The Cadillac That Finally Paid Me Back

My new neighbor kept running over my trash cans until his own Cadillac finally paid me back

My name is Hollis Barnett, and for thirty-one years I have lived in the same gray house on Delaney Street in Corby, Illinois, a town so small that the water tower has our whole personality painted on it, which is to say it just says CORBY and a cartoon ear of corn.

I am sixty years old. I spent thirty-four of those years at the Farmers Co-op grain elevator out on Route 9, running the scale and then the whole yard, and when my knees told me it was time, I came home and set up a little welding and small-engine shop in my garage. I fix mowers and tillers and the occasional snowblower for people who do not want to drive to the city. I am not a loud man. My wife Peg says I am the kind of quiet that makes other people nervous, and I take that as a compliment even though she does not always mean it as one.

I tell you all this so you understand what kind of man I am before I tell you about the trash cans. I am not a man who looks for a fight. I have let a lot of things go in sixty years. I let my brother-in-law win every argument at Thanksgiving. I let the Petersen boys cut across my back lot for eleven years to get to the creek. I am a let-it-go man.

But everybody has a thing. And it turned out my thing was a pair of plastic garbage cans and a man named Brent Kessler.

Let me tell you about Brent.

He bought the Dunmore place across the street in the spring, after Carl Dunmore passed and his kids sold it. The Dunmores had lived there forty years. Carl used to walk over on summer evenings with two cans of Hamm’s and we would stand in my driveway and talk about nothing until the streetlight came on. When the sold sign went up I was already a little sad about it, the way you get sad about a house that is about to belong to a stranger.

Then the stranger arrived in a white Cadillac Escalade the size of a church van.

I remember standing at my kitchen window the first morning it was parked over there, washed and gleaming in a driveway that had held Carl’s old brown Buick for four decades, and Peg came and stood next to me and we both just looked at it. It was very clean. It was the cleanest thing on Delaney Street by a wide margin. It looked like it had been delivered by helicopter.