You Only Get Letters from Jail

by Jodi Angel

  CASH OR TRADE

  My dad brought her home on Thursday and by Saturday she was out on the lot wearing a pair of cutoffs with the front pockets hanging under the ragged bottoms like rabbit ears. They were short, and when she got hot, she took the bottom of her T-shirt and pulled it up toward the neckline, tucked it under, and pulled it through so the shirt turned into a bikini top with sleeves, and when she was bent over working soap on the tires, there were cars that honked as they turned the corner, not a lot, but quite a few. My dad brought me into the office to file. My job was to wash the cars. He paid me five bucks a car on Saturdays to wash the week’s dust off every one, shine the chrome, try to divert the customer’s eyes to the glare of the sun off the clean hood and not the ding in the fender or the rust on the bumper.

  “How much are you gonna pay me to file?” I asked. “This isn’t five bucks a car.”

  My dad took out his comb and slicked his hair back off his forehead. When he was working he kept it greased up and shiny, but he was on day three of a beard that made him look tired and rough.

  “I’ll pay you five bucks an hour,” he said.

  “Five bucks an hour! I can’t earn any money on that.” Most Saturdays I could walk with sixty bucks in half a day. If I put in four hours filing I’d get twenty. “Washing cars is my job. Why can’t she file and I go out there on the lot?”

  “Because she’s good for business,” he said. As he finished his sentence a car came around the corner and honked. She raised up from the yellow bucket and waved a soapy hand toward the driver and he honked again, longer than necessary.

  “How much are you paying her?” I asked.

  Darlene Mason looked up from a stack of finance slips. “Twenty a car.” She looked back down, licked her thumb, and started counting the pink papers again.

  “Twenty a car?”

  “She’s good for business,” my dad said, and he checked his hair in the round mirror that hung on the wall beside the door and then he pulled the office door open and stepped out on the lot.

  “Twenty a car?” I said to Darlene.

  She didn’t look up. She just picked her cigarette out of the ashtray, took a drag, and went back to adding.

  My dad was Big Ed, or Fast Eddie, or just Ed, depending on the commercial. He ran several of them on the local channels—Ed Harvey’s Used Cars. If you can dream it, you can drive it. He had made a lot of money when I was a kid, and then new cars got less expensive and used cars just seemed cheap and his inventory started gathering dust. He moved a few cars every week, especially if he put on the gorilla suit and did the commercial where the girl in the bikini was stretched out across the hood of the Vette, holding up a sign that said “Make Me An Offer.” The girl was Darlene Mason and she was pretty several years ago, I guess, and in the pictures on her desk she was beautiful, but she’d had a couple of kids and everything looked loose in the yellow bikini now, and something had happened to her balance, because she had a hard time holding her position on the hood.

  It was June and one o’clock and hotter than hell and there was no way I was going to file a bunch of carbon copies in folders that didn’t have any titles that made sense. I didn’t have my book with me, just my backpack and nothing in it except my best friend Ronnie’s story he’d written about Superman killing a hooker. I had started reading Salinger, but switched to Kafka when my algebra teacher made a crack about me and Holden Caulfield being “two peas in a pod,” and I couldn’t go back to reading the book after that—not because I was mad about the comparison but because I hate the saying “two peas in a pod” and I knew that every time Holden made a decision I would hear that overrated algebra teacher and his comment. Or maybe what he was saying was that I was Holden, one step away from being expelled, and I didn’t know it yet and probably wouldn’t care when I did. I had pulled a hard D in his class all year. I’d ridden the D train right on through the semester before and decided that it was the best that I could do, so I had quit running logarithms weeks ago and started reading about Gregor Samsa, because I figured there was no way that we were two peas in a pod, what with him waking up as a bug.

  The office was plastered with The Who posters—“wall-to-wall rock and roll,” my dad liked to say. My dad’s claim to fame was that he’d been in the crowd at The Who’s November 20, 1973, concert at the Cow Palace when Keith Moon OD’d. Moon passed out at the drum kit and was carried off stage—twice—before he disappeared and didn’t come back again, and the band couldn’t play, so Pete Townshend took the mike and asked the audience if anyone could play the drums—anyone good—and my dad was eighth row to the left of the stage and raised his hand—raised it high because he could play—and he swore that Pete Townshend saw his hand—“Pete was looking right at me”—and was just about to signal to him when Bill Graham pulled some kid out of the crowd two rows in front of my dad and that kid was Scot Halpin and he went on the stage, and sat at Keith Moon’s drums, and played three songs with the band, and made history.

  When my father drank, which was sometimes often and sometimes more than that, he would tell the story of The Who, and depending on how many beers or vodka and tonics he’d had, he would tell the story with one of two tones—a tone of excitement, of just being there, being part of music history in the making, being so close, or a tone of sadness and a different life where he went up on stage, not Scot Halpin, and he played the three songs and his life changed and he never ended up owning a used-car lot and having two kids and a wife who left him for a pottery teacher. Instead, he went on to tour with The Who, was awarded Rolling Stone magazine’s “Pick-Up Player of the Year” award, threw televisions out of hotel windows, drank and had women and was a star. When he told the story in that tone, the sad one, he always finished by saying, “I was that close,” and he would squint one eye, drain his drink, move his index finger a centimeter from his thumb to mark the distance. “That close.”

  Out the window I could see my dad was standing next to the Chevy Nova that I wanted him to give me and she was rubbing a sponge in circles on the hood, washing the same spot over and over, and then she took the hose and let the water sheet off the car. She had a good system. It had taken me a lot of Saturdays to learn that water is just as effective as soap and there was no need to overdo the work. She was saying something to my dad and he was laughing and she had this look on her face that told me that she had no idea that she was rinsing a 1969 Nova SS with a 350-horsepower 396 V8 engine and a 4-speed close-ratio transmission, and as I kept watching her, watching her soap and rinse and rinse again and rub the chrome, I forgot a little about the car, too, and just looked at her.

  She was Nadine from Bakersfield or Barstow or some town with a B and the sound of nothing going on, and from the story Darlene told, Nadine had shown up on the lot on Thursday trying to finance a VW bug that wasn’t worth the $1,100 my dad was asking for it. Nadine was on her way to something better, she said, maybe Las Vegas because there were jobs, and that made my dad laugh and when Darlene had told the story she cleared her throat at that part as though there was nothing more to say. My dad wasn’t in the habit of bringing people home, but we were living in a big rental house with too little furniture, and Nadine was too young to be a drifter, my dad said, and everybody needed a chance to start on the right foot. Now she was out there washing my cars and making four times my money and I figured that she wasn’t only getting the right foot but the whole damn shoe as well.

  I turned away from the window and sat down in the swivel chair behind my dad’s desk and kicked the filing cabinet closed. Darlene looked up from her adding machine and lit another cigarette. My dad had told her that she didn’t have to work Saturdays but she said it gave her a chance to work a half day and tell her husband she was working all day so she could get away from the kids. Usually on Saturdays my dad and Darlene went to Tips bar down the street, where she would finish out her shift.

  There was a little TV on the top of a shelf and The Flintstones were on. Fred was guiding a d
inosaur crane with a giant rock balanced on its head. I wondered why he worked in a quarry, other than because it was the Stone Age, but that seemed like too obvious of a joke to base an entire cartoon on. I thought about calling my brother, but we never had much to say on the phone. The only time I could call him was when I was at the car lot. Me and my dad didn’t have a home phone yet—we had the line and the number, but we didn’t have anything to plug in and my dad didn’t seem like he was in too big of a hurry to get a phone and I didn’t really care. Junior year was officially behind me, and I just wanted to make it to the grand finale at the end of one more high school year. I had a girlfriend named April and I had been to her house once and met her parents so that she could go to the movies with me. Her dad was ex-Mafia or something, Big Lou “The Bull” Marino, and he scared me because he had a big ring on his little finger and he drank rum with maraschino cherries while her mom took yellow pills and asked us if we wanted some sandwiches, and when we said no thanks, she nodded and after about twenty minutes she asked us again, and we said no thanks, and this went on for the hour that I was there. Big Lou asked me what my deal was, and when I said that I didn’t understand what he meant, he put one big hairy arm around my shoulders so that the big ring was just inches from my chin and said, “You know, your thing—your plan.” I just shrugged and hoped that was the right answer and then he leaned in close to me so that I was strangled with alcohol and cherry and Avon ’55 Thunderbird cologne, and he said, “Vending machines. That is where the future is.”

  I leaned back in my dad’s chair and put my hands behind my head. I thought about taking a nap for a while. The TV was still running cartoons, but I had gone from the past into the future and George Jetson was yelling at Jane to get him off that crazy thing. Darlene had her hand in a Cheetos bag and she was alternating Cheeto and cigarette and licking the orange off her fingers and digging back through the bag again. “You want some?” she asked and tipped the bag my direction.

  “You go ahead,” I said. She had a fan running and when it turned toward the wall the papers on the bulletin board lifted up at the edges and fluttered together like insects. The first days of summer vacation were always the worst. Every year I would be excited to turn in my textbooks and run out to the street when the last bell rang, and then the weekend would come and go and Monday would surface and I would realize that I didn’t have anything to do and nothing but time to do nothing with. Last summer I read twenty-six novels. I got the suggested reading list for junior English class and went to the Book Barn, and then when I was standing in there I saw all these titles and writers that I wanted to read, so I did, one after the other while the sun came up and went down over and over again and the crabgrass thickened under the constant chopped spray of the Rain Bird sprinkler in the center of the yard. That had been in the old house, and now I was in the new house and I felt tired of words. There was nothing to do and I wasn’t even making any money to spend on something I hadn’t decided to buy yet.

  Nadine was in front of the big office window, rolling up hose slack and moving toward the right side of the lot. She waved at me and smiled, and I lifted my hand in return.

  “She’s pretty,” Darlene said. She picked up one of the framed pictures on her desk, the one where she was riding on the float in the homecoming parade. “I remember those days.”

  I watched Nadine bend and pull the hose, and I could imagine her muscles jumping under the skin, pulling tight and bunching in little knots. She had tan legs and they were long and narrow and the fringe on her shorts barely dusted the tops of her thighs. She had long dark hair that she had pulled back in a sloppy ponytail, and her shirt was wet and she looked sweaty and shiny with hose water. I knew that April’s favorite food was spaghetti and that sad movies made her cry and her first dog’s name was Brandy and Brandy had been hit by a car and April wanted to be a teacher someday and work with kids. I didn’t know anything about Nadine except that she was nineteen and had all of her belongings in one duffel bag and made me feel something that April never had.

  “I guess,” I said.

  My dad came back into the office and slapped my feet off his desk. “It’s hotter than hell out there,” he said. His face was red and even though he was in a short-sleeved shirt he still wore a tie and suit pants.

  There was a couple walking around and looking at cars, and my dad was excited, I could tell. He called them fish, like fish in a barrel, and he started checking the Peg-Board for keys. “Where in the hell are the keys to that Buick?” he said. He started lifting stacks of papers off his desk and knocking things on the floor.

  “Here, here,” Darlene said. She took a key fob with a numbered tag out of her in-box.

  “What in the hell are they doing in there?”

  “That Buick has an oil leak. You wanted to take it down to the Shell station and have Bobby look at it on Monday.”

  “Yeah, well, wet pavement and gravel don’t show much, do they? It still runs like a sewing machine.”

  He shook the keys in his hand, but there were only two of them and they didn’t make much sound. “Floyd, if you see me yawn and stretch my hands above my head, I want you to take the back door out of the office, walk around the parking lot to the side, and then come up through the front. Then walk up to me and say, ‘Excuse me, but my mom wants to know if you are still holding that Buick for her.’ Got it? No more and no less.”

  “Are you holding the Buick for my mom.”

  “No. That Buick. Do it right.”

  “Are you holding that Buick for my mom.”

  “Still.”

  “Are you holding that Buick for my mom still.”

  “Jesusfuckingchrist, Floyd. Just do it right. Okay?”

  I wanted to say How much? How much is it worth to you if I close that sale? But I didn’t. I just watched him leave the office and walk across the gravel to the couple, who were peeking through the second row of car windows. They were a young couple, and she may have been pregnant or just fat, but I knew that they would be driving home with a Buick in a couple of hours. Darlene was already typing up the forms.

  The office smelled like glue and the carpet had been ripped up under the air conditioner in the window because the air conditioner leaked and turned the carpet moldy. Now the water just dripped onto the bare cement floor so that there was the constant sound of water drops marking time and I could hear them ticking off the seconds under the noise of the adding machine and the television and the fan on Darlene’s desk and the traffic passing by on the street. I was bored as fuck. I fingered the stacks of papers on my dad’s desk and looked out the window at my dad cracking the hood on the Buick and Nadine moving down the rows of cars on the right, and I thought about staying and doing the work. Then I thought about having the house to myself and the fact that Nadine’s duffel bag was upstairs in the spare room and I was suddenly craving to know what was inside. I didn’t care if it was a bunch of old T-shirts and cutoffs. I didn’t care if there were balled-up gym socks and jeans. I wanted to know something about her—go through her pockets maybe and dig out her receipts and slips of paper and gum wrappers so that I could know what she bought and notes she wrote and the kind of gum that she chewed. I stood up from my dad’s chair and it spun around so that an armrest hit the edge of the desk and knocked a stack of papers to the floor.

  “Those were in alphabetical order,” Darlene said. She was holding up the bar on the typewriter and blowing on some Wite-Out so she could get it to dry faster.

  “I’m going home,” I said. “Can you let my dad know?”

  “What about the Buick?”

  “He’ll manage. He doesn’t need me.”

  Darlene hit the carriage return on the typewriter, spaced the type guide into the next blank, and continued typing. “I guess there’s always Nadine,” she said.

  I slipped out the back door of the office, stepped down the short flight of bare wood stairs, and jogged around the back of the lot until I hit the alley and disappeared down t
he street.

  It had been hot in the office and I knew it was hot outside, but this was furnace-blast heat and I was sweating before I reached the corner of Meadowview and Flower. The pavement was hot, and when the sidewalk broke away and I was forced to walk on the asphalt, I could feel my shoes sinking into the tar and I had to pull hard on them to lift each step and keep stride. I had skipped out on work and didn’t have so much as two quarters in my pocket and I was so thirsty that I felt like the act of swallowing would take the last of my spit and make me cough until I puked. I felt a pinch below my ribs and knew I was getting a side ache. I was still a mile from my house and only two blocks from the lot and already I missed the little television on the shelf and the sound of water dripping from the air conditioner and the intermittent flutter from Darlene’s fan lifting papers on the board. Maybe five bucks an hour wasn’t such a raw deal, especially if it meant a ride home. By skipping out now I was a chickenshit and weak and probably kind of lazy and a disappointment, too, but freedom was freedom and it tasted a hell of a lot better than work.

  I turned the corner at Sundance and headed for Coyote Street and the buried suburbs where every street was a credit to the Battle of the Little Bighorn and Coyote Street hit Thunderhead Circle and War Horse and Arrapahoe and Black Hills and Custer Court, but there was no Sitting Bull on the map, no court or way or street, but there were soccer fields and a public pool, and Comanche Park in between them.

  A car came up behind me and when it honked it knocked me out of my head and jerked me back to the sidewalk so hard that I screamed like a girl. I had been dreaming about chicken tacos and my ninth-grade German teacher named Fran. I turned around and readied my middle finger for the international gesture of fuck off, but when I turned to the street the Vette was behind me and even though I brought my hand up to shield my eyes against the glare, I could have sworn that it was Nadine behind the wheel, but it all had to be an optical illusion, the beginning of heatstroke. My dad didn’t let the Vette off the lot—it was his centerpiece, maybe even his entire center. He kept it parked on a sheet of Astroturf near the front of the office. It was the one car he didn’t let me wash because I might scratch it. He had a habit of walking past the car, stopping suddenly, squinting down at the metal, licking his thumb, and rubbing at something on the hood or the windshield or the roof or the door until he was satisfied that it was gone.