by Roan Parrish
“Uh, no, man, I’m fine.”
He snorts. And finally looks at me. Well, looks down at me. Dude’s even taller than I thought when I saw him in the bar. And bulky with muscle. He has shoulder-length brown hair, and his left eyebrow is broken by scars, the kind you usually see when someone’s taken a bottle to the face. His mouth is grim and his brown eyes are sharp, and he’s looking at me with a combination of amusement and scorn that immediately pisses me off. Like he knows me or some shit.
“You’re wasted,” he says. “Those guys would’ve killed you.” My brain shies away from this piece of information and focuses back on my breathing. As I try to get a deep breath, the edge of panic is back. I know I can get enough air in, but the sensation freaks me out every time. Like at any moment I could drown where I stand.
“Come on,” he says, patting my shoulder lightly, like my old Little League coach—You’ve got it, tiger; back in the game!—like I did to Katie.
Suddenly, I’m so humiliated that I think I might puke again. Pathetic. I squeeze my eyes shut.
“I’m fucking fine, dude,” I say coldly. “I could’ve handled it.”
I jerk away from him and stagger down the alley. When I glance back, he’s still standing there, completely still, watching me.
2
Chapter 2
The orange BMW 320i rolls in just as I swallow the last bite of a mediocre hoagie. Next to me, my younger brother Brian lets out a low whistle. That is one ugly color. It was probably originally a bright orange, but it’s faded and patched and has been painted over a few times. The driver’s side door is maroon and the diving boards are spotted with rust.
I’ve been out of it all day. I took a bunch of Tylenol this morning, but my head is still killing me and my whole body aches. I don’t remember it happening, but there’s a deep scrape on my shoulder so I guess that’s where I hit either the brick wall or the ground in the alley last night. I keep leaning against it to remind myself of what an idiot I am.
“Eighty-one?” Brian asks me. Pop shakes his head in disgust.
“Naw, man,” I tell him, pointing at the elongated aluminum bumpers, “That’s the E30. In ’81 it would’ve been the E21.” I turn to Pop. “I’d go ’85.” He nods.
I actually love the early- to mid-eighties BMWs. Underneath that shitty paint job and mismatched door, the lines of the car are pure, the boxy form sharp and perfectly balanced.
When that maroon door opens, though, it drives away any thoughts about the car. Because the long legs and broad shoulders that emerge belong to the guy from last night. My ears start to buzz and my heart beats unnaturally fast. He scans the garage, and when his eyes land on me, it’s like a physical force catches my breath and pulls it from my chest.
“What?” Brian pokes me in the shoulder. “You know him or something?”
I shake my head and walk toward him before Brian or Pop can.
“Um, hi.”
“Hi,” he says, his voice low.
“Uh, can I help you?” I’m trying to keep my voice steady and professional, but with my eyes I’m begging him not to say anything. To be just another customer.
He jabs his thumb behind him at his car and says, “I wonder if you could take a look. I think I’m leaking oil.”
I grab my clipboard and his key and take down his driver’s license information. Rafael Guerrera. He’s thirty-eight, two years older than me.
“Pop the hood,” I tell him, and I definitely don’t stare when he bends over to pull the lever, his hips twisting and his shirt rucking up just enough to show a sliver of light brown skin. I look at the engine blankly, taking in no information whatsoever. I close the hood and nod at Rafael.
“I’ll take a look, but you’ll need to leave it. That okay?”
“How long will it take?” he asks, and there’s something about the way he says it that makes me think he knows exactly what I’m doing. That I don’t want him to wait here while I look at the car now. That I want him gone, stat.
I shrug, trying to look casual, but it’s more of a twitch. “Tomorrow most likely.”
Rafael nods. He picks up my clipboard and writes something on it. Then he hands it back to me with a completely neutral look and walks out of the garage.
I look at the clipboard. He’s written a phone number and, below it, a note: Your sweatshirt is in the trunk.
Shit. I do vaguely remember dropping it on the barstool last night. For a second, it occurs to me that it was nice of him to bring it back. But then my stomach tightens and my skin starts to crawl with unease.
I catch up to him at the corner.
“Hey!” I reach for his shoulder, but before I come close to touching him, he whips around, looming over me, feet set shoulder width apart. “How the hell did you know where I work?”
“How’s your stomach?” he asks as if I haven’t spoken. His stance has relaxed slightly.
“Look, man. I don’t know what the fuck you think is going on here, okay. But how did you know where I work?”
Rafael runs a hand through his hair and looks away.
I take a good look at him, trying to focus on not punching him. His thick, wavy brown hair is shoulder length, but neat, not like he forgot to cut it. There are freckles across his nose, barely darker than his skin. Judging by his skin and his name, I’m guessing he’s Latino. Is that the right term? I’m not sure. Hispanic? Shit, I don’t know. His lips are full, and his teeth are sharp and crowded, the left front one chipped. His long stubble looks soft, but his mouth turns down in a snarl. I shake my head to clear it.
“Look,” he says, “I wasn’t going to say anything about how we met if that’s what you’re worried about.”
I nod my thanks. “Dude, seriously, how’d you—”
“Colin.” He says it like I’m a skittish animal he doesn’t want to freak out. Damn name tags. “I was concerned last night. It wasn’t safe for you to be wandering around that drunk in the middle of the night. I followed you to make sure you got home okay. That’s all.” He puts his hands up.
“Wait, you followed me. All the way home? I didn’t… I didn’t see you.”
“I know.”
“But wait, how’d you… did you…?” Did I talk to him and not remember it?
“There was a car parked outside your house. It had a bumper sticker for the garage on the back. I figured I’d take a chance it was yours.”
“Um.” Who the fuck would go to that much trouble for someone they don’t even know—especially someone who blew them off—unless they wanted something? Unless—oh, jeez, unless he’s one of those wannabe vigilante freaks with a superhero complex who think they have some mandate to beat up evildoers in alleys and protect the downtrodden…. I saw a movie like that once. Of course, that’s better than the alternative, which is that he’s an entirely different kind of freak.
“Listen,” he says, “can we—”
“Okay,” I say, cutting him off. “So, I’ll be in touch about your car.”
Then I hurry back to the shop before he can say anything else.
The axe comes down before the man has time to scream, blood splattering the barn, the hay, and the rakes that lean ominously against the wall, and I look away from the TV. I put the movie on in the background for some noise.
Usually, I love horror movies and gory war movies. Tonight, though, the sounds are getting to me. Every time someone screams, I find myself looking up. I’m trying to finish the model of the DeLorean DMC-12 that I started months ago and abandoned for a while because the plasticard I got from the hardware store wasn’t setting properly and it was pissing me off. I got new sheet plastic at a hobby shop that’s malleable enough that I can dunk it in hot water and mold it around a can, secure it with rubber bands, and it’ll hold a curve without cracking.
A knock on the door startles me. It’s got to be Brian. He’s the only one who stops by unannounced.
Still, I yell, “Who is it?” at the door as the deranged killer mows down an attract
ive young couple with a thresher.
“Uh, me.”
I’m lucky Brian didn’t just use his key. Thank god I pretty much broke him of that habit last month when he walked in on me jerking off.
A chorus of screams and revving motors is the soundtrack to my brother grinning in the doorway, holding up a six-pack of Yuengling bombers. A few years ago we saved a bunch of those twenty-four ounce cans to be the base of a beer-can Christmas tree, moving to twelve-ouncers toward the top. It was pretty epic.
“Game’s on,” Brian says, tromping in and plopping down on my couch. He cracks open a Yuengling and tosses one to me. It’s warm. “Dude, what the fuck is this gonna be?” he asks, waving around one wing of the DeLorean’s chassis.
“Dude,” I mock, “aren’t you supposed to be a fucking mechanic? What does it look like?”
Brian, impervious and immediately bored as ever, drops it on the coffee table and changes the channel to the Penn State–Michigan game. We watch in silence for a while as Michigan pulls ahead by a touchdown. After a commercial, during which Brian explains how he could tell that the woman who brought her Accord in for an oil change wanted to sleep with him, the broadcast shows an aerial shot of Michigan stadium, teeming with maize and blue, that pulls out to include the fall leaves and artificially green grass of what must be a golf course nearby.
“Hey, Col? Do you think Daniel’s okay?”
Daniel. Our youngest brother moved to Michigan last month for an English professor job. He didn’t even tell us he was leaving until the night before he split. Which was par for the course, considering he didn’t really give a shit about any of us anyway.
“Okay, how?”
“Well, just. Michigan. Like, what do they even do there? Is it near Ann Arbor, where he is?”
“Nah, it’s north.”
“So he’s not teaching, like, at Michigan.” Brian points to the TV, and I shake my head. Brian’s never looked at a map in his life. Hell, I don’t think he’s ever been anywhere outside the Philly area except a few trips to the Jersey shore and one ill-conceived trip to New York to see a Rangers game at Madison Square Garden. He ended up getting trashed and puking into my empty popcorn bucket—well, mostly empty.
“You heard from him?” I ask, trying to sound casual. I’m definitely last on Daniel’s to-call list.
“Nope.” Brian fiddles with the remote. “Do you think—I mean, did you know he was going to move?”
“He certainly didn’t fucking discuss it with me, no.”
No, Daniel hasn’t discussed anything with me since he was about twelve—hell, he’s barely spoken to me since the day he told me he was gay.
It’s like there are two different Daniels.
There’s gay Daniel who couldn’t be bothered to hang around with us, who thought he was too good to let anyone know he was related to mechanics, who thought we were stupid because we didn’t walk around with our noses shoved in books the way he did.
Then there’s normal Daniel, which is how I remember him from when he was a kid. Normal Daniel used to follow me around and dress like me. Hang out with us, watching Pop fix cars and running around the garage playing our brutal version of Marco Polo that usually ended in one of us walking, eyes closed, into some sharp car part or piece of machinery and Pop cursing us out as he poured alcohol on our cuts and slapped Band-Aids over them.
“It’s just weird,” Brian’s saying. “Like, I know he was busy with school and stuff, but I never thought he’d just… not be here anymore.” Brian starts biting at his cuticles, which is truly disgusting because he always has grease on his hands. “I guess he wouldn’t’ve been happy working with us anyway, though, huh? But remember how good he used to be with the cars?”
I remember. He was a natural, quickly sorting out what information was relevant to diagnosing a problem and what was secondary or unrelated.
“Remember the time that old buddy of Pop’s brought his truck in and was trying to explain some complicated problem about a fuel line? Daniel wandered in from school and looked at it and was like, ‘Hey, Mr. McShea, you got a loose gas cap, huh?’”
I snort. Daniel had been about ten, a skinny pale kid with jet-black hair that was always in his face. He wore our old hand-me-down clothes, so they hung on him, making him look even smaller. Mr. McShea had turned bright red and Pop had pulled Daniel close to his side and rubbed his head. Daniel kept a straight face until Mr. McShea turned around. Then he grinned up at Pop and over at me and ran inside to do his homework.
That memory is immediately followed by one from six years later when I came home from getting high at Xavier’s house to find Daniel on his knees in the alley outside the garage with that fuckwad Buddy McKenzie holding him down and—
My expression must be hostile because Brian changes the subject and starts talking about the Michigan marching band and how hot he thinks the girls in uniform are. I swear to god, my brother really needs to get laid.
As usual, Brian leaves a mess of beer cans, shredded napkins, and crumbs on the coffee table and between the couch cushions. They stand out, white against the dark blue fabric, and make my head buzz with the need to make them disappear. I slide the nozzle attachment onto the vacuum cleaner and go to work on the crumbs, then take the cushions off and vacuum underneath them for good measure.
When I shut the vacuum off, an unholy noise comes from outside. At first I ignore it, assuming it’s a neighbor’s TV. But it sounds like someone screaming, and unless they’re watching the horror movie I had on earlier….
If I had an ounce of sense, that’d be reason enough to keep my door shut and locked. But the noise is horrific. It sounds like a baby or something. I look out the small window in my front door and don’t see anyone outside, so I turn the doorknob slowly. As I push the door open, something streaks inside.
“What the—”
From the porch comes a scuffle and the high-pitched sound of a cat in heat. Jesus, I thought that was over for the year. Then, from just inside the door, comes an answering whimper. I shut the door and look around. Shaking under the recliner is a tiny, filthy cat—kitten, whatever. It mews and backs away from me, but its claws get stuck in the worn blue-and-white-striped fabric of the chair.
Oh man. Animals do not like me—not even the ones people say like everyone. And this is just a baby; I’ll probably squish it. I reach under the chair slowly and, in what I hope is a nonthreatening gesture, try to unstick it from the chair.
Not good. The kitten chomps down on my hand with teeth that are much sharper than I expected and starts scrabbling at my wrist with its back paws.
“Fuck, cat!”
It’s left bloody scratches down my arm. Jesus, I hope it’s not rabid. Probably there are animal control people or something that I could call….
I find a can of tuna in the back of the cupboard and dump it onto a plate a few feet away from the chair, trying to draw the kitten out, then go to clean the scratches it left on my arm. Within a minute, there’s a tug at my ankle, the kitten trying to crawl up my leg.
It’s filthy. I cuff my jeans and hoist the kitten into the cuff, where it grabs at the fabric, pricking my calf with its needle claws. In the time it takes to squeeze soap into a big pot and fill it with warm water, the kitten has fallen asleep, but the second it hits the water, it hisses and scrambles to get out. I hold it still with a towel and rub it clean, making sure to keep the soap out of its eyes and mouth the way my mom always did when I was little. Tilt your head back, close your eyes, and hold your nose, love.
It tires itself out pretty quickly, and I wrap it in a towel and put it on my bed. I’m flipping through an old issue of Rolling Stone when the cat wakes up and pushes up out of its towel. It stretches obscenely and pads over to me, suspicious at first, then pushes into my stomach with its paws. I lie back, and as I stop paying attention to it, the kitten jumps onto my stomach and curls into a tiny ball, tucking its head beneath its tail.
After a few minutes of rumbling, it flips ove
r onto its stomach with all four paws spread out and its tail tickling my belly button. It’s pretty fucking cute. White with a black tail and a grayish stripe running from the top of its head all the way down its back, it reminds me of the original 1965 Shelby Mustangs, which were white with a dark blue stripe, so I name it Shelby in my head.
Not that I’m keeping it or anything.
When I run a finger over its head, though, it wakes up and takes a swipe at me. Which is good. The cat may be tiny, but it sure as shit isn’t going to let me hurt it.
Saturday morning, as soon as the first hood’s open, I lose myself in the guts of the car. Here, at least, are problems I can solve. If it’s bouncing excessively going over bumps, check for a worn shock or strut. If heat’s coming from the floor, then the catalytic converter is probably clogged. It’s a system, predictable and logical, and anything I break, anything I mess up, I can fix or replace.
Hell, given enough time and materials, I can take a car that seems beyond help and rebuild it, piece by piece. Give it a new life.
Not only does Rafael not have an oil leak, but nothing seems to be wrong with the car.
It’s old, sure, but the 3 Series have great engines, some power, and good acceleration for an E-class. I drive it around the block just to be sure, and the only issues I can see are that I don’t know how such a big guy fits in such a small car and that all he has is a tape deck but no tapes. In fact, there’s nothing personal in the car at all: no change of clothes, no junk mail, no toolbox, no soccer cleats or gym bag. It’s clean inside, but not pristine. There are some cigarette burns on the passenger-side interior door and the backseats are a bit shabby. The lighter is missing from the console and there’s a ding in the windshield that hasn’t spiderwebbed. But nothing whatsoever that gives me a clue about who this guy is.
As I dial the number on my clipboard, my heart starts to race and my palms sweat.
“Yeah?” he answers, and there are voices in the background, like he’s in a park or something.
