Bobby got the barring bar from the main shop, a forged steel bar as
long as a man's arm with a socket head fitted to the crank pulley bolt, and
he came back with it over his shoulder like a rifle at a funeral. The bar in
the Haskett shop had Vern's father's initials on it, punched in a row that
had gone slightly downhill, and Bobby had first used it when he was
fifteen and the truck was already older than he was. He fitted it to the
pulley under the radiator, in the close hot space where the fan shroud bit
at a man's knuckles, and set his feet in the gravel, and looked up at his
uncle. "Ready when you are," he said.
"Slow," said Vern. "Walk her around like she's sleeping."
And Bobby pulled.
An engine barred over by hand is a different creature from an engine
on a starter, and everyone in that yard who had ever loved machinery
leaned, without deciding to, a degree closer. The starter is a bully; it hurls
the crankshaft around at a bully's pace and drowns the engine's own voice
in its whine, so that all a listener gets is the verdict - fire or no fire - with
none of the testimony. The bar is a conversation. Tooth by tooth the
flywheel came around, the pistons rising and falling in their ancient order,
the belts sighing, the fan moving its wind a hand's breadth at a time
across Bobby's forearms. Through the valve covers came the small
interior weather of the engine: the valvetrain ticking over its cams,
springs compressing and sighing off, the blower turning its slow, oiled,
indifferent turn, displacing air in soft regular breaths through the intake -
a machine breathing in its sleep, deeply, evenly, without distress.
Compression built and released, built and released, each cylinder
shouldering its load and handing it on, the bar going heavy and light in
Bobby's hands in the rhythm Vern had known since before Bobby was
born. "She's free," Marcus said at the second revolution, with enormous
quiet relief, to no one. "Whatever it is, Vernon, she isn't seized. She's free
as a bird."
"She's free as a bird that won't fly," Vern said. "Keep walking her,
Bobby. One more for the cheap seats."
It was on that third revolution - Bobby's shoulders rolling, the bar
coming around slow as the minute hand of the courthouse clock, the yard
gone so still that the fair band warming up four blocks away arrived in
pieces over the rooftops - that Jonah Lowry, standing by the left front tire
with his toolbox open at his feet for no reason he could have given a
magistrate, heard the thing his grandfather had spent three summers
teaching him to hear, and heard it so clearly that for a moment the yard,
the crowd, the money, the whole burning morning went out of focus
around it, the way a room goes out of focus around a voice saying your
name.
Count who answers. On a Detroit two-stroke of this family, barred
slowly with the engine at rest, the eight unit injectors ride their cam lobes
in firing order, and each one, as its lobe comes up, gives a small hard
courtesy of a sound - not loud, not a clang, a click felt as much as heard,
the plunger stroking, the little machine inside the machine doing its one
duty and reporting done. Pap had made him learn it blind, in the salvage
yard, with Jonah's palm flat on the valve cover of a dead bus engine and
his eyes shut against the summer, the old man's voice patient beyond all
other patience he owned: Again. Count out loud. Seven is not eight,
Jonah, not if the good Lord Himself is asking. And Jonah at fourteen,
sweating, furious at the arithmetic of ghosts, learning that a dead engine's
valve cover under a flat palm is a page a boy can read with his hand:
click, click, click, the order coming around the banks, left and right, a
small iron choir answering roll call in the dark of the housing.
From three feet away, through air, on his feet, he could not feel it
through a palm, and he could not have sworn to it in any court the county
kept. What he heard, on Bobby's third revolution, standing close enough
to the left valve cover that the heat of the wash water still on the exhaust
manifold reached him, was the pattern. Not a click - a shape in the sounds
the valve gear made, a rhythm with a place held in it. The valvetrain's
chatter as the bar came around was not the even rain it should have been.
It had a gap. It had - and Jonah's whole body knew it before his mind
consented to - a gap in the same place on the second revolution as on the
third, at the back of the left bank, where the last injector sat under the tail
of the Jake housing, in the shadow place, the place Pap's wrench had been
born to go. Seven voices, and then the bar turning through a silence
shaped exactly like the eighth, and turning on.
He did not move. A boy who has been poor in a small town learns a