The Spark and the Drive

by Wayne Harrison

  “Where’s that Mugsy?” Nick said, and he walked to the counter, where their baby, Joey, sat in his bouncer seat. Father and son played peek-a-boo, Joey huffing and sputtering. He had a comb-over of fine hair and eyes of an indefinite color that watched you with more interest than you deserved—suddenly he’d lift his transparent eyebrows so that his skin didn’t really wrinkle but dented like a balloon. I couldn’t help remembering April, my little sister, at that age. She’d had those same eyebrows.

  Mary Ann turned on the hot water as Nick leaned over the sink. Rather than Goop or GOJO, she took a liter-sized bottle of Castile soap and drizzled it up and down his forearms. It didn’t surprise me to see the foam turn gray as she rubbed it in; Nick always washed his hands in the hurried way of a child who doesn’t want to miss out on anything.

  When she began to scrub his fingers with a nail brush, I had the anxious, envious thought that to be a mechanic of Nick’s caliber you needed a wife as abiding as Mary Ann—not a circumstance in life you could exactly count on. She must’ve just taken a shower. Her wavy hair was falling over her face, black and sheen and smelling of spearmint. “I thought I’d get to see you drunk,” she said to Nick, combing through the bristles of his forearm with the sprayer. With a dish towel she wiped a half-dried tear of laughter from his cheek and kissed him where the tear had been.

  As she went to work on his right arm Nick opened his stance to lean more heavily against the counter. I’d never felt closer to him than earlier in the driveway, our eyes cried out with laughing, but as I watched his copper reflection in a hanging pan—smiling from the sounds Joey made, or from the steady rub of Mary Ann’s fingers—it was as if he’d forgotten I was there.

  * * *

  Nick went out to the living room to answer the phone, and Mary Ann found me a dusty Heineken from the back of the refrigerator. When she yanked on a counter drawer stuck with the humidity, the crash of metal inside startled Joey. She took him out of the bouncer and held him to her chest as she fished in the drawer for a bottle opener.

  We’d grown to be friends after that day in the parts room. Aspects of my personality that I hated—my sensitivity and inclination to overanalyze—were what she found appealing. Her family was three thousand miles away in Oregon, and except for Joey, she had only hard-talking mechanics in her life. She’d ask me what colleges I was trying for next year, and I’d say I was still deciding, though that was becoming less and less true. College was just an extension of boyhood, when boyhood was the very thing I wanted to leave behind. It was hard for me to put into words that I needed this visceral, spontaneous, unapologetic mechanic life to transform me into the man I wanted to be.

  I asked her, in a light way that wouldn’t be insulted by a no answer, if she wanted me to take the baby. She saw that my hands were clean and passed him over. As she checked the salmon I lay Joey facedown like a football on my forearm. His beanbag arms folded at the elbows, hugging and hanging on. He banged his mouth on the heel of my hand, and his warm toothless gums began to suck there.

  From in the living room I could hear Nick on the phone, not really talking but answering “okay,” and less than a minute after he’d come back the phone rang again. Joey started fussing. “Hey, Mugsy, hey,” I said. “He’s coming back.” He didn’t seem to like the nickname coming out of my mouth, and as he whirled his arms and legs like a water frog I began to swing him in a gentle arc.

  “He’s getting hungry,” Mary Ann said, fluffing couscous in an open pan on the stove. She set down the fork and, with her back to me, lifted her breasts one at a time. A cool pain shot through my groin, and I backed away.

  I widened my swing and found an angle that thrilled the baby but didn’t scare him, a technique I had perfected on my little sister. His whole chest fit in my palm, and for an enormous second I felt him giggle without sound, only his little heart racing before he cackled in a long helpless convulsion that ran him out of breath.

  “You don’t have kids, do you?” asked Mary Ann.

  “None I know of.” I sensed in her grin that she thought this lame joke was out of character for me, and I blushed a little explaining about my sister, omitting the embarrassing truth about why my parents divorced before she was born.

  Joey settled with my thumb in his sticky hands, and we could hear Nick in the other room. “They ought to do a real compression check. You can’t trust a cylinder balance.”

  Mary Ann smiled in the direction of the archway. “Mister Popular,” she said. She came up to me and rubbed the back of Joey’s head. “So what was so funny before?” she said. “In the driveway?”

  It was a strange moment. I could have told her about the drive, the mini crashes and the commotion at the intersections, but I wasn’t certain how she’d react. I didn’t want to get Nick in trouble. “I think I have to plead the fifth,” I said.

  She stared at me a moment, unblinking, confused, it seemed, that I didn’t have any more to say. Then abruptly she looked down at her hands and brushed them together. “Of course you do.” She reached for Joey. “Hey there, smooch monster,” she said, and she kissed him on the nose.

  The salmon, poached with rosemary and lemon, seemed to dissolve right into my blood, as if it contained nutrients I had been lacking all my life. It was thick and substantial, you could stab into it with your fork. Mary Ann said that Atlantic salmon had no flavor compared to the wild Chinook and coho in Oregon, but I couldn’t get enough of it. We ate all three pounds, and there was baked kale with drizzled olive oil and rice vinegar and a little salt, crispy like potato chips, and this I couldn’t stop shoveling in, either. “I want to show you something upstairs later,” Nick said. “But eat up. There’s plenty. Eat.”

  After dinner I followed him up to a stuffy bedroom crammed with boxes. On a card table pushed against the wall Nick turned on a portable computer, a Commodore SX-64 he had just taken in trade for a valve job. He turned it on, and after half a minute of the fan whirring and clicking, the screen began to lighten.

  64 RAM SYSTEM.

  38911 BASIC BYTES FREE

  READY

  Nick waved me into the folding chair, and I programmed an IF/THEN number guessing game. But instead of the “Great! You got my number!” response I had used in my BASIC class, I made it say “Holy shit! You’re right!”

  Nick guessed the number after three tries and played it again. He kept resetting it. Sometimes he got it in fewer guesses, sometimes it took four or five. He reprogrammed the game himself with different limits, and when he got the number he watched the effect without joy or disappointment. It didn’t matter how long it took to win. He was trying to figure out how the system worked.

  There was a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf on the opposite wall, and while he played I looked over the spines of Mary Ann’s books on scented oils and Eastern meditation. I leafed through the end book—making lotions and diaper creams and lip gloss from things like olive oil and beeswax.

  The car books were in chronological order on their own shelf, dating back to the first production car, the Oldsmobile Roundabout. Most of the books were on boring cars, Model Ts, curvy touring cars of the ’30s, big-finned sedans that ran pathetic sixteen-second quarter miles—cars that always got in my way at the fairgrounds as I searched for the Chargers and big-block Chevelles.

  There was also a book on Einstein, and on Daniel Bernoulli and fluid mechanics. Two books on thermo dynamics, a dictionary of terms. I opened one on physics and saw that he’d written word definitions in the margins.

  There were footsteps on the stairs, and without turning from the computer, Nick said, “Let me go help put Mugsy down. Stay here.”

  While he was gone I looked in one of the boxes, unweaving the flaps to open it. It was all photo albums, and the spines, written in black Sharpie, said WATERFALLS. FLORENCE TO YACHATS BEACHES. NEWPORT BEACHES. MCKENZIE RIVER 126. I took out the one that said OREGON COUNTRY FAIR, expecting Ferris wheels and fireworks. The first set of breasts I saw made me sweat a little, and I k
ept one eye on the hallway. There were men in costumes with long colored feathers, girls in paisley minidresses and headbands. A guy in a top hat was juggling while riding a unicycle. More sets of breasts, some full-naked and some with ferns and rainbows drawn in body paint.

  Because it was such a contrast, because conflicting images often infected my mind, I imagined Nick and Mary Ann walking nude under towering fir trees, Mary Ann dark and toned, Nick pale and doughy. He must’ve been only too happy to get the hell out of there.

  I heard a stir in the other room and quickly dropped the album back into the box.

  It was after ten when Nick turned from the glow of the computer screen, squinted at the clock on the wall, and said, “Jesus. You got a long drive.” For the first time I truly regretted not living in Waterbury, where I would have made a habit of dropping by to see him after work. In that moment I sensed that he was regretful, too, and I rocketed through a series of outrageous ideas that began, what if?

  He stood and leaned back against some boxes. He said, “Well,” and I understood that this was our sudden good-bye. “Mary Ann’s right,” he said. “You’d better go to college. But if it ever happened that you take off a semester or whatever, come see me. Don’t tell her I said so.”

  We shook hands and he walked me downstairs, where the TV was on. Mary Ann rose from the couch and gave me a hug, and I shivered a little in my chest, but only after I was a few miles from their house, following a shortcut he’d told me to 84, did I turn off the radio and let myself freefall into the dizzying thrill of what he had said.

  4.

  In the aftermath of their divorce, my mother moved us to the comatose little farm town of Levi, where you might get stuck behind a tractor lobbing field mud, or a herd of dairy cows changing pasture. When you’ve had your license less than a year, every mile you clock without a wreck or a ticket is a triumph, but on those dewy summer mornings the twenty-two-mile commute to Nick’s shop in Waterbury seemed not nearly long enough. It should have taken hours, if not days, to get from Levi to anywhere urban. Guys at my school said “nigger” and “spick” all the time because there were no blacks or Hispanics to set them straight. We stuck our arms up cows’ asses for a grade (some didn’t wear gloves) and were tested on how tightly we could pack hay bales on a rack wagon. Farmers were struggling, at least in Levi they were, the enormous dairy barns sagging into viney scrub like the ruins of a lost civilization, but in spite of the facts, the school sold the fiction that a local dairy could compete with the industrial farms in Vermont and New Hampshire, that a man could still make a living off the land.

  That night after dinner at Nick’s, I drove through Levi’s downtown, which was a feed store, a gas station, an antique shop, a restaurant/tavern, and a post office/library, wondering if I belonged here any more than I had at the start of the summer. I’d planned to come back to Northwest with a full tank of engine knowledge such that my schoolmates would have no choice but to respect me, but now the plan began to fall apart under scrutiny.

  I parked next to the town mail truck that was just a Subaru with the steering wheel on the other side, and got out to walk. As if to emphasize the start of school on Monday, I could see my breath under the one sodium arc light on the strip. Faint wood smoke hung in the air. As I walked the empty sidewalk an engine sang out from beyond the rustling corn, and I saw the truth as it had always been: Levi would never accept me. Even two years wasn’t enough time. More importantly, I had no father—not one I admitted to having—and this was a serious offense in a town where sons are taught how to field dress deer and rock a truck out of the mud and chain saw logs without getting the bar stuck, all before high school.

  I got back in my car and drove the two streets to our house, turned right at our lane, rocked over the bumps and ruts, and parked in front of a pine-wood swing set Mom and I had put together for April. I sat for a minute in the car. The east end of the yard leveled off to an aboveground swimming pool that had devolved into a waist-high vat of rainwater and slime bubbles. The pool needed to be dismantled and cut up somehow for a dump run on top of my Nova. In the darkness the hulking shadow of the pool rebuked me for neglecting my family these past months.

  The next morning I went out and split firewood, waiting for the day to heat up before I dealt with the swimming pool. Some of the red oak logs were three feet across, and the dirt underneath crawled with roly-poly bugs and night crawlers. I’d been waiting to see if my mother’s ex-boyfriend would come to take the wood back. She’d broken up with him a week after he’d borrowed a town dump truck to drop the wood off. He was a local cop who, after my mother dumped him, used to spy on us from across the street in his parked cruiser. Now I was running out of time if we wanted firewood for the winter, so fuck Sergeant Lou Costa. As it was I’d need to stack the wood crisscross to season, and still it might be too wet to throw heat.

  It was good cathartic work. You could whale on the big slabs like you were ringing the carnival bell, your body calibrating each swing to the quarter inch, your aim deadly, the ten-pound maul head diving into the coin’s width of a notch you made on your last swing. And sometimes the greener logs would open a swing too soon, leaving me panting and surprised over the split halves like a heavyweight after the knock-down punch, the sweat spraying off my lips hot as blood. The ladybug thermometer read fifty, but I could feel my thermal shirt clinging wet to my shoulders.

  April liked to watch me swing the maul. The medium logs went after five strikes in the center, the sound of the fourth strike hollow like a bass drum, and I’d sing “Dinah, won’t you blow,” and April would return, “Dinah won’t you blow your horn,” which skipped a phrase, but gave her a line before the wood split, and I’d say, “Honk, honk,” and she’d laugh.

  I knew I’d have her for maybe half an hour before she’d want to go back in to watch Inspector Gadget. The limb logs I split one-handed, and she’d grab the halves and throw them in the pile, leaving pink threads from her gloves clinging to splinters. She wanted to try, and on a slab as big around as a manhole cover we held the little hatchet together and knocked apart kindling.

  April hadn’t been inside long when I saw my father walking across the rows of lawn clippings in his wingtip shoes. He held up a glass of water. “Can you take five?” he called.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised to see him. Mom had told him I’d decided to take time off before college next year. She liked to tell him the unpleasant news of our lives in a wry tone that implied his own culpability. “Oh, and by the way, Don,” she’d say. I think also she wanted him to accuse her of neglectful parenting. If he had, she might have found the outrage to finally say what she’d held in for four years: You son of a bitch, why couldn’t I be enough?

  But Don never provoked her, and I think she felt helpless. He hadn’t even given her an affair to hate him for, or the admission that he had fallen out of love when she still loved him. One day he simply changed into this whole other guy—or finally accepted his sexuality, as he put it. When he apologized for hurting her, the apology was laced with the faultless circumstance of having been manipulated by society to think he was straight all these years. After their phone calls, she’d pace the kitchen saying, “How does he sleep at night?” Then she’d collect herself enough to go up to her room and cry.

  She’d just found out she was pregnant when Don stupefied us with the confession that he now liked men, and before she would have to explain a baby bump to the neighbors, Mom sold the house and moved us an hour north to Levi, where half the roads were unpaved, and where she saw in the harvest-season vistas the rolling farmland of her childhood.

  I took the glass of water and drank so forcefully my throat made gulping sounds. Don picked up the maul, tested its weight. His hair was thick and wavy and he had color in his face, but I couldn’t tell if he was thinner, if his lambskin bomber jacket fit more loosely in the shoulders. Whenever he drove out from New Haven to see me, I wondered if he was going to break the news that he had AIDS. It wa
s Russian roulette for gays, everyone said so.

  “Can I give it a go-round?” he said.

  “In a tie?”

  He looked at his clothes under his unzipped jacket. “One of my novelists has a reading in Hartford,” he said. “He used to be a roustabout. He’d appreciate some sweat and calluses.”

  I set up a split piece that needed a second halving. He started from a kind of half squat, and when he swung it around, his necktie smacked him in the face, and his shirt came untucked, but he managed to hit the log about a third of the way in. The maul head opened the top of the log but stopped at the bottom strings of wood grain, so he lifted the maul stuck in the log—opening his stance for balance—and crashed it down so that it fell apart.

  “Hit me again, barkeep,” he said.

  I set up a few easy ones he went through at a swing apiece, singing, “Shout now, with thunder/ Drove the Gaels under/ Cleave them asunder/ Swords of Valhalla!”

  Then I gave him an ugly knotted beast that he bounced off of twice. “Now you’re just being sadistic,” he said. His next swing stuck enough that he could let the handle go and it stayed there. He wiped his hands together.

  “All done?” I said.

  “Are you going to walk on my back when I throw it out?”

  “April might.”

  He patted his forehead with a handkerchief. “She’s adorable. She gave me a hug upstairs.”

  “She’s like that with everybody.”

  “At least I’m everybody,” he said, tucking himself back in. “So no SATs, Mom tells me.” While I set up another log he said that college wouldn’t be like high school, if that’s what concerned me. I regretted the times I’d called him to complain about my miserable experience at Northwest. My classmates had no regard for a private-school transfer who showed up the first day in an Iron Maiden shirt and acid-wash jeans, who didn’t know two-stroke from four-stroke, who scored lower than every girl at backing up a hay wagon with the school’s Super A. Don had offered to let me live with him and start back at Milford Academy in the fall. But then he moved into Stuart’s big colonial (Stuart, the psychiatrist) in New Haven, and it scared me to think what I might witness in that house.