The Spark and the Drive (6 page)

Nick looked in the window and checked the heat gauge. “It’s got to be running, or those heads’ll warp.”

Antifreeze had sprayed onto the fenders, and I got a bucket of soapy water and some clean rags to wash it off. When the engine had dropped to operating temperature, Nick shut it off and I used the hose to rinse off the fenders, spilling more of the cool water over my burning wrist.

“I trust you guys,” Edwin said. “I ask around where to take my Chevy. Who’s the best.”

Nick started to unbolt the radiator, Edwin watching him as if he didn’t know quite how to manifest his disappointment. When Nick went to his toolbox for a swivel socket, I stepped into the painful beam of Edwin’s glare. “Would you mind waiting in the lobby?” I said. “We’ll come get you when it’s done.”

His eyes on me were like things hot to the touch, shimmering as they squeezed and let go, squeezed and let go. He seemed to be two men inside himself, and finally it was the reasonable one who triumphed and didn’t take a swing at me. He said something low and in Spanish before leaving for the lobby as I’d asked him to.

Nick did a terrible job bandaging me. He cut off the gauze in the shape of a musical note and taped my wrist as if it were a package he was mailing to China. His blisters were bigger and whiter than mine, and I taped the back of his hand carefully, keeping pressure on the gauze to flatten air pockets.

“He said there was a screwdriver,” Nick said.

I ran the last strip of tape and he pulled his hand away. Every response I could offer had pitfalls I wanted to think through, and finally he said, “Jesus,” and walked away. I followed him into the lobby, ready to say that I never saw any screwdriver, but each second that passed shot the moment farther out of reach.

*   *   *

Rather than asking for a shuttle, Edwin took the bus back to work, and Mary Ann had one other customer in the lobby. I went over to the window ledge, where the coffee maker, cups, creamer, and sugar packs were arranged on a cafeteria tray. Nick poured a cup and watched out the window as a black Suburban pulled in with a car trailer in tow. A man in sunglasses and a white sports coat got out and started undoing multiple covers over what looked to be a yellow Corvette.

Across the counter from Mary Ann, the customer started to laugh. He was dressed in a Hugo Boss jacket and electric green T-shirt, and he could have passed for Italian except for his accent, which he seemed to be parodying. “If I don’t do dis, I do someting else. You got to have dis,” he said, rubbing his fingers to indicate money, “to have dis,” and he curled his fingers back to the lapels of his jacket. “If you don’t have dis, you have natting. Natting.” I guessed he was Albanian.

It took a few seconds for me to understand he was flirting with her. Our repeat customers knew she was Nick’s wife, but the new ones, who never saw her holding Joey or showing Nick affection—bumping or tickling him, or just being aware of him in the room—these customers you couldn’t really blame. Though Mary Ann didn’t have feathered and blow-dried hair, wore almost no makeup, and used essential oils instead of Poison or Obsession, she was pretty in the West Coast sense, which was the seventies, rather than the eighties, sense. You became attracted to her by small surprises—her almost bronze eyes, the terra-cotta freckles that dusted her nose and forehead. On her finger she wore a band of colored bars that didn’t look like a wedding ring if you didn’t want it to.

I poured my coffee and looked back to find Nick staring, frozen, at the Corvette. I didn’t understand. Corvettes came in all the time. The car covers were mostly off by now, and I could see enough of it to have a reasonable guess at the year. It had a flat back window, which meant older than ’77, and a front bumper, which meant older than ’73. Third-generation Corvettes began in ’68, so it was between a ’68 and ’72. Finally, and I was proud of my detective work here, there was no fender flare, which appeared in ’70, so we were looking at either a ’68 or a ’69.

The car also had a strange black stripe squaring off the hood. I’d never seen one like it. If Chevys had stripes they were usually the two fat Super Sport stripes over the trunk and hood.

“I order tave kosi,” the customer was saying to Mary Ann. “You will like the tave kosi. Dis, I guarantee.”

Rubbing her fingers, Mary Ann said, “You don’t have dis for dis”—pointing at the paperwork—“you get dis”—making a fist. She turned to see Nick, who was only six feet away from them, still watching the Corvette outside. I don’t know what words could have been as malicious, as unloving as his indifference to an awkward situation that could have easily been cleared up.

“Or any menu you pick,” the Albanian said.

“You’re asking me out to dinner?” Mary Ann said, still watching Nick. He was a photograph, his thumb touching two fingers as if he were holding a tiny teacup in front of him.

“No lamb, no problem,” the Albanian said.

She turned abruptly. “Why not? My husband doesn’t seem to have an opinion.”

It took the guy a second to register, and then he held his hands up. “I kid, I kid,” he said. Mary Ann looked down and began punching numbers on the calculator.

“I’m a dick,” the guy said, his accent gone. “Let me get out of your hair. I’m sorry. I’ll come back.” Nick still had his back to them, so the guy approached me. “I apologize,” he said, and stupidly I shook his hand.

I started to leave with my coffee black, hell with the sugar, but as I glanced back I saw that Mary Ann had closed her eyes and was pressing one of her temples. “Nick,” she said, but he was lost. She dropped her hand and stared at him with surprise and fury, a look that precedes someone saying, with full contempt, “Are you kidding?”—in fact, I thought for a moment she had said that.

After a long second she turned and went down the hallway to the office. In the humming quiet, what drew me back to Nick was the small sound of liquid running onto the carpet. His cup was turned over on an end table, the last of the coffee beaded over the cover of a
People
magazine. “You should talk to her,” I said, and he turned suddenly and bumped into me, causing my own coffee to splash out onto my shoe. His eyes were startled and seemed not to recognize me. I moved out of his way.

I got paper towels from the bathroom, and when I looked through the front window, Nick was pacing by the car trailer with his hands on his head, like a witness fresh on the scene of a gory wreck.

*   *   *

When I came back out to the bays, Ray was alone in a folding chair with an Arby’s Big Boy on his thigh. He was staring contemptuously at a
Smokey and the Bandit
TransAm in his bay. “Are you telling me I have to get up for this shit box?” he said.

I looked at the car, black and gold and all weighed down with ground effects and spoilers. The hood was opened, but that was all, no diagnostic leads clamped on. Ray preferred his own five senses to any oscilloscope. He read spark plugs like a mystic reads tea leaves and could tell you the octane of a gasoline by tasting it.

The TransAm’s engine was choked with hoses and vacuum lines for smog control. You couldn’t even see the spark plug boots. I leaned over and started loosening the wing nut on the giant air cleaner, singing, as I did, a line of “Eastbound and Down” from the movie.

“It’s a real shame what you got for cars,” Ray said. “Your generation. The music’s shit, too. Now it’s the law I got to wear a seat belt?”

He went on like that and worked himself into a coughing fit, after which he spat something terrible into a trash can.

“What’s the deal with Nick and Mary Ann?” I said.

“Aw Christ. Hell. Don’t ask me.” He walked away, and then came back. “All I know is if you’re going to call it quits, do it young. Me and Bonnie stayed married for the kids, and what the fuck good did that do? All they ever seen was fighting.” He spit again into the trash can. “My boy’s out in Ohio someplace with a warrant out. Ginny’s got that big Polack, can’t even feed his kids. Meantime, I’m fifty-two. I want company, I’m supposed to go dance the jungle boogie? You laugh. Just wait, your time’s coming.” He chugged his Dr Pepper and produced a great explosive burp that caught him off guard. “Jay-sus,” he said and glanced up the aisle between bays. In a sudden low voice he said to me, “Don we now our gay apparel.”

I ducked out from under the hood as a man in a mauve polo shirt and pleated pants walked up to the car. “This one’s mine,” he said. “I just picked it up.” He looked a little embarrassed. He’d had to have heard Ray’s belch. “From that place Chachi’s, on 69.”

“They give you a money-back guarantee?” Ray said.

The man smiled as if getting a joke, but Ray didn’t say anything else, and the poor guy laughed awkwardly. “Nobody does that,” he said.

“What do you mean it hesitates?” Ray said.

“Not really like a bog or a skip. She asked me that out front. More like I’m towing something. It doesn’t pick up like you’d expect.” He gave Ray a chance to answer all that he’d said, but Ray stared at him vacantly.

“I remember when I was a kid my neighbor had this Super Commando—”

“Okay, let me stop you right there, chief.” Ray stood and threw away the last two bites of his sandwich. “A big Mopar and this you got here have zero in common. Zero.”

The guy looked at me, and I rolled my eyes in a weak show of camaraderie.

“You ever want to break the speed limit in this boat,” Ray said, “yank out that smog motor and invest in a four-bolt small block. End of story.”

I went back to get the work order for the Albanian’s car. At the pegboard I was reading over his complaint when, from the lower-level parking lot outside, I heard gunshots. I ran to the open window. Two stories below, the yellow Corvette was parked in the middle of the dirt lot and Nick was walking around it, creating a perimeter, it seemed, between the car and the old tires and hoses and oil drums and trash unrelated to cars that had ended up in the weeds. After a moment Bobby came out of the Dungeon hauling out buckets of the rusted bolts and engine parts littering the bay.

When I got down there Nick had his hands buried in his pockets and was slightly bent over the open hood, his mouth moving. I hurried into the Dungeon. “He’s out there talking to himself, Bobby,” I said.

He handed me a .22 Marlin rifle. “Here, I’m not supposed to be around these things,” he said, speaking with a cigarette in his lips. “You see a rat, blast his ass. Nuke the little cocksucker.”

He brought out two more buckets while I stood dumbfounded between the damp fieldstone walls, the mortar black with mold, until a rat the size of a fireplace log ran past me. By the time I thought about the rifle I was holding, it had disappeared behind a broken Hibachi. Then Nick was beside me. “Get something to cover that,” he said, pointing at the little scratched Plexiglass window no bigger than a cereal box in the bay door. “Find some cardboard. Here.” He handed me an ancient roll of duct tape from a workbench and then hurried back to the Corvette. All the cardboard was rotten, but I was able to cover the small window with strips of duct tape alone.

“The ’Vette needs an overhaul,” Bobby said, returning to the small bay for more buckets. “You and Nick are doing it down here and don’t tell nobody. If they ask upstairs, you’re scraping asbestos out of the ceiling. That way they’ll stay out.”

I was only frustrated a few seconds longer, because it had to be some kind of joke. Bobby was big on jokes. He’d charge a points condenser with eight thousand volts, pick it up with rubber-handled pliers, and toss it to you. He’d glaze a toilet seat with WD-40 or paper the inside of your locker with hermaphrodite porn.

I leaned the rifle against an old radiator and lit a cigarette as I followed him outside.

“No fuck-ups on this one,” he said, as he passed me again. “You watch him whenever his hands are on that motor, you hear? After it’s done, we get a few pictures to prove it.”

“Prove what?” I said, kicking around a foot of old radiator hose.

He dropped the buckets and shook blood back into his hands. “It’s a ZL-1,” he said, turning to the Corvette. “King of the hill. The fastest production car America ever built.”

I exhaled smoke with a wry laugh. “Right.”

He looked at me, annoyed, and I wondered what the hell the joke was. How could a Corvette be faster than a Hemi Superbird, for instance. Or a big-block Cobra? Except for the side pipes and high-rise hood, this yellow one looked like any other Corvette. It had Florida plates that said
EVEADE
.

“Is that a vanity plate?” I said. “It’s spelled wrong.”

Bobby ignored me.

“What is it again?”

“ZL-1. All-aluminum four twenty-seven.”

I laughed again. “All aluminum. Does it fly around and shoot laser beams?”

He started back for the Dungeon, the veins in his neck standing out like waxed extensions of his mustache.

“How many are there?” I said. Since I’d been here, we’d worked on a convertible ’Cuda, one of two hundred and fifteen, and a ’67 Z/28, one of seventy-three.

“Two,” he said, and I realized he thought I meant how many buckets did he have left to bring out.

“How many ZL1s, I mean.”

“I just told you. Two.”

“This car is one of two?”

“Careful you don’t ding the paint,” he said.

7.

The car was owned by a tall redhead named Eve Moore. Though I associated true redheads with tomboys, suspenders, freckles, bare feet like Huck Finn, Eve wore a sun hat and a white dress that looked like it was silk, over which she had tossed a light aqua sweater, the color of her eyes, that had only one tiny button at the neck. Her hair, shoulder-length, looked expensively maintained—each strand coated to slide individually so that the cumulative effect was a movement like water when she turned her head. As she got closer I smelled an understated perfume that made my scalp tingle. She was the kind of woman I instinctively looked away from, reading any interest she might show as mockery and steeling myself against her smile.

Eve had asked us to pick a restaurant and to not worry about prices. Nick didn’t care where we ate, and of course I didn’t know any fine dining in Waterbury, so after some discussion Ray and Bobby decided on Tia Juanita’s, where the house wine came out of a box and they charged for a second helping of chips.