The Spark and the Drive

by Wayne Harrison

  Nick asked what I was making, and after a moment I was able to tell him.

  “Starting this week, you’re up to seven percent commission on top,” he said. “Computer work’s fast and expensive. That’s better than a raise.”

  14.

  Backing out the Corvette, I glimpsed Mary Ann through the big window as she arrived for the day and set her purse behind the counter. From the low bucket seat I watched like a stalker, feeling lost to myself, thinking the words “crime of passion” and how that was only a way of rationalizing the crime. What was I now? What was she?

  I expected her to look like a victim, adrift and betrayed, but instead she wore the expression of any other day, glancing around behind the counter at the work she had to do.

  I parked the Corvette and went in with the work order. The lobby was empty, and as I came up to the counter she said, “Good morning,” in a sweet way, and the indescribable thing we had done was in the realm of the possible. All I had to do was seem capable of containing it.

  She smiled and glanced down at the counter. “Nick didn’t do last night’s deposit, I see.” And, my God, that she’d allowed my hands over her soft breasts, that her hands had told mine to squeeze, and that she’d kissed me with even some shyness in the backward order of my already being inside her. I was seeing her body and our messy lovemaking on my third try, when I was able to last and she made the sounds of letting go and I let go inside her.

  Unlike my own, her eyes were bright and not swollen; already I’d been in the bathroom trying to wash out the bloodshot with tap water, which made it worse, and then pressing a cold Dr Pepper can to the under-eye bags, which did nothing at all.

  “So how are you?” she said.

  I couldn’t hide my amazement at the question. “I’m not sure.”

  She zipped up the money bag and the wrapped change made a thud where she dropped it on the floor. “That can wait.” Then she looked up at me with a sudden smile. “So what are your plans for lunch?”

  * * *

  I fell on her over the front seat and jammed the gearshift up to first with my shin. The backseat would have been more practical, but I was ready to snap off the steering wheel and throw it out the window before I broke from her long enough to climb over the seat. My cock felt harder than any bone in my body when she took it in her warm hand. Under her cotton dress I found that she was as ready as I was.

  I stopped to open my shirt because you couldn’t really see my upper body muscle with it on. Then I was tearing at a studded condom package with my teeth. “What are you doing?” she said. “I have my diaphragm in.” She knocked the little red package out of my hand, and I hated to see it go. In the bathroom at Chevron I’d put my quarters in the Ultra Ribbed slot, between Ultra Thin and Extra Sensitive. I would’ve picked No Feeling At All, if that had been an option.

  I thought that Nick could probably last with Mary Ann. He could look at her phenomenal face, her sexy lean jogging body, and not feel daunted. It seemed to be a passage of manhood to deaden yourself to the unspeakable beauty of women.

  “Are you safe?” she said. “I’m safe. I guess we should’ve discussed that yesterday.” She kissed me. “I trust you, Justin.”

  She’d done an extraordinary thing since I’d seen her in the lobby—she’d put on eyeliner. I could suddenly recall the very few times she’d worn it. I don’t know what the occasions were, but now I was the occasion. My God she was hot. I was pumping in her hand before I realized it. “I’m sorry,” I said, agonizing for a final allowance.

  “I want this as bad as you do.” She reached down to disentangle one leg from her panties.

  It wasn’t long, seconds, before I was thrusting with all my strength. I had to pull back and out and close my eyes, hold my breath, let the still release of the air reset the timer. As we began again and found our rhythm, she didn’t make sex sounds or really let her hips answer my thrusting, but only breathed in lapping rhythm with our slow dance. When she finally did start to move I tried to pull back again but she held me there, and with her first soft, “oh,” I was done. I pressed my mouth down on hers and let go. Then all I could do was hold still, like an invalid, pressing down on her until her eyes rolled back, and I watched her face, watched everything it did. She settled and sighed, and when she looked up at me she smiled with such sweet thank-you, her face flushed, her eyes sleepy and wet.

  * * *

  Only minutes had passed since we’d parked, and we got out of the car at a place that looked like the day after the Apocalypse. Sections of concrete parking lot jutted up like broken ice on a pond, and rusted and peeling chain-link fence opened on mini temples that had been caved in or knocked apart.

  It was the remnants of a Waterbury oddity called Holy Land, USA. I’d read that in the ’60s a hundred thousand people every year made the pilgrimage here, some from overseas. Its name had even issued from the Pope’s holy mouth, I forget why, but now it was just a bizarre Road Warrior vision of the Bible. Crosses were covered with spray paint, nearly every statue decapitated. The Ark of the Covenant lay half charred and upside-down under the archway for Eden. According to the Waterbury Republican, the park was a haven for junkies and gangbangers, and I noticed for the first time the cluster of low-riders parked on the opposite side of the lot.

  She wanted to take me on a little tour, and we still had some time. I’d told Nick I was going for a test drive and then to Popeye’s Chicken, where there was always a mile-long line at the register. In a skipping Dodge Dart I’d followed her Malibu out through neighborhoods of turn-of-the-century mansions that were three-family houses now, with round parlor rooms and wraparound porches, and up Pine Hill to a world that was sacred and terrifying.

  Through the parking lot she led me around fire pits and glass and rain-puckered porn magazines. Past the broken cinder-block wall of a former gift shop, guys with black bandannas were spray-painting crowns over the Ten Commandment tablets. They weren’t bullies but the murderous badasses that bullies modeled themselves on. Relaxed among the wreckage, they seemed to arise from lawless places, one of them baseballing rocks out into the biblical city with a stick. They were Latin Kings, and according to the paper, they’d left bodies in this very park. They called each other Angels with the unsettling implication that they weren’t afraid to die.

  I avoided eye contact and smiled at nothing. Though I couldn’t think of a single word, I strained to give the impression that Mary Ann and I were deep in conversation, and also that I was the last person who would ever report a crime. Someone laughed and I couldn’t swallow. With her olive complexion, Mary Ann could have passed for Puerto Rican, and I saw the danger that holding her hand and being white might put me in. I was afraid enough to let go, but I didn’t let go.

  In my periphery I saw one of the Kings stop moving. Then a voice full of gravel: “Yo,” and in a black Yankees cap he glided up on us. He was squinting so hard one eye was almost closed, as if aiming a gun, only the gun would come up sideways. They pointed them sideways to break convention, or to say this is my hand, too, this gun is my hand and you’re so close I can’t miss, as easily as I can slap you I will shoot you.

  “Hold up,” he said. “You know about Buicks? I got an eighty Regal. It does this shit like ting-ting-ting, like castanets, you know?”

  My brown-and-khaki Out of the Hole uniform. It got me into bars and liquor stores, and now it was saving my life. I looked at Mary Ann, who was waiting for me to speak. “I think he means pinging,” she said.

  I found my voice and asked what kind of gas he used.

  “High-test only,” he said, and I was stunned by both his somberness and the understanding that this outlaw, this “soldier of the street” according to the paper, used the same grade of gasoline as the CEOs who brought us their muscle cars. With a slight dip of his head, a faint bow of respect, he asked if I could take a look. I allowed myself to smile when I was walking behind him, giddy with a resurgence of faith in my profession. Automobiles were like a
great species among us, more vital and abiding than most people in our lives, yet only a handful of us fully understood their complicated language. Even gangbangers were humbled by the ailments of their cars.

  The radiator was low on coolant and I showed him a leak at the thermostat housing. From out of a Newport pack he handed me a joint, and though I’d never tried pot I thanked him, as if he’d tipped me in ordinary currency.

  Mary Ann laughed about it when we were alone again. She took my hand and I was sure of nothing, a moment gone wild because it wasn’t a casual crossing of the hands but a lacing of fingers that pressed that softest of skin. It was just that everything was working in reverse, and only now was I realizing that she liked me, despite all my fervent denials.

  She led me along a path that must’ve been a lawn at one time, though what grew now grew out of magazine pages, cigarette packs, McDonald’s wrappers, broken glass, plastic bags. The weeds looked mutated they were so big, and there were briar bushes and poison ivy and tamarack trees that didn’t know where they were, flying a ripped flannel shirt like a flag, the leaves yellowing underneath, other limbs broken by a tire, a rusted tricycle. And the crawling and flitting bugs didn’t know where they were either, hovering down to a rose petal that was really a torn Doritos bag.

  There was a stucco table with stucco benches in a clearing where gravel and concrete kept the plant life down. You could imagine a family having lunch here long ago, but now half the table had been broken off, its rusted chicken-wire skeleton showing underneath. When I lifted a damp newspaper off the bench on my side, two firey centipedes came to life and I knocked them away.

  “Last Thanksgiving, there were guys in army jackets up here,” she said. “Vietnam vets. They made a fire and had a turkey cooking on a spit. It snowed, remember that?” She looked around as she described the flocked buildings, the vets using the park for cover in a snowball fight, and it occurred to me that Thanksgiving was only days after Joey died. I looked around through her eyes of mourning, imagining a kind of comfort she’d found in all the wreckage.

  Rather than looking like a tiny burrito, the marijuana joint was carefully rolled into a funnel shape. The wide end was twisted into a fuse and the narrow end had a small tube of cardboard wrapped inside, to keep the contents dry from saliva, I assumed. I turned it lightly in my fingers, appreciating the street skills of criminals.

  “What are your plans for that?” Mary Ann said, and my surprise at the question embarrassed me. I didn’t know anything about this illegal twig in my fingers. At the age when I would’ve been open to experimenting I transferred to Northwest, where pot smoking, with its associations of laziness and pinko Democrats, got you labeled a burnout. I closed my mind to the few stoners and learned how to hustle laughs from the farmer kids with slit-eyed Cheech impersonations. (“Fifth time I’m late to work dis week, and it’s only like Tuesday, man.”)

  I gave her the joint and lit it with my lighter, and like the song says she smiled before she let it go. I’d never actually watched someone smoke, and when her eyes softened and glassed over with almost sexual delight, I let go of four years of prejudice in a second or two. Her eyes were lighter than I’d realized, gold-flecked with the early afternoon sun, under eyebrows that were thick and exotic—foreign, though she was half Klamath Indian and more American than I was. Her nose wasn’t wide and flat like a girl I knew who said she was Cherokee, but thin and straight-edged and delicate. But it was her eyes first and the close, unselfish way she watched you.

  “That’s not bad,” she said. She hit from the joint again, and I tried it when she offered—a puff diluted with air that took me right to the brink of coughing. I gave it back and waited to see what happened.

  Across from us, the Real Photograph of Jesus Christ was sun-faded and shellacked with grime, but the Hitler mustache and swastika earrings stood out in a throbbing gold. At the top of the hill behind Mary Ann were three crosses, white in the sun. Jesus hung on the middle one, his body missing from the waist down, and for the time I had an odd sense of piety up here. “My mom works at a church,” I said.

  “Does she?”

  “It’s Methodist.”

  “Are you Methodist?”

  “No. She isn’t either. It was after they got divorced. She went one Sunday for service and came back with a job.”

  After a third toke she tapped the end of the joint and set it on the table between us. “I hope she found some answers,” she said. “Or peace of mind, at least.”

  I looked past her, to the surrounding neighborhood of triple-decker houses with TV antennas sticking up, to where the I-84 lunch-hour traffic had loaded up the exit ramps. In between billboards and rooftops flashed the green leaf canopies of distant hills. “Not really,” I said. “You can’t just plug into it. You think you can, but you can’t.”

  Mary Ann smiled easily, the pot working the way it’s supposed to. “You can ask me anything,” she said. “I promise to tell the truth.”

  “If you want me to pretend nothing happened, I will,” I said.

  “Is that what you think I want?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure what Nick means to you anymore.”

  “I know what he means to you,” she said. “And if you want me to pretend nothing happened, I will.”

  I nodded cautiously. Her look was soft and didn’t challenge me to say anything, but long seconds passed when I was afraid to speak. She scraped moss from the rutted tabletop with a flake of stucco. “You can never predict how you’ll be,” she said. “My sister came out. She was with me every minute for a week. But Nick went back to work. Back to his cars. He should have had people around him and he had machines.” She looked up at me and sighed. “I know, Ray and Bobby and all his minions. I don’t mean them, I mean real people. And I’m sorry to sound cruel. I should’ve closed the shop. But that’s the only part I blame myself for. I said I’d give it a year. But what’s it costing? We don’t touch anymore. We don’t talk. If you asked me what he wants from his life, I honestly couldn’t tell you. The man I’ve lived with for seven years.”

  As she said all this her voice drew taut and at times was tearful, and the sudden wash of emotion both stunned me and made me feel close to her. I put my hand over hers. Words seemed weak now, and there was nothing I needed to know.

  “So that’s what he means to me, Justin. Less and less.”

  Everything she said was so far removed from what I’d expected to hear that I felt dizzied by it. Suddenly I was in the rarefied place of sitting across from her while she seemed to want to prove something to me.

  She made a circle of her thumb and forefinger and sent the burnt-out joint spinning into the weeds. “You want to stay friends with Nick,” she said. “I don’t blame you. I think it’s sort of noble, actually.” This she said without sarcasm, and I thought about love and loyalty, how one can get in the way of the other, and it felt like the secret to the good life was in making the two compatible.

  We stood and held hands. As we walked back toward the cars there was a laugh from nearby, a woman’s laugh, and Mary Ann stopped and turned. From inside the Beit Shearim Catacombs a light flickered. It went out and that was all—no voices, no sexual sounds that I found myself listening for, imagining a couple looking by matchlight at themselves lying in the cave.

  “I like how it blurs together up here,” she said, and I understood that blurring to mean the holy and the unholy, the right and the wrong.

  PART TWO

  15.

  Eve didn’t show up for the Corvette the next day, or the day after, or the day after that. The mood around the shop darkened as the idea that she and Dennis were really Jimmy-Hoffa gone evolved from an outside possibility into a likelihood. Talk went around about calling the police, but what would be the point? The killers were certainly contract pros who got to be that way by not leaving evidence, and all that would happen, the cops would confiscate the Corvette and auction it and keep the money.

  I was mourning the Miami
dream for my own reasons. Surely if Eve had come back Nick would have told Mary Ann by now that he was leaving her. And in that time of selling the shop, selling the house, they each would have moved into their own apartments. Would Nick hold it against me if I started seeing her before the divorce went through? I even let myself think, wouldn’t he be grateful I was there for her?

  On the eighth day Nick disappeared after lunch, and I found him in the Dungeon. The chamois-lined car cover was off the ZL1, and in front of the car Nick was slumped on a milk crate like a string puppet set down. Antifreeze drained out of the radiator into a catch pan. He noticed me with a casual glance. After a moment he said, “Imagine being the guy that breaks in and gets his hands on this sucker. Doesn’t even know what it is.”

  “What’re you doing?”

  “I can’t sell it without the title. Whatever I can get for the engine is it.”

  I went in the passenger side and opened the glove box, but it was empty. “Over there,” Nick said, jutting his chin at the workbench. The vinyl envelope contained the registration and insurance card. Eve Moore. No address and the same P.O. box as she gave on the work order. I wondered if her last name was really Moore. I got out and came around to the front of the car.

  I don’t know how the idea came to me, just from staring at the car, I guess. “You think anything could beat it in the quarter mile?”

  * * *

  After work that evening I stayed in Waterbury, waiting to meet Nick. I had dinner at a Greek diner on Franklin, walked around Kmart for a while, and then got carded at the Scoreboard, so I went through the new McDonald’s drive-through window. Sucking on a milkshake I watched the light stream of traffic. About every third car on Wolcott had its headlights on.