The Junkyard Motor in Dad’s Barn

People at the ramp turned around to look at it.

He made it about a mile out. Then the temperature alarm went off, and by the time he understood what that whining buzzer was, there was steam coming up out of the engine hatch.

A race motor is not a marine motor. It does not matter that both of them say Chevrolet on the side.

A boat motor is cooled by lake water pulled in by its own pump, and it is set up with a different cam and different parts so it can run hard for hours at a time without a breath of air going over it.

My race motor was built to run fifteen laps at a time with a big radiator in front of it and wind coming through the grille.

Trent had rigged the boat’s old cooling hoses onto it with hose clamps and a belt that did not line up right.

It had never been moving enough water. It just took that long to find out.

He shut it down out in the middle of the lake, with the steam coming off it, and when he tried to start it again it would not turn over. The heat had locked it up tight.

He sat out there for most of an hour. It was Lonnie from across the street at home who finally came by in his pontoon, the slowest boat on the whole lake, and threw him a rope.

Lonnie towed Trent the whole way back to the public ramp at about four miles an hour.

Half the lake watched it. There was nothing else to watch.

A shiny boat with a dead motor and a man sitting in the back of it with his arms crossed, behind a pontoon full of Lonnie’s grandkids waving at everybody on shore.

Lonnie told me later that Trent did not say one word the whole ride in. When they got to the dock he said thank you and shook Lonnie’s hand.

Then he winched his boat up on the trailer by himself with the people in line all looking at him, and he drove home.

The opener on Sunday was an afternoon show. Our track runs afternoons in April, because it is too cold at night for the grandstand. We got to the fairgrounds by ten.

Dad rode with me in my pickup with the trailer behind, a cooler between his feet and his old seed corn cap pulled down low.

It was a bright, clear day, with a cold wind coming over the top of the grandstand and the sun so strong you squinted even with sunglasses.

The pits were full of haulers and pickups and open trailers, and every motor in the place seemed to be running at once.

Elton Rusk was up on the flag stand, where he has been at that track for about thirty years.

He is seventy now, a little stooped and wiry, and he still flags every race standing, with his feet planted and every flag held out at arm’s length like it weighs something.

He came by the pits before the drivers’ meeting, the way he does every week, walking down the row of cars with his hands in his jacket pockets.

He stopped in front of my car and looked at the motor under the open hood for a while.

“That’s not the motor you had in there last fall,” he said.

“No, sir.”

“Who painted the valve covers?”