by Burt Levy
"Say, buddy, where's the nearest gas station? We're kinda lost. . . ."
"Lost, eh?" he answered in a chipmunk's voice. "Where yew boys headed for?"
"Grand Island. Near Buffalo."
"Buffalo, eh?" The big guy with the tiny voice sniggered, "then I guess ye could say yew boys . . ."—you could see he thought this was awful damn funny—" . . . that yew boys'r ON A BUFFALO HUNT!" and he let go a high, ear-piercing cackle that damn near fluttered the shingles on the vegetable stand's roof.
"Ah, look here," I tried to explain, "we're also about outta gas, see, and—"
"Outta gas?" he said. "Outta GAS?? And lost, too? Why that's real sad, boys." He was starting to giggle again. "Real, real sad."
"Yeah," Butch snarled, glaring at him, "an' I gotta find me a can soon. You understand me? Real soon."
"Weeeell," the big guy said, scratching at the scraggly beard around his chins, "I figger the nearest gas station is, oh, mebbe thutteen or fourteen miles."
"I ain't gonna make it!" Butch groaned, a hint of panic rising in his voice. I can't say as I'd ever heard a sound that helpless or pitiful out of Butch before, and it was just a little scary.
"Weeeell, I got me a one-holer out back there. Ye kin use it if ye like." He looked us over again and added, "Fer a dime, anyways."
Butch looked at me and I looked back at Butch and we both understood this was no time to haggle. So I ran over and handed the guy his lousy dime and then did my best to help Butch to the outhouse. We couldn't use the wheelchair on account of it was on a hill with bushes and rocks and stuff and just this little beaten-down dirt path to the door, and I couldn't believe how that mountain-sized local jerk just stayed there under his damn truck like a denim-covered compost heap and let Butch and me struggle it out by ourselves. Why, I had to damn near carry him a couple times and we had a hell of a time getting his pants down and trying to swing the damn door open and lever him over the stinking hole. And I do mean stinking. Then there wasn't any paper, so I had to run back down and beg some off the guy under the pickup. He wanted an extra nickel for that. It was starting to dawn on me how incredibly difficult (and humiliating) it was for a guy in Butch's condition to do the simple little everyday things that everybody else on this earth takes for granted. Made you wonder how people like him keep getting out of bed every morning, you know?
As you can imagine, we'd had it up to here with the moneygrubbing lardass under the Dodge, but since the needle on the Ford's gas gauge was resting against the peg like a fallen timber, we were about out of options. "Say, buddy," Butch asked, trying to work up a friendly smile, "y'think you could maybe fix us up with a gallon or two of gas?"
The guy under the pickup pretended like he didn't even hear. He just kept working away on his oil pan gasket, taking the bolts out the hard way by flopping a box-end combination wrench over and over in very tight quarters, an eighth of a turn at a time. You can always spot amateurs by the way they never use the proper tool. "We'd be happy to pay for it," I added sheepishly.
That got the guy's attention. He jiggled out from underneath the oil pan, kind of squirming along on his back because he was just too big to roll over and crawl out (and that Dodge was up on cinder blocks so it had damn near two feet of ground clearance!) but it was easy to see why when he grabbed the front bumper and hauled himself upright. Jee-zus, what a monster! He was wearing the biggest damn pair of coveralls I'd ever seen outside of a Barnum & Bailey sideshow attraction, and sported one of those goofy hayseed beards like a fur halo around his pumpkin-sized face. But although he may have looked like some sort of hulking, back-country hick, he sure as hell understood an open wound of economic opportunity when he saw one. "Suuuure," he smiled, filling up the entire passenger-side window with his head. "I might could provide ye a leetle gas. Ye got enny cash money on you?"
Butch flashed him two wadded-up singles.
"Help ye'self," he grinned even wider, gathering up the money in a melon-sized hand. "Take all ye want. . . . Up t'two gallons, that is."
"Two gallons!" Butch wailed, but I gave him a shot in the ribs to shut him up. After all, the mammoth vegetable-stand bumpkin from North Java had us by the short hairs and knew it. I mean, can you imagine paying a whole damn dollar for one lousy gallon of gasoline?
Naturally, we didn't have anything like a proper siphon hose, so I had to take one of our empty beer bottles, climb under the pickup, undo the fuel line, fill the bottle, put the hose back on, crawl out, empty it into the Ford, and then do the whole deal all over again. And again. And again. I noticed a damp spot while I was under the Ford, and sure enough we'd picked up a pinhole leak in the seam around the brass bung on the bottom.
"Hey, no problem," Butch said, and turned to the guy in the overfilled coveralls again. "Say, you got any hand soap around here?"
"Hmm. Might have. Cost ye, though."
"How much?" Butch asked, his eyes narrowing.
"Oh, I'd say about twenty cents?"
Butch's nostrils flared. "Howzabout a dime, huh?"
The big guy rolled his eyeballs skyward and thoughtfully pulled on his beard, mulling it over. "Naw," he said at last, "times bein' how they are, I don't see as how I could see my way clear t'sell enny soap fer less'n twenty cents. Supply and demand, don't ye know. That's the American Way."
Butch glowered at him, but in the end dug a dime and two nickels out of his pocket and handed it over. The big guy rummaged through all the two-by-fours and linoleum tile scraps and stub rolls of tar paper in the back of his pickup until he came up with a small, dirty chunk of Ivory. "I use it fer soapin' wood screws," he explained, "but it's almost brand-new. Bought it just last month. Honest I did."
Butch wiped it on his shirt a few times and then had me crawl under the Ford and rub it where the fuel was weeping out. I'd never heard of that trick before, but it worked like a charm. Then it was back to crawling under the pickup, filling the beer bottle, crawling out from under the pickup, pouring it in the Ford, crawling back under . . . you get the idea. Naturally, fuel went all over the place (mostly on me!) and even after a dozen trips the needle on the gauge hadn't so much as budged. But the pickup guy must've figured we'd gotten our two gallons' worth, because he asked if he could maybe take a look at that beer bottle just as I was about to slide under his Dodge for the umpteenth time. I handed it over without thinking, and he just hauled off and threw it as high and far as he could. It rainbowed up over the telephone lines and came down dead center in the middle of the highway, shattering like ice. "Nice doing business with ye, boys," the big guy cackled, and waddled back over to finish the oil pan job on his pickup, taking each bolt out one flat at a time.
Boy, were we pissed! Not only had the sonofabitch screwed us out of two dollars for what should have been about fifty cents' worth of gas, but he'd rubbed our damn noses in it as well. Still, there was nothing you could do short of taking a swing at him, and as a general policy I never pick fights with people who outweigh me by more than twice. So the asshole had us, and there was nothing left to do but put my ears down, drop my tail between my legs, and take off.
SHIT!
Butch said he would've dragged the fat bastard out by the heels, kicked him until blood ran out both ears, and taken our goddam money back. Then he yanked out another Pall Mall and started fumbling around for a match, but I had to stop him on account of I reeked of gasoline and the last thing that old Ford needed was a major interior fire. As we drove off, it occurred to me that stuff like that never happened when I was traveling with Big Ed. In fact, just the opposite. Pull in someplace in a gleaming new Jaguar that costs more than what most poor lunch-buckets earn in a year and folks simply can't do enough for you. For nothing! But show up lost and out of gas in a rusty, broken-down Ford sedan and they'll screw you every time. And act mean as hell while they're at it. Like the enormous vegetable-stand butcher from North Java said, it's the American way.
We stopped a little later in East Aurora for gas, and even managed to borrow a hose
to spray off the undercarriage so the Ford wouldn't smell so much like cow manure. Or at least not as bad, anyway. Afterward we ate breakfast, got ourselves as cleaned up as you can get in a street-corner coffee-shop men's room, and took off again for Grand Island. The weather had cleared up considerably, and we enjoyed a nice drive through Spring Brook, Cheektowaga, and Eggertsville, but ran into a hellacious traffic jam once we got near the toll bridge over the Niagara River to Grand Island. Sports cars and family sedans full of racers, fans, centennial celebrants, and general curiosity-seekers were backed up bumper-to-bumper for more than a mile, mostly because the S.C.M.A. registration tent was the first thing you came to on the other side of the bridge, and it was taking five to ten minutes for each car to go through the necessary red tape before it could either enter the paddock or be on its way. Which of course meant most of the Jags in line were steaming merrily away, but since Charlie Priddle was in charge, there was no way you could even think about parking your car in the paddock first and then walking back out to the S.C.M.A. tent to register.
It took damn near an hour to get across and signed in with the Westbridge crew, and then the armband people didn't want to let us in on account of we didn't have one of Charlie Priddle's precious little stickers on the windshield (not to mention that they were less than impressed with the general presentability, style, and lingering manure odor of Butch's old Ford). But instead of turning around and fighting our way back, I pointed to Butch's wheelchair and rolled my palms up in the well-known New York what-can-you-do shrug. The armband people looked at Butch, looked at the wheelchair, looked at each other, and gathered together for a quick behind-the-hand powwow about what should be done. After an incredible amount of nodding, finger pointing, head shaking, mustache tugging, and elbow scratching, they agreed to let us through, but only after we promised to hide the Ford behind something large and opaque where nobody could see it.
We found the Westbridge truck parked along a stretch of snow fencing on the back row of the paddock, and naturally everything was up for grabs trying to get the cars ready for practice. To tell the truth, Barry didn't seem too thrilled to see me once he got a load of Butch, his wheelchair, and our ratty old Ford (not to mention that I wasn't looking particularly chipper myself that morning) but he had us park it more or less out of sight behind the truck, and from that moment on, my day at Grand Island turned into a total blur. Why, if I wasn't tapping knockoffs and checking tire pressures on a TC, I was changing oil on an XK120 or chasing a filter out of the parts truck or pulling a windshield off or synchronizing a set of S.U.s that had gone out of balance on the trip up from Manhattan. And I can't tell you how many times I found myself crawling around on my hands and knees trying to find some damn bolt or clip or cotter pin that had rolled off a fender and dropped in the grass.
Of course, the more cars we got ready, the more came roaring in off the circuit steaming hot and spewing oil and brandishing symptoms of all sorts of new mechanical maladies we had to track down and repair. And we weren't just working on Westbridge customer cars, either, since racing was a blood serious commercial venture as far as Barry Spline was concerned, and he stood ready and willing—clipboard in hand—to tackle any damn English sports car problem in the paddock. As long as the job paid cash, that is.
So there was just no end to it, one thing after another, and it didn't take long to realize that I was about the only honest-to-goodness mechanic Barry had on hand that weekend. I guess the other designated crew guys either got lost or sick or wised up and quit at the last minute, and seeing as how Barry was not real keen on bringing Sylvester Jones to the races, he and I were the only Westbridge representatives in the paddock. Which meant my old friend Butch came in real handy, wheeling around as best he could to put tape over headlights and paint numbers on doors with shoe polish, not to mention doing bench work like fixing bum fuel pumps and sticking distributor plates. We set him up in the shade of the parts truck with an old outhouse door laid across two sawhorses and a little tray of hand tools, and I swear Butch was happy as Old King Cole, cursing in five or six different languages while he fiddled away with contact points and carburetor packing gaskets and this and that. Wheelchair or not, Butch turned out to be quite an asset. Sure, he couldn't do big stuff anymore, and he still had a hell of a time making that lump of a right hand do what he wanted, but Butch could take something apart on his makeshift workbench and tell you in two seconds if it could be lashed up or field dressed or jury-rigged somehow to make it through the weekend. Oh, Barry didn't much appreciate how he cursed at everything and the way you had to keep bringing him this or that, or especially his habit of fixing things instead of simply demanding new parts (many of which Barry had readily available at his special, 50 percent-over-retail Race Weekend prices). But even Barry Spline had to admit that Butch was a big help to us that Friday at Grand Island.
While the three of us were slaving away on a Jag with a slipping clutch, an MG with a jammed starter, an Allard with its exhaust system coming adrift, and another MG with bent pushrods thanks to an over-enthusiastic owner who apparently didn't know what a tachometer was for, who should pull in next to us but Skippy Welcher and Milton Fitting, accompanied by more damn racing gear than you have ever seen in a two-seat automobile. It's a wonder the rear springs didn't collapse from sheer exhaustion. Squire Milton set about unloading Skippy's massive collection of vital racing stuff—stacking it in a neat, perfectly aligned row along the fencing—while The Skipper waltzed over to negotiate himself a deal on a new oil filter element for his ex-everything XK120. Naturally, Barry was up to his eyeballs in a bewildering array of British car problems, but that made no difference at all to Skippy. No sir. It wasn't like The Skipper didn't care if you were desperately busy, but more like he never seemed to notice. "So, tell me," The Skipper asked, his eyelids flickering ominously, "exactly how much would'ja charge me for an oil filter for my Jag?"
"With or without an oil change?" Barry gasped, straddling the transmission of the XK120 and pulling desperately with bloody, grease-blackened fingers to get it separated from the block. Sweat beads the size of ball bearings were rolling down his cheeks.
"Well," Skippy mused, thoughtfully stroking his chin, "why don't you just give me a price with the oil and without the oil. I'm perfectly capable of changing it myself, you know. Or at least my squire"—he twitched in the general direction of Milton Fitting,—"can do it for me. He's really the expert at that sort of thing. Changing oil, I mean. Does it for me all the time. Uses real vegetable oil, too. None of that crappy mineral stuff. Never use mineral oil in a Jaguar. Gums up the works. We tried it once. Hah! Gummed up the works, just like I told you. But, of course, we didn't know any better then. Why, you should've seen how that . . ."
And that's about when I stopped paying attention and went back to installing Butch's rebuilt starter on the TC. There was a point at which you could more or less stop listening to what The Skipper was actually saying and let it all turn into a kind of whining, gyrating background noise. The kind a dry speedometer cable makes if it's got a bad kink in it.
We had extra trouble that day when all the Allard drivers started dropping by to complain about skittish handling, and no question the brutes were a real handful on the narrow, bumpy, high-crowned pavement at Grand Island. "Why, the car's simply uncontrollable," one of the slower guys whined, dabbing his forehead with a cowboy bandana, "and you know how terribly, terribly serious things can be... out there ..." He let that last part dangle like a carcass on a meat hook while staring off in the general direction of oblivion, and my personal opinion was that people like him really had no business racing. Especially in hairy-chested equipment like an Allard. Hell, if all you wanted was to parade around in goggles and driving gloves and put on airs at the beer parties, you could embarrass yourself just as thoroughly in an MG TC or one of those pretty little Crosley-engined Siatas. Why pick something that scared you half to death?
But since all the other Allard guys were singing the same
tune (although not whimpering so much) and since they were also mostly Westbridge customers (and cash customers, at that), we wound up checking every damn Allard shock, spring, wheel nut, steering knuckle, idler arm, and tire pressure in the whole blessed paddock. But we couldn't find anything wrong, and the inescapable conclusion was that it was some sort of backbone difficulty with the drivers. It sure made me wish Tommy Edwards was on hand to show those crybabies how a real race car driver makes the best of things and gets on with the job at hand. But Tommy was missing that weekend. Something about trying to keep his marriage together.