The Last Open Road

by Burt Levy

  "No, Butch, I . . ."

  "Besides," he added, squeezing off an insider wink, "if the sonofabitch breaks, we'll just up an' fix it! After all, we're goddam mechanics, ain't we?"

  10: GRAND ISLAND

  THERE WAS a lot of stuff to do around the Westbridge shop come race week, and it seemed like the instant I'd get done changing the oil in an XK120 or checking the spoke tension on an MG's spare or packing cans of brake fluid and chassis grease in the back of the parts van, Barry'd be right there with another three-page shit list of things that required immediate attention. In fact, you had to be impressed with the way he kept everything straight while the entire shop crew was scurrying around like the last passengers on the Titanic. It was a tremendous amount of work, and I wound up pulling tandem all-nighters Tuesday and Wednesday, and daybreak Thursday found me still hard at it, helping Barry and one of his foreign-born grease monkeys load damn near everything in the shop into the parts van. Then he lowered the overhead door and drove off, leaving me to take the damn hour and a half bus-and-train ride back to Jersey. It didn't even occur to the sonofabitch to offer me a lift. Then again, maybe this was just another sterling example of the freedom and independent thought that came along with employment as a Westbridge racing mechanic.

  It was straight-up noon by the time I got over to Butch's place, and another hour before we got done packing his stuff and dropping by my apartment so's I could grab the three s's (shit, shower, and shave) and do the same. I reckon it was mid-afternoon when we finally hit the road in Butch's ratty old Ford, taking off across most of New Jersey and virtually all of New York toward Grand Island, which sits in the middle of the Niagara River about seven miles north of Buffalo. The S.C.M.A. had cooked up a deal with the local city fathers to put on a race as part of the Grand Island Centennial Celebration. They could do that sort of thing because lots of the S.C.M.A. regulars were the city father-type themselves. Or at least their fathers or grandfathers were. In any case, the S.C.M.A. races stood out as unquestionably the most exciting feature of the entire festival weekend. Unless you're partial to high school marching bands and pie-eating contests, that is.

  But it was one whale of a long drive to get there—almost 400 miles—and I had to do it pretty much solo on account of there was still no way Butch could operate a set of pedals. We tried having him sit behind the wheel to steer while I kind of angled my feet in from the passenger side and worked the clutch, gas, and brakes for him—he really seemed to get a charge out of that-—but after we damn near ran up the backside of a gravel truck outside Paramus, I decided that maybe wasn't such a good idea. So I wound up doing all the driving while Butch sat there in the passenger seat with a road map spread across his lap, smoking cigarette after cigarette and telling me what road to take and how far we were from the next town and yelling at me to "get the goddam lead out" whenever we got bottled up behind a slow-moving truck. But every now and again we'd get a clear stretch of road, and then Butch'd make me run that old Ford as fast as she'd go. And I was happy to oblige, mashing down on the gas until it just about put a dent in the firewall. The damn thing'd shake like a paint mixer at anything much over 45, but that didn't bother Butch and me. Not one bit. I can't say exactly how fast we went (the speedometer needle waved all over the dial) but I'd hazard to say we touched 75 or 80 a couple times on the long downhill slopes. Believe me, that's god-awful scary fast in a rattletrap like Butch's old Ford.

  We followed New Jersey 23 up through Paterson, Hamburg, and Colesville to Port Jervis, then northwest on Route 97, kind of running along the Delaware River. It was real pretty country, what with thick green forests and the river running all blue and frothy down below and these huge limestone rock formations rising up on either side. It reminded me how much handsome, free-roaming space there is in this country once you get outside the towns and cities. I kept wishing I had Julie there to share it with me, since old Butch was hardly the type to appreciate fresh air and fine scenery. At least to say anything about it, anyway.

  Around seven we stopped to eat at a little railroad-car diner near Damascus, and that's where Butch and me had our first major difference of opinion. He didn't want me to haul his wheelchair out and roll him into the restaurant. "Gimme them goddam crutches," he growled. "I ain't about to be wheeled around ever'where like a friggin' tea cart." Against my better judgment I went along with him, and it took Butch about forever to hobble and scrape and stumble his way across the parking lot and up the three little steps to the door. I caught myself looking around the diner real sheepish—as if I was apologizing for something, you know?—and I'm sure glad Butch didn't see me. I mean, why should I give two shits about what a bunch of truck drivers and hash-house waitresses think in some broken-down roadside diner?

  Turns out I must, though, because after we ordered I swallowed hard a couple times and told Butch what was on my mind. "Look, Butch," I said, talking real soft so none of the coffee-and-doughnut jerks who were craning their necks to listen in on our conversation could hear, "I don't mind pushing you around in that wheelchair. Honest I don't." I saw his eyes start to squint down, but I kept after it. "We'll cover a lot more ground that way. Really we will. You'll see."

  Butch wavered for a moment, and just about the time I expected him to uncork both barrels and let me have it, he sagged back in his seat and rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling fan. "Yeah, I s'pose," he sighed in barely a whisper, staring up at the slowly rotating blades. "But what a damn pain in the ass."

  "It sure is," I agreed solemnly, and took myself a king-sized bite out of a hamburger that tasted an awful lot like coal tar.

  After dinner we gassed up, added a quart of oil, tossed a couple more in the backseat (just in case, right?), and stopped at a liquor store for a cold sixer of beer. But the jerk behind the counter wouldn't sell it to me on account of I wasn't twenty-one, so I had to haul out the wheelchair and roll Butch inside just so's he could hand over the cash. Naturally, Butch got hot about it and called the counter guy a couple nasty names—in several different languages, in fact—but the weasel behind the cash register didn't have any shame and yelled right back at him, wheelchair and all. "Now lissen here," he screeched like a rusty gate hinge, "I ain't about t'jep-or-dize my liquor license over a couple broken-down, beer-guzzling stumblebums. No sir."

  Well, that did it. Butch exploded up out of that wheelchair with every intention of giving the jerk a well-deserved sock in the nose. But of course he couldn't keep his balance, and if I hadn't grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, Butch would've fallen right through the big glass cigar case next to the register. Boy, what a mess that would've been! Then there was nothing to do but wrestle Butch back into his wheelchair, snatch our beer and change, and hustle our buns the hell out of there before the guy could retaliate. It was a pretty ugly scene (to say the least!) and made me think about what Marlene had to put up with every day of the year. No question my friend Butch Bohunk had himself one very short fuse.

  We drove along in silence for an hour or so, just sipping our beers and listening to all the rasping, rolling, grating, thumping, whistling, and gyrating noises Butch's old Ford made, and it wasn't until fifteen miles east of Binghamton that I finally got up the nerve to throw my two cents in. "Look, Butch," I said, measuring my words carefully, "you really gotta watch that temper of yours. It's gonna land us in some serious trouble one of these days."

  "Mmmph," Butch snorted. "How many other little sissygirls they got back home at the Palumbo household?"

  "Hey, I mean it, Butch. Nobody's gonna take a sock at you, right? So who stands to catch hell, huh?"

  Butch opened up his pocketknife and levered the caps off our last two bottles of beer. "Y'know," he sighed, taking a good long pull, "I ain't been in a decent fistfight since I got messed up in my accident. Prob'ly never will again. I reckon I miss that more than fuckin'. Honest to God I do."

  We finished off our beers and Butch smoked himself another cigarette as we drove into the last of the sunset between B
inghamton and Elmira, and it must've been pretty handsome, since neither of us said much of anything until the final smudges of purple and raspberry-orange faded from the sky. I was so tired that Butch tried another stint at driving, but working the pedals for him was even tougher than handling the car solo, and I was thankful when he finally pulled over at a little roadside grocery to buy another pack of cigarettes and let me take the wheel again.

  Butch kind of nodded off to sleep after that, and you'd have to say that was one of his greatest talents: He could sleep anywhere. In damn near any position. And I'm talking a real sleep, not one of those closed-eye fakes you pull when you're riding the knife-edge between asleep and awake and trying to kid yourself into dozing off. You could tell it was the McCoy because he'd start snoring like surf rolling in and every once in awhile snort or chuckle or mutter into his shirt collar as he dreamed of sonofabitch Marine sergeants, broken Fords, big meaty women, and splendid fistfights.

  All I could do was keep driving, and that can get pretty monotonous after dark, what with that endless dotted centerline coming at and at and at you through the jiggling blobs of headlamp light. I eventually got so damn woozy that I must've missed a turn and all of a sudden there weren't any highway signs anymore. Or highway, for that matter. Not only was the centerline missing, but the road itself had gone from smooth and straight to rough and swervy. The pitching and bouncing woke Butch up, and right away he wanted to know where the hell we were. "Jesus, Palumbo, where the hell are we?"

  "Uh, I'm, ah, not exactly sure, Butch. . . ."

  "Whaddaya mean, not exactly?"

  "I mean I, uh, kind of lost the highway."

  "Whaddaya mean, lost the highway?" He was starting to sound a little upset.

  "Well, we're, ah, not on it anymore."

  "How d'ya know?"

  "Well, uh, first off, they don't generally make state highways outta dirt, do they? Besides," I added, pointing out the windshield, "state highways most usually don't have barns built at the end of them, either."

  Sure enough, there was a big old wooden barn dead ahead, completely blocking the road. I slowed to a stop, but before I could so much as grab reverse, this Pa Kettle type in oversized bib coveralls came gimping out of nowhere with a shotgun under his arm. "What's yer business?" he demanded, waggling his shotgun at us to make sure we recognized what it was. Which we most certainly did. "Yew boys here after my chicken aigs agin'?"

  "Uh, we, ah, kinda got ourselves lost off the main highway," I tried to explain. But the farmer had apparently formed a pretty solid opinion about us already—no question we looked the part of poultry thieves in Butch's old Ford—and raised his shotgun up to shoulder level.

  "I'll give ye jest thutty seconts t'get off my proppity!" he shouted, glaring down the gun sight. "Thutty seconds, y'hear?"

  "Gee whiz, mister, could'ja maybe just tell us where the main highway is?"

  "Back where ye came from, idjit!" the farmer yelled, clicking back the hammers on both barrels. "Now GIT!"

  Have you ever tried backing a rickety old Ford with a plywood slab over the back window down a rutted and totally unfamiliar dirt driveway in the middle of the night? With a shotgun pointed your way? If you have, it will come as no surprise that I managed to hit a haystack, a ditch, and a decent-sized manure pile in quick succession before side-swiping the gate clear off the old geezer's fence as I whipped us around backward onto the public right-of-way. As you can imagine, the farmer didn't appreciate that at all and let loose a blast from the shotgun to properly register his displeasure. "Jee-ZUS!" I yelped, "The sonofabitch is shooting at us!" and hammered the gas to the floor.

  But Butch didn't seem upset at all. In fact, he was laughing his ass off. "Haw-haw-haw-haw!" he bellowed, eyes wide and wild as a kid on Christmas morning. "Haw-haw-haw-haw-haw!" Why, he was whooping it up so hard he damn near choked on it. "Aw geez, Buddy," he gasped as we sped out of range, "I ain't had this much fun in ages!" No question Butch loved a little raw-boned excitement, and I guess you never get much of that when you're stranded in a damn wheelchair.

  But we were still lost. And I mean LOST. All I knew is that we were on some strange, pitch-black country back road heading hell only knows where, and the sky was all overcast so we couldn't make out the moon or stars or anything to help get our bearings. Not that it would've done much good, since the pavement swooped uphill, downhill, left-right through S-curves, Y-intersections, and assorted switchbacks until neither of us had any idea whether we were pointed north, south, east, west, up, down, or sideways. Every now and again we'd come to some nowhere backwoods intersection marked with a little hand-painted wood sign reading COUNTY ZP ALT or APPLESAP SPRING RD or something similar (none of which were on our map, of course) and it was about then I noticed that the fuel gauge was registering dead empty. Oh, great! Of course, you never really know about fuel gauges until you've done a little experimenting and run a particular automobile bone-dry once or twice, but this one certainly looked like it meant business, what with the needle pointed over toward the hopeless side of E. Still, it seemed awful soon to be out of gas, and I wondered if we'd maybe picked up a little hole in the tank. Like about the size of a shotgun pellet?

  Now the Marine Corps always told Butch it was important to have a backup contingency plan on tap for emergency situations, and I'm proud to say he knew exactly what to do. He had me pull over to the side, shut off the motor, and explained as how we were going to spend what was left of the night right there in his old Ford (which, you'll recall, had run through a rather substantial manure pile earlier that same evening and smelled distinctly of cow shit). But Butch figured there wasn't any sense using up the last fumes in the tank just to stumble around in the dark looking for a gas station that most likely wouldn't be open till morning anyway, and I had to agree. "We bunk right here," he told me, sounding none too happy about it.

  "You think we'll be, you know, safe out here?" I'm basically a city boy—born and raised around Passaic—and like most city boys, I always imagined it'd be real peaceful out on a farm-country back road in the middle of a pitch-black farm-country night. But it's nothing of the kind. There's all sorts of hooting and mooing and cackling and rustling in the bushes going on—big stuff, too—and I swear, every time a damn twig snapped or owl hooted or frog burped I'd jump like I'd grabbed the business end of a hot coil wire. I tried rolling the windows up, but that just turned up the manure smell off the undercarriage even worse. No question we took a pretty healthy chunk out of that farmer's fertilizer supply. "Jeez, Butch," I grumbled as we tried to settle in for the night, "I'm real sorry about all this."

  "Aw, don't worry about it," he said, trying his best to shift into a comfortable position. "Why, I ain't had this much fun since I can't remember when."

  "Hey, thanks a lot, Butch."

  "No sweat, Buddy. Reminds me what life useta be like. Just wish we had us a bottle of something to keep us company. . . . Saaay, wait a minute! Take a look under the seat, willya?"

  So I reached under the seat (jeez, there was all kinds of stuff down there!) and rummaged around until I located a half-empty pint of sloe gin in a wrinkled paper bag. "Haw! I knew it!" Butch beamed. "I knew old Marlene'd have a li'l nip bottle tucked away someplace. Lemme see it." Butch took a pull and I had a sip and then we more or less polished it off, passing it back and forth without a word while we listened to all the frogs and crickets and whatever the hell else was out there dancing around in the darkness.

  Butch fell asleep right on cue as soon as the bottle was empty (like I said, it was a gift) but it was already coming up light when I finally dozed off. And I swear it didn't seem fifteen minutes before some local rooster started crowing his ass off and blasted me wide awake again. A thick, heavy fog had settled in around us like an enormous cloud that was just too damn heavy to float, and looking out the windshield you couldn't see much past the fenders. And was it ever quiet. I can't ever remember a morning that ghostly silent and liquid still. Why, you could almost hear t
he dew puddling up on the leaves. Then old Butch unloaded a good-morning fart that could've easily blown up a half dozen party balloons, and that more or less broke the mood. I think it would've topped ten seconds if you'd had a watch on it. "Hey, asshole," Butch growled, opening one eye an eighth of an inch, "you waitin' for a damn engraved invitation t'get yer God Damn ass in gear?"

  "No, Butch, it's just I—"

  "Well, I gotta crap, see, so you better start findin' us a place where I can do it." He let loose another monster fart to show he meant business, and then began fishing around in his pockets for his breakfast cigarette. So I fired up the Ford and we took off, barely creeping along on account of the fog. We were still disastrously low on gas, not at all sure where we were going, or even what damn direction we were headed. But no more than a mile up the road we came to a nice, wide asphalt two-lane with a freshly painted stripe down the middle and even a stop sign facing our way to mark it as a major highway.

  Seeing as how we had no idea where west might be (or north, south, or east, for that matter), we flipped a coin and turned right when it came up tails. Naturally, I took it real easy and made sure to coast on all the downhills in order to stretch whatever fuel we had left as far as it would go. Not that you could've gone any faster, since the fog was like a wad of cotton wrapped around us and I had to navigate off the centerline and the gravel at the edge of the road. Every now and then we'd break into a clear area where we could see the sky, and since it seemed a shade or two lighter over to our right, it was better than even money we were headed north. Then the road would dip down into a hollow and just like that we'd be back in the soup again. The gas gauge couldn't have read any emptier, and just about the time I expected the motor to start sputtering, we broke out of a heavy fog patch in a tiny, two-bit town named North Java, which consisted of a general store (closed), a pay phone (not working), and a roadside vegetable stand where some oversized amateur grease monkey was stuffed under an ancient Dodge pickup, trying to fix a leaky oil pan at 5:30 in the morning.