The Spark and the Drive (18 page)

Nick pressed his fingers against the valve cover, studying the vibration. “I never asked if he went to charm school.”

I stood there a few more seconds, though that was all he had to say. Later I wondered if there was some resentment toward me in that answer. Maybe he thought I’d coerced him into telling me about Joey, and now he didn’t like my having that secret.

I wandered over to the oil-change bay. Turning his cap back, Bobby brought his face up to the coil spring of the Grand National on the lift. He reached around the scorching manifold and flinched with the claustrophobia of plunging your arm to the hilt in a blind labyrinth of rusty metal, the scrape and the prickling coming right up through your spine. He swore as he contorted his body for leverage, twisting until a drizzle of black oil ran down from the loosened filter, and he jerked back his arm with two dull bumps of muscle and bone. I could see the red creases all the way down his forearm.

“Just don’t open your face,” he said to me.

“You shouldn’t be doing his oil changes.”

“I don’t mess with microwaves or TV sets, either,” he said. “You maybe got a brain that can handle invisible little pulses and flashes. I need to see it move.”

“The needle on an ohmmeter moves.”

“We did old school in here for three years. People clapping for us when the dyno goes up. Tipping us. We could retire on that if Nick gets right in his mind again.”

“Bobby, how many hot rods are still going to be on the road in ten years?”

“Go on back wherever the fuck you were.” He shoved his hand back up around the A-frame and spring. After a few seconds he yanked his arm back down, white where the scrapes were starting to bleed, holding a Fram filter that he turned in his fingers like a quarterback looking for the laces. Then he looked at me and side-armed the filter through the back window.

For the rest of the day, whenever I noticed the broken glass I looked over at Bobby and tried to think of a way to approach him. This is how I happened to catch him wiring a car.

We called it zapping, and what you did was cram some fourteen-gauge wire into the boot of an unhooked spark plug wire. You needed a spool long enough to run down under the engine so that your victim couldn’t see the wire. Carefully you snaked it in through the passenger door and between the driver’s seatback and seat with enough poking out for them to sit on. You cut off a few inches of insulation and splayed the wire threads until they were invisible on the seat.

Ray used to zap customers he didn’t like. “Hop in and crank it for me, would you?” he’d say. Those eight thousand volts closed a loop between your ass and your fingers on the ignition key—I’d seen guys jump up and bash their skulls on the headliner. Whether getting zapped would be enough to cure Rod of his blindness, I couldn’t say. By blindness I mean the way some people can’t see who their enemies are. If you were to ask Rod what he thought of Bobby, I could hear him say, “Ah, he’s all right. He gives me a little shit, and I give it right back.”

At least Bobby might get something out of his system, I thought, as I got us a couple of coffees from the lobby and came out to watch. When I handed Bobby the coffee he said, “I need to check amps at the starter. Do me a favor and crank it over.”

Hearing that was like a jump into ice water, but if he saw the color drain out of my face, Bobby gave no sign. I went around to the driver’s door without feeling my feet touch the ground and sat on the wires. I owe him this, I thought, and I turned the key.

23.

It was during uneventful evenings at home that I fell in love the rest of the way. Mary Ann was coming over three days a week and staying through dinner. She cooked for me and came into my room, where no girlfriend had been before, with her smell and her soft voice, and looked at my posters and took down my books and beat me at Space Invaders on my little black-and-white TV.

“Where is he?” she said one evening, looking at a photo album page of me and Don.

“In New Haven. He’s gay, now. He turned gay.”

And oh, that it didn’t matter. She had gay friends in Oregon, and of course it was there, in permissive Oregon, that someone like Mary Ann could ever happen.

She ordered a book from there and read it to April on the living room floor. “But why is he Bigfoot?” April said when she finished.

“Because he has great big ears like Dumbo.”

“No,” April barked.

“Because he has a nose like a beach ball?”

April begged her to read it again.

“Can Justin help?” Mary Ann said.

I lowered myself off the couch to the floor with them.

“Did I ever tell you that Nick used to hunt Bigfoot?” Mary Ann said.

“Nick?” I said. I nearly said, “
Our
Nick?”

“Not gun hunting,” she said to April. “Picture hunting, like Toby in the book. He would hike way up into the Cascade Mountains.”

“But who
is
Nick?” April said.

“He’s my friend from Oregon, of course. And one day he asked me to go with him. How do you think that made me feel? I mean, should I be scared?”

“It wouldn’t scare me,” April said.

Mary Ann smiled. “I was excited.”

I was, too, and not only because she’d called Nick just a friend. I liked to hear about her past. I wanted to go back with her, to the time before Waterbury and her short tragic motherhood, so I could fall in love with that Mary Ann, too.

“But then I thought of a really good prank,” she continued.

“What’s—”

“A little joke you play on someone,” I said.

“I borrowed a tape player and made a recording of hitting logs together. Knock. Knock-knock. That sound.”

April started to bang her feet against the coffee table. “I have a tape player!”

“Shh,” I said. “Listen to the story.”

“It’s sort of the way Bigfeet use the telephone. Knock-knock-knock. So I recorded ten minutes of that. But I started after twenty minutes of blank tape so I could hide it in the woods and get away.”

“Very smart,” I said.

“Thank you. Then we hiked almost to the snowline and put up our tent. We found this little pond and sat there dressed up in camo waiting for a Bigfoot to come get a drink. But I guess he didn’t want to be famous. He never showed up.”

“But maybe they don’t like ponds,” April said.

Mary Ann took April’s hand and kissed it on top. “So we got in our tent at night, and in our sleeping bags, and then I sat up and told him I had to go pee—”

“You pee-peed outside?” April looked shocked.

“Like you never have,” I said.

“In the woods all there is is outside, but I didn’t really have to pee. I started the tape recorder, and then—run, run, run—I got back in my sleeping bag. Pretty soon here it comes, knock-knock-knock. Nick jumps up but can’t find his shoes. He had one of those giant Maglites that takes a hundred batteries, and it got left on, so he’s trying to change the batteries in the pitch black. Meanwhile the tape recorder stops, and I mean you can’t tell him it’s just a joke, he’s so excited now. He can’t even cuss, he’s so excited. He’s saying, ‘Oh come on, come on. Man, oh man,’ dropping batteries everywhere.”

“Why couldn’t he cuss?” I said.

She looked at me. “Haven’t you ever been like that? Something incredible happens and all you have are little-kid words again? I couldn’t cuss at the end of my labor, and that was pain there isn’t words for, and then you see this little cap of hair, and it’s true. He’s coming. Here he comes into the world.”

April sat forward. “Who’s coming?”

But Mary Ann was no longer with us. “Man, oh man,” she said, gazing at a memory up on the ceiling.

24.

Coming back one evening from the lake on Transylvania Road (our one outing that failed—a skin of yellow pollen kept us out of the water; Mary Ann got stung; April picked up a condom), I stopped for gas at Arco, and as a consolation for a lame trip Mary Ann took April inside for a Drumstick cone.

The lock on the pump handle didn’t work, and I was bent over the back bumper when a guy who’d once locked me in a corn silo swung his monster GMC off Route 6 and skidded to a stop at the pump opposite mine. “Bailey,” he yelled down from his window. He said a big-block Chevelle was coming out to Wickersham’s Saturday. “You guys could make some bank. He went for half a grand with Kimball’s old man.”

I looked at the numbers on the pump and let go right at $9.98. I had just a ten in my wallet. “Did he win?” I said, twitching in the last two cents.

“Barely. And Kimball’s old man drives like I fucking spit.”

*   *   *

Eight or nine cars were on the edge of the strip, a few more lined up in the field. We were waved to and I heard my name called like a stadium chant, “Bail
ee.
” In a few weeks, Nick and I had gone from being nobodies to being the home team.

Fireflies pulsed in the corn and Hank Williams Jr. sang about getting whiskey bent and hell bound. It was the first night there were girls, and the rich exhaust and cooked-tire smells were interrupted by the occasional perfume of tanned bodies passing by with cigarettes.

The Chevelle was a ’70 with black SS stripes, five-spoke alloys, and a Cowl Induction hood. I couldn’t believe the owner was sitting on the lacquer fender, a tall redhead standing between his legs. He was talking with a guy who wasn’t very selective, who had even hung out with me a few times in the smoking area at school. When we got out of the Corvette the owner of the Chevelle bounded over to us with his hand out—Duane Pabst, from Torrington. He had a big handshake and sculpted arms that had to be the product of workout rooms with forty-five-pound plates and wall mirrors. He wore carpenter pants and a flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off, but he smelled like he was fresh out of the shower.

“Wrap your ass in fiberglass,” he said, walking around the Corvette. “You got a big rat motor in that beast? No, don’t tell me, don’t tell me, keep it like poker. Maybe it’s just a tuned-up mouse. I don’t need to know.”

I couldn’t tell if the guy was on something. His bright teeth kept flashing, and he had these long dimples pleating his cheeks. “I can do a grand,” he said to Nick. “You feel like doing a grand?”

I started over to conference with Nick, as we’d done before, to compare our vibes on the guy in private, but before I’d taken a full step toward him, Nick said, “Sure,” and Pabst grinned and clapped his hands. “This shit is
on.”

It was agreed that Pabst and Nick would race alone, and when they walked over to the start line to give Motts their money, the redhead stood there by herself. The other girls didn’t talk to her. She looked like a city girl, smoking her designer cigarette with one arm wrapped in front of her short biker jacket. I said hi and could tell she appreciated it.

But then I was called over to the keg, where I was handed a cup of foamy beer and someone asked if I’d had in any decent Mopars lately, and when I was going to try a run in my Nova, and somebody yelled my name, and I forgot all about keeping the redhead company.

It was like these guys had been my friends all along but I’d just misunderstood them. It was my own fault, all the surrendering—who could respect that? They wanted to see Pabst lose. What the fuck did he need a grand for? It turned out his family were the ones who brewed the Blue Ribbon beer.

And in a few minutes I was with Valerie Wilson, who I’d pined for more fanatically than any of the other top-tier girls in my class. Valerie had once written our names in a heart on a chalkboard in one of the Ag buildings, and for two days I tried to be where she was in the halls. Before I found out that the Justin she meant was a twenty-three-year-old house framer, I approached her in the cafeteria line, where she stood with two of her friends, big-haired untouchable girls like herself, and I chickened out so that all that happened thank God was a moment of awkward silence before I turned and heard behind me, “Ok
ay
,” in a girl’s heartless sarcasm.

“How’s Waterbury?” Valerie said now. “I never go there, unfortunately.”

I pulled out a piece of straw from the bale we were sitting on and dropped the names of a few bars I said I knew. Skinny’s. The Shanghai. Hog Wild.

“God, I need an ID. Where do you even get one?”

I told her that Richie at Hog Wild would serve her, but I did have to warn her that it was a biker bar. “It can get kind of rough.”

“It sounds like heaven compared to here.” She gave a bleak glance at the fields, and in the same grim spirit she took my cigarette and brought it to that mouth that had never smiled at me before, leaving a lipstick print and giving it back, so that when I smoked it I was almost kissing her, and I had the impulse to put the filter in my pocket to keep, as I certainly would’ve done in high school.

“You know what I’m so sick of?” she said. “Everything all wet with dew. Stinking like bonfire and either sweating or freezing your ass off. Like in twenty years I’m going to wake up in this same freaking shithole. The only bar I’ve even ever been in is the Fireside.” She reached down to slap a mosquito on her calf. “That’s just like being here but without getting eaten alive.”

Minutes later she was writing on a slip of paper, bent forward so that I could look straight in to where her breast lay in the formed pocket of her bra, I mean the whole thing I was looking at, its small spongy nipple the color of her lips (it would only occur to me later that she’d wanted me to see it, she spent so long writing her name and number), and I found my fingers cupping into the shape of her bra.

“Showtime,” Pabst called from the road, and he and Nick got in their cars.

“You think Nick can beat him?” she said. She handed me, as if I’d asked for it, the folded slip of paper.

“We’ll see,” I said. “I don’t know what he’s running.”

“A four fifty-four. My sister used to be friends with his sister.”

I nodded. “It’ll be close.”

“L6 or something,” she said.

I looked at her. “LS6?”

“Yeah, that’s it,” she said.

“Jesus.” I started to get up to go tell Nick that he needed to race hard, but then he started the engine, and I hesitated. Maybe it was too late to run over there. Maybe Nick would hear, when Pabst did a hole shot to clean the tires, how little rpm was needed to break them loose, and he’d know. Or maybe I just wanted to see Nick finally lose, I can’t say. I sat back down.