August and Then Some (10 page)

Summer between junior and senior year me and Noke worked pretty much full-time at his father Ricky's garage on Lockwood Ave. We did simple stuff like oil changes, belt replacements, inspections, and we cleaned the place during downtime. The job let us support our summer, our drinking, and our desire to stay out of our houses—which at times were all excessive.

Ricky never cared about the rough nights I brought to work or personal phone calls, and didn't get bent if I came late or left early—
as long as the job gets done
. He was always civil about reminding me he was in charge and he never snapped at me even if I might have had it coming. He was a patient teacher and never tried to sound like he knew more about cars than I did, even though he did. He ordered lunch from the same deli six times a week. He used to talk to me about girls only if I brought it up, smiled at women customers but didn't flirt. He wasn't big on preaching or asking questions. He seemed to be OK with knowing very little about me and Nokey's lives, and probably knew more than he let on.

As actual bosses went, Ricky was real easy on me, but he and Noke were another story. Nokey said, “Best thing I can say about my dad is that he knows he can't stop us from being seventeen.”
Why Ricky and Nokey went at it all the time is beyond me. The father and son thing covers a lot, but they drew that line so thin it was nearly invisible. They treated each other more like brothers with bad blood. They worked on cars together like wolves fighting over the last piece of dead cow.

Ricky's hands were covered in what you could call a mechanic's tattoo. Twenty-three years of grease and dirt permanently baked into his skin, like he'd blackened his fingertips over a flame. Whenever I caught him at the sink trying to wipe some of the grime off he'd tell me, “If you don't want your hands to look like this for the rest of your life, stay in school.”

Ricky Cervella gave me two things I can't shake: a mechanic's education, and the question of what I want my hands covered in when I'm fifty.

I was under the hood of a Sable when the phone rang. This was early July. An afternoon flash thunderstorm made little rivers against curbs. Nokey was working on the car next to the office and his father picked it up then yelled, “Noke?”

“What?”

“It's for JT.”

“What is?”

“The phone.”

“The what?”

“The PHONE.”

“Huh?”

“What does this look like, a dildo? It's a fucking phone. Clean the potatoes out of your head and tell JT it's for him.”

The potato thing always pushed Noke over the line. And Ricky knew it. There was always a silence after that with some kind of injury in it. Nokey looked at me. “JT.”

I said, “Yeah, I got it.”

“He's coming, Ricky. And Ricky?”

“What?”

“Your mother thinks it's a dildo.”

“After having four kids I think she knows the difference, you hopeless degenerate.”

“No, I'm not kidding. Smell it.”

Ricky said, “Who are you, where did you come from, and why do I let you work here?”

“I'm your wife's kid, I came from her, and I work here because she told you she wanted me out of the house.”

“I don't know you,” said Ricky.

“It's mutual.”

On my way to the phone I said, “Noke, why don't you leave the poor guy alone for once?”

“If I survived him, he can survive me.”

I could feel Ricky behind me while I got the news. He wasn't eavesdropping, he just knew something was up and kept watch over me. I guess I looked a little freaked out when I hung up because he asked me if everything was all right.

“My dad hurt his leg on the job. They dropped a piece of sheet metal. He's at the hospital. They said he's got crutches. He can go home, but my mom can't leave her shift so they need someone to go over there and pick him up.”

“Yeah, go head, we got you covered. Take my car.” And he reached in his drawer for the keys.

What I remember most about that phone call was the sound of my mother's voice. Underneath the words something small and distant was poking its head out. An excited person on their toes waving at me above a crowd, telling me that what was coming for a long time was finally here.

 

Walking to the entrance, I looked up to a second-floor window and remembered that Lawrence Hospital had been in my family
for three generations. I was born there and my grandmother Terri died there. My mother was already working there at the time, and says everyone agreed that Terri was a real pain in the ass patient. Sounds like Terri confused nurses with waitresses, asking them for things like different color sheets. Because she complained about the food so much, and because my mom could sneak her in only so many lunches, she had a nurse bring her a legal pad and a magic marker and made a sign that she put in her window facing the street that read:
THIS FOOD WILL BE THE DEATH OF ME
. Turned out it was her heart. Mom says she still reminisces with the older doctors who knew Terri about all the demands she made that, after the fact, they see as her spirit fighting to survive. If I had to guess, and I do, I'd say it's possible she was like many people—much more charming in retrospect.

Dad sat on the edge of the bed with his leg propped up on a chair, staring through the vertical blinds with something heavier on his mind than the accident. Decay blew through the yellow room in slow motion. Lights threw this grayish-green tint on his face like the first layer of rigor mortis. I said, “You OK?”

He kept looking out the window. “Yeah.”

“I guess I'm gonna take you home now.”

He turned his head to me and shook off whatever thought was beyond the window. “Let's get on it then.” He lifted himself off the bed, grunted and his face squished in pain.

“Should I help you?”

“No, no.”

“Didn't they give you crutches?”

“Yeah, but I don't use crutches, thank you very much. They wanted to put me in a chair to get me outta here, too, but I told your mother to nix it. I can do it. They gave me these.” He held up a bottle of pills. “Up the dosage a little and they're even better than crutches.” He tried to straighten himself and couldn't take more than one step without having to catch his
balance on the bed. “I guess these pills don't work without a shoulder. Get over here.”

I managed to help him out of the hospital and dump him in the car. The thunderstorm had let up. Bars of light broke through the clouds and pulled steam out of the streets. I kept the windows down so I could smell the wet asphalt, and take my mind off having to schlep my father up the front stairs.

He had one hand on the railing and leaned all the rest of his weight into me. My shoulder was under his armpit and his breath was hitting me in the right side of my face, stagnant as a hospital room. He took each step in an off-balanced hop. His face crumpled up again, but he laughed and said, “We should have built these things more even.” I helped him redo those stairs when I was like nine, which meant I occasionally broke rocks with a hammer, carried bags of rubble to the rented dumpster and scratched my initials in the wet cement with a stick. “Yeah,” I said, “that woulda come in handy about now.”

We made it through the front door and I unloaded him on the couch. He was down and it was done and I wanted to get the hell out of that house before he had me rubbing his feet. I said, “I gotta get Ricky's car back to the garage.”

“Yeah, go head.”

“Mom'll be home soon. I guess. Or later.”

I turned to leave and he said, “Thanks, Jake.”

I think I nodded my head or maybe I said
yeah
or
sure
or
no fucking problem, man.
Or some combination of the three.

On my way back to the garage I drove on the highway, parallel to the Bronx River for a stretch, and I so wished it was clean right then, or that the thunderstorm was still hammering down because if you've ever carried one of your parents on your back then you know why right then I could have really used diving into some water.

 

A week after my dad's accident I was at Ricky's garage adjusting a timing belt on a Buick and Mom called to tell me she had to stay at work late and could I pick up Dani from swimming practice. “No problem,” I told her. And that was my first sign that she had something going on, because staying late at work wasn't ever her stride.

“But don't bring her home,” she said.

I borrowed Nokey's car and took the fifteen-minute drive to get my sister at the pool. When I pulled up outside Dani and another girl from the swim team were sitting outside waiting. They were straddling the bench with their bathing suits still on and towels wrapped around their waists. Dani had her back to the girl who was combing out her wet hair with a brush.

I didn't know this other girl. She was a few inches shorter than Dani with more muscles, like a gymnast instead of a swimmer. She had lighter hair pulled into a ponytail, a few earrings in each ear, a string of bottle caps as an ankle bracelet, and one on her wrist homemade from colored thread. Dani had her beat with the bracelets: different sizes of silver rings covering her wrists halfway up her forearms, reflecting the sun like disco balls. I don't know if she wore them to swim, and if she'd taken those things off once in the past two years, my back was turned.

While this other girl was brushing out Dani's hair she was telling her a story that seemed to be the funniest thing the two of them had heard in about a year. At one point Dani whipped her head around and opened her mouth wide like she couldn't believe what the girl just said. The girl stopped combing, put her hand on her heart and looked up to the sky swearing to God she was telling the truth. This made them both bend over at the waist in a laughing fit and this girl crashed her forehead into Dani's back. They stayed there convulsing until their faces turned red. I wanted in on it, but if I rolled up the joke would have been shot in the ass, so I pulled the car over before they could see me and watched.

They recovered from the laughing fit, sat up again, and the girl went back to brushing. She held a small section of hair at the roots and, starting at the ends, she pulled at the knots in little jolts, working her way further up with each stroke until finally she ran the brush through the whole section without a snag. And there was something in that free swipe that transformed Dani's hair and then the rest of her into someone else. If I didn't know her, I would have thought she was some girl who drinks beer on the hood of her boyfriend's car. A girl who flirts, goes skinny dipping, and spends a lot of time being cool. For the second it took that girl to swipe that brush down one long section of my sister's hair, Dani was that girl. Or maybe she was always that girl and it took a hair-brushing for me to notice.

I felt like a schmuck for beeping the horn, because as soon as I did she replaced her smile with straight lips, stood up, grabbed her backpack, and waved goodbye to the girl. She walked to me, and got in the car as the quiet uncool thirteen-year-old girl who only swims indoors and lets no one but her teammates touch her hair.

On the ride home I asked, “How come you never got your ears pierced?”

She shrugged and said, “I might. I might get everything pierced. Ears, eyebrows, lips, tongue, bellybutton.”

“O … K. Think that might hurt?”

“Not even a little,” she explained. And was proud of that fact.

I pulled into Ricky's place, got out of the car and made my way back into the garage to the Sable I'd been working on.

Dani stood near the gas pumps with her backpack over one shoulder, tucking her half-brushed damp hair behind her ears. She was teetering on the outside edges of her sneakers, not wanting to come inside the garage, not really wanting to go anywhere else, so I went over to her and said, “What's up?”

“Mom didn't want me to go home after practice, right?”

“Right.”

“So I'm here with you instead?”

“Right.”

She adjusted her backpack as if it needed it, and looked away from me. “Listen,” I said, “we'll be done in like an hour. Probably hit the river later. Is that cool?”

She nodded her head a few times.

I pulled money out of my pocket and handed her ten of it. “Here. If you're hungry or something, go to the deli.” She pocketed the ten and walked to the corner.

On my way back inside Ricky waved me in through the glass window of his office. He was standing behind the desk leafing through invoices.

“What's up, Rick?”

“I know this is cutting it close, but I need you to rotate this guy's tires before you leave. Can you swing it?”

“Do you need the belt on the Sable done first thing tomorrow?”

“Afternoon's OK.”

“Then yeah, I can do it.”

“Good. Normally I'd tell the guy to get in line, but he's a friend of a friend who's calling in a favor.”

“I gotcha.”

“The barter system's a beautiful thing.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Listen, JT, I forgot to ask how your dad was.”

“He's, you know … hurt. They're not sure how his leg is gonna be. Sheet metal ripped up his ligaments and I guess they don't heal too easy. They said it's too soon to tell, you know?”

“Can he walk?”

“He can get around, but not so well. Has to stay off it for a while.”

“Shit. At least he's got comp. Well tell him I was asking for him, all right?”

“I will.”

I took another step toward the door when he said, “How about your mom?”

“She's … still my mom.”

Ricky laughed. “Tell me about it. I got one too.” I hung back as he looked out the office window at Dani waiting for the light, so she could cross to the deli. “Your sister need anything?”