Bruce Yells-At-Crows and His Propane Engine

Most people who live as far from town as I do have acquired the habit of saving leftover bits and pieces of just about everything. I will throw a funny looking screw into a coffee can full of other funny looking screws and say to myself: "That’ll save me a trip to town some day", and now and then it will. But, when it comes to making do with what's on hand, my friend Bruce Yells-At-Crows puts the rest of us in the shade.

Not long ago Bruce appeared at my house in his 1956 Chevy pickup to show me how he had converted it to run on propane. My first thought was that a conversion job like that costs several hundred dollars; more money than Bruce can usually lay his hands on, so I was curious to see how he had improvised. "Impossible; it won’t work" I said after looking the thing over, but there the pickup sat, purring like a cat. I worked the throttle linkage and jumped back as the engine responded with a roar. It was obvious that it did work, and also that the job hadn't cost Bruce much more than his labor and a few pieces of recycled scrap. He had borrowed a propane cylinder off an old brush burner and anchored it to the bed of the truck; then he had run a copper tube from the cylinder through the back of the cab under the floorboards and up to a little brass valve—his only cash purchase—bolted to the dashboard. From the valve he had run another copper tube through the firewall and down into the top of the engine's air-cleaner through a hole drilled in it's lid. All you had to do to make the truck go was open the valve, hurry and turn the engine over with the starter before too much raw propane accumulated under the hood, and, when it caught, drive away. The regular foot-throttle on the car worked fine once you got going. You needed to tune the fuel valve a little now and then—too much fuel and she'd backfire; too little and she'd overheat.

"It won't work" I said again, but there it was, working. After some thought, I realized that of course it would work. Propane liquid from the cylinder under high pressure would vaporize as it crossed the valve; then the vapor would flow through the tube into the air cleaner and from there, being heavier than air, down into the carburetor. If you got the valve set just right so as to provide a slightly rich propane-air mixture in the carburetor, and yet not too rich, it should work—a bit touchy, but it should work.

Bruce said he was going to get a better looking valve for the dashboard when he got time. Time! Bruce has nothing but time. He belongs to a multitude of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews and cousins who all have nothing but time. The word “time” is probably the least used word in the Navajo's English vocabulary, and sometimes I wonder if it exists at all in the Navajo vocabulary.

"It's probably a good idea to get the truck rolling as soon as you start her up. That way the air can blow across the engine and blow away the excess gas that’s accumulated under the hood. Otherwise you could have an explosion," I said, smelling propane and standing clear. I didn't feel safe until Bruce was fading from sight down the road and even then I was half expecting to hear the sound of an explosion.

He's wasting a lot of gas, and sooner or later he might get nuked by his creation, but Bruce isn't afraid of horse or man, or anything else for that matter; except owls. He won't stay long at my place anymore and never after sundown because one time when we were fishing down on Lake Nadapescada just at twilight a big barred owl landed on a limb over our heads. Bruce mumbled something about skinwalkers, gathered up his stuff and was gone before I could say goodbye. He hasn't been back here since except in the middle of the day.

I was reading one of Tony Hillermans novels—one about Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee—and I came across a part about Navajo witches; skinwalkers. Well, Bruce is a displaced Navajo with thousands of years of tribal lore still intact in his DNA so it's no wonder he believes in skinwalkers. I say displaced because this part of Oklahoma is the home of the Chickasaws, not the Navajos. Bruce's real home is near Mexican Hat, Utah. His mother and father farm up there on the Chinlee Wash near Glenn Canyon. Bruce said it got too cold for him in the wintertime so he came south to Oklahoma to stay with his aunt Vera and uncle Joseph Two Bears on their farm down near Stonewell.

Anyway, Bruce believes there really are skinwalkers. In the Navajo language they are called the yee nadlooshii. They are were-people, shape shifters, who come after sundown in the guise of an animal such as a wolf, a coyote or an owl and do great evil. He believes that the owl we saw when we were fishing was really a skinwalker because when he got home after sundown that evening his aunt Vera told him that a man had come to the farm looking for him. After she told the man he was not home she had peeked through the curtains to see if the man had left and there was nothing outside but an owl perched on a limb over the porch.

I wish Bruce hadn’t ever seen the owl at the fish pond, and I wish he hadn’t told me all that stuff about skinwalkers because when I'm out doing chores after sundown and I hear something strange it makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

It has been at least a year since the day Bruce showed me his propane driven pickup. He hasn't been back since, but the other day I saw him driving down Main Street in Ada with a full load of Indians. The engine hasn’t blown up yet, and it looks like the skinwalker hasn't got Bruce yet either. On the other hand maybe he has; maby he has turned Bruce into a skinwalker too.

Alex Coyle
Ahloso
3/21/07 (rev. 11/17/08)