Cold Start

by Leigh Brackett, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

A Screenplay in Two Sequences

Calder, Ohio, a steel town on the Mahoning River. Thursday, 22 September 1977, three days after the Eastbank Works announced that it would close. Calder, its mill and everyone in it are invented.

CAST

WALT HUDAK, 56, a mechanic with a one-bay garage on the East Side; a combat engineer in 1944–45
FRANK BODNAR, 68, who has run the numbers on the North Side since the fifties
DANNY HUDAK, 24, Walt's nephew, laid off from the Eastbank hot strip on Monday
STEVE KOVACH, 50s, laid off, at the barrel fire by the mill gate
MAN AT THE BARREL, laid off

SEQUENCE ONE — SIX-FIFTEEN

FADE IN:

EXT. CALDER, OHIO — THE FLATS — NIGHT

The river bottom, seen from the bluff. Four miles of mill along the Mahoning: blast furnaces, stacks, the long black sheds of the hot strip, the ore bridges standing over their piles like animals left out to graze. All of it dark.

Over it, the sky. For eighty years the sky over the flats has been orange at night. Tonight it is only sky. There are stars in it, and the stars look wrong.

One sodium lamp burns at the main gate. Under it, a barrel fire, and three men who are not going in.

EXT. ELM HILL — BODNAR HOUSE — NIGHT

A brick house on the North Side, built in 1920 by somebody who had money and wanted the street to know it. Lawn gone frost-brown at the edges. A carriage lamp at the side door.

In the driveway, a 1975 Cadillac Sedan de Ville, dark blue, beaded all over with dew.

Headlights swing across it. A 1966 Ford pickup, green, one front fender in gray primer, pulls in behind and stops. The engine dies. The lights die.

INT. WALT'S PICKUP — CONTINUOUS

WALT HUDAK, 56, sits a moment in the dark. A big man gone thick through the middle, with hands you could set a fence post with. Wool shirt, canvas coat, a cap with the earflaps tied up. His wristwatch says 6:14.

On the floor by his boots an aluminum hard hat rocks a quarter turn and settles. Stenciled on the back: D. HUDAK. A sticker under it: EASTBANK WORKS — 1,000 SAFE DAYS.

Walt picks it up, sets it on the seat beside him, and gets out.

EXT. BODNAR HOUSE — DRIVEWAY — CONTINUOUS

The cold has a smell this morning, and it is not the smell. Wet leaves. Somebody's furnace oil. Under that, faint, the coke and sulphur that have hung over Calder since before Walt was born, thinner now, like a voice in another room.

From the pickup bed he takes: a five-cell flashlight. A yardstick with a dentist's mirror taped to the end, the tape gone brown with handling. A mechanic's creeper. A canvas tool roll.

He lays them on the concrete in a row. It is the same row. You can see that it is always the same row.

In the house a kitchen light comes on. FRANK BODNAR, 68, cardigan, reading glasses on a cord around his neck, stands at the sink filling a percolator. He lifts a hand. Walt lifts the yardstick.

Then Walt walks the car.

Clockwise, from the driver's front fender. Flashlight held low, raking. The mirror goes into the wheel well and Walt's face goes to the mirror: brake line, shock absorber, the inside lip of the fender, mud, a maple key stuck in the mud. Next wheel. At the tailpipe he bends, shines the light up it, sniffs. The rear bumper. The gas door: he opens it, looks at the cap, closes it.

His breath smokes. He does not hurry. This is a man who has done one thing five thousand times and has never once done it fast.

He sits on the creeper, lies back, and pushes himself under the car with his heels.

UNDER THE CADILLAC — CONTINUOUS

The flashlight walks the frame rails. Exhaust pipe, crossmember, the fat belly of the transmission, the fuel line clipped along the rail. Dew gathers on the rocker panel and drops onto his cheek. He doesn't wipe it.

Clean.

EXT. BODNAR HOUSE — DRIVEWAY — CONTINUOUS

He rolls out and stands, knees cracking like kindling, and raises the hood.

The engine bay in the flashlight. He touches things as he comes to them, lips moving with no sound: the coil. The starter solenoid, low down, his arm in to the elbow. The battery, both side terminals; he wiggles each cable. The distributor cap.

Clean. Clean. Clean.

He lowers the hood and leans on it with both palms until it latches. It makes almost no sound.

He wipes his hands on a red shop rag. From his ring he picks one key among a dozen, worn bright, and unlocks the driver's door. Opens it.

The dome light does not come on.

Walt stands there with the door open.

The inside of the Cadillac is a cave. Blue velour. A smell of cigar and carpet shampoo and the cardboard pine tree hanging from the mirror.

He looks up at the dome light. He looks at the switch in the door jamb, a little plunger in a rubber boot. He presses it with his thumb. Lets it out. Nothing.

He doesn't get in.

In the kitchen window, Bodnar pours his coffee. He isn't watching.

Walt puts the flashlight on the dome. The lens is there. He reaches up, not leaning in, standing outside the car, his arm only, and pries the lens off with his thumbnail.

The socket is empty.

He holds the plastic lens in his palm. He stands very still. Then he sets it on the roof of the car, slowly, as if it might go off.

He backs out of the doorway. He leaves the door open.

He goes around to the front, raises the hood again, takes a five-sixteenths wrench from the roll. Loosens the negative cable at the battery. Lifts it clear, wraps the end in the shop rag, lays it over the fender where it can't fall back.

Now you can hear him breathe.

INT. CADILLAC — FRONT — CONTINUOUS

Walt on his back on the creeper, head and shoulders in through the open door, under the dash. The big flashlight lies on the door sill beside his ear, pointing up.

The underside of the dash: the steering column, a fat loom of wires going up into it, every one colored. He knows them like hymns. The purple wire is the one that lives only while the key is turned all the way to START.

Six inches below the column, the purple wire has something new on it. Black tape, wound around a splice. Tape so fresh the end hasn't stuck down; it curls up like a lip. He can smell it from here, the tar-rubber smell of a new roll.

From the splice a thin wire, the kind you hang a doorbell with, runs down under the carpet. A second one runs from a screw in the dash frame and goes down beside it.

Walt lies there and looks at it. Somewhere in the house a radio comes on, faint: hog prices, Chicago.

WALT
(barely)
Under the seat.

He isn't saying it to anybody.

He takes a pair of side cutters from his coat. He looks at the doorbell wire for a long time. The battery is off. It's dead. He knows it's dead.

He cuts the wire at the splice. Then the one at the screw. With his thumbnail he skins back half an inch on each loose end, twists the two bare ends together, tight and then tighter, and folds the twist back on itself.

EXT. BODNAR HOUSE — DRIVEWAY — CONTINUOUS

He opens the rear door on the driver's side and kneels on the wet concrete, head down in the back footwell, light going under the front seat.

Between the seat rails, where nothing should be: a bundle the size of a loaf of bread, bound in black friction tape. The ends of six sticks show through, brown waxed paper, the color of a grocery sack. The twisted wire runs into the middle of it.

He puts the light close on the paper. Dry. No beads on it, no oily stain soaked through. Fresh stock. He breathes out through his nose.

His hand goes in. It is a big hand and the space is small. He gets two fingers under the bundle and draws it toward him a fraction at a time. The tape snags on the seat track. He stops. Works it loose. Draws it again.

It comes out into the gray air and he sits back on his heels with it in his lap.

The blasting cap is a little aluminum tube, thin as a pencil, pushed into the end of the center stick, the twisted wires coming out of it. He takes hold of it between finger and thumb.

He has done this before. A long time ago, in a forest, in the rain.

He draws the cap out of the stick, slow and straight, the way you take a splinter out of a child's foot.

It comes.

Sweat runs out of his hair into the cold.

EXT. BODNAR HOUSE — DRIVEWAY — MINUTES LATER

Gray coming into the sky. A dog somewhere, two streets over. A paperboy's bicycle ticks past the end of the drive and doesn't stop.

Six sticks of dynamite lie on the red shop rag on the hood of the Cadillac. Beside them, the dome-light lens.

At the tailgate of his pickup Walt holds a three-pound coffee can half full of sand. He lowers the cap into it by its wires. Presses it down with one finger. Fits the plastic lid on. Then he stands holding the can, and for a moment he doesn't know what to do with his other hand.

The side door of the house opens. Bodnar comes out in slippers, the cardigan buttoned one hole wrong, a mug in one hand. In the other, a five-dollar bill folded once lengthwise, the way he has folded it for twenty years.

BODNAR
You're late. It's not running.

He sees the hood. He sees what is on the rag.

He stops. He looks at it the way a man looks at a bill he always knew was coming.

BODNAR (CONT'D)
Huh.

He comes on and stands by the fender. Drinks some coffee.

BODNAR (CONT'D)
Under the hood?

WALT
Under your seat.

BODNAR
Since when do they put it under the seat.

WALT
Since they know I look under the hood.

Bodnar takes that. He sets his mug on the roof of the Cadillac, carefully, beside the little lens.

BODNAR
Sixty-three, the last one. Mike Sisak's Buick. I went to the funeral.
(beat)
They kept the lid down.

He leans in close over the sticks, reading glasses up to his nose, interested, the way he'd look at a racing form.

BODNAR (CONT'D)
How'd you know?

WALT
Light didn't come on.

Bodnar looks around at the open door. The dark inside.

BODNAR
That's it? The light?

WALT
They took the bulb out so they could work in the dark. Careful boys.

BODNAR
Not careful enough.

WALT
Careful enough for most people.

BODNAR
(the sticks)
That all of it?

WALT
That's all of it. Cap's in the can.

Bodnar looks at the coffee can in Walt's hand.

BODNAR
You going to take that home?

WALT
You want it in your kitchen?

Bodnar almost smiles. Doesn't. He takes his glasses off and lets them drop on the cord.

BODNAR
Twenty years, Walt. You go around this car like a priest. Every morning. Wheels, pipe, under, hood. Never once inside.

WALT
Never had to.

BODNAR
So who knows that. That you don't look inside.

Walt doesn't answer right away. His eyes go past Bodnar for a moment, to the pickup. Through its windshield, on the seat: the hard hat. D. HUDAK.

Bodnar's eyes follow his. Rest there. Come back. Bodnar says nothing.

WALT
Anybody who ever stood at a window, Frank.

BODNAR
I stand at a window.

WALT
Then you knew.

Bodnar laughs, one note, and it turns into a cough. He holds out the five.

Walt looks at it.

WALT (CONT'D)
I didn't start it.

BODNAR
No.
(beat)
You didn't.

He pushes the folded bill into the breast pocket of Walt's coat himself, two fingers, the way you'd tip a boy who carried your bags. Walt lets him.

BODNAR (CONT'D)
Put my battery back on.

Walt goes to the front of the car. Unwraps the cable, fits it to the terminal, tightens the bolt. Bodnar watches with the mug held against his chest for the warmth.

BODNAR (CONT'D)
And get that off my car.

Walt rolls the six sticks up in the shop rag like sausages in butcher's paper and carries them to the pickup in both hands. Lays them in the steel toolbox in the bed. Closes the lid. Latches it.

He collects the yardstick and its mirror, the creeper, the roll, and puts each in its place in the bed.

Bodnar is still standing at the open door of his car, looking in at the dark.

BODNAR (CONT'D)
Tomorrow.

WALT
Six-fifteen.

INT. WALT'S PICKUP — CONTINUOUS

Walt climbs in. Sets the coffee can on the seat and pushes it up against the hard hat so it won't roll.

He puts his key in the ignition and turns it, the way he has turned it every morning of his life, without a thought in his head. The starter grinds. The engine catches.

And then he thinks.

His hand stays on the key. He looks down at it as if it belonged to somebody else. Slowly, he takes it away.

The engine idles. The heater blows cold air at his knees. On the seat beside him, the coffee can and the hard hat, side by side.

Through the windshield: Bodnar at the Cadillac's open door with his coffee, not getting in.

Walt backs out of the drive. Beyond the rooftops of the North Side, down in the flats, there is no glow at all.

CUT TO:

SEQUENCE TWO — FIVE DOLLARS

EXT. EASTBANK WORKS — MAIN GATE — DAY

Seven-thirty, and light enough now to see what the dark was keeping. Chain-link eight feet high. On the gate, a padlock and a length of chain that would hold a ship. Wired to the fence, a square of cardboard lettered in house paint: WE BUILT THIS PLACE. Under it, smaller, in another hand: 80 YEARS.

The barrel fire has burned down to pallet nails and red coals. Six men stand around it in mill jackets and hunting caps. Their lunch pails sit at their feet out of habit. There is nothing in them.

Beyond the fence the sheds go back and back, and nothing moves in all that iron but pigeons.

Walt's pickup pulls onto the cinders. He gets out, comes to the barrel and holds his hands over it. Nobody says hello. Nobody has to.

STEVE KOVACH, 50s, a narrow man with a mustache gone yellow from Luckies, breaks a slat over his knee and feeds it in.

KOVACH
Still doing the Hungarian's car?

WALT
Every morning.

KOVACH
Nice to have a job.

He doesn't say it mean. He doesn't say it any other way either.

WALT
Danny been by?

KOVACH
Twenty minutes ago. Looking for you.
(beat)
Said your shop was shut. Said you're never shut.

WALT
I'm never shut.

Kovach looks at him properly for the first time. The fire pops. A spark goes up and dies.

KOVACH
He was flush Tuesday. Bought the house a round at Stan's. Kid gets his slip Monday, he's buying rounds Tuesday.

WALT
Who was he drinking with?

KOVACH
Fellows I didn't know.
(beat)
Nice coats.

Walt takes his hands from the fire and puts them in his pockets.

WALT
Where is he?

KOVACH
Went back to wait on you.

Walt nods and turns for the truck. One of the men at the barrel, a young one still in his steel-toes, calls after him.

MAN AT THE BARREL
Hey, Walt. You need a man in that shop?

WALT
(not turning)
I barely need me.

The men laugh, the way you laugh at a wake.

INT. HUDAK SERVICE — DAY

One bay. One lift. A grease pit with planks laid over it. On the pegboard every tool hangs inside its own outline, painted around in white years ago, so that a missing wrench would show like a missing tooth.

A parts-house calendar still on August. Over the bench, an electric clock with a spark plug printed on its face. The shop smells of oil and cold steel and coffee boiled too long.

DANNY HUDAK, 24, sits on an upturned bucket by the space heater with his knees going. Jean jacket, hair over the collar, a mustache that isn't getting anywhere. He hasn't slept. He let himself in with the key from under the oil drum, and the coffee he put on the hotplate has gone down to tar.

The side door opens. Walt.

Danny is on his feet before he knows it. Something goes over his face, fast, and what it leaves behind is a grin.

DANNY
There he is. Where you been? Shop's shut, I thought you died.

Walt looks at him. He doesn't answer.

He sets the coffee can on the bench. He sets the hard hat beside it.

DANNY (CONT'D)
You found my hat. I been looking all over.
(beat)
Not like I need it.

Walt takes off his coat and hangs it on its nail. He pours the tar down the drain, rinses the pot, measures coffee into the basket with a spoon, level, four spoons. Danny watches all of it.

Danny's eyes go to the clock. 7:51.

WALT
You eat?

DANNY
I'm okay.

The pot starts to tick on the hotplate. Danny looks at the clock. 7:55.

WALT
Sit down, Danny.

Danny sets the bucket right and sits. Walt takes the stool at the bench. The coffee can is between them.

Danny looks at the clock. 7:58.

WALT (CONT'D)
What's at eight?

DANNY
What?

WALT
You keep looking.

DANNY
Unemployment. They open at eight. You're not there early, you're there all day.

Walt nods, as if this is a reasonable thing for a man to say.

He pries the plastic lid off the coffee can. Two fingers into the sand. He draws out the blasting cap by its twisted wires and lays it on a clean rag on the bench, the way you'd put down a watch for repair.

Danny looks at it. He doesn't know what it is.

Then he does.

The minute hand of the spark-plug clock stands up straight. Eight o'clock. Danny's head turns, very slightly, toward the North Side, as though he could hear that far. The coffee perks. A truck goes by on Wilson Avenue. Nothing else happens anywhere.

DANNY
(small)
It was supposed to be eight.

WALT
What was.

DANNY
They said a clock. A little clock. Eight o'clock, you're long gone, he's in his kitchen, it's just the car. A message. They said it was a message, nobody's—
(he stops)
Where'd you get that?

WALT
Under his seat.

Walt turns the cap over with one fingertip. The two leads, twisted together.

WALT (CONT'D)
One wire went to his start wire. One went to ground. That's all there was.
(beat)
Where's the clock, Danny?

Danny looks at the two wires.

He works it out. You can watch him do it: the key; the starter; who turns that key at a quarter past six every morning and sits with the door open while it warms.

DANNY
No.

WALT
You turn the key. That's the clock.

Danny comes up off the bucket so fast it goes over and rolls. He walks to the bay door. Walks back. Walks to the door again. He's crying now and he's angry at it, wiping his face with the heel of his hand like it's somebody else's.

DANNY
They asked what you look at. That's all they asked. What do you look at. I said wheels, the pipe, underneath, the hood, I said he never gets down inside, he's got the knees—
(beat)
Five hundred bucks to tell them what I seen since I was ten years old. I owed Ruzicka four. They were going to take the car.

Walt says nothing.

On the bench beside the cap lies a ball-peen hammer. Walt's hand rests by it. His fingers close around the handle.

Danny sees that.

Walt looks down at his own hand. He opens it. He gets up, takes the hammer to the pegboard and hangs it inside its white outline, square.

WALT
They pay you the five hundred?

DANNY
Half. Rest after.

WALT
There's no after.

Walt reaches to the top shelf and brings down another coffee can, the twin of the one on the bench. Inside: a roll of bills with a rubber band around it. He takes the folded five out of his breast pocket and lays it on top of the roll, and holds the lot out.

WALT (CONT'D)
Ten-forty to Pittsburgh. Then wherever.

Danny doesn't take it. He's looking at the five, folded once lengthwise.

DANNY
That's the Hungarian's fold.

WALT
Spends the same.

Danny takes it.

DANNY
What are you going to tell him?

WALT
Nothing he doesn't know.

The coffee has finished. Neither of them pours it.

EXT. CALDER — GREYHOUND STATION — DAY

Walt's pickup at the curb under the running-dog sign. Danny gets out with a gym bag. The hard hat stays on the seat.

He shuts the door, and then he raps on the window. Walt rolls it down.

DANNY
You check your truck?

Walt looks at him a long moment.

WALT
Go get your bus.

Danny goes in through the glass doors and doesn't look back.

Walt rolls the window up.

INT. HUDAK SERVICE — LATER — DAY

Noon light, flat and gray, through the bay windows. Walt at the bench with a carburetor in pieces on a tray, a job somebody will pay for some week.

Through the window behind him the steel toolbox in his truck bed stands open. Empty.

The Cadillac pulls onto the apron.

Bodnar gets out. Overcoat, a gray hat, a tie. When the door opens the dome light comes on, a small yellow light in the blue.

He comes in and stands looking at the pegboard with his hands in his coat pockets.

BODNAR
Started it myself.

WALT
How was it?

BODNAR
I sat there a while first.
(beat)
Put a bulb in. Forty-nine cents.

Walt wipes his fingers on a rag.

BODNAR (CONT'D)
Your brother's boy. Joe's boy.

WALT
Danny.

BODNAR
He was in Stan's Tuesday night with some fellows from Cleveland. Buying.

WALT
Lot of boys out of work this week.

BODNAR
Lot of boys.

He takes off his hat and looks into it, as if he might find something there.

BODNAR (CONT'D)
He still in town?

WALT
No.

BODNAR
Good.

Walt looks at him. Bodnar's face gives him nothing back at all.

BODNAR (CONT'D)
I'm selling the house. My sister's in Sarasota. She has a room with a fan in it.
(beat)
Cleveland can have the North Side. There's nobody left on it with a dollar to bet.

WALT
They didn't have to blow you up for it.

BODNAR
No. They could have asked.

He takes a money clip from his pants pocket and peels off a five. He folds it once, lengthwise, and lays it on the bench beside the coffee can with nothing in it.

BODNAR (CONT'D)
Last one.

Walt looks at the bill. He doesn't touch it.

BODNAR (CONT'D)
You don't need to come tomorrow.

Walt nods, slowly.

Bodnar puts his hat on and goes out to the car. The dome light comes on and goes off with the door. He starts it. Lets the window down.

BODNAR (CONT'D)
You were a good mechanic, Walt.

WALT
I'm still a good mechanic.

BODNAR
Who to?

The window goes up. The Cadillac backs off the apron and turns toward downtown, and is gone.

Walt stands in the door of his bay a long time.

EXT. HUDAK SERVICE — NIGHT

Friday. Walt comes down the outside stairs from the rooms above the shop. His wristwatch says 6:15.

From the shop he brings out: the five-cell flashlight. The yardstick with its mirror. The creeper. He lays them on the apron in a row. The same row.

Then he walks his own truck.

Clockwise, from the driver's front fender. The mirror into the wheel well, his face to the mirror. The tailpipe. The gas cap. Back on the creeper and under, the light walking the frame rails, cold coming up through his coat from the concrete. Up. The hood: coil, solenoid, battery, distributor. His lips move with no sound.

He lowers the hood and latches it.

He opens the driver's door.

The dome light comes on. Small and yellow, and it shows his face.

He stands and looks at it.

Then he gets down on his knees on the apron and puts the flashlight under the seat. A jack handle. A road map of Pennsylvania. A woman's glove, brown leather, gone stiff, that has been under there since 1971.

He looks at the glove a while. He leaves it where it is.

He gets in. The hard hat on the seat beside him. The door shuts and the light goes out.

He puts the key in the ignition. He looks at it. Then he turns it.

The starter grinds. The engine catches.

His hand comes off the key, easy.

He sits with it running. After a while the heater begins to blow warm against his knees.

Through the windshield, past the roofs of the East Side, the flats are still dark. One small fire at the gate.

He sits in the warm cab and lets it run.

FADE OUT.

THE END

✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾ ✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾ ✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum Kalendās Novembrēs (26 October 2026), ā Leighā Brackett per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

Leigh Brackett, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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