He had left his chair now and was moving through the darkened house, looking for something. The TV flickered in the corner like an aquarium. Whatever he was looking for, a tool or a weapon he could use as a tool, was eluding him. Gliding under the chassis, tighten, tighten, gliding back out. Something Kyle said once, now that he’s remembering Kyle: If he ever had a daughter he would name her Chassis, because it was pretty. They were talking cars, all of them, and everyone had turned around and stared at Kyle.

Once you understood basic physics, you could use things as tools that weren’t necessarily tools. A screw turned just so into a block of wood would lift the cap off a beer bottle more efficiently than a church key; a strand of dental floss would slice a cheesecake more cleanly than the sharpest knife. Et cetera. He would never use the right tool if he could use a better wrong one. Unlike the old man, who would demand his Polish problem solver (aka the hammer) and then whale on whatever it was until it broke free or just broke. Which is how one of the boys got three of his fingers cut off at age eleven during an episode with a tree branch caught in the mower blade.

Gimme muh problem solver, the old man had said. And then: Lift the gawdam thing. And then whack, whack, whack, until the blade sprang free and finished its revolution.

It wudden spose to do that was what the old man said to the sheriff, who drove out to look around after the hospital reported that a boy was brought in minus several fingers. Afterward, the old man cut up about what had happened to regain his authority. I thought he was a bawling like that cuz he dropped his posies, he said in a mincing voice. They were meant to laugh and they probably did.

Not much was asked of those kinds of men back then; all day surrounded by manure and recalcitrant machinery, they just simmered in their meanness. The women too—every egg his grandmother cracked had shit and feathers stuck to it, every shirt she scrubbed with her own knuckles and ran through the wringer came out of the wash still smelling like the old man. She knew how to improvise a tool too; maybe that’s where he learned it. Everything from a wooden spatula grabbed off the back of the stove to an extension cord to the old wire rug beater, which the boys called the Doug beater after a particular incident that got it retired permanently.