The Alternator
by Ben Shahon
“Yep, it’s the alternator all right.”
Your grandfather tells you this after fifteen minutes of standing in your parents’ driveway. The late summer Montebello sun, just starting to break into its most unbearable September, beats down on your brows as he wipes his with a floral gray bandana, careful not to signal affiliation where there is none. Your father called him, your mother’s dad, to have a look at his engine, since Pops had never taught him how to do these kind of repair and maintenance jobs himself. Pops never really had been the teaching type, or the type concerned with anything other than what’s right in front of him. But Grandpa wants to show you the car, wants you to be the type of person that can take care of things, a real man. He asks you to hand him the wrench as he gets to work.
***
Sometimes you’ll be out with your grandfather in his truck, running an errand or else going out to hit the town in one way or another, and the engine will put putter to a stop at a red light. You’ll be worried, ask if the car is out of gas, but your grandfather will shake you off, tell you not to worry. Then, he’ll turn the car off, turning the ignition key to spark it once again. He’ll cycle it two or three times before the light turns green again, waiting to hear just the right cadence of humming coming from the engine block up front. When you ask him why it works, he just tells you it’s a bit of magic, and that he can’t reveal his secrets, lest he be out of a job as a wizard.
You know he works as a mechanic down at the garage, that he’s been there for forty years, since he was practically a child himself, but you don’t press him. You know he likes these little victories.
***
The next day, your father’s car starts as expected. It’s a hybrid, the kind of car that Grandpa makes fun of your father for driving. Your father has a good job as a computer programmer, the easy kind of job where as hard as he claims to be working, at the end of the day you know he’s sitting at a nice desk in a nice office surrounded by nice people. He isn’t spending all day in the sun like Grandpa, wrenching life out of machines that feel like they have no life left to give.
Your father drives you to the first day of a new school year, asks you what you want to be when you grow up. It’s a normal enough question, the kind you’ve talked about with him on dozens of trips to school, and given dozens of different answers over the years—silly ones, fun ones, ones that could never happen, ones that would make him proud. But today, you tell him something secret, something true.
“I want to be like Grandpa.”
“Well, you know, hard work is great. And you can be like Grandpa in that way whatever you do. But what do you really want to do?”
“I want to be a mechanic. Like him.”
This answer won’t do. Your father starts to lecture you on your talents, your intelligence. He starts to tell you that if you decide being a mechanic is really for you and apply all your talents in that direction, that it would be a tremendous waste, a tragedy really, and that you owe it to yourself and the rest of the world to apply yourself more generously than that. You can tell he’s getting worked up over it, keeps taking large sips of his coffee, delicately placed into his travel mug that morning by your mom, mixed with just the right amount of cream and sugar to be to his liking, which is to say generous amounts of both. He’s using the coffee to fill his mouth with something other than anger, even though his tone is even and measured throughout your “talk.” You wish you had pretended not to hear him ask.
***
You later tell your grandfather about this conversation with your dad. He tells you to pay it no mind, and promises to show you more about the engines next time you have a day off school. You take him up on his offer, come with him down to the garage on a furlough holiday, and watch as he explains the pistons, the fuel injector, the battery. It all seems like a jumbled mess to you at first, but you appreciate that someone smart like Grandpa knows all the parts, can give you the directions this way and back for navigating it, and can diagnose so quickly why a car isn’t going. He doesn’t expect you to retain all the information he’s handing you, giving you a wry little smile when he can see the look of confusion on your face. When the day gets hot enough, and the work on one particular car is finished, Grandpa will ask the other mechanics to cover him for an hour to take you for ice cream. He says c’mon, and the two of you load in his truck.
The drive over is relatively smooth; he only needs to restart the ignition at two red lights on the drive to the ice cream shop across town.
***
After school, you’re on a regimented schedule. In the thirty minutes after class gets out, your mom picks you up, a perfectly arranged lunch pail of snacks, with bits of cheese and fruit and exactly three crackers waiting for you in the backseat of her sedan. She always has it ready for you, expects you to eat quickly as you get to a busy afternoon. First, from 3:30 to 4:30, you have piano lessons, followed by swim lessons from 5:00 to 6:00. At that point, you’ll go home, take a quick shower, and then have dinner in your jammies promptly at 6:30 with mom and dad. Your father will watch the evening news, and occasionally he’ll let you sit in the room with him while you complete your homework, depending on the complexity of the assignment and on whether or not he has something private to talk about with your mother. Mom usually tries to get dad to let you stay more than he would like, but it’s common that he shoos you away. You don’t mind. In time, you grow to appreciate the dull buzz of their conversation over the droning of the television.
Tonight, you finish your mathematics early, and decide that you’ve had enough of reading A Tale of Two Cities, a book that utterly bores the pants off of you. Your parents are impressed that you’ve been assigned the novel, but you know it’s because the teacher has somehow been deluded into thinking you’re smarter than you are, just because you got lucky on some logic puzzles once a few years ago. It isn’t your fault that you’ve always enjoyed eye spy games and jigsaws. You shouldn’t be punished with such boring books.
Instead of creeping downstairs like you usually would, you decide to take the phone off the hook and dial up your grandfather. There are only a few phone numbers you really know—you carry the rest in a notebook that stays pretty much exclusively in your backpack—but one of them is his. You wait with nervous anticipation of disturbing him. You’ve never called this late before.
“Hello?”
“Hi grandpa.”
“Hey kiddo. What can I do for you?”
“Nothing. I’m just calling to talk to you. To see what you’re doing.”
Your grandfather tells you about his evening. It’s been a relatively simple one. He came home from work at six o’clock, the same time you’ve gotten home. He’s watching the Dodger game on Channel 5, had a sandwich for dinner, and is drinking a beer while he talks on the phone with you. Every word of his fascinates you, pulls you in harder than any story of rich and poor people in France hundreds of years ago. You ask him about the cars he worked on today, and he tells you all about the exotic sports cars and hot rods he got to see the insides of, take apart and put back together.
“Really?”
“No, c’mon kid. I thought you were smarter than that.”
You laugh at being just a little too gullible. But then he really gets into the meat of it, talking about the carburetor of the minivan Mrs. Johnson down the street drives, and how he had to replace the air filter on a hearse today, and a whole host of other little repairs he did all day long. He asks you what you’re learning in school, and for some reason you tell him about Dickens, and about how you think the book is stupid, and how you’re not sure you’re going to finish it, even though your teacher and parents really want you to. He tells you that you really ought to, that there’s value to being smart and getting a smart person’s job, not like him. You tell him about your conversation with your dad that morning, and he chuckles.
“Kiddo, you don’t want to be anything like me. You should listen to your old man. For once, he knows what’s good for you.”
***
It’s late October, and the other kids are all out getting their costumes ready for Halloween. But you’re home, in the garage, because you heard there was going to be a soapbox rally in Whittier the first weekend of November. You’re carefully affixing some old bicycle wheels your grandfather got for you from the junkyard to a body made of old milk crates. The back ones were easy, just a straight pole that’ll hide underneath a plank Grandpa set at an angle for you to sit comfortably on. The front ones were a little more involved, needing the two of you to affix a rack and pinion he pulled off an old Pinto, the kind of car that your grandfather looked at wistfully, as though he wished he could repair it instead of pulling parts from it. You ask him why he likes the car, and he tells you that he used to have one like that back when your mom was your age, and that he misses those days a lot, even if he enjoys your company fine as a substitute. You sort of hit him, and he giggles at your little fists unable to make a dent in his bicep.
You decide even in its unpainted state, the soapbox car is ready for a good little test run. Grandpa agrees to watch the back and block traffic as you roll the toy down the hill. A part of you worries that a car will come from the other direction, not see you because of how low to the ground you are, but Grandpa reassures you the street is quiet enough that it shouldn’t be a problem. And you trust your grandfather, after all.
The wind brushes your hair faster behind you than you thought was possible. You aren’t the kind of family that had the money for regular trips down the 5 to Disneyland, so instead, this is the kind of thrills that you have access to. You gain speed down the hill, but soon realize there aren’t any breaks on this thing. You’re going to have to find a way to slow down, but not too fast. You don’t want to crash after all.
At the bottom of the hill, you turn sharply right, just out of sight of your grandfather. He calls your name out, and runs down the hill. You can tell he’s worried that he lost you. But you’re o.k., since it was just a little tumble, no broken bones, just a few scratches and scrapes. Dad won’t be happy, but mom probably won’t mind. After all, she’s used to your grandfather and the kinds of antics he regularly gets involved with.
***
You’re going to be grounded for a week, they tell you. No TV, no going out with friends to the park, no working on your soapbox car. And no calling your grandfather on the phone. You’re bummed, but you suppose that you did just get your fill of hanging out with him—if such a thing is possible for you.
It started simple enough. You had convinced your parents you were old enough to bike to school, that you could be trusted with the responsibility of getting to class on time and home from the school quickly enough to practice piano. You didn’t mind skipping the snack, since you were getting older and weren’t always hungry after school these days. They acquiesced fairly easily. After all, you had never really given them a reason not to believe you would do what you said, be where you said you would be.
But at 8:42, you asked your homeroom teacher if you could get up to use the restroom. She gave permission to leave the classroom for the moment, but you went a little further than the reaches of the nearest bathrooms. No, you took your bike down to the auto shop, since you had packed a sack lunch anyways. Your grandfather tried to send you back, but you told him no, you’d much rather be here with him in the shop, learning more about how to fix the cars.
You would have gotten away with the whole thing, since you made it back when you said you were going to be home from school, and had a perfect alibi planned for every class, full of mundane events your parents would have believed in, and would have studied the material you missed in a way not too dissimilar from the ways you ordinarily complete your homework. It was the perfect crime, so you thought. Until you walked in the door to see your mom and dad sitting in the living room talking to the attendance counselor on the phone, asking after your absence to see if you’d come home. Your mother had brought the cord of the phone from the kitchen to the living room, something she rarely does unless there is bad news. But she hears you as soon as you open the door, and she informs the school that you’re, “home. Just walked in the door. Thank you. Goodnight.”
You come clean, and are sent to bed without dinner for the evening, in addition to the grounding.
***
When the day of the derby comes around, you’re fidgeting like a hyperactive kid given too much sugar to start their day. You can’t stop tapping your foot at every word the teachers say, just watch the clock tick down, second by second, until you can zoom out of the school and home, this time at the appropriate time. You almost forget to put your helmet on, until one of the adults monitoring the cars picking other kids up yells at you to do so.
By now, the soapbox car is painted a gorgeous baby blue, and the bicycle wheels are all adorned with playing cards, one suit per wheel, so when they spin they each look like a fabulous pinwheel of red or black. You put on your Rams jersey, #29, the horns on each sleeve making your feel powerful and fast, like the man whose name you bore across your back. You even bought a pair of goggles that looked similar, since your grandfather said that it could only help in your pursuit of speed. You realize with time that he was just being supportive, but looking back you appreciate it all the same.
As you get to the top of the hill, you expect to see him there. You look around, and no one you know is there, except for your Dad. You ask him where your grandfather is, and he diplomatically tells you Grandpa is probably just running a bit late. But as it gets closer and closer to the start of the race, you ask him if he’d be willing to push you off if your grandfather doesn’t make it there in time. He says he doesn’t want to step on Grandpa’s toes, but he’d step in if you needed. It eases your tension a bit, but not much. After all you want your grandfather to see.
The race sets off with a brutal ferocity. Your soapbox wasn’t meant to take this kind of beating, and every minor collision makes you worry if a wheel is coming off or a plank is going to be pried loose. You know that if the one you’re sitting on comes out of place, the car will basically have one big emergency brake. But somehow, you narrowly manage to finish the race third overall, which is a tremendous accomplishment for your first car. Your dad is there with a polaroid, capturing the moment that should have been yours and Grandpa’s to share. But you smile anyways, knowing that your dad would be upset if you were ungrateful for such a good first performance.
***
When you and Dad come home from celebratory ice cream, your grandfather isn’t there either. Neither is mom. What is there, however, is a note held up to the fridge with a novelty magnet about good home cooking. It tells you that your mom has gone to the hospital, and that it’s Grandpa.
You and your dad take the hybrid down to the hospital, and quickly find the room. Your mom is already waiting outside, crying like you’ve never seen her cry before. You ask her what’s wrong, what’s going on, and she scarcely has the words in her throat to speak. Your dad manages to pull a nurse to explain the situation, and she informs you that your grandfather has had a heart attack, and that his pacemakers are failing. He’s been placed on life support, but he’s pretty badly hurt and can’t see any visitors other than your mom. He was in his car when it happened, most likely on the way to your race.
You sit outside the door with your mom on the aluminum and vinyl chairs all night. When your father tries to bring you home, you throw the biggest fit you have since you were a little kid. Your mom comes to your defense, saying that it’s o.k., that you deserve to know what happens next right away too, and that there’s no time to wait for a good time at the payphone.
His vitals stay stable through the next day and a half, but then they start creaking steadily down. You ask your mom how much longer they think he has, and she says she’s not quite sure. The nurses and doctors here are good, they check him often, and run as many tests as they reasonably can to try to get him a bit more stabilized, but all the numbers keep trending in the wrong directions.
On the second night in the hospital, you dream about him, imagine talking to him about the ins and outs of fixing his heart, the same way as he would fix an engine. It’s all simple, you tell him, that the atrium and ventricle inject blood through the body in the same way as the fuel injector pulls gasoline into the engine, and he seems to be getting it. But, like all dreams, you wake up, and you’re right back where you were when you fell asleep. About an hour later, a doctor wakes your mom up to talk, and when they’re done, she tells you to pick up your things. It’s time to go home, she tells you. There’s nothing more anyone can do for your grandfather.
At 2:15 p.m. the following day, the medical staff takes your grandfather off life support. The real test at this point, they say, is to see if they can improve his condition, or otherwise push him toward a state more resembling recovery without the use of additional physical apparatuses. But Grandpa doesn’t wake up this time. This time, his engine has finally decided to give up the ghost, once and for all.
Ben Shahon is the author of the chapbooks Short Relief (.406 Press) and A Collection for No One to Read (Bottlecap Features). His work has been featured this year in such journals as The Daily Drunk, BULL, and Ghost Parachute, and he was the founding editor of JAKE. Ben struggles against the machine on the border of LA and Orange Counties in Southern California.
by Ben Shahon
“Yep, it’s the alternator all right.”
Your grandfather tells you this after fifteen minutes of standing in your parents’ driveway. The late summer Montebello sun, just starting to break into its most unbearable September, beats down on your brows as he wipes his with a floral gray bandana, careful not to signal affiliation where there is none. Your father called him, your mother’s dad, to have a look at his engine, since Pops had never taught him how to do these kind of repair and maintenance jobs himself. Pops never really had been the teaching type, or the type concerned with anything other than what’s right in front of him. But Grandpa wants to show you the car, wants you to be the type of person that can take care of things, a real man. He asks you to hand him the wrench as he gets to work.
***
Sometimes you’ll be out with your grandfather in his truck, running an errand or else going out to hit the town in one way or another, and the engine will put putter to a stop at a red light. You’ll be worried, ask if the car is out of gas, but your grandfather will shake you off, tell you not to worry. Then, he’ll turn the car off, turning the ignition key to spark it once again. He’ll cycle it two or three times before the light turns green again, waiting to hear just the right cadence of humming coming from the engine block up front. When you ask him why it works, he just tells you it’s a bit of magic, and that he can’t reveal his secrets, lest he be out of a job as a wizard.
You know he works as a mechanic down at the garage, that he’s been there for forty years, since he was practically a child himself, but you don’t press him. You know he likes these little victories.
***
The next day, your father’s car starts as expected. It’s a hybrid, the kind of car that Grandpa makes fun of your father for driving. Your father has a good job as a computer programmer, the easy kind of job where as hard as he claims to be working, at the end of the day you know he’s sitting at a nice desk in a nice office surrounded by nice people. He isn’t spending all day in the sun like Grandpa, wrenching life out of machines that feel like they have no life left to give.
Your father drives you to the first day of a new school year, asks you what you want to be when you grow up. It’s a normal enough question, the kind you’ve talked about with him on dozens of trips to school, and given dozens of different answers over the years—silly ones, fun ones, ones that could never happen, ones that would make him proud. But today, you tell him something secret, something true.
“I want to be like Grandpa.”
“Well, you know, hard work is great. And you can be like Grandpa in that way whatever you do. But what do you really want to do?”
“I want to be a mechanic. Like him.”
This answer won’t do. Your father starts to lecture you on your talents, your intelligence. He starts to tell you that if you decide being a mechanic is really for you and apply all your talents in that direction, that it would be a tremendous waste, a tragedy really, and that you owe it to yourself and the rest of the world to apply yourself more generously than that. You can tell he’s getting worked up over it, keeps taking large sips of his coffee, delicately placed into his travel mug that morning by your mom, mixed with just the right amount of cream and sugar to be to his liking, which is to say generous amounts of both. He’s using the coffee to fill his mouth with something other than anger, even though his tone is even and measured throughout your “talk.” You wish you had pretended not to hear him ask.
***
You later tell your grandfather about this conversation with your dad. He tells you to pay it no mind, and promises to show you more about the engines next time you have a day off school. You take him up on his offer, come with him down to the garage on a furlough holiday, and watch as he explains the pistons, the fuel injector, the battery. It all seems like a jumbled mess to you at first, but you appreciate that someone smart like Grandpa knows all the parts, can give you the directions this way and back for navigating it, and can diagnose so quickly why a car isn’t going. He doesn’t expect you to retain all the information he’s handing you, giving you a wry little smile when he can see the look of confusion on your face. When the day gets hot enough, and the work on one particular car is finished, Grandpa will ask the other mechanics to cover him for an hour to take you for ice cream. He says c’mon, and the two of you load in his truck.
The drive over is relatively smooth; he only needs to restart the ignition at two red lights on the drive to the ice cream shop across town.
***
After school, you’re on a regimented schedule. In the thirty minutes after class gets out, your mom picks you up, a perfectly arranged lunch pail of snacks, with bits of cheese and fruit and exactly three crackers waiting for you in the backseat of her sedan. She always has it ready for you, expects you to eat quickly as you get to a busy afternoon. First, from 3:30 to 4:30, you have piano lessons, followed by swim lessons from 5:00 to 6:00. At that point, you’ll go home, take a quick shower, and then have dinner in your jammies promptly at 6:30 with mom and dad. Your father will watch the evening news, and occasionally he’ll let you sit in the room with him while you complete your homework, depending on the complexity of the assignment and on whether or not he has something private to talk about with your mother. Mom usually tries to get dad to let you stay more than he would like, but it’s common that he shoos you away. You don’t mind. In time, you grow to appreciate the dull buzz of their conversation over the droning of the television.
Tonight, you finish your mathematics early, and decide that you’ve had enough of reading A Tale of Two Cities, a book that utterly bores the pants off of you. Your parents are impressed that you’ve been assigned the novel, but you know it’s because the teacher has somehow been deluded into thinking you’re smarter than you are, just because you got lucky on some logic puzzles once a few years ago. It isn’t your fault that you’ve always enjoyed eye spy games and jigsaws. You shouldn’t be punished with such boring books.
Instead of creeping downstairs like you usually would, you decide to take the phone off the hook and dial up your grandfather. There are only a few phone numbers you really know—you carry the rest in a notebook that stays pretty much exclusively in your backpack—but one of them is his. You wait with nervous anticipation of disturbing him. You’ve never called this late before.
“Hello?”
“Hi grandpa.”
“Hey kiddo. What can I do for you?”
“Nothing. I’m just calling to talk to you. To see what you’re doing.”
Your grandfather tells you about his evening. It’s been a relatively simple one. He came home from work at six o’clock, the same time you’ve gotten home. He’s watching the Dodger game on Channel 5, had a sandwich for dinner, and is drinking a beer while he talks on the phone with you. Every word of his fascinates you, pulls you in harder than any story of rich and poor people in France hundreds of years ago. You ask him about the cars he worked on today, and he tells you all about the exotic sports cars and hot rods he got to see the insides of, take apart and put back together.
“Really?”
“No, c’mon kid. I thought you were smarter than that.”
You laugh at being just a little too gullible. But then he really gets into the meat of it, talking about the carburetor of the minivan Mrs. Johnson down the street drives, and how he had to replace the air filter on a hearse today, and a whole host of other little repairs he did all day long. He asks you what you’re learning in school, and for some reason you tell him about Dickens, and about how you think the book is stupid, and how you’re not sure you’re going to finish it, even though your teacher and parents really want you to. He tells you that you really ought to, that there’s value to being smart and getting a smart person’s job, not like him. You tell him about your conversation with your dad that morning, and he chuckles.
“Kiddo, you don’t want to be anything like me. You should listen to your old man. For once, he knows what’s good for you.”
***
It’s late October, and the other kids are all out getting their costumes ready for Halloween. But you’re home, in the garage, because you heard there was going to be a soapbox rally in Whittier the first weekend of November. You’re carefully affixing some old bicycle wheels your grandfather got for you from the junkyard to a body made of old milk crates. The back ones were easy, just a straight pole that’ll hide underneath a plank Grandpa set at an angle for you to sit comfortably on. The front ones were a little more involved, needing the two of you to affix a rack and pinion he pulled off an old Pinto, the kind of car that your grandfather looked at wistfully, as though he wished he could repair it instead of pulling parts from it. You ask him why he likes the car, and he tells you that he used to have one like that back when your mom was your age, and that he misses those days a lot, even if he enjoys your company fine as a substitute. You sort of hit him, and he giggles at your little fists unable to make a dent in his bicep.
You decide even in its unpainted state, the soapbox car is ready for a good little test run. Grandpa agrees to watch the back and block traffic as you roll the toy down the hill. A part of you worries that a car will come from the other direction, not see you because of how low to the ground you are, but Grandpa reassures you the street is quiet enough that it shouldn’t be a problem. And you trust your grandfather, after all.
The wind brushes your hair faster behind you than you thought was possible. You aren’t the kind of family that had the money for regular trips down the 5 to Disneyland, so instead, this is the kind of thrills that you have access to. You gain speed down the hill, but soon realize there aren’t any breaks on this thing. You’re going to have to find a way to slow down, but not too fast. You don’t want to crash after all.
At the bottom of the hill, you turn sharply right, just out of sight of your grandfather. He calls your name out, and runs down the hill. You can tell he’s worried that he lost you. But you’re o.k., since it was just a little tumble, no broken bones, just a few scratches and scrapes. Dad won’t be happy, but mom probably won’t mind. After all, she’s used to your grandfather and the kinds of antics he regularly gets involved with.
***
You’re going to be grounded for a week, they tell you. No TV, no going out with friends to the park, no working on your soapbox car. And no calling your grandfather on the phone. You’re bummed, but you suppose that you did just get your fill of hanging out with him—if such a thing is possible for you.
It started simple enough. You had convinced your parents you were old enough to bike to school, that you could be trusted with the responsibility of getting to class on time and home from the school quickly enough to practice piano. You didn’t mind skipping the snack, since you were getting older and weren’t always hungry after school these days. They acquiesced fairly easily. After all, you had never really given them a reason not to believe you would do what you said, be where you said you would be.
But at 8:42, you asked your homeroom teacher if you could get up to use the restroom. She gave permission to leave the classroom for the moment, but you went a little further than the reaches of the nearest bathrooms. No, you took your bike down to the auto shop, since you had packed a sack lunch anyways. Your grandfather tried to send you back, but you told him no, you’d much rather be here with him in the shop, learning more about how to fix the cars.
You would have gotten away with the whole thing, since you made it back when you said you were going to be home from school, and had a perfect alibi planned for every class, full of mundane events your parents would have believed in, and would have studied the material you missed in a way not too dissimilar from the ways you ordinarily complete your homework. It was the perfect crime, so you thought. Until you walked in the door to see your mom and dad sitting in the living room talking to the attendance counselor on the phone, asking after your absence to see if you’d come home. Your mother had brought the cord of the phone from the kitchen to the living room, something she rarely does unless there is bad news. But she hears you as soon as you open the door, and she informs the school that you’re, “home. Just walked in the door. Thank you. Goodnight.”
You come clean, and are sent to bed without dinner for the evening, in addition to the grounding.
***
When the day of the derby comes around, you’re fidgeting like a hyperactive kid given too much sugar to start their day. You can’t stop tapping your foot at every word the teachers say, just watch the clock tick down, second by second, until you can zoom out of the school and home, this time at the appropriate time. You almost forget to put your helmet on, until one of the adults monitoring the cars picking other kids up yells at you to do so.
By now, the soapbox car is painted a gorgeous baby blue, and the bicycle wheels are all adorned with playing cards, one suit per wheel, so when they spin they each look like a fabulous pinwheel of red or black. You put on your Rams jersey, #29, the horns on each sleeve making your feel powerful and fast, like the man whose name you bore across your back. You even bought a pair of goggles that looked similar, since your grandfather said that it could only help in your pursuit of speed. You realize with time that he was just being supportive, but looking back you appreciate it all the same.
As you get to the top of the hill, you expect to see him there. You look around, and no one you know is there, except for your Dad. You ask him where your grandfather is, and he diplomatically tells you Grandpa is probably just running a bit late. But as it gets closer and closer to the start of the race, you ask him if he’d be willing to push you off if your grandfather doesn’t make it there in time. He says he doesn’t want to step on Grandpa’s toes, but he’d step in if you needed. It eases your tension a bit, but not much. After all you want your grandfather to see.
The race sets off with a brutal ferocity. Your soapbox wasn’t meant to take this kind of beating, and every minor collision makes you worry if a wheel is coming off or a plank is going to be pried loose. You know that if the one you’re sitting on comes out of place, the car will basically have one big emergency brake. But somehow, you narrowly manage to finish the race third overall, which is a tremendous accomplishment for your first car. Your dad is there with a polaroid, capturing the moment that should have been yours and Grandpa’s to share. But you smile anyways, knowing that your dad would be upset if you were ungrateful for such a good first performance.
***
When you and Dad come home from celebratory ice cream, your grandfather isn’t there either. Neither is mom. What is there, however, is a note held up to the fridge with a novelty magnet about good home cooking. It tells you that your mom has gone to the hospital, and that it’s Grandpa.
You and your dad take the hybrid down to the hospital, and quickly find the room. Your mom is already waiting outside, crying like you’ve never seen her cry before. You ask her what’s wrong, what’s going on, and she scarcely has the words in her throat to speak. Your dad manages to pull a nurse to explain the situation, and she informs you that your grandfather has had a heart attack, and that his pacemakers are failing. He’s been placed on life support, but he’s pretty badly hurt and can’t see any visitors other than your mom. He was in his car when it happened, most likely on the way to your race.
You sit outside the door with your mom on the aluminum and vinyl chairs all night. When your father tries to bring you home, you throw the biggest fit you have since you were a little kid. Your mom comes to your defense, saying that it’s o.k., that you deserve to know what happens next right away too, and that there’s no time to wait for a good time at the payphone.
His vitals stay stable through the next day and a half, but then they start creaking steadily down. You ask your mom how much longer they think he has, and she says she’s not quite sure. The nurses and doctors here are good, they check him often, and run as many tests as they reasonably can to try to get him a bit more stabilized, but all the numbers keep trending in the wrong directions.
On the second night in the hospital, you dream about him, imagine talking to him about the ins and outs of fixing his heart, the same way as he would fix an engine. It’s all simple, you tell him, that the atrium and ventricle inject blood through the body in the same way as the fuel injector pulls gasoline into the engine, and he seems to be getting it. But, like all dreams, you wake up, and you’re right back where you were when you fell asleep. About an hour later, a doctor wakes your mom up to talk, and when they’re done, she tells you to pick up your things. It’s time to go home, she tells you. There’s nothing more anyone can do for your grandfather.
At 2:15 p.m. the following day, the medical staff takes your grandfather off life support. The real test at this point, they say, is to see if they can improve his condition, or otherwise push him toward a state more resembling recovery without the use of additional physical apparatuses. But Grandpa doesn’t wake up this time. This time, his engine has finally decided to give up the ghost, once and for all.
Ben Shahon is the author of the chapbooks Short Relief (.406 Press) and A Collection for No One to Read (Bottlecap Features). His work has been featured this year in such journals as The Daily Drunk, BULL, and Ghost Parachute, and he was the founding editor of JAKE. Ben struggles against the machine on the border of LA and Orange Counties in Southern California.