The Axles From the Fifty Eight Derby

Across the Road

Lonnie Fite has lived across the road from us since before I was born.

He is eighty years old, bald as a doorknob, with a white beard he keeps trimmed short and a pair of suspenders on every day of his life, Sundays included.

He had been sitting on his front porch with his coffee when Darrell pulled in. I had not even noticed him. He had watched the whole thing, every bolt, and had not said one word.

Now he was standing at the edge of my carport, looking down at the blue car with his hands in his back pockets.

He did not ask what happened. He did not say a word about Darrell. He asked Beckett one question.

“What’s she weigh with you in her, son?”

Beckett looked up. “Miss Rhea weighed us Thursday,” he said. “A hundred and eighty-one with me in it. The limit’s two hundred.”

Lonnie nodded slowly, like that was the right answer to a hard question. Then he turned around without another word and walked back across the road toward his garage.

The Rafters

I have known Lonnie my whole life. I knew he had won the derby once, back when they first ran it down the Main Street hill.

There is a picture of him in the bank lobby, a skinny boy in a leather helmet, holding a little tin trophy.

What I did not know was that he still had the car.

I heard the garage door go up, then the scrape of the pull-down attic ladder. Then I heard him say a word that I will not repeat, and I ran across the road.

He was halfway up the ladder in the dim garage, reaching into the rafters, moving things that had not been moved in a long time.

Old window screens. A box of Mason jars. A rolled-up rug that came down in a cloud of dust.

“Haley, hold this ladder before I kill myself,” he said. “My wife would never forgive me.”

His wife has been gone four years. I held the ladder anyway, and Beckett came running in behind me and stood with both hands on the bottom rung, looking up.

Lonnie came down slowly with something long wrapped in an old feed sack, tied with baling twine. He handed it to me.

It was heavy. Then he went back up and came down a second time with a bushel basket.

In the basket were four wheels. They were not like anything you see now. Thin steel spokes, a narrow rubber tire on each one, the hubs packed in old grease and wrapped in rags.

The rubber was dry, but it was good. He had kept them out of the sun.