Chapter 20

A Company Man

Vern Willen knew how possessive Wayne was about his knife, the long blade that he always wore on his belt. Wayne had made it clear to everyone that he didn’t lend it out, even for the smallest purpose. It was sacred.

But in the few months that Vern had worked now, side by side with Wayne, he had grown respectfully fond of Wayne. And on one particularly memorable day, as Vern and Wayne labored with a load of cardboard-wrapped furniture, Vern reached for his own folding knife, which he carried in his pocket. It wasn’t there. He remembered that he had left it somewhere else.

Thinking to himself, looking at Wayne’s knife, snug in its sheath, and knowing what the answer would be, he decided to go ahead and ask Wayne anyway. Could he use the knife. Just this once. To cut some string.

“Mine’s not handy,” Vern explained. “Hey, can I borrow your knife?” He came right out with it.

Wayne didn’t look up.

“No, you got your own knife,” he said point blank.

Vern shrugged it off. It was just another case of Wayne being Wayne. He didn’t like him any less for it. But there was such a definitive quality in Wayne’s response, such adamance, that Vern wouldn’t forget it, even if it didn’t really matter very much that Vern had to go retrieve his own knife to cut the string ties that day.

Months later, in the early part of 1986, Vern had a second occasion to ask the impossible: to borrow the knife. Wayne was behind the wheel and they were crossing town, heading back to the warehouse after making a delivery. Vern sat on the passenger side of the cab, prying with his fingernails at a wood sliver that had become deeply embedded in his palm. Just like the last time, Vern didn’t have his knife handy.

“Can I borrow your knife?” he said, holding out his hand. “To dig this out.” Vern may have colored his request with a pitiful tinge. Or maybe it was the sight of blood on his broad palm.

“Sure.” Wayne didn’t hesitate. He dropped his right hand to his side and pulled out the knife. “Watch it, though. The point is very sharp.”

Vern didn’t say anything as he dug away. He got the sliver and the bleeding seemed too profuse for what it had entailed. He wiped the blade and handed it back.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Sure.”

It was a simple human kindness, not worth recording to memory, but Vern did, because he knew how much it must have meant to Wayne, the knife fancier. He had collected dozens of them. In his room at home he hung his favorite ones on the walls, along with swords and daggers he had either bought or made. He kept drawers full of them, and he added to his collection whenever he found one he couldn’t resist. In between deliveries for Conlin’s, when Wayne and Rick Mace were teamed up, they would often stop at Rice’s, where his friend Rick Davis now worked, to look at the secondhand knives. Wayne bought half a dozen knives from Rice’s, mostly junk-grade stuff, such as a serpentine blade affair of Japanese manufacture that was much like the one he already owned and had named “Hook”—the one he had flashed around at Taco John’s years before. Wayne already owned a pair of brass knuckles from his days at the Cabin, and at Rice’s he acquired a more lethal pair, the kind that when fitted on a closed fist have a two-inch blade protruding between the second and third finger.

While the simple acquisition of a knife, even an eight- or twelve-dollar knife from Rice’s, where the price was scrawled in felt pen on the blade, gave him pleasure, it didn’t give him ultimate satisfaction. What Wayne really wanted was a Ruana. Something like a 12A Ruana Sticker with standard sheath, described in the catalogue as an “all-around knife for any use—carpentering, fishing, hunting. A favorite with servicemen.”

The 12A with five-inch blade was priced at eighty dollars, and Wayne’s coworkers will never forget the day he got it. They recognized the name, because Ruana had been big in western Montana since any of them were old enough to remember. The Ruana Knife Works, Inc. got its start in the late Thirties. The local outfit traced its beginnings to Rudolph Ruana, who first started making knives as a farrier in the U.S. Army Cavalry in the early 1920s. When he eventually settled in tiny Bonner, Montana, in 1937, he started a business that has survived until today, with customers all over the world. Matt Hangas, grandson of the legendary knifemaker, was a classmate of Wayne’s at Bonner Elementary. Now he worked in the family business, making knives in the family tradition.

When he started, “Rudy” Ruana priced the average-sized, five-inch working man’s knife at what a Bonner mill worker made in a day. Today, the average knife ranges between $65 and $75, still about a day’s pay for a mill laborer in Bonner. While Wayne, as a warehouse worker and delivery man, was making less than that—about $40 a day—he would have the knife anyway. Its blade was hammer-forged, heat-treated high-carbon sprung steel. Its aluminum handle was cast directly on the tang. Its grip was native Montana elk horn, beveled and riveted. Its hand-tooled sheath was made of heavy, naturally tanned leather, stitched with seven-ply harness thread and secured at the blade’s tip with copper nails. This was a work of craftsman’s art. It was the granddaddy of his collection, an exemplar of the sword that had slain the Jabberwock:

One, Two! One Two! And through and through

The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

Wednesday was payday at Conlin’s, and it was also the day that the bulk of local deliveries were scheduled. If Wayne were out in the truck with Vern, and happened to be near Vern’s bank and they weren’t in a bind for time, Vern would typically ask if they could stop so he could cash his check. The answer was always the same. Wayne, the company man, would lecture him about doing personal business on company time.

But Vern persisted. After all, he had just recently been honored by Wayne’s permission to let him use the Ruana to extract a splinter from his hand. He thought he had seen a softer side of Wayne’s otherwise dogmatic personality, and besides, Christ, the bank was right there.

“It’ll take ten minutes tops. Why don’t you cash yours?”

“You don’t do that on company time.” Wayne bore down, driving on.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Vern shrugged. How could he have presumed otherwise? This was the guy who had even refined a methodology for segregating the big plastic covers that they used in the warehouse from the smaller ones.

“These we use for sofas, loveseats, chairs. The small plastic we keep over here, for smaller stuff,” Wayne would say.

“Yeah,” Vern responded. “Yeah.”