He was momentarily cheered by Muskrat’s automotive kingdom, which could very well have passed for a chop shop were most of the parts not rusty and from an earlier stage of vehicle evolution. Bubba stepped around an ancient air jack and a bearing press. He made his way through miscellaneous flowerpots, coils of garden hoses, fenders, headlights, hoods, bumpers, car seats, stacks of split firewood and fifty-five-gallon drums overflowing with junk parts.

Bubba was convinced, although he spoke of it rarely, that there was a Bermuda Triangle for vehicles. He believed cars and trucks swept up in floods and tornadoes, or perhaps gone and believed stolen, ended up in places like Muskrat’s shop, where they would be cared for and used to help humans continue their journeys through this life. Bubba intended to write this insight to Click and Clack’s Car Talk on the Internet or perhaps to his favorite, Miss Lonely Parts, a syndicated columnist who was really a man.

“Hey Scrat!” Bubba called out.

He walked inside the garage, where an old furnace burned a mixture of dirty motor oil and firewood.

“Scrat? Where the hell are ya?” Bubba tried again.

Muskrat wasn’t always easy to locate within the jumbles of heater cores, batteries, oil pans, grease guns, chains, tow ropes, bungee straps, gas lines, vacuum hoses, homemade jumper cables, stands made of old Ford wheels, clutches. Pressure plates were stacked like doughnuts on sections of exhaust pipes. There were grinders, a chain horse to lift out engines, and hundreds of American and metric wrenches, ratchets, pliers, chisels, awls, vises, presses, springs, drill bits, spark plugs, dead blow mallets and brass hammers.

“How come you got the heat on, Scrat?”

“To keep my joints from aching. What’dya try to fix this time?” Muskrat’s voice was muffled under a jacked-up 1996 Mercury Cougar.

“Who tried to fix?” Bubba accused.

Muskrat was flat on his back on a creeper. He rolled out from underneath the car, suddenly there, a wizard in a mechanic’s blue work pants and shirt and a NAPA Auto Parts cap.

“What do you mean, I tried?” asked Muskrat, who was at least seventy, with hands rough and hard like horn.

“Windshield’s leaking again,” Bubba let him know. “You fixed it last, Scrat.”

“Uh huh,” Muskrat blandly said as he snatched toilet paper from an industrial roll overhead and began cleaning his glasses. “Well, drive her on in here, Bubba. I’ll take a look but I keep telling you to get the boys at Harding Glass to put in a new windshield. Or dump the damn thing altogether and get something that don’t break down every other minute.”

Bubba walked out of the garage, not listening. He got into his Jeep and cranked the engine as anger pecked at him. He could not and would not believe that his buddy Smudge had cheated him. It couldn’t be that Smudge had sold him a piece of shit. The possibility of it resurrected other injustices as Bubba parked inside the garage, in the bay next to the Cougar, and climbed out.