Just What Someone Always Wanted

By John O’Bryan

Long ago, when my youngest son Christian was three or four years old, he wanted to be two things when he grew up: a fire truck and a banana.  This may have had something to do with cartoons or maybe it’s in the blood, because I’ve always loved fire trucks, too.

At any rate, from the moment he could communicate with us, he was adamant that he didn’t want to be a fireman, he wanted to be a fire truck. Why he wanted to be a banana was beyond our comprehension.

Christian had an interesting speech pattern that only his brother could decipher. We looked to Wesley for translation when Christian tried to explain what he wanted for dinner, which part of his body he had hurt, or what he wanted to be when he grew up.

Thankfully, he developed out of that phase pretty quickly, but we still have indecipherable recordings of him when he was little at which all of us shake our heads, even Wesley, who long ago lost his ability to translate.

Because of Christian’s lack of verbal acuity, for all we knew he could have been telling us he wanted to be a doctor or a fan dancer, but we relied on Wesley’s interpretation that more than anything his brother wanted to have four wheels and a fire hose. He did have a bedwetting problem for a while, so maybe that was a factor in him wanting to be a pumper truck but in any case, we all got the message.

The author's son Christian with the prized yellow fire truck. John O'Bryan.

Christian and his wife Lee with the truck. John O'Bryan.

Potlatch depot. Robert Ashworth.

Grass fire near Potlatch. Robert Ashworth.

Many years later, after Christian had grown up and married, he and his wife Lee accompanied my wife Kelly and me on a drive to Coeur d’Alene. As we passed through Potlatch, something wonderful caught my eye. To the surprise of everyone else in the truck, I locked the wheels, flipped it around, and came to an abrupt stop facing the opposite direction in a cloud of blue smoke. 

“What are you doing?” Kelly screamed, all four of her limbs bracing for impact.

I pointed, mouth agape, at a real live fire truck parked on the roadside. It was as yellow as a banana, and wedged under its wiper was a for sale sign.

“Wait, you almost killed us to show us that?  Why do you want to show us a fire truck?” She wasn’t quite yelling but was on the edge of it and had a tone in her voice that made me pause before answering. 

“Um,” I said, “because it’s a fire truck?”

“And?”

“And…none of my friends have one!” My voice raised a few octaves toward the end of this sentence and I waved my arms and pointed with both hands at the vehicle framed in our windshield.  “Who else but me would be able to say, ‘Hey guys, you want to see my fire truck?’”

She rolled her eyes as she had done a hundred times before, took a deep breath, and went back to her book. We knew this was a good sign. The young people and I jumped out to take a closer look. We climbed over and around the fire truck, laughing at ever being able to afford such an amazing thing, knowing that the asking price would likely be twenty or thirty thousand dollars, but as I always say, it never hurts to look.

Maybe to buy it at six figures would be an amazing deal, which would mean to get it for thirty thousand would be a steal.  How would anyone know what the value of a fire truck is, anyway?  It would be like asking the surgeon what the total price of a hip replacement would be.  No one knows how much it costs.  You just pay what they tell you at the end and be happy about it.

The old man who was selling this piece of machinery for the “actual” owner just happened to be working in his field when we stopped and was very happy to give us the lowdown on his multi-wheeled beast of a man-lure. He appeared at my elbow so quickly after we approached the truck that it felt like he’d been waiting in the bushes. Worried that I might be at a crossroads of some sort, I looked for horns in his hairline.

 “Just sixteen thousand miles on that beauty,” he said. “The owner only drove it in parades and there ain’t many parades no more.  He says he’s getting too old to drive it now and wants to get rid of it. I think you should buy it.” He winked and nodded.

I looked under a wheel well and tapped at the gauges as if I knew everything there was to know about fire trucks. I gazed off into the distance like I was bored.

“I don’t know,” I said, “seems kind of run down to me.  How much do you think he’d take for such an old piece of machinery?”

The man smiled. “You seem to know a lot about fire trucks, so you’ll know this is an American LaFrance, probably the best example of this model year in existence. Bluebook value has to be in the thirty thousand range, especially since everything works on it.”

He rubbed his white beard, and then seemed to make up his mind.  “However, because I like you, I will let it go for five thousand dollars. I mean,” he said, “the owner would let it go for that price.”

Christian saw a familiar look in my eyes and started jumping up and down and yelling like a four-year-old. “We’re getting a fire truck, and it’s a banana!”

Only five thousand for such a beauty? I mean, how could I resist?  How could anyone resist?  As I walked back to our truck, I saw my wife scribbling furiously on a piece of paper.  She stopped as I approached. 

I looked curiously at her, grabbed the checkbook from her hands, and made my way back to my new fire truck. I opened the checkbook only to find that across every single check was written in big black letters “void.” I looked back at Kelly, who shrugged and waved a little.

I showed the old man what she had done. He smiled and nodded. “You’ve got a kind wife right there. You should have seen what the wife wrote on the checks of the guy that was here before you.”

I hurried the kids back into the truck and took off for home to get a fresh set of checks. Some time later, I skidded into our driveway in Moscow and was back in the truck with both a new checkbook and, I noticed in the rearview mirror, a look of triumph on my face.

I may have broken the speed limit racing back to the fire truck, yet when we got to the place, it was gone, and the old man with it. I sat there for a moment in stunned silence as my son comforted me with empty words about there being another fire truck in my future. But I knew it wasn’t going to happen.

I pulled out onto the highway in my puny, not yellow, under-powered truck with no extension ladder or hoses and started the long ride home. Depression could have set in, but I had been hoarding things long enough to know that this feeling of gloom would pass soon enough.

Still, that realization didn’t take the sting out of almost owning a real live yellow working fire truck. For Christian, I mean.

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