Life, on the Line by Grant Achatz (leveled readers .TXT) 📗

400-cubic-inch, 350-horsepower automatic. Over the past week I had read everything I could find on Goats and was trying to act smart.

“Well, I guess you do know then! You’re a lucky kid, but I hope you’re good with a wrench, too.”

“I think we’ll be fine,” my dad said as he shot me a wink.

We shoved the front fenders inside the empty chassis shell and the flatbed started to pull the car up the platform. We loaded the doors, boxes of parts, and bags of unknown stuff into the back of the pickup and headed home to St. Clair.

My dad knew that this would be a fantastic life lesson on organization, hard work, and persistence. You want a great car? Build one.

At first my motivation waned. The car didn’t look like anything I wanted to drive, and it was difficult for me to visualize the end result. It was also really hard work to build it.

The first step was restoring the frame to its original condition and that meant the miserable task of sandblasting years of rust, grease, and tar from the skeleton. I would suit up in a thick ski-coat with gloves, put the hood up, and drop a shield in front of my face so the sand wouldn’t get in my eyes or rip off my skin. As the sand whizzed out of the nozzle it would bounce off the frame and scatter everywhere—down my shirt, and in my pants and my hair. I would shower twice after finishing but still find sand behind my ears the next day in school.

My dad sensed when my motivation wavered and kept me interested by letting me choose cosmetic improvements: a chrome air filter, metal-braided plug wires, and eventually the wheels. He gave me books and encouraged me to learn about everything we were doing. Before work began we talked about what we hoped to accomplish that day, and he’d hand me the giant builder’s manual to look up the procedures. We then carefully grouped, labeled, and boxed up all the loose parts in the order they would be needed.

It was a lot like organizing a kitchen.

The deeper we got into the project, the more it grew. I don’t think my dad realized how involved it would become. We converted the garage into a miniature body shop and my dad took crash courses on painting, bodywork, and welding. Before long we had giant air compressors, a host of specialty tools, and were as adept at talking the lingo as mechanics.

For Christmas my parents got me a complete Alpine sound system for the half-built car: equalizer, six-disc CD changer, and radio. I opened the presents in rapid succession and the signature black and green boxes piled up. I was shocked that the biggest of the bunch read ROCKFORD FOSGATE.

“Wow! You guys got me Rockford Fosgate subwoofers? Unbelievable! But where is the box?” I asked, referring to the enclosure for speakers.

“You’re going to build the box, Grant.”

“Build it? Build the box?”

None of the prefabs would fit level in the trunk—they were all made for flat trunks. My dad thought that if we studied the way the boxes work, we could make one that was louder—and cooler—than anything we could buy.

At the two-year mark we were nearly done. We took the entire body off the frame and disassembled the main pieces, painted and cleaned each one, and put them back together. My dad painted the body bright red, the original color, and I helped him stretch and glue down the black vinyl top. We bought reproduction material for the seats, brand-new premolded carpet for the floor, and had the dashboard and rubber bumper sent out to be re-dipped so that they’d look like new. Then, at last, we bolted on the oversize centerline wheels.

On my sixteenth birthday we stood in front of the car and my dad dropped the keys into my hand. We looked at a show-quality 1970 GTO that my dad and I had built together.

“Let’s go for a ride.”

I was making dinner at home one evening in 1995, chatting with my mom and waiting for my dad to return from his weekly golf league outing when I heard the phone ring, watched my mom answer, and could tell immediately that something was wrong.

“That was the golf course. They want me to come get your dad.”

“What? Why?”

“Apparently he’s too drunk to drive.”

I offered to go, but my mom refused. Instead, I rode with her. Anticipating his reaction, especially when he saw me, I suggested we make sure he was somehow unable to jump in his truck and drive off. When we reached the course, I popped the hood of his truck and pulled all of the wires from the spark plugs and the distributor. I knew from building the GTO that each plug wire aligns with a specific plug on the cap to ensure the engine fires in succession. Once the order is lost it would take him an hour to get the plugs synchronized—when he was sober, that is. I closed the hood, and we walked inside to retrieve my dad.

He insisted, of course, that he was fine as he stumbled out of the club toward the truck. Instead of fighting him, I motioned to my mom to let him get in and turn the key.

The truck sat there silently as he turned the ignition. He figured out what I’d done and shot me a look with a raised eyebrow and faint smile before he got angry. I suspect he appreciated the cleverness for a moment; he had no choice but to surrender to the backseat of my mom’s car.

The fifteen-minute ride was painful.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” my mom lectured. “Is that want you want? To have your son see you like this?”

My father sat there in silence, his head bobbing up and down a bit with the bumps in the road, not saying a word or reacting in any way. It was as if