The Spark and the Drive (21 page)

“Restoring muscle cars?” I said.

He sat a little straighter. “You find a hot rod in the paper. You get the body straight and painted, beef up the motor. I got a place I could rent for three-fifty a month. One bay, toilet, air compressor, woodstove. I could set up a cot and quit paying rent.” Bobby refilled our glasses from the pitcher and laid out the plan, which was fairly straightforward. A convenience store on Baldwin sold the big newspapers from every state in the country. He’d go up and down the East Coast buying used muscle cars.

“Right now there’s a Boss four twenty-nine Mustang in
Hemmings,
needs a tranny and a rear-end, for seven thou. You know what you could turn that over restored? A Boss with a three fifty-one Cleveland just went for twenty-four. After the first seven or so, it’s just reinvesting.”

“Hon,” Pam interrupted, “exactly how much are we telling here?”

“I trust this guy more than that brother-in-law of yours. He told me it was the Russians that took out the space shuttle.”

“Go scratch, Bobby. He’s sweet.”

“Lot of sweet guys in D block.”

“So you need start-up money,” I said.

“Bingo.”

Pam clapped her hands and sang, “‘I-N-G-O.’ Oh, come on.” She got up and I watched her leave, her thighs almost rubbing, but sexy, strutting like a runway model toward the women’s room.

Bobby watched then looked down at his beer and sighed. “Yeah, well. I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy,” he said. He took a long drag from his cigarette, which seemed to perk him back up. “Listen. She can get me addresses of repo cars before the repo man gets them. My brother, she can even get a copy of the keys.”

“Your capital is going to be stolen cars?”

“No, not stolen, no. Not really, not technically. Even if it was legal it couldn’t be a whole lot safer.” He took a sip and glanced around the bar. “She gets me the key and the address where the car’s at—they ain’t made the payments, it’s just sitting there waiting on the paperwork. See? Repo man’s coming day after tomorrow. But there’s no car when he gets there because I go out the night before and”—he made the sound of ignition—“drive it away.”

“Yeah?” I said.

“Think about it. Dude gets up the next morning, what’s he think? His car got repo’d. Then the repo guy shows up, and what’s he think? The dude must’ve unloaded it for parts. It’s a great big cluster fuck.”

I watched him skeptically. “What if the guy calls the cops when you’re taking it?”

“I got the key in my hand, bro. Dude comes out, I say, ‘Legal repossession, talk to the dealer. You need your sunglasses and Trojans out of the glove box, get ’em.’ Then I shag ass.”

“What if they figure out it’s an inside job?”

“All right, yeah, I thought about that. So her cokehead boss also had some gambling shit up until last year. And Pammy’s clean, not even a speeding ticket. Who would you think the bad guy was? And if it ever happened to get that far, which it won’t, well, we’re done. We’re out, no more. They got nothing on her or me. Or you. That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

The evening turned into night, and then into my first time closing a bar. When the lights came on Bobby and I were playing pool and Pam was dancing alone next to the jukebox.

Bobby wanted me to be his ride and his lookout. I would drop him off and then watch the street while he got in the car. Any trouble and I’d cause a distraction—do a smoke show or something—until he pulled away.

He didn’t need an answer tonight, he said, but as we were putting up our pool cues I gave him one. If I didn’t, I knew I would lose Bobby. First Ray, now Bobby—pretty soon the shop would be lost to me altogether, and I dreaded that in the same way Bobby dreaded the inevitable birth of new technology. And besides, it was hard to believe the scenario he’d described could ever actually happen, though that should have told me something—much of what I’d done and witnessed these past two months I never would have believed.

“I’ll do it if you come back to work,” I said. And it was brilliant. All I had to figure out was how to make the job more bearable, and he’d see that the risk wasn’t worth taking.

He didn’t agree until we were in the parking lot, when he said, “Just keep fuck-stick away from me. I’d hate to have to go back inside for murder.”

27.

Friday at the shop we turned away half a dozen tune-ups before lunch. Nick didn’t show up—ulcers, Rod said, after he’d called Mary Ann. “I know that tune,” he added. “Feels like you got run over by a Peterbilt.” And Bobby was hung over, rubbing his temple with one hand while he opened a throttle with the other. “Keep out of the shitter if you like to breathe,” he told me. He managed a couple of oil changes and a carb overhaul. I bought him an egg-and-cheese bagel off the roach coach, but he barely touched it. He ran on a liquid diet of coffee and Dr Pepper until he had some KFC mashed potatoes at lunch, and I gave him the last three Bayer I had in my toolbox.

That evening I came home to find an empty driveway. “She called to say she wasn’t feeling well,” Mom said, grabbing her purse to make a six o’clock meeting. She turned and blew April a fast kiss on her way out to the garage.

“It’s Nick,” Mary Ann said when I called. She’d taken him to Mercy that afternoon, where he was prescribed medication, bland food, and rest. She wouldn’t be able to watch April for the next few days at least.

“We only did about ten cars today,” I said.

“I’ll come in tomorrow to work the counter.”

“Can you talk?”

“Not really,” she said. “Not now.”

For the next three days, I couldn’t get her alone. After work she made the bank deposit next door and then went straight home to Nick. My own drive back to Levi, which I’d been making in record time the last few weeks, became a torturous slog in which I was only dimly aware of other drivers blaring their horns or flipping me off.

One day Bobby invited me to Hog Wild after work, but I was afraid he’d want to talk about stealing our first car, and so I told him I had plans and then felt shitty for lying. At home, Mom had grown used to having her evenings free. She went out on dates with Costa, to movies and to restaurants in Southbury, and they did the circuit of late-summer carnivals, the ones guys from school used to get drunk at and then brag about in the fall.

I tried spending more time with April, but my need for company seemed to drive her away. To my questions she gave short, testy answers, and it was hard to get her to look at me. If withstanding loneliness was a form of conditioning, then my high school years should have made me a marathon champion of being alone. But I hated not having her in the room. I sat with her through hours of lame cartoons, and at bedtime all she’d talk about was Mary Ann. Then the grief came flooding back, and I’d realize that on the outside I was acting, trying to live a rock ballad where dignity overcomes the heartache.

“Is she coming back the next day after today?”

“Tomorrow. I’m not sure.”

“Because she’s supposed to,” she said. “And I really really really miss her.”

*   *   *

The Z-28’s owner wouldn’t let anyone one but Nick wrap up the job. In the lobby Mary Ann explained that Nick was home with a peptic ulcer, but the guy kept pressing. “Okay, fine,” she said and grabbed the phone receiver. “Let me just call and see if he’ll come in with his bleeding stomach and set your fucking idle.”

The other customers looked up with alarm and curiosity, but Mary Ann stayed committed and unapologetic even as the poor slob backed away saying he’d call.

One evening after the customers were gone I came out to the lobby as she was batching up the last work orders. She glanced at me, and her smile was really just a loosening of her lips from their taut line of concentration. My plan had been to tickle her, but instead I leaned on the wall behind her and watched her reflection in the bay window. She pulled apart the yellow sheets from the pink ones, and faintly I smelled her oils, pine and citrus, until the silence became corrosive. I imagined the many possible ways she could take anything I said.

She looked at my reflection. “I feel confused,” she said. I knew she wasn’t crying but I hoped for a second that she might be. “It’s hard to take all these fucking changes, you know?”

“Let’s go somewhere after work,” I said. “Just to talk.”

“I can’t. We’ve got friends coming by tonight.”

I nodded and stayed calm, but Jesus Christ, friends coming by? Wouldn’t Nick and Mary Ann pretend they were still happy in front of their friends? Couldn’t pretending lead to the real thing?

I felt helpless. With Mary Ann, I had been more charitable and impulsive and funny than I’d been with anyone else in my life, but when she was away from me, I saw that my best wasn’t enough. Nick offered her something better that I didn’t understand. On a scrap of cardboard I’d started a list of everything he was and wasn’t. Not anxious, never hysterical. They say anxious people live in the future and depressed people live in the past, and it seemed that Nick’s quiet suffering was more deserving of sympathy, at least of Mary Ann’s, than my lingering unease. He was brooding and silent and uncynical, and all of these, especially not allowing himself the release of criticizing people who deserved it, were the very aspects of his personality that were probably eating away his stomach. He didn’t take care of himself, which I used to think was a plus in my column, but I didn’t work out for my health or for any noble reasons. I did it to impress or intimidate people. Nick, on the other hand, was exactly what he appeared to be.

I wondered how he could see his life as being livable if a woman as good-looking and tragic and brave and thrilling and misunderstood as Mary Ann was subtracted from it. He didn’t fear what seemed, to me, looming—the regret of having not seen what his marriage was worth—and I had no idea why. But it was hard for me to keep pretending that Mary Ann didn’t find some or all of this irresistible.

Now she stood staring at the floor, and her eyes seemed to soften. “Monday,” she said. “We can talk after work.”

28.

On my lunch break Monday I went to the package store and paid twenty-six dollars for a Pinot Noir from California; at Caldor I bought champagne flutes, a corkscrew, and a Jefferson Starship cassette that had “Miracles” on it, the most romantic song I knew. After work Bobby was lounging in one of the customer chairs with a Heineken resting on his thigh when Rod and I came out to the lobby. Bobby handed me a beer that I would’ve declined if he hadn’t opened it already. “Hey Nimrod,” he said, “bust some suds?” He held up what was left of the six-pack to Rod.

“You’re cold, my brother,” Rod said. And I drank my beer against feeling bothered by this new tolerance, if not the first impulses of a friendship forged, between them.

Mary Ann put together the night’s deposit with an amused awareness of us, like a mother doing dishes while her children run rampant in the kitchen.

After work I pulled onto the shattered concrete lot at Holy Land. There were a few other cars and some guys standing around a low crackling fire. I parked facing where the sun would set on a pair of sugar maples already turning color. I decided to wait on the Starship song, which was after all a lovemaking song, and plugged in “Bell Bottom Blues.” Like “Layla,” Clapton had written it for Patty Boyd, who wasn’t as good-looking by a long shot as Mary Ann. I rewound the song and sat with the key off as long as I could before I had to get out and smoke a cigarette.

The nights were cooler now, and over my street clothes I had on my brown shop jacket, which I hoped would have the same effect on the Latin Kings as my uniform. None of the parked cars was the Celica from the last time. The music was rap, which Ray used to call jungle boogie, and now I tried to decipher the rhythm so that I might nod a little with the bass beat. I brought out the wine and champagne flutes, hoping that anyone watching would see I was only waiting on a girl.

When she turned into the lot I got back in my car. She parked beside me, and I leaned over to open the passenger door as she came around, clutching her purse.

As I showed her the wine, I explained how coastal vineyards give the grape a long, cool growing season (I’d read it on the label—the guy at Liquor Mart barely knew red from white), and I couldn’t tell if she was impressed or just being polite when she said it sounded yummy. As I was pouring her glass she said, “That’s enough,” and I didn’t like the way she said that, so I pulled the bottle back with some drama.

“Too much is going to put me to sleep,” she said. “But thank you.”

We didn’t have a lot of time before the sun set. I was hoping the view would spark something for us, but Mary Ann yawned twice without apologizing, and I worried that each break in conversation would become her cue to say goodnight. She asked about April, so in return, and since it felt so goddamned formal between us, I asked about Nick. He was getting better, eating more, sleeping through the night.

“I heard you won’t let him go out to the garage,” I said.

She watched the sun, which was just getting liquid near the big cross, and sipped her wine. “A few days ago he went out to invent some kind of new distributor tool,” she said. “I heard him throwing up in the driveway.”

“Well, he’s lucky he’s got you,” I said, intending next to say that he didn’t deserve her, but Mary Ann shrugged and said, “For better, for worse.”

The only thing that kept breath in me was that I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic. “It seems like all you get is the worse,” I said.

She stared for a few moments at a long frayed cloud soaking up the color before she looked at me. “Meaning I’m not supposed to have compassion?”

“Does he?”

She smiled bitterly, right at the peak of the sunset, and put her champagne flute on the dashboard. “Thank you,” she said. “This was fun.”

“The answer’s no, Mary Ann.”

“You’re pushing me, Justin. I know you’re nineteen. I know you think everything is your business.”

And here it was all at once, the crossness, the implied giving up, that I thought she would never—even on those nights I dreamed of our marriage and children and hand-in-hand passage into old age—use on me.