The Spark and the Drive

by Wayne Harrison

  I poured my coffee and looked back to find Nick staring, frozen, at the Corvette. I didn’t understand. Corvettes came in all the time. The car covers were mostly off by now, and I could see enough of it to have a reasonable guess at the year. It had a flat back window, which meant older than ’77, and a front bumper, which meant older than ’73. Third-generation Corvettes began in ’68, so it was between a ’68 and ’72. Finally, and I was proud of my detective work here, there was no fender flare, which appeared in ’70, so we were looking at either a ’68 or a ’69.

  The car also had a strange black stripe squaring off the hood. I’d never seen one like it. If Chevys had stripes they were usually the two fat Super Sport stripes over the trunk and hood.

  “I order tave kosi,” the customer was saying to Mary Ann. “You will like the tave kosi. Dis, I guarantee.”

  Rubbing her fingers, Mary Ann said, “You don’t have dis for dis”—pointing at the paperwork—“you get dis”—making a fist. She turned to see Nick, who was only six feet away from them, still watching the Corvette outside. I don’t know what words could have been as malicious, as unloving as his indifference to an awkward situation that could have easily been cleared up.

  “Or any menu you pick,” the Albanian said.

  “You’re asking me out to dinner?” Mary Ann said, still watching Nick. He was a photograph, his thumb touching two fingers as if he were holding a tiny teacup in front of him.

  “No lamb, no problem,” the Albanian said.

  She turned abruptly. “Why not? My husband doesn’t seem to have an opinion.”

  It took the guy a second to register, and then he held his hands up. “I kid, I kid,” he said. Mary Ann looked down and began punching numbers on the calculator.

  “I’m a dick,” the guy said, his accent gone. “Let me get out of your hair. I’m sorry. I’ll come back.” Nick still had his back to them, so the guy approached me. “I apologize,” he said, and stupidly I shook his hand.

  I started to leave with my coffee black, hell with the sugar, but as I glanced back I saw that Mary Ann had closed her eyes and was pressing one of her temples. “Nick,” she said, but he was lost. She dropped her hand and stared at him with surprise and fury, a look that precedes someone saying, with full contempt, “Are you kidding?”—in fact, I thought for a moment she had said that.

  After a long second she turned and went down the hallway to the office. In the humming quiet, what drew me back to Nick was the small sound of liquid running onto the carpet. His cup was turned over on an end table, the last of the coffee beaded over the cover of a People magazine. “You should talk to her,” I said, and he turned suddenly and bumped into me, causing my own coffee to splash out onto my shoe. His eyes were startled and seemed not to recognize me. I moved out of his way.

  I got paper towels from the bathroom, and when I looked through the front window, Nick was pacing by the car trailer with his hands on his head, like a witness fresh on the scene of a gory wreck.

  * * *

  When I came back out to the bays, Ray was alone in a folding chair with an Arby’s Big Boy on his thigh. He was staring contemptuously at a Smokey and the Bandit TransAm in his bay. “Are you telling me I have to get up for this shit box?” he said.

  I looked at the car, black and gold and all weighed down with ground effects and spoilers. The hood was opened, but that was all, no diagnostic leads clamped on. Ray preferred his own five senses to any oscilloscope. He read spark plugs like a mystic reads tea leaves and could tell you the octane of a gasoline by tasting it.

  The TransAm’s engine was choked with hoses and vacuum lines for smog control. You couldn’t even see the spark plug boots. I leaned over and started loosening the wing nut on the giant air cleaner, singing, as I did, a line of “Eastbound and Down” from the movie.

  “It’s a real shame what you got for cars,” Ray said. “Your generation. The music’s shit, too. Now it’s the law I got to wear a seat belt?”

  He went on like that and worked himself into a coughing fit, after which he spat something terrible into a trash can.

  “What’s the deal with Nick and Mary Ann?” I said.

  “Aw Christ. Hell. Don’t ask me.” He walked away, and then came back. “All I know is if you’re going to call it quits, do it young. Me and Bonnie stayed married for the kids, and what the fuck good did that do? All they ever seen was fighting.” He spit again into the trash can. “My boy’s out in Ohio someplace with a warrant out. Ginny’s got that big Polack, can’t even feed his kids. Meantime, I’m fifty-two. I want company, I’m supposed to go dance the jungle boogie? You laugh. Just wait, your time’s coming.” He chugged his Dr Pepper and produced a great explosive burp that caught him off guard. “Jay-sus,” he said and glanced up the aisle between bays. In a sudden low voice he said to me, “Don we now our gay apparel.”

  I ducked out from under the hood as a man in a mauve polo shirt and pleated pants walked up to the car. “This one’s mine,” he said. “I just picked it up.” He looked a little embarrassed. He’d had to have heard Ray’s belch. “From that place Chachi’s, on 69.”

  “They give you a money-back guarantee?” Ray said.

  The man smiled as if getting a joke, but Ray didn’t say anything else, and the poor guy laughed awkwardly. “Nobody does that,” he said.

  “What do you mean it hesitates?” Ray said.

  “Not really like a bog or a skip. She asked me that out front. More like I’m towing something. It doesn’t pick up like you’d expect.” He gave Ray a chance to answer all that he’d said, but Ray stared at him vacantly.

  “I remember when I was a kid my neighbor had this Super Commando—”

  “Okay, let me stop you right there, chief.” Ray stood and threw away the last two bites of his sandwich. “A big Mopar and this you got here have zero in common. Zero.”

  The guy looked at me, and I rolled my eyes in a weak show of camaraderie.

  “You ever want to break the speed limit in this boat,” Ray said, “yank out that smog motor and invest in a four-bolt small block. End of story.”

  I went back to get the work order for the Albanian’s car. At the pegboard I was reading over his complaint when, from the lower-level parking lot outside, I heard gunshots. I ran to the open window. Two stories below, the yellow Corvette was parked in the middle of the dirt lot and Nick was walking around it, creating a perimeter, it seemed, between the car and the old tires and hoses and oil drums and trash unrelated to cars that had ended up in the weeds. After a moment Bobby came out of the Dungeon hauling out buckets of the rusted bolts and engine parts littering the bay.

  When I got down there Nick had his hands buried in his pockets and was slightly bent over the open hood, his mouth moving. I hurried into the Dungeon. “He’s out there talking to himself, Bobby,” I said.

  He handed me a .22 Marlin rifle. “Here, I’m not supposed to be around these things,” he said, speaking with a cigarette in his lips. “You see a rat, blast his ass. Nuke the little cocksucker.”

  He brought out two more buckets while I stood dumbfounded between the damp fieldstone walls, the mortar black with mold, until a rat the size of a fireplace log ran past me. By the time I thought about the rifle I was holding, it had disappeared behind a broken Hibachi. Then Nick was beside me. “Get something to cover that,” he said, pointing at the little scratched Plexiglass window no bigger than a cereal box in the bay door. “Find some cardboard. Here.” He handed me an ancient roll of duct tape from a workbench and then hurried back to the Corvette. All the cardboard was rotten, but I was able to cover the small window with strips of duct tape alone.

  “The ’Vette needs an overhaul,” Bobby said, returning to the small bay for more buckets. “You and Nick are doing it down here and don’t tell nobody. If they ask upstairs, you’re scraping asbestos out of the ceiling. That way they’ll stay out.”

  I was only frustrated a few seconds longer, because it had to be some kind of joke. Bobby was big
on jokes. He’d charge a points condenser with eight thousand volts, pick it up with rubber-handled pliers, and toss it to you. He’d glaze a toilet seat with WD-40 or paper the inside of your locker with hermaphrodite porn.

  I leaned the rifle against an old radiator and lit a cigarette as I followed him outside.

  “No fuck-ups on this one,” he said, as he passed me again. “You watch him whenever his hands are on that motor, you hear? After it’s done, we get a few pictures to prove it.”

  “Prove what?” I said, kicking around a foot of old radiator hose.

  He dropped the buckets and shook blood back into his hands. “It’s a ZL-1,” he said, turning to the Corvette. “King of the hill. The fastest production car America ever built.”

  I exhaled smoke with a wry laugh. “Right.”

  He looked at me, annoyed, and I wondered what the hell the joke was. How could a Corvette be faster than a Hemi Superbird, for instance. Or a big-block Cobra? Except for the side pipes and high-rise hood, this yellow one looked like any other Corvette. It had Florida plates that said EVEADE.

  “Is that a vanity plate?” I said. “It’s spelled wrong.”

  Bobby ignored me.

  “What is it again?”

  “ZL-1. All-aluminum four twenty-seven.”

  I laughed again. “All aluminum. Does it fly around and shoot laser beams?”

  He started back for the Dungeon, the veins in his neck standing out like waxed extensions of his mustache.

  “How many are there?” I said. Since I’d been here, we’d worked on a convertible ’Cuda, one of two hundred and fifteen, and a ’67 Z/28, one of seventy-three.

  “Two,” he said, and I realized he thought I meant how many buckets did he have left to bring out.

  “How many ZL1s, I mean.”

  “I just told you. Two.”

  “This car is one of two?”

  “Careful you don’t ding the paint,” he said.

  7.

  The car was owned by a tall redhead named Eve Moore. Though I associated true redheads with tomboys, suspenders, freckles, bare feet like Huck Finn, Eve wore a sun hat and a white dress that looked like it was silk, over which she had tossed a light aqua sweater, the color of her eyes, that had only one tiny button at the neck. Her hair, shoulder-length, looked expensively maintained—each strand coated to slide individually so that the cumulative effect was a movement like water when she turned her head. As she got closer I smelled an understated perfume that made my scalp tingle. She was the kind of woman I instinctively looked away from, reading any interest she might show as mockery and steeling myself against her smile.

  Eve had asked us to pick a restaurant and to not worry about prices. Nick didn’t care where we ate, and of course I didn’t know any fine dining in Waterbury, so after some discussion Ray and Bobby decided on Tia Juanita’s, where the house wine came out of a box and they charged for a second helping of chips.

  Bobby rode with me to the restaurant, and I speculated on how a woman so young could own such a car. I thought she was an actress—I was pretty sure I’d seen her on episodes of The New Mike Hammer, and maybe in St. Elmo’s Fire. Bobby just let me go on and on and was grinning when I looked at him. “I mean, what’s a car like that worth, you think?” I said.

  The number he said so astounded me that for a second or two I wasn’t even driving my Nova, as if I’d fallen asleep, and I woke to find Bobby’s hand nudging the wheel back from the center lines.

  Bobby started playing drums on the dashboard. “She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie,” he crooned, rolling the backs of his nails over the vents and flicking them against the window for a cymbal when he got to the payoff: “Cocaine.”

  “She told you that?”

  “She’s rich in Miami, bro. They got a meeting in New York tonight. Look at that big Dago she’s got opening her doors.” He drummed some more.

  * * *

  Not until the six of us were standing by the stucco arch in the foyer, waiting under the knotted strings of paper shades as the waiters sang “Happy Birthday” to a fat kid in a giant sombrero, did I really take a look at Dennis. His eyes drooped like a boxer’s (though it might have been Bobby’s calling him a Dago that made me think of Sylvester Stallone) and he was stocky with short, moussed hair that was the same black and ivory as his herringbone blazer. When Eve spoke to him he leaned in attentively, nodding with his brows lifted, and after she finished he turned and offered a brief reply I couldn’t hear, before returning to a spine-stiff military stance, hands clasped in front of him.

  Bobby had told me what the ZL-1 was worth, and who else had that kind of money? I looked around and imagined men with Uzis splattering blood all over the cheap frescoes and mosaic tabletops.

  Dennis left his blazer on when he sat, which made me think there was a shoulder holster under it that contained maybe a Bren-10 like Crockett wore on Miami Vice. But when he leaned forward to take a menu, his jacket opened, and I saw that all he was hiding was patches of dark that spread from the armpits of his shirt. I ordered a Negra Modelo like he did.

  The day was fast turning into the strangest of my life, and every next minute distanced me from my innocent past. Five years ago I was at Milford Academy in my blazer and tie, and now I was here, watching in a daze as food was ordered, was brought to the table; we ate and drank.

  I don’t remember what was talked about until Dennis broke his silence. He leaned toward Bobby and said, “Back in my knucklehead twenties, I did a job for some disorganized people that cost me twenty-eight months in North Dade. I say so because I notice how you got your arm around your plate.”

  The dangerous moment came when they watched each other, each man frank and undaunted, and even after Bobby nodded there was a long, uncertain second before he spoke. “They got me on a stretch up here just about like that. Twenty-six months.”

  Dennis leaned back from the table and sipped his beer, and when I saw that his inquiry was finished, I said to Bobby, “Tell them how you did it.”

  Bobby set down his fork and tried to laugh it off with modesty that was only half genuine. “I’d like to hear it,” Eve said, and she held him with her big pale eyes as if no one had ever interested her as much.

  Bobby looked away first, dragging a forkful of enchilada through his guacamole and leaning over for a bite. “Well,” he said, wiping a napkin over his mustache, “looks like I got the floor now. So back in my ‘knucklehead’ twenties,” he said, and Dennis gave a polite laugh, “I realized that about twice my paycheck was going into drink and drug. I had a girlfriend was working at the Howard Johnson’s in Hopeville, which is out of downtown, but not too far. You can’t see the parking lot from the street. It’s where a lot of secretaries and their bosses like to go for a nooner. It’s sort of famous for it.”

  Bobby left out that everyone called the hotel “Blow-Jos,” and that he’d keep his story clean for a woman gave me the strange feeling of laughing inside. Often Bobby seemed remote and a little dangerous, a former taker of bad pills and a drunk, a former thief and convict, a current biker with biker friends, and whenever I saw a recognizable behavior—due to manners, in this case—I felt that we weren’t so different, that whatever made us different wasn’t more than the random matter of life experience.

  “A guy I knew ran a chop shop over in Bunker Hill,” Bobby continued. “‘I’m always getting guys bringing me Town Cars and Audis,’ he tells me, ‘only I can’t unload ’em. What I need is Hondas, Camrys, Escorts, like that. Joe Lunchbucket rides.’”

  “Because who gets high-end parts from a chop shop?” Eve said.

  He opened out his hands in affirmation. “So I’ve got Melanie keeping her eyes open for couples that show up, no bags. Cash. They try to leave the make and model blank on the form, but Melanie tells them they’ll get towed. So when she gets a good one, she puts ’em in front so they can’t see the parking lot from their room. Then she gives me a call. I slim-jim it, hammer the steering column. I’m o
ut in a minute and a half. Leave my own rig in the lot, pick it up later.”

  “Oh my God,” Eve said. “It never gets reported.”

  “Or if it does, they say it got took from work, or from Bradlees or somewhere. By the time it even comes over the radio that Camry’s in fifty pieces, VIN numbers ground off. And I’m out the door with a tax-free grand in my pocket.”

  Nick and Ray were finished eating, and Nick lit a cigarette. Eve gave Bobby a chance to chew his food, but she never stopped watching him, and the way she just barely squinted made her eyes seem enchanted and capable of extracting all your secrets.

  “You miss it?” she said.

  “What, jacking cars?” He grinned, his forehead shining. “Nothing too severe. You get cocky, and in the clink you go. I keep that in mind. But I think about walking out of that place with my money, and knowing the car’s their problem now, and I wasn’t going to get caught. All you keep saying to yourself is, ‘It worked. Holy fuck, it worked.’ Yeah, that I miss.”

  Though drugs were never mentioned that night, I couldn’t help thinking that these were serious felons, and I found myself putting on an act of casualness, shaping the ash of my cigarette on the rim of my plate or faking a yawn when I was certain they could all hear my heart banging like a Super Ball in a jar.

  “You know what I’m good at?” Eve said, settling back in her seat after Dennis had lit her Benson & Hedges. The question was put out to all of us. Nick sat back and watched her, and even Ray looked earnestly curious, as if he’d never given a wise-ass answer in his life. “I understand customer demand,” she said. “It sounds simple, and it is simple. Miami right now is the place to have your midlife crisis. All you see are hot rods.”

  “Everybody wants that bad B-body they couldn’t afford in high school,” Nick said.

  “Go fast and go American,” Eve said. “Three shops in South Dade specialize in Ferraris—thank you, Don Johnson. But when I wanted someone I could trust with my Chevy big block, look how far I had to come.”