“You think that’s a good idea?”
He shrugged. “Maybe they’re no good for each other. My brother-in-law quit screwing my sister, but then she caught him beating off with her panties. Weird shit happens.”
“At least he’s got somebody,” I said. “Who’s going to take care of him down there?”
“The single life’s a son of a bitch.”
“Maybe if they had another baby.”
Bobby shook his head. “He got cut.”
I stared at him.
“Fixed,” he said. “No toothpaste in the tube, man.”
“He told you that?”
“I drove him to the clinic,” Bobby said. “When Mary Ann’s sister was here. I thought it was a fucked-up plan. What, a week after they lost him. But he did it, he wouldn’t say why. I don’t think she even knows.”
The story didn’t seem over, but he swung around because the talk was getting quieter, and then the crowd in front of us sort of parted around an angry blonde holding a little boy. It took me a minute to realize that this was the baby in the picture Bobby had showed me. Robbie? Ronnie? Randy—that was it.
Bobby slid off his stool. “What’re you bringing him here for?”
She handed the boy out to Bobby. “You’re only moving down there to get out of visitation,” she said. “I’m not a moron.” She spoke for everyone in the bar to hear. “He’s yours tonight. I’ve got plans.” She was almost to the door when she turned back and called, “Bye, baby,” and blew a kiss to the boy.
Randy locked his hands around Bobby’s neck. I guess he was about a year old. “Hey, bud,” Bobby said. To Richie he called, “Get me some of that apple juice.”
A one-year-old at a bar. The idea that anyone might object didn’t occur to Bobby, and there was, consequently, nothing wrong with it at all. Three years of being told when to turn out his light and when to eat, shower, shave, and shit had probably cemented this libertarian spirit as soon as he was released. Though he joked often and was dedicated to his sobriety, chugging near-beer among all these alcoholics, Bobby was fiercely suspicious of the laws of society. He was the kind of man you could imagine dying over a minor principle. From his example, I saw myself in a few years acting on what I wanted, heedless of, and fully ready to accept, the consequences.
Later that night he set Randy on the pool table. The boy jumped when the clang happened and the balls came cracking down. Bobby racked, and we shot lightly while Randy scraped blue chalk over his knee.
From one of the nearby tables a giant in height and muscle and fat—a man who could’ve filled a doorway and destroyed it by lifting his elbows—called over to us, “Naw, man. He’ll piss on the felt.”
“Calm down, Larson,” Bobby said. “You know what a diaper is. Your old lady wears ’em.”
12.
I didn’t expect Mary Ann to be home when I came by for the jack. I parked behind her Malibu in the driveway and found the garage key under the second brick, where Nick said it would be. The garage was a separate little building in the narrow side yard. Under humming fluorescent lights I walked around two refrigerator-sized Snap-on boxes and stripped engine blocks three to a stack against the back wall. Nick’s last project had been a ’66 GTO he’d gotten for twelve hundred and flipped for eight thousand, and there was just room enough to fit a car, though I wondered if he’d ever find the energy for side work again.
It started to rain as I was putting the jack and torque wrench in my trunk. I hopped in but felt Nick’s key still in my pocket, and as I ran it back the rain came to a crescendo, big drops splashing up from the cement, a sudden current rushing in the eave gutter over my head. With my back against the door I lit a cigarette and watched the house until the rain let up. I looked in the windows for Mary Ann, realizing too late that I should have knocked to let her know why I was here, in case Nick hadn’t told her. I thought about going up to the house, anyway. I didn’t know how I would say it, or if I’d be able to, but I saw one last hope for Miami—if she only knew about it. Maybe it could be a new start for them. And I’d heard that vasectomies were reversible, or maybe they could adopt, or maybe they could just be enough for each other.
The rain slowed and I snuffed out my cigarette. On the steps to the kitchen door I had to dare myself to knock, and I waited in the spitting rain, juggling thoughts that were in the end irrelevant. She never answered the door.
Walking back to my car I heard her before I saw her, her exhales sharp and arrested, her face flushed a deep red as she turned in from the street. Lifting and dropping of her feet seemed to help her vacuum in the air, and she slowed to a wide-gaited walk right past me. Hands on her hips she came back nodding, gasping, “Hey,” and then pacing back. She was soaked through her tie-dye T-shirt and shorts.
“How far did you run?”
She shook her head, panting. “What time is it?”
I didn’t own a watch. “About two, I think.”
She wiped her wet forehead with her wet forearm, her sweat indistinguishable from the rain. “I left at eleven thirty.” As she walked up the stairs she pulled from between her T-shirt and sports bra a necklace ribbon holding the house key.
I’d never done much jogging—four-minute rounds on the heavy bag was the closest I came to aerobic exhaustion—and it always amazed me how serious runners could take themselves near death and be half recovered in ten minutes. In the kitchen she drank a full glass of water, still breathing heavily through her nose. I smelled her warmth and the quiet made me anxious. I told her I’d come for the jack, which she didn’t seem to know or care about.
“I meant to thank you for calling the other night,” she said. She set down the empty water glass and leaned back on the wall. Her face was still red, her wet hair pulled back tight in a ponytail.
“Did he tell you about the Corvette?”
I was surprised when she shook her head. I’d thought it had been a safe question to ask. Already I’d told Mom and April and even Don about the car, and I would have told many others if Nick hadn’t told me not to.
“As a matter of fact, no, he didn’t,” she said. “We didn’t really talk at all. Not today. And if not today … Today or never, right?” She smiled, and when she turned her face up to the ceiling I saw that she was fighting back tears. I didn’t understand. She was standing on one sneaker with the other pressed against the wall, so that her knee, bloodless white, pointed at me. I pictured the wet shape she would leave on the wallpaper when she stood away from it.
“I got up with him. I followed him in here, back to the bedroom. He changed clothes. He brushed his…” She pushed the heel of her hand against her forehead. “He wouldn’t say anything.” There was a calendar push-pinned to the wall across from me, and I looked at today, July 26th, but the square was empty. What was today? I couldn’t ask her. Somehow that would be a betrayal on par with the betrayal of Nick’s not talking to her. July 26th. Exactly a month before my birthday.
It struck me a moment after I thought the word “birthday,” and suddenly I was breathing through my mouth, the air burning cool on my tongue. I dropped into a chair at the table. I took off my hat with the sensation that it could suffocate me. One year old, he would have been. When I looked at her she had drawn her arms around, hugging herself. I said the only thing I could say immediately, the thing on my mind. “Nick should have stayed home today.”
She began to nod, her lips curled, and with her arms still in place she started to cry violently. Her body couldn’t give up more air or water, I thought in the second before all thought turned to instinct, and I went to her. Her lips were drenched and she opened them to breathe and pinched them closed and shook her head no, but I knew that the no wasn’t for me but for Joey leaving her and for Nick leaving her, and I took another step before she pushed herself off the wall. I caught her, staggering, her arms around me. Her heat came through my shirt, and her sweat was so flushed through as to have no smell except for the faint baby powder of her antiperspirant. She wanted to be off the gr
ound—I didn’t realize this until her leg came up around my leg, buckling it so that I staggered and tipped over with her onto the kitchen floor.
I was able to throw my weight and take most of the impact on my elbow and shoulder, and I started to ask her if she was hurt, but she kept her face hard on my collarbone, holding me against her with all the shaking strength she had left. My shoulder on the floor was taking most of our weight, but I stopped feeling it as the pressure of my embrace seemed to be slowing her down, deepening her breaths.
We lay there on our sides on her kitchen floor. Time was measured by how settled she became, how close to settled, and the wet that was her wetness all over me was cooler now, and when I closed my eyes my sense of smell heightened—pine, maybe, and the weak shampoo of her last shower. The ball of pressure on my back was her hand, I realized when she opened it, and her fingers spread over my spine. The sensation of her pressing fingertips caused a movement in my testicles, and I recognized with horror that I was getting hard, and then was fully hard, the length of my cock mashed against her thigh. When I pulled back, she made a sound and the hand that had been on my upper back sank down, and with this as leverage she slammed her hip back against me.
Before my mind turned off for some immeasurable time, I knew that I would feel remorse, which was an old reflex that usually kept me out of trouble. But the gigantic wrongness of what we were doing was only in words. It was nowhere in her touching me, her warmth and softness, her wanting to, though strangely I felt the sin of what Kim and I had done a year earlier without love, the contrast of those two sticky gropings in the hay dust with now.
In a slow lucid moment, I let my body determine what was necessary. This love. Mary Ann. I’d resisted letting myself know her because I was afraid I could love her. The way she looked, the unexpected things she said, her courage after Joey. Had there been an opening to talk now, I would have said the kindest words. I would have been selfless, better than myself.
Yet it was because we weren’t talking that I felt briefly awakened, if not in the Buddhist sense then as if a film, a residue of some kind, had been peeled away. I wasn’t looking behind or ahead. My mind was in fact empty and I was my body, following the light, no matter its source. The truth was there, and it said that a moment I lived inside of could never be bad.
The snap opened and the zipper spread, and when she squeezed me a flaring pain ended, a crushing weight was removed, and there was no stifling the groan from deep inside. She laughed a nervous, encouraging laugh, and I came in a burst of heat that must’ve gone straight up her bare arm and onto her shorts and maybe the floor. I couldn’t look down at it, couldn’t look at her, closed my eyes, and when she rolled back from me I reached down to close my pants, feeling the warm disgusting glue of myself, but she said, “No, God.” She knocked over one of the kitchen chairs swinging around to throw off shorts and panties together, and then she rolled back and pulled my pants down to my knees with one clean yank. When she straddled me I was hard still and became harder inside her.
On top of me she pulled off her shirt and the sports bra. She reached for my hands and brought them up around her sides so that I could feel her smooth ribs, and later I would think about this positioning of my hands—she even spread apart my fingers—as a kind of preparation for the moment when she tipped forward and kissed me.
13.
Nick was slouched over in the swivel chair behind the old Gunlocke desk, and I couldn’t stay away from him. At first, it was just out of needing to know if Mary Ann had said anything—I’d staggered from her house yesterday with no idea about the future—and then it was out of wanting to tell him what I’d done.
But getting us anywhere near that conversation was complicated by a bizarre circumstance: Eve hadn’t come in yesterday morning to pick up the Corvette. It was parked in the Dungeon, its exotic fenders scarcely concealed by the terry-lined cover. We had no phone number and her address on the work order was just a P.O. box in Miami.
Nick shook his lighter trying to get it to work. “No phone call, nothing,” he said, as if all the worry had occurred in the last five minutes.
I set down the spark plugs I was gapping and came over with a lit match. “She said they were staying at a Hyatt. The Grand Hyatt, I think.”
“I called over there. They never checked in.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I had to keep myself from saying it over and over. I went to the door with my spark plugs but turned back. I just had to be around him.
“Now I got this car down there,” he said, knocking ash over the floor, “this famous car waiting to get stole.”
Lying awake last night, I’d tried to convince myself that Nick was bad for Mary Ann, and that in ways I wasn’t fully aware of, she was bad for him. But now I couldn’t get beyond seeing Nick as my friend, and I was in a mood to talk like friends at the same time I was afraid that silence might turn into accusation. I knew I was a coward, uncertain of myself at an age when I wanted my personality to be set in steel.
In the months before Don finally left us—he’d been erasing himself for years by then, working late or attending readings in the city, poring over manuscripts on the weekends—I would tell myself that at least he wasn’t like some fathers out there. He didn’t hit me or insult me or embarrass me in public. But when I was facing any of the thousand crossroads of my childhood, when I was called on to tell the painful truth, or to stand on principle, then I felt only jealous of the kids who had fathers they looked up to. So I’d compiled several men into a role model of my own, and now the stoic Charles Bronson wanted to remain silent, while the morally complicated Don Johnson wanted to hear Nick say that he didn’t love Mary Ann.
“It’s like having a padlock on the Mona Lisa down there,” Nick said. “Anybody with a pry bar could jimmy that bay door.”
“But nobody knows it’s a ZL1,” I said. “Right? I didn’t tell anyone. And I know you didn’t. Does Mary Ann even know?”
When Nick looked up at me, I couldn’t read his stare. He was wise to me, and now that I’d said her name … Suddenly he turned and threw himself over the desk, pounding the parts room window in a deranged expression of his full hatred of me.
But no. On the other side of the glass, Bobby was taking a work order off the peg hooks. “No cherry-picking, Stango,” Nick called. “Take it in order.”
Bobby cussed, put back the second work order, and took down the first. He came in to the parts room and set it on the table. “What the hell am I supposed to diagnose?” he said. I looked at the work order. A 1982 Corvette. Check engine light. Black smoke. Hesitation.
“Course it hesitates,” Bobby said. “It’s got a Tonka Toy motor.”
Nick took down one of the new computer books he’d bought at Carquest and handed it to Bobby. “See what you can figure out.”
“I figured it out when it pulled in,” he said. “Low compression and a shitload of wires.”
“It’s a D and A,” Nick said. “Hook it up to the scope.”
“Rally rims and a spoiler do not a muscle car make.”
Both of us were shocked—at least I know I was—when Nick grabbed the book out of his hand and gave it to me. “Here,” he said. “Go see what you can figure out.”
Bobby came over when I had the Corvette hooked up to the scope. “He’s serious,” I said. “He wants us doing computer cars down there.”
“Down where,” he said. “I look around, I don’t see Eve coming back.” Bobby thought she was dead. He knew a mid-level manager for Fat Tony Salerno in Harlem, who said there was a whole graveyard of out-of-town drug dealers at the bottom of the East River.
The engine was choked with vacuum lines and wiring harnesses. In the center of it a large plastic cover read CROSS-FIRE INJECTION. Bobby shook his head. “Best of luck.”
But then he kept coming over to see what I was doing. “So you just ask the computer what’s wrong?”
“That is the plan.”
“One robot talking to a
nother robot. Neat.”
I took the air cleaner covers off the two throttle bodies. “It’s like dual carbs on a Hemi.”
“That,” Bobby said, “is about as unlike dual carbs as a pair of bowling balls. Where do you adjust the float? Where’s the choke and the mixture screws, smart guy?”
I sat in the driver’s seat and read through the diagnosis section twice. It was almost funny what it was telling me to do. I found a paper clip on the ground and straightened it into a V. Under the dashboard was a matchbox-size ALDL connector with twelve cavities. Just like the manual said, I ground the A cavity with the B cavity using the paper clip, then turned the key. There came a clicking from under the hood, and the check engine light started to blink. One blink. Pause. Three blinks. Then one again, three again. Code thirteen. “Holy shit,” I heard myself say.
“It’s the oxygen sensor,” I told Nick.
“You sure?”
“I’ll check resistance, and then yeah. A bad sensor can make it run rich.”
He went over to the book and moved his finger down the page it was open to. I was about 95 percent sure I was right. “It was a code thirteen.”
“I believe you,” he said. He came back over and leaned on the opposite fender. As I was discovering beyond any doubt that it was the oxygen sensor, Nick said, “You’re in it.”
I looked up from my ohmmeter, caught off guard and suddenly looking him in the eye, which was the last thing I was ready to do. He watched me with the admiration of a father grooming his son to take over the family business, and I knew that my voice would break if I opened my mouth.
“Wouldn’t matter if the place was burning down around you,” he said. “You’re working it through. Seeing the patterns, what’s causing what. No surprises. It can’t be any other way than what you’re thinking. You’re in it, partner.” He clapped my shoulder and I had to look again at the quivering dial on the ohmmeter, my face hot, my sinuses melting. I’d been waiting all morning for Mary Ann to show up, but I was suddenly glad that she hadn’t, and that I couldn’t see her and that she couldn’t see me, because I felt, for the first time, angry at her. I couldn’t have said why, because it had nothing to do with the mind.
The Spark and the Drive Page 8
