Free The Spark and the Drive by Wayne Harrison

yet?” he said.
    “Hey,” I said, wishing I hadn’t picked up. “Hey, Lou.”
    “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