"Well," the dude said.
We looked at him.
"There is a thing I noticed."
"Oh?"
"If you'll just look right here," he said. "See how the rubber grommet's gone on the top of your shock absorber mounting, that's what called it to my attention. Now you see your car's right above the hydraulic lift, that's cause I had it up before to take a look at your shocks. Now let me just raise it up again and I can point out to you what's wrong."
Well, he pressed a switch or some such to send the car up off the ground, and then he pointed here and there underneath it to show us where the shocks were shot and something was cutting into something else and about to commence bending the frame.
"If you got the time you ought to let me take care of that for you," he said. "Because if you don't get it seen to you wind up with frame damage and your whole front end goes on you, and then where are you?"
He let us take a long look at the underside of the car. There was no question that something was pressing on something and cutting into it. What the hell it all added up to was beyond me.
"Just let me talk to my brother a minute," Newt said to him, and he took hold of my arm and we walked around the side.
"Well," he said, "what do you think? It looks like this old boy here is sticking it in pretty deep."
"It does at that. But that fan belt was shot and those hoses was the next thing to petrified."
"True."
"If they was our fan belt and hoses in the first place and not some junk he had around."
"I had that very thought, Vern."
"Now as for the shock absorbers-"
"Something sure don't look altogether perfect underneath that car. Something's sure cutting into something."
"I know it. But maybe he just went and got a file or some such thing and did some cutting himself."
"In other words, either he's a con man or he's a saint."
"Except we know he ain't a saint, not at the price he gets for gasoline, and not telling us how he eats all his meals across the road and all the time his own wife's running it."
"So what do we do? You want to go on to Silver City on those shocks? I don't even know if we got enough money to cover putting shocks on, far as that goes."
We walked around to the front and asked the price of the shocks. He worked it all out with pencil and paper and came up with a figure of forty-five dollars, including the parts and the labor and the tax and all. Newt and I went into another huddle and he counted his money and I went through my own pockets and came up with a couple of dollars, and it worked out that we could pay what we owed and get the shocks and come up with three dollars to bless ourselves with.
So I looked at Newt and he looked back at me and gave a great shrug of his shoulders. Close as we are we can say a lot without speaking.
We told the dude to go ahead and do the work.
While he installed the shocks, me and Newt went across the road and had us a couple of chicken-fried steaks. They wasn't bad at all even if the price was on the high side. We washed the steaks down with a beer apiece and then each of us had a cup of that coffee. I guess there's been times I had better coffee.
"I'd say you fellows sure were lucky you stopped here," the woman said.
"It's our lucky day, all right," Newt said. While he paid her I looked over the paperback books and magazines. Some of them looked to be old and secondhand but they weren't none of them reduced in price on account of it, and this didn't surprise me much.
What also didn't surprise us was when we got back to find the shocks installed and our friend with his big hat off and scratching his mop of hair and telling us how the rear shocks was in even worse shape than the front ones. He went and ran the car up in the air again to show us more things that didn't mean much to us.
Newton said, "Well, sir, my brother and I, we talked it over. We figure we been neglecting this here automobile and we really ought to do right by it. If those rear shocks is bad, well, let's just get 'em the hell off of there and new ones on. And while we're here I'm just about positive we're due for an oil change."
"And I'll replace the oil filter while I'm at it."
"You do that," Newt told him. "And I guess you'll find other things that can do with a bit of fixing. Now we haven't got all the time in the world or all the money in the world either, but I guess we got us a pair of hours to spare, and we consider ourselves lucky having the good fortune to run up against a mechanic who knows which end of the wrench is which. So what we'll do, we'll just find us a patch of shade to set in and you check that car over and find things to do to her. Only things that need doing, but I guess you'd be the best judge of that."
Well, I'll tell you he found things to fix. Now and then a car would roll on in and he'd have to go and sell somebody a tank of gas, but we sure got the lion's share of his time. He replaced the air filter, he cleaned the carburetor, he changed the oil and replaced the oil filter, he tuned the engine and drained and flushed the radiator and filled her with fresh coolant, he gave us new plugs and points, he did this and that and every damn thing he could think of, and I guess the only parts of that car he didn't replace were ones he didn't have replacement parts for.
Through it all Newt and I sat in a patch of shade and sipped Cokes out of the bottle. Every now and then that bird would come over and tell us what else he found that he ought to be doing, and we'd look at each other and shrug our shoulders and say for him to go ahead and do what had to be done.
"Amazing what was wrong with that car of ours," Newt said to me. "Here I thought it rode pretty good."
"Hell, I pulled in here wanting nothing in the world but a tank of gas. Maybe a quart of oil, and oil was the one thing in the world we didn't need, or it looks like."
"Should ride a whole lot better once he's done with it."
"Well I guess it should. Man's building a whole new car around the cigarette lighter."
"And the clock. Nothing wrong with that clock, outside of it loses a few minutes a day."
"Lord," Newt said, "don't you be telling him about those few minutes the clock loses. We won't never get out of here."
That dude took the two hours we gave him and about twelve minutes besides, and then he came on over into the shade and presented us with his bill. It was all neatly itemized, everything listed in the right place and all of it added up, and the figure in the bottom right-hand corner with the circle around it read $277.45.
"That there is quite a number," I said.
He put the big hat on the back of his head and ran his hand over his forehead. "Whole lot of work involved," he said. "When you take into account all of those parts and all that labor."
"Oh, that's for certain," Newt said. "And I can see they all been taken into account, all right."
"That's clear as black and white," I said. "One thing, you couldn't call this a nickel-and-dime figure."
"That you couldn't," Newton said. "Well, sir, let me just go and get some money from the car. Vern?"
We walked over to the car together. "Funny how things work out," Vern said. "I swear people get forced into things, I just swear to hell and gone they do. What did either of us want beside a tank of gas?"
"Just a tank of gas is all."
"And here we are," he said. He opened the door on the passenger side, waited for a pickup truck to pass going west to east, then popped the glove compartment. He took the.38 for himself and gave me the.32 revolver. "I'll just settle up with our good buddy here," he said, loud enough for the good buddy in question to hear him. "Meanwhile, why don't you just step across the street and pick us up something to drink later on this evening? You never know, might turn out to be a long ways between liquor stores."
I went and gave him a little punch in the upper arm. He laughed the way he does and I put the.32 in my pocket and trotted on across the road to the cafe.
The End
Block - CMS - Nothing Short of Highway Robbery
Lawrence Block - CMS - Nothing Short of Highway Robbery Page 2