Mr. Dent

I had great neighbors in Cheyenne during the five years I lived there, after being transferred there on my job in 2002. I chose a corner lot on the edge of Cheyenne next to a big vacant lot, for the precise reason that I am a country girl, and I didn't want neighbors that close. The first six months I was there, no one in the neighborhood spoke to me or even waved. Then one day the lady across the street waved to me as she went from her house to her workshop.
I can imagine what they must have thought, because most of them disclosed to me what they were thinking after I got to know them a little. I pulled in with trucks, tractors, trailers, and went to work cleaning up the place. The previous owners had operated a welding shop on the premises, and someone told me the whole back acre had been a junk yard at one time. I hauled tons of junk out the first year I was there, and after I put horses on it, their hooves kept churning up various car parts like springs, brake shoes, mufflers, air cleaners, hub caps, etc. I think I dug up a whole car out there. That's when I decided to call my little place the "Redneck Ranch."
I got to know the waving neighbor, and she was a fun lady. She'd lived in Cheyenne most of her life, except for a few years following her first husband around in the military lifestyle. Then she married Mr. Dent, from Dent County, Missouri. Yes, the county was named after his family. I call him the original hippie. He is definitely a redneck. A retired Consolidated Freightways truck driver, he drives a jacked up 1970 Chevy Van, 4 X 4, and has an original C.H.I.P.S. motorcycle. He was jealous of my tractor.
Said tractor had a low front tire when I went out to do a job one Saturday morning. I knew Mr. Dent had a portable air tank, so I walked over and asked if I could borrow it to air up my tractor tire. He said he'd bring it over. After loading the five-pound apparatus in his 4 X 4 van, he drove the 100 or so feet over to where my tractor was. I had to open a gate and take down a fence to get him and his big, honkin' van in there.
He puffed up the front tire and said, "Any more of 'em need it, there's a few more pounds left in here."
I looked and one rear tire was a little soft, so he came around with the air tank while I pulled the valve stem cover off. He squashed the air chuck up against the stem and fluid began squirting from it.
"That's gonna have to be fixed," he stated.
I stuck my finger up against the stem to keep all the air and fluid from escaping, while he walked back over to his garage to get his valve stem tool. Large tractor tires are sometimes filled with calcium chloride, a corrosive substance, and it had rusted the valve stem away. Clark came back and inserted his valve stem remover, and promptly got it stuck. He worked and worked, but couldn't extract either the tool or the valve stem. He finally stepped back and I reached in there, grabbed the tool, gave a sharp tug, and out it popped. I stuffed the valve stem cap back on and stopped the leak.
Mr. Dent's mouth dropped open and he scratched his head as he looked at me. "No wonder you don't have a man living over here with you," he said. "A man would just be in your way." Amen to that.