The Spark and the Drive (29 page)

At Mercy I parked in the row she was in and ran under the emergency room awning, following signs to the trauma center. They told me Nick was still in surgery, and in the third waiting room I found Mary Ann in a plastic chair, staring up at Joan Lunden on a ceiling-mounted TV.

When she saw me she got to her feet too fast and fell against me. I was ready and strong for her. “They don’t know,” she said. “They said I have to wait. They can’t tell.”

She was shaking like she might crumble apart, and my mouth opened wordlessly, breathing the words he would live, he would make it, a car could never kill him. This was a warning, but everything would restart. And now we’d know better. Now we’d have the truth.

The first blow came to my ribs with a dull burst. I closed my eyes and welcomed the pain. She held me with one arm and hit me with the other. She found a place on my spine that sent cold lightning to the base of my skull. She pounded me in the kidney. I opened my eyes just as an older man stopped in the hallway, looking at us, horrified, and I waved him past before I closed my eyes again. Each time she hit me a new color surged.

I wasn’t ready for it to be over when she draped her arms around me weakly and cried. In a few minutes she was saying she was sorry.

I said, “Don’t be. Don’t be.”

There were chairs and a cloth couch, and I walked her to the couch. We sat beside each other, leaned against each other. The sun came out in the hallway window, and I don’t know how many times the TV shows changed. Twice a doctor came out and spoke to us.

I wouldn’t have expected a doctor to be fat, but he was, he was enormous, and your mind does things—I had an impulse to ask for a different doctor, as if his big hands getting in there could … what if it went long and he couldn’t keep standing …

Broken wrist, broken femur, radius, humerus, broken ribs, but no sign of organ injury. The real concern was the brain swelling. They had taken off a piece of his skull and would put it back when the swelling went down.

People came in and sat and cried softly and laughed barking laughs and left, and it didn’t matter what anyone said. We were all suffering. Here, if nowhere else in the world, insanity was ignored, you could say anything without getting looks. These were some of the things Mary Ann said:

“One summer he caught a coho salmon on a valve spring. He stretched it out to spin in the current. He should have gone with fishing. Imagine if he fished.

“His father sold one of his rebuilds for three thousand dollars. He was twelve. This dad of his lied and said he sold it for four hundred and gave Nick half of that. He told me that the day he died, from the hospital bed, the son of a bitch.

“Don’t ever tell him I told you, you promise? When he reads books he moves his finger down the page. It embarrasses him.” She smiled, shaking her head, crying.

When a nurse came out to say she could see him now in ICU, Mary Ann started to follow her and then looked back at me and said I was Nick’s brother.

He looked small in the mechanical bed, a good foot of empty mattress extending beyond him on both ends. His head was elevated and bandaged around like a Q-tip, and in front the bandage slanted down over one of his eyes. A yellow ventilator mask was strapped over his nose and mouth. His left leg and left arm were in casts, and the other arm looked swollen, his thick hand palm-up beside him. His face was lumpy, his cheek bruised almost black. His left leg they had put a stocking over, and behind its elastic fabric his leg hair curled up like pencil etchings.

The ventilator machine operated with the sound of a woman drawing a long breath and politely sneezing. Two hanging IV bags were plugged in to his forearms, and a tube from under his robe connected to a bag a quarter-way filled with urine.

Even in a coma they say a person can hear you, and in that strange way you experience volume when you’re in temporary shock, I heard Mary Ann’s voice faintly and then coming up. “Okay, honey,” she was saying to Nick. “I’m here now. I’m not going anywhere. And here’s your friend, Justin.” She wiped her eyes, but you couldn’t hear anything in her voice. She sounded happy.

Nick’s hand, warm and dry, felt stiff and gave me a pang of dread that this was all for nothing, the artificial breathing and the monitors, because rigor mortis had already set in. “Hi, Nick. Hi, buddy,” I said, bringing my other hand over his as well.

“Justin needs help with a car. Tell him,” Mary Ann said to me.

It was too soon to try something like this, and I stood over him imagining only the most basic chemical reactions and electric pulses happening in his swollen head. His brain couldn’t possibly be ready for abstract thought.

But for Mary Ann’s sake I told him about a car with an intermittent stall, and I held his hand as if we were shaking hands. After a time of talking to him this way, I had fantasies of purging him of the poisonous thoughts and memories, only some of which he’d been able to tell me.

“We need you back,” I said. I looked up at Mary Ann, hungry for her approval, but she had covered her mouth, her eyes narrowed and holding back, then bulging all at once in shock before she turned and left the room.

“She went for a Dr Pepper,” I said. “You thirsty, Nick? Need one?” As soon as she left the room a sweet warm mist seemed to dissolve, and I saw in a harsher light that he was only his body now. He was just a man, and all of us were guilty of not letting him be just a man. I stared at his closed eye for a quiver, anything. I put my forehead down on his. I closed my eyes, smelling the Styrofoam smell of his bandages, and prayed for him. I sold myself to God to bring him back. “She forgives you, Nick,” I said at the end. “She doesn’t love me, she loves you. Trust her.”

*   *   *

The next morning, I went to Dobson’s, Firestone, Meineke, Maaco, Classic Coach, the dealerships along Route 8, and rounded up all the gearheads who’d once hung around the bays at Out of the Hole.

The hospital room was about the size of a shop bay, and at one point there were nine guys, half of them over two hundred pounds, standing around in that awkward, wrist-holding way of men not used to standing around. I was counting them the way I used to count friends at my birthday parties.

Mary Ann would leave the room graciously, and as soon as she did shoulders fell, sighs were released, giggles bubbled up. They dropped in the fabric chairs. They talked about old times, old engines Nick had built. They cussed and laughed, and I shut the door to the hallway when they got loud.

“You guys see Shorty Long down in Emergency? One time I seen that fucking guy cram four pool balls in his mouth.”

“What happened? He swallow one?”

The only thing that mattered was that they weren’t awkward talking to Nick—swollen and bandaged, his life being blown into him by a respirator. Coming here was some unexpected good in their lives. I imagined them lathering their arms at a tub sink, that communal place mechanics have at the end of the day. One saying, “They got fifty-cent Hamms at Brass Balls. We ought to partake.”

Another one, “Can’t. I’m going up to see Nicky.”

They started the tradition of bringing him a Matchbox car from the gift shop. From a wing of the hospital under construction, they’d ripped off a windowsill six feet long. It was wide enough for a six-car Matchbox race. Tommy Burns went to work oiling it down with thirty-weight. He even rigged a starting gate that swung up on a pair of eyebolts.

“Are we ever going to use this thing, Tommy? You’re not making fucking furniture.”

“Before Nurse Ratched gets back.”

They put down money on the races. Lyle Keaton found a Matchbox El Camino, and that was Nick’s car. Naturally, it smoked all the rest. Nobody complained, even after it was revealed that Lyle had Superglued a couple of pennies to the undercarriage. They gave me Nick’s money, and I passed it on to Mary Ann.

Ray came by one afternoon. He was pulling parts at NAPA now and looked ten years younger. I wasn’t used to seeing him clean. His stubble was gone and his hair, parted over, gleamed with a Listerine-smelling pomade. He stood by the bed for a long while before he spoke quietly to the still, discolored face that only faintly resembled Nick. “How you doing, kid? I hear you got all the nurses fighting over…” He smiled severely then turned and left the room.

In the hallway I caught up to him, dropping quarters into the coffee machine. “Weird how it’s computers keeping him going now,” he said. I put a hand on his shoulder. We went and sat in chairs by the window. “How long since I was in here?” he said.

“A month. A month and a half.”

“Seems longer.”

“You were funny,” I said. “You kept calling the nurse Dolly.”

He wiped his eyes. “You see them milk cans? Dolly Double-D.”

“Remember I went to get you your snuff?” I said. “Mary Ann stayed.”

He nodded and looked at the cards on his coffee cup. The nub where his middle finger had been was still the glistening red of a scab fallen off.

“Did you guys talk?” I said.

“You mean about you?”

I thought I was ready for this, but suddenly I had ice in my stomach and the urge to look for a bathroom.

“Kid, I was so loopy on Vicodin I remember shaking hands with Terry Bradshaw on his TV show. That don’t mean it ever happened.”

*   *   *

I went to work because Nick and Mary Ann would need the money, and I made a surprisingly effective stand with Rod and Bobby that we weren’t taking commissions anymore. I expected to have some resistance, especially from Rod, but they agreed.

One evening after Mary Ann went down to the cafeteria, something happened. I’m not certain if the squeeze was intentional, but when I told Mary Ann later I said it was in response to my asking if I should check a distributor cap for carbon tracking. Mary Ann didn’t want me to leave that day. She went down and brought me back dinner, and while she was gone it happened again but in a lighter way, and when I wasn’t talking to him, a kind of flinch.

I told him he and Mary Ann were going to have a baby.

On the tenth day they took out the ventilator and put a tube through a hole in his throat. This was a tipping point, the doctor had said. With a napkin I occasionally leaned over him to wipe away the gray mucus at the site of the hole. When Mary Ann would leave the room, unable to help my selfishness, I would confess to him. “I thought you were immune to everything. I’m sorry, Nick. I know you weren’t. You didn’t mean to hurt anybody, and I did. That was the real difference. Can you hear me? When you build the time machine, I want to get in now. You tell me what you need, and I’ll get it. I’ll bring it here. Forget everything, Nick. We just start over.”

The day after the tracheotomy Mary Ann interrupted me as I was presenting him with a new engine scenario. “Justin can’t do it without you. They’ll have to refund his money. It’s a shame. I don’t know how long you plan on being here, Nick. Honey. They need you.”

Her conversations with him now were just that, conversations, with answers anticipated in the silences. Should they go back to Oregon for Thanksgiving? Or should they eat at Across from the Horse again? Remember that sweet potato pie? Should they finally get HBO? She brought in a cable guide and told him about the movies and the new shows on MTV.

The doctors tested him on the Glasgow Scale, and he flexed his hand to pain. There was improvement. Then he opened his eyes one day when I was at work, and the tube was out of his throat that evening. A few days later he was looking at the pages of a glossy muscle car book. I’d forget myself and talk to him the way I first talked to April. Mary Ann scolded me out in the hallway. “Don’t insult him. It’s better if he’s a little confused than insulted.”

“You were right,” I told him when I came back. “We’ll get it again. With computers and intercoolers.”

Wickersham had the Corvette towed to the shop, where it was spatulaed off by a hydraulic flatbed. All four fenders, the passenger door, and the trunk lid had been torn off, and the windshield was blown out, a back and front wheel were missing, but remarkably the hood had only superficial scrapes and one of the T-tops was still in place.

And this was the very best we could do, our greatest effort at road travel, as near as we’d come to building a car from the future. I thought of what Mary Ann had once said about God looking down on Holy Land USA and holding Himself accountable for expecting too much. Now I imagined God looking down and shaking His head at these remains.

Bobby came into work late one morning with a swollen eye and a bandage on his jaw. He didn’t explain and I didn’t ask, and after that day he stopped coming in at all. Rod helped me pull the engine and transmission from the ZL1, and he sold the body and frame to a scrap yard for almost exactly the cost of the tow from Wickersham’s. A few nights a week after I left the hospital, I went back to the shop and worked on the engine, which had been mostly spared in the roll. It needed only external work—a fuel pump, a water pump, thermostat housing, the passenger-side exhaust header, and a carburetor overhaul.

I did the work in a back bay upstairs and covered the engine with a tarp during the day. It took me five nights.

I placed an ad in
Hemmings Motor News,
and a little after midnight I started hooking up the engine to the dynamometer. By two I was ready to test it, something we hadn’t done after the overhaul, thinking we didn’t have time before Eve came to pick it up.

The 430-horsepower rating that Chevrolet had advertised was at 5,200 rpm, but when I hit that mark the dynamometer read 512 horsepower. I kept going—6,500, 7,000. When fan belts began to drop from their peg hooks the dyno read 640 horsepower, and I was afraid to push it any more.

I left the engine hooked up to the dyno and two days later brought it up to 7,200 rpm once again for a man who had driven up from Georgia. He was the guy, the only other person in the world, who also owned a ZL1, the white one, and he paid me twenty-five grand in thousand-dollar bills for the engine (I threw in the tranny for free, what the hell), and I couldn’t help telling him that he now owned the last remaining ZL1.

“Tell me what happened,” he said. “Wait.” He ran out to his big Chevy truck and returned with a pen and a notepad. “For the record.” He wanted to know everything—the name of the driver, the cause of the wreck. I shook my head. He went into the envelope and held out another thousand-dollar bill.