FICTION / Tread Lightly / Nick Brouard
Photo by Catherine Zaidova on Unsplash
Winter is never a good time to start a business. The sentiment toward new ventures in the colder months, financial or otherwise, is typically one of wanton apathy. Probably due to old survival instincts kicking in: the desire to avoid jeopardising what is already good by undertaking the inessential in harsher climes. It’s like a Neanderthal deciding to leave the family cave to hunt a sabre-toothed tiger during the Ice-Age, when he still has perfectly good mammoth in his pantry to hunker down on—you just don’t do it. Michael Stevenson, a pretty much ordinary man from Little Shale, Arkansas, had never heard that particular strained analogy or any others like it before though, so he decided to go ahead and do just that.
Michael’s father, Mickey Stevenson Senior, had made a decent living from selling car tyres. Thanks to the pointy pebbles the town was named after, the old patriarch’s wheel business, Get a Grip Tyres, was one of few things that had actually managed to get on a roll in Little Shale. Mickey Senior used to boast that the only guy that had sold more tyres than him was the Michelin man after which his son was named (Michel being French for Michael, you understand).
Mickey Senior had a particular affinity for selling customers two spare tyres, a precaution he ensured the public wasn’t so much a sales tactic but a frank looking-out for their safety. The story goes that he was driving home from the local well late one night when he spotted the town crone Mrs Kowalski on the side of the town’s main street, West and 28th, wailing on her Ford Pinto’s busted tyre with a bent wrench and screaming a rainbow of murder at all of the cars passing her by.
The professional he was, Mickey had a few heavy-tread Dunlops kicking around in the trunk of his truck and made short work of changing the wheel for the cantankerous old girl. So you can imagine his surprise when he was awoken the following morning by a phone-call from Kowalski, stood in the exact spot he had left her on the road hours earlier, with her new tyre flattened by those “fucking little rocks again”—Kowalski’s words, not mine.
It was from then on, that Mickey became an ardent purveyor of what he called “The Two Tyre Technique”. But the Kowalski story turned out to be an exception, not the rule, and that was how he wound up making his money: selling tyres to the oftentimes more than sufficiently tyred. He even went so far as to place a one-year expiry date on everything he sold, on the off chance the town’s roads would someday burst his business plan, too.
It was through the aggressive proliferation of car tyres that Mickey Senior managed to achieve apotheotic levels of fatherhood and to gain bliss for himself and his family. Bliss, that is, for everyone but his son Michael.
#
“Lasticophobia. Your boys got himself an irrational fear of car tyres, Mick,” said Doctor Doc, writing it down on a notepad to show him: la-stico-pho-bia. “You see, it has ‘lastic’ in it, like e-lastic, rubber—"
“I’m not scared of them. I just can’t look at them too long, touch them, smell them, or hear them,” Michael interrupted, trying his best to soften the news to his father but shuddering in the process.
“That means you’re scared of them,” Doctor Doc confirmed flatly.
#
The ambition with which Mickey Senior built his business paled to the drive he applied to adjusting his son’s attitude towards its wares. He even assigned Michael a job polishing hubcaps in his office, behind closed doors and away from the rest of the shop, but the inevitability with which the rims always needed to be paired with tyres soon ruined that one.
It was no use. Michael couldn’t be around them. He hated their texture, he hated their sporty names, he hated the men that didn’t seem to mind rubbing their bare hands all over them, and he hated the monotony of their colour, which he figured was needlessly joyless. In fact, he disliked wheels so much that the moment Mickey Senior tightened his last bolt, figuratively speaking, he closed the shop altogether. And Little Shale was worse off for it, Get a Grip Tyres being the only place to change a wheel in town and all.
When a person runs a successful business in a small town, they get to know everybody, and because of that, their family does too. So when Michael shut his father’s shop not one Little Shalian missed an opportunity to voice their disappointment in him. Even Mrs Kowalski, who was still alive at one-hundred-and-two and, more to the point, still driving her Ford Pinto, told him “What a fucking shame it was he didn’t have the fruit to keep it going.”
Yes, Michael certainly felt a bump from the pothole he left in his community by closing up and knew that if he ever intended on hearing the end of it, he needed to plug it with something as indispensable as the tyre shop had been—and fast.
#
Little Shale Recreational Park is an apologetic place. As stony as the rest of town, all it has by means of children’s light entertainment is a long, rusty slide that would be slipperier if it were made of sandpaper and these empty, semi-circular, metal frames sticking out of its play-area like lawn croquet goals for an untidy giant.
During a mournful stroll through the park one morning, Michael noticed a little girl pointing to one of the structures with a question mark above her head:
“What’s this, momma?” she asked, straddling the frame in that awkward half-way house between a climb and a ride.
“It used to be a swing, I guess,” her mother replied from a haze of Eton Mess flavoured fog.
“What’s a swing?” the girl went on, plate eyed.
That was it. The image of the girl’s face as it transformed from one of vacant curiosity to high-flying wonder after feeling her first nudge on a swing was all it took for Michael to decide to open up a swing shop in Little Shale. Not a bad idea, really, had it not been January, the Monday of the calendar year.
#
To say business dragged during Sultans of Swings initial opening would be a gross understatement. Michael didn’t have a single customer for his first two months – the little girl and her mother were nowhere to be seen. Though it was understandable, it was blizzard season in Arkansas and, as predicted at the beginning of this short story, folks had decided to keep themselves to themselves. In the throes of winter, nobody was interested in Michael’s fine selection of children’s and adult’s swing sets: SIDESWIZZLERS, ZEROGRAVITYMAGICCARPETS, SWINGSWANGS, SWINGYLINGYS, or plain old toddler rides and double-seaters, that I’m told are great for barbeques.
#
But then on the first day of spring, as the sun yawned its way through the last of the winter’s pitch-grey clouds, removing any possible threat of sabre-tooth tigers, it finally happened. A wrapped-up man with snow still thawing on his shoulders shivered his way into Michael’s shop.
“I-I’ve come all the way from West and 28th,“ he said. There was a brief pause as he swung some of Michael’s stock. “Do you have any tyre swings?”
Nick Brouard is an award-winning copywriter moonlighting as a fiction writer. He currently lives and (sometimes) works in Vancouver, BC.
