20

SO NOW COMES the crunch.

Arney’s sentencing is set for July 22, leaving him less than four months to figure out how Havana might continue to operate, presumably under Slick’s stewardship, when he goes away—and whether Moyock Muscle will survive, at its present site or elsewhere—and of greater import, whether all or part of the Arney Compound can be kept from his creditors and/or the government, so that his wife, children, and crew will have roofs over their heads.

None are rhetorical questions, because Arney’s deal with the government requires him to surrender “any fraud related asset” and “any property that is traceable to, derived from, fungible with, or a substitute for property that constitutes the proceeds of his offense,” which describes close to everything he has. Rather than seize the booty, the feds would prefer to present him with a dollar amount he has to meet through his own liquidation of his assets. It promises to be so big a number—millions on millions—that selling everything is almost certain to leave him short. The feds acknowledge as much in their paperwork, which says that after forfeiture, his net worth will sink from $1.58 million to a negative half million.

Then there’s the matter of restitution—of repaying the money his admitted crimes cost the taxpayers. He has no cash on hand to meet this obligation. To the contrary, he’s struggling to pay his bills: The government’s own assessment is that his monthly expenses already exceed his income by $3,149. It looks as if he’ll go to prison in deep debt to the U.S. Treasury.

Alongside such serious business, the Chevy is a trifle. But Arney has vowed that he’ll drive the wagon before his incarceration, and by God, he intends to do everything in his power to fulfill the promise. So in April, he puts Painter Paul back to work on two of the car’s faulty doors, and in a search of the loft over the Quonset’s workshop finds two more, in pristine condition, that will fit the car. By month’s end, one of the project’s recent setbacks has been eliminated.

At the same time, Arney acquires an engineless four-door sedan that for all of its flaws—and it has too many to count—boasts a perfect left fin. He has Paul and a local welder named Bubba cut out the fin’s outboard panel and graft it to the inner half of the wagon’s. It is a surgery that some body shops would rule impossible—the sedan and wagon have very different metalwork on their tails—but Arney conjures a technique to pull it off, and it works. For the first time since Mary Ricketts’s ownership, the wagon’s left side runs straight from nose to tail.

I allow myself to think: Well, maybe this thing will be finished.

On my next visit to Moyock Muscle, the car’s doors hang straight and flush, and each closes with a reassuringly deep thud. Paul has just painted the wagon’s floor in a glossy black—a detail that will be covered in jute matting and carpet, but leaves no metal unprotected—and has masked the window openings in paper and tape to protect the still-drying enamel while he sheaths the exterior in a final coat of icing and blocks it smooth.

Arney and Skinhead arrive with lunch well into the afternoon. Paul and I walk to the Quonset under a fast-moving sky reflected on hundreds of windshields—a dragonfly’s view of the heavens. “You know,” I tell him, “it’s been more than three years that I’ve been hanging around here, watching you work on that Chevy.”

He shakes his head and, grinning, says: “I told you.”

It’s warm in the office. As I find a chair I see that Arney has wadded up several paper towels and shoved them down the front of his wifebeater. Skinhead offers us a tight-lipped smile, having misplaced a dental appliance that stands in for his AWOL upper four front teeth. “Paul, what have you done today?” Arney asks. “You look tired.”

“A little,” Paul says as he sits. He rubs an arm dusted with dried icing. “Blocking and blocking.”

Well, Arney says, he and Skinhead have had a full day themselves. Among other tasks, they’ve picked up some belts for the fan that vents the hood over the stove at Havana. The fan runs thirteen hours a day, every day, and what with Skinhead being too weak to adequately tighten the belts when he installs them, they wear out quickly.

“This has nothing to do with me being weak,” Skinhead objects.

“A weak motherfucker,” Arney insists.

“What the fuck,” Skinhead says, “does this have to do—?”

“Tell me this, motherfucker,” Arney interrupts. “How the fuck does a motherfucker lose his teeth?” He glances my way. “He lost his teeth a week ago.” It’s Arney’s theory, which he now shares at some length, that one or more of the five cats living in Skinhead’s house took them.

“The cats didn’t touch my fucking teeth,” Skinhead counters.

“Well, where the fuck did they go, then?” Arney asks. “What happened is, you put them down somewhere, and the fucking cats took them. Because in all reality, there’s no other explanation.”

“The cats didn’t do it,” Skinhead says. “The cats can’t even get to them. I put my teeth in the same place, every time, and the cats can’t get up there.”

“So where the fuck are they?”

“I don’t know,” Skinhead says.

“He shouldn’t even have the fucking cats in there,” Arney tells me. “He only has them because he thought it would get him some pussy if he looked after this bitch’s cats.”

“Is that true?” I ask.

Skinhead is typically forthright. “Yes.”

“Did it work?”

His expression is blank. “No.”

Arney clears the remains of his lunch from his desktop, then reaches for a roll of paper towels and wipes down his neck and arms. His thoughts shift to the Chevy. “Paul, the windows will be here Thursday. And the gaskets and all the other shit. And the windows are already assembled. They’re all on tracks and everything.”

“And the vents are already assembled?” Skinhead asks.

“Yeah. They already have chrome on them.”

“All right,” Paul nods.

Arney tears off a long stretch of paper towel and soaks his desktop in spray cleaner. He’s brought in a new fax-copier to replace an old and broken example, and in anticipation of setting it up, directs Skinhead to clean his desk, which is back-to-back with his own and piled with manuals, keys, empty cups, assorted paperwork. “You can’t let your desk get like that,” he lectures as he scrubs his down. “It doesn’t look good when people come in.”

“It looks like I work,” Skinhead replies. He leafs through a stack of papers.

“No,” Arney says, “it makes it look like you’re a filthy, nasty, cocksucking motherfucker, to be truthful.”

The sniping continues as they disconnect wires from the old machine, set it aside, and carefully position the new device. It peaks when Arney snatches up the outgoing copier and lobs it across the room at Skinhead, who sees it coming just in time to catch it with his gut and a backward stagger. “One of these days,” Skinhead says, feigning as though he’s going to toss it back.

“You wish you could kick my ass, don’t you?” Arney asks him.

“I do,” Skinhead says, with a gaping black scowl. “If I could, I would.”

Arney, chewing on a toothpick, regards him silently for a moment. “Well,” he says, “I wish you could almost kick my ass.”

THE CHEVY’S NEW windows arrive on schedule. Arney tells me he intends to have them installed at once, and to follow that work with a new interior—upholstery, carpeting, door panels, headliner. After that, he’ll have Paul paint the car. But Paul, who is finishing the last of the blocking on the car’s tail, convinces him that it makes sense to paint first, to better avoid fouling the glass and new vinyl with his spray gun.

So in early June, Paul paints the interior of the car and the doorjambs above the beltline in Timor Beige. Once sheathed in the glossy paint, which tends to reveal the slightest imperfection in whatever it covers, the quality of his earlier metalwork is plain: The wheel wells in the cargo hold, once perforated with rust, are flawlessly smooth. The next day he finishes the lower portions of the jambs in Tangerine Twist, and I can’t stifle my amazement at the sublimity of seams and joints that two years ago were nonexistent, having been devoured by rot.

At midmonth he begins water-blocking the car, for which he wets down the exterior and goes over it with a super-fine sandpaper. The step takes several days, during which he also clears the shed of extraneous car parts and tools and equipment not directly related to the last complicated, make-or-break task in the Chevy’s restoration.

After paint, what’s left of the job is quick and easy. Window installation takes a day or two. The interior, which Arney has always planned to job out to an upholsterer, should take a week or ten days, tops, and relies on patterns and precut fabric. Paint, on the other hand, is a tricky undertaking—expensive, difficult, and prone to environmental interference. Extremes of temperature or humidity play hell with drying paint. An errant insect, alighting on a freshly applied coat, can necessitate hours of repair. The paint itself must be mixed with thinners and drying agents in proportions that are as much intuition as straight-up chemistry. The process requires both skillful speed and patience, along with physical stamina, artistic grace, and an eagle-eyed attention to detail. And it all comes down to one day’s work: A good day will ratify Paul’s three long years of labor to save the wagon, and a bad one will usher expensive correction.

So Paul, like all good painters, prepares for the job with an unvarying ritual born of years of practice. He wipes down the car not once, not twice, but over and over and over. He hoses down the paint shed with a power washer, removing every stray grain of dust from the car’s surroundings, lest such a grain settle on his freshly painted baby. He remasks all of the openings into the car’s interior with paper and tape, ensuring that the seal is complete. He bags the wheels and tires in plastic. He opens two small windows high in the paint shed’s rear wall, and over the openings tapes blue furnace filters, allowing a breeze to enter, but with nothing on it.

An hour before dawn on a Friday in late June 2013, I watch as he stumbles from his house to my car, in which I’m picking him up at this unthinkable hour because Arney and Skinhead are unreliable early risers, and because success at painting the car requires an early start. The temperature and humidity will climb high by midafternoon—a problem in itself—and should the heat provoke a thunderstorm, as it has on recent days, insects will seek shelter from the rain and most likely defeat Paul’s efforts to keep them out.

We beat the doughnut truck to the convenience store where we stop for coffee, and pull into Moyock Muscle at 5:20 A.M. Clouds are scudding by just a few hundred feet off the deck, obscuring a gibbous half-moon. Off in the black, ducks are quacking. Paul opens the paint shed, turns on the lights, and goes over the car with paper towels and blasts from his air hose as Pat Benatar thumps through an anthem on the boom box.

As the sun clears the trees a mile to the east, he lowers the shed’s roll-up door onto a homemade contraption that resembles a ladder on its side: It’s two feet tall by eleven wide, fashioned from two-by-fours, and in the gaps between its rungs are fitted five furnace filters—another low-tech attempt to promote a little ventilation in the otherwise airless building. He soaks the shed’s concrete floor with water, as much to keep the temperature down as any dust. He wipes down the car with prep solvent, which dissolves any lingering wax or grease. He shoots it with the air hose, waits a few minutes, then goes over it with a “tack cloth,” which in purpose is not unlike a lint roller. Then, at long last, he mixes up a pot of paint, pulls on a respirator, and locks himself into the shed with the Chevy.

The first coat is white, to create a uniform base for the paints that follow. When he opens the door to the shed and pulls off his respirator twenty minutes later, I’m struck by how good the wagon looks in a single color. Its mottled, primered skin of the past couple of years has confused the eye as dazzle paint on warships did during World War II, obscuring the pleasing length of the car’s beltline, the grace of its curves.

Paul runs a tack cloth over the car, then mixes a pot of Timor Beige and, alone in the shed, applies several coats of the paint to the Chevy’s roof, pillars, and the triangular accent panels on its fins. The tan finished, he masks the triangles with tape and paper, using as his guide the holes through which the car’s chrome trim will attach. Skinhead pulls into the lot, and Paul enlists his help in spreading clear plastic over the roof and anchoring it with tape carefully placed along the beltline. Paul mixes a pot of Tangerine Twist, and has finished laying down several coats by late morning.

These “base coats” are matte, not glossy; the paint job’s shine and depth will come with four layers of clearcoat, which Paul now hastens to prepare as the temperature outside climbs through the eighties. He kicks me out after gingerly peeling the tape and paper from the masked portions of the car and loading his spray gun. As the drying time for clearcoat is significantly longer than that for the base colors, it’ll be forty minutes before the door to the shed reopens, so I wander the lot under an intensifying sun.

The fences are down. The interior barriers, the ones the county insisted Arney erect to shield his inoperable inventory, have been toppled by the wind. I look to the lot’s perimeter, see that the fence along the northern edge is now just a picket line of steel posts, the wire ties binding them to the chain link having snapped in a recent storm. The metal mesh lays flat on the ground, weeds shoving their way through its gaps. I stroll toward the eastern property line, passing the lagoon en route. Eight-foot reeds erupt from its water. Algae carpets much of the rest, dimples in the slime betraying invisible life beneath. I keep an eye peeled for snakes.

The long eastern fence is standing, though much of it has been stripped of the plastic sheeting that sequestered the lot from public view. From where I stand, at the inventory’s edge, I can look out over a field of low cropland to a ragged copse of pine, and beyond it, a new subdivision of big homes. A few are yet unfinished, clad in bright yellow pine and Tyvek. Off to the southeast is a house much closer than the others, maybe two hundred yards from Moyock Muscle’s edge. It wasn’t there when the fence went up.

I am transfixed by these early declarations of postrecession confidence, out here on the outermost ring of suburbia. Intrigued by the notion that whatever else has changed in American life since the Chevy’s infancy—and what hasn’t?—the suburban ideal has survived, adapting in its details to shifts in taste and technology, but in its essence remaining pretty much as it was when its first blooms appeared. Three generations on, we still demand elbow room and privacy, and we still love, rely on, and are enslaved by the automobile.

Some mock the suburban model advertised by the Cleavers and Nelsons. Some denigrate it. Some note, rightly, that in an era of declining energy and rising temperatures, it may be unsustainable. Still, it remains a part of us, a fantasy of safety, order, and independence firmly imbedded in the American psyche.

I turn away from the new houses and trudge back to the paint shed, where Painter Paul is overhauling a tattered emblem of that ideal, and making it seem new.

OUR STORY COULD end here.

Maybe it should, with Arney yet unsentenced, and still lording over his crew, and surrounded every day by his beloved cars and customers at Havana—and, most important, for our purposes, with the Chevy’s salvation assured. Regardless of what happens to its current owner the car is safe; it will not be parted out or abandoned. At worst, it might be sold—and it will be an easy sell, because as we’ve already discussed, the hard work is done. The restoration is all but complete. It would be a mighty attractive buy for someone with a little bit of money.

It would be a satisfying ending, because in the hands of such a buyer the wagon would come full circle. It would return to the suburbs, most likely, to a family of means, to a place near the cultural center. It would again inspire lust. The cycles of ownership would begin anew.

Here would end a story of human ruin and redemption, of a protagonist who has himself been written off as unsalvageable, and whose struggle to rescue the Chevy from the scrap heap serves as metaphor for his own unlikely rise to pseudo-respectability. Who, in saving the car from death in a junkyard crusher, has rescued a little piece of American history, and preserved the long procession of hopes and dreams it represents. And whose down-to-the-last-bolt approach means that the car should, if provided a sensible level of care, last at least as long as it already has, which is to say well past its hundredth birthday.

But, no: We’ve come too far to stop now. Instead, take a minute to mull those grand, closing thoughts, and then let’s get back to the action, because there are two scenes remaining to bring this story to a proper close. We’ll preface them with a series of snapshots taken as Arney’s sentencing looms:

Skinhead gets new teeth and a dazzling white smile. Paul sands the Chevy’s thick armor of clearcoat with ever-finer paper, then buffs it to a mirror finish. Eleven days after the paint job, he rolls the wagon out of the shed, and sunshine transforms the Tangerine Twist into a visual scream that can be seen and heard two counties away. Arney has a new windshield installed, but has to reorder the curving panes that wrap around the cargo hold—when he uncrates the pair delivered in June, he finds they’re broken, and because he didn’t open the crates immediately, the company that sent them will not take them back.

Along the way, I notice in some government paperwork that the feds have adjusted their appraisals of the cars they tagged at Moyock Muscle, so that now they’re almost credible. The ’69 Camaro convertible body under the tarp in Paul’s body shop, initially lowballed at $10,000, is now said to be worth $23,100. The value of the hand-built ’81 Excalibur roadster has been boosted from $10,000 to $33,895.

I notice, too, that the feds include a “1957 Chevrolet wagon” among Arney’s unencumbered assets, which they presumably intend to seize. The document sets this Chevy’s value at $13,950.

Arney has told me he has close to $40,000 in the wagon. Can it really be worth less than fourteen grand? Confused, I ask him whether the feds are talking about the same car. Yes, Arney says: An agent was at Moyock Muscle one day, saw the wagon, and added it to the forfeiture list. “It’ll be finished,” he tells me, “and if they take it, they take it. I’d like to keep it, but really, it don’t matter. We’ll drive it.”

On July 15, a week before his sentencing, he mentions again that the wagon is on the government’s hit list. This comes in the course of his telling me that his bankers are calling the note on the Moyock Muscle properties. “They wouldn’t renew my loan, even though I made every payment,” he says. “They said, ‘We’re not going to extend it.’ So they’ll take the property that Moyock Muscle is on.

“The feds will take all the cars—all of them. They’re going to take everything—everything I’ve worked for, for forty years, will be gone. They’ll fucking take it all.

“I’m trying to get them to let me keep the ’57,” he says, “but I don’t know.”

At the end of this conversation, it seems obvious to me that the Chevy’s fourteenth owner will be the People of the United States.

But to spend time with Tommy Arney is to court the unexpected, and now comes a twist that I haven’t foreseen and don’t quite understand: Two days before his sentencing, he tells me that the wagon on the government list is not Nicholas Thornhill’s Chevy, after all—it’s some other car. Exactly which is unclear, but no doubt about it, it is not the car that he’s had Painter Paul working on for three years. The serial numbers make that plain, he says. The car on the list is identified by a VIN that is not VB57B239191. And as we’ve established earlier in this story, tags are everything.

He tells me in the same conversation that he’s out of money. Flat broke. He can’t afford to finish the restoration. But he thinks he’s found a way to make it happen. A longtime employee of his restaurants, a convivial sixty-two-year-old fellow named Al Godsey—a lifelong bachelor who keeps birds, lives in a walled-off portion of Skinhead’s house, and has been with Arney since his Body Shop days—has offered to buy the car for a modest sum of cash and the cost of completing the job.

Before I’m able to process this information, Arney has an appointment to keep with Judge Raymond Jackson.

HIS ARRIVAL AT Norfolk’s federal courthouse has the air of a red carpet event: Arney strolls in smiling, fist-bumping friends seated along the aisle, loose and relaxed and looking sleek in a fresh, close haircut and a sharp gray suit. He’s trailed by Slick, Krista, and Ashlee, all of them wearing sunglasses and high, high heels, and by Ryan and his girlfriend, Holly. The family occupies the gallery’s front bench, well-wishers crowding those behind. Slick winds up directly in front of me. “How you doing?” I ask.

“I could be better,” she admits. “I need a shot.”

Judge Jackson enters. The court has reviewed the papers filed by the defendant and the United States, he intones. Among those papers is a government motion for “downward adjustment” of Mr. Arney’s time behind bars, in recognition of his aid to the prosecution. Said adjustment would lower the recommended sentence by more than half—instead of looking at sixty-three to seventy-eight months, he’ll face twenty-seven to thirty-three.

Prosecutor Katherine Martin steps to the microphone to present the government’s argument supporting the motion. “Despite his limited education, Mr. Arney is a very smart man,” she opens. “He’s a very savvy man. He was exploiting, through his own fraud and deceit, a culture of corruption” at the Bank of the Commonwealth. But he is also a man “who’s overcome a number of obstacles,” she says, and in doing so, he has “become a devoted family man and friend.”

As she says this, Arney’s wife and longtime mistress are sitting maybe five feet apart on the bench in front of me.

Martin notes that the court has received eighteen letters vouching for Arney’s good works, and she quotes one, from Ryan. “My father has arrived here today as a loving, generous, honest, responsible, and hard-working man,” the letter reads. “He has come a long way from the abandoned and homeless teenage boy with a few cents in his pocket, living in a service station bathroom. He has never used his lack of education or poor upbringing as an excuse for any of the mistakes he has made or setbacks he has encountered.

“The day my father pled guilty and agreed to cooperate with the investigators in this case I was neither ashamed nor embarrassed,” Ryan wrote. “I was filled with admiration. I knew that day that the stress and difficulty of this situation had not changed him one bit. He has always been an honest man who takes full responsibility for his actions and mistakes he has made.”

Martin tells the judge that Arney is “readily distinguishable from other defendants in this trial,” in part because he “did not minimize his conduct, he did not blame it on others, and he did not lie about it.”

By the time she finishes, she’s made a pretty convincing case that Arney ranks among Greater Norfolk’s first citizens. Bill Taliaferro takes the mike and reiterates many of the same points, adding that his client “has expressed tremendous contrition for what he’s done.”

The judge asks Arney if he’d like to speak. He replies, “I think everything’s been said, your honor.”

Jackson peers at him from the bench. “The record reflects an ability to overcome and adjust,” he tells the defendant, “and as counsel has noted, you have been a successful businessman and a compassionate member of the community.

“You have done well with your life,” he says, which makes Arney’s presence here today all the more disappointing: “How did you somehow manage, in this point in your life, to slip into this corrupt activity and jeopardize all you had done in your life?” He answers his own question: “A lot of it was just plain greed.”

So while his situation might be “unique and different” from those of his fellow defendants, the judge says, “at the end of the day, Mr. Arney, there is a penalty to be paid.” He imposes a sentence of twenty-seven months. Arney will get 15 percent of that, or four months, knocked off if he behaves himself in prison. He’ll serve six months of it in a halfway house. In sum, he’ll spend seventeen months behind bars.

He’ll also do three years of supervised probation. He’ll pay more than $2 million in restitution. He’ll forfeit cash and property totaling $7.5 million and change. “You fail to make the restitution,” Jackson warns, “you’ll find yourself back in here.”

Taliaferro requests that Arney be allowed to report to prison in ninety days. Martin seconds the motion: “Some of the things on the list to liquidate, down in Moyock—it would be helpful to have Mr. Arney’s help,” she says. The judge isn’t convinced. Thirty days is plenty. “The court’s confident you can get it all done,” he says.

Arney’s exit from the courtroom is delayed by hugs, more handshakes, hearty congratulations. When he finally gets outside, he’s smiling broadly. With the exception of the thirty days instead of ninety, the session went better than he expected. He unknots his tie, pulls it off, and unbuttons not just his collar, but the top four buttons of his dress shirt, which he then pulls open to reveal a thicket of silver chest hair.

“So what are you doing for the rest of the day?” I ask him, thinking that perhaps he’s going to enjoy a celebratory lunch with his family.

He looks at me like I’m crazy. “I’m going to work, is what I’m doing,” he says. “I’ve got a fuck of a lot to do in the next thirty days.”

INCLUDING THIS:

On a cloudless and balmy afternoon a few days later, Paul pushes the Chevy out of the paint shed, and he and Arney hook it to the rollback and pull it onto the bed. I watch as the truck jounces over the back lot’s ruts, the wagon swaying on its back, then thread my way through the Moyock inventory, planning to meet the men and their cargo over by the Quonset.

On the way I encounter a couple standing under a carport next to the building. It’s Jeff Simmons, the Chevy’s ninth owner, and his wife, Patricia. Simmons is wearing a black hat and T-shirt emblazoned with patriotic eagles, stars, and stripes, in keeping with his status as a navy veteran. We shake hands. “So where’s the car?” he asks.

I look out to Route 168, clogged with beach-bound traffic, where the rollback is waiting to turn in to Moyock Muscle’s main entrance. The Chevy hovers above the cars and pickups around it, orange paint bright enough to cause corneal damage. It’s what I imagine a nuclear meltdown to look like.

Jeff Simmons’s eyes widen. “Oh my God,” he whispers.

“Where?” Patricia asks, looking around.

“There, on the truck,” he says. His eyes are glued to the car as Arney swings the rollback into the lot. A few days ago, when I called Simmons to propose this reunion with his old friend, he told me that he missed the wagon terribly. “I still talk about that car,” he said. “I’ve made some stupid decisions in my life—I can rank the five stupidest decisions I’ve ever made. And selling that car probably ranks number one.”

A few seconds later I run into Picot Savage, owner number five, who’s watching as Arney backs the rollback toward the building, tilts the bed, slowly unspools the Chevy to the ground. Savage wanders around to the car’s nose, where the Simmonses are taking pictures. “It’s beautiful,” Jeff Simmons says. He sniffles, rubs his eyes, moves a few yards off, and stands for a minute with his back to us.

“He just lost his dad,” Patricia explains. “And he loved this car.”

“I got some memories of that car, too,” Savage says. “Some good, some bad.” The Simmonses laugh. “Did you actually drive it?” Savage asks them.

“I got it running,” Jeff Simmons says, but adds that he drove it only to get it home from the pawnshop—and at that point it was smoking, trembling, and he could barely see the road from the collapsed front seat. “But I loved it,” he adds.

“When I got it, all it needed was to have the chrome strips attached,” Savage says. “I had them, but they just weren’t on the car. That’s all that was wrong with it.”

“I liked it better when it was green,” Patricia says.

“Nah, I like it this way, too,” Jeff counters. He shakes his head. “Beautiful. If I won the lottery right now, I’d buy it.”

Up walks Nicholas Thornhill’s daughter-in-law, Ruby, now ninety, with her daughter, Janet—to whom the Chevy’s first owner pointed out black cows on Sunday drives fifty years ago, and claimed that they made chocolate milk. Ruby peers at the bare metal interior through the right front window opening. “I’ve ridden in this car a lot, let me tell you,” she says.

“Oh, yes,” Janet says, grinning. “Me, too.”

“I like the colors,” Ruby says, studying the Tangerine Twist. “It’s a little bit loud, but so what?”

“Why not make it loud?” Janet agrees.

I introduce them to Sid Pollard, who has ridden down to Moyock with his girlfriend, Liz, on motorcycles. Janet immediately recognizes Pollard’s name: “You bought the car from Bruce,” she says, meaning her brother, the car’s second owner, who was called out of town today.

While they’re getting acquainted, Arney talks with Dave and Chris Simon, both of whom are eyeing the car with their arms folded across their chests. Chris, whose muttonchop sideburns have achieved almost feral wildness, tells me that he’s living with his folks these days and restoring a four-door hardtop on the property. With three ’57 Chevys parked outside, not counting a wagon that Dave has been attempting to transform into a car-pickup hybrid, the Simon place has recaptured its Battleship Row past.

I stroll among the guests, eavesdropping on conversations, sharing their excitement, gratified that everyone seems happy to be here. I knew ahead of time that some past owners wouldn’t make it today. Nicholas Thornhill, obviously. Bobby Dowdy, owner number twelve, who told me he’d be out of town. Alan Wilson and Al Seely, the seventh members of the fraternity, who not only live hundreds of miles away in Albany, Georgia, but are grieving the loss, just days ago, of Seely’s mother.

I’m disappointed I won’t see those two, because I’d like to congratulate them: On Valentine’s Day 2013, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the brunch at which they met, Wilson proposed to his longtime partner and Seely accepted. They’ve had their share of challenges—Seely shut down his design business in the spring of 2013, after several lean years—but they have three grandchildren, who call Wilson “Gramps” and Seely “Grumps,” and they live in a modernist house that Seely admired for years before they bought it. Life is pretty good.

I also knew not to expect Mary Ricketts, with whom I spoke a few times after interviewing her back in 2004. In one such conversation, the car’s sixth owner told me that she’d just seen the wagon up close, eleven years after selling it. “It was like visiting an old friend,” she said. “I had my little moment.”

Most recently, I called her in May 2011 to suggest we get together. She said she’d been feeling poorly, but promised to call when she recovered. The following month, I ran across her obituary in the paper. Struggling with her stroke’s aftereffects, bruised by several job losses and demotions, she’d plunged into a depression the year before and holed up in her Norfolk apartment, eating infrequently, drinking constantly. At her death, she’d dwindled to vapor.

Much of the conversation at her memorial centered on her funkiness, her love of kitsch, her appreciation for midcentury style. An urn containing her ashes occupied the middle of a table arrayed with fossils from her life—photos, books, musical instruments. Prominent among them was a framed photo of Mary with the Chevy.

I notice Dave Marcincuk standing alone at the wagon’s tail, squinting at the car as if he’s trying to work out a puzzle. I walk over to him. Since selling the car, Marcincuk has won the love of a Christian woman, to whom he proposed two weeks after they met. They married in 2006 and had a daughter two years later. He’s still a garbageman for the city of Norfolk, and still lives in his little Craftsman cottage, which looks a lot more put-together these days. Life, he said, “is more wonderfuller than I could have imagined.”

He was surprised to hear of the reunion when I called him a few days ago. “I thought that car was a total loss,” he told me. “The ’57 was worthless, really.”

“So,” I say now, nodding at the wagon, “what do you think?”

He shakes his head. “I’m just overwhelmed by the amount of work,” he says. He searches the gleaming Chevy for something—anything—familiar, and shakes his head again. “There’s no clue that this is the same car,” he says, “other than your telling me that it is.”

Indeed, the wagon’s every telltale tic has been erased. The flaws that Marcincuk once obsessed over have been cut out, welded, replaced. If I didn’t witness the transformation myself, I might not buy it.

But I did.

“Believe me,” I tell him. “It’s the same car.”

LATER IN THE day, a short while before Moyock Muscle locks up for the weekend, I find Tommy Arney alone in the Quonset, taking stock. The big neon Bootleggers sign is mounted on one wall, facing a sign across the showroom that once advertised another of his bars, Tommy’s. A ceramic “No Smoking” placard from his first gas station hangs over the office. An old, smoke-stained print of Jesus that he found in a back room of the Body Shop is on display between two pieces of NASCAR memorabilia.

“I came in here yesterday, and I was just looking around at all this, thinking about all I’ve done in my life,” he tells me. “The feds’ll come in and take all of this shit.” Just yesterday he surrendered the family’s Mercedes. In the coming days he’ll turn over his giant red pickup and a couple of Corvettes, including a rare 1963 model he gave his son for his twenty-first birthday. Any time now, an army of government agents might descend on the lot to take everything here, down to the pictures on the walls, after which he expects the bank will claim the property.

“But that’s okay,” he says. “I protected my family, and I protected Victoria. Everything else is just bullshit.” Havana will continue to operate with Slick as the boss, and Skinhead will stay chief of the kitchen. The feds have agreed to spare the Arney Compound, so that will remain intact, assuming the mortgages are paid. His family and crew will hang together.

And once he’s again a free man, they’ll start over. They’ll rebuild. He’s done it once. He can do it again. “I can’t wait to get there,” he tells me. “I can’t wait to go to prison. I want to get this shit started so I can get it done.”

Bill Taliaferro called him a day after his sentencing with a plan to extend the time before he reports, but Arney says he stopped him. “If they’d take me today, I’d go today,” he says. “I asked them, ‘Can’t I just go right now, and get this motherfucker started?’ And they said, ‘No, Mr. Arney. You have to wait.’

“I got to bail, buddy. I got to get this shit started. I’ve got shit to do.”

As for the Chevy: It isn’t seized. I’ve seen the government’s forfeiture papers myself, and can attest that the VIN of the ’57 Chevy wagon they list does not match that of the wagon. Arney signs VB57B239191 over to Al Godsey.

I’ve often seen the wagon’s fourteenth owner at Havana, usually in the kitchen, but exactly what he does to earn his keep has eluded me. When I ask him a few days after the reunion, he’s uncertain, himself. “Our situation isn’t really like working for somebody. It’s more like a lifestyle,” he says. “It’s not like we have titles or anything. We’re just here, you know? I try to look out for Tommy, and he looks out for me.”

He’s known Arney so long that he doesn’t remember how they met, but it was during a time when he frequented after-hours joints—“seven days a week,” he says—and Arney did, too. He first came to work for the boss twenty-one years ago, not intending a long stay. “It isn’t a career, really,” he says. “It’s more like just going through life.”

Godsey obtained the title in exchange for two thousand dollars and the cost of all parts necessary to build out the car, he tells me, adding that the crew will perform any labor involved at no charge. Even so, “It’s going to be a little while before I’ll have the money to be able to complete it,” he says. “We’re not rich right now. But little by little, we’ll turn it around. It’ll get done.”

Two thousand dollars, I think to myself, for a car in which Arney figures he’s invested forty thousand. As the thought lingers, Godsey offers that “it’s a good deal for me, and it’s a good deal for him.”

I ask him how that can be. “It doesn’t go anywhere,” he says. “It kind of stays in the family.”

And then it makes sense.

“So when Tommy gets out,” I say, “will you sell it back to him, if he wants it?”

“Oh, yeah,” Godsey replies. “If he wanted it, I’d hand it right to him.”

I’m betting he’ll want it. He may not have driven the Chevy before beginning his sentence, as he’s promised so many times that he would.

But just you wait: He will, once he’s out. He’ll take the wagon out onto the same streets where it logged its first miles, into a city and a world much changed from Nicholas Thornhill’s day.

He’ll drive that motherfucker.