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The second chapter of a five-part series.

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They said the Lincoln carried dignity like a steeple; the Ford carried defiance like a barn door held on with two screws and a prayer.

By dawn, Oaxaca smelled like bread and spent incense. The city had not yet forgotten the tremors from Lucinda and Delgado’s Room 203 jubilee — the hotel staff were still discreetly moving plaster dust off the sills — and the rest of the convoy carried the aftertaste of that night like an unwashed cup. Rusty Hammer and Hairless B29 came down the Monte Albán stairs like two men bargaining with gravity. Rusty’s shirt still had grease in the collar where he’d been hunched over the Customline at three a.m., and Hairless looked like a law professor who’d lost a footnote and all his sleep.

The Ford sat in a pool of morning shadow near the curb: a 1954 Customline Tudor that had known better paint, fewer denting experiences, and no small number of farmyard indignities. Where the Lincoln looked designed for parades, the Ford looked built for survival. Rusty was proud of that fact as a crier is proud of his bell; Hairless considered it an insult to human engineering. Between them, the car had earned a personality: practical, loud, slightly mad.

“Smell that?” Rusty said to no one in particular as he popped the hood. The straight-six scratched awake like a throat clearing itself. “That’s American iron. That’s the sound of history.”

Hairless peered in. “It’s the sound of air being refused, another mortgage being avoided, and the Roman gods laughing. The exhaust manifold has the dignity of a broken violin.”

“It plays!” Rusty grinned. “And if we listen close, we’ll hear it hum the national anthem.”

They had not met at a concours. They had met in Rusty Hammer Hardware, a plank-built shrine to every tool a man could borrow and forget to return. The Customline had been a rescue—a salvage-job romance. According to Rumor (always their town’s most dependable historian), the car had once been owned by a farmer who kept it clean because his ex-wife liked chrome. Later it passed through a gentleman who painted it two shades and then drifted away. Rusty bought it from a man who had bought it for parts. Delgado called Rusty reckless. Lucinda called him resourceful. The Ford called itself whatever kept it on four wheels.

The car truly became Rusty’s when he replaced a rusted fender with sheet metal nicked from an old seed bin and bolted on a bumper found behind the feed store. He swapped the original V8 dreams for a reliable, economical 223ci six—a motor notorious for being plain but stubborn. He’d tacked on parts with an aesthetic sensibility that aligned with duct tape and optimism. A cultivator spring here, an irrigation pipe vent there, a strip of baling wire in strategic places. It had a three-speed manual with a gear that insisted it was for aesthetic purposes and not for getting out of trouble. The bench seat had the comforting give of a hello wave that never ends; the heater hose had a habit of sighing at inopportune times. It had character, which in Rusty’s taxonomy equaled love.

Breakfast convinced them of two things: one, that Room 203 had irreparably altered the town’s sleep schedule; two, that coffee and a plan might not save a car, but they certainly could steady two men enough to argue. Lucinda teased Rusty about the night before; Delgado gave the Customline an appreciative, if solemn, nod. Sister Thelma prayed for engines. Hairless recited an elegy about drywall. The Lucky Lady napkin with the “deed” to Rusty’s hardware sat between eggs and toast like a question nobody wanted to answer sober. Rusty shoved the napkin back into his pocket and slid into the Ford as if it were his pulpit.

As they rolled out, the town saw them off with a good-natured curiosity. Children ran hand-painted numbers down the curb. A woman in a hat gave Rusty a wink and a jar of pickles because that’s what credit looked like in the best towns. Lucinda leaned out of the Lincoln and blew a queenly kiss, the kind that lands in the memory. Delgado, grave as a headstone, lifted a hand. The road swallowed them and spat them out toward a landscape that competed with the speeches people gave in bars—dramatic, cruel, and very persuasive.

The highway left the town behind and stitched through the hills. The Customline’s six-cylinder grunted like a man considering mercy. Hairless rode shotgun with a notebook he never seemed to write in and a mind that loved to quote things that had nothing to do with carburetors. He narrated their progress as if this were a play and the Ford, the reluctant lead.

“The Greek dramatists would have us careen here, Rusty,” he said. “This curve is destiny. That sign—Desvío—is a small sonnet in asphalt.”

Rusty chewed on a jerky stick, eyes on the road. “That sign means money-saving short-cut if you don’t understand the Spanish and trust me like the good lord in a hard hat.”

They took the detour. It sulked into a riverbed, all loose stones and scrub. Two burros looked up, suspicious, like the audience at a town meeting when somebody with charisma speaks too long. Rusty spun the Ford’s wheels hard enough to throw a piece of gravel like a warning, eased the clutch, and took back the main road with triumphant, dusty swagger.

It was the kind of resourceful stupidity Rusty specialized in. He believed any problem could be fixed with a combination of elbow grease, ingenuity, and a parts bin whose door rattled prophetic tales. When the Ford’s radiator began to flirt with heat, he stopped at a roadside stand that sold mangos and pre-owned implements. The vendor, a man with laughter in his teeth, handed Rusty a set of louvers—exhaust vents from a combine. “For a fiver,” he said. Rusty, delighted at a language that translated directly to salvage, bought them on the spot.

Back on the road, the California-bred wind whistled through the newly bolted vents like a chorus of second-hand angels. “Looks like a kitchen hood,” Hairless observed.

“Now it breathes,” Rusty said. “She breathes.”

Hairless, who in another life might have been a critic of all things combustible, lit a cigarette and quoted Hemingway in a tone that sounded like he wished the sentence would do the work of a prayer: “The world breaks everyone… thereafter many are strong at the broken places.”

“Great,” Rusty said. “We’re strong at the places held together with channel locks.”

They found humor where the road offered none, and they found mercy in the small barterings of strangers. A woman with a shawl waved them down offering homemade tamales and a charge of ice—commodities in the sort of economy where goodwill equaled gas money. An old man in a loin of red clay traded them a sliver of advice and a bottle of dubious fluid he swore would “clean carburetors and bring back lovers.”

By mid-afternoon the Ford had taken on the aroma of a farm; the grill carried the badge of scraped hay. Children along the route chalked a little 147 on the roadside stones because every contest needs spectators, and spectators make myth. The car wore their marks like temporary registrations. For all its makeshift repairs, the Customline had a rhythm—a stubborn throb that argued with entropy and usually, by fate or foolishness, won the next round.

The crash came like a joke delivered in the wrong key and suddenly everyone was laughing in discomfort.

A wooden goat pen blocked the valley’s narrow road before a small village where women carried water in pitchers and men argued politics with the sincerity of people who have been chosen by history for minor roles. The herder, heart-stood face and arms as flailing semaphore, tried to guide his animals away. Rusty decelerated. The brake pedal sank like a moral quandary.

“Pumps,” Rusty commented, more to himself than to anyone. He jammed his foot harder. There was a staccato thunk and the pedal met pavement as if pleading for mercy. The Ford sailed through like a ship through reeds. Wood splintered. Goats performed a sudden airborne ballet—the billy goat variety—and one chose the hood as a platform, bracing his beard on the windshield wiper like a little, furious ambassador.

Hairless let go a sound that was part oath, part sonnet. “We have engaged with pastoral forces beyond our ken.”

“You ever seen a goat turn the air blue?” Rusty asked, wrestling with the wheel. A goat slid across the passenger seat and planted itself above Hairless’s knees with a dignity that said it had been to more churches than either man. The poor animal chewed calmly on the corner of Hairless’s sleeve. A second goat, more entrepreneurial, leapt to the roof and arranged hoofprints like punctuation marks.

They stopped in a dust column that tasted like panic and hay. The herder ran at them with a rhetorical tirade in Spanish. Rusty, always ready for commerce, fumbled for a crumpled bill.

“Emergency toll,” he announced, handing over two greenbacks and a half-eaten jerky stick. “Compensation.”

The herder scooped his goats like a man gathering coins, and in the exchange the Ford received a new kind of dignity: the battle scar of having been tried by goats and found—somehow—still worthy. They cleaned the glass with whatever hotel napkins remained in a glovebox full of mysteries. Hairless brushed goat hair from his notebook and considered the possibilities of converting the event into an essay with a tragic arc.

At the next cantina Rusty secured the goat hoofprint to the roof with a strip of baling wire. “Badge of honor,” he said proudly. “And it’s aerodynamic.”

Hairless coughed and squinted at the sunset. “We are in truth motley pilgrims.”

They threaded the final leg to Puebla as evening slid down like a curtain. The Ford, patched and reinscribed by experience, trundled into the Zócalo with the kind of entrance that made pigeons begin to stage their own evacuation. People turned their faces. Lucinda clapped with theatrical sympathy. Delgado’s smile was a slow, deliberate nod; even he appreciated the stubbornness that kept a machine moving when it could have easily chosen retirement.

Rusty disembarked with triumphant posture. “See?” he told the circle of exasperated compatriots. “She takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’.”

Hairless, shirt torn and sleeve still smelling faintly of countryside, looked like a hymn in human form. “We are a small boat,” he intoned, “in a cosmography determined by weather and caprice.”

“Cute,” Rusty said. “I call it trucking.”

That night in Puebla they were the joke and the chorus. Over mezcal and roasted squash, everyone narrated the day back to life as if raising a flag. Lucinda told the goat story with a sigh that made her lipstick more provocative than any speech. Angus offered a theory involving municipal conspiracy and several tollbooths. Sister Thelma gave a short, colorful invocation that said, in essence, that if God had wanted racing, he would’ve given everyone better brakes. Hairless recited a long poem about the dignity of wreckage; Rusty punctuated it by knocking his glass and declaring the Ford valid.

There is a peculiar kind of celebrity reserved for those who survive looking unlikely. The Customline, with its patched hood, louvers, makeshift vents, and proud goat hoofprint, wore that celebrity like a work shirt. People gathered to see the car up close: a child ran a finger along the baling wire and clapped once, considered evidence of real magic. A hotel clerk snapped a photo with a camera the size of a Bible and promised to send it “to a cousin in the city” who liked such things.

Hairless, still oscillating between revulsion and affection, finally sat in the quiet and admitted, “It holds together in a way that suggests… stubbornness is a virtue.”

Rusty lit a cigarette and shrugged with the self-satisfaction of a man who has found a marriage between gumption and gasoline. “That’s all a car needs,” he said. “A damn good reason to keep going.”

As the square’s lamps blinked awake and the cathedral bells settled into their evening pattern, the convoy prepared for the next day. Ahead waited Mexico City’s chaos, longer stretches, and officialdom that took paper and signatures with the reverence of a catechism. The Ford, after a day of indignities and improvisations, had become a talisman on wheels. It had been scolded by goats, adorned by strangers, and paraded by children. It had, in short, earned its hour.

When the teams finally turned in, the hotel staff noted dented panels and goat hair in the upholstery with the professionalism of people who had seen the world’s small wars and came away with a towel and a scowl. In the lobby, Sister Thelma left a card that read, For the recovery of souls and radiators. Hairless tucked himself into a chair and began to compose a monologue that would later be given the title The Lament of the Customline and read at the Lucky Lady to a group of men who laughed until they cried and then argued about which song to play on the jukebox.

Rusty slept like a man who believed tomorrow would require him to be two sizes larger in courage. Hairless dreamt of verses that smelled of diesel. The Customline, patched and idiosyncratic, rested. It would breathe morning air again and begin the unseen work of the day—really the only work that mattered on a long trip: staying alive.

Tomorrow, the city would test them in its own merciless way. For now, the Ford was a story in three-dimensional metal and grease, its lack of polish a kind of honesty. The best cars were not always the prettiest. Often they were the ones that insisted, with a clumsy doggedness, on remaining in play. Rusty and Hairless had found one of those cars, and like any pair of believers, they would shout its virtues from plazas and later whisper them to the curtains. The Ford took a lickin’. It kept on tickin’. And the next day, when the road opened again, they would be there to prove it.

Cutter’s Chalkboard Standings

The next morning, Cutter Bridges wheeled his chalkboard into the plaza and wrote in careful script:

1. Lucinda & Delgado — 1956 Lincoln Premiere
2. Trixie & Sister Thelma — 1954 Lincoln Capri
3. Rex Hall & Cutter Bridges — 1953 Studebaker Commander
4. Angus & Chad — 1965 Ford Falcon
5. Rusty & Hairless — 1954 Ford Customline Tudor (goat penalty applied)

Rusty threw his hat down. “Penalty?! Those goats ambushed me!”

“The board reflects observable reality,” Cutter intoned.

Lucinda sipped her coffee. “Observable reality is you’re still last, honey.”

Hairless raised his glass. “Last in time, first in poetry.”

Even Delgado smiled faintly. The chalkboard said what it said.

And so the race pressed on.

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