The Rusted Ford in the Barn Bay

Two Winters

I should tell you how we got there, because it was not a quick thing, and it was not a stupid thing either. Most of the worst hurts in my life have come out of things that started good.

Two Novembers before, Dean called me from a farm sale over in Juniata County. He was standing in a fencerow looking at a 1968 Camaro coupe that had been sitting under a tarp since the Carter years.

“It’s a real one,” he said on the phone. “Rough. Floors are gone. But it’s all there, and the guy wants twenty-five hundred.”

He bought it with his own money that afternoon. That is why the title went in his name, and I never once thought twice about it. Dean had found the car. Dean had paid for the shell. It seemed right.

What we did not have was a place to work. Dean and Michelle had a little ranch house in town, with a one-car garage you could barely open a door in.

I had a big pole barn with a shop bay, a hard-packed dirt floor, two hundred amp service, and every tool a diesel mechanic collects in twenty years.

So the Camaro came to my barn. We hauled it on my trailer behind my truck, and we set it on jack stands in the bay where I usually parked the tractor.

I work at a diesel shop out by the interstate, mostly tractor-trailers and some farm equipment when the dealer gets backed up.

Dean bends sheet metal for a heating and cooling outfit in State College. Between the two of us we could build just about anything.

We worked Tuesday and Thursday nights and most Saturdays. Two winters of it. A kerosene heater going in the corner, the radio on the oldies station out of Lewistown, frost on the inside of the windows by midnight.

Dean did the metal. He cut out the rotted floor pans and the quarter panel patches and welded new steel in, and I will say this for him, his work was beautiful.

You could not find his seams with your fingertips when he was done.

I did the mechanical. The engine, the transmission, the rear end, the brakes, the wiring. And because Dean was always a little short on money, and I had steady overtime that year, I bought most of the parts.

I kept every receipt in a coffee can on the shelf over the workbench. The Muncie four-speed. The twelve-bolt rear end. The wiring harness.

The brake lines. Most of the paint. When I added it up later, it came to a little over nine thousand dollars.

Nobody made me do it. I want to be honest about that. I bought those parts because I wanted the car finished, and because Dean was my friend, and because in my head it was our car. Not his car. Ours.

In late June, two weeks before that Saturday, Dean asked if he could take it to his place for a while.

There was a cruise night coming up in Lewisburg and he wanted to show it, and he said his brother had room in a garage.

I helped him load it. I even wiped the fingerprints off the chrome before he pulled out.