stop in mid pen-stroke to look up at the circle of us, losing himself in the tangles of our beards, so untrimmed they’re rabbinical – that’s when he seems to have a moment, what must connect to some long-ago Friday night, him the child out of breath, flushed, in a circle of stern beards, a boy’s footsteps on wet paving stones, an echo, time’s slippage, the lost world of a Yeshiva boy, surely in trouble, late again for Shul.