The Junkyard Motor in Dad’s Barn

I pointed over at the fence. Elton looked over there and saw Dad, and his whole face changed. He lifted one hand off his pocket. Dad lifted his back.

“I flagged against him once,” Elton said. “1979. I was running a car myself that year. Your dad put me into the wall in turn three, and then came over to my pit after and helped me fix the A-arm.”

He looked back at the valve covers. “Same red, isn’t it.”

“Same can.”

Elton nodded slowly. He did not say anything else. He just tapped the fender twice with his knuckles and went on down the row.

I ran third in my heat, which got me into the feature. It started me eleventh.

There were eighteen cars in the hobby stock feature, fifteen laps, and most of the cars in front of me had more motor than I did. I knew that going in.

They threw the green. I could feel the junkyard motor pull out of turn four like a mule leaning into a harness.

Not fast. Steady. It just kept pulling, every lap, never once faltering, never once missing.

Two cars got together in turn two on lap three, and I went low under them. One car spun on lap six and I got by it.

On lap nine I got around a blue car on the outside, and on lap twelve I went under a car that had been fast all day and was now smoking a little out of the left side.

I came around for the last lap in fourth place.

I could see the leaders up ahead of me, too far to catch, and I did not try to catch them. I just held my line and ran it out.

When I came down the front stretch under the checkered flag, Elton leaned out over the edge of the stand and gave me a little nod, and swung the flag down low beside the car as I went by, the way the old flagmen used to do it.

I pulled into the pits and shut it off. I unbuckled, climbed out the window, and popped the hood, and I leaned on the open hood in my black T-shirt with grease up both arms to the elbow, and I looked at that orange motor sitting in there in the bright April sun.

I did not think about my brother. I did not think about the money.

I thought about my dad bent over those valve covers with his hand shaking, and the old can of red enamel, and how a motor that came out of a ditch had just run fifteen laps without missing a single beat.

I was still smiling at it when Dad came walking up through the pits. He did not say anything at first.

He just stood next to me and looked at the motor with me, the way you might stand next to somebody at a fence and look at a field.

“Fourth,” he said finally.

“Fourth.”

“Out of eighteen.”

“Out of eighteen.”

He nodded. “Not bad for four hundred dollars.”

That was when the man from the hauler next to us came over.

He races a hobby stock too, a nice man from out by Rockwell who brings his whole family. He stopped beside us with his cap pushed back on his head.

“Colby,” he said. “Hey. Wasn’t that your brother’s boat they had to tow in at the lake yesterday?”

I thought about Trent sitting out in the middle of that lake for an hour with the steam coming up and everybody on the shore watching, and his wife gone, and nobody to call.