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The Dancing Girls
by
At seventeen he went to work in the Elite Garage. He hadn’t been there a month before the owner was saying, “Say, Chug, take a look at this here bus, will you? She don’t run right but I can’t find out what’s got into her.”
Chug would put his ear to the heart of the car, and tap its vitals, and count its pulse-beats as a doctor sounds you with his stethoscope. The look on his face was that of a violinist who tries his G-string.
For the rest, he filled gas tanks, changed and pumped up tires, tested batteries, oiled tappets. But the thing that fascinated him was the engine. An oily, blue-eyed boy in spattered overalls, he was always just emerging from beneath a car, or crawling under it. When a new car came in, en route–a proud, glittering affair–he always managed to get a chance at it somehow, though the owner or chauffeur guarded it ever so jealously. The only thing on wheels that he really despised was an electric brougham. Chippewa’s well-paved streets made these vehicles possible. Your true garage man’s feeling for electrics is unprintable. The least that they called them was juice-boxes.
At home Chug was forever rigging up labour-saving devices for his mother. The Scaritt’s window-shades always rolled; their doorbell always rang with a satisfactory zing; their suction-pump never stuck. By the time he was twenty Chug was manager of the garage and his mother was saying, “You’re around that garage sixteen hours a day. When you’re home you’re everlastingly reading those engineering papers and things. Your pa at your age had a girl for every night in the week and two on Sundays.”
“Another year or so and I can buy out old Behnke and own the place. Soon’s I do I’m going to come home in the speediest boat in the barn, and I’m going to bust up those curtain frames into kindling wood, over my knee, and pile ’em in the backyard and make a bonfire out of ’em.”
“They’ve been pretty good friends to us, Chug–those curtain frames.”
“Um.” He glanced at her parboiled fingers. “Just the same, it’ll be nix with the lace curtains for you.”
Glancing back on what has been told of Chug he sounds, somehow, so much like a modern Rollo, with a dash of Alger, that unless something is told of his social side he may be misunderstood.
Chug was a natural born dancer. There are young men who, after the music has struck up, can start out incredibly enough by saying: “What is this, anyway–waltz or fox trot?” This was inconceivable to Chug. He had never had a dancing lesson in his life, but he had a sense of rhythm that was infallible. He could no more have danced out of time than he could have started a car on high, or confused a flivver with a Twelve. He didn’t look particularly swanlike as he danced, having large, sensible feet, but they were expert at not being where someone else’s feet happened to be, and he could time a beat to the fraction of a second.
When you have practically spent your entire day sprawled under a balky car, with a piece of dirty mat between you and the cement floor, your view limited to crank-case, transmission, universal, fly-wheel, differential, pan, and brake-rods you can do with a bit of colour in the evening. And just here was where Chippewa failed Chug.
He had a grave problem confronting him in his search for an evening’s amusement. Chippewa, Wisconsin, was proud of its paved streets, its thirty thousand population, its lighting system, and the Greek temple that was the new First National Bank. It boasted of its interurban lines, its neat houses set well back among old elms, its paper mills, its plough works, and its prosperity. If you had told Chippewa that it was criminally ignoring Chug’s crying need it would have put you down as mad.