CLAYBORN, IA — Ron Halverson, who has manned the parts counter at the Highway 14 NAPA for nineteen years and is generally regarded as the closest thing Clayborn County has to a working economist, told a customer Tuesday morning that he could either ring up the radiator hose or walk her through the current state of U.S.-China trade relations, but not both inside the half-hour she had before her hair appointment.
The customer, who had come in for a $14.99 hose and stayed forty-eight minutes, left with the hose, three pamphlets Ron printed off the internet, and a working but bitter understanding of the phrase ‘reciprocal.’
‘I had a guy in here Monday wanted to know if his serpentine belt was Chinese,’ Halverson said, ringing up an air filter without looking down. ‘I told him the belt was made in Tennessee and the rubber was from Malaysia and the box was printed in Kentucky and the truck it’s going into is a 2003 Silverado, so at some point you have to decide what counts as American and what counts as a hobby.’
By Wednesday afternoon, Halverson had instituted what he is calling, with the flat affect of a man who has not slept well, a five-dollar geopolitics surcharge, payable at the counter and applicable to any question that begins with the words ‘now is it true that.’ He has so far collected forty-five dollars and one homemade rhubarb pie from Marlene Voss, who said she didn’t have cash but felt bad taking up his time.
Mrs. Peterson came in Tuesday to ask whether the tariffs would affect the price of the wiper blades on her 1998 LeSabre, which she has owned since the wiper blades were installed at the factory and has never replaced. Halverson confirmed they likely would, at which point Mrs. Peterson said she supposed she’d just keep driving slower in the rain, the same solution she has applied to most of the last twenty-seven years.
Dr. Pritha Saldana, an applied economist at Drake University who agreed to take Halverson’s call Tuesday after he found her on the school’s faculty page, said the situation at the Highway 14 NAPA was ‘a more honest seminar than most of the ones I teach,’ and added that Halverson had grasped the concept of input-cost pass-through faster than her graduate students, though she noted he kept calling it ‘getting screwed downstream.’
Store owner Dean Brockhauser, asked whether he supported Ron’s surcharge policy, said he supported anything that got the line moving, and noted that the counter had become ‘a little bit of a town square situation’ since early April, with retirees stopping in to argue about steel without buying anything and one man, identified by other customers only as ‘the guy with the Bronco,’ staying for three hours Monday to deliver what witnesses described as ‘a real strong opinion about Vietnam.’
Across the highway at the Hen House Diner, waitress Carla Bemis confirmed that Halverson had eaten lunch at the counter Wednesday in complete silence, ordered the meatloaf without commentary, and tipped in exact change. ‘He looked,’ Bemis said, refilling a coffee, ‘like a man who had explained one too many things to one too many people, for free, in a building he does not own.’