The Daylight Room and other short stories

The Wind

I learned everything I needed to know about being a mechanic from one car. I learned everything I needed to know about life from one man, a man I never really knew.
The car was a 1950 Formula One Ferrari 125 and the man was my grandfather.
I hardly knew him as flesh and blood, my memory of him as a kid was sepia and grey. I was no more than three or four when he went away forever and we moved into his house with my grandma. Over the years that followed my memory of him was coloured in by my father and the car he once loved.
We live just a mile outside of a town called Cedar Vale in Colorado.  Our neighbour Herve Johnson would say, 'If you dropped a pin as close as maybe to the centre of the United States you'd likely land in his yard.' If that were true then you'd be no more than two miles as the crow flies from ours, and that included the barn.
It was in that barn that my grandpa's old car had sat rusting away for the entirety of my life. The barn was where my father would do most all of his 'fixin and mendin' as he called it. Running a farm as we did with most of the help having been let go there were always machines to breakdown and to fix. He'd raise some cash doing similar work for locals too. In the early days my mum was away working at the laundrette in town.
'Watch him,' she'd say almost every day. 'I don't wanna come home and find him inside a bale o' hay.'
I spent my summers lay on a pile of tyres reading the comic books I'd bought from the thrift store in town. In the end the work replaced the comic books and I'd set about jobs of my own. Through all of those years I can see now how I bonded so closely with my Pa and my Grandpa through the tales he shared.
Most times the stories were as exciting as the ones I read in my Eagle or Hotspur comics. In later years I wondered if they actually were from comic books. My grandpa had come through a war in Europe by wits and the skin of his teeth. After the war ended he was demobbed and after a slight diversion through Europe he found himself back in Cedar Vale.

They say men home from war are never the same, the blank stares, the nightmares. For my grandpa it seemed the opposite was true, those blank stares weren't memories of the trauma of war but the secret dreams and lust for adventure.

I believe that sometimes you have to see things through an adult's eyes to make sense of them, most often that's too late. I know now that my dad never wanted to be like his own father, to just up and disappear one night, never to be seen again. Dad said he didn't blame him but that wasn't true. He had adventure in his blood, running through his veins and the thought of settling down in Cedar Vale for the rest of his life must have cut him in half.
The night he disappeared he took nothing, and that nothing included his prized 1950 formula one Ferrari 125. His racing days hadn't cured his need for adventure after all.

The car had been there ever since, she was known affectionately as 'The Wind.' Although she was covered she still weathered over the years. The rubber cracking and the spots of rust advancing like an invading army. As a kid I never saw any of that though.
In the summer I'd climb underneath and sit in the driving seat. I'd imagine those daring racers with their red leather helmets. We still had grandad's and I'd know that one day I'd be big enough to wear his racing leathers too. High on a shelf and out of my reach sat a gold cup, a souvenir  of his proudest moment. Over the years it had lost it's shine and was covered in dust. In the parlour my father still had the newspaper with grandpa's photo in. The day he won that cup he'd been the talk of the town. My father said he'd not bought his own drinks for a year.
For me the car never aged. It's chrome shone like a mirror, the paintwork was the deepest bright red. I could hear the engine roar and feel the power beneath me as I pushed the car to its limits. In the heat under the tarpaulin I raced grand prix after grand prix. Always winning, finding a way to come from behind into the final lap. Under the tarpaulin you could taste the oil and burning metal. The old car would never run of course, I'd tried. The car was part of my life growing up, the only thing that had been constant. In brighter moments my dad would say to me. 'We're gonna bring it back, it's gonna race again and it's gonna win again.' I really believed him, every time, I believed him.
I once overheard Herve from the next farm talking to my dad. He stood there in his dungarees with a rag hanging out of his pocket. He was always chewing some kind of stick or piece of wood.
"You oughta look into it," he said to my dad, hands on his hips, squinting into the sun. "These old things can fetch a pretty penny I tell yah." Dad stared thoughtfully at the rusting red beast before him. For a moment there was a look in his eye until he noticed me watching them both.
"Well Herve, you know I might well look into that," he said, turning. As he passed me he winked and I smiled at them both as they wandered back to the house. "So let's go look at these here eggs you brought over and see if Mandy has cooked us up some lunch." he said as they walked.