The Spark and the Drive (20 page)

One night Lou Costa called again. “I hear you’re turning wrenches for Nick Campbell,” he said. “What would he soak me for a rebuild on the prowler, you think? Some of these soup jobs I can’t catch up to anymore.”

“Depends,” I said. I turned in the kitchen and Mary Ann was watching me. After I rolled my eyes she took April out to the living room. “It ranges. I can ask.”

“I’d be obliged,” he said, and there was a short pause before he asked how I’d been. “One minute you’re in high school, and next thing I’ll be buying you a beer.”

We had a few minutes of small talk, and then abruptly he said, “Listen, when she gets in have her holler at me. I’m just farting around over here tonight. Be up late.”

The only thing I wanted less than to leave Mom the message was for Costa to find out that I hadn’t. And a few nights later she called me from the church where her meeting had gotten over and asked if she could go on a date.

That night after bathtime, I went downstairs and arranged three candles on my bed stand while Mary Ann brushed April’s teeth. On my way back I stopped near the door and listened to Mary Ann reading, her voice lowering and rising in pitch to accent the danger and triumph. I stayed there for a full minute. When I read to April I never paused, my mind always on whatever TV show I was missing downstairs. But Mary Ann had different voices for different characters, and she played the calm, discerning narrator in between.

The Gingerbread Man was in his annoying “Run, run, as fast as you can…” and Mary Ann couldn’t stop or look up but acknowledged my presence with a smile as she read. I sat on the lid of April’s toy box and watched them together, Mary Ann scratching April’s back and finger-combing her hair as she read.

Call it karma. If I hadn’t left Mom the message from Costa, and I was tempted not to, she would have been home by nine and Mary Ann and I would not have been able to lie together in the candlelight.

Beside her on the bed, I smelled lavender in her hair and hoped it would stay in the pillow. I wished I’d had the foresight to open the window, so that she might get under the sheet and leave even more of herself here. I held her hand, rubbing with my fingertips. Conversation was a little strained now that we knew we wouldn’t be interrupted, or possibly because of what Nick had told me. She turned into glass, she was breakable, and I couldn’t assemble my words because I was trying to radiate the words “You’re safe.”

And then April was screaming upstairs. It wasn’t nightmares but what the pediatrician had called night terrors. The trick was to get up there fast, turn on her lights, and carry her around showing her the room until she remembered where she was. Mom had mixed up a concoction we called “scared spray,” which was water with a few drips of red food coloring, and I’d hit all the corners and the closet and spray twice under the bed.

But this was a bad one. I pulled her tight against me as she convulsed and like a harmonica screamed on the inhale and exhale both. Our chests mashed together, I could only tell her where she was and who she was with and tell her she was safe, until her hands came to rest on my shoulders and I felt them begin to un-fist and soften. Her face was burning on my neck, the wet sticky and not sticky, and I held the back of her head and drew air long and smoothly against her still choppy, misfiring breath, whispering, “You’re okay,” with my eyes closed, searching for that telepathic wave we sometimes found.

Finally she settled. She started to yawn.

There was a creak, and I opened my eyes in time to see a shadow slide away from the door.

When I came back, Mary Ann was lying under the sheet, and slung over the director’s chair was her dress, her panties and bra on the top of the dresser. I closed the door, trembling. When I turned back she threw the sheet off, suddenly urgent and bold, and said, “Here I am,” and after that we didn’t speak.

My room was right under April’s, so we made our sounds softly into each other’s mouths while we kissed, and after I was inside her we went entire seconds without moving. It was our first time taking our time. Our jumping, candlelit shadows exaggerated our stillness. I let go into her as she let go staring into my eyes. I lowered my face to hers like a bee coming down on a blossom.

“I wish I could sleep here,” she said.

26.

I watched Nick as I might watch a wild animal, from under open hoods, in rearview mirrors, through the parts room window, trying to decipher his thoughts by his movements. He hadn’t gotten a recheck in almost a month, which I’d attributed at least in part to what must’ve been reduced tension at home now that Mary Ann was happy, and he was taking in more jobs, and more complicated jobs, than he had before. But he was less excited about his work, sulking from fender to toolbox to scope screen with his head down, barely talking. Mary Ann had told me about his childhood, his alcoholic father, the school nights out in the garage while his parents fought. I’d started to see him as the product of a lonely childhood, which I knew about, but I held back, afraid that if I talked to him I’d risk understanding him. And I blinded myself to his wizardry until he was only the thing he had done to Mary Ann.

More than once in this dark time I thought about quitting, but I still saw the job as the right path to manhood, still was in love with the idea of myself a mechanic, and with less than a year’s experience I’d be lucky to get hired on as an oil changer anywhere else. But there was also another reason that was strangely more pressing. I felt Mary Ann falling in love with me by slow degrees, and my quitting would eliminate our last reason for not telling Nick. I needed to hear her say she loved me before doing anything that might disrupt the balance and force her to decide.

And I wondered why she was still with him. What she was afraid of. There were days when I sent cars away with only half the spark plugs changed, and rechecks of my own were starting to rack up.

For two days Nick worked on a limited-edition Z-28, and the rest of us picked up the tune-ups and diagnosis jobs. Rod didn’t seem to mind working behind the counter, coming out only to diagnose a computer car I had hooked up, like a dentist looking in a mouth and telling the hygienist what to do. I’d replace what he told me to, and we’d split the commission.

Waiting on a new crankshaft for the Z-28, Nick came out to the bays with the owner of a Galaxy Bobby had been working on. Bobby had left for lunch more than two hours ago and never came back. “Where is he?” Nick asked me.

I looked around. “He was just here,” I said, and Nick flattened his mouth as though he’d expected me to lie and I hadn’t surprised him. He asked the customer for another fifteen minutes and offered him ten percent off the bill.

In the lobby Rod was talking to Mary Ann while she changed the receipt tape on the cash register. Pouring coffee I was able to piece together that Rod thought Bobby was drinking again. “Watch how much he eats for lunch,” he said. “He got that chicken cordon bleu yesterday and threw out half of it. He’s starting to pull his pants up—pretty soon he’ll be wearing a belt. He’s smoking more, too.”

“You’re sure?” Mary Ann said.

“I’m the closest we got to an expert. Yeah, he’s wet again. Maybe a little crank to boot.”

“What’re you spying on him for?” I said.

Rod looked at me, nodding. “I could of shut up when you came out, but you ought to hear it. You’re his friend. Being blind is the last thing you want to do.”

I followed Rod through the bays to a late-model IROC I’d hooked up. Rod sat in the driver’s seat and plugged a paper clip into the diagnostic connector to check the codes.

“Thirty-five. Idle air control.” He pulled out the paper clip and went around to sign off on the work order.

“I could have done that,” I said.

“Then you should have.” He grinned to say I had no choice but to defer to his logic.

“He was happy before you started working here,” I said.

“Hey, cool. I’ve been the scapegoat before.” But he didn’t leave or get excited, or call me on my childishness, and my temper let up. “What would you do?” I said. “I want to help, but I’m pretty sure he won’t let me.”

“What about a sponsor you could call?”

From the locker room there came a loud retch, and I followed Rod to the source. “Sounds like he’s back,” he said. “Sounds like lunch was barley sandwiches.” The bathroom door was closed and the violent noise was followed by a quiet splash, a little more than a dry heave.

He groaned when he coughed, and we knew by the voice it wasn’t Bobby in there but Nick.

Rod knocked on the door. “You all right, boss?”

He retched again, coughed again, and then made a low whimpering noise. Water ran. Rod backed away from the door, and we waited for him to come out.

Nick’s voice came through the door. “Can you go get Mary Ann?”

*   *   *

After Nick went home, I drove to Hog Wild and parked two spaces away from Bobby’s car. Across the parking lot I strode with urgency and purpose, but then I yanked on the door too hard—the long handle bumped the adjacent brick façade—and inside I made my way through the bodies and smoke with affected heedlessness I hoped no one would see through.

Bobby was leaning back in the corner of a booth. He had a bandanna tied over his hair and a black tank top, his shoulders like rocks under the tight straps, a guy you’d trample people to get away from. Across from him a brunette with a pageboy was talking, and Bobby listened casually. They had a pitcher just about finished on the table between them.

I watched Bobby, my friend who had fought it for more than four years, drain the last inch of beer from a pint. In the car I’d engaged in a short fantasy of making it in time to stop him.

I ducked in between a couple of women at the bar. When Richie came over, I dug out a twenty and asked for a pitcher of what Bobby had.

In the booth he was staring at his clasped hands on the table. “No insulation is the one hitch,” he was telling the woman. “But it’s a couple thousand square feet. For the money, you can’t beat it.” When I set the pitcher between them, the woman pulled back in exaggerated surprise, and Bobby looked up at me without alarm, only curiosity.

“Look who’s here,” he said. “Computer-man. Mr. Joystick.”

“Screw you, Bobby,” I said, and he stared at me deadpan for a perilous second before he grinned and clapped me on the shoulder.

“Pam, meet my man Justin.” He slid down for me to join them.

I wanted tonight to be our only night drinking together, our first and our last, when we would get drunk with comedy and candor before I dragged him back to his sobriety. In that spirit, I filled our glasses and held mine up: “To the people of Bolivia,” I said, which had been Don’s toast after Reagan said it to the president of Brazil. “This guy’s insane,” Bobby said, and I was ushered in.

Pam, his friend, was dressed in a way that made overweight look buxom and seductive—you could look right down her blouse into a mile of sunburned cleavage—and her green eyes distracted your attention from the acne scars that the bad light filled with shadow. She started talking, tilting her head after every other sentence when she said “right?” as if you and she were the only sane ones left. Less than halfway into my first beer, I knew that her boss at the Ford dealership was a cokehead, that the salesmen got extra commissions for selling rust treatments that didn’t work, that dried semen had been found on the mirror in the women’s restroom. Twice.

She said “semen” without embarrassment, and I wondered if she and Bobby were lovers.

“Tell him your idea for a new club,” Pam said, and she put her hand over mine and squeezed—I felt the warm metal of her rings on my knuckles before she moved her hand to the ashtray, where a cigarette the size of a mixer-straw was burning.

“See, you make it a singles bar,” Bobby said. “Only the deal is at the door you got a guy with one of those finger prickers. You want to get in, you give him ten bucks and he gets your blood on a slide.”

Pam turned to me. “Barf me out, right? But it gets better.”

“In the back room, a scientist guy checks it for AIDS. If you’re clean, come on in. If you’re not, hasta baby. You make the blacklist. Call the place ‘Free Love,’ whatever. You’re picking up chicks you know don’t have the bug. Pam here thinks it’s a million-dollar idea.”

“Ten million,” she said. “I said ten.” She expanded the idea to include hotels and public swimming pools.

When she poured herself a glass of beer, Bobby looked at me. “Nick think I quit?”

“He’s wondering where you went.”

He grinned. “Let him keep wondering, he wants to hire dickheads.”

“He went home sick,” I said.

“Nick did? Jesus. One time I seen him zipped up in a wool coat with pneumonia changing plugs.”

“He was throwing up blood.”

Bobby stared at me a moment and then looked down and shook his head at the table.

I sat back and had a long drink. Across from us a guy at the pool table was pointing to the place on a low ball that he wanted his girlfriend to hit, but she kept giggling and missed the cue ball altogether. An older woman, upon finding the door to the women’s room locked, went in the men’s room and I heard her yell, “Too goddamn bad.”

“Nah, I’m done,” Bobby said. “I’ll come get my tools, but that’s it.”

“Every shop has a punk, hon,” Pam said to him. “You should see this new
spigotti
at Maxwell’s. He wears cologne in the bays and all this hair gel, muscles out to here. Plays that shitty rap on the radio—bom, pitta-pitta—right? And everybody’s scared to change the station.
I
have to go out there and put the radio back on PLR.”

“That’s just part of it,” Bobby said. “I heard Cadillac’s got a motor that runs on eight cylinders on the highway and four in city. All computer controls. What do you do with that? But it’s fuck or die. Pretty soon, you don’t know computers, you better sign up for welfare.” Bobby sipped his beer and smiled mysteriously at Pam. Then he looked at me again. “I paid four bills for my GTX. You know what I could get for it now? Seven, eight thou. Even after what I put into it, I’m still clearing close to five. Say it takes me a month to do a car, and that’s bottom-up. Sixty grand a year. Not too fucking bad for doing what you want.”