by Roan Parrish
“Yeah, that’s right.” I smile at her, but she keeps staring at the car. “Know what it stands for?” No way will any of them know this. Hell, most people who own BMWs don’t know what it stands for. I look at Rafe, who shrugs, proving my point.
“Bayerische Motoren Werke.”
Ricky again. Holy shit.
“Uh, yeah, that’s right.” She’s staring blankly at the car. “Do you know a lot about cars?” She shakes her head. “Do you know anything else about BMWs?”
“BMW. Established 1916. Produced aircraft engines but forced to stop based on the terms of the Treaty of Versailles prohibiting the manufacture and stockpile of arms or armored vehicles. Began producing motorcycles in 1923 and cars in 1928. In the 1930s, BMW engine designs were used for Luftwaffe aircraft, including the first four-jet aircraft to be flown—”
“Holy crap, so Conan has a Nazi car?” Carlos says.
I can’t take my eyes off Ricky. She’s staring straight ahead like she’s reading this information out of the air.
“Hey, Ricky?” I say. She jerks her gaze toward me. “That’s really impressive. How do you know all that?”
“Yo, Ricky Recordo right here! She’s got a straight-up photographic memory,” Mikal says, stepping closer to me and winking.
“Oh. Cool,” I say. “Great. So, we’ve got the year, the manufacturer. Then the model of the car. In this case, 320. Well, 320i, but the i just means it has fuel injection—anyway, the 320 refers to which BMW it is.”
The kids are looking a little blank.
“But, okay, so a 2014 Honda Civic is simpler: it was made in 2014, by Honda, and the model is a Civic. Got it?”
“Got it,” a few of them echo.
“Pop the hood?” I ask Rafe. He has to contort to do it from outside the car and he’s surprisingly flexible. He has on worn black jeans that sit low on his hips and hug his ass perfectly and a gray henley with the sleeves pushed up his muscular forearms. Damn, I am not paying attention to that right now because I’m supposed to be talking about cars. Uh, no, I’m not paying attention to that period.
I force my eyes to the car and resolve not to look at Rafe again. Under the hood is familiar territory, and I lose myself for a moment in the satisfaction of seeing everything exactly where it should be.
When Daniel was little, he had these books he would beg me to read to him that he got from the school library where a wacky science teacher miniaturized the kids in her class so that they could see things at the micro level. Daniel would sit on my lap and we’d trace the students’ path through the human body, through a hurricane, through the solar system. That’s how I feel when I look at a car. Like I’m tiny and can imagine a path through all its different systems. It’s dumb, I guess, but it helps me picture everything.
I figured that I’d start by explaining how each of the systems work—engine, exhaust, brakes, cooling, electrical, fuel, suspension, etc. It will give them a good sense of the basics and how all the systems interrelate.
“So, does anyone know what makes a car starts when you turn the key?”
Blank looks and narrowed eyes.
Ignition is so cool—like an action movie. I can see it in my head: the combustion chamber and the crankcase, the pistons floating on a layer of oil in the cylinder, moving up and down, rotating the crankshaft and starting rotary motion; the valve train; the camshaft opening the intake valve as the piston moves down, forming a vacuum that sucks air and fuel into the combustion chamber where they’re compressed; the spark plug firing, igniting fuel and air, the explosion pushing the piston back down the cylinder and driving the crankshaft; the exhaust valve opening and the excess gasses being pushed out to the exhaust system. Each tiny piece has one job, and when they work together perfectly, they power this one-and-a-half-ton machine. It amazes me every time I think about it.
I realize I haven’t said anything out loud and the kids are still staring at me, and I immediately rethink my plan to explain all the systems. I don’t know how to express to them the… magic that I see.
“Um,” I say. “Well, really, it’s an explosion. Fuel—the gas you put in the car—and air get compressed, squeezed into a really small space, and then a spark ignites them and the explosion starts the car. Like a bullet.”
“Whoa, cool,” the kids chorus.
“So why doesn’t the whole car explode?” asks one of the girls who introduced each other earlier.
“Yeah,” says the other. “And sometimes don’t they just explode?”
“Totally,” Carlos says. “Hey, do real cars explode like in the movies? Like… what do you call it…?”
“Spontaneous combustion,” supplies Gap Model quietly.
“Yeah,” says Carlos, pounding on Gap Model’s shoulder in thanks, “spontaneous combustion! That’s so sweet.”
“Ooh, honey, I saw a car on fire once, at 12th and Girard. I bet it totes blew up,” Mikal says.
“Oh my god, would you stop it with ‘totes,’ Mikey. You sound like a twelve-year-old white girl.”
“Shut up with that Mikey shit, Dot.”
“Boy, don’t call me that or I’ll make you wish—”
“Stop.” Rafe’s voice cuts through the squabbling. “We have a guest. Can we please save the discussion of nicknames for later?”
Dorothy rolls her eyes but nods. Mikal turns to me and gives me a look that is clearly meant to be charming or seductive, but is mostly just amusing.
“Sorry, sweetie,” he says, pouting and opening his eyes wide.
“Uh, no problem,” I say. I turn back to Carlos and the twins. “Well, most cars aren’t going to randomly catch on fire or explode.” A few people exhale with relief and I debate whether I should go on. Eh, shit, everyone likes explosions, right? “But it can happen. Sometimes a battery will be defective and it’ll explode, and that looks like the car itself is exploding. When you’re charging your car battery, it releases hydrogen, and if a spark were to ignite the hydrogen, it would definitely explode.
“Or, you know, if you had a gas or oil leak in your car and the fuel dripped onto something really hot, that could cause an explosion too. Oh, and sometimes electrical systems go all weird. They can overheat or short out, which can cause a fire, and that can cause an explosion if the fire hits fuel.”
Everyone is staring at me. Rafe has his right hand protectively on the roof of his car as if it’s going to explode at any moment.
“But, um, those are all really rare occurrences. Really, really rare,” I reassure them. “I’ve never seen it happen and I’ve been a mechanic for almost twenty years.” This seems to put them at ease a little.
“So, what kind of car do you have,” Mikal asks, his tone flirtatious. People always expect that if you’re a mechanic, then you’re going to have some tricked-out showy car, but I’ve never known any mechanic who did.
“A ’93 VW Rabbit,” I say. “Right now.”
They look supremely unimpressed.
“Like, but why?” asks Carlos. “That’s almost as old as Conan’s car. Couldn’t you, like, put together any car you want?”
“Hey, let’s not insult our guest’s car,” Rafe says.
“No, it’s cool,” I say. “Well, most mechanics I know drive junkers. For one thing, people are always offering to sell us crappy cars for really cheap. And when you know what you’re doing, you can fix it up so it runs just fine. So why spend a ton of money when you know you have an endless supply of four-hundred-dollar cars that you can cycle through? Plus, I hate to shatter your illusions, but we don’t make that much money. It’s not like people are giving away their fancy sports cars when they have something wrong with them. So, yeah, mostly, it’s just really easy to have a car I don’t have to worry about.
“That’s how I got my first car, actually. A customer brought in a falling-apart piece of crap and my dad told him it was worth a few bucks as scrap but would cost a fortune to fix, and the guy sold it to him for two hundred dollars. I bought it off my dad and fixed
it up.”
I painstakingly replaced each busted, rusted-out part in that car, one by one, until it ran as well as anything—hell, better than anything I could’ve afforded. It took almost a year, but had the bonus of familiarizing me with every scrapyard and junk shop in a thirty-block radius.
This seems to have gotten a few of them interested.
“Could we learn to do that?” Gap Model asks.
“Oh yeah,” I say. “It would take a lot of practice, but now there are some really good videos on YouTube of people fixing different parts of cars and stuff.”
“Why don’t we take ten and then meet back here, okay?” Rafe says. The kids wander back into the church. Rafe is so close I can smell him, can feel his warmth at my side.
“Listen,” he says, his voice low. “You’re doing great. Just be careful you don’t promise them anything you won’t follow through with, okay?”
“What do you mean?”
“Most of these kids don’t have people who will spend time teaching them things. So, when they do—look, you just don’t want to make it sound like you’ll be around to help them learn all this stuff if you won’t be. It’s hard for them if they start counting on you to come back and you don’t. They already have a lot of that in their lives. People disappearing. Breaking promises. You know?”
Rafe looks sad, gazing toward the door the kids left through.
“Yeah, I get it.”
He squeezes my biceps and nods.
Mikal is the first one back, and it looks like he’s applied some kind of glittery lip gloss.
“So,” he says, standing about a foot too close to me, “what’s wrong with you?”
“Um, excuse me?”
“Well, there must be something wrong with you; you’re here.” Mikal gestures around him.
I look at Rafe, unsure of what to say.
“Besides, Khal Drogo here is a sucker for a lost cause. Just look around.” Mikal’s trying to tease, I know, but his voice has changed, his flirty tone gone flat.
“Hey,” says Rafe, holding Mikal’s gaze. “There’s nothing wrong with you. Any of you. You aren’t… lost causes.” He practically spits the words out. Mikal nods but drops his eyes. I can tell Rafe wants to say more but he bites it back as the other kids join us.
The rest of the workshop goes better now that I’m not so nervous. I demonstrate a few things on Rafe’s car, things that I think would be most useful to the kids in case their family cars have problems—how to change a flat tire, how to add oil and top off other fluids. And I look like a complete ass when I try and imitate common noises that cars make when certain things are wrong with them, which quickly devolves into us all making weird shrieking and groaning noises like a pack of wild dogs.
I also answer some of the weirdest questions about cars I’ve ever heard, including, “Could you put together a car that had two front ends or two back ends?” from Gap Model, to which someone replies, “Course you want something with two back ends,” whatever that means; “Is it possible to have a second set of wheels so cars could move side to side?” from one of the twins; and “You know that flying car in Harry Potter? Could you make that?” from the kid in all black who hasn’t spoken since he walked in. I don’t know the flying car in Harry Potter, but the rest of the kids greet this idea with enthusiasm.
Then it’s over, and the time has gone so fast that I feel like I didn’t get to talk about even 10 percent of what I’d wanted to. The twins, Gap Model, and Dorothy wave good-bye to me and call out their thanks as they leave. Carlos thanks me and turns to Rafe.
“Good one, Conan. Way better than that modern dance bullshit.”
“You think I didn’t see you enjoying the hell out of modern dance, Carlito?”
Carlos mutters something and jogs away. The kid in all black waves good-bye just as he waved hello and wanders off in the other direction.
“Thank you,” says DeShawn, holding out his hand. “That was interesting.” Again, I’m struck by the softness of his voice, though his handshake is firm. Something about the way he’s trying not to seem threatening reminds me of Rafe. I mostly do the opposite.
“You’re welcome,” I say. He nods solemnly and starts to walk off, but Rafe catches up to him and they start talking about something I can’t hear.
Only Ricky is left, staring at Rafe’s car as if she’s still seeing its guts even though the hood is down now.
“You know,” I say quietly to Ricky, taking a page out of DeShawn’s book so as not to startle her, “with a photographic memory, you could learn cars really easily. So much of it is just remembering how the pieces interact; what goes where; which are the things that are different in one model versus another. You’d probably be real good at it.”
She sighs but doesn’t look at me.
“Probably,” she says. And she walks away, thin arms wrapped around her chest, hugging herself.
I’m packing up my tools when Rafe comes back over.
“That went well, huh?”
“You think? I—there was so much I could’ve told them. I don’t know if I picked the right stuff. Or if it’ll be useful to them.”
“They seemed to really enjoy it,” he says, and he sounds completely sure. “It interested them, caught their attention. That was my goal for it, and by that measure it was a definite success.”
“Oh, okay. Well, that’s good, then.”
“It is. So, thank you. Let me buy you lunch? There’s a great burger place a couple blocks from here.”
As I load my tools into the trunk, Rafe stands close enough that I can smell him—warm and spicy and clean—and I fight the urge to lean in and sniff him by slamming the trunk shut hard and digging my car keys into my palm.
The burger place is a little hole-in-the-wall with stools under a bar built into the wall. Rafe’s posture is casual and he seems totally concentrated on enjoying his burger, so I try to do the same. I force myself to relax, muscle by muscle, like I do when I can’t sleep.
I have the strangest feeling that I’ve been transported to some other world, like in a science fiction movie. Like I woke up this morning, got in my car, and at some point, drove through a—what do they call them in those movies: wormholes? Yeah, I drove through a wormhole and now I’m here in some alternate North Philly with this person who doesn’t exist in my real life, doing things I’d never do in my real life, like the workshop, feeling like I never feel in my real life.
Almost… what’s the opposite of miserable?
It’s like a warm charge in my chest. Energy, maybe, but not the kind of fidgety energy I usually have that compels me to run or lift until I can sit still without ripping myself apart. This is—fuck, I don’t know.
“Are you going to eat?”
“Huh?”
Rafe points to my burger, which only has one bite taken out of it.
“Oh,” I say. “Yeah.”
I haven’t figured out how to talk to Rafe yet. Fortunately, shoving food in my face gives me a great excuse not to. We don’t know each other, so there’s nothing to catch up on like there is with Xavier. No “How’s your mom?” or “Is your officemate still a jerkoff?” Usually, that would mean small talk, but Rafe has shown himself to be uninterested in that so it seems silly to bother.
“So, um,” I say, “I didn’t catch some of the kids’ names. Can you go through them again?”
Rafe’s eyes light up and I know I picked the right topic.
“Carlos,” he begins, and I nod. That one I got. “He’s a nice kid. I think he’ll calm down some. He’s been coming to the YA for about three years.”
“YA?”
“Youth Alliance.”
I nod and keep eating. The burger is really good, despite the fact that the floor is dirty and I can’t even tell what color the walls are supposed to be.
“Then there’s Dorothy. She talks tough, but she looks out for everyone. She’s a poet. Really amazing.”
“Who were the twins?”
“Oh,
that’s Sammi and Tynesha. They’re not twins, they’re cousins, but they do everything together. They just started coming a few months ago, so I don’t know them that well. Edward is quiet—”
“Is that the Gap model? White T-shirt?”
“Shit, he does look like a Gap model.” Rafe smiles. “From the nineties.” He shakes his head. “Yeah, he’s quiet, but if you get him talking about music, he’s all right.”
“What kind of music?”
“Not sure, exactly. I don’t usually know most of what they listen to. But I’ve heard him talk a lot with Mikal about experimental music from, I don’t know, Sweden or Iceland or something. Not really stuff I know anything about, though it sounds interesting.”
He gets a look in his eye that I take to mean he’s going to look into it. Rafe seems interested in everything. I respect it, that curiosity. Like he genuinely cares enough about some teenager to look into the music he likes so he can talk to him about it. I can’t even imagine Pop doing something like that. Or my brothers, for that matter. Well. No, Daniel would do that. Hell, Daniel did do that. He’d ask me who did a song and then ask me things about the band. Then the next time that song came on the radio, he always remembered it.
“So what kind of music do you like?” I ask.
“Honestly?” Rafe runs a hand through his hair. “I mostly end up listening to whatever radio station the kids put on: Top 40 or hip-hop or alternative, usually. I think I know the words to every Taylor Swift song, but I wouldn’t know her if I fell over her.”
“Taylor Swift—I—wow.” I can’t help but laugh at the picture of Rafe singing along to Taylor Swift, but he smiles at me, not seeming embarrassed by it, really.
“What would you listen to at home, then?” I try to predict what he’s going to say; I’m usually pretty good at that, but he’s jammed every signal I have for this sort of thing and I really have no idea.
“I don’t listen to music that much,” he says. “Mostly in the car, and I don’t drive that often. I like country some. I used to listen to mostly rap and hip-hop when I was younger, but that was when I was with friends. Yeah, country. Bluesy country I like a lot. Mostly when I’m home, though, I listen to podcasts.”
