The Spark and the Drive (8 page)

“She around?” he said, and I told him she was sleeping.

“Double-check on that, would you? She said to call around ten.”

I looked out the window at the dirt turnaround across the street where he used to spy on us from his cruiser. Then I returned to the living room and took a closer look at Mom. She was on her side with her legs curled up, snoring softly on a corduroy throw pillow that would leave lines on her cheek. For a moment I watched her mouth tighten and slacken in what looked like an uneasy dream. When I touched her she jerked forward, almost falling off the couch, and in the moment before she realized where she was, I saw on her face a look of true horror.

“It’s okay, Mom,” I said, gently as I could. “You’re safe. You’re home.”

9.

The next morning I left the house a little after sunrise. When I got to the shop, Nick’s El Camino was already parked in front of the bay door window I’d covered in duct tape. He was inside pouring hydraulic fluid into the reservoir on the old frame lift. Blood-colored drips fell onto his boots and the brown concrete slab. He was the only one there.

I could smell burnt cordite from Bobby shooting rats on Saturday, or from Nick shooting some this morning. Black dirt spread across the floor from each damp wall, and the ten-by-fourteen slab seemed to float like an island in a bottomless sea. A foul tub sink canted forward on metal legs, and in one corner a shower curtain hung in front of a steel toilet, the kind they have in bus stations. On the ground a damp box with orange mushrooms growing on the edges lay melting into the toxic dirt.

I’d picked up coffee and donuts in Watertown, which was exactly halfway between Levi and Waterbury, and Nick sipped his tall regular as I stood on the lift arms so he could raise me up and test the lines. Mornings at the shop we came in fresh and clean and caffeinated, smelling like Irish Spring, but even with comb lines still in his hair Nick looked old, his skin dull and chalky, eyes red-rimmed, his smooth-shaven jowls pulling down. It was like getting a glimpse of him in his sixties, before his stubble surfaced and leaning over fenders put the blood back in his face.

We lifted off the Corvette’s hood like the front plate of a bomb and then put the car in the air, the lift wheezing and groaning. I held my breath until the first pins locked, so that even if a line blew it wouldn’t fall far—these pins clicked in every foot or so. While Nick drained all the fluids and started disconnecting the transmission, I taped paper floor mats, white-side up, onto the top and bottom trays of five rolling carts. I wrote “
TOP END
” on one tray, “
PISTONS
” on another, and so on.

When the engine was disconnected, he lowered the car and wheeled over the engine lift. The aluminum 427 was supposed to weigh a hundred pounds less than the cast-iron version, and I could feel the difference as I pumped the lift. I worked it steadily, an inch at a time then a break to see that nothing was snagging or scraping, and then another inch, the front springs creaking until the car sat high in the front, like a funny car gunning out of the hole at a track. In the ten minutes or so it took, Nick’s hands caressed every surface of the engine to check for clearance and to keep it from swinging.

I felt a great release, as if my body were a taut cable suddenly given slack, when the engine was safely bolted to the stand. I lit a cigarette and touched the strange glazed metal of the block. I couldn’t tell if it was cooler or warmer than cast iron, but it was certainly different, like some new element just cometed down from another planet, and I was afraid to get any grease on it.

There are two kinds of grease. One comes from a grease gun and has a new sheen and a mild varnish smell. The other kind, the common kind, is caused by oil seeping through valve cover gaskets, oil pan gaskets, half-moon gaskets, rear main seals, all of it blown by the fan and by driving speed as a petroleum vapor that thickens in the air, and what it leaves on your skin smells like gasoline—which is, of course, a derivative of oil itself. You don’t realize that until some gas splashes in your face and eyes and doesn’t burn like acid but has a warm, slick feel. This second grease, grainy with bits of road sand and dust, coated every horizontal surface of the Dungeon, where we began to disassemble this rare engine of immaculate design.

Nick suffered me as I took bolts from where he set them down and sometimes right from his fingers, to make sure that nothing was lost between engine and the parts tray. I understood that doing the job right was more important to him than his pride, and this is perhaps the single attribute that distinguishes a great mechanic from a good one. I invaded his space to touch what he touched, sometimes brushing the rough dead skin of his forearms, where any fine hair had long ago been worn away and only pig bristles stabbed out, forearms twice the size of mine from the pull-and-push strength of car work.

Nick had wired in an intercom receiver and it crackled before Mary Ann’s voice came through: “Green Cordova coming down for a recheck.”

Nick finished torquing the last engine stand bolt and walked over to the intercom. “I thought I was getting left alone down here,” he said into it.

“He was throwing a fit,” she said, and there was a second of silence, of waiting, before she released her button with another crackle.

Nick and I stepped out the side door as the car pulled in, a two-ton tank that slid to a stop in the gravel. A black man with a shaved head got out, and Nick asked what the trouble was.

“Get in and smell.”

Nick leaned in the open window and then came around the front to pop the hood.

I don’t know what would’ve happened if the engine had gotten hot enough. What you see in the movies is all hype—even shooting into a gas tank won’t make it explode. But there was a small surge of panic, an impulse to run for a fire extinguisher, when I saw the fuel line dribbling over the intake manifold and a brown ring of evaporated gas.

Nick took a screwdriver out of his shirt pocket and got a full turn and a half out of the fuel line clamp. The guy was incredulous, laughing bitterly and then walking away with his arms folded, shaking his head, whispering what I think was, “Christ, God.” Before Nick handed him eighty dollars out of his wallet, the guy told us, “I hook up cable TV. That’s my business. That’s my livelihood. You think I don’t go through every one of them motherfucking channels before I pack up? That’s dependability. I don’t want to get a call that motherfucking HBO went out right when Holmes is putting the jab on Spinks.”

After he was gone I followed Nick back into the Dungeon, where he picked up a half-inch wrench and started loosening a mounting nut under the carburetor of the Corvette. He was out of shape, and the machine of him took long sucks of air to operate, and as I listened to his whistled breathing I understood there would be no more mention of the Cordova or of how Nick had neglected a detail as significant as a fuel line. He seemed to have come to the fatalistic resolve that his rechecks were inevitable, and I worried that Miami was doomed. All the juggling I’d been doing in my mind to take Mom and April down with me, and now it felt decided. No Miami. And he might be finished here in a year or two.

We worked our ratchets on either side of the 427, and when we had the massive single-intake manifold off, we flipped the engine over and started unbolting the oil pan.

For a while I couldn’t shake the self-pitying thought that the end was coming and it all was avoidable, such a waste. After what felt like an hour I asked, just to have words going, how Nick had first gotten into engine work.

“My old man used to bring home junk motors,” he said. “Three oh twos. Three oh fives. We’d do rebuilds and then he’d put them in the paper.”

“Where’d he get them?”

“He ran a boneyard in Oregon.”

“Was he a good mechanic?”

“When he was sober, he was. Let me get that swivel.”

I passed it to him and couldn’t think of anything else to say. In a while, he asked if I was going to come by his house to pick up the two-ton floor jack he was getting rid of. “Wednesday,” I said.

“I told you where the key is, right? There’s a torque wrench you can have, too. An old dial one.”

The headache of bad sleep I’d been fighting came pounding back. I’d been doubling up on cigarettes to fight it, and now I felt dehydrated. I went over to the tub sink, where the spitting flow ran orange, and waited as long as I could before I leaned over and sucked at the blood-tasting water.

“I’m not going,” I said when I came back.

He handed me the oil pan bolts he’d taken off on his side. “You’re not going where?”

“To Miami, Nick. Whenever it happens.”

We lifted off the oil pan and started peeling the gasket off the bottom of the engine with our fingers. “It wouldn’t be like here,” he said. “You’d get ASE training. You know computers.”

“I know WordPerfect and Donkey Kong.”

“More than these guys know,” he said. “More than I know.” He handed me a single-edged razor blade. He’d explained that we’d need to use these rather than the steel gasket scrapers to avoid gouging the aluminum. It was small, tedious work, half an inch at a time.

“Because of that Cordova?” he said after a while.

“Here at least you have a reputation. Nobody’s going to know you down there. What if we don’t get any business? It’s a big deal for me. You already moved across the country. I’ve never lived out of Connecticut.” I stopped myself when my voice shook, and we worked for a few minutes in silence.

My hand throbbed under two Band-Aids, and I gripped a screwdriver to choke the nerves with contracted muscle, which was only temporary relief—I knew the pain would come back two- or three-fold when I let off. During a mindless stretch of loosening machine screws, I thought how I’d burned my hand for him, how I’d just admitted that moving far away scared me, and what was he giving back? They were ugly thoughts, thoughts I knew I wouldn’t be proud of as soon as the hurt subsided, but right then they were the truth.

“What’s it like?” I said. “Like you’re thinking ahead and then you miss a step?”

“I’d tell you if I knew.”

“Talking might help.”

He dug gasket out of a channel with his thumbnail. “I forgot to tighten the fuel line,” he said. He wasn’t trying to be funny, but I stopped working and stared at him as if he were. He crouched to blow off the chips of cork gasket and blue sealer, the dull white-silver aluminum spotless where he’d worked. “What do you want me to say?”

I was poised to remind him exactly what was at stake—this car was one of two, she’d come fifteen hundred miles—but I saw how easily the points could erupt into melodrama.

“Maybe it’s something else making you forget,” I said. “Like from some other part of your life.”

“You sound like a shrink,” he said. “I just start talking, and no more rechecks?”

“What could it hurt?”

He looked off at an orange stripe of ooze on one of the fieldstone walls, possibly thinking of a way or two that talking might hurt. “You saw it on
MASH
,” he said. “Hawkeye can’t stop sneezing until he remembers he got pushed in a lake when he was a kid.”

I had to laugh because it was true, and I felt an opening. But then he said, “All I know is I never got pushed in a lake.”

When the gasket was removed, we turned the engine sideways. Nick started unbolting the main bearing caps while I cleaned up the intake manifold.

“When my little sister was a baby,” I said, “she had this fever like a hundred and five. We had to take her to the hospital. She was lying in my lap. She needed a drink, but we didn’t have her bottle, we forgot it. She lost her voice she was so thirsty. Her eyes were all pink. Her fingers were burning up. I thought she was going to die, it was like I was seeing it happen. I mean, this baby, holding on to my finger.”

We were both sitting on milk crates now with the engine between us, and I could only see his legs under the exhaust ports. The legs were still.

“We get there, and my mom runs into Emergency with her. I’m just sort of wandering around between cars. I remember being in this Chinese restaurant all of a sudden, and the hostess was talking to me. Your brain just shuts off. All I could think was, she’s not coming home again. She never even said a word yet. She never walked. She never did anything wrong. If she didn’t make it, I don’t know what I would have done.”

I had to get up. I went over and leaned against the bay door, where I stared at the ground and smoked half a cigarette. When I came back to the engine Nick was frowning at the bearing cap, turning his coarse-toothed Snap-on ratchet so slowly you could count the clicks.

“That’s what I mean,” I said. “Just talking, okay?”

He lit a cigarette.

“Why don’t you try it?” I said.

“What do you say we quit playing Sigmund Freud and get back to work.”

I told him I needed coffee and went outside, where I picked up a bald tire and ran with it over my head, hurling it finally at an old radiator. The radiator folded over at the site of impact, its brittle fins crushing in with the sound of stepping on shells. I was panting. Emotions for me were infectious, and the shock I felt going back four years to that car ride with April, that shaking dread and superstition that thinking about it now could somehow make it happen again, all these feelings translated easily into fast hot anger.

My hand was throbbing again. From the gravel under-story parking lot I looked up at the backside of Out of the Hole Automotive, a two-level building that had once been a brass mill with a foundry right here in the basement. The brick was pitted and round on the corners, the mortar cracked under a sagging wooden roof. It seemed to be standing only by Nick’s magic. If he could just get his shit together, someday we’d laugh about this place, not only the building but this lowdown city of Waterbury, remembering the slumming days as we polished our ratchets in Miami, surrounded by the best diagnostic equipment drug money could buy.

I called him an asshole and paced around. I told myself I’d been using him all along, that I wouldn’t be his friend except for his genius, because more than anything that was what I felt as I paced the dusty parking lot: used.