The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

Author:Cormac McCarthy [McCarthy, Cormac]
Language: eng
Format: epub

He arrived in Paris in the fall of 1969, coming on the boat train from London. The last thing Chapman said to him was the old saw about racing. Fast chaps, rich chaps, and idiots. Sometimes you can find all three in a single Nomex suit.

Would that be me?

You’re too late, Bobby. The day of the gentleman racer is over. I’ve seen a lot of blokes who were rich and dumb become poor and smart. Everything in racing is a tradeoff. Except big brakes. The only edge you might have is that in Formula racing there actually is a substitute for cubic inches. It’s called engineering.

He walked out of the Gare du Nord carrying his two leather bags and stood in the Paris night. He stood there a long time. Just getting his shit together. Finally he got a cab and gave the driver the address of the Mont Jolí in the rue Fromentin near Pigalle. The hotel was favored by traveling entertainers and any morning there would be jugglers and hypnotists and exotic dancers and trained dogs in the lobby coffeeshop. He rented a garage in the ninth arrondissement and began to collect tools. The car arrived on a transporter a week later and Armand arrived a day after that. Every day he’d take the bus out through the bleak suburbs and unlock the door and take down his coveralls and pull them on. The Lotus stood on jacks and he and Armand would roll around the concrete floor on mechanics’ dollies setting the caster and camber and toe-in on the car. Adjusting the sway bars. Then recalibrating the injection and the timing on the tiny screaming engine. They would tow the car out to the track with Armand’s truck and trailer and take turns driving it with the new settings and then tow it back, sometimes in the dark.

In those first evenings he sat by himself at the bench rebuilding the spare engine. Chapman had done the machine work and sleeved the cylinders. Everything was aluminum and the clearances were enormous. He tightened the connecting-rod bolts and measured the boltstretch with a dial indicator. He checked the book and measured again. There was a paraffin heater in the shop but he was always cold. He and Armand would eat lunch at a tabac two blocks from the garage. The regulars were astonished to see an American in greasy coveralls sitting among them.

She left school and came to Paris and in the evening he would take her to dinner at Boutin’s down the street from the hotel. Miller used to eat here back in the thirties. Wonderful veal dish with a cream sauce that cost seven francs. The prostitutes couldnt take their eyes off her. The first race was at Spa-Francorchamps and the Lotus ran like a train for twenty-seven laps and then quit cold when the petrol pump packed up.

He took her down to IHES and they found a room for her and said goodbye. Chapman sent the other car over in March.

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