Dirt Bomb

by Beale, Fleur

  ‘You need to get your full,’ I said to Buzz. Sure, Robbie and I could do with getting our learners’, but I wished Buzz’s parents weren’t so picky about letting him drive us places.

  ‘Dad’ll take us,’ Buzz said. ‘We’ll ask nicely.’

  Frank didn’t even need persuading, but the catch was we had to have Bella along for the ride.

  ‘Get your own friends,’ Buzz said.

  Bella said, ‘I’ve got more friends than you. They’re just on holiday.’

  Robbie and I sat in the back of Frank’s Mazda with Bella between us. She talked a lot. I began to see why she bugged poor old Buzz so much.

  FRANK STOPPED THE car at Boscombe’s gate, or where a gate would have been if there had been one. From there we could see a stack of car bodies about fifty metres away.

  Robbie shook his head. ‘Not a decent burial for any of them. Poor old cars.’

  Bella opened her mouth. I’d heard enough of her voice for the year, so I got in first. ‘If his shed’s like that, he’ll never find the distributor. If he’s even got one.’

  ‘Well,’ said Frank, ‘I guess we go and find out.’

  We drove up to the shed, parked outside and got out. An old guy came out to meet us, his hand resting on the head of a massive rottweiler. I hoped the dog was better disciplined than the shed, because that was stuffed to the rafters. On a high shelf nearest the door I could see an axle sticking out, something with wires jammed in beside it, a couple of hubcaps, a wing mirror and a steering wheel. Boscombe might have a system for storing it all, but the gear had drowned it out long ago.

  Buzz told him what we were after. The rotty stopped giving us the evils and lay down, his big head on his paws.

  The old guy didn’t say a word, just stared off into space, or maybe into a secret filing system in his head. He stood like that, looking like he’d been struck by an alien’s paralysing gun, then he just turned round and shuffled into the shed.

  We glanced at each other. Follow him or stay put? Robbie took a step towards the shed. The rotty lifted his head. I swear that every hair on that dog’s body was alert and ready to jump. Robbie stepped back. The rotty relaxed.

  ‘Well trained,’ said Buzz.

  Could have been a fluke, but we didn’t feel like testing it.

  After a year or three, old Boscombe wove his way back through the mess and held out something that could have been a distributor. I hoped Buzz knew if it was. Robbie and I looked at him, but maybe he didn’t know either because he waved Frank over.

  Frank got out of the Mazda and told Bella to stay put. He held out a hand. ‘Frank Tring.’

  Boscombe ignored the hand. Frank gave a bit of a smile and took a look at the distributor. ‘It’s in good nick for what it is.’ He nodded to the three of us and went back to wait in the car with Bella.

  Buzz cleared his throat. ‘How much is it?’

  ‘A hundred.’

  Our eyes bulged. It had to be a try-on. Wreckers had electronic ones for under thirty.

  ‘Twenty-five,’ I said.

  He got a glint in his eye. ‘Seventy-five.’

  ‘Thirty,’ I said.

  He ran a finger over the distributor. ‘Sixty-five.’

  ‘Thirty-two fifty.’

  A corner of his mouth twitched. ‘Fifty-five twenty-five.’

  ‘A nice even thirty-five.’

  He pretended to think. Yeah right. If he didn’t have the exact sum he wanted in his ancient noddle, then I was an ace racing driver. ‘Fifty.’

  I stopped to think too, but I was really making the brain work, not like him, the old thief. I figured he could want $40 since he was creeping the bids down now. My next offer was critical — couldn’t be too high. ‘Thirty-six eighty.’

  He yawned. ‘Forty.’

  ‘Done,’ I said before he could change his mind or fall asleep.

  Buzz held the dollars out with one hand and took the distributor with the other. ‘Thanks.’

  Old Boscombe turned away without wasting another word on us and eased himself back into the jungle, the rotty following him. Nice dog. I wondered if the old skinflint ever talked to it.

  Frank was laughing when we climbed back in the car. ‘Funny as a film,’ he said. He looked at me in the rear-view mirror. ‘Good bargaining, Jake.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Robbie. ‘I thought he meant it.’

  Buzz said, ‘I was ready to pay him the hundred.’

  I didn’t tell them that years of trying to get money out of my father had made me an expert bargainer.

  Bella said, ‘Forty dollars for that old thing. What a rip-off.’

  It was more than we’d expected it to be, but we had it now. And I’d saved us sixty bucks. Well done, Jake.

  Chapter Seven

  BACKFIRE

  IT WAS A helluva lot easier putting the distributor in than it had been finding it. We slid it in, lined it up and did up the bolt at the side, then it was just a matter of attaching the leads to the spark plugs.

  ‘Does it matter where they go?’ I asked.

  Buzz said, ‘Yeah, but I think we’ve got it right.’

  ‘All done and dusted,’ Robbie said. We stood about, grins on our ugly faces.

  ‘So let’s fire her up,’ I said.

  We let Buzz have the honour, because we needed petrol that he could ask his dad for. Frank had a tank of the stuff and maybe he’d let us have some but maybe he wouldn’t. He did. We had to put it in a can, then pour it into the Commodore.

  ‘Okay!’ Buzz swung himself into the car. ‘Time to hit the paddocks!’

  He started the car. The engine roared and backfired. We laughed and waited for him to take off. The gears graunched, Buzz swore and revved the motor, but that only produced some more loud backfires. The car stayed right where it was. He tried second, then every other gear. Same horrible graunching, but again no movement.

  ‘Dad!’

  Frank ambled over. ‘Busted gear box. And your timing’s out on the dizzy.’

  He ambled back. No help there.

  We were gutted. So near, so much work and the bloody thing wasn’t going anywhere.

  ‘Back to the wrecker then,’ Robbie said at last.

  ‘I guess,’ Buzz said. ‘Can’t do it today though. The place’ll be shut by the time we get there.’

  ‘We could fix the timing,’ I said. ‘Might as well get that right.’

  We hauled up the bonnet and bent over the engine bay. Buzz undid the bolt on the distributor. ‘We must’ve lined it up wrong.’ We took it out, figured out which way it should go in and set it up all over again.

  Frank stirred himself enough to shout, ‘Stand back when you start the motor.’

  Buzz jumped back in the car, while Robbie and I stood up straight enough to make Frank think we’d taken his advice. The engine roared, flames leapt up at us, and we fell back, swiping at our eyebrows. As the flames died down, we poked our heads back into the engine bay.

  ‘Get out, Buzz,’ I yelled.

  ‘The engine’s on fire!’ Robbie hollered.

  Buzz hauled himself out at the same time as Frank ambled over, a rag in his hand. He squashed it over the flame, damping it down. He kept his face straight and said, ‘Thought that might happen. You’ve got the dizzy out by a hundred and eighty degrees.’

  It took us another half hour of taking the dizzy out, adjusting it, putting it back and trying the engine before we got things running sweetly, with no flames and no backfiring.

  We stood around, looking at the car. ‘A good day’s work,’ I said.

  Robbie picked up his bike. ‘Speaking of work, I gotta go.’

  Buzz leapt as if a bee had got him in a tender spot. ‘Shit! What’s the time?’ He took off for the house.

  ‘See ya tomorrow,’ I shouted. He waved a hand.

  I didn’t want to ride to Tauranga again. I thought about it all the way home, and I had room for thinking, because old ditzy Robbie was riding straight and true. The age of miracles and all t
hat. But no miracle slipped into my head.

  Speck came to meet me. Gramps was home, but the kitchen wasn’t looking like an army had gone through it. ‘Where’s the old guy?’ I asked Speck. I took a look through the window. Sure enough he was out in the back garden, doing something fancy with a wheelbarrow and the compost heap. ‘Doing his bit,’ I told Speck.

  I made food for me and her. Damn it. I so didn’t want to spend another day on the bike. And we could get all the way out there and the wrecker mightn’t have a fecking gear box anyway. Or we could get one and the thing could be a box of bones and how the hell were we meant to know? Speck was no help.

  I wandered out to Gramps. ‘Know anything about gear boxes?’ I asked.

  He straightened up. ‘I might. But I’m too dry to talk. Cuppa could help.’

  The old blackmailer. I went back inside to put the kettle on. Brought him his cuppa and a pile of yesterday’s biscuits, which I ate most of.

  ‘What you want to know?’

  ‘How you can tell if one’s any good if it’s in a wrecked car,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t think you can,’ he said. ‘Luck of the draw.’

  Shit. If that was right, we could definitely have a long bike ride for nothing.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said after he’d chewed through two biscuits and downed his cuppa without saying a word. ‘You clean my car. Inside and out. And I’ll take the three of you to the wrecker tomorrow.’

  I thought about that. The pain of riding, versus the pain of Gramps crowing like a rooster because he’d got some work out of me, plus I’d have to clean that car like he was going to get married in the old heap. Pain today, gain tomorrow?

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  He went back to the wheelbarrow, cackling like a chook.

  I cleaned the car. Vacuumed it. Cleaned the windows inside. It took me nearly two hours — less than the time it took to ride one way to the wrecker. Halfway through, Gramps took himself into the kitchen and watched me through the window.

  ‘Finished!’ I bellowed.

  He came out, inspected it like it was the latest Lamborghini instead of an old Honda. ‘Not bad. Not bad at all.’ He nodded. ‘Okay, you’ve earned yourself a ride tomorrow.’

  ‘Thanks Gramps.’ I ignored the lesson-for-Jake.

  I rang Robbie. ‘Awesome. Didn’t want to do that ride again.’

  I rang Buzz. ‘Brilliant. What did you have to do to score that?’

  ‘Clean his car. Turns out it’s not brown. It’s red.’

  Buzz laughed. ‘See you tomorrow. Good one, Jake.’

  More Brownie points. They were mounting up.

  GRAMPS STAYED IN the car with his paper while we hit the wrecker’s yard. Buzz asked the guy in the office if he knew whether any of the Commodores had working gear boxes. The man wasn’t helpful. ‘Just pick your car, sonny. You might be lucky. You might not be.’

  I bet a thousand that he hoped we’d be dead unlucky.

  ‘So do we choose a really smashed-up car or one that’s not so bent and busted?’ Robbie asked.

  We didn’t know. We walked down the row, looking at all the wrecks and not getting any nearer to reaching a decision. After a few minutes of that, Buzz said, ‘I say we don’t get one from a smash. The drive shaft could be bent and the whole thing completely munted.’

  True. In the end we settled on the car we’d taken the starter motor from. Buzz said, ‘Okay, who wants to slide under and undo the bolts?’

  Robbie looked at me. I looked at Robbie.

  ‘Um, I don’t actually know what a gear box looks like,’ I said, feeling really stupid.

  Robbie said, ‘Same.’

  But did Buzz quietly get himself under the car and sort it all? No. ‘Come on, guys. Time to learn. Stick your heads under and watch.’

  All three of us lay on the ground so that the car had legs sticking out from the front and both sides. ‘Drive shaft first,’ Buzz said.

  There were four bolts to undo. None of them gave him any problems, which was lucky because we’d left the spray lube at his place. He slid the shaft out.

  ‘Okay, bros — who’s going to take the clutch cable off?’

  ‘Robbie can,’ I said.

  ‘Jake will,’ he said.

  Buzz said, ‘Morons.’ He showed us where it was. It actually wasn’t too complicated, and by the time I’d undone a heap more bolts I knew what a bell housing was and would know a cross-member if one ever hit me on the head.

  Buzz wriggled out from under the car.

  ‘Hey! Where are you going?’ Robbie yelled. ‘The bloody thing’s still stuck in the bloody wreck.’

  ‘Come and get your mind expanded, my friend,’ Buzz said.

  I wasn’t sorry to get vertical again. Buzz was leaning into the car and tugging at the console round the gear stick. ‘It’s much easier to get it out if we take the gear stick out first.’ He tugged at the console around it. ‘Damn it! These things are buggers to get off.’

  Not if you’ve got brains, bro. I pulled my head out of the car and went fishing in the bag of tools.

  Buzz looked up when I came back waving the eight-inch crescent. ‘Wake up, Jake. That’s no use.’

  ‘Stand back,’ I ordered. ‘Watch and learn.’ I took an almighty swing at the plastic console and smashed the head of the spanner into it. A crack line shot across it.

  ‘He could have a brain in his head after all,’ Robbie said.

  ‘Classy,’ Buzz said. ‘And tidy.’

  I didn’t care, just kept on bashing. After a few more thumps, Robbie got stuck in with the smaller crescent. It wasn’t as good, but he did enough damage to make him happy. Buzz watched, nodding his head every time another chunk of plastic bit the dust.

  It didn’t take long to demolish the console. ‘Look at that,’ Robbie said. ‘One perfect gear stick.’

  No dramas getting it out either, then it was back under the car where we discovered exactly how heavy a gear box was. We had quite a struggle to lift the fecker.

  ‘It had better work after all this,’ Buzz grunted.

  We lugged it to the office, paid our money, and headed for Gramps and his chariot, mighty glad we didn’t have to try to carry the gear box and drive shaft on our bikes.

  Frank wasn’t around when we got back, but he’d left us a very loud note. USE THE BIG JACK TO LIFT THE CAR. PUT AXLE STANDS UNDER IT. IF I GET BACK AND FIND YOU SQUASHED YOU’RE DEAD.

  We got the picture.

  Robbie and I got the honour of taking the gear box out of the Commodore while Buzz kept a sharp eye on us. No sweat. It wasn’t too hard getting the new one back in. No dramas.

  We lowered the car. Now for the big test — had we got a good one or a lemon?

  Buzz climbed in via the window and started the motor without any flames or backfiring. The three of us held our breaths as he slipped the gear stick into first and eased down on the gas. ‘Yes!’ Buzz had a huge grin on his face while Robbie and I leapt up and down, high-fiving and yahooing. Frank drove up in time to watch Buzz do a lap of the yard.

  ‘Can’t believe it,’ Robbie said. ‘We’ve got the old girl going.’

  Frank got out of the ute. ‘Well done, you lot. Good work. We’ll put it on the trailer and take it to the paddock. Which is where, by the way?’ He looked at us, head on one side.

  ‘Um,’ said Robbie.

  ‘Er,’ I said.

  ‘We haven’t actually thought about that,’ said Buzz.

  Frank did the slight grin and headed into the shed. ‘Let me know when you’ve got it sorted.’

  ‘Hot bloody damn,’ Buzz said.

  ‘Never thought about getting a paddock,’ Robbie said. He looked at Buzz. ‘Could you ask some of your farmers?’

  Buzz shrugged. ‘I guess. They’ll say no, though. They won’t want a whole paddock wrecked.’ He rubbed his hands through his hair. I guess grease could be good for hair. ‘It’ll be sweet after the maize is harvested.’

  ‘When’s that?’ I asked. S
oon? Like tomorrow?

  Buzz pulled his mouth down. ‘Starts in March.’

  We kicked round a few ideas. Came up with sweet nothing. Went home.

  Chapter Eight

  ROAR OF EXHAUST

  GRAMPS WAS COOKING again. Preparing a feast for the barbie. Sausages and steak soaking in something. Speck didn’t come and say hi — too busy with pieces of steak in her dish.

  ‘End of the world on the way, is it?’ Gramps asked.

  Very funny. I stuck my head in the fridge. Tried the pantry. Nothing. It would have to be toast.

  ‘Gear box no good?’ he asked. He sounded faintly interested, so I told him the sad story and waited for him to laugh his socks off.

  He did do a bit of a grin, but he looked like he was thinking too, so I kept my trap shut, squatted down and had a chat to Speck.

  But nothing doing. Gramps shook his head. ‘If I think of anywhere, I’ll let you know.’ He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘If I had a paddock, I’d let you use it.’

  Easy to say, but coming from him that was like saying a big fat sorry about that old chum. So I just said, ‘Ta.’

  Mum came home looking about as cheerful as I felt. She flopped into a deck chair. Gramps brought her out a cold one. Didn’t offer me one, so I got it myself. He grabbed it off me. ‘You don’t drink till you can buy your own.’ I didn’t bother pointing out that the rate the law was heading that would be when I was about the same age as him.

  ‘I need a new job,’ Mum said. She said that on average once a month. Apparently receptionist at a land agent’s wasn’t the job of her dreams. She looked at me. ‘You’d better do some work at school this year, Jake. Get some qualifications behind you.’

  Yeah, yeah.

  Gramps fired up the barbie. People started arriving. He must’ve invited the entire bowling club, median age ninety not out. The phone went just when they were starting to sing. I raced inside to answer it on the off-chance it was Buzz saying his dad had found us a paddock.

  In my dreams.