The Spark and the Drive (16 page)

If he hadn’t been staring hatefully at the engine, Bobby would have seen how indifferent Rod looked, his arms loosely folded, his attention half on Bobby and half on traffic at the intersection. It didn’t seem right that upon meeting senior employees, whose house he was in, Rod wouldn’t be a little more obliging and eager to make friends. I thought of how wildly earnest I had been in my first weeks here. My first months.

Rod turned to me unexpectedly and said, “Give that mass air flow sensor a knock for me, would you?” I looked at the idling engine and adjusted the fender mat where the corner had folded over, anything to buy time, glancing sideways at Rod, who I knew was testing me. Bobby cut in, “I can give you a little ass air flow,” and Rod chuckled and pointed to where the sensor was on the intake hose. I gave it a hard rap with my knuckles, and the car stalled.

“Bing-o was his name-o,” Rod said. “They short out right around fifty thousand. I just made ten bucks commish for five minutes’ work. That’s two a minute, if my math’s any good.”

“He got you on commission already?” Bobby said.

“I don’t take a job without it.” Rod started the car again and went up to the scope, where he looked at the emissions readings and started a cylinder balance.

With my brows up, I looked at Bobby—see? computer jobs make money—and he frowned. “Swapping pieces of plastic.” He looked at what Rod was doing. “It’s the wave of the future, I guess,” he said. “Computers telling motors what to do.”

“Engines,” Rod said. “Motors are electric.” He pushed the KV button and looked at one of the hanging leads. “I like Sun Scopes better,” he said. “These here, you can’t even interface.”

There was a big uncertain moment before Bobby sighed, finally, and said, “Just came over to say hey.”

“Right on,” Rod said. Bobby held out his pack of cigarettes, but Rod shook his head. “Long story,” he said. “I’m an alcoholic. Trying not to be, I mean.”

“It’s a cigarette,” Bobby said.

“I light that, next thing I’ll be on a packy run. No thanks, friend. You can keep it.”

*   *   *

Two days later I was ditching behind oscilloscopes to avoid him. Not only was he overbearing, but there were tendencies toward exaggeration and self-promotion that went against my idea of mechanics or men, but his skill under the hood gave me an opportunity. When I had asked Mary Ann if she could babysit April, I told her I could help cover the counter, since Rod was turning over jobs at least twice as fast as Ray, and there were more breaks for me. I found myself speaking rapidly, nervously, and when I was finished she seemed not to have heard, looking up from a stack of checks and smiling as you do when you’re pretending to understand a foreigner.

“Thank you,” she said. “I have to think about it.”

But the next morning she called me at home and said she would love to watch April. I fell into a kitchen chair and started to laugh, and then she asked what I was doing today, what my plans were, if we could meet somewhere in the country.

“Great,” I said. “It’s supposed to be hot.”

“Then maybe we could swim.”

*   *   *

There were two popular lakes in Levi, with beaches and rope swings and fire pits, that I’d explored in the early spring when kids from school weren’t around. Most of my swimming I did from a blow-up mattress on a mile float down the Pomperaug. Occasionally there were trout fishermen running spoons through the nervous water on the upper stretch, but farther down, between wooded banks that bordered soybean and alfalfa fields, I was certain enough of my privacy to jump naked into the pools. I could live in my fantasies in that slow-winding isolation, the still water amplifying sound so that even my foot splashes would surprise me. In places where the river got wide it smelled like a sweating body and drying mud and even like the little rainbow trout they stocked every spring. The deeper water had its own cool mineral smell, and I’d pass through bands of honeysuckle that sent me into spinning dreams of love and sex.

At the end of the float was a bedrock shelf hanging ten feet over the water. Two years ago, the summer before junior year, I spent a solid month under the shelf dredging leaves and muck and pea gravel, wrestling pillow-sized rocks off the bottom for a dam I made on the downstream rim. When I needed more rocks to fill in the spaces I took them from one of the mossy stone walls you find in the hardwood forests of northern Connecticut—two or three feet high, perhaps dating back to little Pilgrim neighborhoods. When my work was done I had a chest-deep pool, into which I could jump from the ledge and lightly tap the bottom with my heels.

I hadn’t been there in more than a year, and that morning the path from Skunk Hollow Road was wider than I’d remembered. Knobby tire tracks had ripped through the carpet of plant life to the rocky dirt, and at the end of it the shelf was littered with hook wrappers, Styrofoam worm cups, webs of monofilament, cigarette boxes, candy wrappers, beer cans and tins of Copenhagen snuff, a little fire pit full of all matter of half-burned crap. I didn’t have a trash bag with me, so I ran armloads into the woods and made a heap behind a rotting stump. It took more than an hour to get it like I wanted, and then I had to haul ass to the Levi Shopping Plaza, where Mary Ann was parked in front of Harrison’s Hardware, having a cigarette in the shade of an ornamental tree.

“Are we calling this our first date?” she said, riding in the passenger seat of my Nova.

I was smiling and dumbstruck with such a wholesome idea as a first date, after what we’d done in her kitchen and up in Holy Land. But later, as I parked along the gravel shoulder, I thought, Why not? Why couldn’t we fall in love in the right order like everyone else?

On the river path we walked by a patch of Queen Anne’s lace where I’d missed two Coors cans. “So it’s not spectacular or anything,” I said. But she stopped to hum a few gratified notes where there was a break in the woods and you could see water. As she walked ahead of me, her thighs shook in the firm way muscle does, and her smooth calves tightened and loosened. Kimberly had been out of shape at sixteen, and here was a woman almost twice her age who looked better naked than clothed. Her breasts were soft from nursing, but from the stomach down she could have been in a centerfold.

Where the path widened, she waited for me to walk beside her. “It wasn’t fair at the house the other night,” she said. “I don’t know what was wrong with me.”

“I wasn’t sure what to say.”

“You’re his friend. I remember what that feels like.”

“He ought to talk to you more,” I said, but it came out mumbled, like a fast lie, only this wasn’t a lie. It was just my first time talking about him behind his back.

“You don’t have to take sides,” she said. “You’re not in the middle of anything.” She smiled with dreamy sad eyes, eyes that contained the knowledge of past sadness like wisdom.

Our clearing over the water was framed by a mossy boulder and three crooked shagbarks. I smelled heat in the little breeze coming up from the fields. We had maybe an hour before the full sun, when even the scissored shade wouldn’t be comfortable, and I spread the checkered blanket over the dry crumbling earth.

Mary Ann had scooped up some pebbles and was pitching them into the water one at a time—I could just hear their tiny chirps—and studying the effect. From the blanket I could see the part of the tea-colored water where every few seconds, after the last ripples had vanished, she’d toss another pebble.

“It’s clean water,” I said. “I wouldn’t drink it, but cleaner than Waterbury, anyway.”

“Where I put Joey reminds me of here.”

I gave her a few moments and said, “In Oregon.”

“Where the fall salmon spawn, the Chinook. But the ashes didn’t float like I thought they would. They tumbled in the current. They parted around these big red fish and washed over the eggs.”

There was nothing to say, and I found the wine in her canvas bag. Pinot Noir from the Russian River Valley, the label said. I wasn’t great with a corkscrew and took my time to not go in at an angle. When I looked back again she had stepped to the ledge. In one continuous motion she pulled off shorts and panties and tank top, and I was staring at the pink memory of waistband around her hips as she tossed her clothes into the fiddleheads of a cinnamon fern. I hopped up and threw off my T-shirt, and there came a torturous second, as in a dream where you need to run but can’t, when I knew what would happen but couldn’t produce an action or a sound to prevent it, when time in fact stretched out so that I felt the first blanketing weight of mourning her death, her subtraction from my life.

The soles of her feet were pale angel wings as she dove where it wasn’t safe to dive.

I slid down a side path, and when I got in the water she was already up and pushing back her hair. Two heavy, slimed-over branches caught on my rock dam had brought the water up a few inches, but it was only inches. She’d gone in at an unrepeatable angle, not perpendicular but severe enough to curve off the bottom without crashing her head into the gravel ledge. Inches.

In the water I pulled and pulled her slick against me, as if she were a ghost briefly materialized, and her surprise was just another strong emotion in the boil. I found her mouth and banged and slid over it with mine, and she kissed me with my hair in her fist. Water crashed up around us. “Yes,” she said, the word of her wanting me to be unapologetic, unwavering, not as I’d been with anyone before. We broke from the kiss and my shorts were gone—ripped off by one of us or both of us, and sinking away, and my rude wanting was her wanting. It drove me past her consent to a burning feral intent that couldn’t have been stopped.

*   *   *

On the blanket later, we sipped the peppery red wine from plastic champagne flutes. Only then, dripping and cool enough to huddle, did my heart return to any kind of normal beat. “I can’t believe you dove.”

She rubbed my knee and laughed. “I’m sorry I scared you.”

“If you asked what the chances were of not breaking your neck, I’d say about ten to one.”

“Is that true?”

“Roughly.”

The hills we stared at were wimpy and lush with bent little hardwoods, nothing like the sheer cliffs and sky-scraping forests of Oregon, I figured, but she seemed genuinely captivated, glancing from canopy to canopy as if they weren’t exactly the same.

She took a plastic knife from her bag and spread Brie onto a cracker. “One time I brought some home and forgot to tell Nick what it was. In the morning there was a spit-out bite of a bagel in the sink and a note that said, ‘I threw out the cream cheese.’”

I liked that Nick already had the association of a mutual friend, and that the difference in our relationship to him was only that she had known him longer. I kissed her bare shoulder, thinking of those summer floats I couldn’t enjoy all the way for feeling ashamed—holding my polyester trunks in my fist should I need to roll into the water and slip them on. We were naked on public property, which counted as a crime in Connecticut, but Mary Ann knew the higher laws that were nature’s laws, maybe everyone in Oregon did, and to feel the moving water between your legs, and now the sunlight and the air, was to feel that we are a beautiful species and it was the world that was obscene for making us hide.

Moments before, the water cool on our stomachs and cold on our feet, the sand tapping our shins in the light current, she angled her lower body so that I was inside her with a squeaky-clean kind of friction, and with the sweet water on our lips we kissed more slowly. She gripped me as her hand had gripped me and told me not to move. To close my eyes and picture her all around me. “It’s going to make me come,” she had said.

Now she watched a contrail make its Etch A Sketch line up the sky. She had strong, high cheeks that were the Indian in her, her Jones—she’d told me that her Klamath grandmother had been instructed by a government agent to pull her last name out of a hat.

“Will she like me?” she said.

“April? Of course she will.”

“And you think I’m ready?”

It hadn’t occurred to me that she might not be ready, and I paused with a brief and unexpected protectiveness of April, feeling at the same time the sudden shock of Joey’s death.

“Actually,” she said, “I don’t think I really can.”

“Mary Ann.”

“As far as time. It’s probably not—”

“You’re ready. You’re perfect.”

She closed her eyes a moment and breathed. Then she looked at me with pink swimmer’s eyes and rested her chin on her pulled-up knees. With her freckles and no hairstyle and colorless lips, she could have been my age. This was the face she saw in the mirror after a shower, when she was the woman and the girl together. “Okay,” she said. “Okay,” and for a second I thought she might say she loved me. I felt my face flush, as if I’d already heard it and was only waiting on my voice to say it back. But she didn’t say it, not in words, and instead she stood and walked to the ledge again. I didn’t know what this meant, and the earlier panic of her dive rose in me, but she held her hand open behind her, a few shimmering water beads running down her back, her beautiful ass pink and creased from sitting. “Come jump with me,” she said.

20.

At least once a week, Nick and I raced the ZL-1 at Wickersham’s. We staged undramatic upsets against cars that had been exalted like royalty over fish sticks in the school cafeteria.

I kept my promise not to tell Mary Ann about the races, and having secrets infused me with a self-possession that I imagined important men had—senators, generals, technology engineers. It was a man’s burden to keep secrets. Though of course there was the other secret, the cowardly one I still couldn’t dare myself to tell Nick. But I kept the truth from Mary Ann because she would worry, and that she would worry made the racing dangerous, though that was never how it felt with Nick behind the wheel.

From the Corvette’s passenger seat, I only saw how strategically he drove. He’d lurch up to the back fender and fall back, then pull even just before the end, so that every time it seemed he’d won by dumb luck more than anything—a bad shift or an extended burnout by the other car. He got nowhere near red-lining the Corvette—he didn’t need to, was smart not to, though inside I begged him to, just once, just once. There was no sense of chance and thus no fear I felt, no adrenalized clenching or loss of spit, because Nick drove without surprise, feeling the perimeter of the Corvette as if it were an extension of his body, reading the minds of anyone who put up money against him, and surging not a second sooner than was required to win.