Becoming Chloe (12 page)

I laugh. It’s really a pretty bizarre sight. Back and forth, up and down. This great, fierce beast looking absolutely preposterous because his butt itches.

We sit there and watch until he’s done. It’s just too good to miss.

Chloe says, “You really didn’t even have to point to that one, Jordy. I could have found that one on my own.”

We’re headed south. Picking up as southern a route as possible, because we’re going to be gradually heading into winter. Because we’ll be out here for months, and so will the cold weather. And we’re camping, so we need the weather on our side.

Pennsylvania slides by like a pleasant dream, though it takes us nearly ten days to dream it. For some reason we go particularly slowly through Pennsylvania. Must be all the trees.

Then after many fairly uneventful days, we hit a day that’s hard. It rains. We want to stop somewhere and get something to eat, but there isn’t anywhere. I mean, not on the road we’re traveling.

Chloe’s gotten to really like back roads and scenic routes.

More cats and cows and rabbits scurrying across the road. Chloe likes to be the one to ask now. Now she’s the one who likes to talk to total strangers. I stop and she asks. “What’s the prettiest way to go?”

So the road we’re on is pretty, but there’s no place to stop.

No civilization. No services. And the rain is a hard rain. And no cars have passed us. We haven’t seen a soul. We’ve already driven farther than we usually drive at a stretch, and the rain is so hard that there’s really nothing outside to see except the rain.

And the rain has stopped looking beautiful.

Then I realize we’re going up quite a steep grade. So I downshift the gears. I’m using more gas but going slower. I look up and the rain is falling faster than the wipers can sweep it aside, and the grade just keeps getting steeper, and it goes on forever. Miles.

As far as my eyes can see, upgrade, with no end in sight. I’m suddenly prone to believing this whole back-road thing was a lousy idea. We should’ve stayed on the main highway. Because what if the truck won’t make it up this grade? Where would we find a call box? How long would it be before some helpful motorist or state trooper happened by? Could be days.

Almost before I finish that thought, the truck engine makes this god-awful bang. It’s like a shot fired. Then I realize that the thought didn’t come out of nowhere. I was listening to the engine grind and strain, and the noise it was making was wrong. I just couldn’t admit it to myself consciously until after the bang.

The engine dies and we lose momentum almost immediately, and I pull over fast and stop before we start drifting backward downhill. I wrench on the hand brake as hard as I possibly can.

Little whisps of smoke are coming up through the grille, and the rain is slicing and twisting them, stopping them from rising.

Nearly stopping them from existing at all.

Chloe looks at me and I look at her. Nobody asks the question about what comes next, but it seems to be hanging in the truck anyway. So I turn the key to see if the engine will start. It screams out, that awful metal-on-metal scream, and rattles and bangs, and when I shut it off again, another big puff of smoke comes up from the grille to be dampened down by the rain. I turn the key all the way to off, and it’s quiet except for the torrent outside. The windshield wipers have stopped, so the windshield is just a muted sheet of water. It’s cold without the heater.

Chloe says, “Maybe somebody’ll come by.”

“Sure. Sooner or later somebody will.”

Only we’ve been on this road for hours and haven’t seen one other motorist. And that was by day. Now the sun is nearly down. We’re hungry. We don’t have anything to eat or drink.

Chloe says, “So what do we do while we’re waiting?”

“Oh. Let’s make some more notes in your book.”

“Okay.” She takes it out and waits with the pencil ready.

“Um . . .” I’m trying to think of something good in all this. I don’t want that ugly category getting too big.

“Rain,” Chloe says. “Ugly.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I think the rain is beautiful. It makes the grass grow. There’d be no trees without it. The world wouldn’t be green.”

“It also keeps us from sleeping out in the truck bed. We can’t put our sleeping bags anywhere tonight.”

“True.”

She writes “rain” in both the “beautiful” and “ugly” columns.

“It’s cold,” she says. “Cold sucks.”

I find that hard to debate.

We have our sleeping bags up front, behind the seats, because we wanted to keep them out of the rain. It isn’t easy to pull them free without stepping out of the truck, but we manage. We unzip them and wrap up tight. We don’t debate any more columns or categories, but it’s hard not to think about it. The sun is almost down. It doesn’t seem likely that anyone will come by until morning. Maybe not even then. Maybe in the morning we’ll have to get out and hike this monster grade. Maybe even in the rain.

Is a truck good or bad? Is a broken truck good or bad? Should I be grateful for this shelter even though it’s not even big enough to sleep lying down? Are there other people who don’t even have a tiny dry space and a sleeping bag tonight? And then, the biggest question of all: Even if there are, does that really mean this doesn’t suck?

Dear Dr. Reynoso. This is more complicated than I thought. Did you know it would be this complicated? Never mind. Don’t answer that.

We fall asleep twisted strangely around each other, half comforted and half disturbed by the drumming of the rain on the roof.

❃ ❃ ❃

I wake to a tapping on the window. It’s light outside. I’m lying twisted onto my side on the seat, my head in Chloe’s lap. When I sit up, I’m in a lot of pain from the cramped position.

It’s still raining. There’s a man standing in the rain at the driver’s-side window.

I roll it halfway down, taking spatters and drops into my hair and eyes.

The man is standing drenched, no hat. No coat, just coveralls.

He’s missing one front tooth on the top. In my peripheral vision I see his big flatbed truck pulled level with us and parked in the middle of the road. It has a tractor tied down onto the bed. The wind and rain are so loud, or I was sleeping so soundly, I didn’t even hear it pull up.

“You folks all right?”

“Not really. We broke down. Can you give us a lift somewhere?

Anywhere, really. Just so we’re not in the middle of nowhere.”

The man smiles broadly, displaying the bare stretch of gums.

“Aw, you ain’t in the middle of nowhere. There’s a town just right over this grade. There’s a great little coffee shop and a gas station that does good mechanic work.”

“Great, can you drive us there?”

“Well, don’t you want your truck to go there, too? Can’t do no good mechanic work on a truck if you don’t get it there.”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“Piece a cake,” he says. “You leave it to me.”

He swings up onto the back of the flatbed truck. The tractor is tied down with five or six enormous chains. Huge links with big metal hooks on the end that can be hooked back through the chain at any point. The guy frees one, then rearranges the others so the tractor is still secure.

I roll my window up all but an inch or two to keep the rain out of my face, and I watch him through the inch of opening.

Now and then a drop still splashes me in the eye. But all and all, I’m dry. The guy on the flatbed is soaked through and through.

I’m wondering if I should have offered to help him. Then again, what do I know about tying down a tractor?

I look over at Chloe, who is, amazingly, still asleep. Sitting up, but fast asleep. I stretch and think of how happy she’ll be to wake up in a good mechanic’s shop. Especially if I can hand her a cup of hot coffee and tell her there’s a café with good food nearby.

The guy hooks one end of this gigantic chain somewhere under the front end of our truck, then secures the other end to the towing ball on the back of the flatbed.

He comes back to the window and I roll it down.

“Turn your key to ‘accessory’ and put your wipers on. You need to be able to see the back of my truck. When we crest the hill, put on your brakes so’s you don’t roll down and smack me. I’ll come back and unhook you. You can coast all the way down into town.

The gas station is at the bottom of the hill on the right.”

“We really appreciate this,” I say.

He smiles another gap-tooth smile. “Ain’t no thang,” he says.

Then he climbs into the truck and I take off the brake.

There’s a lurch as the slack comes out of the chain, and then we’re rolling. Not fast, but we’re rolling.

I turn on my wipers and watch the back of the truck. The tractor is facing me, alarmingly, like traffic going the wrong way in my lane, coming right at me. We must never get beyond first or second gear, because we take the hill at just a few miles an hour.

But, hell, we’re going a lot faster than we were without his help.

Then we crest the top of the hill and stop, and he comes out into the rain and takes his chain back. I roll down my window and try to yell “thank you” to the guy but he doesn’t seem to hear. I look over at Chloe but she’s still fast asleep. The guy waves at me through the rear cab window. I wave back. He pulls away, and we coast. The license plate on the back of his truck says West Virginia, so I wonder if that’s where we are already.

We coast at maybe thirty-five, forty miles per hour, rocketing through the rain, and then suddenly there is no rain. Suddenly the air is clear, and one single beam of early sun finds its way out of the heavy clouds and lights a spot on the dark valley below.

Farmland. Then I look straight ahead of us, down the road, and there’s a town. Services. The kind of town that would have a restaurant and a good mechanic, just like I was told.

I look over to see that Chloe is awake. Somehow the sheer momentum got her attention, even in her sleep. She woke up to feel us going so fast. Past her face I see there’s a rainbow stretched across the valley. The sky is still black in that direction; even the air looks black. It’s probably still raining over there. But there’s a rainbow.

“There, Chloe,” I say. And I point. “Right there.”

I’m sitting on a tire just outside the service bay, drinking hot coffee.

Watching Chloe win over a dog. A skinny little blueeyed dog with an all-over itch and hardly any hair on its rump and docked tail.

The mechanic, Jim, is leaning into our engine compartment, but he sticks his head out and says, “That dog won’t come near you, miss, don’t take it personal. She’s just shy.”

I give Chloe three minutes to win that dog over.

We’ve had breakfast. I have to admit I feel better. Just getting fed and settled somewhere. Even though I know in my gut that we still have big problems. Unless the problem with the truck is something small and cheap. Thing is, I don’t think so. It didn’t sound small and cheap. It sounded big and expensive.

The mechanic waves me in. I get up and walk halfway into the service bay, then stop dead when I encounter a sign that says, absolutely no customers allowed in the service area.

“Pay that no mind,” Jim says.

We lean into the engine together. He’s taken something off or apart. I can see engine parts that I know are normally covered.

They shine with blackened oil. I try to look at the engine intelligently.

As if I will be clear on what I see.

“I’m bad at this,” Jim says. “I hate to give bad news. I only like to tell people what I know they want to hear.”

“Okay, fine. Tell me what I want to hear.”

“Wish I could, dude. Wish I could.” Long beat. “Know anything about engines?”

“No.”

“Okay. It’s like this. The timing chain keeps the cam and the crank running together. That’s why it’s called a timing chain.

Keeps the timing right between the valves and the pistons.”

“I thought it kept the timing right between the crank and the cam.”

“Right. Camshaft runs your valves. Crankshaft runs your pistons.”

“I’m confused.”

“Okay, let’s go at it another way. You got to have the timing right between your compression stroke and your exhaust stroke, and if you don’t . . .” Jim looks at my face and realizes I’m no closer to mastery. “Okay, maybe I’m trying to explain too much.

You got serious damage inside this engine. It’ll have to be all torn down. Hard to say what we’ll find till we open her up.

Maybe new pistons and valves and valve stems, and then maybe we’ll find out that the cylinder walls are scored and then maybe we can bore and sleeve, or maybe the engine is just trash and you’ll have to start all over again with a new short block.”

I recognized about three English words in all of that, and they all sounded expensive.

“How much money are we talking?”

“I’m not sure you even want to know.”

“What’s the very least it could be?”

“Well, we’re talking labor and machine work. Even with no nasty surprises I can’t see you getting off for less than eleven or twelve hundred.”

“Oh.”

“More than you can handle?”

“Oh, yeah. Truck’s not even worth that. Is it?”

“Hell yeah it is. Are you kidding? ’54 Chevy pickup? People kill for these. They restore ’em. Worth a fortune all cherried out.

I know two guys within forty miles of here who’d scratch each other’s eyes out for this truck. Everything all original. Body in good shape.”

“But it doesn’t run.”

“But these guys, even if it did run, first thing they’d do is haul the engine out and rebuild it. Anyway. I’m not saying that a busted engine brings the price up exactly. But lots of people’d still want it.”

“What do you think I could get for it?”

Jim scratches his head. “I’d give you eight hundred for it right here right now. But I got to be honest and say you could maybe do better. If I was to give these guys a call . . .” He smiles. Then he smiles even wider, like he’ll break into a laugh any minute.

“Well, that might be fun to see. These guys don’t like each other any too much. One of ’em is just sure the other stole a set of factory original hubcaps off him in the dead of night. If they both knew this truck was for sale, it might just be interesting to see.”