Martha turned her sweet face and gave me a loving brown-eyed look, then put her nose back into the wind and resumed her joyous surveillance of the coastal route. She’d gotten with the program, and now I had to do the same.
I’d brought along a few things to help me do just that: about a half dozen books I’d been wanting to read; my screwball-comedy videos; and my guitar, an old Seagull acoustic that I’d strummed sporadically for twenty years.
As sunshine brightened the road, I found my mood lightening. It was a stunning day and it was all mine. I turned on the radio and fiddled with the dial until I found a station in the thick of a rock and roll revival.
The disk jockey was practically reading my mind, spinning hits of the seventies and eighties, sending me back to my childhood and to my college days and memories of a hundred nights with my all-girl band jamming in bars and coffeehouses.
It was June once again, and school was out—maybe for good.
I turned up the volume.
The music took me over, and my lungs filled as I sang LA dude rock and other hits of the times. I crooned “Hotel California” and “You Make Loving Fun,” and when Springsteen bellowed “Born to Run,” I was pounding the steering wheel, feeling the body and soul of the song out to the ends of my hair.
I even egged Martha on, getting her to howl along with Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty.”
And that’s when it dawned on me.
I really was running on empty. The little blinking gas light was frantically signaling that my tank was dry.
Chapter 24
I COASTED INTO A filling station right inside the limits of Half Moon Bay. It was an indie that had somehow avoided takeover by the oil conglomerates, a rustic place with a galvanized-steel canopy over the tanks and a hand-lettered sign over the office door: Man in the Moon Garage.
A sandy-haired guy looking to be in his late twenties wiped his hands on a rag and approached as I got out of the car to work a cramp out of my bum leg.
We had a brief exchange about octane, then I headed toward the soda machine in front of the office. I looked around the side yard, a lot full of sticker weeds, teetering towers of worn-out tires, and a few beached old junkers.
I’d just lifted a cold can of Diet Coke to my lips when I noticed a car in the shadows of the garage that made my heart do a little dance.
It was a bronze-colored ’81 Pontiac Bonneville, the twin of the car my uncle Dougie had owned when I was in high school. I wandered over and peered into the passenger compartment, then I looked under the open hood. The battery was encrusted, and mice had eaten the spark plug wires, but to my eyes the innards looked clean.
I had an idea.
As I handed my credit card to the gas station attendant, I pointed a thumb back over my shoulder and asked, “Is that old Bonneville for sale?”
“She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” He grinned at me from under the bill of his cap. He balanced a clipboard against a denim thigh, ran the slider over my card, then turned the sales slip around for me to sign.
“My uncle bought a car like that the year it came out.”
“No kidding? It’s a classic, all right.”
“Does it run?”
“It will. I’m working on it now. The tranny’s in good shape. Needs a new starter motor, alternator, a little this and a little that.”
“Actually, I’d like to fool around with the engine myself. Kind of a project, you know?”
The gas station guy grinned again and seemed pleased by the idea. He told me to make him an offer, and I put up four fingers. He said, “You wish. That car’s worth a thousand if it’s worth a nickel.”
I held up the flat of my hand, five fingers waggling in the breeze.
“Five hundred bucks is my limit for a pig in a poke.”
The kid thought about it for a long moment, making me realize how much I wanted that car. I was about to up the ante when he said, “Okay, but it’s ‘as is,’ you understand. No guarantees.”
“You’ve got the manual?”
“It’s in the glove box. And I’ll throw in a socket wrench and a couple of screwdrivers.”