Never More Than Five Percent From Perfect (standard:romance, 3378 words)
Author: Ravenwood	Added: Feb 06 2012	Views/Reads: 2912/4786	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
As long as there have been cars, there have been boys in trouble with them. But with a grandfather in on it?

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

When I circled back, he was pointing and laughing, tears glistening on
his cheeks. He continued that way, as best I saw from the bumpy ride, 
until a rut steered me into the water and the car teetered like it was 
turning onto its side. Is your life supposed to flash before you when 
you're just a kid? I could hardly swim! The car balanced back upright, 
splashing to a stop with a wave going over the car completely. Water 
settled up past the running boards by a foot it looked like. Poppy 
shouted insistence that I stay aboard, and he loped out of my sight, 
returning later with a mule he'd borrowed. 

When the situation was fixed, I asked Poppy if he was mad. 

“No, Rascal. Just scared for you when it was happening. I should have
shown you better how to brace your elbows against yourself... it was my 
fault.” His hug lasted longer than most. 

Poppy needed a hug more than I did. He didn't sing or whistle on the
trip back. The first time I'd ever been with him that he didn't. I 
called out to him, not knowing if he could hear above the fenders 
rattling from the mud covered, out-of-balance wheels. 

“Is everything okay, Poppy?” 

“We got to go tell your folks, son. They knew I was letting you drive,
but by yourself?” He shook his head. “And we won't pretend that you 
didn't. That wouldn't be right.” 

Mother was upset—I could have drowned, she said. She and Daddy left the
two of us on the sofa while they continued their discussion in the 
kitchen, but we still heard. Poppy's knuckles were white from gripping 
his hat in his hands. He gripped it like his life was in the balance. 
And I guess it was. Grandma had been gone for ten years, and I was the 
only grandson. I shared most of his time when I wasn't in school. 

I didn't see it then, of course. I just knew we were both in trouble.
And I loved it! I'd been in trouble together with the boy down the 
street, but with my own Poppy? 

“I'm thinking of taking the car away from him!” mother's voice
threatened. 

“From Rascal?” 

“No, from your father.” 

I looked at Poppy. Could she do that? 

“Now, Bev... “ 

They weren't finished. When they finally did, Poppy was let off with
probation. He would have to ask before any more death-defying 
escapades. 

It rained next day, and Poppy backed the car out for a time, mud
dropping from everywhere. Then we dried it inside the shop. A single 
bulb drooped from the two-by-four rafters, hanging by braided golden 
cord, but the shop never seemed dim. It was too immersed in Poppy's 
laughter. The shop and me, both. He'd started that day like a scolded 
puppy, but by lunchtime, singing and laughter had returned. 

His neighbors routinely brought Cushman scooters or Maytag washing
machines that wouldn't start and returned later for a Stradivarius. At 
first, I didn't know what Poppy did to the machines, just caressed them 
with those hands, it seemed to me. 

He would remove a plug wire from the running Model A. Then a second.
Then a third. Readjusting the spark and throttle with each succession. 
Then we would climb aboard and putt-putt up and down Main Street on the 
one cylinder, always stopping at the Malt Shoppe. “Rascal can drive the 
car,” he'd boast to all in earshot, my chest swelling again, “but he 
has no license for town, yet.” 

Poppy taught me the engine things: how to pull and replace the pistons.
He would torque a bolt in place with just a break-over bar on the 
socket. He placed his ear near the bar's handle: listened and felt for 
the correct creak of the tool. Then have me test the result with the 
torque wrench. He was never more than five percent from perfect. 

“Evans will be here today,” he'd sometimes say. Or Wilson. Or Smith.
Sometimes he just said "Someone', with no name. He had no phone, and 
I'd been in his every waken hour. How he knew they were coming was 
beyond my understanding. But they most always showed, just as he 
forecast. Fine-tuning their cars, Poppy would set a glass of water atop 
the air cleaner. He would remove half the plug wires and turn the 
carburetor air-bleed screws gently in and out, watching the water 
intently. Lost in the exercise. If the owner asked a question, Poppy 
didn't hush them. He didn't hear them. 

If someone stopped with a drip under their vehicle, Poppy would place
that crooked ring finger—the one he'd broken at the mill and then reset 
himself—into the droplet and place the fingertip to his tongue. He knew 
whether the vagrant was water with antifreeze (and whether the 
antifreeze was sufficient), whether engine oil, transmission oil, and 
whether the engine or transmission needed attention for other than the 
leak. 

Summers passed. The two-by-four blocks atop the Model A pedals decreased
from two-deep to one-deep and then they were gone altogether. 

By length, my jeans were hard to tell from my daddy's by '54, when the
county had exhausted the supply of gravel from Maxwell's pit near 
Coyote Creek. Maxwell fashioned the remains into a car race track, 
hauling in clay for the racing surface. I'd had my learner's permit for 
near a year already—I'd driven the Model A for five years before that. 
I was convinced that I was ready to challenge the locals. 

I asked Poppy. 

“You're only fifteen, Rascal. Do you think that's old enough to drive in
a race?' 

“Troy Ruttman won the Indianapolis 500 when he was hardly twenty-two.” 

Poppy nodded in acknowledgement of the recent event. “You'd need a car,
wouldn't you, Rascal?” 

“They'll be running jalopys, they say. Old coupes with V-8 flatheads.
Hopped up, but still, couldn't we build one, Poppy?” 

“Me? You'd be better with someone with experience. There's a bunch of
difference between the things I know and the things needed to prepare a 
real racing car" 

“We could do it. I know we could. And I could pay for the car... some
day.” 

"Am I too young to learn," he laughed. "Our second year would be better
than our first.” 

Poppy asked my folks. They would have to sign a release. 

Like before, Poppy and I waited on the sofa with my parent's voices
drifting in from the kitchen. 

“He could be hurt... or worse,” worried mother. 

“Would you rather him be working on a race car at daddy's or sitting at
the Malt Shoppe with the duck-tail-combed, cigarette smoking kids you 
see there sometimes.” 

“He doesn't have to do either one.” 

“Neither do they. Neither does any other teenager in this town. But,
unfortunately, those are the choices that they see. This rock-and-roll 
music is scaring me, Bev.” 

Mother sighed. 

Poppy and I didn't start on a car until we knew the track would let me
drive. We took the release mother and daddy had signed. It gave their 
permission because I wasn't twenty-one, but it didn't say how old I 
was. Or wasn't. Instead, the track had affidavit–type forms where one 
could testify that the driver was over eighteen. Poppy filled in one of 
those, swearing that James Roscoe Canyon was over eighteen. He just 
failed to say which James Roscoe Canyon it was. 

And then the fun began. We stripped down a '36 Ford three-window coupe,
and welded in a roll bar. Poppy found a Mercury motor. He bartered for 
aluminum heads and a manifold that held two carburetors. A 
Harmon-Collins camshaft went in. And Jahns pistons. When that thing 
barked to life for the first time, it must have been heard near all 
over town because a caravan of cars rolled down Poppy's alley looking 
like the Fourth of July parade down Main Street. 

We won first time out. Not the main. Not the semi. Just our heat race.
The track officials were as green as were we. They had forgotten the 
stop watch, so we drew for starting position, and luck had us start on 
the pole. Then a pileup sidelined most of the other five cars. When we 
went to the pay line, Poppy got another of his conscience attacks. Or 
blessings. Whichever they were. He confessed to the race judge that I 
was only fifteen, and we didn't merit the payoff. We wouldn't be back, 
he said. Suppose that they would help advertise the car for sale? 

They said the age was required by their insurance, but they didn't have
the policy paid for, anyway. Never would, so we could continue to race. 
But for our transgression we wouldn't get paid for that night. What 
they did instead with the six dollars we'd won, we didn't know. 

We won every race that year. Impressive, isn't it? Until I tell the rest
of it. We won every race that we finished. Counting the first night, 
that number is three. Poppy had been right: knowing cars and knowing 
race cars were two different things. And I wasn't the driver that I had 
thought I was. And the drivers drove into each other and over each 
other, with no consequence, so that became the norm. And once, a coyote 
crossed the track in the midst of a race, and I steered into the wall 
to avoid him. 

The next year, we would be better. We would redo some things, then tow
the car for test sessions to Axenwell where the racing season started 
earlier than ours. We'd towed to Coyote Creek with the Model A—scaring 
ourselves sometimes—and we didn't dare trek seventy miles in that 
manner: neither the Model A, nor the fright. 

The dealer for John Deere/GMC had cars tucked in around the tractors and
combines. A streamlined, black, '48 Pontiac Chieftain had my eye, and 
Poppy lent me the money to buy it. He penciled the $410.00 in the back 
of the Testament, same as he had penciled other folks that he was 
helping out. I was to pay him back from my job sacking groceries at 
McEnally's. 

Secretly, I dreamed that the car would win that much or more. It did,
and competitors became interested—now offering to buy the car—from 
Axenwell and Coyote Creek, both. But our earnings, instead of paying on 
the Pontiac, went for repairs and gasoline. So did most of my salary. 
The owner of Western Auto gave us a discount on parts and he gave us 
fifty dollars, but those gestures were because he liked Poppy; he 
didn't want the store's name on the car. I thought it may be because of 
the brushed-on paint job, but Poppy explained he didn't want to be 
liable in the event of misfortune. 

I tried out for football during the school year, but I wasn't good
enough to play. Just good enough to travel with the team and sit on the 
bench. But I didn't give up. I might have if older players hadn't 
praised me for trying. The sport had me cut my hours at McEnally's, and 
I hadn't even started to repay Poppy for the car. I'd repaid him the 
race car initial cost but not for his loan on The Pontiac. Poppy never 
mentioned it. 

We cut back on racing the next year. Poppy was seventy-six, but the
slower schedule wasn't because of that. 

“Dang-funkel” had always been an occasional visitor to Poppy's garage...
Poppy's only swear words, as best I know. But Dang-funkel came with 
increasing regularity. Poppy grew to misplace his glasses, or tools, 
more than usual. And he sometimes turned a bolt the wrong way when he 
meant to do the other. He said it was like his eyes were watching one 
movie, but his hands—or his legs—were in another.  Dang-funkel passed 
his lips for his impatience with himself. He tried to keep up his 
laughter, but it sometimes seemed forced. 

And then we were equally surprised that he could no longer recite the
firing order for most every engine. And his stories grew to be more of 
the past than the present. He stopped calling his friends by name 
because he sometimes got them mixed up. 

He finally agreed to park the race car completely, but he wouldn't allow
me to sell it. “I got to have that car out there,” he said. “I got to 
think we'll run it again. I got to think that I have a future, or 
else... I'll know that I don't.” 

He hardly took the Model A out any more. Only on his ‘good days', and
they grew fewer. On one of them, hardly after dawn, the car was pulling 
in as I arrived. Poppy stepped out with a vigor I recognized from 
before. 

“Hitting on all four!” he beamed. 

“You or the car?” 

“Both of us.” 

It too, was short-lived. 

One morning—he was seventy-seven then—he didn't answer my tap at his
door. Around back, the Ford was gone, and the garage-door open as 
though he may have forgotten to close it. 

I expected the car to be found in the heights of State Park, Poppy
frozen upright in the rumble seat, his Testament in a hand. Speculation 
being that he'd become disoriented and couldn't find his way home. He 
had confided that could be the case. “I won't have some 'uns set me in 
a room,” he'd told me, his hand gripping my wrist. Still with the force 
of a vise. “Like a potted plant. To stare all day at walls without even 
knowing that the walls are there. Without knowing that I am there. I 
admire them that can do it, don't take me wrong, and I bleed for them, 
but... not me. Could be that I'm being selfish, but not me.” 

Instead, the car was found on the grass pasture at the lake. It looked
to have circled at speed—“hitting on all four”—until coasting to a stop 
when the driver's foot relaxed from the gas pedal. I imagined Poppy 
laughing and recreating the pleasure he had given us both there. He 
wasn't frozen, but he was deceased, and no cause was found... his 
angels hadn't let him down. 

I did sell the race car then. I'd had standing offers, and the car and
spare engine brought more than I owed Poppy. I would repay him by 
paying his funeral expenses. 

We laid him next to Grandma, and I asked for more than date-of-death to
be added to his head stone. No one disagreed, and it wouldn't have 
mattered if they had. So in section four, row seven, plot six of 
Milburn County Cemetery, a headstone reads... “JAMES ROSCOE CANYON” and 
“NEVER MORE THAN FIVE PERCENT FROM PERFECT.” 

“Others want to help with the funeral,” Daddy said. “Would you allow
that? I know how you love him, but still...” 

“I can't, Daddy. One thing or the other always got in the way, and I
never repaid him the loan for that Pontiac. It ate on me. It ate on me 
a lot.” 

His eyes widened. “I thought you had. I have his Testament, and the page
with your name shows that nothing is owed.” 

I looked. The zeroed balance was dated soon after I had taken the loan. 

Daddy divided up Poppy's things. That request had been left in Poppy's
handwriting on his dresser. Nothing was specific, except for the Model 
A. I was to receive that. 

I drove it to the lake once again. Sat on the floating pier and
remembered Poppy's lesson from years past: that the Big Guy wouldn't 
love us more. Wouldn't love us less. He would fear for us when we 
erred, and He would hug us tight once he'd saved us from those... after 
taking the blame for it, himself. 

Now, from my page in the back of Poppy's Hew Testament was a final
lesson on our benefactor: no matter how much we dread for the debt that 
we feel to owe, the Big Guy has already marked it PAID. 

If I were king of the world... 


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