Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“Around thirty, thirty-five dollars. Depends on the model and who does the work for you, things like that.”

“Take very long?”

“Maybe twenty minutes.”

“Could you do it for us?”

The dude considered, cleared his throat, spat in the dirt. “Could,” he allowed. “If I got the part. Let me just go and check.”

When he walked off I said, “Brother, what’s the odds that he’s got that part?”

“No bet a-tall. You figure there’s something wrong with our fan clutch?”

“Who knows?”

“Yeah,” Newt said. “Can’t figure on him being a crook and just spending his life out here in the middle of nowhere, but then you got to consider the price he gets for the gas and all. He hasn’t had a customer since we pulled in, you know. Maybe he gets one car a day and tries to make a living off it.”

“So tell him what to do with his fan clutch.”

“Then again, Vern, maybe all he is in the world is a good mechanic trying to do us a service. Suppose we cut out of here and fifty miles down the road our fan clutch up and kicks our water pump through our radiator or whatever the hell it is. By God, Vernon, if we don’t get to Silver City tonight Johnny Mack Lee’s going to be vexed with us.”

“That’s a fact. But thirty-five dollars for a fan clutch sure eats a hole in our capital, and suppose we finally get to Silver City and find out Johnny Mack Lee got out the wrong side of bed and slipped on a banana peel or something? Meaning if we get there and there’s no job and we’re stuck in the middle of nowhere, then what do we do?”

“Well, I guess it’s better’n being stuck in the desert.”

“I guess.”

Of course he had just the part he needed. You had to wonder how a little gas station like that would happen to carry a full line of fan clutches, which I never even heard of that particular part before, but when I said as much to Newt he shrugged and said maybe an out-of-the-way place like that was likely to carry a big stock because he was too far from civilization to order parts when the need for them arose.

“The thing is,” he said, “all up and down the line you can read all of this either way. Either we’re being taken or we’re being done a favor for, and there’s no way to know for sure.”

While he set about doing whatever he had to do with the fan clutch, we took his advice and went across the street for some coffee. “Woman who runs the place is a pretty fair cook,” he said. “I take all my meals there my own self.”

“Takes all his meals here,” I said to Newt. “Hell, she’s got him where he’s got us. He don’t want to eat here, he can walk sixty miles to a place more to his liking.”

The car that had been parked at the cafe was gone now and we were the only customers. The woman in charge was too thin and rawboned to serve as an advertisement for her own cooking. She had her faded blonde hair tied up in a red kerchief and she was perched on a stool smoking a cigarette and studying a True Confessions magazine. We each of us ordered apple pie at a dollar a wedge and coffee at thirty-five cents a cup. While we were eating a car pulled up and a man wearing a suit and tie bought a pack of cigarettes from her. He put down a dollar bill and didn’t get back but two dimes change.

“I think I know why that old boy across the street charges so much,” Newt said softly. “He needs to get top dollar if he’s gonna pay for his meals here.”

“She does charge the earth.”

“You happen to note the liquor prices? She gets seven dollars for a bottle of Ancient Age bourbon. And that’s not for a quart, either. That’s for a fifth.”

I nodded slowly. I said, “I just wonder where they keep all that money.”

“Brother, we don’t even want to think on that.”

“Never hurt a man to think.”

“These days it’s all credit cards anyways. The tourist trade is nothing but credit cards and his regular customers most likely run a monthly tab and give him a check for it.”

“We’ll be paying cash.”

“Well, it’s a bit hard to establish credit in our line of work.”

“Must be other people pays him cash. And the food and liquor over here, that’s gotta be all cash, or most all cash.”

“And how much does it generally come to in a day? Be sensible. As little business as they’re doing—”

“I already thought of that. Same time, though, look how far they are from wherever they do their banking.”

“So?”

“So they wouldn’t be banking the day’s receipts every night. More likely they drive in and make their deposits once a week, maybe even once every two weeks.”

Newt thought about that. “Likely you’re right,” he allowed. “Still, we’re just talking small change.”

“Oh, I know.”

But when we paid for our pie and coffee Newton gave the old girl a smile and told her how we sure had enjoyed the pie, which we hadn’t all that much, and how her husband was doing a real good job on our car over across the street.

“Oh, he does real good work,” she said.

“What he’s doing for us,” Newt said, “he’s replacing our fan clutch. I guess you probably get a lot of people here needing new fan clutches.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” she said. “Thing is I don’t know much about cars. He’s the mechanic and I’m the cook is how we divvy things up.”

“Sounds like a good system,” Newt told her.

On the wayacross the street Newt separated two twenties from our bankroll and tucked them into his shirt pocket. Then I reminded him about the gas and he added a third twenty. He gave the rest of our stake a quick count and shook his head in annoyance. “We’re getting pretty close to the bone,” he said. “Johnny Mack Lee better be where’s he’s supposed to be.”

“He’s always been reliable.”

“That’s God’s truth. And the bank, it better be the piece of cake he says it is.”

“I just hope.”

“Twenty thousand a man is how he has it figured. Plus he says it could run three times that. I sure wouldn’t complain if it did, brother.”

I said I wouldn’t either. “It does make it silly to even think about nickels and dimes,” I said.

“Just what I was telling you.”

“I was never thinking about it, really. Not in the sense of doing it. Just mental exercise, keeps the brain in order.”

He gave me a brotherly punch in the shoulder and we laughed together some. Then we went on to where the dude in the big hat was playing with our car. He gave us a big smile and held out a piece of metal for us to admire. “Your old fan clutch,” he said, which I had more or less figured. “Take hold of this part. That’s it, right there. Now try to turn it.”

I tried to turn it and it was hard to turn. He had Newt do the same thing. “Tight,” Newt said.

“Lucky you got this far with it,” he said, and clucked his tongue and shook his head and heaved the old fan clutch onto a heap of old metallic junk.

I stood there wondering if a fan clutch was supposed to turn hard or easy or not at all, and if that was our original fan clutch or a piece of junk he kept around for this particular purpose, and I knew my brother Newton was wondering just the same thing. I wished they could have taught us something useful in the state pen, something that might have come in handy in later life, something like your basic auto mechanics course. But they had me melting my flesh off my bones in the prison laundry and they had Newt sewing mail sacks, which there isn’t much call for in civilian life, being the state penal system has an official monopoly on the business.

Meanwhile Newt had the three twenties out of his shirt pocket and was standing there straightening them out and lining up their edges. “Let’s see now,” he said. “That’s sixteen and change for the gas, and you said thirty to thirty-five for the fan clutch, so what’s that all come to?”