For Joe’s sixteenth birthday, his father gave him an old, beaten up pickup truck with potential for repair and possibly restoring. This had been a tradition in the Blieu family for the past couple of generations now, where the father would show up with a rickety old vehicle in hopes of spending some father-son time together while restoring them.

The truck was a 1976 4X4 Dodge Power Wagon, with a big beefy V8 motor, a manual transmission, and no muffler system to speak of. It hardly stopped either, as it had almost nothing for brakes. The tires looked as though they may explode at even the mere sight of a sharp rock. The bed of the pickup had cancerous rust holes in it the size of most babies’ heads. It was hard to tell, but it looked like the original colors may have been a two-tone brown and tan,

“You wanna head in to town to the performance shop to see what we can get for that thing,” Joe asked.

Joe felt like he had run for 50 miles, when in reality it was only about one mile. He ran up to the farmhouse and pounded on the door. An elderly lady answered the door and Joe tried to explain, but was so excited that he finally just asked to use a telephone for an emergency. Of course, the lady was happy to let him. He called for help, which arrived shortly thereafter. The sheriff picked Joe up and he led the way for the sheriff and ambulance to the accident scene.

The pair headed back out toward the parking lot and proceeded to head home. As they came closer to the gravel road that they lived on, Joe asked Pete how fast he thought the truck would go. Pete said he had no idea, but that he wanted to find out. As Pete pulled onto the gravel road, he gunned the gas, and the rear wheels began to spin, causing the rear end of the truck to slide sideways. He straightened out the truck and it began to speed down the dusty road. The speedometer kept climbing. It passed 50, 60, 70, then 75 miles per hour. Suddenly a car came up over the hill and Pete slammed on the brakes, hoping that there was enough there to slow them down. The front tires locked up on the loose gravel and suddenly the truck was all

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