Written by Stephen F. Moloney
“At fixing cars?” repeated Ray, confused at hearing such a request. “Uh … I mean, I know a thing or two – depends on how serious a repair job we’re talkin’.”
Again, from the conflicted expression on his face, Ray could tell the kid wasn’t exactly sure how best to proceed – he even looked slightly worried that he’d already said too much as is. Knowing he’d done well to get him talking at all, Ray moved quickly to keep the conversation going.
“Look, how ‘bout we make a deal?” he posed, trying to sound as democratic as possible. “Now, you obviously have a car that needs lookin’ at, right?”
“Yeah …” mumbled the kid.
“Well, the way I look at it,” continued Ray. “Given you seem hellbent on keepin’ who you are a secret, combined with the fact that you clearly ain’t old enough to be drivin’, I’m goin’ to go right ahead and assume that you don’t wanna risk bringin’ this car of yours to a garage – that is, of course, if it’s even movin’.”
Though he didn’t answer, the kid’s silence was all the confirmation Ray needed to know that whatever car he had was, indeed, dead as a dodo.
“I see ….” said Ray flatly. “Well then, here’s what I propose. You show me this car of yours and I’ll see if I can get it goin’. But, if it turns out I can’t and that I need some tools, then I’ll come back tomorrow – on the condition that you crash at my place for the night. It’s up to you.”
From the expression on his face, Ray could tell the kid was weighing up his offer, carefully sifting through the pros and the cons.
“And you won’t tell anyone you saw me?” he asked, seeking clarification on the fine print of Ray’s offer.
“Not a soul,” confirmed Ray, genuinely. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I think I should tell somebody, but if not doing that means gettin’ you out of this swamp? Well then … you have my word.”
The cogs were now turning so hard in the kid’s head, Ray was convinced he could almost hear them – whirring away like there was a Victorian factory secretly hiding behind his forehead. Yet, he dared not say anything more to try and convince him to take up his offer. The situation was a delicate one, so he didn’t want to risk spooking him by pushing too hard. If he was going to trust him, the kid was going to have to do it on his terms – no one else’s.
“Ok then …” said the kid, his voice barely audible.
“Ok?” repeated Ray, wanting to make sure he’d heard correctly. “We’ve a deal?”
“Yeah.” answered the kid, raising the volume just a touch. “As long as you don’t tell anyone about me … we’ve a deal.”
“Cool.” smiled Ray, sticking out his hand for a handshake.
The kid glanced down at Ray’s hand and then back up at him like he’d just stepped foot off a spaceship, such was his apparent confusion at seeing someone initiate a potential handshake.
“Don’t worry,” said Ray dryly. “It’s just a regular old handshake I’m looking for – unless, of course, you want us to blunder our way through a coordinated handshake that we’ve never practiced?”
“Fine …” replied the kid, the faintest of smirks flashing across his face as he reached out his hand and had it enveloped by Ray’s colossal mitt.
“Well then, now that it’s official,” said Ray, releasing the kid’s hand after shaking it with a comical enthusiasm. “Let’s see this car of yours, kid.”
*
“Ok, so be honest …” said Maggie, smiling like she already knew the answer to the question she was about to ask. “At that stage, had you already decided that you wouldn’t be able to fix his car, even if you actually could?”
“Are you suggestin’ that I would have lied to Mustang after making a gentleman’s agreement with him?” asked Ray, affecting a faux-insulted tone.
“Absolutely, yeah.” replied Magglie, flatly.
“And you’d be damn right!” laughed Ray, his eyes flashing widely as he leaned forward on his stump. “There weren’t no way I was going to let him spend another night in here! So, as soon as I got him to agree to show me his car, yeah, I decided right there and then that, even if it turned out it was only somethin’ small like a … I don’t know … loose spark plug or whatever that was wrong with it? I’d be tellin’ him it was somethin’ more serious and I’d have to come back the next day.”
“And what did turn out to be wrong with it?”
“Well, that’s the thing,” answered Ray, his eyes calming back down a touch. “When we actually got to the car and I got under the hood, it turned out the radiator had blown; so, given I didn’t happen to be walkin’ around with a spare one of those on me, I didn’t have to lie about not bein’ able to get it goin’.”
“So where was the car exactly?” asked Maggie, suddenly remembering that they were in the middle of a swamp and therefore it wasn’t quite the easiest of places to drive a car through with a busted radiator.
“See that gap over there?” said Ray, turning ever so slightly and pointing off behind where he was sitting towards a far corner of the clearing. “The one where the trees have started to grow across it?”
“Yeah …”
“Well, if you go through there …” continued Ray, gratefully turning himself back around on his stump. “You’ll find yourself on this long, narrow track – straight as an arrow – that runs for nearly a mile or so to the road you would have used to get here. François had it cut straight through the swamp when he was building this place, hence why everyone who knows about it just refers to it as ‘The Champs-Élysées’.”
As Ray had been speaking, a confused expression had carved its way into Maggie’s face. On her way to Crescent Creek, when she’d seen how secluded the place the navigation app on her phone had led her to, she had taken to carefully scanning both sides of the road for anything that might tell her she was, indeed, getting close to the golf course – even doing so on the road Ray had just gestured loosely towards. Yet, if her memory was serving her correctly – which she had every right to believe it was – she didn’t remember seeing any entrance that would have indicated the track Ray had just described.
“And you’re sure it leads out to that road?” asked Maggie, the absurdity of asking Ray such a question not lost on her as she pointed off towards the road in question. “Because I was actively looking for any sign of civilization on the drive here and I don’t remember seeing a gate or anything.”
“That’s because there ain’t no gate to see.” smiled Ray, almost craftily, as if he were revealing the twist in a story he’d been telling. “You know those walls you’d have seen at the main gates in here? The big, long, red brick ones that stretch a ways down the road?”
Maggie nodded her head.
“Well, they only go so far, right?” continued Ray. “But the actual boundary of the course keeps on going way beyond where they stop. So, unless you knew where to look when you were driving along that road, you wouldn’t have seen the gap where the entrance to the track is because it’s all near overgrown at this stage, so it just blends right in with the treeline. The fact Mustang was able to find it was just pure blind luck ‘cause his car started to give out right alongside it – and, because he didn’t want to risk gettin’ seen at the side of the road, he pulled in through it to make sure he’d stay hidden.”
“It sounds like he was a smart kid.” said Maggie, impressed with Mustang’s wherewithal.
“That he was.” replied Ray, smiling wistfully. “And his car? Man, what a machine!”
“Really?” questioned Maggie, a touch sceptically. “What was it?”
*
After loudly coughing and sputtering its way out of the workshed, silence descended on the range once again as Ray turned off the engine in his geriatric-looking fairway mower.
“I sincerely hope you wear earplugs when you’re riding around on that thing?” said Maggie, her face screwed up in discomfort thanks to the slight ringing which was now echoing around inside her eardrums.
“Yes, ma’am.” joked Ray, dryly, as he climbed down off the fairway mower and began to walk back towards the workshed.
“Why don’t you just buy a new one?” asked Maggie, following Ray in through the large opening at the front of the workshed and moving towards a large, cluttered workbench pressed up against the wall. “I mean, you obviously have the money for it, right?”
“I do …” answered Ray, moving towards a rope that was anchored through a metal loop attached to the wall of the workshed.
“Then why not just spend some of it on a mower?” queried Maggie.
“Well …” said Ray, now undoing the knot keeping the rope secured to the loop. “I guess it comes down to a couple reasons, really.”
“Those being?”
“Well, for one, it has sentimental value.” said Ray, measuredly, loosening the first piece of the knot.
“Fair enough.” replied Maggie, sounding the tiniest bit sceptical. “I mean, that’s what a lot of those hoarders you see on T.V. say about their collections of old newspapers and rusted screws, but, you know … whatever.”
“And two …” said Ray, smiling as he looked back over his shoulder at Maggie. “As much of a temperamental old goat as that mower is, it still works – and as someone turning into a temperamental old goat himself, I feel a certain … affinity with it.”
“I’m not going to lie, Ray …” quipped Maggie as she idly picked up a slightly rusted wrench lying loose on top of the workbench. “Those are pretty weak reasons to justify keeping that heap of junk over buying a nice, shiny, new one.”
“Alright, look!” replied Ray, as he finally freed the rope from the loop with one more flick of his wrist. “Are we here to talk about mowers or do you want to see Mustang’s car?!”
“Can’t we do both?” replied Maggie, tongue-in-cheek.
Ray’s eyes narrowed as he got the same half-smirking look of exasperation on his face that a parent might get when dealing with a child.
“Just grab that flashlight,” he sighed with a rueful shake of his head. “The one on the bench.”
Smiling cheekily, Maggie turned around and grabbed the aforementioned flashlight from where it was standing alongside a long-since-emptied can of soda. Upon turning back around, Maggie was met with the sight of Ray already throwing his full weight into pulling on the rope he’d freed earlier. Following the path of it up to the roof, Maggie quickly pieced together that the rope ran through a series of cobweb-covered pulleys placed intermittently across the main wooden beam which stretched the entire span of the workshed. Where it came to a stop in the middle of the beam, the rope then dove back down towards the ground through the largest of the pulleys until it reached where it was tethered onto two large, wooden trap doors that took up a good twelve-foot by ten-foot space in the middle of the concrete floor, which, itself, was cracking in places and covered in old clumps of dried-out grass.
“Do you need a hand with that?” asked Maggie, sounding a touch concerned as the ever-tautening rope began to strain under the pressure Ray was exerting on it.
“Nope …” replied Ray, his voice, too, straining slightly as he took a momentary pause from pulling on the rope. “I got it … it’s just a bit … stiff … is all.”
Realising she was better off just leaving Ray to it, Maggie stood back and watched as the rope began to slowly haul the two trap doors open like it was opening up a very heavy and very stiff book. With each inch that the gap between the two doors grew, however, and the more daylight that began to pour down into the hole they were covering, the more Maggie’s intrigue grew. Because there was something down there. Something big.
After continuing to hoist them open for another few seconds, the two trap doors finally reached the limits imposed by the six rusted hinges attaching them to the wooden frame around the hole and stayed standing in a bolt upright position. Now fully exposed, Maggie moved closer to the edge of the hole and gazed down into it. What had been nothing more than shadowy outlines hinting at what could possibly lie beneath her feet as Ray slowly opened the doors, were now fully formed, solid lines that revealed exactly what she had been brought here to look at.
It was a car – and an old one at that. The type you didn’t see anymore. A far-flung ancestor in the evolutionary chain of automobiles. A relic with a yellow and black paint job.
Maggie flicked on the flashlight and shone it down into the hole, the beam of light piercing the gloom until it found the surface of the car. The predominantly bright yellow paint popped far more vividly than what she expected it to for a car that would have been clocking up miles long before she was even born. She traced the light along the path of the two black stripes running down the middle of the roof, down across the slightly clouded windshield, and picked up where the stripes started once again on the hood until she reached the nose of the car.
And then she saw it. Perfectly centred in the middle of the grill, inside a little rectangle, was a chrome horse frozen in mid-gallop that, no matter how old the car was, instantly told Maggie what it was.
A Mustang.