The Spark and the Drive (5 page)

At school I learned to be invisible, which essentially meant overcoming impulses of joy and curiosity, and I’d also discovered the weight room. Hardly anybody at Northwest lifted weights—they could stack the military press just from farm work and spent free periods in metal shop welding push bars for their pickups—and in the wall mirror I watched myself grow. When I finally declined Don’s offer I felt good about myself, embarking, as I saw it, on a manhood of my own making. Don was disappointed, I heard it in his voice as I heard it now when he asked if I thought I’d still be interested in college after a year off. “A lot can happen in a year,” he said. “You’ll start making good money. You’ll get an apartment, right? Have dinner out, vacations, new clothes. How’s it sounding?”

“How do you think?”

“But then the sabbatical’s over, and it’s a two-room dorm and a meal plan.”

“Maybe I’ll have a career started.”

“Most people change careers,” he said. “What kind of openings are out there with no degree?”

“So then I go back to school.”

“With credit card debt. Maybe a Mrs. Bailey. A Justin Junior.”

“Remember Richard Elvin?” I said. Elvin was one of Don’s fiction authors at the agency in New York.

Don closed his mouth and watched me for a moment. “Rick,” he said. “He’s got a collection coming out this spring.”

“You called him a genius.”

“Well, he hasn’t exactly set the world on fire yet.”

“I know a genius,” I said. “I worked for him all summer.” My strength had come back, and my swings were fluid, the steel handle shooting electric current all the way up to my elbows.

He waited, but I couldn’t get my words right. I’d thought the point would be glaring, but now it eluded me. “A genius mechanic,” he said, finally. “Mom told me. He’s the opposite of me, is that the appeal?” And then after half a minute or so he grinned: “I like your tactics. Keep quiet until I make an ass out of myself.”

“So only your kind of genius counts?” I said.

“What if you majored in business first? Then go all in. Open a shop like your friend. Maybe at that point I can come up with—”

I swung into a log I’d been avoiding, three feet in diameter and crooked with knots. A big hit buried the maul head halfway in. I tried to stomp on the handle and missed. My teeth jounced. “Fuck,” I said.

“Don’t hurt yourself, son. Take a break.”

I picked up the hatchet where April had dropped it. Don stepped back, his eyes wide, the fear in them swelling me up as I walked past him to the swimming pool. I took a one-handed golf swing with the hatchet and it felt like striking the side of a whale. The hatchet broke the plastic and slipped out of my hand into the rip. Instantly green water sprayed in an arc that reached the halved logs five feet away.

Don lurched and stumbled, threw up his hands in surrender. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You win,” and he scrambled back up the hill.

5.

I liked taking the Seven Hills route into Waterbury, winding out the narrow county roads, Weekeepeemee to Quassapaug to Bunker Hill, which rudely became South Main, and driving along the banks of the Mad River, where I’d once seen Mary Ann jogging along the crumbling sidewalks, probably the only jogger in the history of those sidewalks. Porchless triple-deckers were set right up against the street, and then you were dodging potholes under the carcasses of old brass factories, ten-story hulks of dull brick and what looked like silos, train tracks running into the heart of their darkness. The lower windows were empty of glass, and sections of brick wall caved in as though someone had taken a few swings with a wrecking ball, said, “Why bother?” and left. On the other side of the street were private detached garages carved into hillsides, and their angry little houses leaned over brown rectangles of front yard.

Past the 84 overpass, Wolcott Avenue ascended to a brief crest from which you looked down at the treeless west side, the low, vandalized retaining walls bulging over the sidewalks. Parking lots spilled out in crooked oblongs from discount shops and Greek diners and package stores, and sagging electric lines led to the farthest stoplight, which harmonized the three-way traffic in front of Out of the Hole.

It was my last Christmas break before graduation. Four months ago my internship ended at Out of the Hole, and I couldn’t wait until summer to know if Nick was serious about hiring me.

One tight parking spot was left in the front lot, right up on a telephone pole, and thankfully the bay doors were fogged up so they couldn’t see my six-point parking job. Outside, I walked past a metallic blue Barracuda, a candy-apple Firebird, a ragtop Challenger. Even seeing them parked was, by the artistry of their designers, like seeing them move—burying their speedometers or laying rubber up a city block. Long hoods and short decks, elevated rear fenders and wide racing stripes. They looked like resting dragons. Acting according to their nature was illegal, and on public streets they were hunted by the law. They were the bullies, the badasses, and, for a short summer, my very close friends. Already I felt estranged from them. Surely someone would yell at me if I went over and opened a hood. Their absence from my life I experienced as a physical oppression, and I had to stop suddenly and take a breath.

I hadn’t paid attention to the woman standing in the cold smoking a cigarette until I saw that it was Mary Ann. Walking toward her I thought to razz her about smoking (she’d gotten on to me about it before), but she was glancing vacantly at the passing cars, or at the cleaners across the street, as if she didn’t know where she was.

When I was only a few feet away, she turned and blinked at me. “Justin,” she said. The fleece-lined jean jacket she wore was unbuttoned, though she was trying to hold the front closed with her elbows. “How’s school?”

I shrugged, feeling more like a stranger than a friend. “We’re off now. Winter break.”

“God, it’s cold,” she said, stepping the cigarette out among the other frozen butts. She looked in through the lobby window, and vaguely embarrassed I asked if Nick was around.

With the panel doors closed the bays were humid, and the air was choked with hydrocarbons. Through watering eyes I first saw Ray, who wore a Santa hat and was occupied with a carburetor float. “It’s beginning to feel a lot like syphilis,” he sang to himself and didn’t notice me.

Nick was in the third bay, staring at the ground as another man, a customer, spoke to him excitedly, opening his hands, his fingers, laughing. In the slow course of bringing a cigarette to his lips, Nick saw me, jutted his chin once, and looked away. Suddenly aware of my enthusiasm, I stopped by a trash can, and he didn’t look at me again. As if I had other business I turned abruptly and found Bobby shooting a timing light under the hood of an Olds 442.

He came around the fender and gave me a bear hug I only pretended to resist. He said that Tina at Carquest kept asking about me. “They got
Rocky IV
playing at the Six Plex,” he said. “You should take her to that.”

“She’s got a boyfriend, Bobby.”

“That cat with the poofy hair? What’s his name, Fifi?”

He got us a couple of Dr Peppers out of the machine. The taste of it, so crisp your eyes watered, was the taste of working here, of having earned your first break after the morning rush.

We lit cigarettes, and Bobby was showing off a new air wrench when Nick walked over. Nick grinned quickly, awkwardly it seemed, and the handshake was an afterthought. When he asked about school just as his wife had, I wondered if she’d found out that he’d offered me a job. I spoke indifferently about school in the hopes that Nick might pick up on my fading enthusiasm and realize he’d squandered my attention. I wanted him to think that I was going to be a mechanic whether he hired me or not, that I’d be his loss, but he only stared at me a moment, nodding almost imperceptibly, before he glanced down at the engine.

“Needs a distributor,” Bobby said. “Advance springs are shot. The points are pointless.”

“HEI?”

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

I looked at Bobby, my only hope—if I lost him to the job, I’d be left to wander after Ray—and suddenly remembered that Bobby’s girlfriend had been eight months pregnant when I left. “Was it a boy or a girl?” I said.

Bobby grinned. “Kill it, would you?” he said to Nick, who went around to turn off the engine. Bobby handed me a creased three-by-five picture cut smaller, which he pulled out from where the bills were in his wallet. “Rowdy Randy,” he said, and then a little more seriously, “After Randy Rhodes, is who we were thinking.” The baby had a crown of blond fuzz and big ears. Cute, I thought to say, or adorable, but they were strange words to use in the bays, and I’d have to follow it with a lame joke that he must resemble his mother. So I told him congratulations and held the picture for Nick to see, only Nick was gone.

I leaned to look around the car but he was already out of sight, in the parts room or the lobby. “I’m an asshole,” Bobby said. He tossed a ratchet into a rolling tool tray, where it crashed into wrenches with the sound of glass. “You heard about Joey? A month ago. Not even a month.”

I don’t remember handing the picture back, but Bobby was looking down at it, explaining SIDS, which he said was when a baby dies for no reason. “Even the doctors don’t know shit.”

“You mean he died? Joey died?”

He pushed open the back window and spit down to the excavated gravel lot two stories below.

“I should go say something,” I said.

“Man, there’s nothing to say.”

A few minutes later I walked out to my Nova. From the parking lot I could see into the lobby, where Mary Ann was batching service orders and Nick leaned on the counter beside her, giving one-word answers over the phone.

A month, Bobby had said, just a month. It was no time at all.

I got in my car but couldn’t turn the ignition. In my mind, I saw April die, and I was staggering around in a wasteland of cold light. When I looked at the lobby again, Mary Ann was outside having another cigarette. I got out of the car again, but then froze when I was ten feet away, as if I had just run to jump into water before getting a look at how high I was.

I came up to her slowly, and she saw me and started to nod. She looked away and exhaled smoke. “I kind of wish people would stop finding out,” she said. “That it could just be after.” She bent to pick up a flattened paper cup. “Most of the time,” she said, but then didn’t finish. I followed her to the Dumpster and lifted back the metal lid so she could drop the cup inside. And then she started picking up trash behind the Dumpster. It was ankle-deep back there, blown in from all over the city to a kind of wind eddy between buildings. We picked up newspaper pages and hamburger wrappers, straws, cigarette packs, plastic bags, as well as shop trash that had fallen out when the Dumpster was overflowing. There was so much, we would’ve needed snow shovels to make a real dent in it, but I didn’t think about what we were doing, more than to believe in easing a nervous breakdown with small bursts of insanity.

“I feel like I’m just waiting,” she said as she worked. “The morning’s got to end, then the afternoon. I don’t know how people say there’s not enough time.” As randomly as she’d started picking up, she quit it and went back to the lobby door. I thought about hugging her, but she wasn’t crying yet, and I expected her to if we hugged. When I said good-bye, she said, “Okay,” and before she turned and pulled open the door she brightened for a moment, but then lost expression again, as if she knew it would hurt to smile.

6.

My hands were still in that raw, rashy stage, unused to the solvents and grease, when Nick’s jobs started coming back as rechecks. It was a few weeks after I’d gotten my diploma, in June of 1986, and Nick had just hired me as an apprentice mechanic. I sensed already that his gifts might be fading, but I tried to prolong his greatness by intercepting the cars and sometimes, while he was washing up, by popping the hood on a job he’d finished and double-checking his work. But over time, covering for Nick changed me, allowed me to see him as human and fallible.

I was dragging a trash barrel loaded with spent oil filters out to the Dumpster when a Monte Carlo pulled in overheating. I’d stopped twice to squeeze blood back in my hand, and had it not taken three tries to get the barrel over the lip, I wouldn’t have been outside to see the car pinging up the small incline from the street.

Two days earlier I had shuttled the car’s owner to his janitor job at the Naugatuck Valley Mall. The Monte’s interior had been spotless and gleaming with Armor All, a faint smell of ammonia radiating from the windshield. We barely spoke on the ride—his English seemed to embarrass him—and staring at the bronzed baby shoes hanging from the rearview mirror, I decided that he was a hard-working man, the father of very unspoiled children.

I hated to see him come back now.

“Edwin, right?” I called, deserting the trash barrel on the sidewalk to intercept him. He took another step toward the shop before he turned. “I need Nick,” he said.

“I can help. What’s up?” It was a nervous question—we could both hear the coolant hissing from his engine—and he shook his head once and continued on toward the bays. After he was inside I jogged over to the Monte and opened the hood. Jesus Christ, one of Nick’s screwdrivers had harpooned the top of the radiator. I reached into the sugary-smelling steam, thinking only to hide the evidence as pin-sprays of antifreeze seared the living shit out of my wrist. Wagging my arm around for the slight relief of moving air, I took out a rag and unstuck the screwdriver, then kicked it under a neighboring Dodge while the last dregs of coolant streamed out of the radiator.

Edwin came out with Nick two steps behind, dragging a kinked hose that he handed to me. I poured the cool water over my wrist as Edwin looked down into the engine compartment. I said, “It looks like a rock might have kicked up and—”

“Why you took it out?” Edwin said.

Nick sawed through the top hose with a kitchen knife. He threw himself under the car and cut through the bottom hose, the last of the steaming water trickling over his hand. As he stood I cooled his hand for a second before he took the hose from me and jammed it into the thermostat housing. “Start the car,” he yelled, and Edwin hopped in. The engine sucked the water into its canals and jackets and expelled it onto the pavement, where a foaming stream ran down to the curb.