“Oh, he does real good work,” she said.
“What he’s doing for us,” Newt said, “he’s replacing our fan clutch. I guess you probably get a lot of people here needing new fan clutches.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” she said. “Thing is I don’t know much about cars. He’s the mechanic and I’m the cook is how we divvy things up.”
“Sounds like a good system,” Newt told her.
On the way across the street Newt separated two twenties from our bankroll and tucked them into his shirt pocket. Then I reminded him about the gas and he added a third twenty. He gave the rest of our stake a quick count and shook his head in annoyance. “We’re getting pretty close to the bone,” he said. “Johnny Mack Lee better be where’s he’s supposed to be.”
“He’s always been reliable.”
“That’s God’s truth. And the bank, it better be the piece of cake he says it is.”
“I just hope.”
“Twenty thousand a man is how he has it figured. Plus he says it could run three times that. I sure wouldn’t complain if it did, brother.”
I said I wouldn’t either. “It does make it silly to even think about nickels and dimes,” I said.
“Just what I was telling you.”
“I was never thinking about it, really. Not in the sense of doing it. Just mental exercise, keeps the brain in order.”
He gave me a brotherly punch in the shoulder and we laughed together some. Then we went on to where the dude in the big hat was playing with our car. He gave us a big smile and held out a piece of metal for us to admire. “Your old fan clutch,” he said, which I had more or less figured. “Take hold of this part. That’s it, right there. Now try to turn it.”
I tried to turn it and it was hard to turn. He had Newt do the same thing. “Tight,” Newt said.
“Lucky you got this far with it,” he said, and clucked his tongue and shook his head and heaved the old fan clutch onto a heap of old metallic junk.
I stood there wondering if a fan clutch was supposed to turn hard or easy or not at all, and if that was our original fan clutch or a piece of junk he kept around for this particular purpose, and I knew my brother Newton was wondering just the same thing. I wished they could have taught us something useful in the state pen, something that might have come in handy in later life, something like your basic auto mechanics course. But they had me melting my flesh off my bones in the prison laundry and they had Newt sewing mail sacks, which there isn’t much call for in civilian life, being the state penal system has an official monopoly on the business.
Meanwhile Newt had the three twenties out of his shirt pocket and was standing there straightening them out and lining up their edges. “Let’s see now,” he said. “That’s sixteen and change for the gas, and you said thirty to thirty-five for the fan clutch, so what’s that all come to?”
It turned out that it came to just under eighty-five dollars.
The fan clutch, it seemed, had run higher than he’d thought it would. Forty-two fifty was what it came to, and that was for the part exclusive of labor. Labor tacked another twelve dollars onto our tab. And while he’d been working there under the hood, our friend had found a few things that simply needed attending to. Our fan belt, for example, was clearly on its last legs and ready to pop any minute. He showed it to us and you could see how worn it was, all frayed and just a thread or two away from popping.
So he had replaced it, and he’d replaced our radiator hoses at the same time. He fished around in his junkpile and came up with a pair of radiator hoses which he said had come off our car. The rubber was old and stiff with little cracks in the surface, and it sure smelled like something awful.
I studied the hoses and agreed they were in terrible shape. “So you just went ahead and replaced them on your own,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “I didn’t want to bother you while you were eating.”
“That was considerate,” Newt said.
“I figured you fellows would want it seen to. You blow a fan belt or a hose out there, well, it’s a long walk back, you know. ‘Course I realize you didn’t authorize me to do the work, so if you actually want me to take the new ones off and put the old back on—”
Of course there was no question of doing that. Newt looked at me for a minute and I looked back at him and he took out our roll, which I don’t guess you could call a roll anymore from the size of it, and he peeled off another twenty and a ten and added them to the three twenties from his shirt pocket. He held the money in his hand and looked at it and then at the dude, then back at the money, then back at the dude again. You could see he was doing heavy thinking, and I had an idea where his thoughts were leading.
Finally he took in a whole lot of air and let it out in a rush and said, “Well, hell, I guess it’s worth it if it leaves us with a car in good condition. Last thing either of us wants is any damn trouble with the damn car and I guess it’s worth it. This fixes us up, right? Now we’re in good shape with nothing to worry about, right?”
“Well,” the dude said.
We looked at him.
“There is a thing I noticed.”
“Oh?”
“If you’ll just look right here,” he said. “See how the rubber grommet’s gone on the top of your shock absorber mounting, that’s what called it to my attention. Now you see your car’s right above the hydraulic lift, that’s cause I had it up before to take a look at your shocks. Now let me just raise it up again and I can point out to you what’s wrong.”
Well, he pressed a switch or some such to send the car up off the ground, and then he pointed here and there underneath it to show us where the shocks were shot and something was cutting into something else and about to commence bending the frame.
“If you got the time you ought to let me take care of that for you,” he said. “Because if you don’t get it seen to you wind up with frame damage and your whole front end goes on you, and then where are you?”
He let us take a long look at the underside of the car. There was no question that something was pressing on something and cutting into it. What the hell it all added up to was beyond me.
“Just let me talk to my brother a minute,” Newt said to him, and he took hold of my arm and we walked around the side.
“Well,” he said, “what do you think? It looks like this old boy here is sticking it in pretty deep.”
“It does at that. But that fan belt was shot and those hoses was the next thing to petrified.”
“True.”
“If they was our fan belt and hoses in the first place and not some junk he had around.”
“I had that very thought, Vern.”
“Now as for the shock absorbers—”
“Something sure don’t look altogether perfect underneath that car. Something’s sure cutting into something.”
“I know it. But maybe he just went and got a file or some such thing and did some cutting himself.”
“In other words, either he’s a con man or he’s a saint.”
“Except we know he ain’t a saint, not at the price he gets for gasoline, and not telling us how he eats all his meals across the road and all the time his own wife’s running it.”
“So what do we do? You want to go on to Silver City on those shocks? I don’t even know if we got enough money to cover putting shocks on, far as that goes.”
We walked around to the front and asked the price of the shocks. He worked it all out with pencil and paper and came up with a figure of forty-five dollars, including the parts and the labor and the tax and all. Newt and I went into another huddle and he counted his money and I went through my own pockets and came up with a couple of dollars, and it worked out that we could pay what we owed and get the shocks and come up with three dollars to bless ourselves with.