Out of Nowhere (6 page)

“Uh, Mikal works for me,” I say, trying not to be a total asshole.

Most of the others say their names too quickly for me to retain. Among them are a tall blond guy wearing a plain white T-shirt and jeans like a Gap model who mutters his name like he wants me to forget it; a pair of brightly dressed girls who introduce each other, but do it so quickly I don’t catch either name; a beautiful girl who looks Latina—or, shit, is it Hispanic? I really need to ask Rafe about that—and says her name like she’s daring me to use it. One guy just waves at me, smiling sweetly. He looks about fourteen or fifteen and has bright blond hair, blue eyes, and pale skin that look otherworldly against his all-black clothes. The smallest one says his name is Stuart, but he says it so softly I can hardly hear him, and one of the older girls, who introduced herself as “Dorothy, but way smarter than that dumb-ass white girl in that Oz movie,” repeats it for me.

Last is the oldest and biggest of them: a tall muscular guy I would’ve put in his early twenties, except that Rafe told me only kids up to age eighteen are allowed here. He’s black, with a shaved head and white glasses, and his expression is serious and a bit suspicious. Like he’s waiting to decide if he’s happy to have me here or not. He’s taller than me—maybe six foot two—but not as tall as Rafe, and his worn white chinos, white tank top, and white Converse are all spotless.

“DeShawn,” he says in a voice softer than I expected.

“Okay,” Rafe says, “let’s go talk about cars.” And he does seem excited, rubbing his palms together like he’s one of the kids.

“So,” I say once we’re standing in a ring around Rafe’s BMW, “this is a 1985 BMW 320i. I know that sounds like just a bunch of numbers and letters, but it’s actually kind of like a… a… a secret language that gives you clues about the car. And when you know how to decode the secret language, it saves lots of time because you can shorthand stuff. Okay, so it always goes in that order. The first thing you say is the year. So, Rafe’s car was born in 1985.”

“Dude,” Carlos says, “your car’s ancient. It’s older than me!”

“Not older than me,” Rafe says, raising his scarred eyebrow in warning.

“Me either,” I say. “So, okay, next: BMW. That’s the name of the manufacturer. Anyone know where BMWs are from?”

“Germany,” says Ricky. She’s moved her bangs aside enough so that she can see the car with one eye.

“Yeah, that’s right.” I smile at her, but she keeps staring at the car. “Know what it stands for?” No way will any of them know this. Hell, most people who
own
BMWs don’t know what it stands for. I look at Rafe, who shrugs, proving my point.

“Bayerische Motoren Werke.”

Ricky again. Holy shit.

“Uh, yeah, that’s right.” She’s staring blankly at the car. “Do you know a lot about cars?” She shakes her head. “Do you know anything else about BMWs?”

“BMW. Established 1916. Produced aircraft engines but forced to stop based on the terms of the Treaty of Versailles prohibiting the manufacture and stockpile of arms or armored vehicles. Began producing motorcycles in 1923 and cars in 1928. In the 1930s, BMW engine designs were used for Luftwaffe aircraft, including the first four-jet aircraft to be flown—”

“Holy crap, so Conan has a Nazi car?” Carlos says.

I can’t take my eyes off Ricky. She’s staring straight ahead like she’s reading this information out of the air.

“Hey, Ricky?” I say. She jerks her gaze toward me. “That’s really impressive. How do you know all that?”

“Yo, Ricky Recordo right here! She’s got a straight-up photographic memory,” Mikal says, stepping closer to me and winking.

“Oh. Cool,” I say. “Great. So, we’ve got the year, the manufacturer. Then the model of the car. In this case, 320. Well, 320i, but the
i
just means it has fuel injection—anyway, the 320 refers to
which
BMW it is.”

The kids are looking a little blank.

“But, okay, so a 2014 Honda Civic is simpler: it was made in 2014, by Honda, and the model is a Civic. Got it?”

“Got it,” a few of them echo.

“Pop the hood?” I ask Rafe. He has to contort to do it from outside the car and he’s surprisingly flexible. He has on worn black jeans that sit low on his hips and hug his ass perfectly and a gray henley with the sleeves pushed up his muscular forearms. Damn, I am
not
paying attention to that right now because I’m supposed to be talking about cars. Uh, no, I’m not paying attention to that
period
.

I force my eyes to the car and resolve not to look at Rafe again. Under the hood is familiar territory, and I lose myself for a moment in the satisfaction of seeing everything exactly where it should be. When Daniel was little, he had these books he would beg me to read to him that he got from the school library where a wacky science teacher miniaturized the kids in her class so that they could see things at the micro level. Daniel would sit on my lap and we’d trace the students’ path through the human body, through a hurricane, through the solar system. That’s how I feel when I look at a car. Like I’m tiny and can imagine a path through all its different systems. It’s dumb, I guess, but it helps me picture everything.

I figured that I’d start by explaining how each of the systems work—engine, exhaust, brakes, cooling, electrical, fuel, suspension, etc. It will give them a good sense of the basics and how all the systems interrelate.

“So, does anyone know what makes a car starts when you turn the key?”

Blank looks and narrowed eyes.

Ignition is so cool—like an action movie. I can see it in my head: the combustion chamber and the crankcase, the pistons floating on a layer of oil in the cylinder, moving up and down, rotating the crankshaft and starting rotary motion; the valve train; the camshaft opening the intake valve as the piston moves down, forming a vacuum that sucks air and fuel into the combustion chamber where they’re compressed; the spark plug firing, igniting fuel and air, the explosion pushing the piston back down the cylinder and driving the crankshaft; the exhaust valve opening and the excess gasses being pushed out to the exhaust system. Each tiny piece has one job, and when they work together perfectly, they power this one-and-a-half-ton machine. It amazes me every time I think about it.

I realize I haven’t said anything out loud and the kids are still staring at me, and I immediately rethink my plan to explain all the systems. I don’t know how to express to them the… magic that I see.

“Um,” I say. “Well, really, it’s an explosion. Fuel—the gas you put in the car—and air get compressed, squeezed into a really small space, and then a spark ignites them and the explosion starts the car. Like a bullet.”

“Whoa, cool,” the kids chorus.

“So why doesn’t the whole car explode?” asks one of the girls who introduced each other earlier.

“Yeah,” says the other. “And sometimes
don’t
they just explode?”

“Totally,” Carlos says. “Hey, do real cars explode like in the movies? Like… what do you call it…?”

“Spontaneous combustion,” supplies Gap Model quietly.

“Yeah,” says Carlos, pounding on Gap Model’s shoulder in thanks, “spontaneous combustion! That’s so sweet.”

“Ooh, honey, I saw a car on
fire
once, at 12th and Girard. I bet it totes blew up,” Mikal says.

“Oh my god, would you stop it with ‘totes,’ Mikey. You sound like a twelve-year-old white girl.”

“Shut up with that Mikey shit,
Dot
.”

“Boy, don’t call me that or I’ll make you wish—”

“Stop.” Rafe’s voice cuts through the squabbling. “We have a guest. Can we please save the discussion of nicknames for later?”

Dorothy rolls her eyes but nods. Mikal turns to me and gives me a look that is clearly meant to be charming or seductive, but is mostly just amusing.

“Sorry, sweetie,” he says, pouting and opening his eyes wide.

“Uh, no problem,” I say. I turn back to Carlos and the twins. “Well, most cars aren’t going to randomly catch on fire or explode.” A few people exhale with relief and I debate whether I should go on. Eh, shit, everyone likes explosions, right? “But it can happen. Sometimes a battery will be defective and it’ll explode, and that looks like the car itself is exploding. When you’re charging your car battery, it releases hydrogen, and if a spark were to ignite the hydrogen, it would definitely explode.

“Or, you know, if you had a gas or oil leak in your car and the fuel dripped onto something really hot, that could cause an explosion too. Oh, and sometimes electrical systems go all weird. They can overheat or short out, which can cause a fire, and that can cause an explosion if the fire hits fuel.”

Everyone is staring at me. Rafe has his right hand protectively on the roof of his car as if it’s going to explode at any moment.

“But, um, those are all really rare occurrences. Really, really rare,” I reassure them. “I’ve never seen it happen and I’ve been a mechanic for almost twenty years.” This seems to put them at ease a little.

“So, what kind of car do
you
have,” Mikal asks, his tone flirtatious. People always expect that if you’re a mechanic, then you’re going to have some tricked-out showy car, but I’ve never known any mechanic who did.

“A ’93 VW Rabbit,” I say. “Right now.”

They look supremely unimpressed.

“Like, but why?” asks Carlos. “That’s almost as old as Conan’s car. Couldn’t you, like, put together any car you want?”

“Hey, let’s not insult our guest’s car,” Rafe says.

“No, it’s cool,” I say. “Well, most mechanics I know drive junkers. For one thing, people are always offering to sell us crappy cars for really cheap. And when you know what you’re doing, you can fix it up so it runs just fine. So why spend a ton of money when you know you have an endless supply of four-hundred-dollar cars that you can cycle through? Plus, I hate to shatter your illusions, but we don’t make that much money. It’s not like people are giving away their fancy sports cars when they have something wrong with them. So, yeah, mostly, it’s just really easy to have a car I don’t have to worry about.

“That’s how I got my first car, actually. A customer brought in a falling-apart piece of crap and my dad told him it was worth a few bucks as scrap but would cost a fortune to fix, and the guy sold it to him for two hundred dollars. I bought it off my dad and fixed it up.” I painstakingly replaced each busted, rusted-out part in that car, one by one, until it ran as well as anything—hell, better than anything I could’ve afforded. It took almost a year, but had the bonus of familiarizing me with every scrapyard and junk shop in a thirty-block radius.

This seems to have gotten a few of them interested.

“Could we learn to do that?” Gap Model asks.

“Oh yeah,” I say. “It would take a lot of practice, but now there are some really good videos on YouTube of people fixing different parts of cars and stuff.”

“Why don’t we take ten and then meet back here, okay?” Rafe says. The kids wander back into the church. Rafe is so close I can smell him, can feel his warmth at my side.

“Listen,” he says, his voice low. “You’re doing great. Just be careful you don’t promise them anything you won’t follow through with, okay?”

“What do you mean?”

“Most of these kids don’t have people who will spend time teaching them things. So, when they do—look, you just don’t want to make it sound like you’ll be around to help them learn all this stuff if you won’t be. It’s hard for them if they start counting on you to come back and you don’t. They already have a lot of that in their lives. People disappearing. Breaking promises. You know?”

Rafe looks sad, gazing toward the door the kids left through.

“Yeah, I get it.”

He squeezes my biceps and nods.

Mikal is the first one back, and it looks like he’s applied some kind of glittery lip gloss.

“So,” he says, standing about a foot too close to me, “what’s wrong with you?”

“Um, excuse me?”

“Well, there must be something wrong with you; you’re here.” Mikal gestures around him.

I look at Rafe, unsure of what to say.

“Besides, Khal Drogo here is a sucker for a lost cause. Just look around.” Mikal’s trying to tease, I know, but his voice has changed, his flirty tone gone flat.

“Hey,” says Rafe, holding Mikal’s gaze. “There’s nothing wrong with you. Any of you. You aren’t… lost causes.” He practically spits the words out. Mikal nods but drops his eyes. I can tell Rafe wants to say more but he bites it back as the other kids join us.

The rest of the workshop goes better now that I’m not so nervous. I demonstrate a few things on Rafe’s car, things that I think would be most useful to the kids in case their family cars have problems—how to change a flat tire, how to add oil and top off other fluids. And I look like a complete ass when I try and imitate common noises that cars make when certain things are wrong with them, which quickly devolves into us all making weird shrieking and groaning noises like a pack of wild dogs.

I also answer some of the weirdest questions about cars I’ve ever heard, including, “Could you put together a car that had two front ends or two back ends?” from Gap Model, to which someone replies, “Course you want something with two back ends,” whatever that means; “Is it possible to have a second set of wheels so cars could move side to side?” from one of the twins; and “You know that flying car in
Harry Potter
? Could you make that?” from the kid in all black who hasn’t spoken since he walked in. I don’t know the flying car in
Harry Potter
, but the rest of the kids greet this idea with enthusiasm.

Then it’s over, and the time has gone so fast that I feel like I didn’t get to talk about even 10 percent of what I’d wanted to. The twins, Gap Model, and Dorothy wave good-bye to me and call out their thanks as they leave. Carlos thanks me and turns to Rafe.

“Good one, Conan. Way better than that modern dance bullshit.”

“You think I didn’t see you enjoying the hell out of modern dance, Carlito?”

Carlos mutters something and jogs away. The kid in all black waves good-bye just as he waved hello and wanders off in the other direction.