Make Me Work (3 page)

“Tommy T.!”

“Tommy T. That's your name?”

“Yes! I grow up with this blues!”

He sounded Eastern European—Czech or Polish or something like that. “And where was that, Tommy? Where you grew up. Gdansk?”

He was silent for a second inside her phones. “You have excellent ear,” he said. “My home is near Gdansk.”

Lisa laughed. “I was kidding, Tommy. It was a joke, you know? Lech Walesa? Solidarity? Gdansk shipyards?”

“Yes!” he said. “Why is Gdansk joke?”

“It's not. I meant that Gdansk is the only thing people like me know about your country, so I mentioned it.”

“Oh.”

“Would you like to request a song, Tommy?”

“I know how your car is breaking!”

“‘I Know How Your Heart Is Breaking.' Sounds familiar. Who did it?”

“No! You! Your car!”

“My
heart is breaking. As a matter of fact, it is, Tommy. But just how did you happen to know that?”

“The man on radio tell about it. Before.”

A man on the radio told him my heart was breaking, thought Lisa. One way you knew you'd plunged to the deep, hidden crux of reality was that the strange people started calling you up. It happened to Lisa periodically—clusters of crazies ringing her phone.

“Tommy, have you ever noticed how other people's license plates contain secret messages meant for you alone?” He fell silent. Lisa recalled that she was strange now herself, and shouldn't be casting stones. She had a James Cotton song going with twenty seconds left to run and there was nothing else cued up. “I have to put you on hold,” she said, and hit the button for Rodney's booth. “Rod, talk to this guy for me, will you? I can't figure him out.”

She flipped through some discs. The station had a brand-new CD copy of “Layla,” by Derek and the Dominos—an immortal creation that contained, as she remembered it, an astounding version of “Have You Ever Loved a Woman.” It was a song about a man in love with his best friend's wife, which Eric Clapton actually had been at the time. That was why it was astounding. If you didn't know, you knew the instant you heard his guitar.

She let it roll and punched Rodney again. “So what's the story?”

“He's from Poland.”

“I got that.”

“His whole life is the blues.”

“I sort of got that, too.”

“He came to America to play blues guitar. He wants to fix your car.”

She unraveled this for a second. “Oh, my car.”

“Yeah, what did you think?”

“Never mind.” He was a guitar bum who also worked on cars. Why did those things always go together? And here was evidence that it went well beyond America—to Poland, of all places. Didn't that prove it was something in the structure of the male brain? She got back on the phone.

“You play Eric Clapton!” Tommy exclaimed.

“I do that sometimes. But this one's for you, Tommy.”

“Thank you!”

“I understand you play the blues.”

“Yes! I am blues-guitar player!”

“A guitar player who fixes cars? I've never heard of that.”

“I am fixing car for living. You stall in puddle, yes?”

“Yes. Right. But now it won't even start in the rain anymore.”

“I know! Vapors! Wires getting wet! Not hard to fix. Great honor to fix blues lady's car. Please come to shop today. I fix for you!”

She did need to do something about the car, and her usual mechanic was Mitchell's best friend. “What's your real name, Tommy?”

He didn't answer right away. “Tomasz,” he finally said. “Tomasz Tomaczewski. But is no good for blues.”

“I can see that. And where are you fixing cars, exactly?”

She knew the garage he was working at, and said she'd drop by after her show. She had a soft spot for Tommy T., because he reminded her of a feeble old joke she'd loved as a girl at summer camp—the one about a Polish window washer who frightens a woman on the phone.
I am viper. I am coming to you
.

“I am coming to you,” she told Tommy T.

“I fix car for blues disc-jockey lady!” he declared.

The garage where Tommy T. worked was a place Lisa had seen for years but never visited—a former gas station known now as Al's Car Repair. She sputtered over there in the unending rain. Rodney had gleaned on the phone that Tommy knew someone who knew someone who knew Al, and that was how he'd got this job. He must have been an ace mechanic, but, even so, he was dumb lucky to be working at all; he'd been in the States only three months.

As if her car knew where they were, it hit a puddle in Al's potholed lot and died right there. She opened her door to the stinging weather. WWHY was playing loud in the shop. She got halfway across the lot when the world wobbled like a bad TV tube. In the dark mouth of the building, beside the stout chrome shaft of a lift, her father was working under a car. Not her father as she knew him last, but a man younger than she was now—the father who threw her bottle in the sea. He was wearing bluejeans and a red plaid shirt, and his straight brown hair fell to his shoulders like the prince in disguise in a story he used to read to her. She stopped in the lot and closed her eyes. In the red darkness, her father-prince emerged from the building with her bottle in his hand. When she opened her eyes, the real guy had come out holding a wrench. It wasn't her father in his late twenties, just a man who looked miraculously like him. “Blues?” he cried out.

She smiled and nodded her head. He came running over. He wanted to shake hands, but his were coated with engine grease, so he just waved the wrench around and babbled. He was a good five years younger than Lisa was, and he acted younger than that—the enthusiasm overdose combined with the language barrier, she supposed. But he wasn't the dark, self-involved guitar jock she'd expected. He was a big, cute puppy of a guy.

“I know, Tommy!” she finally got in. “You love the blues. You told me.”

Two other guys came out, men in grubby overalls who wanted to see the lady d.j. “We always listen to your show!” one said.

“We didn't think Tommy was really gonna call you,” said the other.

“Tommy,” Lisa said, “I hope you didn't call me on a dare.”

Tommy didn't understand this.

“We didn't dare him to do nothin',” said the second guy. “It was his idea.”

“If I close my eyes it's just like the radio!” the first guy said.

People always said this. The guys pushed her car into a bay, where Tommy examined it for a while. It turned out she had bad corrosion of delicate parts, and the supplier was closed for the day. Tommy would get replacement parts tomorrow, but her car had to stay the night.

“I give you ride home,” Tommy said, but first he had to wash his hands and show her his guitar and amp, which he had right there with him at Al's Car Repair. They were precious vintage Fenders, just like the ones the famous bluesmen used. He opened the guitar case and lifted a Stratocaster from the orange plush. It was blue. He held it up like a baby for Lisa to see.

“You bring this stuff to work with you, Tommy?”

“I worry if someone will steal! Also, maybe after working I jam. I must jam, Lisa!”

He had an old beat-up Dodge wagon, not the most confidence-inspiring vehicle for your new mechanic to be driving, but the heat and the wipers worked, and they were the essential things right then. The weather was revolting. Lisa thought, When I get back in my house, I'm not coming out till I see the sun, like a groundhog. Which reminded her. “You know anything about raccoons?”

He looked at her quizzically. “Animal?”

“Yeah, the animal.” Tommy T. made her feel afresh the vast possibilities of America, where raccoons might be a brand name of something, or a rock band you'd never heard about. She spread her fingers across her face to mimic the masks of the woodsy creatures who seemed so cute till you discovered they were vermin, vicious and diseased. She had stopped feeding Sparky, but he came to her closed window every night anyway. When she banged on the glass to make him go away, he hissed at her—a frightening, feral hiss. “I think I have one in my basement.”

“Not good when animal in house,” Tommy said.

“Any animal? I have a dog and a cat.”

“Dog is good! Why not dog get raccoon?”

“Because he'll kill it, Tommy.”

“Good!”

“I don't want my dog killing things. Besides, raccoons have rabies. That raccoon could bite my dog and my dog could die.”

This was hilarious to Tommy. “Raccoon not kill dog! Dog kill raccoon!”

At Lisa's house, he guided his big spongy boat into the horseshoe drive. Lisa was unlocking her front door when she saw him getting his equipment out. “Tommy, it's perfectly safe here,” she said, and gestured to the woods around them. “Nobody's gonna steal your stuff.”

“Too cold for guitar in car,” he said, hauling out the battered luggage of his sacred things.

Her heart sank at the adolescence of it, his obsessiveness about his stuff, but artists were like that, weren't they? It wasn't like being an Elvis fanatic. If you could find a man to love you the way Tommy T. loved his Fender guitar, you'd be all right.

She heard Jesse plop down from the bed when she opened the door. She'd been letting him sleep with her since she'd moved out here—starting him at the foot of the bed, but giving in until now he stretched out full-length, with his head on the pillow. He came down the hall like a cannonball, saw the man in the drive, and flew past Lisa out the door. Tommy had his guitar in one hand and his amp in the other, and no time to set them down. When the dog leaped, Tommy hoisted his knee, and Jesse landed on his back with a squeal Lisa had never heard him make. He got up and tried it again, and got the same thing from Tommy.

“No jump!” Tommy commanded. To Lisa's amazement, Jesse obeyed. “Heel!” Tommy said, and Jesse escorted him up the steps, all eye contact and lolling tongue. He'd met the alpha male Lisa was always hearing about from the obedience-school people.

Tommy taught Jesse to sit while Lisa got the guitarist a beer. She wondered about the signal she was sending, having this stranger in her house, and thought she should get right to the raccoon. Sparky saved her the trouble. They heard the undeniable scrabbling of a sizable mammal in the floor.

“Oh, ho!” Tommy said, crouching to follow the sound to the pantry threshold, where a pipe came up from the basement. “Stay!” he told Jesse, his hand like a cop's. The hole in the floor was larger than the metal tube passing through it, and missing the decorative cuff used to finish such installations. Tommy beckoned Lisa over. In the gap between floorboards and pipe, she saw the eye of a raccoon.

“He watch us!” Tommy whispered.

“Sparky, you devil,” Lisa said. “I call him Sparky,” she told Tommy.

“You have hammer?”

“You're not going to hit him with a hammer!”

“No! Not hit him! Nails, too?”

She had those things in her junk drawer in the pantry. Tommy swigged his beer and headed for the basement. “Stay,” he told Lisa and Jesse both, and closed the door behind him.

“Don't you hurt him!” Lisa said to the door.

Tommy started smacking the basement pipes with the hammer. The clanking shot through the arteries of the house and ended up in the fillings of Lisa's teeth. Suddenly the floor was raccoon pin-ball, Sparky bouncing around like bonus points in five places at once. She heard Tommy yelling, “Ha! Hey! You!” and hammering nails into wood. Was he crucifying the poor thing?

She pulled Jesse out the back door. Sergeant Pepper slipped out, too, and jumped onto the deck's wooden railing. Lisa dragged Jesse down the stairs and hooked him to his wire tether that ran the length of the yard—scene of her dreams of springtime rebirth and renewal. At the moment, it was a slapping, sucking pit of muck.

After a while, Tommy appeared on the deck. “Surprise!” he called down. Through the railing, Lisa could see Sarge nuzzling his ankles. “Sparky not boy!”

“What!”

“Have babies!”

“You're kidding me!” Lisa cried. She ran up the steps. “Then we can't throw them out! Stop! Don't do anything to them!”

Tommy had coffee grounds and scraps of deliquescing salad on his boots, and he was scratching himself all over. “Lisa, you have female emotion.”

“Don't you dare tell me that!”

“Sorry!” he said. “I find hole, too!”

“They were coming in a hole?”

“I hammer it up!”

“How many babies?”

“Three? Four?” He pulled down one of his socks and clawed his ankle. “Fleas bite me, little suckers!” He stamped his foot. “Lisa! Sparky must live outside!”

“I guess you're right,” she said.

He pointed along the length of the house. “I get them out window! Watch!” he said, and ran back in.

Lisa returned to the muddy yard. It was twilight—the magic time, when the souls of animals took dream forms and wandered through the world, visible only to the shamans of the tribe. Lisa remembered this from some spooky Carlos Castaneda books she'd read in college. The basement window popped inward and Tommy's face appeared in the house's foundation. He propped the window with a stick and disappeared.

“No jump!” she commanded Jesse, but he jumped anyway, choking on his wire. Then his mouth dropped open in a rictus. He flexed the black leather of his nose-wings, tuning in to nature's great radio.

Lisa didn't like being outside alone at night, and now her shaman thoughts were making her feel upset. She heard a flapping sound and looked up: bats were flying against the nacreous sky. Softly, she started to sing: “Heavenly shades of night are falling, it's twilight time…”

A loud, weird wail hit the darkening air. Her heart stopped, and she fell to her knees in the mud. She wasn't breathing. She looked for Jesse. He was dead, too; the electrocuting spirit scream had knocked him right into the ground. Then she touched her face. No, she wasn't dead. Jesse wasn't, either. He sprang up like a swamp creature to howl and lunge at the otherworldly sounds emanating from the house. Lisa struggled to her feet. The tops of her boots had filled with mud. She slogged across the yard until she could see into the open basement window.