fixing a flat tire

The Cadillac rounded a curve and started up a long hill. Tami had to keep the pedal floored. This engine had a lot of power but no pickup. A big, glorious car in disrepair. Tami couldn’t help noting the contrast between the refitted lab at Chalfont, where no expense had been spared, and McMasters’s lonely, shoestring operation. Obviously this marketing trip was his own deal, not the college’s.

She got onto a long uphill straightaway and then the car started to fall away to the left. The rough rumbling from behind could only mean one thing. Tami slowed down and pulled over onto the gravelly shoulder, which fortunately was pretty wide. As she came to a stop McMasters looked up from his map and said, “What’s wrong?”

“Flat tire, I think. Left rear.” Tami straightened up in her seat, feeling her bare back unstick from the vinyl. Cars were passing quickly from behind, and the eastbound side of the interstate was a ways away. She was glad that her bare breasts were not visible to them. She said, “Flat tire”, to Wanda as her nemesis roused herself in the back seat. Wanda put on her sneakers and got out to stand around in back as McMasters popped the trunk. This was one of the older models where the spare tire was fitted into a bulge in the center of the trunk. Tami thought she could get away with staying nice and hidden in the car, not getting out. As the car was jacked up a hundred pounds or so of extra weight wouldn’t matter.

As the minutes dragged by Tami drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. What was taking him so long? She didn’t want a curious patrolman stopping by. Finally she heard McMasters’s sheepish voice. “Tami, can you give us a hand?”

Fearing the worst, she scooted over and emerged from the car on the passenger’s side, then, keeping her head low, crept along the rough gravel. She saw that there were no cars coming, then darted over to the roadward side. Her bare shoulders drooped and she covered her eyes in exasperation.

It was one of those old-style cylinder jacks, undoubtedly bought from a junkyard, and the klutz had put it under the quarterpanel, not under the jack point. It was a wonder the chrome wasn’t bent. “Where’s the lug wrench?” the naked girl said.

“I -- I don’t know.” As McMasters and Wanda stood behind Tami, fortunately hiding her from the view of a car that whizzed by, she realized that this guy had no idea what he was doing and she was going to have to take charge. She had always liked working on cars; in high school she was the only girl to take the class in auto repair, the future career for many of her male classmates, and had worked on the family car with her father. But now that she was naked it seemed she was doomed to work on cars in public because the guys around her were all thumbs. She thought of her ordeal on Christmas Day back home, when she had to get out in the freezing slush in front of all those churchgoers to attach the jumper cables on that old car because her brother didn’t know how.

And here was McMasters, who besides jacking the car up on an unstable surface didn’t even know to loosen the lug nuts first. Tami decided the quickest thing was to just do this whole thing herself. Shaming, but it would get them out of here faster. Squatting down, she lowered the jack, an arduous task because it was rusty and the crank stick was hard to turn. Then she stood up with a sigh and rummaged through the open trunk to find the lug wrench, trying to ignore the boxes there and the knowledge of what they contained.

As cars whizzed by Tami wordlessly went through her task. She fitted the tire iron over the first lug and pressed a tough bare foot on it. To extract that first reluctant squeak she had hold onto the roof and jump up and down on the iron. To her chagrin McMasters and Wanda retreated to lean on the guard rail to give her room to work, exposing her bouncing breasts and heaving stomach muscles as one car and then another passed and then stopped short, dangerously backtracking to park in front of them. Both were driven by men who walked behind the Cadillac to watch in amazement at this naked girl changing a tire on the highway, wondering if this was a kind of stunt. Was this a nude dancer trying to drum up business for a bar? They half-expected to be handed a handbill for a free lap dance. Their hesitant query, “Do you need any help, Miss?”, was answered by a curt, “No.”