The Transmission The Shop Sold Me
“I’d like to.” He turned his cap in his hands. “But I won’t go in there like a posse, Gladys. If I go, I go to ask like a man.”
“Tomorrow morning,” Dolores said. “They open at eight on Saturdays.”
“Tomorrow morning,” Verlin said. “I’ll ask him to his face.”
“I’ll come with you,” I said.
“I’d count on it,” said Verlin.
Saturday it drizzled, a fine October rain that did not so much fall as hang. I drove the Grand Marquis, with its new transmission shifting like butter, and Verlin sat beside me with his cane across his knees and Orville’s notebook in his coat pocket. We passed the Methodist church and the Cenex station and the feed store with Del Hanlon’s old sign still half visible under the paint.
Burkett Tire and Auto had its bay doors up when we got there. A young tech named Colt was sweeping the floor. Rick stood in the office door with a coffee in his hand, and I watched him see my car, and then see who was in it.
He set the coffee on the counter. He did not hurry. He came out to the lot in the rain without a jacket.
“Mrs. Wachter,” he said. “Verlin.”
“Rick,” Verlin said.
“Something wrong with the car?”
“The car’s fine,” I said. “It shifts beautifully.”
Verlin got out slowly, one hand on the door. He took out the notebook and opened it to the circled page and held it up, not toward Rick’s face, just toward him, the way you show a man a deed.
“I’d like to see the old unit,” Verlin said. “The one that came out of this car. If you haven’t shipped it.”
Rick looked at the page. I saw him read it. He read it all the way to the end, and he did not look up from it for a while.
“It’s out back,” he said. “By the door. Under the tarp.”
That was all he said. He did not ask why. He did not say he had nothing to hide.
He led us around the building. The old transmission sat on a wooden pallet beside the dumpster under a blue tarp, a lumpy gray casting about the size of a small barrel, with the bell housing still bolted on and a rime of oil dried on it. Colt followed and set a drain pan on the concrete without being asked.
Verlin lowered himself onto an overturned bucket and looked at the thing for a minute, the way a man looks at a field he used to farm.
“I can’t do the bolts,” he said. “Not anymore.”
Rick took the socket from Colt’s hand. He knelt in the wet in his clean gray shirt and began taking out the pan bolts, one at a time, a dozen and a half small ones, while Verlin told him the order to go in. It took a long time. The rain ticked on the tarp. Out on the highway a grain truck went by with its brakes hissing.
The pan came down with a gush of fluid into the drain pan. Verlin leaned over and looked at it. He dipped a finger and rubbed it against his thumb and put it to his nose.