Shimming the Ching

(My 1964 Dodge Powerwagon blew chunks climbing out of the Missouri breaks on the Rocky Boys Indian Reservation south of Havre, Montana. I was laying on a flattened banana box in the middle of nowhere, replacing a u-joint, when Charlie Swallow appeared from somewhere across the prairie. He wore an army blanket as a poncho and drank from a neatly creased brown paper bag. He lay down, looked under the rig and started this tale. )

"Throwing the I Ching is like jerking the handle on the big cosmic slot machine, like reading chicken gizzards and tea leaves, like following an eighteen wheeler through the fog. Depends on how you use it. But, in all the years I've been flipping coins and fumbling through hexagrams, I've only one time seen the Ching be right, exactly, dead on.
"About ten years back, I woke up one morning in my van underneath that railroad overpass east of Cut Bank. You watch the weather on the tube? That is the coldest spot in the lower forty-eight. You leave a sixpack outside on the Fourth of July in that town, it'll freeze overnight. I was running real low on weed, out of money, too grubby to get a job. Red dog wine was ruining my eyes. So I pulled out my three bronze Chinese bus tokens, got 'em in Nam, that kind with the square hole in the middle, and threw the Ching on the question of just exactly what the fuck I should do next.
"The hexagram came up with a broken line at the bottom and solid lines all the way up from there, "Kou, Coming to Meet", talking about how the strong and the weak, the good and the evil, are part of the same thing and are going to meet and join. The first line said that bronze was going to be real important to me.
"I took it all to mean that it was time to get out on the road, so I put twenty bucks worth of gas on my brother's Chevron card, and headed south. Fifteen miles below Darby, going up the Bitterroot, I came around a long righthand corner and damn near rear-ended a big white Cadillac Seville that was stopped in my lane. A couple of senior citizens were dancing around on the center stripe, waving me down with a purple Pendleton blanket.
"The folks were from California, headed north out of Jackpot, Nevada, on their way up to see Glacier Park. The wife bought a book in Boise to help her identify wildflowers. She'd spotted a patch of Indian paintbrush, had the old man pull a U-turn in the highway so she could pick a sample. The car crapped out on them right there by the flowers, wouldn't even turn over.
"When I squoze my belly under that big old boat, I saw that Mr. Goodwrench down in Anaheim had used an air tool on the mounting bolts for the starter and had run the threads to mincemeat. The starter wasn't making electrical contact with the flywheel housing anymore, just hanging there on the studs by gravity, which wasn't quite good enough for a ground path for the electricity. No juice to the starter motor.
"Meanwhile the folks were chatting me up. You know, did I live in a tipi, did I have a herd of horses, did I eat buffalo? Not exactly savvy travelers..
"Right then I remembered the Ching, "Coming to Meet," and how bronze is going to be important, so I went back to the van, got my Ching coins and a little ballpeen hammer, and drove the bronze tokens as shims around the starter motor. The positive and negative electrical paths came to meet. The solenoid still threw the starter gear far enough, and the Caddy started five times in a row. The old couple were tickled shitless, and the dude laid a hundred silver dollars on me that he won in Jackpot.
"I told him they should, for sure, stop up in Missoula at a real garage and get things fixed right. Last time I saw my Chinese coins, they were under that Caddy, headed north on Highway 93. Been throwing the Ching with these here three silver dollars ever since. Got any smoke?"