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Having been shamed into addressing that which is never even seen, I began the process of refurbishing the underside of the Fairlane 500 so that it more closely matched the newly minted trunk and engine bay. The trunk had been cleaned, painted and organized. The engine compartment had received enough attention that I could now open the hood without first considering whether the person standing beside me was likely to be judgmental. The underside, however, remained a sixty-six-year-old collection of road dust, surface rust and whatever Ford had applied in 1960 to discourage the elements. It had been doing its job well enough, considering that nobody had paid much attention to it since Eisenhower was president, but apparently that was no longer sufficient.

Was this a knee-jerk reaction? Probably.

At any point did I regret the decision? Many.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, or some other saying generally offered by people who are not the ones expected to make the journey. My single step was heading for YouTube to see what I could find. There was plenty, and it was all over the map. Apparently there are as many ways to refurbish the underside of an automobile as there are ways to prepare brisket, and the people who favor one method have roughly the same opinion of the people who favor another.

One fellow had basically disassembled his entire car and painted each individual part separately after treating it with chemicals that looked as though they might require authorization from the Department of Defense. He removed the suspension, cleaned the frame, stripped the old coatings, treated the metal, painted everything and then reassembled the automobile with the calm assurance of a man who had never once wondered what he was going to do with the rest of his afternoon. The finished product was beautiful. It also represented a level of commitment that the neighbor’s dog and I were not prepared to make. I wanted the underside of the Fairlane to look better. I did not want to become the curator of a Ford archaeological excavation.

Other videos recommended treating everything underneath with lanolin, which apparently could protect the metal for years. The results did not do much to improve the appearance, at least to my eye, but the treatment seemed useful for slowing rust inside places that had never seen daylight and probably preferred it that way. I filed that information away under “Things Worth Knowing If I Ever Completely Run Out Of Things To Do,” which, considering the amount of money and effort already invested, was becoming less of a hypothetical category.

Then there was a video devoted entirely to whether there was any actual difference between “Professional Grade” and “Regular” Rust-Oleum rust-proofing undercoating. The guy sprayed one half of his truck with the Professional Grade and the other half with the Regular, then compared the results. At the end of the video, he concluded that he could not see any meaningful difference between the two. This suggested that the Professional Grade might be the same stuff in a different can for more money, although I am sure the people who manufacture it would have a more sophisticated explanation involving polymers, proprietary formulations and the importance of not asking too many questions. I had to concur with the guy’s findings. The Man was attempting to stick it to us again, this time from underneath.

Another guy had a relatively new truck that was already beginning to rust, so he was treating the entire undercarriage. My first thought was that there are a great many places in America where a man can live without having to do that to a relatively new truck. Fort Stockton, for example, has its disadvantages, but the roads are not generally seasoned with enough salt to preserve a ham. Nonetheless, I picked up some useful tips from his process.

The opinions became more passionate the deeper I went. Some people swore by one product. Others insisted that same product was the worst thing a person could possibly put on an automobile short of battery acid and a campaign bumper sticker. One YouTuber discussed POR-15 with such hostility that I began to suspect the company had once run over his dog. I am pretty sure I know who he voted for, although I could not have told you which product his candidate preferred. Politics has apparently seeped into every corner of American life, including the places underneath a car where even the owner is reluctant to go.

There was one dude who bought several cans of undercoating and did no preparation whatsoever. I mean none. He did not power wash. He did not sand. He did not scrape. He simply got out of his truck, shook the can a few times, sprayed it on and said, “Yep. Looks damn good to me.” At the time, I considered this an irresponsible approach to automotive preservation. Later, while lying on hot concrete with rust falling into every crack and crevice of my being, I would come to regard him as a man of considerable wisdom.

The video that finally got my attention featured a fellow using an Air Needle Scaler, Rust Remover Pneumatic Tool. According to him, it was the key to making the project go quicker, look better and last longer. Those are three things everybody wants whenever a project involves lying on concrete for hours at a time when it is 103 degrees outside. I ordered one from Amazon before the video was over. At the same time, I ordered goggles, gloves, wire brushes and a half dozen cans of Regular Rust-Oleum rust-proofing undercoating. None of that Professional Grade sleight of hand for this guy. I was not born yesterday.

The neighbor’s dog thought I should have ordered twelve cans, but I am pretty sure we all know why by now.

Over the next two days, Amazon made several deliveries to the front door, and I made a trip to the local Hand Job Car Wash to power wash everything underneath the Fairlane. I spent a good deal of time wrestling the wash wand around the rear axle, frame rails and suspension, trying to direct the water toward the places I could not see while avoiding the places I could. By the time I finished, I had washed the underside of the car, most of my trousers, my left foot, and a considerable portion of the concrete. I gave everything plenty of time to dry before beginning the actual work. The experience had already reminded me that there is a difference between being willing to do a job and being physically enthusiastic about it.

But I remained committed. On the appointed day, I backed the Fairlane out of the garage and centered it in the driveway at seven o’clock in the morning. I gathered the tools, air compressor, drop cloths, undercoating, wire brushes, goggles, jack and jack stands. I laid everything out with the confidence of a man who had watched enough instructional videos to believe he was now qualified to instruct somebody else.

My plan was to jack up the car, put the jack stands strategically underneath, chock the front wheels and proceed. There was a flaw in the plan, not so much in the individual steps as in the order in which I intended to perform them. Fortunately, the Fairlane pointed this out before I got underneath it. Getting the jack unstuck from the rear wheel, where it had wedged itself when the car rolled forward, added some time to the process. I saw the neighbor’s dog roll his eyes, as though he could have done any better. Once the car was properly secured, I resumed the operation with considerably more respect for gravity.

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Getting the south end of the Fairlane pointed toward the heavens as high as it could safely go and seeing that it was still going to be a tight fit made me wish I had thought longer about paying the guy who owned the muffler shop to rent his lift for an afternoon. I would have paid cash. I would have paid in advance. I might even have brought him breakfast. But the car was up, the tools were out, and the neighbor’s dog was already beside the fence, so there was no turning back without creating a precedent that could be used against me later.

The Air Needle Scaler, Rust Remover Pneumatic Tool did not come with instructions, not that I would have read them. Most tools are fairly self-explanatory, at least until they are not. It did not take long to put together, hook up to the compressor and experiment with. It also did not take long to become obvious that the YouTuber making that particular video was probably receiving a commission from the Air Needle Scaler, Rust Remover Pneumatic Tool people.

The area the tool actually worked on was about the size of a quarter, or roughly one square inch. Doing the underside of a twenty-foot-long Ford one square inch at a time quickly proved to be an unreasonable method. The Fairlane was the widest automobile Ford ever manufactured, and from underneath it, with my shoulders wedged between the concrete and the frame, it certainly felt like it. The neighbor’s dog was beginning to wonder if we were ever going to get to the spray-can phase.

The wire brushes did remarkably well, although my back, shoulders and general disposition began paying a price considerably higher than the cost of the pneumatic tool. There is something about lying beneath an automobile that makes every movement require advance planning. You cannot simply reach for something. You have to decide whether it is worth crawling out, standing up, retrieving it, getting back down and then discovering that you have left something else just beyond reach. By the time I had repeated this process a dozen times, I had begun to understand why professional mechanics own lifts and why they do not generally invite customers to borrow them.

Before long, Buttercup wandered out of the house and into the driveway.

“What are you doing?” she asked, looking at the Fairlane, the tools and the portion of me visible beneath the rear bumper.

“Cleaning up the undercarriage of the car.”

“Why?”

“Because Motcat shamed me.”

“Is Motcat the neighbor’s dog?”

“No. He’s a guy in Arizona.”

The look of bewilderment took a turn for the worse.

“Then what’s the neighbor’s dog’s name?”

“Rattlecan.”

“Who names their dog Rattlecan?”

“I did.”

“You named the neighbor’s dog?”

Sometimes in marriage, there comes a point where it is better to stop talking and let things settle where they are. The silence hung there for a moment. I began wire brushing again. Buttercup returned to the house, presumably to consider whether this was the same man she had married or whether somebody had switched him out during the night.

My mind wandered as I worked. I thought about Marty, who is a lot older than I am and has a fleet of old cars that he drives and tours regularly. I wondered how in the world he kept up with it all. I had one old Ford, and by midmorning I was beginning to feel as though I had been assigned maintenance responsibility for the entire Texas Department of Transportation.

I thought about the fellow in the video who had simply shaken the can and started spraying without doing any preparation. He did not seem nearly as crazy as he had originally. In fact, I was beginning to suspect he might have been the only person on YouTube who understood the proper relationship between effort and reward.

I thought about whether I could have even started this project if I were just a year or two older. About the twenty-seventh time I got up for something and then crawled back down onto the hot, hard concrete, there were parts of my body that I had not thought about in years that were suddenly making themselves known. Knees, shoulders, hips and assorted smaller components had apparently formed a committee and were demanding to know who had authorized the work.

And then I thought about Motcat. How I had allowed him to shame me into this project, only to learn later that he had let the Jeep Cherokee that had belonged to his father die a long, slow death in the Arizona desert. He probably never gave the undercarriage a thought. Yet here I was, lying beneath a Ford with a wire brush, attempting to satisfy a standard that the guy who suggested it had apparently never applied to himself. There is a lesson in there somewhere, although I was too busy coughing up rust dust to work out what it was.

By the time the cleaning was finished, I was covered from head to toe in red rust dust. My clothes looked as though I had been working in a West Texas iron mine, assuming West Texas had iron mines and assuming the miners were foolish enough to do the work lying down. But the loose rust and old material were gone, the surfaces were ready, and it was finally time to break out the Rust-Oleum.

Rattlecan was beside the fence, nose poking through the loose picket, taking deep breaths before I even had the lid off the first can. I told him he was going to have to enjoy this phase from a safe distance, which he regarded as an unnecessary government intrusion into private enterprise. I moved the cans and the dog’s audience position accordingly, then put on my respirator and began spraying.

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There is a peculiar satisfaction in watching an old, dusty, rust-colored surface turn into a uniform black one. It is not the same satisfaction as painting a fender or polishing chrome, because nobody is ever going to see it unless something has gone terribly wrong or you have invited them underneath your automobile. But it is satisfaction nonetheless. The frame rails began to look cleaner. The suspension looked less neglected. The underside of the trunk, which had been the original source of my embarrassment, finally looked as though it belonged to the same automobile as the freshly restored compartment above it.

By the third can, Rattlecan had lost interest in the actual work and was lying in the shade, apparently contemplating a private concert by Three Dog Night. I was silently thanking Motcat for providing the inspiration for a project that would only be enjoyed by an audience of one. Well, two, if you count Rattlecan, although he had not contributed much beyond moral support and several questionable purchasing recommendations.

When I finally crawled out from underneath the Fairlane, the driveway looked like the aftermath of a small industrial accident. There were empty cans, dirty brushes, cardboard, tools and enough rust dust to suggest that the car had shed an entire layer of its previous life. I stood there for a moment, looking at the underside from the only angle available to a man who was no longer willing to lie down, and felt the satisfaction of having finished something I had not particularly wanted to start.

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Buttercup wandered back out to the driveway sometime late in the afternoon and found me standing beside the Fairlane covered from head to toe in red rust dust, black overspray and enough assorted automotive residue to qualify me as a minor Superfund site. She looked me over carefully before announcing, “There is no way you are walking through this house and getting into the shower I just cleaned just so you can destroy it with whatever toxic coating you are currently wearing.” I looked at her. She looked at me. “Figure it out.” This is one of those phrases in a marriage that sounds like permission but is actually a transfer of liability. Fortunately, the backyard was surrounded by a privacy fence, so I gathered up the garden hose, stepped behind the gate, stripped down to the condition in which the Lord originally issued me and began spraying myself off with cold water, a process that took considerably longer than I had budgeted. Rust dust apparently possesses the same adhesive qualities as roofing tar once introduced to perspiration, and the black undercoating had established several beachheads that required direct attention.

Eventually I was standing naked in the middle of a toxic reddish-brown pool of automotive runoff that I felt relatively certain would kill the hydrangeas and possibly prevent anything else from growing there until the next presidential administration. I looked up and discovered Rattlecan staring through the loose picket in the fence with an expression I had never seen before. For a moment I considered explaining the scientific relationship between cold water and shrinkage, but it seemed we had moved beyond that point in our relationship. Still, I did not want him thinking less of me, so I turned around and faced the other direction. That was when I noticed I had forgotten to shut the gate. Suddenly the hydrangeas were no longer my biggest concern. Neither was Rattlecan.

The next morning, it took me longer than usual to get out of bed. Everything hurt. I had to negotiate with my knees before standing up, and my shoulders were behaving as though they had been involved in a disagreement with a piece of farm equipment. But I could not resist the temptation to get in the Fairlane and head down to the Grounds for Divorce to show off a little bit. I mean, I had just spent more time lying on my back looking up and cussing than even Trixie does when the Mud Hens are in town for a home game.

I parked right out front, in the spot normally reserved for pregnant mothers and recent transplant recipients, and made my way inside with the careful gait of a man who had recently discovered that his skeleton was not under warranty. I took my seat at the big round table and kept glancing out the window, as though there might be something to see. The Fairlane sat there in the morning sunlight, looking exactly as it had the day before, which was both the point of the project and the principal difficulty in getting anybody to appreciate it.

Finally Lucinda said, “What do you keep looking at?”

“Oh, nothing,” I replied. “I just did a little work on the Fairlane.”

Hairless and Angus glanced outside, then went back to discussing how in the world Mayor Goodman had ever been elected not once, but twice. Chad was asking Pastor Peterson exactly what made food kosher. Rusty Hammer was lying about the largemouth bass he had caught over Labor Day weekend and how it probably set a Lake Leon record. Trey was explaining to nobody in particular that it was almost time to put up the new autumn rake display he had been sketching out.

“Yeah, I cleaned and painted the underside of the whole thing,” I said. “Really looks a lot better.”

I raised my voice just a little. Not enough to draw too much attention, but enough to clarify that there had been some major improvements to the automobile if anybody had any interest at all.

Lucinda walked back to the Bunn-O-Matic.

Nobody else showed the slightest inclination to acknowledge the effort.

“If anybody’s interested, I parked right out front. Just right outside the door.”

Angus and Hairless had moved on to the question of whether Goodman would be fit to serve as dogcatcher after his term expired. Chad asked Pastor Peterson whether the Piggly Wiggly needed a kosher section, which was an odd question to put to a Methodist minister, although Pastor Peterson was doing his best. Trey took out a pen and, on the back of a napkin, sketched his vision for the Fall ’26 display, which included not just rakes but leaf blowers, mulching lawn mowers and fire pits. Rusty’s bass had gained another two pounds.

I looked out the window again.

Finally, Trixie said, “I’ll bet it’s pretty as a peach underneath your Ford, darlin’. I’d go out there and take a look, but there’s no way I can squat in this dress.”

I appreciated the effort. But if I was a young Mud Hen, I guarantee you she could.

The conversation moved on, as it always did, and the Fairlane remained outside with its newly refurbished underbelly hidden from the world. I had spent two days cleaning and painting something nobody could see, and the only person who had expressed any interest in looking at it was a woman who had just explained why she could not. There was probably another lesson in that, too, but I had already learned enough for one week.

I finished my coffee, stood up carefully and headed for the door. The Fairlane was waiting in the same spot, its white paint shining in the morning sun. I opened the door, eased myself behind the wheel and sat there for a moment before starting the engine. The trunk was clean. The engine bay was clean. The underside was clean. Nobody at the Grounds for Divorce cared, and I was beginning to think that was probably the proper arrangement.

Then I thought about the muffler.

It was the first thing underneath the Fairlane to be addressed, the original repair that had started this whole business. Now the rest of the undercarriage finally looked as good as the new muffler and exhaust. What had begun as a shaming had turned into a restoration project, which is generally how these things happen. You fix one thing, notice the next thing, and before long you are lying on concrete wondering whether the people who built the car in 1960 ever imagined somebody would still be worrying about it sixty-six years later.

I started the Fairlane and pulled away from the Grounds for Divorce.

Somewhere in Arizona, Motcat was probably having a perfectly pleasant morning.

And somewhere behind the neighbor’s fence, Rattlecan was probably wondering whether six more cans would have been just about right.

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