Little Wrecks

by Meredith Miller

  “Okay, Charlie. See? We don’t ‘get each other.’ Obviously. Fuck off.”

  “All right! Why are you being such a bitch? Calm down.”

  “I’m calm, Charlie. I’m so calm right now, you have no idea. Seriously, though, if you think you’re gonna turn around now and start sleeping with me instead of Isabel, you’re way stupider than I thought, even.”

  “What the hell is your problem, Carter? You walk around looking like that, guys are gonna pay attention. No need to get worked up about it.”

  Ruth sits on her back steps to catch her breath and make sure Charlie has really gone. She’s waiting for the twilight to finish romancing everything, waiting for the good honest dark. She has a mug of tea in her hands and a cloud of cinnamon steam drifts up into her face. Next to her is a soda bottle full of water and a crescent wrench. She can’t tell Magda what she’s doing, but she does it like Magda would, with Magda-style precision. How did her life suddenly get so practical and mechanical? So physical? Magda doesn’t have to get her past every locked door and every creepy guy anymore. Ruth is doing fine all by herself.

  “Cripple Creek Ferry” is playing on the living room stereo and the sound of it comes out the screen door like a jaunty invasion in completely the wrong key. How can someone play that song on a night like this? It’s so obviously time for Billie Holiday, or a Dylan piano blues. Everything about Danny Pavlich happens at the wrong time in the wrong tone. He sticks out of their lives like an extra, unnecessary limb.

  Her front yard is pretending to be a lawn, but badly. Mostly it’s dry yellow dust with a few tufts of switchgrass. You have to drain the master cylinder from underneath, so she grabs Danny’s front bumper and slides under the car. The cloud of dry dirt that comes up makes her choke. Danny and her mother are right there on the living room couch by the window, listening to the wrong music and talking about transcendental meditation, or making their own yogurt, or whatever it is this week. If they look out the window, they’ll see her. She uses her teacup to catch the fluid she drains out. Probably a bad idea, but whatever. She’ll wash it.

  The release for the hood is inside by the driver’s seat. She checked that already. She leaves the car door open so they won’t hear it slamming shut. Then she lifts up the hood, unscrews the cap, and adds the water.

  If she cut the brake line or something, Danny would notice before he even got started, before he got up any speed. But also, if it happens too slow, he’ll stop and get it checked. That is why the water is such a cool plan. Mr. Macanajian said it doesn’t fuck your brakes until the water gets hot and boils off. Well, he didn’t say fuck. And he had no idea why she was interested.

  Someone drives by while she is standing with the hood propped up, using the bottom of her thermal army shirt to unscrew the cap on the reservoir. If it had been someone who knew them, they would have stopped, and she’d be busted. Once the road is empty again she feels like throwing up.

  In the end, she’s glad that everything she does is covered up by the sound of “Southern Man” blasting out the front window. Another annoying thing about Danny Pavlich: he always leaves the turntable on repeat, but tonight it’s lucky.

  Back in the kitchen, she makes more tea, then takes it out onto the steps and sits watching the dead street on the other side of the woods. Brake fluid stinks. Her shirt is covered in it, and her jeans are ruined. How the hell does Mr. Macanajian keep his hands so clean? If Danny or her mother came in the kitchen they might poke their heads out to say something caring that would show how much they noticed her and considered her a real person, just as good as a grown-up. It wouldn’t really be about her, though; it would be about how cool they are. If they did that, they might notice that she is covered in grease and dirt and ask her why. It’s possible, but it isn’t likely. If they did ask her she’d say, someone has to be the grown-up around here. Someone has to think about the consequences.

  Sitting on her poured-concrete kitchen porch, factory-made precisely like all the porches on her street, with her mother’s hippie tea and her shirt covered with brake fluid and grease, she is all the way alive. The real, solid darkness has fallen now, and it makes breathing easier. This is her element. She doesn’t need Magda, or even Virgil Mackie, to tell her she’s right. For tonight at least, she knows what needs to be done, for herself and her mother. She’s doing it, even if she can’t tell anyone. She’s one of those heroes that melt in and out of shadows, saving lives in secret.

  five

  “YOU GUYS SHOULD see yourselves,” Isabel says.

  Ruth and Magda are across from her at the front booth in the Harpoon Diner, facing the sun, and their two different pairs of eyes throw the light back blue and brown. It’s one of those moments when you just know the reason for everything. Whatever she did on Friday, whatever those two ever know about it, this kind of beauty is the reason. How can you not know it, especially with Ruth Carter sitting right across from you? Isn’t this worth killing for?

  “You look like terrifying angels with the sun behind you. You’re like Joan of Arc sitting next to Saint Barbara or something. Seriously, Holy of Holies. You two inspire my awe.”

  “Don’t listen,” Ruth says. “It’s a setup.”

  “Whatever.” Isabel looks over at the bookstore. “Mr. Lipsky’ll close up soon; we can go over there and get him to give us a coffee before he walks his dad.”

  “Oh nice, Isabel.” Ruth is drawing now and doesn’t look up.

  “I like the dad, actually. He has that old, tough way of talking, like in a gangster movie. He’s cool. Anyway, Mr. Lipsky does walk him, every night before it gets dark. They have a routine. Ruth, do me a quadratic equation, please?”

  “See? Told you she wanted something. Ask Magda.”

  “I’m not teaching her,” Magda says. “Ask Charlie. He can do math. He just pretends he can’t ’cause he thinks it means he’s a rebel if he’s taking algebra for the third time.”

  “Come on, Ruth, just let me look at your notebook.” Isabel makes a grab for it, and Ruth slaps her hand away. “Wow, did you do that in art today?”

  “They’re tulips.”

  “Magda, you should have heard her ranting about tulips the other night. It was pure genius.”

  “No it wasn’t,” Ruth says. “It just seemed like it at the time. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I was just thinking about a new drawing. School is boring.”

  “For you,” Magda says. “Some of us pay attention.”

  “Not me,” Isabel says. “I’m training to be a professional daydreamer. It’s a public-service vocation.”

  “Yeah, okay, Isabel.” Ruth laughs that sarcastic laugh she seems to have picked up somewhere recently. “You keep on dreaming. Me and Magda’ll just deal with all your consequences. If there’s jail, we’ll do it while you hang out with your typewriter being surrealist on your houseboat. Not a problem. Honest.”

  “Magda, do you get what’s going on with her? She keeps saying there’s nothing wrong.”

  Isabel told Ruth she was beautiful and they messed around. She needed her. Aren’t your friends supposed to be there when you need them?

  “Because there isn’t anything wrong, Isabel.” Ruth bends over her notebook and speaks through her hanging-down hair. “I don’t care what you do.”

  “So.” Magda looks down at the two crumpled-up dollar bills and the pile of change on the table. “This is what we got. This and some stolen weed you guys can’t figure out what to do with and more brains than any other three people who might be sitting at a table together in Highbone. How do we translate that into an escape plan?”

  Isabel scans the menu while Magda puts pennies into piles of ten and Ruth goes to work on the silver.

  “Apple pie à la mode,” Isabel says, “or a sundae?”

  “This is the situation, on every level.” Magda piles the pennies on Ruth’s notebook and Ruth knocks them off. “A menu full of choices, too many women to feed, and a pile of crumpled bills way too small. It’s like one of t
hose word problems where we’re on a boat, castaway with one oar and not enough food.”

  “Yeah,” Ruth says, “now we get to decide who to throw over and who to save.”

  “For real”—Isabel puts the menu down—“I am dying for an egg cream. It’s some kind of period thing. I just want a fizzy, chocolaty, milky thing. Please?”

  “Seriously?” Ruth leans over the table and lowers her voice. “Are you paying attention at all, Isabel? What’s your big plan? Magda has a bunch of Matt Kerwin’s weed stashed at her house. It was your idea. So are you gonna do something with it before one of us gets arrested and has to do your time?”

  “What? Calm down, Ruth. It’s not gonna disappear, and no one will find it. We have time; we’ll think of something.”

  “By which I guess you mean, Magda will think of something?” Magda says.

  “Well, you are traditionally the mastermind.”

  “Four dollars and eighty-seven cents.” Ruth has piled it all on the table next to the tulips in her notebook.

  “So, Magda, what’s your plan about the weed?”

  “Shhh! First of all I just want to remind you, this was your half-cocked piece of genius. First you robbed a cop, and now Matt. As usual, somebody else is gonna get kicked by one of your knee-jerk reactions.”

  “Uh, you went with me, Magda. You climbed through the freaking window, remember?” But really, what Isabel sees right then is the napalm jacket guy’s eyes unfocusing in the acid shadows of the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot. Right there in the air between them she can hear the crack of metal on his bone. She waves a hand to push the vision away and knocks a menu off the table.

  “Well, it isn’t like I expected follow-through from you,” Magda says. “I thought of something.”

  Ruth turns her head and speaks to the window and the street outside. “Why don’t you just let her get her own self out of the shit for once?”

  “That isn’t how we do, Ruth.” Magda picks the menu up off the floor and slaps a hand down on it. “Right, bottomless coffee we can all share when he’s not looking. Then we can get pie and an egg cream and fries. If he’s nice to us, we can leave him the rest.”

  “Saint Magdalene the Bountiful.” Isabel puts her hands over the money. “So, what’s your plan?”

  “Never you mind. I’ll only try it if you don’t ask me about it anymore.”

  “Fine,” Isabel says. “No coffee. I told you, we can get it from Mr. Lipsky later. We can get two orders of fries, an egg cream, and a lemon Coke.”

  “Now you’re in charge?”

  “I did the math. Proud of me?”

  six

  AT RUTH’S HOUSE the front yard is empty. She’d worried all the way from the diner that the house would be full of people and consequences. Now she is so relieved by the lack of cars that she feels like they’ve been lifted away by angels. In her mind’s eye, it’s a junkyard assumption. The resurrection of Danny’s Dodge Dart and her mom’s Pinto, and the random pickup trucks of their friends. She can see the junkyard angels, covered in white feathers and engine grease, hovering with light streaming from their hands.

  Danny is out driving somewhere, boiling the water in his brake line into steam. The house is theirs for now.

  Ruth opens the door and takes a deep breath, soaking in the emptiness. It isn’t a bad place. It just weighs her down sometimes. Too many old thoughts kicking around in here. Too many pictures she can’t get away from.

  “Great, no one’s home and I have some macaroni and cheese stashed in my room,” she says. “See what’s on TV.”

  “What is it, contraband?” Isabel throws herself onto the couch.

  “Mom would have a fit. Or probably just throw it out when I wasn’t home. She thinks anything with sauce in a packet gives you cancer. It probably does. I’m up for some carcinogens. What about you guys?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Isabel leafs through the TV Guide. “His Girl Friday, Brady Bunch reruns, or some Western?” she shouts.

  “Westerns have no girls,” Magda says. “We’ve already established this. The Brady Bunch has a laugh track.”

  “His Girl Friday it is, then. It’s already half an hour in.”

  There is a minute while Ruth is making boxed macaroni and cheese when life seems perfect. She can hear the television and Magda’s running commentary on sexism in the studio era, but none of it is clear. The sounds are half-defined and comforting, just like the smells of home. Someone is growing mint and basil in the kitchen window. How long has it been there?

  “Ruth, you’re ignoring me.” Magda leans in the kitchen doorway, looking both ways so they’ll both listen.

  “Sorry. What?”

  “My plan. We might be able to make a deal tonight. I need to get that shit out of my dad’s house before I get killed.”

  “Make a deal with who?”

  “She won’t tell me,” Isabel shouts from the couch. “It’s some kind of secret connection. Do you have any orange juice?”

  “Orange juice with mac and cheese?”

  “What? It’s a color theme.”

  “Okay, Isabel. Magda, are you gonna get us in trouble?”

  “You’re seriously asking me that now, Ruth? We robbed a dealer. We stashed a pound of weed in my dad’s house. My dad. I’m trying to get us out of trouble.”

  “Do you think this is going to come back on us, Magda? I mean what are we supposed to think of ourselves now that we did all this? What’s the payback gonna be?”

  “Let me ask you something, Ruth. Ever wonder why it’s me you’re asking this stuff? How am I supposed to know about the laws of the fucking universe? I’m not the one who doles out karma.” Magda rolls her eyes at the ceiling and goes back to Rosalind Russell.

  While Ruth drains the pasta she looks out the back window and there he is, striding through the yard with his back to her. Mackie. She taps on the window and he turns to face her, standing at the edge of the woods. She can see the chain from his watch and something like a feather tied into his hair. He will know what to do about Matt and the weed and karma, and which part of fate is her job and which belongs to the universe. He raises two fingers to his forehead and salutes her with a smile, then turns away again. That’s what she’ll do, ask Virgil Mackie.

  She makes three trips to the living room with bowls and glasses, then Magda says, “Eat up, women. We’re going to the beach to set up a drug deal.”

  When His Girl Friday ends, it’s the evening news. A nun in Queens is claiming to have stigmata. She’s there with a priest, like he’s a kind of spokesman. Her handler. What if it were true, if people just opened up and bled? Not because they were hurt, because they were marked by God. It would be like your heart coming out of you, pumping your soul out into the light.

  The nun’s habit is just like the ones teachers have at St. Ignatius, made of polyester, blue with a white edge around her face. The priest has the whole slacks-and-cardigan thing going on. They’re being filmed in an institutional hallway somewhere, and the nun is showing off her wrists with raw, bloody patches on them. Father Cardigan stays between her and the camera, talking fast without stopping. They look more like carnival hucksters than angels. Across the bottom of the TV screen is a strip of words saying Nun Claims Stigmata in the kind of typeface that leans drunkenly to the left and is supposed to show movement.

  “This,” Magda says, “is exactly the kind of craziness that is the whole reason for television.”

  “Yeah.” Isabel sits up and puts her bowl on the floor. “Everyone else thinks the news is information.”

  “Why are they doing it, do you think? What’s the scam?”

  “Dunno”—Isabel points her fork at the TV—“but those two are so fucking each other.”

  Magda stands up. “Yeah, but with lots of guilt. So that’s okay.”

  The parking lot at Fiddler’s Cove is half-full. It’s warm, and everyone is smiling, laughing, moving more than they do in the winter. There are buds on the salt roses and the air smell
s like smoke. They’re all inside a rosebud, a robin’s egg. Soon the world will crack open and inside it will be July.

  Magda makes Ruth sit with Isabel at the picnic tables while she goes to talk to some guy in a green Mustang. Ruth watches Magda lean into the driver’s-side window, so she doesn’t have to look at Isabel. That’s why she sees him grab a handful of Magda’s hair and kiss her. Isabel is oblivious.

  “Ruth,” she says, “do they have rivers in Mexico? I was thinking I could put my boat on a river in Mexico.”

  “They have bugs in Mexico, Isabel. Huge fucking bugs. They live in the jails where they put you when you try to buy weed. Or steal it. Be here now, woman. Just for a change. Who the hell is that?”

  “What?”

  “That person who seems to be entitled to your friend Magdalene Warren’s body.” Ruth points to the Mustang. “Obviously there’s something you two aren’t telling me.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Isabel tilts her head up to look at Ruth, and the salt wind blows her hair into her eyes. She squints over at Magda, then says, “Oh, crap. Who is that?”

  “Welcome to the conversation. That’s what I’m asking you.”

  Magda turns around, leans on the door of the car, and waves for them to come over. They have to weave in between a load of football players standing around a pickup and two couples in cars trying to pretend Fiddler’s Cove is romantic. By the time they get to Magda, all Ruth can feel is eyes, all over her. Someone is standing in the shadows behind the bathrooms. He’s just an outline in a long coat, but she can tell it’s Virgil Mackie by the way he raises one hand, slow and somehow sarcastic. She glances to the side, but Isabel hasn’t seen him. She’s distracted by whatever is going on with Magda.

  “Go around and get in front, Magdalene Warren,” the guy says. He runs his eyes up and down Ruth, then sideways at Isabel. “Why don’t you two pile in back? Magdalene says you want my advice and kindly assistance.”