The Ford My Son and I Rebuilt
Twelve Years and Two Winters
Chad and I had been running together since the ninth grade at Keota, two boys who could not afford the cars we loved so we fixed the ones nobody else wanted.
He stood up with me at my wedding. I carried one end of his mama’s casket. When Levi was born six weeks early, Chad drove to the hospital in Muskogee at two in the morning and sat in the lot all night because they would not let him up to the floor.
That is the part people do not understand when they hear the end of this. You do not build a thing like that Camaro with a man you only sort of know. You build it with your brother.
The car came home on a Saturday in October two years back, a hull the color of a dead wasp, the floor pans rusted through so you could watch the road go by under your boots.
We set up two sawhorses and a work light and we stood there looking at it, and Chad said, “This is either the dumbest thing we ever did or the best,” and I said, “Could be both,” and we laughed and got after it.
Two winters. Every evening I did not have a cow calving or a part-time diesel job in town, I was out in that bay, and most of those evenings Chad was out there with me.
We pulled the motor on my daddy’s old engine hoist, the one with the bent leg we always had to shim. We media-blasted the shell behind the barn with a rented pot and both of us coughing red Oklahoma dust for a week.
Donna would bring us a thermos of coffee and a plate of something, and she would stand in the door and shake her head at the two of us, forty years old and happier than we had any business being.
We welded in new floor pans on our backs on the cold concrete, taking turns with the wire feed because the other one’s shoulder would give out.
We argued about paint for a month. He wanted it red. I wanted it the factory green it left Detroit in, and in the end he gave in, and when that green went on it was the prettiest thing either of us had ever had a hand in.
The night it first ran, this past October, we did not even drive it. We just stood in the open bay with the motor idling and the exhaust note bouncing off the metal walls, and Chad put his hand on my shoulder and did not say anything, and he did not need to.
Nine days later he sold it off the trailer to a man from Tulsa and set three thousand dollars on my bench.
I keep the two of those nights side by side in my head. I will for the rest of my life. A man’s hand on your shoulder and then a man’s envelope on your bench, and the same hand did both.