The Spark and the Drive (9 page)

Up in the lobby Mary Ann was calling in a parts order, and I went over to the coffee maker. She put her hand over the receiver. “I thought you two were unavailable.”

I held up the coffee cup but didn’t trust my voice. She finished the call as I was stirring in my third packet of sugar. “What happened?” she said. I realized what I must’ve looked like.

“Did he say something to you?”

“No, he didn’t. That’s kind of the problem.”

“If he’s rude, you don’t have to put up with it,” she said, and I was pulled into her eyes, gold-flecked and more fiery than I’d ever noticed. I could only feel myself nodding as we shared for a moment the same broken heart.

“I know he likes you, Justin,” she said. “And I know how it is when you’re in his spotlight—you feel big—and then when you’re not you feel so small.” She looked down and pushed papers across the counter, ending the moment abruptly, as if she was afraid of what she might hear herself say.

10.

Tuesday was the day that time forgot. Nick and I worked until noon upstairs while the engine block was being boiled and resurfaced at McGreggor’s, and after lunch we slipped quietly through the side door and down to the Dungeon.

I had the rolling trays in order, and as we worked I wheeled them over one at a time and handed Nick tools and parts, often without his needing to ask. There was no clock or radio, and only a dim line of daylight along the bottom edge of the bay door indicated that it wasn’t yet night. I couldn’t measure progress by time and the hours took on an abstract quality. We didn’t talk. The reassembling demanded all of our concentration, and we entered a higher plane of exactness and discipline. If we worked this efficiently upstairs, our dependability and attention to detail would’ve been world famous, though the stress would’ve killed us young, the sense that metal was crystal that couldn’t be bumped or scratched, certainly not dropped.

The second sandwich I’d brought caused a dull pain in my stomach, either because I ate it too fast or I’d gone too long between meals, roast beef and Dijon plunking into a pool of raging stomach acid. Nick didn’t eat. He’d brought in a coffee maker, and only Folgers and cigarette smoke entered his system. He was at the height of his powers as he pieced together these ultra-high-performance parts, his mind transcending the needs of his body. I mean, my spine felt like it was on fire, and I was seventeen years younger and in shape.

It was slow, steady, un-glorious work. It was evenly painting Loctite over bolt threads and then keeping them free of grit, closing your eyes to get them to catch, and a full three turns before using a ratchet because good luck retapping aluminum if you rushed and cross-threaded. It was ignoring pain. Nick worked as if it didn’t matter if we ever got to hear it run. There was no future but only this thin steady bead of gasket sealer, this gentle, silent seating of valve to port. It was genius broken down to small observable moments, no action or acclaim, just don’t rush, don’t rush.

Before we lowered the engine in, I splashed my face and did some jumping jacks in the back lot. Outside the sodium arc lamp buzzed in the full dark over Nichols Street, the windows upstairs reflecting the weak blue security lighting. All I knew for sure was that it was after eight because Lenny’s Liquor Locker was closed. I’d been prepared to stay, had told Mom not to expect me until late, but my body was approaching full exhaustion, a striking thing to feel at eighteen.

I took my place behind the engine lift, opening the valve to release no more than a pinhole hiss of pressure, and when the engine was in place we tightened bolts, plugged in harnesses, and connected lines. Nick used the bathroom for only the second time since we’d come down. There wasn’t any coffee left, and I sat on a milk crate with a cigarette, hoping to pull another ten or twenty minutes of consciousness from the nicotine, but then I opened my eyes and Nick was standing over me holding my cigarette, his hand on my shoulder. “Help me get the hood back on,” he said. “Then go on up and crash in my office.”

*   *   *

It was just after midnight, and before I lay down on the vinyl couch I opened the phone book. She answered on the third ring. “I need to ask you something,” she said, “and I don’t want you to think—”

“Mary Ann, it’s Justin.”

She was quiet, then cleared her throat from a distance. “He’s not coming home tonight, is he.”

“We couldn’t find a stopping point. Nick wanted me to call you.”

“Would you mind interrupting him to deliver a message?”

I closed my eyes. “Okay.”

But then she only sighed. “He didn’t ask you to call.”

My eyes still closed, I could only wait for her to keep talking or hang up. “What would you do if you were me?” she said.

“I guess wait and see.”

A few seconds passed, and then she laughed an exasperated laugh.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be. I knew that’s what you’d say.”

*   *   *

Thunder rolled as I dove off the bow of a lightning-struck ship and onto the low shag carpet. I stood and paced around the office, picking up things to bring myself out of the world of dreams.

Coffee was on in the lobby, though the door sign was turned to closed—it wasn’t even seven yet. Out in the shop the Corvette was holding a big choppy idle in the first bay, the massive camshaft lobes I’d held now pushing against the heavy valve springs. Nick was adjusting the mixture on the bottom of the carburetor. He revved it only minimally and the sound was how the world would end at low volume.

Nick straightened from the fender. “Sleeping beauty,” he said. Remarkably he didn’t even look tired. I asked if he’d taken it for a ride yet, he had, and if he’d put the pedal down, he hadn’t. A rebuilt engine needed about five hundred miles of easy driving to seat the rings and bearings—we told this to customers all the time, and it was always a small heartache for the guys to baby the cars on test drives, never tasting the fruits of their work.

But how could you climb behind the wheel of such a car and not put the pedal down? Eve was coming tomorrow morning, and after that, who knew? It seemed worth it to risk scoring a cylinder or spinning a bearing and then having to rebuild it just to find out what a car like that could really do.

He killed the engine, and I helped disconnect the scope. Over the ticking cool aluminum he handed me a postcard from the White Mountains of New Hampshire. I didn’t understand.

“Don’t believe the name,” he said. “None of them mountains was white.”

*   *   *

The saddle-back seats pulled you down at the hips as if in preparation for a blastoff. You had to reach up for the radio dials, and a mile under the dashboard your heels pressed heavier than your toes, the glove box level with your chest. The emergency brake at your elbow had a gun handle like a bomb hatch pull in a warplane.

New Hampshire and back was enough mileage to break in the engine and then some, but Nick was still babying it with me. He pulled onto I-84 and then onto Route 8 South. He told me to watch for cops, but then he barely broke the speed limit, the engine humming low as he slipped in the passing lane and eased by an early commuter. I have to admit I felt relieved, as you did as a child when the carnival ride you dared yourself to get in line for stops working through no fault of your own. I’d held the lungs and muscle of this engine in my hands and had a pretty good idea of what it could do.

It sounded great at low rpm, deep and gravelly and implying—like the husky voice of a rock singer—that it was capable of an outrageous scream.

“Harley-Davidson wants to trademark their sound,” Nick said, evidently reading my mind. “That po
ta
to-po
ta
to. They only use one connecting pin for two cylinders. It’s a waste of compression. Inefficient as hell. That’s how come Bobby rides a Triumph.”

“I didn’t know you knew about bikes,” I said.

“Engines. Think what the two of us could do if we only cared about noise. How you could shape an exhaust valve. A combustion chamber. We could invent a new V-8 sound and get rich.”

I nodded, a little flattered to be part of his daydream.

“But you know you wouldn’t do that. You’re not working on a church organ. When you get done with a rebuild, you want that thing to
go.
Who waters down horsepower on purpose?”

“No mechanic I ever knew.”

He grinned and then turned to look at me for a long second. “You did good work,” he said. “I think we got it perfect.”

We got off the highway after five exits, and then idled up the overpass and onto the entrance ramp headed back north. Merging onto the highway Nick started winding the engine. When he punched the gas in third I thought we’d been rear-ended by a train. He shifted to fourth at sixty and the awesome car chirped its tires, and then we were coming off the ground. This wasn’t my imagination—Nick, who never drove with two hands, grabbed the wheel at ten and two, joggling back and forth to no effect at all.

We passed between bedrock cliffs and the side pipes echoed like jackhammers—I caught myself lurching for the floor. The highway wasn’t wide or straight enough for our speed. Nick, when I glanced at him in horror, was saying words I couldn’t hear, his eyes wide and moving, looking awestruck and like death was the last thing he expected. It didn’t seem right that his hair wasn’t being blown back.

Up ahead a panel van cut into the fast lane, and if it had been me driving we would’ve died in flames and pieces, but rather than swerve Nick switched lanes so gradually it was more of a lean, like on a motorcycle, until the gray smoke that was the van disappeared and he swayed back. And then our exit was coming up and he let off on the gas. The five exits north seemed to flash by in less than a minute. It felt like we were barely moving, like I could open my door and step out, and I wondered if something was wrong with the engine, if he was going to have to stop in the breakdown lane, but when I looked at the speedometer we were doing seventy-five.

“How fast was that?” I said, mainly to let him know I hadn’t had a heart attack or anything. We were on the exit ramp now. Tears were in his eyes as he stopped the car at the bottom of the ramp, and he dropped his face on the steering wheel. He was breathing hard, and I reached over to put my hand on his shoulder when he started to speak.

“Intercoolers are what it’s going to take,” he said. “Grand Nash intercoolers, in line with turbos and port fuel on V-8s. More cold air in the cylinder and a computer mixing gas. Carburetors are gone, cam shaft fuel pumps are gone. No slop. A sensor wherever air goes through. Make it clean. Metered. Exact.” He ripped up the emergency brake and got out of the car pronouncing furious words I didn’t want to embarrass him by getting out and hearing. He circled the car with his hands up in his hair.

At the shop, Nick slept from late morning through the afternoon in his office. I was adrenalized enough to work the full day, which was fortunate since the scheduling of jobs at Out of the Hole was engineered around Nick’s only taking off Sundays. I did eight tune-ups and ten oil changes by myself. I barely saw Bobby and talked to him only once, while we were washing our hands, when I tried to tell him about the drive in the Corvette. But words are never enough for an experience like that, and all you’ve got is your pauses and whatever lame adjectives you can think of. Bobby shook his head, grinning. “Once in a lifetime,” he said, and then we were back out spinning ratchets, scarfing lunch over a fender. It would occur to me only later, as I was walking out to the parking lot for the next job, that Bobby must’ve been hoping to go for a ride.

11.

After work I drove to Hog Wild, a low windowless Waterbury tavern in the last strip mall before the warehouses and empty casings plants on Freight Street. Parked among Harley Sportsters and a few Softails, Bobby’s Triumph was backed up to the sidewalk curb.

The heavy Gothic-arch door pulled open on a dim room under a tin-stamp ceiling whose spinning fans you couldn’t feel. There were wooden chairs with cut-out handles in the backs, deer heads and coats of arms and dart boards, and in one corner a red-felt pool table. Bumper stickers were taped to the mirror behind the bar.
LOUD PIPES SAVE LIVES. HELL WAS FULL SO I CAME BACK. I SUPPORT POLE DANCERS.

Southern rock played on a jukebox I couldn’t see through the crowd. There were a lot of guys who, you could tell, didn’t give a fuck, who wore bandannas like pirates and had handlebar mustaches and week-old stubble. You felt far from the law in here, and though sidestepping in the cigarette smoke was disorienting I stayed aware of my distance from the door.

As I walked the length of the bar searching the tables someone got me in a headlock, and I resisted only for one second—that resistance of instinct—and went limp in the hopes that it was only Bobby, and of course it was, horsing around.

“This is the guy going with me,” he said, and then I was tucked at his side and walked to an empty stool, where he asked the next guy over to shove down. Bobby introduced me to men in Levi’s and engineer boots, some in leather vests, all with y’s at the end of their names. I pulled off a number of the three-point handshakes he’d taught me, and half terrified—it was like being in a mead house after a battle—I said almost nothing and tried not to smile too much.

“What’re you in work clothes for, dummy?” Bobby said.

I came up close to his ear. “To look older.”

Bobby took a drag from a cigarette going in the ashtray. “Richie,” he called over the bar. An older guy with a braided ponytail looked up from the drink he was pouring.

“My man here is twenty-five.”

“The fuck do I give a fuck?” Richie said.

Bobby clapped a big hand around the back of my neck and said to Richie, “This is who’s going to be in the picture you get from Miami. Me and him and a motherfucking marlin.”

We split a plate of nachos at one of the tables across from the bar. Though he was only drinking O’Doul’s, Bobby was drunk on a dream. We’d spend New Year’s in Key West, rent a cigarette boat, get me a bike and cruise the Everglades.