The Junkyard Motor in Dad’s Barn

Dad heard it too. He did not say anything for a while. Then he looked at me.

“He’ll bring it back,” Dad said. “Now he will.”

Monday afternoon I got off my shift at two and drove straight out to Dad’s place.

I had told him I would change the oil in the junkyard motor and check the valve lash, which you do after a first race on a new build.

I had been in the barn about an hour when I heard a truck on the gravel.

It was Trent. He had his pickup and a borrowed flatbed trailer behind it, and on the trailer, strapped down on a wooden pallet, sat my motor, the built one, with lake weeds still hanging off the bottom of it.

He had his own cherry picker in the bed of the truck.

He got out. He was not in his work clothes. He was in jeans and an old sweatshirt from the high school, and he looked like he had not slept much.

He looked at me in the barn door, and then at Dad behind me at the bench.

Nobody said anything. Trent got the cherry picker down out of the truck by himself and rolled it across the gravel to the trailer.

He hooked the chain to the motor and pumped the handle until it came up off the pallet, swinging a little.

He rolled it to the middle of the barn floor, right next to my car, and let the handle down until the motor sat on the concrete. Then he unhooked the chain and stood there.

The motor smelled like burnt coolant. The paint on the heads had gone brown in patches from the heat.

You could see where the exhaust manifolds had cooked, and there was a little puddle of lake water coming out from under the oil pan.

“It’s locked up,” Trent said. He did not look at me when he said it. He looked at the motor. “I tried to turn it with a breaker bar last night. It won’t move.”

Dad came around the bench. He did not hurry. He crouched down by the motor, which is not easy for him anymore, and put his hand flat on the block, the way you would put your hand on a sick animal.

“Probably the rings stuck in the bores,” he said. “Maybe a head gasket. Maybe the cam. Won’t know until it comes apart.”

“I’ll pay for it,” Trent said. “Whatever the shop says. I’ll pay it.”

“Yes,” Dad said, without looking up. “You will.”

Trent stood there with his hands at his sides. He was thirty-eight years old, and I had not seen him look like that since he was a boy and broke the window on the old milk house with a baseball.

“Colby,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He swallowed. “I knew it wasn’t mine. I knew it the whole time I was doing it. I just wanted something to go right. And I wanted it to be mine for once.”

I did not say anything for a minute. I looked at the motor on the floor, and at my car beside it, with the orange motor in it and the red 17 on the valve covers.

“Vida’s gone,” I said. “Dad told me.”

“Yeah.” He wiped his face with the back of his wrist. “She’s gone.”

“I’m sorry about that,” I said. And I was. “But that boat was never going to fix it.”

“I know that now.”

“I know you do.”