If awards were handed out to sloppy operators, one would surely have gone to Stan and Nick Stubble. I first met them back in the late sixties -- their farm was about ten miles from town, on the way to the gravel pits. When all the spring seeding was finished, they'd take turns hauling aggregates for a large concrete company, with their ugly, old long-nosed cornbinder tandem truck.

The truck had a short wheel base and was equipped with a beat-up dump box that overhung the back wheels by about a foot and a half. In order to get the allotted weight on the steering axle, it was necessary to crowd the load as far forward as possible--in fact, right up onto the cabshield, giving the rig a hunched-up appearance. When viewed from a distance, labouring down the highway, it looked (to put it politely) like a huge dog trying to mate with a garbage can.

The truck was a marvel of haywire repairs--heater hoses, and even a brake line, were pinched off with vice-grips; a bungy cord stretched from one inside door handle to the other, serving to keep the driver's door closed. Nick liked to joke that it doubled as a seatbelt too. Their solution for worn-out centre bushings was to fasten two lengths of cable diagonally from one walking beam hanger to the other, like a bobsled, in a crude attempt to prevent the tires from rubbing on the frame rails when turning a corner. Fortunately, today, you couldn't get a permit to drive it to the scrap yard.

When warned that their name must be printed on both sides of the truck, they couldn't agree on whose given name should appear first, and instead of just "Stubble Bros.," they put Nick on one side and Stan on the other. So, Nick was coming, and Stan was going.

With their bent-up, leaky tailgate and torn or missing mud-flaps, they broke more windshields than a Texas hailstorm. It was only a matter of time before they broke the wrong one...and of course, it had to belong to a local radio talk-show host, whose usual crusades consisted of keeping a senile old woman with over a hundred stray cats from the wrath of her neighbours and the local heath authorities. When he wasn't occupied with that, he was railing about all forms of kinky sexual behaviour - this latter topic being his particular favourite. The Stubble brothers had now managed to divert his attention from pussycats and pornography to the perils of sharing the roads with large, poorly maintained gravel trucks, driven by, as he put it, idiots that were not fit to be washing towels in a whorehouse.

The heat was on everyone.....good drivers paid with time lost at the scales while D.O.T. inspectors scrutinized their rigs...sloppy operators skulked off, with their tailgates dragging, finally forced to make the long-overdue repairs. The Stubbles were no exception. For a week they were busy scrounging in the junkyards for the parts their truck needed in order to pass the dreaded inspections.

Finally after much work, they decided a fresh coat of paint would go a long way in diverting the critical eyes of the inspectors. So, with their usual ingenuity and convoluted logic, they set about sanding and masking the offensive-looking beast of burden. They had plenty of old, left-over red barn paint, and they figured that if they thinned it with gasoline, it would dry a lot faster.

The weather was looking unsettled, so they backed the truck into their brand-new sixty-by-forty-foot metal machine shed, taking the precaution of opening the big sliding doors at each end. With the truck safely under cover, they proceeded to spray on the now-"quick-dry" barn paint.

Upon completion, they stood back to admire their efforts. One of the brothers soon produced the makings and they wasted little time rolling a couple of smokes.

I don't know which one struck the match, but the results were fairly impressive, to say the least. According to their neighbour, Walter Kolchinski, there was a thunderous, earth-shaking "whump", and flames shot at least fifty feet from both ends of the machine shed. The Stubble brothers flew just as far; their clothes flew even further. A large flock of chickens feeding around the buildings had most of their feathers blasted off, and either the wind or a tremendous backdraft sucked feathers, dirt and straw back into the open machine shed, covering the freshly painted truck with the debris. The building's metal cladding now bulged severely, giving it the appearance of a giant green pillow stuffed with feathers and straw. The resulting blast left Nick and Stan totally naked except for their cowboy boots and undershorts. So there they stood - no hair, no clothing - like a couple of singed hogs, and in a fair bit of pain. Their quicker-thinking neighbour ran over to the cold-storage shed, and grabbing a big tub of butter, smeared the contents all over them. With a couple of old green army blankets wrapped around their naked bodies, they looked, as Walter joked afterwards, like a pair of giant holubchi. "All they needed was tomato sauce, and they'd have been good enough to serve at my cousin Steve's wedding," he laughed. According to Stan, they were nearly deaf for three days afterwards.

By the time they regained hair and hide, the gravel-hauling season was over. The now-famous truck, a constant source of ridicule, was put out to pasture, restricted to hauling grain from the combine to the bins. The Stubble Brothers never again infested the trucking business with their felonious stupidity...but rest assured - there are plenty of others out there just as bad.

- B.J. Rhodes