Just North of Nowhere (43 page)

Hey…what are you doing?
she might sing out,
Go on over and do that in the river you lazy bastard. You live here!
And he knew what she meant, and he’d hang is head and go over to the water’s edge and add his respectful tinkle to the murmuring stream. She sang not in people words, but Einar got the message.

He started working for Old Man Olafsohn at
the Amoco
about that time. Shit work. He ran for sandwiches and beers on account at the Sons of Norway, he pumped gas, checked tires, stood around with his finger up his ass but made a buck here and there. With which he bought bread and baloney, scrounged a shift knob or rubber floor mat when he could.

He lived. Like folks do.

If anyone knew he was on the Banks they didn’t care or didn’t say; he was just that kid from up
the Amoco
, what the hell? Someone else’s lookout. Even old Pers Olafsohn didn’t much mind where he went or what he did when he got there. He wasn’t, whatchacall an employee, hell no; that little rat sure as shooting wasn’t getting his hands on the working parts of any customer vehicles. Hell if he was!

When nights started whistling and icy crystals started tingling his bare parts, the Dragon started talking plain. He tried ignoring her, patched and stuffed until she got good and pissed and wouldn’t let him open the door without a fight, so he hitched to Cruxton, climbed all over
Wayne’s Wrecks
till he found the right piece of glass, stole it, then hooked a ride back to the Banks – he was picked up, ironically, by Andre Trois-Coeur LeMais, deadheading back to Bluffton in the stock truck! That’s right: the same cab in which his old man’s hat had got stuffed into his brains ten, eleven years before (they’d pop-riveted a sheet of tin to the roof by then).

Einar grumbled all the way home. Not to do with the truck or Andre’s driving – Andre drove fine even if he was half-Chippewa, half-French – grumbling had come to Einar. Something the Dragon did. He picked it up, naturally, from her.

When he got back, it was dark. Still, Einar took that side vent window and fitted it into the place where he’d whacked out the old one, gusseted it with a strip of rubber and a bead of silicon and she was good as new.

The Dragon sang a pretty little song and, curled warm and comfortable, Einar was fine. Never grumbled, not even in sleep, all that night.

One evening after spring had come, the old car cried. She didn’t sing, didn’t talk.

What the hell?
Einar wondered. He slipped in and out quiet and respectful, giving her time. She wouldn’t say a word though, just whimpered in the owls, sniffled in the bubble of the river and ooze of the mud.

Einar finally looked under her hood. She hadn’t said to he just figured that after wintering over in her, well, he figured life wasn’t too lousy and maybe he ought to do something for the old car.

She yawned open, squealing rust, and – holy hell – life got different.

Most engines Einar had peeked at
the Amoco
were hot, oily things, things that shook, bit or burned. This? Cripes. She was a fused lump of dried nowhere. He stared for hours. He touched her only when he figured he’d stared enough – and then he touched her easy. He moved his fingers slowly along the block, around the carb, over the plugs and what was left of their cables – not that he knew those things or what they were, he just felt for something, he didn’t know what. When he felt what, she sang a kind of chirp in his gut and he wiggled whatever it was. When the wiggle showed where his fingers ought to walk next, he walked them there. When he touched and walked his fingers long enough, and the rippling river, spring birds and his wiggling gut said what was needed, he tried moving the hose, wire, shaft, whatever. Sometimes, whatever slipped off and lay like a dead mouse in his dirty hand. Sometimes the piece required a twist or a yank, sometimes a whack. He borrowed tools when old Pers Olafsohn wasn’t looking. Applied cautiously, the tools let him explore. He found for himself how one part engaged another, why some damn thing here, made another Goddamn thing over there do something completely damn remarkable!

Every day that old Dragon showed him what.

When he saw something wrong, he’d figure how to make it right. He’d get the stuff. He’d do the damn job. Then he’d listen to the Dragon about how to do the damn job right, then he’d do it again, and there it to hell was!

The finger-walk took him three years to touch, wiggle, and listen to every part of that engine; a thousand days, days wrapped around thousands of hours at
the Amoco
, days with him earning money to buy – or finding a second to steal – a tool, a part, a notion.

In the end, the Dragon fired up.

She sputtered, he adjusted; it grumbled, he nudged. They went back and forth, days on. They burned miles of gas and didn’t move an inch. But when she gurgled sweet and throaty, Einar sat behind the wheel – just like a damn driver, his hands resting easy on her wheel, like they belonged; he felt her quiver down beyond her steering column and linkages. He touched the horn button and she burst into a throaty laugh. He turned on the heat. Like that, she chattered, chewed a couple spider sacs and dry leaves, and breathed an oily sigh of dust into Einar’s greasy face. Her breath! He had no idea what it was, but, yes, there – there it was – heat from the engine that had raised him.

A few minutes and he turned her off with a teeth-showing smile. She went smoothly quiet, ticked a couple seconds, then was still.

They didn’t move. No tires, for one thing. For another, she was still sunk to her floorboards in river dirt. There was a whole world of Kaiser Dragon, beneath! She had parts Einar had neither seen nor touched: frame, springs, shocks, exhaust system, gas tank, oil pan, lines, cables, struts. About all that, he knew not a Goddamn thing. No. They were going no place.

Anyway, Einar couldn’t drive.

That night she sang again and he cried. The next day he hitched out and enlisted. Army.

He learned by the book! By the Goddamned book! He learned frames, springs, suspensions, exhaust, electrical systems; learned vehicles the book way, the Army way. Once learned that way, he went off and did it the hot and greasy way, the way the machines taught. He did it for three years, re-uped, did it for some more years. Then he came back to Bluffton.

The Kaiser was gone.

Half-way, he expected it. Sheriff Eriksson – old man Eriksson, not Vinnie, the son, who became town cop later – told Einar they’d dragged that piece of crap away, damn near, what? Six, seven years ago and who the hell was he and by the way did he have any I.D.?

“Fuck you,” Einar said. Expression he’d picked up in the Army.

“Bum,” the sheriff said.

The door clanged closed and clicked.

“I got a home,” Einar yelled! “That Kaiser. She is my POV!” He pointed out he’d fixed that Kaiser hisowndamn self, made it nice, and it was his by right of fixing or whatyoucallit. The County had hauled away his place of whatchacall!

“Eminent Domain? Domicile?” sheriff Erikson yelled back. “You lived in that piecea shit Kaiser?” He yelled. “Bum!” he yelled again.

“I got money!” Einar yelled at the sheriff’s back.

Which got the sheriff’s attention.

Einar had money. He hadn’t spent a cent while in the Army. What for? The Army gave him clothes, food and a bunk. He didn’t take to friends or friendship so he hadn’t to stand rounds of beers, loan out money or give up whatever else friends cost. Army stuck all his pay in accounts and Einar grew himself a wad, a back-in-the-fucking-world wad!

The county took a hundred for vagrancy.

Einar bitched up and down Commonwealth and spent enough of the wad to get good and schnockered at the
Wheel
and did enough grousing to piss off everyone who heard.

When he came to he still had the wad—which turned out to be exactly enough for earnest money on
the AMOCO
, Pers Olafsohn having died three weeks before – about the time Einar had hit town grousing. Which is how he missed it.

Then on, Bluffton noticed Einar. Army service had not improved his looks, temper, habits or nature but folks just naturally didn’t like him anyway: Einar, the grumbler, grouser, weasel, the sunofabitch.

A couple, three decades later, not much had changed.

Part Four

EYES IN THE DARK

“Aw heck, there, pretty pear,” Einar said.

Night was quiet; no weather, no critters, the houses down the way from the shop were dark, all the folks, brats and mutts were tucked in and no doubt smiling.

Einar ran his hand along the styling cut that dipped at the J’s door handle. His eye ran the curve of the line. It rose, then rolled in a gentle dip toward the tail where it reared up. The line crested in a fin, an empty lightless little thing, like a baby ’53 Caddy, its eyes still shut.

‘S hurting,
she whispered with the tingle running in his spine.
Mom says you’ll make me better, Einar.

“Yeah, yeah,” he answered. “That son of a bitch. That Karl son of a bitch ain’t using you for a killing thing! No more, no ma’am.”

The J percolated and cooed sweetly to Einar’s hand.
You make me better, right honey? You take the pain, huh?

It took Einar two days to realign her frame, pop and fill her ripples. A new driver’s side windshield took a week on rush order all the way from San Antonio. He dropped and benched the front quarter-panel for major surgery, spent an easy Sunday just rounding out the headlamp frame.

He hated finishing, but he did. It was what he did. He tuned and tweaked her and she ran finer than frog fur. Didn’t look bad, either. Except for that shitty wooden bumper, she was a pear. A pear!

He said something about that wooden bumper to her.

Cripes, honey,
she said back,
I like it! Makes me feel, what the hell? A little bad!
Her pipes growled and popped, she shimmied on her shocks.

So he left it, left the Goddamn bumper. Top it all, he gave her a coat of primer, soft, flat, gray. She loved that. She sat drinking light from the overheads, giving nothing back, not a twinkle or a wink, nothing but gray flat cool.

The time came when Einar couldn’t say she wasn’t ready yet.

Karl came by – by night, of course, dressed for the road. The son of a bitch handed Einar the fifty bucks he’d said, left a bottle of
Pauli Girl
and drove to the dark.

The shop was empty.

Einar was out four, maybe five, hundred. He tossed the frothing beer at the road and the narrowing dark space between her two red taillights, at the Goddamn dark between!

Karl was back three days later, the J’s fat-lip bumper sagging. “Goddamn Bunch an’ his shitty welds! Popped, there. You see there where? I got that cowcatcher wired up? Popped like THAT—on a doe. Cripes sake, a doe!”

Einar crawled under. Sure as shit, Bunch’s shitty weld. He’d crystallized her with the heat.

Einar touched the place. “Aw, cripes,” he said. A tear squeezed from his looking-eye.

‘S, okay,
she said with his touch,
‘S okay, hon
. She whispered like she was giving strokes, for crineoutloud.
C’mon, c’mon…there, there,
she crooned
.
It’s all right, I’m okay. Just tack it back. I’ll be fine...come on tack it back!”
kind of antsy, you know?

“It’ll take time!” Einar said.

Karl grumbled but that was it.

Einar didn’t rush. First, he cut some spring leaves, tied them together with steel bands. Then, he hacked off the whole damn thing, let the bumper clang to the cement, I-beam ringing, the blooded wood resonating like a marimba.

What the shit!
she said and
cripes, what the...!

“S’okay, little pear,” he said and took the grinder to her welds. He breathed oxidized metal from the spray of molten sparks that streamed over him like perfume so wicked! Then he reattached the wood and I-beam bumper with spring steel struts, fluxing his torch just so in the doing.

“There honey,” he nudged the bumper. “She’ll give you some Goddamn bounce, now. Know what I mean? Absorb the whatchakallit so you won’t feel it so, for cripes sake. The shock. Sticking that thing on with re-bar! Re-bar don’t absorb shit! Crineoutloud what the hell them guys thinking!”

The J didn’t say. She just stood and purred.

See? Einar had no idea. Not about her. Not about himself, if it came to that. She just pissed him off sitting perfect and ready to go again. Silent, cool, gray as morning.

Quiet makes some men go funny. And, well, Einar went into her and onto her, half-blind with piss! He screwed her timing, cranked her dwell into truly hairy numbers, pulled her number two plug, smacked the gap, then stuck the thing back. He spent the night with the J. She whimpered all the while.

In the morning Karl took her.

“Good Service
!” Einar shouted at the empty road and he wept.

“What for Christ sake?” Karl yelled the next day. “Piece-a-crap’s got no stuff! I give it gas, it dies! Cripes, Einar! This is what service has come to in this town!”