Chapter 17

The barn was about like I remembered it, except that it needed a little paint and was looking just a touch wobbly. My guess was that it wasn't used for anything but Frank's junk race-car parts, and it looked to me from the way the grass had grown up that the main doors hadn't been opened in a while. In fact, when we got inside, it seemed like no one had been in there for a while, either; we went through the side door into a huge collection of spider webs. "Jeez," Frank said. "I can't tell you the last time I was out here, but it has to have been a while. A couple years, at least. Most of the time there's no reason to come out here."

It was pretty dark inside the barn, and I couldn't really see much of anything in the faint light from a dim bulb in the next room, other than the fact that there were a bunch of car parts sitting around. "Any way we can get a little more light in here?" I asked.

"Yeah, sure," Frank said. The two of us turned to fiddling with the big wooden sliding doors, and it took us a while to get one of them open part way, but that let a lot more light into the place.

Yeah, there were a bunch of car parts sitting around. Some of them looked pretty familiar; there were some bent body panels that I remembered from a dozen years before, and other stacks of parts, some of which I'd probably put into place myself. "Yeah, that takes me back," I said softly.

"You want something that takes you back," Frank smiled, "Come back this way."

I followed him through the mess, toward the back door of the barn. The light wasn't good, but I could see that there was a more or less whole car sitting there. I could see that it had been wrecked pretty bad, although it was still recognizable. For some reason there was a light in a side bay in the barn, and when Frank flipped it on the sight sent me reeling. There, on the bent-up tailpiece flopped down over an obviously empty engine bay I could read the number "2" – Arlene's old car!

"What the hell happened to this?" I asked.

"Well, it got wrecked," Frank shrugged. "We were getting down to the end of the fair season back in '54, and we were down in southern Illinois some place, I don't remember now where. We'd more or less been forced to take what drivers we could get and like it, and there was this guy we picked up somewhere that said he could drive. Well, beggars can't be choosers, so Spud and I decided to take a risk. Well, he got tagged trying to pass someone, slid through a fence and rolled. He didn't get hurt too bad, but he sure as hell banged up the car. We just stuffed it into the truck and hauled it back, then dumped it out here. Like I told you, at the time we weren't at all sure we were going to be running the next year, so there was no point on working on it, Bush didn't want to take any of this old junk."

"Well, son of a gun," I said, shaking my head and looking it over. "It's beat up pretty bad, isn't it?"

"Yeah, I remember Spud and I talking about whether it was more worth our time to try to fix it up or just build a new one. As it turned out, we didn't do either. It's just sat here since November of 1954. I'm sure the frame is bent up pretty bad, and I don't know if it could be repaired or not. But this is as close to a complete MMSA car that exists anymore, for what it's worth. No engine, I'm afraid, we did yank that out."

"Good God," I said, just standing there and taking it in. "God, does that bring back the memories. I remember Arlene washing and waxing and polishing this thing till it shone. It'd make her heart sick to see it like this."

"Yeah, it's pretty much junk," Frank said. "I know a guy that deals in scrap, maybe I just ought to have him come over and haul it all off."

I stood there looking at it, remembering seeing it on the track with Arlene driving. Battling with her for position on dirt tracks all over the Midwest, the V8-60s roaring, plumes of dust in the sky, the smell of hot oil and exhaust and rubber and dirt. It was a long time ago, and just about another lifetime.

Should I do it? It was tempting...

"Frank," I asked, "What would you have to have for all this junk?"

"What in hell would you want it for?" he frowned. "Like I said, there's parts enough here to go a long way toward fixing the 2 car, maybe even get a good start on another car, but there's absolutely nothing you could use it for. Besides, Spud would tell you that they don't do it that way anymore. That's a rail frame with a design right out of the thirties. Sprint cars and midgets today are all tubular space frame."

"Look, Frank," I smiled. "You remember I teach auto shop, right?"

"Yeah, so what does that have to do with anything?"

"I like to give my Auto Shop II kids a project to work on. Over the years, we've rebuilt several cars, including my old '37 Ford."

"Yeah, I remember you saying that."

"So, one of the things that I've had to deal with this summer is to find a project for the kids to work on this winter. Granted, this thing is obsolete as hell, but there's a little bit of a heritage or antique value, nostalgia if nothing else, especially for me, and there will be for Arlene, too. I wouldn't think about racing it, but it'd be neat to drive in the local Fourth of July parade or something like that."

"Yeah," Frank nodded his head thoughtfully. "It would be interesting to see one of these things restored. Tell you what. If you want to haul everything out of here, when you get everything restored you paint 'Frank Blixter Ford, Livonia, Michigan' on it somewhere, you can have all this shit."

"Fair enough," I smiled. "You got a deal."

"I just want you to understand that I don't have any real notion of what all is here, or how good it is," Frank warned. "I don't know if there are any engines here at all, for example, and there's lots of busted, junk parts. I think there's another frame around here from the car that got wrecked the night we met Arlene, but if you remember, we abandoned it as being too bent up to fix."

"You say Peewee is still down in Indianapolis?" I asked. "He built the darn things in the first place, if anyone can fix those things he ought to be able to. Besides, I remember that there were a lot of stock Ford parts that went into these things just to make life a little easier if we had to go hunting for parts out on the road some place."

"Yeah, but that involved being able to find '30s-model Fords in the junk yards," Frank shook his head. "I hate to tell you, but you don't do that much anymore."

"It was hard to find those parts ten years ago when my shop kids and I rebuilt the '37," I told him. "It can't be any easier now. But that just makes for a challenge."

"Mel," Frank shook his head, "You are crazy as hell. But I wish you the best of luck with it. It would be nice to see one of these old cars running again, even if it's not racing."

"I think so, too," I smiled. "Look, I'm probably not going to be able to get a truck and some spare hands until the weekend, Saturday or Sunday. Will that be all right?"

"Take your time," he said. "This shit has all set here for ten years and more; it won't hurt it to sit here another week or two if that's what it takes. Have you seen what you want to see, or do you want to paw through this stuff some more?"

"I'd love to paw through it," I told him. "But these clothes are too good for that, and I don't have any work clothes with me, so I guess I've seen what I want for now."

"Good enough," he said. "I guess I wouldn't mind pawing through it a little myself, just because it brings back some memories, but I'm not dressed for it, either. Let's get this place closed up and go get some lunch."

It was a little easier to close the barn up than it had been to open it. Frank and I brushed ourselves off – we'd picked up a few spider webs in spite of everything – and headed back out to the Mustang. "Well, at least this will get my uncle off my ass about that stuff," Frank said. "Hell, that's probably worth it by itself. Tell you what. Let's head over to the import agency. Vivian and Jerry are probably going to be too tied up with those Japs to have lunch with us, but we ought to be able to just to say hello to them. But I'll bet Pepper and Dewey wouldn't turn us down if we invited them out to lunch with us."

"Sure, it'd be good to see them again, too," I nodded. We got back into the Mustang, with me driving again. I pulled out onto the road in front of the place, which was more or less out in the country, although there had been suburbs built up along the way since I'd last been there. The road was pretty empty, so just for the hell of it I stuck my foot into those three deuces under the hood of that thing, and had it pretty well flying by the time I hit fourth gear. When the speedometer hit three digits I backed off out of it and let it slow down to sixty-five, the speed limit back then.

"That's still kind of fun, isn't it?" Frank laughed as we got slowed down to the point where the wind noise allowed us to talk. "You're still a racer at heart, aren't you?"

"There are times," I said. "You have to remember that this is the hottest car I've driven since my racing days, and I wouldn't want to bet that the midgets were faster than this."

"Actually, there's no way of telling without you rebuilding one, but I think they'd get around a quarter mile dirt track quicker," he smiled. "The midget would just handle better. Paved track, I don't know. I think this thing would run with the midget through the corners, maybe a little behind it, but blow it away down the straights."

"Yeah, it does go in a straight line pretty good," I agreed. "Boy, cars have sure changed since those days, haven't they?"

"Sure have," he said. "You ever seen an MG-1100? There's some at the import agency, we'll have to stop and look at one. There's some real interesting thinking there. The car is front wheel drive, and the engine sits sideways under the hood. Me, I don't think it'll catch on, but you've got to give them points for trying."

Again, I'm going to jump way ahead of the story here to point out that Frank's talent at prophecy was no better than mine. If you've ever looked under the hood of a new street car today, the odds are pretty darn good that it's front wheel drive and the engine sits sideways under the hood. It seems almost natural today, but it really was a radical notion back then that took a while to catch on.

Frank and I had always been car people, and that hadn't changed. We shot the bull about new cars and old cars and how they'd changed in the nearly twenty years since we'd first met back on Okinawa. Eventually, we reached the import agency, which proved to be on the exit off the freeway that I'd taken earlier – I'd driven right by it when I'd first come into Livonia. This was another big dealership, although not quite as big as Frank's Ford dealership, and there were a lot of cars sitting around. We headed inside.

As expected, Vivian and Jerry were tied up with the negotiations with the Toyota people, but Frank leaned on Jerry's secretary a little to call them out of the meeting. "Tell them both there's someone here they'd like to meet." He didn't tell her who I was.

In a few minutes, Jerry came out of the conference room first. "My God!" Jerry's eyes grew wide. "Mel, where have you been hiding yourself?"

"Oh, I've been around," I smiled. "I see you're still shilling the marks."

"Not quite the same old way, but it's the same thing in the end," he laughed. Like everybody else, he looked older, too. He was a little older than I was, so he about had to be in his forties, but he didn't look quite right in a suit and tie. "Jeez, you look good. How long has it been, anyway? Ten years? No, it must be longer."

"A little less than ten since I got left behind," I told him. "Arlene and I are living down in Bradford, over toward South Bend."

"Mel!" Vivian cried as she saw me. She was a sight for sore eyes, too. She had to be in her early forties too by then, since I knew she was also a little older than I. But she had aged well, and didn't look much more than mid-thirties. She was still a beautiful woman, and I'd have to say a very handsome one at the same time. She looked like she had money, that was for sure, a very classy looking lady, not that she ever hadn't been. She was wearing a tasteful business suit with a moderate-length skirt, not like the miniskirts that were just starting to get popular then. "You don't have any idea how many times I've wondered what happened to you! So you wound up marrying Arlene? Frank said he figured the two of you would wind up getting together."

"From what I've heard today, it was obvious to everyone but me until we did," I smiled. "She couldn't come today, but I don't think she's going to be happy that she missed this."

"Mel, I'd really love to stand around and reminisce about the old days," she said. "But we're tied up in this meeting and we've got to get everything worked out. We're just going to have to work out a time to get together, and that means Arlene, too."