Little Wrecks

by Meredith Miller

  Charlie walks up and down, looking through the windows of cars. Magda stands and turns her back to the two people in the next row, where the noises coming from the woman are no longer words. The parking lot stretches out around them, empty except for that voice. The rows of cars close in, all that metal right in the way of her perspective.

  After a minute, Charlie calls them and jerks his head at a blue Chevy Nova with a mother and son getting out of it. The kid leans on the roof and talks to his mother over the car for a minute before they disappear into the mall. The bank of chrome-and-glass doors moves in and out to swallow them, slicing up the reflection of the cars and the metal sky. Charlie pulls a slim jim out of the side of his jeans and does the driver’s-side door, then leans through to let Isabel in.

  “No, let me use that.” Isabel always whines when she’s with Charlie.

  “Don’t be an idiot, Isabel,” he says. “The door’s already unlocked.”

  He opens the glove compartment to see what’s in there, and Isabel slides in under his hands while Magda makes a flat-out dive, landing facedown on the backseat. Charlie pulls Jackson Browne’s The Pretender out of the tape player and frisbees it onto the asphalt. It skids along under the row of cars and he puts in a copy of Houses of the Holy he got from between the seats, slamming the driver’s-side door.

  Magda lies down in the backseat, while Charlie rifles through the glove compartment and Isabel looks around the floor in front. She hands Charlie a newspaper and he spills some buds out onto it. None of them seems to have anything to say. They just let the car fill with quiet smoke while the air outside the windows gets heavier. If it were July there would be a thunderstorm coming, but the world hasn’t built up enough heat and tension for that yet.

  After a while, Charlie says, “I know where there’s three pounds of Colombian and half a pound of Thai stick just sitting under a bed.”

  Isabel is reading, so it’s Magdalene who has to answer.

  “Uh, okay.”

  “I’m just saying, it seems like kind of a golden opportunity.”

  “Anyone with that much weed doesn’t just leave it sitting under a bed, Charlie. They’ll have a gun, you know that. People with lots of weed also have guns.”

  Hasn’t he read a single book? The big guys have guns, and they shoot you for getting in the way of their cash flow. Anyone who ever read The Saint knows that. But, then, it isn’t likely that Charlie’s read anything since Curious George. Did anyone even read him that? Which brings Magdalene back to the question of the white T-shirt and the jail tattoos. Contemplating Charlie is just too much work for no reward. If she had to guess, she’d say no one ever read him bedtime stories.

  “Are you listening back there, Warren?” Charlie taps her and holds out the joint. “This guy I’m talking about just got some money from somewhere. He knows some other guys from Nassau County and they hooked him up. He’s a total amateur. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

  “Neither do you, Charlie,” Magda says, still lying back and looking at the roof of the Nova, fake black leather with little holes pricked in it.

  Isabel turns the page, blows smoke out of her mouth and sucks it back in through her nostrils. Nothing to add.

  “Right, well,” Charlie says, “Matt Kerwin and his friends always go out for beers at the same time, right before The Twilight Zone and Dr. Who come on channel 13 and . . .”

  “Jesus, Charlie! Matt Kerwin? No way.” Magda rolls over and raises her voice. “He may not have a gun, but he can kick your skinny ass.”

  Isabel looks up from her book. “He’s Ruth’s mother’s dealer.”

  “Also he’s twenty-two, and his friends are all landscapers and construction workers.” She sits up and rests her chin on the back of the front seat. “You’d be so dead, man.”

  “Ruth feels sorry for Matt,” Isabel says. “She thinks he’s brooding and tragic. He’s the kind of guy my mom calls Byronic.”

  “Well he’s gonna need consoling after next week, so tell her to get ready.”

  “And you’re gonna need a plain pine box. Should we order it now? Anyway, why are you telling us this? Isn’t it your bigsecretmasterplan? If you go telling everybody you know, you’re definitely gonna die. I mean, loose lips sink ships, sweetheart.”

  Charlie isn’t any smarter than them, but of course he assumes he is.

  “I’m telling you because you’re girls,” he says. “And I need to tell someone, in case something happens. If I tell any guys, they might get there before me, ’cause it is the perfect crime. I mean what’s he gonna do, call the cops on me?”

  Well, he isn’t wrong about that.

  Before they leave the car, Magdalene leans over into the front and pops Houses of the Holy out of the stereo. She pulls the shiny brown ribbon of tape from the case and ties it to the handle of the blue Nova, then carries the cassette with her. Charlie and Isabel are walking side by side a few steps in front of her. Isabel holds her new book like it doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t matter to Charlie.

  And there, on the way out of the parking lot, is the woman from before, from the other car. She’s outside now, leaning against the light pole where they started, holding an unbuttoned cotton shirt tight around her and staring at a point somewhere just above the horizon. Her makeup is weirdly perfect and her expression is as empty and as heavy as the color of the sky. She looks like there are no words inside her at all, like language has taken a vacation from her life and left her alone.

  If Magdalene could just lift up from the parking lot, look at everything from the sky, she would be able to see it all as a pattern that makes sense. Now she just feels surrounded, by Charlie and Isabel and the endless parking spaces, and by the memory of that strangled, desperate voice coming from the car in the next row. That’s the condition they’re all in, most likely. Magda, Charlie, Isabel, and the woman from the car, feeling it from both angles. Their bodies are surrounded, but inside they’re looking at it from the sky.

  Isabel doesn’t see the woman standing there, Isabel who was so concerned about desperate strangers an hour ago. She’s completely absorbed in looking at Charlie like he’s going to give her something she needs. He isn’t. It’s an old story, and Magdalene is bored with it. She goes back to watching the plastic cassette empty out as she walks, noticing the two tiny Phillips-head screws that hold it together and thinking what she could make with the spooling mechanism inside. The tape flutters down and sticks to the ground behind them, all the way from the car out to the traffic light on Herman Road.

  “I need to meet Ruth,” she says. “We’re picking Henry up from his friend’s house. Coming, Isabel?”

  No response. No sound from the parking lot now, either.

  From the sky, the three of them would look like giant snails, leaving an iridescent trail of audiotape. Once they get near the bus stop, Magda puts the empty cassette with the other things in a pocket of her coat. All of it rattles together when she walks.

  four

  THERE IS DANNY’S Dodge when Ruth gets home from school on Monday afternoon, sitting in the front yard with four shiny, new tires. Danny has a lot of friends with useful jobs, and his car insurance is up to date. For a pothead who can’t keep his hair out of his eyes, Danny is really organized. He thinks somebody just came off the road and slashed his tires for no reason. “It happens, flowergirl,” he said to her on Sunday morning. Just like that, with the same goofy smile as always. Anyway, there is his car, sitting on its nice new treads and letting Ruth know there’s no point going inside.

  She’d like to say it’s her house and he should get out, but it isn’t her house, really. Never has been. Everyone thinks it would be so great to have Ruth’s mother, because her mother hangs out with longhairs and listens to cool music. Nobody ever stops to think what it would mean to try to figure out what you are when your mother is already it. Nobody ever asks how it feels when you see that kind of mother crouching in the corner trying to protect her face. Her mother and all her
friends, with their wide-eyed looking at Ruth like they’re really listening to her, don’t actually leave her any room to say anything at all. Nobody ever says, do you want to live with this guy? What about this one? What about the next one?

  Ruth wishes she could set Danny Pavlich’s car on fire and stand in the front yard, shouting out the truth while a crowd gathered, awestruck and terrified of her. Mostly, she wishes she could be like Magda. Except if she had that kind of conviction, she wouldn’t waste it.

  She walks around the house and through the woods to the brake repair shop. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. Do not stop to be gravely listened to by stoned people who pay way too much attention to you.

  Driving in a car, you’d think the brake repair shop is ten minutes from Ruth’s house, but really they share the same little set of backyard trees full of old beer cans and poison ivy. The same family of raccoons steals shiny things from both yards. Mr. Macanajian owns the shop and the only other person who works there is a young guy who is maybe related to him. The young guy is the creepy one. Mr. Macanajian is skinny and talkative and his hands are always clean, which is weird for a mechanic. He has a blue union suit with a perpetual pack of Marlboros in the breast pocket, and he doesn’t seem to think it’s wrong for kids to smoke. That’s how Ruth got to know him, bumming cigarettes. She goes to Macanajian’s brake repair shop a lot, when home gets to be too much. Break. Repair. Today, though, she is on a mission.

  Ruth wants to know about the brakes on Danny’s car.

  Mr. Macanajian has one of those square pits someone can stand down inside of while somebody else pulls a car over it. A light on a cord hangs by a hook in the side of the pit. It would take a lot of trust to stand down in there while someone parked a car on top of you. What if they slipped? What if they pulled that light cord out of the socket? What if they were busy trying to feel up the girl who lived in the house behind the shop and they forgot about you and left you in there with two tons of Cadillac parked on top of you? That pit is like a grave that isn’t quite big enough for a car to be buried in, but it’s big enough for at least fifteen bodies.

  Anyway, it’s just Mr. Macanajian in the shop right now, no creepy, touchy-feely kid, and he isn’t using the pit. He’s flushing the brakes on some guy’s Lincoln. Ruth asks him for a cigarette, and they stand out front because he won’t smoke near the cars.

  “So,” she says. “What does that mean, flushing the brakes?” She maybe should have led up to it, but he doesn’t seem to think it’s a weird question.

  “If the system gets water in it, your brakes can fail when the water burns off,” Mr. Macanajian says. “Anyway, what are you learning at school, then, kid? Why don’t you tell me what they teach you in history or something? You’re not gonna be a mechanic when you grow up, are you?”

  He means it as a joke. Ha, ha, girl mechanic. He never met Magda.

  “Why not?”

  “You look like the college type.”

  Ruth laughs out loud. “Are you serious? You can see my house from here, Mr. Macanajian. So, how does the water get in there?”

  “Finish that cigarette and I’ll show you.” He isn’t creepy, but there aren’t that many men who won’t show Ruth whatever she asks them to. Usually, Ruth wishes she had someone else’s body, but today she’ll use what she’s got. Or maybe Mr. Macanajian actually just likes her as a person, who knows? Weirder things have definitely happened.

  By the time they come out of the garage, Ruth is pretty sure she can find the master cylinder on Danny’s car. She looks up into the bright sky, soaking in the blankness through her eyes. Mr. Macanajian says he has to go back to work, so she sits down on the side of the road in front of his shop, trying to keep her mind still by staring at the oil making rainbows in the road. Half of her is making a plan, and half of her is trying not to. She grips the cement curb with both hands, trying to breathe herself into its weight, trying to quiet down the argument that’s always going on in her head lately. Is she the person who messes with someone’s brakes to make them go away? Is she the person who just hides in her room while her mother gets hit in the face by some shithead? Well, yeah, she is, because she’s already done that. Is there some kind of middle ground between those two things? Is she a middle-ground kind of person?

  A shadow falls over Ruth, and a big, white thigh stretches out next to her.

  “Hey.” It’s Doris, who lives with the bikers across the road.

  “Hey,” Ruth says. She can’t think of anything else.

  Doris has cutoffs on and overly blond hair, bleached and curled like a waitress in a truck stop.

  “You again, eh?” she says.

  “Nope, actually just one continuous me since last time I saw you.”

  “Very funny. Cute. What’ve you been up to, girlie?” She actually says that, girlie.

  Ruth met Doris a couple weeks before. She’s pretty much the most interesting thing that’s happened in South Highbone in ages. Maybe ever.

  Around Easter-time, Doris and her biker boyfriend and the rest of them just dropped into town from someplace else. All of the sudden they all seemed to live in the old garage across from the brake repair shop. Well, it’s a garage now that they’ve moved into it, anyway. It looks more like an old barn, clapboards and huge yellow doors you could drive a tank through. Now it opens up every day around noon and a dozen motorcycles pour out, roaring towards the beach. Doris rides in the sidecar of her boyfriend’s pink trike.

  It would have been pretty hard not to notice her. Everything about Doris is big. Not fat, big. Big thighs, big eyes, big, matronly tits, and enough blond for three truck stop waitresses if it came down to it. Doris talks to Ruth like them talking is just normal. She looks at her straight, not up or down.

  “Know any place they’re hiring in Highbone?” She doesn’t seem to notice that Ruth is barely old enough to have working papers.

  “You can pretty much always get a job at the supermarket,” Ruth says. “People don’t stay long.”

  “I’m not too good at sitting still and smiling at housewives.” Doris squints her eyes with a little, sarcastic smile. “What else?”

  “My mom cleans houses in the village. Sometimes I help her. Could you do that?”

  “Rich people don’t tend to feel comfortable giving me their keys for some reason. What else?”

  Ruth just laughs. “Does your boyfriend drop you off? Maybe it’s the trike.”

  “Then they’re just stupid. That trike is the ultimate possession. No one who gets to ride around on that needs to steal anything.”

  “Except maybe gas.”

  “I like you, girlie.” Doris slaps Ruth on the thigh. “You look like a forties movie star, but you’re not stuck-up. How does that work?”

  “Uh, I only just turned fifteen. I live in South Highbone. There’s a 90 percent chance my dad is some married guy from the village, but my mom seems to be living with a clammer who’s about ten years younger than her. I’m only guessing he lives with us, though, ’cause she hasn’t actually told me yet. I don’t really have that much to be stuck-up about.”

  “Your dad get visits?”

  “Are you kidding? People in Highbone Village don’t admit they knocked up their cleaning ladies. And if the cleaning ladies talked about it, they’d never work again. Anyway, I’m not 100 percent sure it’s him. It’s not like anyone ever bothered to explain it to me.”

  “Look, girlie, in a few years it won’t matter. You’re smart.” Doris looks Ruth up and down like maybe smart is something that shows on you somewhere. “I can tell that already. And, shit, I wouldn’t leave you alone with my boyfriend. Wanna see my new tattoo?”

  She pulls the leg of her shorts up an extra inch to show it off. On the inside of her thigh, all the way up, it says just a kiss away.

  Ruth takes a minute to figure out what to do with that image.

  “So, where did you move here from, anyway?” she asks.

  “Around,” Doris says. “We
stay moving.”

  Somewhere, there is a place where women get tattoos like that. Ruth would like to live there, whether Magda wants to or not. That makes her a little dizzy. It’s the first time she can ever remember wanting to go anywhere without Magdalene.

  “You wanna come in for a smoke?” Doris waves her hand at the bikers’ garage.

  “I have to meet my friends.” Ruth gets up, hesitates, then holds a hand out for Doris to grab on to.

  “You don’t have to be scared of us, girlie. Don’t you trust me yet?” Doris nearly pulls Ruth over when she grabs her hand and heaves herself off the curb. “We don’t steal kids, I swear.”

  “No, really. My friends get bitchy if you stand them up. I’ll come another time. Promise.”

  There are a lot of things circling around Ruth’s head. She needs somewhere quiet to think about everything she’s learned today—master cylinders and the boiling point of brake fluid and the new self that seems to be struggling to take over her body. And Doris. How does she get to have a life like that? She can roar down roads on a giant pink trike, live in barns with guys everyone’s scared of, and tattoo instructions for them on the inside of her thighs.

  One thing Ruth noticed right away: none of Doris’s friends are girls.

  Later, out on 25A, Ruth watches Isabel running towards her with Henry riding piggyback.

  “Flap your wings, Henry! Flap as hard as you can!” Isabel shouts.

  Magda is behind them, watching them like Isabel might drop her little brother and break him. Isabel pretends it’s Henry making them go faster. Henry isn’t laughing. He flies past Ruth with a look on his face like he’s actually making the physical effort it would take to carry them along. Henry is so little he can believe anything, which is a kind of magic all by itself. What does it take to make that go away? Ruth wants it back, that little-kid belief.

  The road out of the village has the junior high school and the public library on it. The trees that line the sidewalks thin out and then disappear at the highway. There is a gas station that sells cigarettes, a Dunkin’ Donuts, and a twenty-four-hour supermarket. This is the road of real life. The village by the harbor might as well be on the back lot at Universal. They put all the ugly stuff, the gas and the junk food and the shocking pink doughnut shops, up here on 25A, out of the way of their sailboats and their nice old houses. And the people who clean their houses and mow their lawns, they stick them up here, too.