That day after school, I met up with Helen right after lunch, and the two of us ended up riding around for hours, in no real hurry to be anywhere else. I'd talked her into skipping her last few classes, something she probably wouldn't have agreed on the first day after the break, but my contagious excitement to ride with her made her agree with me.
We stuck mostly to the back roads outside town, weaving past fields and empty stretches of highway with nothing but open sky overhead. It was almost like meditation to drive on smooth roads. I think I found something I love.
Eventually the clock caught up with us, and I got her back home just before her parents were due back, cutting it closer than either of us probably should have.
"It was fun, bye," Helen said, quickly kissing me on the cheek before rushing off toward her house.
I hadn't taken on any new projects since finishing the bike, mostly just enjoying the downtime while it lasted, but that stretch of rest was officially over now. Today I planned on heading out to track down whatever the next project would be.
I got home right as Mom called out for me.
"Charlie! Kevin's on the phone!"
"Coming," I told her, jogging toward the kitchen.
"So you miss me already," I said, teasing, once I'd grabbed the receiver.
"Do you know anything about tractors?" he asked, skipping straight past any greeting.
"Hmm?" I wasn't entirely sure what he was even asking at first.
"My dad's tractor broke down in the middle of work today. Can you come out to the farm and take a look?" he asked, and I said yes without a second's hesitation.
"I'll be at your place in a minute," I told him.
I rode my bike over to his house, and from there we took his car the rest of the way out to the farm. It wasn't much of a drive at all, and once we arrived, I got my first real look at the land his father worked. His dad was already out there, hood propped open, staring down at the tractor with a frustrated, confused expression.
"Afternoon, sir. Mind if I take a look?" I said to Kevin's dad, Mr. Johnson, and he greeted me with an easy, friendly smile.
"Be my guest, son," he said.
Kevin's dad turned out to be genuinely thrilled the moment he found out I actually knew my way around an engine. Kevin must have told him about how I fix and sell cars to make money now.
He lit up like he'd struck gold, clearly relieved to have someone competent standing in his field instead of just his son.
I got the sense he'd been dragging Kevin out to help around the farm a lot more often lately precisely because of that, which explained why Kevin had been complaining nonstop about farm chores without ever really saying why.
I made a show of looking things over while quietly resting a hand against the tractor, letting Appraisal do the actual work underneath the act. What it found was a corroded, half-clogged fuel filter, choked with rust flakes shed from the inside of the old tank, just enough to starve the engine of fuel whenever it was put under any real load. An easy fix, and a cheap one at that.
"I think I know the problem," I told Kevin's dad, and though he looked more than a little skeptical that a kid my age had actually figured it out that fast, the fix itself was cheap enough that he agreed to let me handle it anyway.
Kevin and I made a quick stop at the parts shop to grab the fuel filter, with Kevin covering the cost from what his father had given him. On the way back out to the farm, we swung by my house so I could grab my toolbox, and that's when Georgie caught wind of what we were up to.
He tagged along without needing much convincing, more curious about watching me work on tractors than actually offering to help. He did ask, at some point during the drive, how I knew about fixing trucks now.
I just said the same words as last time.
“I read a book”
“Yeah that seems right”
he swallowed it whole without a second thought. Honestly, gullible Georgie ought to be the kid's actual legal name at this point.
Back at the farm, I got straight to work, popping the access panel and tracing the fuel line down to the filter housing. I pulled the old filter free, already caked solid with rust flakes from years of sitting in that corroded tank, and swapped in the replacement in under a minute. From there it was just a matter of bleeding the line, priming the pump by hand a few times, and double checking the clamps were seated properly before buttoning the panel back up.
The whole job, start to finish, took maybe ten minutes, most of which was spent making it look like I was actually struggling with something.
Kevin's dad, Mr. Johnson, watched the entire process without saying a word, and a few other hands from the farm had wandered over too by the time I finished, drawn in by the sight of some teenager elbow-deep in a tractor engine. Kevin climbed up into the seat once I'd closed everything back up.
"Turn it on," I told him, and the engine caught immediately, running with a clean, steady hum that sounded nothing like the rough sputter it had before. Kevin took it for a slow loop around the field, and it handled smooth the whole way.
"It's running better than before," Kevin said, still perched up there, sounding a little confused by that fact. Of course it was better. I'd slipped the passive Durability Enhancement onto it. No efficiency enhancement. Since I didn't know how it would react on tractors.
"Good job, son," Mr. Johnson said, patting shoulders and reaching for his wallet, though I waved him off before he could get any further.
"Couldn't take your money, Mr. Johnson. Kevin's my friend," I told him, firm about it.
"Well, if you really want to help us out, you could always send your farmer friends our way whenever they need repair work," Georgie cut in, always quick to sniff out an opportunity when one showed up.
"Funny you mention that. There's a big equipment auction coming up in Houston. I'll be heading down there myself, on the fourteenth of January. There will be a lot of repairing needed there. You could use your skills to earn some money there." Mr. Johnson said. That was genuinely great news.
Only two weeks off. Farm equipment carried serious money at auctions like that, and if I could find a way to put my skill to use in that setting, there was real profit sitting there waiting to be picked up.
"But that's all the way in Houston," Georgie complained.
"How about I just take you boys along with me," Mr. Johnson offered. I perked right up at that.
"Really?" Georgie said, practically bouncing.
"That's real kind of you, sir. We'll have to check with our parents first," I said, though I was already fully sold on the idea myself.
"Sounds like a proper boys' trip," Kevin said, just as thrilled as Georgie was. The two of them high-fived right there in the driveway, and Kevin spent the whole ride back to our place mapping out the entire trip out loud, dragging Georgie into the planning right along with him.
Their excitement was contagious enough that I found myself grinning the whole way home too.
I told Georgie we still needed to grab a car to fix up for the week ahead, and the two of us climbed out once Kevin dropped us off.
"Where's the Rebel?" Georgie asked.
I blinked, and it took a second for it to actually register. The bike was still sitting back at Kevin's place. I punched the air in frustration.
"Damn it," I muttered, annoyed at my own carelessness. I still wasn't fully used to keeping track of an actual vehicle of my own.
"You're stupid," Missy said, laughing the second she caught the tail end of our conversation.
"Stupid, like, Georgie-level stupid," she added, then took off running the moment I pretended to lunge after her.
"This stupid's about to make you stupid too," I said, chasing her in a full loop around the house while she shrieked somewhere between laughing and crying. I finally caught her when she was on the couch and tickled her without mercy.
"Stop! Please stop! I'm sowwy! Hahahaaaa…" she wailed, genuine tears mixing in with the laughter now. Oops.
"Charlie!" Mom's voice rang out from inside the house the second she heard Missy crying, and I bolted before she could catch me in the act.
"Wait up!" Georgie shouted, sprinting after me, clearly not interested in getting caught in the crossfire of whatever punishment was coming.
____
We walked to Kevin's place to retrieve the bike, where he had a good long laugh at my expense too. From there, Georgie and I headed straight to a car dealership and picked up a pair of seventies trucks to fix up over the coming week. Trucks from that era practically sold themselves around here, reliable, easy to source parts for, and always in demand from somebody looking for a solid workhorse rather than anything flashy.
Between the cost of the two trucks and whatever repairs they'd need, we figured on spending around fifteen hundred dollars total, with each one turning around and selling for close to two thousand once we handed them back to the dealership.
That put us looking at a solid twenty-five hundred dollars in profit for a single week's worth of work, which wasn't bad at all for two guys not even old enough to legally drive without supervision.
Part of me still wanted to get my hands on something genuinely luxurious eventually, but nothing in that category had turned up yet here that was in our budget. Whatever we did find it was either not worth the effort or it was out of our budget.
In the meantime, I kept setting money aside with a bigger goal in mind, opening my own proper auto shop somewhere down the line, hopefully within the next few months if things kept going the way they had been. I will have to take a loan though.
We brought up the Houston trip over dinner that night, and Mom and Dad barely blinked at the idea. Dad knew Kevin's father, and since I didn't exactly have a wide circle of friends to begin with, Mom had never really made a habit of standing in the way whenever Kevin was involved. She trusted him, plain and simple, she considered him a good kid.
"So it'd just be you, Georgie, and Kevin? No other kids?" Mom asked, cutting into her potatoes.
"And Mr. Johnson driving the whole way," I added.
"Well, that settles it then," Dad said. "There will be a responsible adult with ya’"
"Not fair. Why do they get a whole boys' trip and I'm stuck here?" Missy cut in, arms crossed, clearly unwilling to let this go without a fight.
“I am happy. Maybe it will be quiet this weekend.”
Before Mom could even respond, Meemaw leaned over and whispered something directly into Missy's ear. Whatever it was worked instantly, Missy's scowl melting into a satisfied little smile.
"Actually, never mind. Have fun, boys," she said sweetly.
I raised an eyebrow at her from across the table, and she just grinned back, making a small gun shape with her fingers without mom noticing. That told me everything I needed to know. Meemaw was taking her back out to the shooting range when we were gone.
"Dad, I want to open a bank account. For me and Georgie both," I said, once dinner had settled down.
"Yeah, smart move, getting your savings somewhere proper," he said, nodding along, promising to help me sort it out.
Saving money in a shoebox wasn't going to get me anywhere close to actually building something real, though, so I figured opening a proper bank account was the sensible first move.
Down the line, I planned on taking a business loan to set something of my own, something to actually get a real shop registered and running under our own name.
Once that happened, registering the business properly would become unavoidable too. We were pulling in decent money now, enough that I'd rather deal with the paperwork and pay whatever taxes were owed than risk drawing unwanted attention down the road.
Beyond that, once I had enough capital built up, I wanted to start looking seriously at actual investments, which meant I'd probably need to start reading the financial section of the newspaper regularly. I figure that I will be rich in the future. It was just the question of when.
After dinner, the two of us ended up back in the living room, and I had a book open in my lap when a voice on the television cut straight through my concentration.
"Fans everywhere are anticipating the return of the undisputed heavyweight champion after his time off. Don't miss Mike Tyson taking on Buster Douglas, live on the eleventh of February..."
My head snapped up before the announcer even finished the sentence.
I knew this fight. Somewhere in the back of my mind, buried under years of half-remembered clips and old documentaries, this exact date clicked into place.
Tyson versus Douglas. One of the single biggest upsets in the entire history of the sport, a fight where the undefeated, unstoppable champion walked in expecting a formality and walked out having lost everything.
I sat there frozen for a second, my book forgotten completely in my lap.
Finally. Something concrete, something from the future I actually remembered that I could use.
The excitement lasted about as long as it took me to actually think the plan through. Betting on fights like this one was flatly illegal in Texas, same as everything Maggie ran out of that back room at the gun range. Even if I found a way in, what were the odds anyone handed back real money over to a fifteen-year-old kid even if he won. It was texas. People shot others for less.
I had a little over a month to figure out an angle, some way to turn a piece of knowledge into actual money.
I lay awake a long while that night, turning the problem over from every angle I could think of, half-formed plans rising and collapsing one after another in the dark.
Somewhere out there was a way to make this work. I just had to find it before the eleventh of February came and went, and the chance disappeared for good.