A Dusty Tires Short Story

By Dusty Tires

The day after he went out on his first date ever with a girl, James made a firm resolution to buy a car of his own.

He was 19 years old that June, and he had worked at a local restaurant for about a year, first as a dishwasher and then as a short order cook. A waitress there had caught his eye, and they went out on a date. It was his first real date – he had a couple of girlfriends while in Rendville High School, but those were girls he mainly had socialized with as part of larger groups.

He had a problem, however. He had no car of his own. His only option for transportation was to use his parents’ blue 1968 Chevrolet Bel Air station wagon, and it was not ideal. It was designed for taking nine passengers on long trips, not two people for a romantic evening. Not only did it look nerdy — somehow it turned him into a complete nerd when he drove it.

After acquiring the keys to the huge Chevy wagon, he and the girl went to a nearby city park. After they got out of the car to take a walk, he suddenly realized he had locked the keys in the car. It took a long time to live down his embarrassment from that. That incident provided him with the resolve to buy a car for himself.

He had enough money saved up from his earnings at the restaurant, so he bought a copy of Tradin’ Times, a classified ad newspaper, and pored over the used car ads at the kitchen table for days. After studying dozens of ads, he read this one:

“1967 Chevy Chevelle Malibu, 79,000 miles, 2-door coupe, 283 V8 engine, manual transmission, black exterior, tan interior. Good condition, runs well. $400, 614-837-2354.”

He wasn’t sure about the manual transmission part but the rest of it sounded good. So he called. The car was stored in a barn in the town of Remington a few miles away.

James and his friend Dave, who drove his own car, went out to look the vehicle over the next evening. Sure enough, the car was peeking out from the doors of a small barn — the proverbial barn find! He had no idea how fortunate he was.

The car ran great but had an exhaust leak, as well as numerous scratches from cats or raccoons on the hood. He plunked down $400 in cash without any horse-trading. It was a good deal, and Dave thought it was a decent car as well.

With some title work and temporary license tags, the car was his, but he couldn’t drive it quite yet. He’d never driven a manual transmission before, and this one was the peculiar “three on the tree” shifter on the steering column. So Dave drove it home while James followed in Dave’s car.

The very next evening after work James went out with Dave on some deserted country roads and worked on learning how to use the manual shifter and the clutch pedal. After about an hour and numerous stall-outs and jumpy starts, he’d gotten the hang of it well enough to drive it back home himself.

The next day he went over the car closely. The deck under the rear window was warped and sun-damaged. The radio didn’t work, but all the other controls did. The front bench seat was worn through on the driver’s side, but seat covers would take care of that. Of course, the other major thing was the exhaust leak – it would need a new muffler and probably an entire exhaust system.

James opened up the hood and viewed the dirty engine. He pulled out the oil dipstick and frowned at the black syrupy liquid dripping slowly off the end of the stick. The oil would need to be changed. He pulled one of the spark plug wires and cranked out the spark plug. The tip was scorched and blackened. Needs new spark plugs and probably wires, too, he thought.

He took off the air cleaner and lifted out the filter, which was dirty and would need replaced. He still needed to check belts, hoses, carburetor, brakes and a whole lot of other things he wasn’t very knowledgeable about.

Unlike a lot of other guys his age, he wasn’t interested in modifying the Chevelle to make it a high-performance car or hot rod with a lot of custom features. He couldn’t afford these expenses, and besides, he was satisfied with the car as it was. It just needed enough improvements made so that it would run well enough to get him where he wanted to go and back again.

Dave, who also worked at the restaurant, came over after work and showed him how to set spark plug gaps, change points in the condenser and check the timing, among a lot of other things.

“I’ve named it ‘Black Betty’ – you know, after the song on the radio,” James told Dave.

Dave laughed. “You should call this car ‘Raccoon Track Black’ because of all the scratches on the hood.”

The only thing special it needed was a good stereo. Within a couple weeks James had gone to Saturn TV & Appliance and bought a midrange am-fm cassette stereo for the dashboard and two speakers for the rear deck. Dave, of course, helped him install the stereo and connect all the wiring.

He had constructed a new rear deck out of plywood upon which to mount the speakers and spray-painted it black. The speakers were not flush mounted but stood on pedestals in the rear window. That feature made them look really cool, but he would eventually find that it also made them very attractive to thieves. But he was not thinking of that when he bought them.

By the end of the summer, he had all the basic issues with the car repaired, replaced and put into decent order. The car still had a hidden weakness that he eventually discovered. Whenever it rained a lot, which was fairly often, the engine would sputter and miss. One time, after a heavy rain, the engine quit running and simply wouldn’t start back up.

With Dave’s diagnostic help, he found the problem. The distributor cap seemed to soak up moisture, perhaps from a hairline crack in the plastic shell. When the distributor cap got wet inside, the sensitive electronics inside that were supposed to spark did not spark. A simple fix was to bring paper towels with him to wipe out and dry the distributor cap whenever things got wet. But after it happened a few times, he simply replaced the distributor cap.

The car – whether one called it “Black Betty” or “Raccoon Track Black” – made lots of trips from the east side of Rendville to the state university, many trips back and forth from home to work, and many trips to a certain girl’s home and various other places on dates. It served him well and reliably for about three years.

One evening while he was working at the restaurant, a thief finally broke into his car and stole the stereo and speakers. He was infuriated at the robbery as well as the fact that the thief broke a side vent window to get into the car. But this wasn’t the worst thing that happened to the black car.

One rainy night in May, James attended a college graduation party for one of his friends at a house at Rendville Lake. He, Dave and another friend he had taken as passengers declined an invitation to stay the night, even though they had all had a lot to drink.

Driving in the rainy night back toward his campus-area apartment, he took a curve way too fast on a two-lane highway and the car careened off the road. For him, it seemed like suddenly things went into slow motion. A telephone pole was directly in the path of the car.

At that split second, the car rolled over, went airborne and somehow avoided the pole. The car landed on its roof in a muddy field. The three of them crawled out of the vehicle unhurt except for a few scratches and bruises. All they could do was wait dazedly in the rain for the police and emergency vehicles to arrive. After spending some time with law enforcement authorities, he rode home miserably with his father, who had gotten the dreaded wee hours of the morning phone call from police. 

The next day, he saw the car at a junkyard lot and again could not believe his good fortune – that he and his friends hadn’t been killed or badly injured in the accident. The car’s top was smashed down to within a foot or so of the top of the doors. He knew without a doubt that only a miracle had saved them in that awful crash.

That was the last time James saw his old ’67 Chevelle Malibu. He was glad to be alive and relieved that neither of his friends had been hurt, but he grieved for the car – his first car. It was a twisted, smashed remnant that represented a lot of his youthful hopes and dreams, and a reminder of life’s fragility.

Read more: Classic car culture is strong as ever in Ohio – July 1, 2024, Dusty Tires

Ken Drenten is creator and editor of Dusty-Tires.com, a travel blog for out-of-the-ordinary places in Ohio.

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