The Transmission The Shop Sold Me
Dolores left with her hair half set and her coat over the rollers. She was out the door before the bell stopped ringing.
Verlin Ridgway came to my house at one o’clock that afternoon in a pickup so old it had a hand crank for the passenger window. Dolores rode beside him. His knuckles were the size of walnuts, and he carried a cane he did not seem to need.
“Gladys,” he said. He took off his cap. “I’m sorry about Orville. I should have come by more.”
“You did enough, Verlin. You carried the casket.”
“That’s not enough.” He cleared his throat. “Dolores says you have a book for me.”
I handed him the notebook at the kitchen table. He read the circled page. He did not read it fast. When he came to the line about the sensor, he started to laugh, a low rusty laugh that turned into a cough.
“Seven sixteen,” he said. “I remember it. Orville stood right there in my shop with his arms folded, and I said to him, that’s your turbine shaft speed sensor, Orville, it’s a Ford, it’s a sixty-dollar part, don’t let anybody sell you a transmission for that.”
“What does it do?”
“It tells the computer how fast the front of the transmission is turning. When it dies, the computer loses track of what the thing is doing. It figures something is badly wrong, so it locks the transmission in one gear to get you home. Everyone who has ever seen it thinks the transmission quit. It scares people to death.” He turned the page back and forth. “It’s one bolt and an o-ring on the side of the case. An hour on a lift.”
“Rick told me the clutches were slipping. And the valve body was scored.”
“Did he now.” Verlin took off his glasses. “Did he say what code he pulled?”
“Transmission codes.”
“It is a transmission code, sure. It doesn’t mean the thing is dead.” He rubbed his eyes. “A code reader won’t tell you the clutches are slipping. It won’t tell you about a valve body at all. Those are words a man says after he has had the thing apart, or when he wants you to think he has.”
“Could he have honestly missed it?”
I did want to believe it. I did not want Rick Hanlon to be what I was afraid he was.
Verlin was quiet a minute.
“Rick worked for me two summers in high school,” he said. “I stood him at my bench and made him read that code back to me, twice, because he got it wrong the first time. A boy doesn’t forget a thing he got wrong twice.”
I looked at the table.
“I can’t tell you what’s wrong with the Mercury now,” he went on, “because it’s got a new transmission in it. The only evidence left in this world is the old one. A shop like that sends the old one back as a core. The rebuilder in Oklahoma City runs a truck on Mondays. If Rick hasn’t shipped it, it’s sitting out behind the building right now.”
“Could you look at it?”