Josh’s parents were gone, his father to the college and his mother to the library, both having pulled out of the driveway at the same time ten minutes earlier, his father in the black Cadillac, his mother in the red Toyota Corolla, he going one way at the end of the street, she the other, the whole thing an apt metaphor. Or was it an analogy? No, it must be an underlying theme. Yeah, that’s it. An underlying theme that explained how his parents’ marriage had gone down the crapper the past few years, each of them going their separate ways.
Anyway, they were both gone and he’d waited long enough to make sure neither of them came back for anything. Josh got off his bed and grabbed his jean jacket off the bedpost. Half-way down the stairs he stopped at the photograph. The photograph. It showed two boys on their father’s boat, Pythagoras, on Lake Champlain, smiling, hair trailing behind them, red life jackets covering their hairless, tanned chests. Their dad had been driving the boat while their mom took the picture. That had been three years ago when they were fifteen, just a couple weeks after their birthday. Two weeks on the lake doing nothing but listening to the radio all day (Burlington had a great rock station back then that played all the good stuff), playing ping pong in the rec hall (which meant one brother always beating the other, but the other never seeming to mind too much), walking the old railroad trestle out into the lake, swimming out to the raft and catching some rays for hours on end, fishing with their father at night, and, of course, flirting with the girls whose families had come down from Canada for a couple weeks of vacation. French girls! (Or French Canadian, but, then again, who kept track of such things.)
That day on the boat with mom and dad, both boys would have agreed, had been the best day ever of the best vacation ever.
Josh shook his head and sighed. A thousand-ton anchor settled inside his chest, mooring his heart to a past that got swept out to sea a long time ago. He should not have stopped to look at the picture. How long had it been, a couple months? He should have kept the streak going. He pulled his eyes away from the two boys and descended the rest of the stairs. He crossed the kitchen, evaded the island guarding the middle zone, snatched his car keys that dangled from the wall hook, and slipped out the side door that opened into the garage.
He draped his jean jacket over the wood railing, walked down the five steps to the garage floor, and stood next to the covered machine. His heart lightened and his pulse quickened. He bent down and grabbed the corner of the car cover. He pulled it up to his chest, gave it a flick of the wrists, and pulled the fabric toward him, all in one graceful movement. The trick had taken him an entire week to master.
And there it was—The Beast. His 1967 Pontiac GTO hardtop that he and his father had restored. Equipped with a 400 cubic inch engine that cranked out 360 horsepower at 5,100 rpms (no, Dad, of course I won’t ever push it that far!), Rochester Quadrajet four-barrel carb, three speed Turbo-Hydramatic TH-400 tranny, Hurst Performance Dual-Gate his/her shifter, Rally II wheels, and, topping it off, black high-gloss paint job that gave it a black-panther-on-the-prowl-at-night look.
The car was a monster. It was…The Beast.
When his father had bought the car five years ago for Josh’s thirteenth birthday and had it brought home on Big Earl’s ramp truck—it would be months later, as the transformation of the car took shape, that Josh would christen it The Beast—the thing had been in bad shape. The entire body had been littered with dents and dings, the quarter panels cratered with rusted-out holes, right front fender bashed in by a stubborn tree or telephone pole, engine caked with grease and grime, interior drenched in the rancid aroma of old cigarette smoke and stale cologne and Josh didn’t even want to think about what else. Whoever had owned it obviously hadn’t known the first thing about taking care of such a beautiful machine.
But the old man knew how. Josh didn’t see eye-to-eye with his old man on many things, and he thought his father was clueless about a great many other things, but one thing they did agree on, and one thing his father knew, was cars. It had taken three years’ worth of late nights in the garage eating pizza and grinders and take-out Chinese, saving and scrounging up enough money to buy body panels and engine parts. There had been arguments about what to fix next and how to fix it, they got bogged down overhauling the transmission, and they had to wait forever for Kit’s Auto Body to finish the paint job. Julian had even pitched in every now and then in spite of the well-known fact that he knew next to nothing about cars. There had been many times when Josh had thought they wouldn’t finish it; times when he had wanted to quit because it was too hard, too time-consuming, too much arguing. But his father wouldn’t let him. He always came out with the right thing to say to Josh when discouragement got the best of him, always telling a well-placed joke or story to break the tension when the two of them got on each other’s nerves and were in danger of progressing to each other’s throats. Josh never would have seen it through to the end if it hadn’t been for his father.
In spite of how difficult it had been, Josh had lots of memories from those days. Lots of good memories.
Josh folded the car cover as solemnly as a soldier folding an American flag to be presented to a widow. He then tossed it over the roof of the car. It landed on the floor next to the work bench with a soft flump. He heaved open the garage door then unlocked the driver’s door of The Beast. Reaching up to the railing and snagging the jean jacket, he swung it over his shoulders and slid his arms into the sleeves.
Josh slid behind the wheel of The Beast. He closed the door. He ran his hands over the steering wheel, remembering the day he and his father had spent hours calling and searching all the local and not-so-local junk yards looking for this particular one. They had found it in the next-to-last junk yard on their list. On that sun-drenched, humid August afternoon it had taken them an hour to drive south to the other side of Worcester, another forty-five minutes of sweating and swearing to work the steering wheel off the column of the car, followed by the weary drive back home. On the return trip, the sun having set and the evening darkness creeping over them, they had stopped at a pizza place in Rutland where they ate BLT subs and barbecue chips, drank Cokes, put quarters in the jukebox, and laughed. As hungry and hot and tired as they had been that night, they had laughed all the more and all the fuller.
He reached into his pocket for the keys and inserted one of them into the ignition switch. He checked the rear-view mirror, angling it until it was just right. He grinned and nodded at his reflection. He turned the key. The Beast roared to life, unclogging its throat with a rumble of the engine, breathing out exhaust through its dual tailpipes. Josh relished the power of the machine. He turned on the radio—permanently tuned to WAAF 107.3 FM—in time to hear the DJ segue from AC/DCs ‘Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap’ into a song by Van Halen, a newly discovered rock group. The song, Josh would find out minutes later, was ‘Runnin’ with the Devil.’ He listened to the bass intro, decided he liked the sound of the lead guitar, and cranked it up. He then moved the shifter and guided The Beast out of the garage. He stopped in the driveway, got out, closed the garage door, and hopped back in. As he closed the door and pulled into the street, Josh could hear his mother’s voice inside his head—yeah, just what he needed, another voice up there!—telling him to be sure to drive safely and to wear a winter coat because it was cold and it was supposed to snow later today.
“Don’t worry, Ma,” Josh said as punched the clutch, rammed the shifter into second, and stomped on the gas. “I always drive safely, and it’s definitely a jean jacket kinda day.”