The Junkyard Motor in Dad’s Barn

I knew that 17. Everybody in our family knew that 17.

Dad ran a modified at the fairgrounds track in 1979, the summer before he married Mom.

He only ran one season, because after the wedding they needed the money for the farm and the car got sold to a man from Forest City.

But there is a picture of it in the hallway of the farmhouse, a red number 17 on a white door, with Dad standing beside it at twenty-one years old.

It was the reason I put 17 on my car. I had never told him that. I figured he knew.

“Same red,” Dad said. He put the lid back on the can and tapped it down with the handle of a screwdriver.

“Same can, even. I painted my door with this the spring of ’79. I’ve been saving the rest.”

“For what?”

He did not answer right away. He wiped the brush on his rag and stood there looking at the valve covers.

“Your mother told me to throw that can out about twenty times,” he said. “I told her I’d know when I needed it.” He cleared his throat. “Turns out I did.”

I did not say anything. I could not have. I sat there on that bucket in the barn with the iced tea sweating in my hand, and for the first time since I found the empty engine bay, I cried, not long, and I was not ashamed of it.

Dad put his hand on my shoulder on the way past, just for a second, and squeezed. Then he went to wash the brush out in the utility sink.

The twelfth evening, we set the motor in the car.

Dad ran the cherry picker and I guided it down onto the mounts, and it went in the first time without either of us saying a word.

Headers. Carburetor. Distributor. Water pump, radiator hoses, fuel line. Plug wires in the right order, checked twice.

The second Saturday, we broke it in. You have to run a new flat tappet cam right away, at about two thousand revolutions a minute for twenty minutes, so the lifters and cam lobes wear in together.

If you let it idle, you can wipe out the cam before it ever sees the track.

Dad stood at the fender with a timing light and a watch.

I sat in the car with my foot on the gas, watching the gauges, and the junkyard motor ran up and held two thousand like it had been waiting all its life to be asked.

The barn shook with it. The swallows all went outside.

At the end of twenty minutes, Dad held up his hand. I let it come down to idle.

It idled smooth and even, with a little lope from the cam that made the whole car rock on its springs.

“She’ll go,” he said.

That was Saturday afternoon. The opener was Sunday. Twelve evenings and two Saturdays, from a ditch in a salvage yard to a motor running in my car.

I want to tell you now about Trent’s Saturday, because I did not know about it until the next day, and the way I found out matters.

The first warm weekend of April, everybody who owns a boat puts in at Clear Lake. Trent put in at the public ramp at about eleven in the morning.

He had the boat all cleaned up, the seats new, the hull waxed, and he had the motor sounding like a jet, just like he said.