Auto Biography

by Earl Swift

  The upshot is that days pass, a lot of days, during which Arney is not only not working on the chassis, he’s not even visiting the lot. The gate is padlocked through late February and most of March. It isn’t until the twenty-sixth that Arney and Skinhead return to the office at Moyock Muscle, where they find dozens of messages left on the answering machine.

  A woman’s voice: “Just wondering when and if you guys are ever open. Could you call me?” She leaves a number. “I already talked to that crazy bitch,” Arney growls. Another call: “I don’t know how you intend to make any money if you never answer the—” Arney halts the machine, deletes the message, moves on to the next. “Hi, I’m calling after hours. I’m at the lot, and I just wanted to walk around without getting shot—take a look around, look at some cars, pick something out and come back and talk to you about it.” Arney writes down his number. A new voice, asking about parts. Skinhead records the details. Another, long-distance, seeking some arcane component. Arney jots. Several callers ask about cars they’ve seen on the website. Arney and Skinhead divide up the list.

  Skinhead notes that another call came in that morning, before Arney’s arrival—a guy looking for a price on the 1969 Pontiac Trans Am on the lot. “There’s no such thing,” Arney says.

  “Sure there is,” Skinhead replies. “It’s right outside.”

  “No, you dumb motherfucker, there ain’t no such thing as a ’69 Trans Am,” Arney tells him. “Never was a ’69 Trans Am. There was a ’69 Firebird.”

  “Okay,” Skinhead says. “Whatever. How much do you want for that Pontiac?”

  “We have no ’69 Trans Am. We have a ’69 Firebird.”

  Skinhead nods. “Okay. How much do you want for it?”

  “The one out there—the Firebird—is silver.”

  “Right. Okay. How much do you want for it?”

  “I’ll take thirty-five hundred,” Arney says.

  Skinhead dials a number, and while awaiting an answer murmurs: “I’m sure I’ve seen, in one of these books, a ’69 Trans Am. It was white with blue stripes.”

  Arney scowls at him. “So you’re saying it had one paint scheme?” he asks, his tone incredulous. “God damn, Skinhead, you really are a stupid motherfucker. You think they made a Trans Am with just one paint color?”

  Skinhead points to a pile of manuals, parts catalogs, and muscle car magazines on the desk between them. “I saw it in one of these books.”

  Hold on, Arney says. He flips open his cell and speed-dials a number. “Hey, Slick, look up on the goddamn Internet for me and see what year they introduced the Trans Am for me, will you?” He hangs up.

  A couple of minutes later, she calls back with the news that the Trans Am was introduced in the 1970 model year, which appeared in late 1969. Arney immediately takes to the Internet himself, and reads aloud from a website: “The Trans Am package appeared in the spring of 1969.” It was a midyear offering. He sighs and peers across the desk. “Well, Skinhead, you’re not a stupid motherfucker.”

  “Thank you,” Skinhead says softly.

  “Be glad about that: You’re not a stupid motherfucker,” Arney counsels. A pause. “Well, you are a stupid motherfucker, but not about this.”

  BEFORE HE CAN get back to the Chevy, Arney must first clear enough space in the showroom for the chassis and the donor car, meaning that he’ll have to relocate several of the cars parked there. Three or four can be shoehorned into a large garage at the rear of Pop Jennings’s house, but only after that room—now piled with brake shoes, mufflers, fan belts, old signs, and pails of nuts and bolts—is itself cleaned up and rearranged.

  So the pair spends the rest of the day at Pop’s. Skinhead backs a pickup to the garage door, and he and Arney use it as a Dumpster as they sift through the room’s jumbled contents. “We’ve gotten way ahead of ourselves and now we’ve got to get back to the basics,” Arney says as they work, as much to himself as to Skinhead. “The basics are not buying any more properties—go back to enjoying life, instead of being in a race to get somewhere where it’s no fucking fun being there. I got caught up in what everybody else got caught up in, and it led to me being in a place where everything got out of control.”

  They bolt together a trio of six-foot metal shelving units. “You get addicted to the deal, you know what I mean?” Arney says. “I got addicted to the deal. I got addicted to making that deal. And the fucking banks were giving away all the fucking money you wanted, and I was like so many other people—if you’re giving it away, I’ll take it. I’ll try to make some money with it.”

  Skinhead nods. Arney sighs. “I guess in all fucking reality you get lost in trying to make money. The more money you can get, the more properties you own, the more you want to keep making those deals.”

  “You’re amassing all this shit that you think is wealth,” Skinhead offers, “and it turns out it isn’t wealth at all.”

  Arney grunts agreement. “All my life, I was under the impression that if I bought property, I couldn’t go wrong,” he says. “Well, guess what? I found out that I certainly could go wrong.” They screw the shelving units to the wall, Arney lowering a shoulder against their frames, Skinhead wielding the power driver. “I’m out of the real estate business,” Arney vows. “I just want to own me some cars, and if a motherfucker wants to buy one, they can give me some money and I can go on down the road.”

  They take a break to show a customer a ’67 Camaro with a “Carolina quarter panel”—sheet metal has been patched to the car with rivets, which are unevenly spaced as well as ugly in their own right—but otherwise, the two labor without pause into the evening, bickering all the while like an unhappy couple. Arney accuses Skinhead of soiling himself. Skinhead replies, evenly, that he has not. They argue about it. Arney complains that Skinhead is a weakling. Skinhead counters that he’s as strong as he needs to be. They differ on this at length. Slick calls to report that she’s on her way, and will stop at a hot dog joint en route; the men wrangle over how many hot dogs Skinhead should order.

  They select the first car they’ll move to Pop’s: a 1959 Mercedes 190 SL convertible, its silver paint pristine under a quarter inch of fluffy gray dust, its engine unturned for more than twenty years. Its left front tire is flat; the engine’s belly is resting on the Quonset’s concrete floor. Skinhead jacks up the front end, and under each wheel positions a GoJak, a steel cradle on casters with a foot-operated jack attached; the devices enable him to raise the Mercedes off the floor, inch it onto the rollback, then ease it into Pop’s garage.

  He and Arney start several other cars in the Quonset, most of which fire up eagerly, and drive them onto the lot. With half the showroom empty, they take the rollback to the property’s north side, where the donor car waits between Paul’s paint shed and the body shop. The old sedan’s left side is locked up; neither wheel turns. Arney, impatient, hooks it to the rollback’s winch and drags it shuddering and groaning onto the truck’s bed.

  Thirty minutes later, the donor car is positioned on the showroom’s hydraulic lift. Arney raises it overhead. Pine needles sprout from the undercarriage like hair from an old man’s ears. The frame is studded with mud daubers’ nests. Yet the car’s running gear appears straight, and many a part is ripe for salvage: The exhaust and muffler look new, as does the gas tank. The last won’t fit the wagon—the arrangement of its rear-end components differs from that of Chevys with trunks—but it’s worth keeping just the same.

  Skinhead uses a reciprocating saw to cut away the straps cradling the exhaust pipe, then unbolts the pipe from the engine’s manifold. Arney pulls the cotter pins holding the parking brake cables. They hunt down the bolts joining the body to the frame, unsure of how many there are. Sixteen? Eighteen? Twenty? They unscrew nine, break two others, saw the heads off three more that are stripped beyond turning. They find empty holes where four more ought to be.

  The bolts measure nine-sixteenths of an inch in diameter—not an especially beefy girth, and a reminder that even old-school,
heavy-metal beasts like the wagon have weaknesses: Their integrity depends on their bodies remaining bound to their frames, and that enterprise comes down to these bolts. The car is only as strong as they are.

  At eighteen bolts they figure they’ve found them all, but no—two others turn up, tucked away in folds of the metal, in crannies formed by the frame. They’re nestled too deep to turn with a socket wrench; Skinhead opts to cut them. Smoke curls from a thick rubber washer cushioning one of the bolts as he forces the saw’s dulling blade through.

  Arney next unbolts the shock absorbers from the frame, and Skinhead uses a pry bar to force them free. As they come loose the rear axle drops a foot, dangles by the leaf springs. They unfasten the steel straps hugging the gas tank to the car’s underside, then lower the lift so that Skinhead can disconnect the shock absorbers from the floor of the trunk, where they’re connected to the body. The shocks drop, clattering, to the floor.

  They move to the front end, where Arney unhooks the ignition, feeding the wires through holes in the firewall. They pull the steering wheel. Skinhead disconnects the cable linking the floor shifter to the transmission. They have to enlarge a hole in the floorboard so that the cable will slip through; Arney uses two crossed pry bars, one as fulcrum for the other, to tear the floor while protecting the cable. “I’ve been doing this a long time,” he tells me. “I used to do this in the middle of the night when I was a young man.”

  “Yeah,” Skinhead says, “in people’s driveways.” They both laugh. A few final disconnections—carburetor linkage, master cylinder linkage—and Arney adjusts the arms of the hydraulic lift so that they’re positioned under the car’s body, rather than its frame, and raises it. The body snags on the steering gear.

  They drop the lift, reposition its arms under the frame, raise the whole car so they can reach the steering box from beneath. When Skinhead fails to move with sufficient speed to suit Arney, the boss snatches a wrench from him. “Dum-dum, what the fuck are you doing?”

  Skinhead narrows his eyes. “You talking to a dog or cat or something?”

  “I don’t think so,” Arney says.

  “You don’t have enough money anymore, to be talking to me like that.”

  Arney half laughs, says, “Yeah, I do,” but there’s not much mirth to it. The man who for years has lorded with impunity over Skinhead and the rest of the crew, licensed by providing their sustenance, shelter, and place in the world, now shrinks before their eyes. The dynamic between boss and bossed is shifting. “No,” Skinhead presses, “you don’t.”

  Arney, turning a wrench, resorts to a singsong taunt: “Dum-dum.” Skinhead answers in kind: “Fatty.” Arney straightens and glares at him. “Where do you see any fat on me?”

  “That belly of yours,” Skinhead replies.

  They finish dismantling the steering assembly, and Arney brings the Bobcat into the Quonset, then runs its forklift blades through the donor car’s windshield opening and out the back window. When he raises the blades, the body’s front end lifts, but not its rear. The Bobcat rolls back out. The lift rises. The men pore over the rear end, searching for body bolts they might have overlooked. It takes a while to find one, just behind the back bumper. Skinhead spends several minutes trying to maneuver a wrench to it, but can’t find an angle that works, before an exasperated Arney shoves a chisel against the bolt, gives it a sharp pull, and snaps the head clean off the shaft. “See?” he says. “See how it’s done? And you said I was fat.”

  “You are fat,” Skinhead says.

  “Motherfucker, I’m solid as steel. You’re the fat one.”

  Skinhead squints at him. “I weigh 166 pounds.”

  “I weigh 230,” Arney concedes. “But I can probably lift five times the weight you can.” He steps away from the car, waits for Skinhead to clear the broken bolt. “You’re like a woman, actually,” he says. “That’s why even though I’m always saying I’m going to kick your ass, you know I’m not really going to do it. Because I don’t believe in hitting women.”

  Now, finally, comes a moment of both promise and melancholy, as Arney climbs back into the Bobcat and lifts the donor car’s body away from its frame—promise, because the act exposes the drivetrain that soon will be harvested for the wagon, a key to keeping the Chevy viable for years to come, and melancholy because the wagon gains this future at a price. The donor car is a goner. Its frame may, in time, end up the invisible spine to another restored Chevy; what remains of its body will be sold off a piece at a time, and should find its way into other cars. But as an individual it dies here and now.

  Arney dumps the donor body outside. He lowers the lift to the floor, steps onto the donor frame, stares down at the engine. Its cast-iron block, painted Chevy orange, is stamped with numbers at several places. They indicate that the block was created at or about 4 P.M. on July 7, 1966, and that it was assembled into an engine at GM’s Flint plant on August 30 of the same year. In other words, this motor is not original to the donor car; it’s a decade too new.

  Confirmation comes in another stamped code: The original recipient of this engine was a Chevy II, aka Nova. The same number indicates that the motor was originally paired with Chevrolet’s two-speed Powerglide automatic transmission—which has been swapped, in the years since, for a model even newer than the engine, a three-speed Turbo-Hydramatic 350.

  The Turbo 350, as motorheads call it, is probably no heavier—it has an aluminum housing, versus the Powerglide’s cast iron—but it’s bigger around and longer, which might have prompted a modification that Arney spies under the transmission’s rear: A past owner has augmented the engine and transmission mounts with a homemade metal sling. Arney identifies it, with a glance, as a cross member from a mid-sixties Chevy Impala, hammered flat, bent, and wedged between the transmission housing and the car’s frame. “I can’t figure out why they did this,” Arney says. “But it’s shade-tree, backyard mechanic bullshit, for sure.”

  He eyeballs the engine mounts, decides that even an official Chevy brace would have been unnecessary, then tests the theory: He steps onto the transmission’s bell housing with one foot, then both. “I’ll put that 230 on there,” he says. “Look—that motherfucker ain’t going anywhere.” He bounces up and down on it. The transmission doesn’t budge.

  “So that brace served no purpose whatsoever,” Skinhead says.

  Arney shakes his head. “Whoever did it,” he says, “didn’t know what the fuck he was doing.”

  They roll the donor car’s chassis out of the Quonset. They haul the wagon’s sealed and painted frame over from Paul’s body shop on the duct-tape dolly. They strap the restored frame to the showroom’s hydraulic lift. The engine dangles from a wheeled hoist a few feet away, ready for installation.

  AND THERE IT stays. Two months pass.

  A few of the many occurrences in the interim—

  One: Arney orders the parts necessary to rebuild the chassis. They arrive from Oldedays Classic Car Parts of Waterville, Washington, through which one can obtain most any part for a classic mid-fifties Chevy, albeit at a price—the wagon’s new gas tank and associated gear tops $300, a “front-end rebuild kit, deluxe” costs $239.99, and the brake lines come to just shy of $110. It adds up quickly, and this isn’t the expensive stuff—when the time comes to replace dashboard gauges and chrome, look out.

  Arney or a member of the crew misplaces some of the ordered parts, namely a box containing the little clips with which the brake and fuel lines are attached to the frame. Rather than reorder the clips, Arney berates Skinhead about the loss for several days on end.

  Though Arney swears several times that he’s set to order new leaf springs—without which the chassis cannot be completed, but which cost $120 apiece, minus shipping—he doesn’t do it through April and most of May. Skinhead eventually discovers a used but clean set in the Quonset’s loft storage space, buried under a mountain of parts, supplies, and papers.

  Two: Whatever Paul did or didn’t do to get laid off is apparently f
orgiven. He is rehired full-time, but is put to work on an income-producing job, restoring an El Camino. The undertaking appears simple at first, but turns epic when Paul discovers hidden rust, and lots of it, where an El Camino does well to have none. Arney several times promises that Paul is about to get back to the Chevy; each time, it seems, another complication arises. “I can’t afford to leave my house,” the El Camino’s owner frets to Arney as the job explodes. “I might have to sell my house to pay for my car. I might have to live in the car. I might be living in an El Camino.”

  Three: Money, already tight, gets more so. A rainy spring scares diners away from Havana. Sales are slow at the lot. “We had a lot of folks come in this weekend, but none of them wanted to give me any money,” Arney complains to Fat Joe, the owner of a Norfolk tire and rims business and a longtime acquaintance. “I don’t believe we could sell any pussy down here, if we had any to sell. That’s how bad it is.”*

  Four: Arney has not yet fulfilled his commitments to Currituck County. He has been slow about getting a revised site plan to Ben Woody, and hasn’t even started rearranging Moyock Muscle to reflect the document. He hasn’t paid his fine, either: Ben Woody has not given him an answer about whether the county would waive the five thousand dollars, and Arney has chosen to hold on to his cash until he hears.

  In late May, however, Arney wakes in the middle of the night with a strong sense that he’s waited too long, and that the county is poised to smite him. He calls Woody, asks what’s going on with the fine. Woody is circumspect; he says he never got an answer from his bosses when he asked them about the waiver, and wonders what’s up, himself. Arney’s foreboding continues.

  And finally, one May morning Skinhead steps from his house, headed across the street to feed the horses, when a voice calls: “John?” He turns. A stranger shoves a sheaf of papers at him. The federal investigation into the Bank of the Commonwealth’s collapse has continued to percolate.