by Rosa Jordan
Justin had no idea what to do. He hadn’t thought to ask for a telephone number and Charlie hadn’t thought to give him one. He didn’t even know if his dad lived in Miami or down by the track, in Homestead.
Justin stood on the sidewalk outside the main entrance of the bus station for about fifteen minutes, watching headlights come toward him and go on by. The only other place open was a body-piercing and tattoo shop a few doors down. Justin thought about walking down to look in the window, but he was afraid he might miss his dad—if he ever came.
He had just decided to go in to see if there was a new phone listing for Charlie Martin when a small red sports car swerved to the curb. Justin was so relieved to see the familiar convertible that he was already grinning and waving before he realized that it was not his dad in the driver’s seat. Could there be two red sports cars in the city that looked exactly alike?
“Hey, are you Justin Martin?” yelled the driver, a boy of about nineteen wearing greasy mechanic’s overalls.
“Yeah,” Justin answered. “Who’re you?”
“Jimmy Johnson. Grease monkey down at the pit. Your dad sent me to pick you up. Sorry I’m late. He said to stop and get a pizza. Took awhile, y’know?”
“Where’s Charlie?”
“At the pit. Jump in. That’s where we’re going.”
Jimmy picked up a pizza box and held it until Justin had squeezed into the passenger seat with his backpack between his knees. Then Jimmy handed him the box, which Justin balanced on top of the backpack—not easy given the way Jimmy drove, all gas pedal and brakes.
Justin would have liked to ask some questions about what went on at the garage—or “the pit” as Jimmy called it—but the boy didn’t seem all that interested in carrying on a conversation. He kept one eye on the traffic, muttering and sometimes swearing at cars that got in his way, and the other eye out for girls. Any time a female turned to look at the sexy little car—and quite a few did—Jimmy would flash her a grin and yell, “Hey, foxy lady!” Although Jimmy’s attention-grabbing yells embarrassed Justin, he couldn’t help laughing. A couple of the girls smiled, but one with spiky orange hair gave Jimmy the finger.
They pulled up to a big, well-lighted garage, its doors open. Justin saw a man’s rear end hanging over the fender of a sleek low-slung vehicle that looked like a cross between a car and a spacecraft. Charlie’s head was somewhere down in the engine.
“There’s your dad,” Jimmy pointed out, as if Justin couldn’t recognize his own father’s behind. “The mechanic holding the trouble light for him is Mickey, and the one in the driver’s seat is José.”
“You all working pretty late, aren’t you?” Justin ventured.
Jimmy laughed. “Late? Hell, it’s not even midnight. Sometimes we don’t get out of here till two in the morning. Specially me. I got to stay and clean up. Low man on the totem pole, you know?”
Jimmy leapt out of the car and began picking up and putting away tools. Justin looked around, uneasy but fascinated. This was a whole new world to him. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to spend all day and half the night in a place like this. The gasoline and exhaust smell alone was enough to make you gag.
Charlie, still poking around in the engine, glanced up. “Hey, Justin! You made it. We’re just about done here.” He signaled to the guy named José, who gunned the motor.
A deafening roar reverberated inside the garage. To Justin it just sounded like a loud motor, but the mechanics seemed to hear something more. All three of them grinned and nodded with satisfaction, as if there was something in the engine’s roar that they’d been waiting to hear.
“That’s it.” Charlie went to a sink, dug his fingers into a jar of hand cleaner, and wiped most of the grease off his hands with a dirty rag. “Come on, Justin,” he said, walking over to where Justin still sat in the red convertible. “Let’s head.” He nodded to the others. “See you guys back at the place.”
Justin waved goodbye to Jimmy, and Jimmy waved back with one oil-blackened hand. He was already hard at work, scrubbing down the greasy garage—a job that Justin figured would take the rest of the night.
Charlie’s apartment smelled like the garage, only not as strong. It took Justin a minute to realize that the odor came from the dirty mechanics’ clothes scattered around. You could tell it was a bachelors’ pad by the mess everywhere. Despite the clutter, the place had a bare feel to it, like the people who lived there didn’t expect to stay long. Which, of course, was true.
“Throw your pack in there.” Charlie motioned to a bedroom with twin beds.
Justin did as he was told, then followed Charlie into the kitchen. He set the pizza box on the table. It was about six hours past Justin’s usual suppertime and he was starving. The pizza was cold, but it still smelled good.
Charlie opened the refrigerator. “What’ll you have to drink? Let’s see, we have beer and—oops, looks like we’re out of soda.”
“Water’s fine. I’ll get it.” Justin rinsed out one of the dirty glasses next to the sink and filled it with tap water. Charlie opened a beer for himself and sat down at the table. They were just starting on the pizza when Mickey and José came in. Justin guessed them both to be in their mid-twenties.
“My roommates, Mickey and José,” Charlie announced. “Hey, guys. Say hello to my son, Justin.”
“Nice to meet you, Justin,” José said as he reached past Justin to grab a slice of pizza.
Mickey took a beer from the fridge. “About time we had some young blood around here. Charlie can barely keep up with us.”
“Hey!” Charlie pretended to be insulted. “Is that any way to talk about the man who taught you everything you know?”
José finished wolfing down the pizza and reached for another slice. “Yep,” he said with a grin. “Like how to wash socks, change the TV channel, open a beer—”
Mickey popped the top on a can, and it foamed out onto the floor. Laughing, José pointed. “Course, Mickey here hasn’t got the mechanical aptitude to open a beer.”
“Hell, man, I just need more practice.” Mickey handed the can to José and opened another one for himself. Still chuckling, they headed for the living room.
Justin heard the TV come on. It can’t be much of a life to work till late at night and come home to a more or less empty apartment with nothing to do but watch TV, he thought. On the other hand, those guys seemed to find plenty to laugh about, and nobody was telling them what to do. Then he remembered Jimmy back in the garage. The youngest in the group had obviously gotten the short end of the stick.
“Great guys,” Charlie was saying. “It was José who got me my first speedway job.”
“Out in California?” Justin vaguely remembered that when his dad first disappeared, Mom told them that he’d gone to California.
“Yeah. The Ontario track. We been together ever since. A real tight team.” He shot Justin a look. “But there’s always room for one more.”
“Is it good money?” Justin asked.
“Real good money—if you can do the job right.”
When they finished the pizza, Charlie asked Justin if he wanted to watch TV.
“No thanks,” Justin said. “I’m pretty tired.”
“Me, too,” Charlie admitted. “In fact, I’m whipped.”
They took turns in the bathroom, then climbed into bed. It probably felt natural to Charlie. After all, he was used to different beds in different rooms in different towns. But Justin had slept in the same bed in the same house ever since he was born, except for overnights with Brad and a few other friends. The traffic noises bothered him, and even though it was after midnight, he couldn’t fall asleep.
Justin wondered what it would be like to live like his dad, moving from place to place all the time, going to work in a garage and coming home at night to a place you knew you were only going to stay at for a few weeks. No family, no pets, no friends except for the guys you worked with. It seemed like his dad’s crew were friends and family all rolled
into one.
“What did your mom say when you told her you were coming?” Charlie asked suddenly.
The question startled Justin, because he’d thought his dad was already asleep. “Not much.”
The room got quiet again except for the murmur of the television and Mickey and José’s occasional laughter. A bus hissed to a stop, and a car horn blared. It occurred to Justin that he had a few questions, too—questions he’d had for a long time. This was probably as good a time as any to ask.
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“When you went out to California, how come you never came home?”
“Oh, lots of reasons.”
“Was it something Mom did?”
“Not really.” Charlie was silent for a few seconds, then he said, “I intended to come back.”
A vague memory flickered in Justin’s mind, an image of himself when he was maybe eleven years old, crying or trying hard not to cry because his dad was leaving. His dad was giving him a fake punch on the chin, telling him that it was okay, that he would be back.
“Yeah, I know.” Justin rolled over and looked through the darkness toward the twin bed where Charlie lay. Outside the window, a neon light flickered on and off. He would see his dad in the bright blue-white light for a second, then the room would go dark again. “You said you’d come back.”
“I meant to,” Charlie said. “But when I got the chance to do what I’d always dreamed about doing … well, think about it. How many guys get to work at something they really love?”
Justin didn’t answer, because it wasn’t a real question. It was just his dad’s way of saying how much race-car mechanics meant to him. Charlie kept talking. “In this business you’re on the move all the time. It’s no kind of life for a woman. At least not a woman like Betty, with you kids and all.”
Justin thought that was probably true, but that wasn’t the point. The point was, Charlie hadn’t asked them. He’d just decided what he wanted to do and left them to manage the best they could.
“Didn’t you miss us?” Justin asked.
“Well, yeah. Especially at first.”
“So how come you didn’t at least drop by sometime, just to say hi?”
Charlie was slower to respond to that question. In fact, he let it go so long that Justin thought he wasn’t going to answer.
Finally, after about a minute, Charlie said, “Look, son, you’re old enough to know how a woman can tie you down. I reckon I could’ve given up my dream and come back and stayed a small-town mechanic for the rest of my life, but that’s not the kind of guy I am. When a man wants something, he’s got to go for it. Sometimes a clean break is the best way. You get my drift?”
“I guess,” Justin said. But he didn’t. How could any dad like cars, even race cars, more than his own children? There were some things about grown-ups no kid could possibly understand, Justin concluded. He closed his eyes and finally drifted off to sleep.
They slept till nearly noon on Saturday, then went back to the garage. Charlie tinkered with the weird-looking car he’d been working on the night before, which his dad told him was the kind they ran in Indy open-wheel races. Justin watched and tried to seem interested. After that they went to dinner with the pit crew for the race car. Several of the guys had women with them—some not much older than Justin—and they seemed to get a kick out of teasing him. Red-faced with embarrassment, Justin kept his head down and tried to eat his steak dinner. At the same time, though, he couldn’t help enjoying the female attention.
Sunday was race day. At first Justin found the smell of burning rubber and incessant noise nearly unbearable, but it didn’t take long for him to get swept up into the excitement of the race: the thrill of watching a car spin out of control, the screams from the crowd, then the tension as everyone waited to see if the driver was okay. “You like it, huh?” Charlie smiled at him proudly.
“Yeah, sure!” Justin exclaimed.
“This is nothing. Wait’ll you see—”
Just then the car his dad had been working on the night before streaked across the finish line. Charlie, Mickey, and José jumped up and down and pounded each other on the back, then turned around and pounded on Jimmy’s and Justin’s, too.
“Was that beautiful, or what?” Charlie crowed. “Put a good driver into a machine I’ve gone over and you get top performance every time!”
That moment was probably the closest Justin ever came to understanding his dad. Charlie was part of a team, he realized, and he loved working with his teammates to produce a winner. These guys had a shot at being on a championship team, not just once a year, but over and over as they traveled from one super speedway to another. No wonder his dad was hooked!
“Come on,” Charlie said. “Let’s go down and talk to the driver.”
Justin glanced at his watch. “What about the bus?”
“Cripes! I forgot!” Charlie thumped himself on the forehead with the palm of his hand. “I wonder if there’s a later one?”
There was nothing in the world Justin wanted more right then than to go down on the track and watch the driver congratulate his dad for the good work he’d done. And there were girls everywhere, sexy girls in short shorts and skimpy tops jumping around like they had just dropped live out of an MTV video or something, hugging everybody in sight. Justin ached to be down there with them.
But he’d checked the bus schedule while he was waiting for Charlie at the station, and he knew that the next bus home didn’t leave till nine o’clock the next morning. Mom would freak out if he didn’t come home tonight. And he had promised. The memory of her worried face as she was making up her mind wouldn’t go away. How could he let her down, when she’d trusted him?
“Not till tomorrow,” he told Charlie. “Can’t we make this one, if we hurry?”
Charlie just stared at him, like he couldn’t believe he’d heard right. Leaving the track right then was definitely the last thing he wanted to do. For a minute Justin held his breath, thinking his dad would say no, leaving it up to him to explain to Mom why he hadn’t come back when he said he would. Then Charlie grabbed him by the arm and took off running.
Justin never should have used the word “hurry.” Charlie zoomed out of the parking lot and careened through city traffic as if he were on a super speedway himself. They screeched into the bus station just as the bus was backing out.
Justin thought he had missed it after all, but Charlie had other ideas. He pulled the car up so it blocked the bus. “Run!” he yelled to Justin. “Go!”
Justin banged on the bus door and held up the other half of his round-trip ticket. The door swung open. Justin jumped aboard, then turned and waved goodbye to Charlie.
The last thing he saw before the bus door slammed shut was his dad, grinning, giving him the thumbs-up.
15
TROUBLE FROM ALL SIDES
Justin realized he had a problem as soon as he saw the grade he had gotten on his math test. He was even more worried when Mr. Jackson told him to come by during study hall. But when Coach Donovan showed up for the conference, Justin knew he was in serious trouble.
Mr. Jackson was Justin’s favorite teacher. He was such a good math teacher that last semester he’d helped Justin pull his grades up enough to try out for the varsity team. But that was before Christmas. This semester, which was almost half over, his marks had been pretty pathetic. The score on this latest test was more than pathetic. It was a disaster.
Tapping his grade book, Mr. Jackson said, “There is no excuse for this, Justin.”
Justin glanced nervously at the coach, who was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. He looked like he wanted to slap Justin upside the head. But when Coach Donovan spoke, his voice sounded more disappointed than angry.
“I have never had to drop somebody with your promise from the team before, Justin. But then, I’ve never put a freshman on the team, either. The last freshman to play on this school’s varsity team was Booker Wilson, and that w
as nearly twenty years ago. Maybe I made a mistake. Maybe you’re just not mature enough.”
For one awful minute Justin thought he was going to prove how immature he was by bawling. Then he got control of himself and found his voice. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “It’s just, my dad’s here right now, and, well, I haven’t seen him in a long time.”
Mr. Jackson and the coach exchanged looks. “Well,” Mr. Jackson said finally, “You do have time to bring these grades up before the end of the term. But you’re going to have to buckle down.”
“Consider yourself on probation,” Coach said. “Any more goofing off and your days as a member of the varsity team are history.”
“Yes sir,” Justin said. He meant his voice to sound strong, but it came out like a whisper. “Yes sir, I will.”
Justin wanted to talk to Brad, not because Brad could do anything about it, but just because at a time like this you wanted to be with a friend. He didn’t see Brad in the lunchroom, though, so after lunch he walked down to the seventh-grade lockers. When he couldn’t find Brad, he went back down the hall to his own locker. He was pulling out books for the next class when his friend ran up.
“Justin! Look at this!” Brad didn’t sound like himself. He spoke in a tense, overexcited whisper. His face looked bad, too. Since Friday he’d developed half a dozen zits, and his eyes were all puffy, like he hadn’t slept much the night before. Brad thrust something into Justin’s hand.
It was a blue bandanna wrapped around something heavy, Justin couldn’t tell what. He carelessly unrolled it, and caught the object before it fell to the floor. It was the biggest, meanest-looking switchblade he had ever seen.
“Cripes!” Justin yelped. “What’re you doing with this?”
The moment the words were out of his mouth, Justin spotted a man wearing a white shirt and tie coming toward them. Without even looking to see which teacher it was, he whipped the bandanna around the knife and tried to hand it back to Brad. It was no use. Brad was waving his hands in the air like a wild man, saying, “You won’t believe my loony parents! They’re gonna—”
