The Spark and the Drive (3 page)

My logic for uniting my future wife with my future career was based solely on Nick’s example. In the first meeting I’d conjured up between him and Mary Ann, she pulled in as a customer. Nick repaired her car, and though he tried not to boast she insisted that he describe the complicated process by which he saved her hundreds of dollars in diagnostic labor. He wasn’t flirting, he didn’t have to, and she fell in love in a shop bay. That was the proper order of things, and I’d calibrated my own fantasies by its plausibility: The girl, a little older, a junior in college, is smiling when I look up from her engine. She approaches the car timidly, her tan arms folded over a floral dress. “Can I watch?” she says.

But this new possibility that Mary Ann somehow stumbled onto Nick during a moment of turmoil gave me pause, and though it was none of my business, I’d think about it for days.

*   *   *

I had a chance to prove myself to Nick on the last day of my internship, when a ’75 Formula pulled in with a stalling complaint. It was a second-opinion job that had stumped all the mechanics at Sears Automotive, and as I spread the fender mats and attached the oscilloscope leads—battery, vacuum, tach., emissions—I should have been limbering my mind for the deductive marathon ahead. But instead I was rehearsing how I would tell Nick that I’d pinpointed the problem in the same uninflected voice he would use, as if there were no glory in it at all.

I’m sure it hurt their pride at Sears to send us these diagnosis jobs, but Nick was the local expert and either we would fix the car and they’d take the credit, or we wouldn’t (to my knowledge, this had yet to happen) and they could be consoled by having frustrated the very best. As for Nick, he never gave a hint of feeling threatened. These second-opinion jobs were exactly equal to any other job, as he had shown today when he gave the Formula to me.

The previous mechanic had replaced the carburetor, to the tune of three hundred dollars, only to find that the engine continued to cough and stall. I had my four suspects—fuel, spark, compression, exhaust—and my anxiety rose with each one I ruled out. Nick, after all, had told me that I had a mind for abstract thought—he said that, and now I had to prove it.

I opened a toolbox drawer and propped inside it a chalkboard that my little sister didn’t play with anymore. I wrote down each of my diagnostic steps as I performed them. I stepped back and pondered the board, was hoping for a revelation like mathematicians have in the movies, when Ray came by whistling “Carolina in the Morning” (not sincerely; when he sang it, as he sometimes did, he sang, “Nothing could be finer than to be in her vaginer…”). He stopped cold and stared at my chalkboard. “Son, are you retarded?” he said. Then Bobby Stango walked over rubbing GOJO up his arms. “What’re you, retarded?”

“It’s a second-opinion job,” I said. Bobby skimmed the work order as he lathered off grease. Drips the color of storm clouds spilled off his elbows onto the steel toes of his work boots. When he smiled I felt myself brimming with unrealized greatness. He lit me a Marlboro, which he thought of as a luxury since I smoked Marlboro Lights. “I think our boy here just popped his cherry,” he told Ray.

“He wishes.”

But after an hour I hit the ceiling of my aptitude and was just groping around. When Nick walked out of the lobby, I ran over to my toolbox and slammed the chalkboard in the bottom drawer. I was wiggling vacuum lines I’d already wiggled, hoping to find a split in one that might explain the stalling, when he came up to the car. He stared calmly at the engine, his pale eyes, glassed as mine were from the fumes, flitting from component to component. Then he took a long socket extension and put his ear to it to listen to the intake manifold, glancing as he did at the soaring hydrocarbon count that registered on the emissions screen.

“Wet plugs in six and eight,” I said. “I think it needs a valve job.”

He nudged the throttle lever and brought the rpm up to 2,500. After a few seconds the hydrocarbons dropped to passing. I was baffled. Burnt valves are burnt valves at any rpm.

“Any vacuum leaks?”

I shook my head. “I ran propane all over. And the KVs look good. No carbon tracking.”

Nick lit a Winston and walked over to my toolbox. Inside the lid I’d taped a card my little sister, April, had made, a cake and candles that looked like a blue cactus, over which she’d written HApE BERfdA JUsTiN.

“You’re eighteen now?” he said.

I nodded.

“If you lived in Kenya, you’d be going on your first lion hunt.”

“As long as I get a gun, not a spear,” I said.

“They’d break eggs over your head in Germany.”

“Here in America, your boss takes you out for Jäger shots.”

He grinned. “How about dinner tonight at the house?”

I had to listen to the echo of the words twice in my head before I believed them, an invitation—albeit on my very last day—to enter and investigate his personal life. “Okay, sure,” I said, and had to cut myself off to keep from gushing like a fool. I studied the KV screen again and ran another cylinder balance. I checked the ignition output and coolant level. Things that made no sense to check, I checked. I wanted to prove to him that I was better than the mechanics at Sears.

“Eighteen,” I heard Nick say to himself. He was facing the hopper window behind the oscilloscope, squinting as if in the sooty pane he could see himself at my age. But his eighteen was impressive, the age at which he balanced and blueprinted his first engine—scouring every surface, boiling, polishing, then torquing every fastener to spec. It was the most exhaustive engine work you can do, a feat I was light-years from.

I advanced and retarded the timing until my eyes burned and I couldn’t see the whirling slot mark on the harmonic balancer. I readjusted the idle speed and leaned out the mixture. I looked at the work order one last time and finally lowered my head on my forearms over the fender mat. “Goddamn it,” I said. “It’s unfixable.”

Nick picked up a ball peen hammer, leaned on the passenger-side fender, and tapped the EGR valve. Something held by suction dislodged, the engine coughed once and almost stalled, and he revved it clean. When he let go of the throttle, the engine idled like glass.

We waited to see that the fix held. The engine breathed quietly, and in the afterglow of witnessing a miracle I realized that the job wasn’t going to make me any money. An EGR valve was barely a seventy-dollar ticket, so my commission—I made that plus five an hour—would be almost nothing.

Nick looked over the paperwork again. He stepped up to the Formula, and with one precise smack of the ball peen he cracked the corner of the intake manifold all the way through. The engine began to sputter, and suddenly I was looking at a nine-hundred-dollar ticket. “It’s on Sears,” he said. “Happy birthday.”

3.

That evening, as the dark shop sign waned in my rearview mirror, I considered for the last time the caged windows of Braids Beauty School across the street, and over them the top floors of the Harris Circle Housing Projects, where I’d once seen a car on fire. I felt abandoned and helpless, incapable of uttering a farewell to this place I’d grown to love. In just two months’ time, Ray had learned to tolerate me almost completely, Bobby goofed with me like a brother, and Nick and I were in the vicinity of a friendship I was sure would change my life if only we had more time.

Before we left, Nick had taped a repair plate to the back window of a ’67 Valiant he’d resurrected, thinking he could get a few hundred for the car in the paper, and asked me to follow him home. At a stoplight he revved the Valiant’s slant six, and staring wildly from my beater Nova, I let off the brake and tapped his back bumper. Reverse lights came on and he slammed back into me. We bashed into each other all the way to his house, prolonging a stunt only possible as a departure from a place where anything had seemed possible. I relished the shock on the faces of people who thought they were bearing witness to a bona fide accident. My last slam caught him at an angle and I heard the lens of my right front signal light tinkle on the pavement.

In his driveway we started laughing; as I scooped out shards from my signal light our voices softened to whistling puffs of air. It was wet, helpless laughter, Nick hitting a cackling high note and regaining his voice first. “The guy with the beard … in the Zephyr.”

The side door opened, and Mary Ann came out of the house and started laughing herself. “You got him drunk?” she said to me. “Oh, my God. Say something drunk, Nick.”

“I can’t even look at this guy,” he said.

I followed them up the front steps, trying to talk my voice clean: “All right, phew, God, all right.”

Nick and Mary Ann lived in south Waterbury about three miles from the shop. The first time I saw their house, I’d gotten the address off a bill envelope and drove past expecting a big Victorian or something, a house commensurate with Nick’s talent, but it was only a base-model cape, the kind kindergarteners draw—a triangle on a square with two shutter-less windows flanking the front door. I learned later that Out of the Hole was a failing inheritance from Nick’s uncle, and that Nick had had to take out a mortgage to fix up the building, such as it had been, and buy diagnostic equipment. Still I couldn’t help but feel that something was cosmically out of balance when a mechanic of Nick’s stature should have to live so modestly.

We went first to the kitchen, a room that had nothing I could see of Nick: faded blue rooster wallpaper, dull-white linoleum, painted cabinets whose chrome handles, like the legs of the padded chairs at the table, were flecked with rust. The air, though, was conversely awake with cinnamon, clove, cedarwood, hibiscus, jasmine, lavender. Much later I learned these were Mary Ann’s potions, essential oils that she wore to achieve certain moods in her day.

“Where’s that Mugsy?” Nick said, and he walked to the counter, where their baby, Joey, sat in his bouncer seat. Father and son played peek-a-boo, Joey huffing and sputtering. He had a comb-over of fine hair and eyes of an indefinite color that watched you with more interest than you deserved—suddenly he’d lift his transparent eyebrows so that his skin didn’t really wrinkle but dented like a balloon. I couldn’t help remembering April, my little sister, at that age. She’d had those same eyebrows.

Mary Ann turned on the hot water as Nick leaned over the sink. Rather than Goop or GOJO, she took a liter-sized bottle of Castile soap and drizzled it up and down his forearms. It didn’t surprise me to see the foam turn gray as she rubbed it in; Nick always washed his hands in the hurried way of a child who doesn’t want to miss out on anything.

When she began to scrub his fingers with a nail brush, I had the anxious, envious thought that to be a mechanic of Nick’s caliber you needed a wife as abiding as Mary Ann—not a circumstance in life you could exactly count on. She must’ve just taken a shower. Her wavy hair was falling over her face, black and sheen and smelling of spearmint. “I thought I’d get to see you drunk,” she said to Nick, combing through the bristles of his forearm with the sprayer. With a dish towel she wiped a half-dried tear of laughter from his cheek and kissed him where the tear had been.

As she went to work on his right arm Nick opened his stance to lean more heavily against the counter. I’d never felt closer to him than earlier in the driveway, our eyes cried out with laughing, but as I watched his copper reflection in a hanging pan—smiling from the sounds Joey made, or from the steady rub of Mary Ann’s fingers—it was as if he’d forgotten I was there.

*   *   *

Nick went out to the living room to answer the phone, and Mary Ann found me a dusty Heineken from the back of the refrigerator. When she yanked on a counter drawer stuck with the humidity, the crash of metal inside startled Joey. She took him out of the bouncer and held him to her chest as she fished in the drawer for a bottle opener.

We’d grown to be friends after that day in the parts room. Aspects of my personality that I hated—my sensitivity and inclination to overanalyze—were what she found appealing. Her family was three thousand miles away in Oregon, and except for Joey, she had only hard-talking mechanics in her life. She’d ask me what colleges I was trying for next year, and I’d say I was still deciding, though that was becoming less and less true. College was just an extension of boyhood, when boyhood was the very thing I wanted to leave behind. It was hard for me to put into words that I needed this visceral, spontaneous, unapologetic mechanic life to transform me into the man I wanted to be.

I asked her, in a light way that wouldn’t be insulted by a no answer, if she wanted me to take the baby. She saw that my hands were clean and passed him over. As she checked the salmon I lay Joey facedown like a football on my forearm. His beanbag arms folded at the elbows, hugging and hanging on. He banged his mouth on the heel of my hand, and his warm toothless gums began to suck there.

From in the living room I could hear Nick on the phone, not really talking but answering “okay,” and less than a minute after he’d come back the phone rang again. Joey started fussing. “Hey, Mugsy, hey,” I said. “He’s coming back.” He didn’t seem to like the nickname coming out of my mouth, and as he whirled his arms and legs like a water frog I began to swing him in a gentle arc.

“He’s getting hungry,” Mary Ann said, fluffing couscous in an open pan on the stove. She set down the fork and, with her back to me, lifted her breasts one at a time. A cool pain shot through my groin, and I backed away.

I widened my swing and found an angle that thrilled the baby but didn’t scare him, a technique I had perfected on my little sister. His whole chest fit in my palm, and for an enormous second I felt him giggle without sound, only his little heart racing before he cackled in a long helpless convulsion that ran him out of breath.

“You don’t have kids, do you?” asked Mary Ann.

“None I know of.” I sensed in her grin that she thought this lame joke was out of character for me, and I blushed a little explaining about my sister, omitting the embarrassing truth about why my parents divorced before she was born.