The Last Open Road

by Burt Levy

  "Hey, no problem," I told him, "no problem at all."

  "Oh, great!" Marlene snorted through her usual sourpuss sneer. "Just what I'd always hoped and prayed for. Car shit on the frickin' weekends, too."

  Back at my Aunt Rosamarina's garage, Cal's MG project had pretty much ground to a halt. I had the steering and brakes squared away, but Cal hadn't rounded up enough ready cash for tires or the radiator yet, and we still hadn't so much as laid a finger on the engine. Which meant things were looking seriously unlikely for that S.C.M.A. weekend in Pennsylvania. To tell the truth, I didn't think we could make it, and now and then even Cal was starting to lose heart. No question we hit our all-time low on the Fourth of July, when Cal showed up at my aunt's garage with nothing but a grim expression and a brown paper sack that was way too small for any of the hardware we needed. "So," I asked him, "did'ja do any good on the tires?"

  Cal shook his head.

  "Too bad."

  "Yeah. Seems like it's harder and harder to find any loose money around the old homestead. I think they may be getting wise to me."

  "It's about time."

  "Maybe so," Cal allowed. "Maybe so. But it wasn't a total loss."

  "Oh?"

  I saw an evil smile flickering up in the corners of Cal's mouth. "I did manage to find this." He reached into the sack and slowly withdrew an unopened fifth of fifteen-year-old Pinch whiskey. I'd never seen one before except in magazine ads, what with the bottle all sucked in like a football with half the air out of it. No question this was some pretty expensive hooch.

  "Geez, Cal, where'dja get it?"

  "I pinched it."

  "You pinched your old man's Pinch?"

  "It was the least I could do," Cal nodded, gently breaking the seal and taking a pull. Then he passed it over and I took a snort. The stuff had a pretty serious kick to it. And that's how we spent the rest of the afternoon, standing around Cal's TC with his dad's fancy bottle of whiskey, just shooting the breeze about cars and racing and life in general. On toward dark we heard the Fourth of July crackle of fireworks and the whistle-and-pop of bottle rockets starting up all over the neighborhood, and of course that and the whiskey gave me a splendid idea. "Say, Cal," I mentioned casually, "I bought some pretty decent fireworks off Butch the other day. . . ."

  His eyes narrowed like an alley cat's. "You did?"

  "Uh-huh. He brought 'em up from Tennessee in that old Ford of his." I took another pull off the whiskey. "I got all kinds...."

  Cal leaned over with one eye closed, Long John Silver style. "Arrr, and just where might they be, Jim boy?"

  "Upstairs. Under the bed."

  Cal decided to switch movies. "Um, Kemosabe," he scowled, folding his arms unsteadily across his chest like a cigar-store Indian, "fireworks go heap good with firewater."

  Sure they do.

  I'd have to say that we were pretty careful there at first (especially considering all the whiskey!), setting them off one at a time and watching the old flash-and-bang from a reasonably secure distance. But that got dull after awhile (that's always the problem with fireworks, isn't it?) so Cal rummaged around in my aunt's garage and found us an old wicker sewing box. We loaded it up with a whole damn brick of firecrackers, and you should've seen the way that sucker hopped and jumped and sputtered all over the place when Cal torched it off. "Wow, that was great!" Cal whooped as the remains of my Aunt Rosamarina's sewing box fluttered to a halt. "What else you got in there?"

  "Looks like maybe a dozen skyrockets. Big ones, too."

  "Super! Let's do 'em all at once!"

  Now you're probably thinking we'd imbibed maybe a bit too much whiskey to be messing with fireworks. And you'd be right, on account of that's when Cal and me damn near burned down my aunt's garage. See, we set the busted wheel hub from Cal's MG out in the drive and loaded every blessed skyrocket we had into the hole in the center. Like a vase of flowers, you know? Cal rigged up a common fuse out of a ball of yarn my aunt's cats played with, but it was damp and dirty and wouldn't stay lit. So my resourceful buddy Cal sashayed back inside and dipped that ball of yarn in the MG's gas tank. . . .

  As you can imagine, that yarn went up in a sheet of flame the instant Cal put a match to it, and in a heartbeat we had all the fuses fizzing at once. The first one blasted off exactly as planned—FOOOOOOOSSSSH!—carving out a handsome orange-red comet across the sky. But the shock was enough to make our jury-rigged rocket launcher wobble, teeter up on edge, and finally (in glorious slow motion) topple clear over. OH SHIT! I looked at Cal and he looked at me, and an instant later we were diving for cover as skyrockets went streaking across my aunt's yard in all directions. Two of them scored direct hits into the garage—FOOOOSSH! FOOOOOSSH!—where they impacted on more varieties of flammable material than you could list in an hour.

  "JESUSCHRISTALMIGHTY!" Cal screamed.

  "HOLY SHIT!!" I agreed, and the two of us charged in after them. We grabbed whatever we could find to beat at the flames (accidentally including a pan of mineral spirits—KA-WHUMPF!) and the whole shebang would've gone up for sure if my aunt hadn't come barreling out of her house dragging a huge brass fire extinguisher behind her. Fortunately she'd been watching through her favorite slit in the curtains (natch) and was by nature one of those perpetually terrified Civil Defense types who prepare in advance for every sort of household emergency imaginable. Which is how she came to have an industrial disaster-size fire bottle right under her basement stairs. She knew how to use it, too, charging that fire like Duke Wayne himself and brandishing that big brass extinguisher like a battle-ax. By the time it ran dry, she'd gotten everything down to pretty much hissing and smoldering, and then Cal and me hooked up the garden hose and went on a little tour of her yard, putting out some relatively minor skyrocket damage to the lawn furniture and rose garden. I was sure my aunt was going to let us have it once all the fires were out, but she didn't say a word. Not one. She just stood there, alternately blinking and gulping for air like a goldfish on a living room carpet. And then she headed back into her house, dragging the empty fire bottle behind her. But she stopped at the screen door. "You know, boys," she said without turning around, "I really wish you'd be a little more careful." And with that, my aunt disappeared into her kitchen and poured herself a water glass full of sherry.

  "Jeez, that was close!"

  "Yeah, it sure was," Cal agreed, shaking his head. But you couldn't miss the wicked little smirk flickering up around the corners of his eyes.

  Cal and me came back the next morning to survey the damage, and to tell the truth, it was pretty damn depressing. "Gee whiz," I told him, "maybe we shoulda just let the damn thing burn. I mean, we're never gonna get it back together in time for that race in Pennsylvania."

  "Sure we will," Cal said, trying to make it sound true.

  "But we don't even have tires, Cal. And the radiator's gotta be recored. . . ."

  "No problem," he said. "No problem at all. I'll get the damn money somehow. You wait and see."

  "But what about the rest of it," I groaned. "What about the damn engine? It runs like shit. And the gauge hardly shows any oil pressure at all."

  "Maybe it's the gauge?"

  I shook my head. "No way we're that lucky. And look at the damn bodywork. I can't straighten out those fenders. . . ."

  Cal eased himself down on a scorched pop crate, looking as glum as I'd ever seen him. But it wasn't ten seconds before his eyes popped open like mousetraps. "I got it!" he yelped. "We'll run modified!"

  "We'll what?"

  "Why, we'll turn this thing into a real race car. You'll see."

  By way of explanation, the S.C.M.A. had one class for "stock" MGs (which seldom really were) and another for hopped-up, stripped-down examples, which were referred to as "modifieds." Cal figured it would be easier to rip more stuff off his TC than to try putting it back the way the folks at the MG factory originally intended. And he was probably right. Only problem was that Cal's TC never ran particularly strong against the other so-c
alled stock MGs, and most of those modified cars were a bunch faster. They were stripped to the bare bones and had hotrodded engines with high-compression pistons and high-lift camshafts and Lord only knew what else. Hell, some of those cars even had superchargers on them. "That's a terrible idea," I told Cal.

  So of course we did it. After all, we had a race to make.

  And that's why Cal and me spent all day pulling every damn thing that would come loose off that helpless old TC. We took off the bumpers. And the windshield. And the top. And both sides of the hood. I yanked out all the carpeting and door-panel trim. Cal went underneath with a hacksaw and cut off the muffler. By the middle of the afternoon, it had turned into sort of a crazed feeding frenzy, what with both of us clawing and ripping and tearing at that poor car like hyenas on a fresh carcass. It didn't help that we were still a little loopy from that bottle of Pinch and the garage fire the previous evening, so by nightfall we were stumbling around my aunt's garage like the Three Stooges, bumping into things and hitting ourselves in the head with car parts and making goofy Moe-Larry-Curly noises like "Wooob-wub-wub-woob" and "Nyuck nyuck nyuck" and that sort of thing. My old friend the Earl of Passaic even dropped in for a visit. "I say, Mr. Carrington," the earl asked, "won't you be a bit, shall we say, shy on horsepower compared to the other machinery in the modified division?"

  "So what, your Dorkship," Cal grunted, tugging on a rear fender that still had one bolt attached. "We're gonna be light! You'll see. . . ."

  Fact is, Cal's basic theory was pretty sound. Generally speaking, if you have to choose between more power and less weight, you go with lightness every time. Big horsepower may make a car faster in a straight line, but less weight makes it faster everywhere. Unfortunately for Cal, the drivers with the superchargers and six hundred—dollar engines in their "modified" MGs were also down to the bare bones on weight. In fact, some of them had expensive light-alloy body panels and even custom-made aluminum valve covers and shift knobs to make them lighter yet. Of course, we didn't know about that stuff at the time.

  Anyhow, by midnight Cal's MG looked like it'd been picked over by vultures. The fenders were gone, ditto the sides of the hood, the top was history, the windshield, lights, and bumpers were gone, the muffler was leaning against the wall, the heater (or what passes for a heater on an MG) was in a corner, and that's not even mentioning the passenger-side seat cushion, the carpets, the inside door panels, the ashtray, and the horn. Truth is, we'd pulled everything off that car you could without resorting to a buzz saw, cutting torch, or explosive charges. And I gotta admit, it looked pretty neat that way, all lean and serious and stripped for action. It also looked a little, aah, illegal for general highway duty, and I started wondering just how the hell Cal was planning to get this—this thing—to that race weekend in Wilkes-Barre, Pee-Ay. Or anyplace else, for that matter. Not to mention exactly how Cal was going to explain the skeletal remains of his TC back home at Castle Carrington.

  "Oh, I'll just tell my folks it was wrecked or stolen or fell off a cliff or something," he said, waving his hand through the air like it was no big deal. "At least I will when they get back from Europe, anyway."

  Cal went suddenly flush on me the Wednesday before the race, showing up at my aunt's garage with a new set of Dunlops stuffed in the trunk of his mom's Packard and several cardboard boxes full of TC parts, including an upper and lower gasket set for the engine. Naturally, I decided to throw in a last-minute valve job, and of course we found all the exhaust valves burned—two of them badly—and a couple busted valve springs to boot. So Cal had to make an emergency run over to Westbridge first thing Thursday morning while I called in sick at the Sinclair, pinching my fingers around my nose so the Old Man would think I had pneumonia or something. Not that he believed me for one solitary second.

  Cal didn't get back till two in the afternoon, and I busied myself mounting tires and shimming the relief spring to sort of kid the engine into thinking it had some oil pressure. Besides the valves we needed, Cal bought new points, plugs, carb rebuild kits with richer needles, and even a high-voltage Lucas Sports Coil. I told you what happens when Cal gets a little money in his pocket.

  Working fast as I could, it still took six hours to get the head reassembled, the carbs rebuilt, and all the ignition stuff installed (which is probably some kind of new world record) while Cal took the wheels out for balancing, picked up the radiator over in Clifton, changed the oil, and generally did what he could so the TC might perhaps pass for street legal should anyone happen to ask. Like a police officer, for example. A little past nine, Cal asked for the keys to the Sinclair, and Lord help me, I handed 'em over. I didn't even want to know. He returned a half hour later with some flexible exhaust pipe and what appeared to be the fender-mount spotlight off Old Man Finzio's tow truck. For sure the Old Man wasn't going to be too pleased about that.

  By then it was time to fire up my quick-and-dirty MG rebuild. I had Cal crank the starter while I flattened my palms over the S.U.s to choke them, but the damn thing cranked and cranked and wouldn't fire, and I spent thirty minutes checking the fuel pump, ignition wires, and Lord only knows what else before I realized I'd left the damn rotor out of the distributor! That sort of thing happens with predictable regularity when you've been wrenching away for seventeen hours straight and should've been out the door and gone long before. It's an occupational hazard. But once I got the rotor back in where it belonged, the engine lit off on the very first rotation. And jeez, did it ever make a racket, boxed there inside my aunt's tiny garage with no mufflers or air cleaners to cut down the noise. It seemed to be surging and gurgling a bit, even after it was warm, so I spent the next hour showing Cal everything Sylvester and the Jaguar Service Manual had taught me about setting S.U.s. Or what I could remember, anyway. Anyhow, I'm proud to say that MG sounded pretty damn magnificent when I got done, idling with a nice rich lope and really snapping to attention when you cracked the throttles. Unfortunately, some of my aunt's neighbors turned out to have a tin ear when it came to crisply tuned racing engines. Especially after midnight.

  Needless to say, it was into the wee hours when we finally tiptoed out of Passaic, kind of idling along in fourth to keep the noise down through the rusted-out Buick muffler Cal had found in the trash behind the Sinclair and halfheartedly wired to the MG's exhaust. The spotlight he'd gleeped off the Old Man's tow truck was strapped on right in front of the radiator—Cyclops fashion—with the feed wire going down the side, over the driver's door, behind the seat cushion, and directly to the battery terminal with no switch or fuse of any kind. In the back, Cal made do with a couple bicycle reflectors from Woolworth's five-and-dime. You'd have to say Cal was less than an expert in the automotive electrical field. Much less.

  Without top or windshield, things were decidedly breezy in Cal's TC, and the wind whipped our faces until tears were streaming around our cheeks and puddling up in our ear canals. So Cal reached behind the seat and produced a couple underwater diving masks he'd picked up at Woolworth's along with the bicycle reflectors. They were bright yellow and properly sized for your average twelve-year-old, and no question made us look goofy as hell when we put them on. But they came in handy when we hit rain in the mountains outside Allamuchy. In fact, Cal probably should've picked us up a couple plastic snorkels while he was at it.

  Believe me, that was one scary ride, what with the winding mountain roads and heavy rain and those stupid swim masks fogging up all the time and the damn spotlight in front of the radiator vibrating so bad that the beam bounced all over the road (and the trees, and the sky, and everywhere else). Not to mention that I was sitting on entirely the wrong side of the car. Especially when trucks came hurtling out of the blackness and damn near chewed off my elbow with their lug nuts. Right-hand drive may work fine over in England, but it sure leaves the passenger hung out to dry here in the states.

  Plus my buddy Cal only knew one way to drive—flat out—no matter if it was daylight or dark, open highway or twisty blacktop, bo
ne-dry or glare ice, perfect visibility or so you couldn't see your blessed hand in front of your face. But I must admit, the kid was good. Better than good, even. Why, we'd be skittering down a rain-slicked mountain with our headlamp beam shattering off a sheer rock face on one side and nothing but an empty black void on the other, and I'd look over at Cal with eyes big as coffee saucers and see him leaned back all calm and composed behind the wheel, nonchalantly chewing gum beneath that ridiculous Woolworth's swim mask as he braked, blipped her down a gear, and powered us through the bends in absolutely perfect four-wheel drifts. Cal Carrington was some kind of driver, no two ways about it. But he still wasn't worth dog shit when it came to mechanics, as we discovered once again when his jury-rigged headlamp shorted out in the Pocono Mountains, and even the great Cal Carrington had to pull over when he couldn't see the road anymore. At least the rain had eased off and you could even make out a faint half-moon through the clouds over toward the horizon. It was kind of pretty, actually. Not that we much appreciated it, since Cal and me were cold and wet as a pair of dead mackerels. And real tired. Naturally, we didn't have any spare electrical wire with us (although we were in excellent shape regarding the coat hanger and baling varieties).