The Spark and the Drive Read online

  My work on the 302 gave me a pretty good idea of all I didn’t know about engines, so around the shop I told anyone who’d listen that I was just an intern. It mattered, especially with guys we called “the gearheads”—mechanics from other shops who hung around Out of the Hole on their lunch breaks. They came to pay homage to the cars they dreamed about when they were up to their elbows in skipping Omnis and dieseling Escorts. I was paranoid that they’d ask me something I didn’t know just to prove how incompetent I was. Mostly they ignored me and sat in folding chairs talking about Nick as if he were dead and unforgettable. I’d overheard conversations like this:

  “That time Marbles was going, ‘They’re going to kill me now. I’m dead meat.’”

  “Yeah?” said the second one, wiping his mustache after wolfing a meatball grinder.

  “He owed money, don’t ask me to who. But he gets a race lined up behind the Oxford airport. Four grand. And then what does he do, the dumb fuck? Smokes the tires at a light and turns a bearing. Engine’s toast. He pulls in here right at closing. ‘I need that four grand,’ he says. I mean, white as a marshmallow. And so then Nicky pulls in his Camino, yanks the three twenty-seven, and drops it in Marbles’s Impala. The whole job in like three hours. I told him, call up Guinness. See what the record is.”

  “He win?”

  “Fucking ’course he won. Nick’s got that motor cherry. Four, four and a quarter horse. A lot better than Marbles had in his three fifty. Good second or two, I heard.”

  I couldn’t help myself. “His name is Marbles?”

  The first gearhead turned to me and looked annoyed. “Because of how he talks. He went through a windshield one time.” Then he stood, belched, said to the other guy, “All right, I’m a good hour late now,” and left.

  The second gearhead was the less friendly of the two, so I wandered over to a restored Duster that Ray was working on. “What I miss is how they used to dress,” he said to me, in his habit of greeting you in the middle of a conversation. He torqued a head bolt and ash fell from the cigarette on his lip. “Not the slut outfits you got today. I feel sorry for anybody who never pushed his face up under a poodle skirt. Get your teeth into a pair of them French knickers.”

  “Sounds like good, clean fun.”

  “Bet your sweet ass it was.” He looked past me and straightened from the car, rubbing a shop rag between his hands as Mary Ann came over.

  “I can’t read this word,” she said, holding in one hand a work order and in the other, napping over her shoulder, her baby son. It made me nervous to see Joey out here around scorching manifolds and poisonous vapors. I’d helped enough with my kid sister to know what a fragile thing a baby was.

  Ray went to his toolbox and came back with reading glasses on the end of his nose.

  “Actually, either of these words,” Mary Ann said.

  “Those words there? Those words, I believe, are ‘carbon tracking.’”

  “Where’s the ‘b’? Or ‘k’?”

  “They’re in there, trust me.”

  She set the clipboard down on the Duster’s fender and without waking Joey made the corrections. “Joey’s going to have better handwriting when he’s two,” she said.

  “Then he can take my dictation.”

  She stared at him candidly, and after a moment she shook her head as if clearing her thoughts. She caught my eye and winked. “Ray’s what happens when you drop out of school.”

  “Be a doctor, kid,” Ray said. “They got impeccable handwriting.”

  At this, Mary Ann had to smile. “You’re just on fire today, aren’t you?”

  * * *

  I tried never to bring my home life in to work with me, with one notable exception that happened not long after the night we painted the shop. Seated behind the old desk in the parts room, I called a girl named Kim Weatherall. She worked at a feed store in Levi, where I lived, and answered the phone, “Agway,” in a tone of restless boredom, though after I said who it was, she perked right up. “Come on, man. What are you calling me at work for?”

  I didn’t feel like I had a choice. She hadn’t called me, or been at home when I called her, for two weeks. I’d wanted there to be spark plug cases and carburetor rebuild kits around me when I talked to her. A mechanic in uniform was the right version of myself. In the splashed mirror over the tub sink, I saw not the unpopular kid who was sometimes afraid to get out of bed, but a man in control of things, my Dickies work shirt bearing the name of the most revered automotive shop in Waterbury. I’d hoped to be full of the confidence I knew I wouldn’t have when I got home.

  We weren’t exactly dating, Kim and I. We trout fished together and rode her quad around her grandparents’ property. In my Nova we imitated Eddie Murphy imitating Ralph Kramden. We’d had sex twice in a haymow. It was my first sex but not hers, and the hay gave me a rash on my knees; it was not romantic (though I’d brought candles) but stiff and determined, at times unfriendly. “Don’t move,” she’d said, pinning my legs down with her heels. “Already?” she’d said when I came. She wore her hair back with a ponytail hanging over the plastic adjuster of her red Agway cap, but I’d imagine how she would look in makeup and designer jeans. In any meaningful sense I barely knew Kim at all, but still it depressed me to imagine my life without her.

  The call was short and toxic. I wanted to hear her break up with me and not mean it, and then in a tearful voice say she wanted me back. All fantasy. I couldn’t keep us together any more than I could keep my parents together, any more than I could get the bearded farm kids at Northwest Vo/Ag, guys I admired and feared, to like me. Kim was another part of my life I had no control over.

  “Cunt,” I said, and kicked the bottom desk drawer in such a way that the knob handle punched into the top of my foot. “Cunt cunt cunt!”

  Then I swung around in the metal chair and saw Mary Ann. She hadn’t just come in. Her back was toward the lane between spark plugs and PCV valves, where from behind the center shelf she must’ve heard the entire phone call. Now she didn’t turn and leave or speak. She was just frozen there with a big mystified look.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean you.”

  “No, I didn’t think you did.”

  “That’s not even something I ever say. That word.” I slumped forward. “I’m sorry. You were back there the whole time?”

  She held up her inventory clipboard. “I should have cleared my throat or something.”

  “God.” When I dropped my face into my hands my cap popped off and wobbled upside-down on the concrete floor. I was too drained to even get it. Kim had been my only hope that someone could eventually fall in love with me.

  Mary Ann bent for the cap and then set it lightly on my head. She wore a powder blue polo shirt open to the last button, and from her tan throat came the faint aroma of jasmine. “She must’ve made you happy sometimes,” Mary Ann said. “You might not see it right now. I wouldn’t be able to, either.”

  I smiled, and somehow it brought me closer than I’d been yet to tears. I couldn’t tell which emotions I should trust.

  “There was a guy I dated in college,” she said. “I thought it was pretty serious, but right before finals he dumped me. I was a mess. He didn’t have a record player in his dorm, so I sold back all my books early and got him one. And then I bought every Bay City Rollers album I could find.” She shook her head, grinning, and sat on the edge of the desk and said that he wouldn’t take them. But instead of returning the records and getting her books back to pass her exams, she smashed them in the parking lot. It was a generous, sympathizing story. Eventually he tried to get back together with her (this part was intended to give me hope, I thought), but by then Nick had cruised into her life and college was no longer in the scheme of things.

  “He was into the Bay City Rollers,” she said. “You’d think that would’ve told me something.”

  And I laughed because she laughed, though by then I was considering something else. A marriage like theirs, which had
seemed to me to be ordained by the highest fate, and Nick wasn’t even her first choice?

  You didn’t see a lot of beautiful women traipsing around with auto mechanics. The gearheads were sometimes tracked down by big broad-faced gals with wiry mullets and loose, manly laughs. I’d never seen Bobby’s girlfriend, though I’d heard her yell at him over the phone, and it seemed impossible that any magnitude of hotness could offset her impulsive rage.

  My logic for uniting my future wife with my future career was based solely on Nick’s example. In the first meeting I’d conjured up between him and Mary Ann, she pulled in as a customer. Nick repaired her car, and though he tried not to boast she insisted that he describe the complicated process by which he saved her hundreds of dollars in diagnostic labor. He wasn’t flirting, he didn’t have to, and she fell in love in a shop bay. That was the proper order of things, and I’d calibrated my own fantasies by its plausibility: The girl, a little older, a junior in college, is smiling when I look up from her engine. She approaches the car timidly, her tan arms folded over a floral dress. “Can I watch?” she says.

  But this new possibility that Mary Ann somehow stumbled onto Nick during a moment of turmoil gave me pause, and though it was none of my business, I’d think about it for days.

  * * *

  I had a chance to prove myself to Nick on the last day of my internship, when a ’75 Formula pulled in with a stalling complaint. It was a second-opinion job that had stumped all the mechanics at Sears Automotive, and as I spread the fender mats and attached the oscilloscope leads—battery, vacuum, tach., emissions—I should have been limbering my mind for the deductive marathon ahead. But instead I was rehearsing how I would tell Nick that I’d pinpointed the problem in the same uninflected voice he would use, as if there were no glory in it at all.

  I’m sure it hurt their pride at Sears to send us these diagnosis jobs, but Nick was the local expert and either we would fix the car and they’d take the credit, or we wouldn’t (to my knowledge, this had yet to happen) and they could be consoled by having frustrated the very best. As for Nick, he never gave a hint of feeling threatened. These second-opinion jobs were exactly equal to any other job, as he had shown today when he gave the Formula to me.

  The previous mechanic had replaced the carburetor, to the tune of three hundred dollars, only to find that the engine continued to cough and stall. I had my four suspects—fuel, spark, compression, exhaust—and my anxiety rose with each one I ruled out. Nick, after all, had told me that I had a mind for abstract thought—he said that, and now I had to prove it.

  I opened a toolbox drawer and propped inside it a chalkboard that my little sister didn’t play with anymore. I wrote down each of my diagnostic steps as I performed them. I stepped back and pondered the board, was hoping for a revelation like mathematicians have in the movies, when Ray came by whistling “Carolina in the Morning” (not sincerely; when he sang it, as he sometimes did, he sang, “Nothing could be finer than to be in her vaginer…”). He stopped cold and stared at my chalkboard. “Son, are you retarded?” he said. Then Bobby Stango walked over rubbing GOJO up his arms. “What’re you, retarded?”

  “It’s a second-opinion job,” I said. Bobby skimmed the work order as he lathered off grease. Drips the color of storm clouds spilled off his elbows onto the steel toes of his work boots. When he smiled I felt myself brimming with unrealized greatness. He lit me a Marlboro, which he thought of as a luxury since I smoked Marlboro Lights. “I think our boy here just popped his cherry,” he told Ray.

  “He wishes.”

  But after an hour I hit the ceiling of my aptitude and was just groping around. When Nick walked out of the lobby, I ran over to my toolbox and slammed the chalkboard in the bottom drawer. I was wiggling vacuum lines I’d already wiggled, hoping to find a split in one that might explain the stalling, when he came up to the car. He stared calmly at the engine, his pale eyes, glassed as mine were from the fumes, flitting from component to component. Then he took a long socket extension and put his ear to it to listen to the intake manifold, glancing as he did at the soaring hydrocarbon count that registered on the emissions screen.

  “Wet plugs in six and eight,” I said. “I think it needs a valve job.”

  He nudged the throttle lever and brought the rpm up to 2,500. After a few seconds the hydrocarbons dropped to passing. I was baffled. Burnt valves are burnt valves at any rpm.

  “Any vacuum leaks?”

  I shook my head. “I ran propane all over. And the KVs look good. No carbon tracking.”

  Nick lit a Winston and walked over to my toolbox. Inside the lid I’d taped a card my little sister, April, had made, a cake and candles that looked like a blue cactus, over which she’d written HApE BERfdA JUsTiN.

  “You’re eighteen now?” he said.

  I nodded.

  “If you lived in Kenya, you’d be going on your first lion hunt.”

  “As long as I get a gun, not a spear,” I said.

  “They’d break eggs over your head in Germany.”

  “Here in America, your boss takes you out for Jäger shots.”

  He grinned. “How about dinner tonight at the house?”

  I had to listen to the echo of the words twice in my head before I believed them, an invitation—albeit on my very last day—to enter and investigate his personal life. “Okay, sure,” I said, and had to cut myself off to keep from gushing like a fool. I studied the KV screen again and ran another cylinder balance. I checked the ignition output and coolant level. Things that made no sense to check, I checked. I wanted to prove to him that I was better than the mechanics at Sears.

  “Eighteen,” I heard Nick say to himself. He was facing the hopper window behind the oscilloscope, squinting as if in the sooty pane he could see himself at my age. But his eighteen was impressive, the age at which he balanced and blueprinted his first engine—scouring every surface, boiling, polishing, then torquing every fastener to spec. It was the most exhaustive engine work you can do, a feat I was light-years from.

  I advanced and retarded the timing until my eyes burned and I couldn’t see the whirling slot mark on the harmonic balancer. I readjusted the idle speed and leaned out the mixture. I looked at the work order one last time and finally lowered my head on my forearms over the fender mat. “Goddamn it,” I said. “It’s unfixable.”

  Nick picked up a ball peen hammer, leaned on the passenger-side fender, and tapped the EGR valve. Something held by suction dislodged, the engine coughed once and almost stalled, and he revved it clean. When he let go of the throttle, the engine idled like glass.

  We waited to see that the fix held. The engine breathed quietly, and in the afterglow of witnessing a miracle I realized that the job wasn’t going to make me any money. An EGR valve was barely a seventy-dollar ticket, so my commission—I made that plus five an hour—would be almost nothing.

  Nick looked over the paperwork again. He stepped up to the Formula, and with one precise smack of the ball peen he cracked the corner of the intake manifold all the way through. The engine began to sputter, and suddenly I was looking at a nine-hundred-dollar ticket. “It’s on Sears,” he said. “Happy birthday.”

  3.

  That evening, as the dark shop sign waned in my rearview mirror, I considered for the last time the caged windows of Braids Beauty School across the street, and over them the top floors of the Harris Circle Housing Projects, where I’d once seen a car on fire. I felt abandoned and helpless, incapable of uttering a farewell to this place I’d grown to love. In just two months’ time, Ray had learned to tolerate me almost completely, Bobby goofed with me like a brother, and Nick and I were in the vicinity of a friendship I was sure would change my life if only we had more time.

  Before we left, Nick had taped a repair plate to the back window of a ’67 Valiant he’d resurrected, thinking he could get a few hundred for the car in the paper, and asked me to follow him home. At a stoplight he revved the Valiant’s slant six, and staring wildly from my beat
er Nova, I let off the brake and tapped his back bumper. Reverse lights came on and he slammed back into me. We bashed into each other all the way to his house, prolonging a stunt only possible as a departure from a place where anything had seemed possible. I relished the shock on the faces of people who thought they were bearing witness to a bona fide accident. My last slam caught him at an angle and I heard the lens of my right front signal light tinkle on the pavement.

  In his driveway we started laughing; as I scooped out shards from my signal light our voices softened to whistling puffs of air. It was wet, helpless laughter, Nick hitting a cackling high note and regaining his voice first. “The guy with the beard … in the Zephyr.”

  The side door opened, and Mary Ann came out of the house and started laughing herself. “You got him drunk?” she said to me. “Oh, my God. Say something drunk, Nick.”

  “I can’t even look at this guy,” he said.

  I followed them up the front steps, trying to talk my voice clean: “All right, phew, God, all right.”

  Nick and Mary Ann lived in south Waterbury about three miles from the shop. The first time I saw their house, I’d gotten the address off a bill envelope and drove past expecting a big Victorian or something, a house commensurate with Nick’s talent, but it was only a base-model cape, the kind kindergarteners draw—a triangle on a square with two shutter-less windows flanking the front door. I learned later that Out of the Hole was a failing inheritance from Nick’s uncle, and that Nick had had to take out a mortgage to fix up the building, such as it had been, and buy diagnostic equipment. Still I couldn’t help but feel that something was cosmically out of balance when a mechanic of Nick’s stature should have to live so modestly.

  We went first to the kitchen, a room that had nothing I could see of Nick: faded blue rooster wallpaper, dull-white linoleum, painted cabinets whose chrome handles, like the legs of the padded chairs at the table, were flecked with rust. The air, though, was conversely awake with cinnamon, clove, cedarwood, hibiscus, jasmine, lavender. Much later I learned these were Mary Ann’s potions, essential oils that she wore to achieve certain moods in her day.