Chapter Five

Muskrat's Auto Rescue was Bubba's home away from home, and today especially, he was grateful. It didn't matter that Officer Budget had let Bubba go with only a warning. Bubba was traumatized. The cop had called Bubba names. The cop had brought back old injuries and humiliations and then had been so unfair and ugly as to accuse Bubba of being the one with prejudices.

Muskrat's shop was behind his brick rancher on several junk-scattered acres off Clopton Street, between Midlothian and Hull. The fence bordering Muskrat's garage and its outbuildings was built of old railroad ties piled like Lincoln Logs. Transmissions littered the hard-packed dirt tail housings covered with plastic quart oil bottles to keep out the rain. Cars, vans, pickups, a tractor trailer and an old fire truck used each year in the Azalea Parade were parked wherever Muskrat had left them last. Bubba pulled up to the shop's open bay door, cut the engine and climbed out.

He was momentarily cheered by Muskrat's automotive kingdom, which could very well have passed for a chop shop were most of the parts not rusty and from an earlier stage of vehicle evolution. Bubba stepped around an ancient air jack and a bearing press. He made his way through miscellaneous flowerpots, coils of garden hoses, fenders, headlights, hoods, bumpers, car seats, stacks of split firewood and fifty-five-gallon drums overflowing with junk parts.

Bubba was convinced, although he spoke of it rarely, that there was a Bermuda Triangle for vehicles. He believed cars and trucks swept up in floods and tornadoes, or perhaps gone and believed stolen, ended up in places like Muskrat's shop, where they would be cared for and used to help humans continue their journeys through this life. Bubba intended to write this insight to Click and Clack's Car Talk on the Internet or perhaps to his favorite, Miss Lonely Parts, a syndicated columnist who was really a man.

'Hey Scrat!' Bubba called out.

He walked inside the garage, where an old furnace burned a mixture of dirty motor oil and firewood.

'Scrat? Where the hell are ya?' Bubba tried again.

Muskrat wasn't always easy to locate within the jumbles of heater cores, batteries, oil pans, grease guns, chains, tow ropes, bungee straps, gas lines, vacuum hoses, homemade jumper cables, stands made of old Ford wheels, clutches. Pressure plates were stacked like doughnuts on sections of exhaust pipes. There were grinders, a chain horse to lift out engines, and hundreds of American and metric wrenches, ratchets, pliers, chisels, awls, vises, presses, springs, drill bits, spark plugs, dead blow mallets and brass hammers.

'How come you got the heat on, Scrat?'

'To keep my joints from aching. What'dya try to fix this time?' Muskrat's voice was muffled under a jacked-up 1996 Mercury Cougar.

'Who tried to fix?' Bubba accused.

Muskrat was flat on his back on a creeper. He rolled out from underneath the car, suddenly there, a wizard in a mechanic's blue work pants and shirt and a NAPA Auto Parts cap.

'What do you mean, I tried?' asked Muskrat, who was at least seventy, with hands rough and hard like horn.

'Windshield's leaking again,' Bubba let him know. 'You fixed it last, Scrat.'

'Uh huh,' Muskrat said blandly as he snatched toilet paper from an industrial roll overhead and began cleaning his glasses. 'Well, drive her on in here, Bubba. I'll take a look but I keep telling you to get the boys at Harding Glass to put in a new windshield. Or dump the damn thing altogether and get something that don't break down every other minute.'

Bubba walked out of the garage, not listening. He got into his Jeep and cranked the engine as anger pecked at him. He could not and would not believe that his buddy Smudge had cheated him. It couldn't be that Smudge had sold him a piece of shit. The possibility of it resurrected other injustices as Bubba parked inside the garage, in the bay next to the Cougar, and climbed out.

'I got to tell you right now, Scrat, there's police brutality in this city,' Bubba announced.

'Oh yeah?' Muskrat mumbled as he started looking at the windshield.

'I think something's telling me to do something about it.'

'Bubba, something's always telling you something.'

'There're reasons too complicated to go into that the new chief, that new woman who just moved here, needs my help, Scrat.'

'And you always got complicated reasons, Bubba. I'd stay out of it if I were you.'

Bubba could not stop thinking about Chief Hammer. He had heard her name on his cell phone this morning. There was a reason for this; it was not random.

'It's time we mobilize, Scrat.'

'Who's we?'

'Citizens like us,' Bubba said. 'We gotta get involved.'

'I can't find your leak,' Muskrat said.

'Right here.' Bubba pointed to the top of the windshield, near the rearview mirror. 'The water drips in from this spot here. Want a cigarette?'

Bubba pulled out a pack.

'You need to cut back, boy,' Muskrat said. 'Chew gum. That's what I do to kill the craving when I'm around gasoline and what all.'

'You forget I got TMJ. My jaws are killing me.' Bubba clicked them side to side.

'I told you not to get all those damn crowns,' Muskrat said as he retrieved a Windex spray bottle full of water and uncoiled an air hose. 'You'd probably be better off if he just yanked all of 'em out and fixed you up with a pair of clackers like I got.'

Muskrat grinned, showing off his dentures.

'I'll get on the inside with the hose, and when I tell you to, you start spraying,' said Muskrat.

'Same thing we did last time,' Bubba said. 'And a lot of good it did.'

'It's like fixing those crowns of yours,' Muskrat wouldn't let up as he sat in the driver's seat. 'All you do is go to the dentist. I'd get new ones that don't look like piano keys if I were you. And you sure as hell ought to replace this windshield. The car's been wrecked.' Muskrat had told him this before. 'That's why everything keeps going wrong with it, that and the fact that you're always trying to fix it yourself, Bubba.'

'It ain't been wrecked, good buddy,' Bubba said.

'It sure as hell has. Where you think all that Bondo came from, the factory?'

'I won't have you talking about Smudge that way,' Bubba told him.

'I didn't say a word about Smudge.'

'Smudge has been my good buddy since we were in Sunday school together, way back.'

'Way back when you used to go to church and listen to your daddy,' Muskrat reminded him. 'Don't forget, you was the preacher's kid.'

Bubba was shocked by another memory of name-calling. The flucking preacher's kid. He had forgotten all about it. For a moment, he couldn't speak. His bowels came alive.

'I'm just pointing out, for your own good, Bubba, that it didn't hurt Smudge one bit to be on the preacher's good side. Not everybody has as high opinion of Smudge as you do.'

Muskrat had heard every tale there was about everybody in the city who had ever owned a car that needed fixing, including the Dodge Dart belonging to Miss Prum, who happened to be the director of Christian education at the historic downtown Second Presbyterian Church, where Dr. But Fluck had been the senior minister.

'Look, it's already six-thirty and I gotta start my shift early tonight, as if my day hasn't been bad enough. So I guess we'd better get this leak taken care of,' Bubba said as an Escort drove up and parked outside the shop.

'I'm going as fast as I can,' Muskrat said.

He peeled the Jeep's headliner and its cardboard away from the ceiling and examined the rubbery black polyurethane in the pitch well.

'Least you didn't try to fix this one yourself,' Muskrat observed.

'Didn't have time,' Bubba said.

'Good thing, since you're always screwing up things worse,' Muskrat said candidly.