The Car Read online

  “Waaiiilll-on!” he yelled. He dropped the brush on a shelf on the easel and grabbed Waylon and hugged him. “How in hell are you? I heard you was dead. They said a train killed you, but I knew that was a lie. It would take more than a train. . . .”

  “It was another guy. I was next to him when the train hit him and they thought it got us both. You know how rumors are.”

  “Right, right.” Wayne suddenly seemed to notice Terry. “Who’s your friend?”

  “A traveling companion, name of Terry. He picked me up two nights ago and we’ve had a little trouble and need some help with his car.”

  “That’s what I do . . .”

  Terry was still standing, staring at the woman, and Waylon laughed and spoke to her.

  “Maybe you’d better put some clothes on, Suze—I think you’re hurting his brain.”

  The model nodded but didn’t move until Wayne motioned with his chin. “We’ll stop for the day. We’ve worked enough—now it’s time to play.”

  The woman stepped down from the stand, moving as naturally as a soft wind—or so it seemed to Terry—and put a housecoat on, and at last Terry could take his eyes away from her.

  It was the first time since he’d come in the room that he could look around, and he saw now that on all the walls, hanging from wire hooks, there were gas tanks from motorcycles and parts of car hoods or air scoops and on most of them were paintings of nude women with large breasts in various poses. Here and there, there was a tank painted with an eagle or a skull and crossbones but most of them were women.

  Wayne wiped his hands on a rag and washed his brushes in a sink near one wall, and Terry realized that he lived in this same building. There was a bathroom in a back corner—the only closed-in room—and a large bed off to the right side of the building.

  “What’s with the car?” Wayne asked, when he’d finished the brushes.

  “It’s outside. A home-built. It’s fine, but we need a little more punch.”

  “We’ll look at it. Suze—” He turned to the woman, who had moved to a chair under a lamp by the bed and opened a book. “Why don’t you start some dinner while we look at the car?”

  She looked up, directly at Wayne, and Terry saw in the light that her eyes were purple, and he realized with a start that she was the one not just on the canvas but on almost every gas tank.

  “You mean me?” she asked. “You want me to cook?”

  Wayne frowned, then shook his head. “I guess not.”

  “I don’t cook. You know that. And I don’t clean. I model and you pay me.”

  “Right.”

  “You’d better get your brain checked,” she said, going back to the book. “Even asking is crazy.”

  Wayne turned and went out the front door and stopped outside in front of the car.

  “Oh wow, man. It’s a Blakely Bearcat!”

  “You know the car?” Waylon moved off the side and Terry stood by the car.

  “Know it? I helped a guy build one once. A guy named Blakely wanted Ford to build them and sell them, back in the late seventies. He made about four hundred of them and sold them as factory makes. Then Ford said no and he started selling them as kits. They rod up real good, real good.” He turned to Terry. “What’s it got inside?”

  “A 1974 Ford Pinto motor.”

  “That twenty-three hundred-cc mill?”

  “Yes—that’s what it said.”

  “Oh, man, you guys are in luck.”

  “What do you mean?” Waylon asked.

  “That’s a hell of an engine—incredible. With just a few modifications we can increase the power seven or eight percent, but that ain’t the best.”

  Waylon had let himself slide down the wall and was sitting in the dirt, smiling peacefully. His smile widened. “What else?”

  “I got a blower for it.”

  “A turbocharger?”

  Wayne nodded. “Some guy left it here in a box to pay for his Harley. It’s made by a company out in California—Bunks or something. The thing drops right in where the exhaust manifold goes, clean as snot.”

  “A turbocharger?” Terry’s ears perked. “What’s that?” He had heard about them but didn’t quite understand how they worked.

  “It’s a high-speed fan that drives from the exhaust gases and pushes accelerated air into the carburetor. It’s like everything feeds on itself, man. The faster you go, the more air gets pushed, the faster you go.” Wayne was so excited he was hopping around. “We can do it all in a day, max.”

  “Does it really make a difference?”

  Wayne stopped, stared. “A turbo? How about night and day? It will increase your engine power by up to forty-five percent—you won’t even know the car when we’re done.”

  Terry stood, one hand on the car, and shook his head. “I don’t know. How expensive is it?”

  “Like new the turbo is a couple grand. But I can let you have it for . . .” Wayne hesitated and looked out of the corner of his eye at Waylon, who shook his head. “I can barter it off. You help me clean the place up and I’ll put it in the car for you. Better yet, you help me put it in the car and we’ll call it square.”

  Terry looked at Waylon, at Wayne, started to say something, and stopped. How long? Three days—he’d been with Waylon three days and now he’d just met a man who was going to give him a turbo, seen a naked woman with violet eyes, and watched a fight he still didn’t understand. He sighed. “Thank you. But I think I should pay something.”

  Wayne shook his head. “No way, José. . . .”

  “Later. When I’m rich I’ll send you some money,” Terry said.

  Wayne smiled. “Right on. When you’re rich. Now let’s get to work. We’ve got to get the car inside and pull the exhaust system.”

  He went back in the side door and Terry heard chains rattling and the large door went up six feet. Terry started the Cat and pulled it in, and within moments he and Wayne were under the hood, loosening the exhaust manifold and the tailpipe assembly, the two of them working as hard as Terry had worked alone.

  It grew dark but it didn’t matter. The interior floodlights of the building were brighter than daylight.

  Suze sat reading for a long time—Terry saw the cover of the book once and it said Kafka in large letters—then relented and got up and went to the refrigerator and made sandwiches with turkey and lettuce and mayo. Terry and Wayne ate with greasy hands, ripping into the car, but Waylon didn’t eat.

  He sat outside, watching the night come down, leaning against the wall, his eyes open but not seeing, a small frown on his forehead.

  Hour after hour they worked, and once when Terry went outside to stretch his back he saw that Waylon was still sitting there, quietly looking into the night.

  “What’s the matter with him?” Terry asked Wayne when he came back inside.

  “Nothing. He needs to think.”

  “About what?”

  “About himself. He’ll be in when he settles some things. Hand me that nine-sixteenths box and open end, will you?”

  “Can we help him?”

  Wayne looked out the door. “Did he go against someone?”

  “You mean fight?” Terry nodded. “There were some guys in a pickup who threw a bottle at us. He made me stop at a garage and he did something to them. It wasn’t really fighting.”

  Wayne turned back, sighed. “They went down, right?”

  Terry nodded. “I was worried. I thought, you know, because he was so old they would hurt him. . . .”

  “Old—who? Waylon?”

  “Well, you know. Kind of old.”

  Wayne snorted and Terry thought it might have been a laugh but wasn’t sure. “Old doesn’t mean bad. It isn’t age, it’s where your head is at. And let me tell you something—where Waylon’s head is at is a very, very hard place. Hard and cold and lonely.” He shook his head. “Those guys are lucky he didn’t terminate them.”

  “Terminate? You mean kill?”

  But Wayne was back at work on the mo
tor and didn’t answer, worked in silence while Terry helped him and looked outside at Waylon sitting on the ground, leaning back against the building, looking at the sky.

  “How long have you known him?”

  Wayne glanced up and out at Waylon. “Oh, we go back a long ways. Did a little war, a little peace together. There was a time when he thought he was in love with me, but I ran off with a girl named Carmelita, had black hair that hung down to her ankles and could sing. . . .”

  “Love? You mean, like, if he was gay or something?”

  Wayne nodded and went back to work “Yeah. He’s gay. You didn’t know?”

  Terry stared at Waylon. “But he never . . . I mean, we’ve been together three days and he hasn’t . . . You know . . .”

  Wayne put his wrench down and studied Terry. “Made a move on you? Hell, boy, he’s gay, he’s not a pervert. You’re just a kid, why would he make a move on you?”

  “Well . . .” And the truth was Terry couldn’t think of an answer, nor did it seem important He shrugged and went back to work on the engine with Wayne.

  12

  “YOU READY TO TEST HER?”

  Wayne stood over the engine, his hands and head covered with grease—where they weren’t hidden by his hair—his smile a cut of white across the dirty face.

  Terry was across the Cat, one hand on the windshield. It was early morning. They had worked all night—Terry thought he would never sleep correctly again—and the turbocharger was in place, shining and new-looking though it had been in the box for perhaps years. It was simple in concept. The exhaust manifold had been removed and replaced with the turbo. When the engine fired, the exhaust gases were expelled through the turbo, which was in reality a fan with a duct that led back to the carburetor. When the engine ran, the expelled gases turned the fan and that drove high-pressure air into the carburetor, which dramatically increased the power.

  Or, Terry thought, it was supposed to. But he had never seen anything work this way and most of what had been done was accomplished by Wayne who was—as far as Terry could tell—the best mechanic in the world, or near it. Except that he just worked and didn’t say what he was doing, so much of it was still mysterious to Terry.

  But he nodded.

  “Well, get in—crank her.”

  Terry slid into the seat and held his breath, turned the key, pushed it over to start.

  There was a moment’s hesitation and then the engine fired with a snort and a thundering growl. The Cat was just outside the door of the garage, but the sound was so deafening that Suze ran from the trailer to close the garage door and protect herself.

  “It’s loud,” Terry said, or yelled, smiling at the same time. It sounded like he thought a car should sound—hungry.

  Wayne nodded, leaned over, and yelled back. “That’s because we dropped the muffler and put in that swollen piece of pipe to make it reverb a little. The muffler created too much backdraft for the turbo. Rev her a few times.”

  Terry pushed on the accelerator once, twice, and the sound grew, roared, filled the world. “Wow . . .”

  Wayne nodded. “Far out, right? Oh, man, I can dig this thing. Let’s go for a ride, see how it works.”

  Terry waited while Wayne got in. Waylon was nowhere to be seen and Terry supposed he had gone into the trailer to get some sleep.

  Wayne closed the door. “You’ve got to watch it. It will seem the same for the first second or so, but the turbo kicks in fast and she can get squirrelly.”

  Terry nodded, put the Cat in reverse, turned around to look over the back, and eased the clutch out. It was loud but didn’t seem much different.

  “You don’t want to give her too much—,” Wayne started to say.

  But he was too late. The Cat seemed unchanged to Terry and he pushed on the acclerator.

  A pause, half a beat, then the turbo started pushing air, mixed it under pressure with the gas in the carburetor, and forced it into the pistons.

  Both back tires broke loose.

  There was a screech that nearly broke eardrums and the Cat was suddenly doing thirty-five miles an hour. In reverse.

  “—gas,” Wayne finished, his head snapping forward with the acceleration.

  Terry instinctively cranked the wheel to the right, the car swerved flatly back to the left, whipped around, and he was looking down the driveway over the front end. He clutched, shifted into low, accelerated again, and they were aimed at the road doing almost fifty—all in the space of two or three seconds.

  On the road he caught third, brought her up to sixty, then fourth, and pushed the accelerator where it would have been previously for seventy.

  The Cat jumped to just under a hundred miles an hour and when he backed down to where it would have been for normal cruising speed there was over half the pedal still left.

  “Wow . . .” He shot a quick look at Wayne. “This is incredible.”

  “Far out, right? I dig your driving. Man, that turn in the driveway was pure Sterling Moss.”

  Terry had slowed to turn around at a wide place in the road. “Who’s Sterling Moss?”

  Wayne stared at him. “You don’t know the name?”

  Terry shook his head. “Never heard of him. Did he drive or something?”

  “Oh, man. Never heard of Sterling Moss. Oh, this is too much. Sterling Moss was the driver, the driver back in the sixties and seventies—there were people who said his name would live forever when he won the Grand Prix. He could take turns like nobody has ever taken turns. It looked like his inside wheels were bolted to the road—and you don’t know him. Oh, man, that crushes. That really crushes.”

  While Wayne was talking, Terry had turned and driven back to the driveway and was now pulling up to the metal building. Waylon came outside when they arrived, drinking a Coke and eating a sandwich.

  He and Wayne looked at each other—Terry caught the look—and Waylon nodded, almost imperceptibly, and Wayne answered the nod. Then he waved a hand toward Terry.

  “He doesn’t know who Sterling Moss was.”

  Waylon shook his head. “Tragic.” But he was smiling softly.

  “Well, dammit, think of it. He loves cars, drives like he was born to it, and doesn’t know Sterling Moss. How can that be?”

  Waylon took a sip of Coke. “So he never learned about Moss.”

  “Exactly. My point exactly. He never learned.” Wayne took a breath. “The question is, my friend, how much other stuff doesn’t he know?”

  Waylon nodded slowly.

  “You know what I think?” Wayne stood, his hand still waving toward Terry.

  “No. What do you think?” Waylon burped.

  “I think we should find out what he doesn’t know. There might be a shocking lack of fundamental knowledge here.”

  All this time Terry had been sitting in the car, one hand draped over the wheel, the motor turned off. “How can you do that? I don’t know what I don’t know.”

  Wayne turned. “Simple. We’ll ask until we hit a blank. Let’s start with . . . Hell, I don’t know. Waylon, what should we start with?”

  Waylon had picked up his guitar, which had been resting against the wall at the side of the door, and tickled the strings, making a sound like rain.

  “Music. Let’s ask about music.”

  Wayne nodded, turned to Terry. “What do you know about music?”

  Terry shrugged. “I don’t know. I listen to it. I like some of it.”

  “No.” Waylon hit a stronger chord. “Not the sound, the groups. The writers. The composers.”

  “Dylan,” Wayne said, raising a hand. “Bob Dylan.”

  Terry frowned. “No—I don’t know him.”

  “You don’t know Bob Dylan?” Waylon moved toward the car. “How about Pete Seeger?”

  Terry snapped his fingers. “Bob Seger. I’ve heard of him.”

  “But not Pete?”

  Terry shook his head. “Nope. Sorry.”

  “Different Seegers,” Wayne said. “Way different.”


  “Ian and Sylvia?” Waylon asked. “Bud and Travis? Elvis?”

  “I know Elvis. Of course.”

  “And the Beatles?”

  “I know of them. I’ve seen them on old videos.”

  Wayne stopped them. “I think we’ve got a base here. He pretty much doesn’t know anything about music before maybe 1980 or 1985, except for Elvis and the Beatles.”

  Waylon nodded. “I think you’ve got it.”

  “Which,” Wayne said, “is the same as not knowing anything.”

  “How about Bruce Springsteen?” Terry asked. “I heard him once. . . .”

  Wayne shook his head. “Not real. He came late. Nobody who was anybody listened to him.”

  “Move into rock a little,” Waylon said. “Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Grace Slick . . .”

  Terry sighed. “Nope.”

  “. . . Simon and Garfunkel?”

  “Nope.”

  “God.” Wayne wiped his face. “It’s like he wasn’t born or something.”

  “I wasn’t,” Terry pointed out “They were all before I was born.”

  “Well, there you are.” Wayne nodded. “That explains it You weren’t around.”

  “Books,” Waylon said. “What books have you read?”

  “The ones I have to, for school.”

  “Any Steinbeck—Grapes of Wrath, Tortilla Flats?”

  “Nope. I watched part of a movie called Grapes of Wrath on television, but it was pretty boring.”

  “Boring . . .”

  “Yeah. About a bunch of farmers and they get into a lot of dust or dirt or something. Is that it?”

  Waylon turned away, struck another chord, then back. “That’s the right story, but the wrong way to see it, to know it.”

  “Don Quixote,” Wayne said, leaning over the car. “About a Spanish guy who ran around sticking spears in windmills?”

  Terry held up his hands. “Sorry. I’ve never heard of it.”

  “History,” Waylon said suddenly. “Let’s try history. Washington, Jefferson . . .”

  Terry brightened. “I’ve heard of them. Of course.”

  “What have you heard?”

  “Well, like that Washington won the Revolutionary War and Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, and they were both presidents.”