Free The Spark and the Drive by Wayne Harrison Page A

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