“Rusty” Randy McKinnon was his name. My father’s name. Or as I call him, “Dad.” Stunt driver. How does one become a stunt driver, you ask?

Hell. Same way you do anything else I suppose. Do it for free until someone pays you for it. And in the Old Man’s case, sign up at the fairgrounds for the local demolition derby until he had enough pull to convince them: After the derby, to line up some of them dead clunkers and let him soar his own grimy beast over ‘em to the tune of about fifty dollars.

She wasn’t even a memory. More a legend or a myth, a blown-out, rainy picture in a forsaken lobe of my brain. A missing spark plug from a caved-in combustion chamber. “Your mother,” Rusty said, “only cares about gas, money, and gas money.” I asked him why she wasn’t around much. Birthdays and all that. He gave his honest thoughts, I’m sure, to his credit. He said, “she couldn’t handle the weather.” Didn’t exactly give me the fuzzies but it made sense in the way things like that must if you care to make it through the rest of your life on the feet God gave you. “It’s just the way she is.”

Ever since I can remember my dad drove cars. And I mean drove ‘em. Classic muscle cars, grinding against my ear drums. Slipshod junkers, clanking down dirt roads with mismatched fenders and missing exhaust pipes. Even motorcycles when he could swing it.

Thing about cars is, there’s enough of ‘em to go around. Enough parts, anyway. Every car guy knows another car guy that’s got way too damn many cars. An entire lot. Someone that serves as the community scrapyard. Nothing perishable like a battery unless you were real lucky. But hell, a gear shift or some mudflaps or a beat up carburetor, sure. That car guy, for Dad, was Willie.

Willie once told me I could have his dog. My Old Man rummaged through a crunched-up Buick LeSabre and Willie limped on after him with his Golden (more a rust-red color) Retriever, Rooster, and me, 8-year-old Idiot, dragging ass behind ‘em. Loved that dog, his coat all wrinkled and set in its age. Ol’ Willie’s wife was pretty cranked when she saw me shoving him into the truck bed while his nails scrambled against the flaking paint. She flashed the porch light and dumped a good spray on us with her garden hose. Hollered out after me, “you got my dog all wet.” I don’t like thinking about her.

So Rusty couldn’t find the right sized tie rod, an oddity considering every car in Willie’s acre-plus lot should have had a tie rod or two and most people didn’t come looking for tie rods because they didn’t bust ‘em up like Dad did. And across the whole sacred lot there was not a tie rod fit to Rusty’s liking and he grilled Ol’ Willie about it.

“I paid in advance last week,” he said. Dad always had his leather jacket on. Been through hell and back and through the air in a rocket car, too. Same jacket I wear most every day. Looks better somehow, beat up and scuffed and bent like it knows the sad story you’re about to tell. Like it lived it.

“Hell, got t’ be one out there, Rusty. Got t’ be.”

“What are the chances.” His sentence started with an interrogative, but I assure you it was not a question.

“Small chance,” said Willie.

Dad dug in the breast of his jacket, undid a zipper to a pocket with another zipper in it which secured his most sacred possession: smokes. Made a point to always put ‘em inside that toothy contraption even though he dug ‘em out a hundred times a day and put ‘em right back in. Said something about making it worthwhile. And I asked him about it, a thousand or so times over the years, why he never gave it up. I think he made a point whenever I asked to dig in the secret pocket and fire one up, dangling off his lip as he rolled down the window to blow out a grey plume. Different answer every time; the most entertaining was that he hadn’t worked out how to weld on an iron lung. One time I got an almost honest answer out of him; “Why put in all that work when you ain’t gonna fix the weather?”

All that is to say he never found the tie rod. He managed to snag a few dirty shocks and told Willie, “Aight,” but I knew he was pickled. Good and put out.

We got this sorta belief in our family, for the most part, though Ol’ Rusty McKinnon called it a load of wash from the side of his smoky mouth if you were lucky enough to catch him in a speaking mood. Something about leaving for the last time, never seeing somebody again. Finality. Saying ‘farewell,’ however you want to put it. It’s been known, and in my experience and history I can vouch to the fullest extent of my being, that when you part ways with someone and the sky dumps a pool of rain on the world, and a gulping bolt of lightning cracks down, then you know. That’s the last time. And in this case, and all others before it, it was. Once that night’s terrible storm struck up I don’t recall ever seeing my lost boy, Rooster, or Willie, or his gangly wife ever again. The wife I’m not so sad about. Dad and I hopped into his pickup truck, the sweet blue Ford, restored to new flesh from the Old Man’s finest elbow grease. Not a fleck of rust on it. But the rain could have its say.

So we both silently understood, even though Dad would have denied it, that we were to scoot on out of Willie’s scrapyard and never expect to return. Doesn’t mean anything untimely or grim happened. Might just mean the Old Man was scuffed about the tie rod and felt, as a car guy, he knew enough car guys to scrap a tie rod from.

But that wasn’t the case. Not a single car guy he knew produced a fitting tie rod for him. I think he took it as a sign. Not that he admitted to much faith in signs, har har; Walking into a part store and begging some uniformed minnow to fetch him a shining sparkling tie rod from the backroom—and getting a god forsaken paper receipt rather than a firm, greasy handshake—was bad luck. A bad omen. Something. Not good.

Tie rod goes under the car. Can’t see it. Not unless you, as spectator or mechanic or unholy victim, are, too, under the car. But it seemed off. Maybe it smelled funny. New. Clashed with the welded and torched and dented material of the rest. Like a shiny new cancer. Might make the rest of the car clean. Whatever the opposite of ‘broken in’ is. That.

He slammed away that night, in the garage, his car sinking over the black pit of repair. I wonder if he worked on the tie rod, or perhaps that fleshy iron lung of his. Not sure. I had to sleep for school the next day. And I could almost taste that luscious and dangerous car small in my bed, every time I heard the terrible clatter of hammer on body, sparks on pipes, the roar of catching gasoline.

#

Most cars he ever cleared in one jump was nine. Nine don’t seem like a fantastic number, but given that he built the wagon himself and reigned up as much horsepower as Ol’ Willie’s junkyard afforded him, and that he mostly did his stunts in rural fairgrounds on rutty stretches of horse track, nine ain’t too bad. Pretty damn good most would say and if you think not I encourage you to try it someday.

I sure wouldn’t. Fool’s errand, surely. No point in putting your life and your body and even worse, your beloved automobile at risk for a quick buck or the hoots of a limp stadium of part-time farmers.

But to the Old Man, it wasn’t a hassle, wasn’t a danger. Hell, he liked fixing broken things, least enough to break ‘em again. Most things, anyway, as long as fixing was in the cards. And surging through the sky strapped to a God’s holiest American engineering, the automotive engine, seemed to be the only thing that got his mind right. That and the smokes. So the jumps weren’t a risk. Least not the way I see it. I been thinking about it a long time and I pretty well got it figured. He knew that he could drive. Dammit he could drive. He knew he could drive, knew he could weld, knew he could grind and smash and drive and drive and drive. Lord, that man’s boots must have smelled like the purest gasoline you were ever privileged to witness. But it wasn’t no risk. Not necessarily. Not when you consider the weather.

#

I lost count of the number of times I woke up to a woman pouring herself a watery cup of coffee in our tiny kitchen. Skinny things. Ratty-haired things. Things with a little too much dirt on ‘em. But I remember one of ‘em enough to think her name was Rhonda or Reba or Rebecca, and the way her mouth dipped out to the side when she saw me watching her. Never looked at me straight, just grazed over my face like a plane dumping fertilizer, enough for me to see the makeup dripping off her eyes. She went straight past the formalities, shimmied by greetings, and dug through the old man’s secret jacket pocket to snag his prized smokes. She sparked up right there in the kitchen and kicked open the front door to show the storm: “Men stay with who they can, ladies stay with who they want.” I don’t think she said “remember that” but for some reason my brain wants to tie it on like a string of flags on an antenna. I just smiled. Rusty caught up with me later about Rhonda or whoever she was, and just like all the rest, asked me, “you think this one’ll do, kid?”

#

“Come see Rusty Randy roar through the night!” the ads barked and sizzled over the summer air. He even made it on the radio. Not him, the man, himself, but the ad did. We were driving on 12, dark, suddenly raining after exiting the smoke shop just on the other side of the state line. Cheaper there. No tax. A gnarly jolt of holy lightning smashed down in the distance and the drizzle drops peppered the metal roof like a song I still try to sing. He snapped the dial on the radio over to hear the same announcer what graced the speakers at the fairgrounds saying his name.

“Y’hear that, kid?” he said, his mouth cocked sideways, hair slammed back with God-given grease. “Your old man burning through the air.”

“I hear it,” I said. And that was it. End of the conversation. Except for one more thing my old man said that ain’t left me feeling right since.

“Raining a lot for August.”

It sure was.

#

I sat on the front porch because we lived right near the fairgrounds. Could hear that announcer who blessed the radio, sure, but mostly I heard the roar. The glorious roar of every engine running rich on maximum octane. And that was the plan. Something about the crowds irked me. Still does. And somehow, the solid stone of the front porch didn’t wreck my hind-end as much as those stadium seats. I even grabbed his bolt bucket and sorted the loose ones into proper sized bins so the grease and oil caught on my skin and I washed my hands in that wicked smell.

And so he pulled out front, the sweet blue Ford weighed down with the old towing trailer that had tonight’s Frankenstein of fenders and flashing on it. Black, black, black. Hand-painted black, with a bold orange “41” streaked on the side of it. It was the only number available when he first registered, and in hindsight it seems a cruel joke that Dad just needed to catch up to it in age, which he sadly did, but the locals all knew it as Rusty Randy’s number. I sometimes wonder why I couldn’t just paint over the number. “42” or even “100”. But like he said, you ain’t ever gonna fix the weather.

And he came up and strapped his arms around me and I wished him luck. Only seven cars that night barring any atypical destruction. He’d done nine before. Seven was less by my understanding. What were the chances. And he stepped up into the seat of the pickup and it chugged to life. He grabbed the gear shift and slapped it in place when the rain started.

Something about the way his arm locked in place, like he was leaving one room and got called back by a distant voice. I don’t think I blinked at all. The great bolt of light crashed down to the middle of the street, right past all those roofs and power lines. Cracked it up a good bit, chunks flying. He checked the rear view, making sure 41 hadn’t leapt off the trailer or been carried off by the sudden flood.

And he drove off.

I don’t think I believe in God. Not like that. But I did pray. I don’t know why. Maybe because I didn’t know better, didn’t know what else to do. Might as well. I tried with my eyes squinted shut, and then open to the falling rain, quiet, a mantra in my head, and out loud like a megaphone with my neck craned back. What were the chances. To my knowledge it altered none of the evening’s events.

I heard the announcer that blessed the radio say my old man’s name and number to thunder along the crowd, and the growl of mufflers and exhaust and cracking carburetors in the distance over the neighborhood. A lot of rain, he noted. Over and over again. A lot of rain for August.

They brought me to his jacket, which he folded and squared directly on the driver’s seat of his sweet blue Ford pickup truck. Only time he performed without it, to my knowledge. My guessing is that he tucked that smoke pack up under his shirt sleeve like they did back in the 50’s. Maybe wasn’t worth the dig anymore.

I wore that jacket every day, all day, even through the remainder of August, which dried up considerably after that night. When it became spring and summer again and the heat swelled up I felt I could abstain. Not permanently. Just given how hot it was. No point, really.

But I know he knew. Wouldn’t cop to it but he knew. Wouldn’t change his plans or his mind, probably because he knew exactly what I knew: the rain would have its say. Besides, they already paid him in advance for the jump. Deal was sealed as far as he was concerned. And when they gave me the jacket I stuffed my skinny arms down the sleeves and felt the weight of him crash on my shoulders. I unzipped the secret pocket and found, alongside a soggy receipt for fifty dollars and sixty-three cents deposited to his bank account, the shimmering keys to that sweet blue Ford, restored to new flesh from the old man’s finest elbow grease. Probably the only thing he ever fixed and didn’t try to destroy.