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I should have remembered Proverbs 16:18. For those of you who may not be completely up to speed on your Old Testament verses, it reads, “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”

Not gonna lie, I was feeling pretty good about myself. My abilities. My newly acquired standing in the automotive restoration community, which consisted primarily of me, a few people who read the blog, and the neighbor’s dog.

The back end of the Fairlane 500 looked like the day it left the Ford factory in the spring of 1960. Under the hood might not have been better than factory, but it was better than it had looked since at least December of 1960. Over the course of a few weeks, I had brought both back from the automotive abyss armed with YouTube videos, masking tape, paint remover, face masks, rubber gloves, about seventy-five cans of different rust killers, primers, Dupli-Color, and a vision shared with the neighbor’s dog.

There had been a time, not all that long before, when I would have looked at a rusty piece of automotive sheet metal and wondered who I needed to call. Now I looked at it and wondered whether I had enough primer. That is a dangerous transition in a man’s life. It is the point at which a person who has successfully repaired one thing begins to believe he has acquired a general understanding of how things work, and starts looking around the house for additional evidence of his abilities. Fortunately, Buttercup had not yet asked me to repair the dishwasher.

The trunk had been particularly satisfying. A trunk is a large, enclosed space with enough corners, seams, brackets, and inaccessible places to make a man question whether the people who designed it had ever intended anyone to paint it again. I had cleaned, scraped, treated, masked, and sprayed until the inside of that enormous compartment looked respectable enough to carry luggage for people who owned luggage worth carrying. The engine compartment had required a different sort of patience, because every time I thought I had finished, I noticed another bracket, hose clamp, or small piece of metal that had apparently been hiding behind something else for sixty-five years.

The neighbor’s dog had supervised much of this work from the other side of the fence. He had no particular interest in the mechanical condition of the Fairlane, but he had developed a professional appreciation for the sound of a spray can being shaken. By the time I finished the engine bay, he could distinguish a can of primer from a can of rust converter by the rhythm of the little steel ball. At least, that was my impression. I had never conducted a controlled experiment, and he had never offered to participate in one.

I felt good about myself.

And then, I was shamed.

“Yeah,” someone said in the comments on the blog. “It looks good under the hood and inside the trunk. What about underneath?”

And just like that, I couldn’t quite look at the Fairlane 500 the same.

Sure, I’d spent some time on the garage floor underneath the massive beast. But it was only to install seat belts, primarily so I could take my granddaughter, Mila, with me when it was time to cruise. Did I glance around while I was under there and take a quick inventory of the condition underneath? Yeah. I remember thinking that it wasn’t bad for a sixty-five-year-old car, especially one that had spent a lot of years in Boston.

But over those sixty-five years it had accumulated only 42,000 miles, so it wasn’t as though it had spent every winter commuting through a salt mine. Was it pretty? No. But then, I figured other than me and the occasional guy at a mechanic’s shop, it would never be seen. The underside of a car is a little like the back of a refrigerator. You know it’s there, you hope nothing is growing on it, and you generally don’t invite company over to admire it.

The trouble was that I had already established a standard. Before I cleaned up the trunk, I could look at the engine compartment and tell myself that the rest of the car was sixty-five years old and entitled to look that way. After I cleaned up the engine compartment, I could no longer use that argument without admitting that I had simply stopped when the work became less convenient. There is a particular kind of pride that comes from doing a job nobody else is likely to see, and I had managed to avoid it by convincing myself that nobody else was likely to see it.

But then I did the trunk. And under the hood. And someone pointed out that I really couldn’t take pride in the effort if the underneath side of the car looked like a hammered goat turd. And I remembered Proverbs.

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I walked outside to the driveway and sat on the ground next to the fence, hoping the neighbor’s dog would come over and offer some moral support. Nothing. Dogs have hearing that’s supposed to be 10,000 times better than humans, or at least that’s what I remembered from something I had read somewhere, which is generally how scientific facts become established around here. I lightly whistled. Not enough for the neighbor to actually hear it. Nothing.

I realized immediately how weird it would be if I went over to the neighbor’s front door, knocked, and asked if I could speak to their dog. I mean, I don’t even know its name. We had developed a fairly close working relationship without ever getting around to introductions, which is not entirely unusual in West Texas. I’ve known men for twenty years whose names I still don’t know, but I can tell you what they drive, where they used to work, and which of their brothers got arrested in Monahans.

Then I went into the garage and got a half-empty rattle can of rust converter, went back to the fence and rattled it. He was over before I set the can down.

“What’s up?” he said. “New project?”

“Maybe. Someone said the work so far doesn’t really matter if the undercarriage doesn’t match the trunk and the engine bay.”

He could probably hear the hurt in my voice.

“Who was it?” he asked.

“That doesn’t matter.”

“It was Motcat, wasn’t it?”

I didn’t say anything.

“I knew it. Only one thing we can do. It’s going to involve a lot of hard work, but I’m right here on the other side of the fence for moral support.” He seemed excited to tackle the project. “Best I can figure, it’ll be a good dozen cans of cleaner and spray coating once you’ve got it all prepped.”

I could hear his tail banging up against the fence when he said “a good dozen cans.” He had developed an enthusiasm for aerosol products that I was beginning to suspect had less to do with automotive preservation than with the sound of the little steel ball inside the can and a certain lightheaded buzz that followed shortly thereafter..

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I crawled under the car to judge just how big the job was going to be. The first thing I noted was that the muffler, exhaust, and tailpipe were not as pristine as I remembered them being. They weren’t hanging off the car or anything, but they had the general appearance of something that had spent sixty-five years being asked to work in a hostile environment without ever receiving a Christmas bonus. It was definitely going to require a new installation.

Once I was down there, I stayed long enough to get a better idea of what I had volunteered for. The underside was not a disaster, but it was a large collection of surfaces that had never been included in my previous calculations. There were places where the old coating had held up reasonably well, places where it had not, and places where I could not tell what I was looking at without cleaning it first. The floor pans, frame, suspension, and all the little brackets and fasteners seemed to extend into the distance. From underneath, the Fairlane was no longer a handsome old sedan. It was an industrial project with four wheels.

I also discovered that the driveway was considerably harder than I remembered it being when I installed the seat belts. That may have had something to do with the amount of time I spent on it, or it may have had something to do with the fact that I was now approaching the project with the knowledge that I would have to come back and do actual work. There is a difference between lying under a car for twenty minutes and lying under it while contemplating several days of scraping, cleaning, and spraying. The first is a task. The second is a lifestyle.

I gave the neighbor’s dog a quick update, told him I thought the can count was on the high side, but to keep his ears tuned for when the project started in earnest in the next day or two. He seemed disappointed that I wasn’t going to start spraying immediately, but accepted the explanation that exhaust work ought to come before cosmetics. He has a better grasp of project sequencing than some contractors I’ve dealt with.

The next morning I was at Monroe Muffler.

The owner came out. I sensed by his overall appearance and accent that Monroe no longer owned the place. He guided me as I drove the big Ford up on the lift. I jumped out and watched as it ascended toward the heavens, which is a particularly impressive sight when the automobile in question is approximately the length of a small municipal building.

There is something about seeing your own car on a lift that changes your relationship with it. On the ground, the Fairlane is an automobile. Six feet in the air, it becomes a collection of engineering decisions made by men who have been dead for decades, and you are suddenly able to see all of them. The underside was much easier to inspect from a standing position, and I immediately understood why professional mechanics have lifts and why I had been trying to do this work while lying on a piece of cardboard.

“You want new muffler?”

“Yep.”

“Tailpipe too?”

“Yep.”

He and someone slightly bigger and burlier, but with less command of English than either of us, both looked up at the undercarriage and then departed to a corner of the shop where exhaust pipes were hanging from the ceiling like sausages in an Italian deli and boxes of NOS mufflers were lining the walls. The place had the wonderful old-shop smell of hot metal, rubber, dust, and fifty years of men saying, “We can make that fit.”

I watched them work their way through the inventory. There was no computer screen, no parts-counter employee asking for the last eight digits of the VIN, and no suggestion that I might need to order something from a warehouse in Dallas and come back Thursday. They simply looked at the car, looked at the parts, and began figuring out what would work. It was the kind of operation that used to be common in Fort Stockton, where a man could bring in something old, broken, or unfamiliar and the fellow behind the counter would study it for a minute before saying, “I think I’ve got one of those in the back.”

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They returned with parts and pieces, held different combinations up to the car, and rattled off a quick conversation that two out of the three of us understood. The second box they opened contained a muffler of the same size as the one attached to the car. They had everything they needed.

He walked back over to me.

“Six hundred. For everything.”

“Too much,” I said.

“Five hundred,” he replied.

“Deal.”

“Cash.”

“Are you kidding? Nobody carries $500 in cash around with them.”

“I take you to ATM. Where you bank?”

“Bluebonnet Loan & Trust.”

“Just down street. Let’s go.”

I got into the nastiest car I have ever climbed into and we headed down the street. It was one of those automobiles in which every horizontal surface had become a storage area and every storage area had apparently been occupied since the first Bush administration. There were receipts, tools, fast-food wrappers, and enough loose change to finance a modest archaeological expedition. I looked for a seat belt and found what I believed to be one beneath a collection of things I decided not to identify.

He told me he was from Iraq, had been here for thirty years, and had bought the shop from his cousin twenty years ago.

“Did your cousin buy it from Monroe?”

“Long time ago.”

“I had Monroe do the mufflers on my old Lincoln Continental convertible thirty years ago.”

“I knew you long time customer. That’s why you get good deal.”

“That and the whole cash thing?”

He didn’t have to answer, as we were pulling up to the ATM at the BLT for the cash.

It occurred to me that I had been thinking of Monroe Muffler as the same place I had visited thirty years earlier, even though the man who owned it then was gone and the man who owned it now had been there for twenty years. That is how businesses work in a small town. The name stays on the building, the people change, and eventually you discover that the fellow you thought was new has been there longer than you have. I had been telling people for years that Monroe had done the exhaust on my Lincoln, and now I was sitting in a car with a man from Iraq who had apparently inherited the entire history of the place along with the inventory.

On the short trip back to the shop I heard his perspective on the state of the world. Luckily, it was a short trip. He had opinions about governments, wars, oil, and the general inability of people in charge to leave well enough alone. I contributed the occasional “Yep” and “I can see that,” which are useful West Texas diplomatic instruments when you are riding in somebody else’s car and would like to arrive at your destination without opening a second front.

“Job take two hours. You wait?”

“No. I’ll walk down to the Dairy Twin and get something to eat while I wait,” I said.

“I take you.”

Before I could tell him it was a short enough distance to walk, he pulled out of the shop parking lot right in front of two other cars and gunned it toward the Dairy Twin, depositing me right outside the front door.

“Two hours. If ready sooner I call you. Give me number.”

He wrote down the number on the closest piece of trash and stuffed it into his shirt pocket, which already contained other numbers on other pieces of trash. I had no idea how he distinguished customers from grocery lists, but apparently the system had worked for twenty years and I was in no position to criticize it.

The Dairy Twin was a good place to spend two hours, particularly when the alternative was standing around a muffler shop watching somebody else work. I ordered a breakfast taco basket and coffee and settled in with the pleasant knowledge that the Fairlane was being repaired by people who knew what they were doing. There is a certain relief in handing a job over to somebody else after spending several weeks doing everything yourself. I had become accustomed to measuring progress in inches, waiting for paint to dry, and discovering that the next step required something I had forgotten to buy. At Monroe Muffler, progress was being measured in exhaust pipe, and I was not responsible for any of it.

I also had time to consider the economics of the transaction. Five hundred dollars was not an insignificant amount of money, but it was considerably less than the six hundred dollars I had been quoted approximately thirty seconds earlier. I had saved a hundred dollars by saying two words. If I could apply that technique to the rest of the restoration, I might eventually recover enough money to pay for the seventy-five cans of chemicals already in the garage. I briefly considered calling the paint store and telling them their prices were too high, but decided that negotiating with a man who had already sold you the merchandise was probably not going to produce the same result.

A breakfast taco basket and two cups of Folgers later, I was walking back to Monroe Muffler, wondering if perhaps somewhere in and amongst the exhaust pipes and tailpipes and boxes of NOS mufflers, some of which were probably the same ones that were there when I had brought the Lincoln in, there might be the weapons of mass destruction we invaded the country to find. The timing would have been about right. I decided not to investigate. I had already committed to an undercarriage restoration, and there was no sense adding international diplomacy to the list of things I was unqualified to do.

At the shop, they were just finishing up with the car.

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I looked everything over and was impressed with the work. The new exhaust was properly fitted, the muffler was tucked up where it belonged, and the tailpipe exited at the rear without looking as though it had been installed by a man who had only seen a Ford in a photograph. The old pieces were lying on the floor, and I could see that my memory of their condition had been considerably more charitable than the evidence warranted.

I spent another minute looking at the underside while the car was still in the air. The new exhaust made everything around it look older, which was not entirely encouraging. It was the same problem I had encountered with the trunk and engine compartment. Once one part of the car was clean, the next part began to look as though it had been neglected on purpose. I could already see how this project was going to proceed. I would clean one section, admire it, and then notice that the section beside it looked terrible. Eventually I would either finish the entire underside or run out of places to stand.

I thought briefly about asking how much he’d charge just to rent a lift to me for a day so I could have the car at a much better position to work on, but then thought about the disappointment the neighbor’s dog would feel. And, if there were weapons of mass destruction, and I found them, they would have to kill me. All in all, it just wasn’t worth the disappointment or the risk.

We went into the office. I laid down five crisp one-hundred-dollar bills on the counter. We looked at each other for a moment. I thought maybe there would be a receipt. Then I figured the transaction was cash, and whatever accounting arrangements he had with the government were between him, his accountant, and the Lord. I had come for a muffler, not to conduct an audit.

He didn’t pick up the money, just in case there was a hidden camera in one of my work boots. Just nodded.

I nodded.

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There are transactions in West Texas that require a signed contract, three witnesses, and a notary. There are others that are concluded with two nods and the mutual understanding that nobody is going to make this any more complicated than it needs to be. This appeared to be the latter.

I walked back out to the car, got in, and turned the key. The Mileage Maker Six sounded quieter than it did before. Not dramatically different, because a 1960 Ford six-cylinder was never intended to sound like a NASCAR stock car, but the old hollow rumble had been replaced by a more civilized exhaust note. It sounded like a car that had just had something repaired rather than a car that was trying to explain what needed repairing.

I wondered if readers would believe me when I wrote down the details of what had just taken place, what with the implications it could have on international relations and local tax policy. I pulled over and jotted down some quick notes on the back of an envelope, just so I wouldn’t forget anything when I got home and told the story to the neighbor’s dog.

When I pulled into the driveway, he was already at the fence. I had barely shut off the engine before I heard the familiar thump of his tail.

“Well?” he asked.

“New muffler. New tailpipe. Five hundred dollars.”

“Cash?”

“Cash.”

He considered that for a moment.

“Did you get a receipt?”

“No.”

“Then I guess we’ll have to take your word for it.”

I looked at him.

“Motcat put you up to that, didn’t he?”

He didn’t say anything.

I went into the garage and picked up the half-empty can of rust converter. His ears came up immediately.

“Now,” I said, “we can start on the underneath.”

He looked at the can, then at the Fairlane, then back at me.

“How many cans you figure?”

“I’m still thinking a dozen is too many.”

His tail stopped.

“Pride,” he said, “goeth before destruction.”

I had no idea where he’d learned Proverbs. But I was beginning to suspect he’d been reading the comments.

To be continued….

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