“Are we calling this our first date?” she said, riding in the passenger seat of my Nova.
I was smiling and dumbstruck with such a wholesome idea as a first date, after what we’d done in her kitchen and up in Holy Land. But later, as I parked along the gravel shoulder, I thought, Why not? Why couldn’t we fall in love in the right order like everyone else?
On the river path we walked by a patch of Queen Anne’s lace where I’d missed two Coors cans. “So it’s not spectacular or anything,” I said. But she stopped to hum a few gratified notes where there was a break in the woods and you could see water. As she walked ahead of me, her thighs shook in the firm way muscle does, and her smooth calves tightened and loosened. Kimberly had been out of shape at sixteen, and here was a woman almost twice her age who looked better naked than clothed. Her breasts were soft from nursing, but from the stomach down she could have been in a centerfold.
Where the path widened, she waited for me to walk beside her. “It wasn’t fair at the house the other night,” she said. “I don’t know what was wrong with me.”
“I wasn’t sure what to say.”
“You’re his friend. I remember what that feels like.”
“He ought to talk to you more,” I said, but it came out mumbled, like a fast lie, only this wasn’t a lie. It was just my first time talking about him behind his back.
“You don’t have to take sides,” she said. “You’re not in the middle of anything.” She smiled with dreamy sad eyes, eyes that contained the knowledge of past sadness like wisdom.
Our clearing over the water was framed by a mossy boulder and three crooked shagbarks. I smelled heat in the little breeze coming up from the fields. We had maybe an hour before the full sun, when even the scissored shade wouldn’t be comfortable, and I spread the checkered blanket over the dry crumbling earth.
Mary Ann had scooped up some pebbles and was pitching them into the water one at a time—I could just hear their tiny chirps—and studying the effect. From the blanket I could see the part of the tea-colored water where every few seconds, after the last ripples had vanished, she’d toss another pebble.
“It’s clean water,” I said. “I wouldn’t drink it, but cleaner than Waterbury, anyway.”
“Where I put Joey reminds me of here.”
I gave her a few moments and said, “In Oregon.”
“Where the fall salmon spawn, the Chinook. But the ashes didn’t float like I thought they would. They tumbled in the current. They parted around these big red fish and washed over the eggs.”
There was nothing to say, and I found the wine in her canvas bag. Pinot Noir from the Russian River Valley, the label said. I wasn’t great with a corkscrew and took my time to not go in at an angle. When I looked back again she had stepped to the ledge. In one continuous motion she pulled off shorts and panties and tank top, and I was staring at the pink memory of waistband around her hips as she tossed her clothes into the fiddleheads of a cinnamon fern. I hopped up and threw off my T-shirt, and there came a torturous second, as in a dream where you need to run but can’t, when I knew what would happen but couldn’t produce an action or a sound to prevent it, when time in fact stretched out so that I felt the first blanketing weight of mourning her death, her subtraction from my life.
The soles of her feet were pale angel wings as she dove where it wasn’t safe to dive.
I slid down a side path, and when I got in the water she was already up and pushing back her hair. Two heavy, slimed-over branches caught on my rock dam had brought the water up a few inches, but it was only inches. She’d gone in at an unrepeatable angle, not perpendicular but severe enough to curve off the bottom without crashing her head into the gravel ledge. Inches.
In the water I pulled and pulled her slick against me, as if she were a ghost briefly materialized, and her surprise was just another strong emotion in the boil. I found her mouth and banged and slid over it with mine, and she kissed me with my hair in her fist. Water crashed up around us. “Yes,” she said, the word of her wanting me to be unapologetic, unwavering, not as I’d been with anyone before. We broke from the kiss and my shorts were gone—ripped off by one of us or both of us, and sinking away, and my rude wanting was her wanting. It drove me past her consent to a burning feral intent that couldn’t have been stopped.
* * *
On the blanket later, we sipped the peppery red wine from plastic champagne flutes. Only then, dripping and cool enough to huddle, did my heart return to any kind of normal beat. “I can’t believe you dove.”
She rubbed my knee and laughed. “I’m sorry I scared you.”
“If you asked what the chances were of not breaking your neck, I’d say about ten to one.”
“Is that true?”
“Roughly.”
The hills we stared at were wimpy and lush with bent little hardwoods, nothing like the sheer cliffs and sky-scraping forests of Oregon, I figured, but she seemed genuinely captivated, glancing from canopy to canopy as if they weren’t exactly the same.
She took a plastic knife from her bag and spread Brie onto a cracker. “One time I brought some home and forgot to tell Nick what it was. In the morning there was a spit-out bite of a bagel in the sink and a note that said, ‘I threw out the cream cheese.’”
I liked that Nick already had the association of a mutual friend, and that the difference in our relationship to him was only that she had known him longer. I kissed her bare shoulder, thinking of those summer floats I couldn’t enjoy all the way for feeling ashamed—holding my polyester trunks in my fist should I need to roll into the water and slip them on. We were naked on public property, which counted as a crime in Connecticut, but Mary Ann knew the higher laws that were nature’s laws, maybe everyone in Oregon did, and to feel the moving water between your legs, and now the sunlight and the air, was to feel that we are a beautiful species and it was the world that was obscene for making us hide.
Moments before, the water cool on our stomachs and cold on our feet, the sand tapping our shins in the light current, she angled her lower body so that I was inside her with a squeaky-clean kind of friction, and with the sweet water on our lips we kissed more slowly. She gripped me as her hand had gripped me and told me not to move. To close my eyes and picture her all around me. “It’s going to make me come,” she had said.
Now she watched a contrail make its Etch A Sketch line up the sky. She had strong, high cheeks that were the Indian in her, her Jones—she’d told me that her Klamath grandmother had been instructed by a government agent to pull her last name out of a hat.
“Will she like me?” she said.
“April? Of course she will.”
“And you think I’m ready?”
It hadn’t occurred to me that she might not be ready, and I paused with a brief and unexpected protectiveness of April, feeling at the same time the sudden shock of Joey’s death.
“Actually,” she said, “I don’t think I really can.”
“Mary Ann.”
“As far as time. It’s probably not—”
“You’re ready. You’re perfect.”
She closed her eyes a moment and breathed. Then she looked at me with pink swimmer’s eyes and rested her chin on her pulled-up knees. With her freckles and no hairstyle and colorless lips, she could have been my age. This was the face she saw in the mirror after a shower, when she was the woman and the girl together. “Okay,” she said. “Okay,” and for a second I thought she might say she loved me. I felt my face flush, as if I’d already heard it and was only waiting on my voice to say it back. But she didn’t say it, not in words, and instead she stood and walked to the ledge again. I didn’t know what this meant, and the earlier panic of her dive rose in me, but she held her hand open behind her, a few shimmering water beads running down her back, her beautiful ass pink and creased from sitting. “Come jump with me,” she said.
20.
At least once a week, Nick and I raced the ZL-1 at Wickersham’s. We staged undramat
ic upsets against cars that had been exalted like royalty over fish sticks in the school cafeteria.
I kept my promise not to tell Mary Ann about the races, and having secrets infused me with a self-possession that I imagined important men had—senators, generals, technology engineers. It was a man’s burden to keep secrets. Though of course there was the other secret, the cowardly one I still couldn’t dare myself to tell Nick. But I kept the truth from Mary Ann because she would worry, and that she would worry made the racing dangerous, though that was never how it felt with Nick behind the wheel.
From the Corvette’s passenger seat, I only saw how strategically he drove. He’d lurch up to the back fender and fall back, then pull even just before the end, so that every time it seemed he’d won by dumb luck more than anything—a bad shift or an extended burnout by the other car. He got nowhere near red-lining the Corvette—he didn’t need to, was smart not to, though inside I begged him to, just once, just once. There was no sense of chance and thus no fear I felt, no adrenalized clenching or loss of spit, because Nick drove without surprise, feeling the perimeter of the Corvette as if it were an extension of his body, reading the minds of anyone who put up money against him, and surging not a second sooner than was required to win.
This is what I mean when I say reading their minds: Most races are won or lost in the first two seconds, when a novice might dump the clutch at too high an rpm and break the tires loose. This happened with a big Fairlane Cobra, as Nick knew it would. Of course he wasn’t reading minds. He was just aware of how the kid revved the engine to clean the exhaust before the flag came down. Nick said to me, “He’s going to fishtail,” and then he launched us faster than he had before, faster than I knew the car was capable of launching—the front tires came fully off the ground and slammed back down after breathless floating seconds, when I saw that the Fairlane was not beside us, that its headlights were swinging through the corn, and I turned back to see the car’s rear end in our lane, pulling out of a fishtail that would have sideswiped us had Nick not gotten the fuck out of there.
I understand now that my complacency was irrational. Anything can happen at a hundred and fifteen miles per hour on a dark, unpainted road barely wide enough for two cars, and once we crossed the finish line he had only seconds to let off and start feathering the brakes so that by the time we stopped there was maybe fifty feet before the road turned to gravel and swung up through the big hardwood trees. But Nick was in his element. Watching him behind the wheel of the Corvette was even more exhilarating and holy than watching him work. Rather than driving the car, Nick plugged in to it, an infinite mind to an invincible body, and I had been naïve before, scheming in my clumsy way to rescue his marriage, to think that I could know what would make him happy again.
With a lesser driver behind the wheel, the Corvette would have been a suicide machine. A rush to half-throttle in any gear would send the rear end fishtailing. And who wouldn’t lose his shit when the tire grab lifted the front end right off the ground? The car was flashy, thundering, triumphant. It complemented Nick, picked up where the man fell short, and Nick, among all men, had the skill and discipline to be its master.
He never socialized for very long after the races, and I know he wasn’t racing for the money. Nick made my cut half, and he didn’t look at it more than to divvy up before cramming fifties and hundreds down in his front pocket like tissue he’d wiped his nose with. No, it wasn’t fame or riches, but every few nights it seemed he was calling me up to go back.
It was the intoxication of those thirteen seconds, and the stunning release that came next. When we stopped he would let off a sigh that was the end of his reserve, and then he was free and boylike again. His eyes pulsing, he’d slap me five then pound the steering wheel screaming, “You beast!”
* * *
After the races, I made it a point to stay close to Nick while he consoled the loser. But on the night of our fourth race, somebody called my name—three or four guys were facing us with their backs to the bonfire—and if I didn’t go over they’d think I was afraid.
As luck would have it, it was Dave Bowers, one of the few respected kids who never taunted me at school. That night he asked me about work, and I took a chance and really told him. A valve job on a 413 Wedge, a rebuild on a giant 830 cfm Holley mounted to a Tunnel Ram. He took it all in, interrupting only with a breathy “Damn,” and “Jeeze,” and I felt safe shifting from engine specs to mechanic philosophy. “You’ve got the guy over here who has a big block but can’t work on it. So okay, he can drive, maybe he even races it. But then you’ve got the mechanic, who can make a car go, and knows why it goes. He can see the valves open and close in his head. The power stroke, the crank whipping through the oil. He knows when something’s off. He hears the car tell him what’s wrong. Which one of them you think gets more out of driving?”
“Sort of like if you play guitar, you probably get more out of the radio,” Dave said.
“Exactly.”
I was so caught up in his being caught up that it took a while to notice Ed Rawley watching me from the other side of the fire. As soon as I saw him, I looked away, then heard “Hey Bailey,” and ignored it. He said it again and I had to look at him.
“Costa still banging your mom?” he said.
“Rawley,” Dave said, answering him before I could get my voice. “I heard your old man got loaded and ran into Jack Zimmer’s kid.”
“Zimmer’s full of shit.”
“Go tell him he’s full of shit.”
“Why? Where is he?”
“Up at Wickersham’s,” Dave said, nodding toward a floodlit outbuilding on the edge of the cornfield.
Rawley smiled and the guys got quiet, and then a six-foot board fell out of the fire and Rawley hopped up and stomped it out, laughing and cussing. But it wasn’t a big deal, the ground was only mud and two other guys were closer. Rawley could have ignored it and said something back if he had something to say.
* * *
At the shop Bobby was suffering. He and Nick were drifting apart, as they had a year ago, but then it was different, there were no bad feelings between them, it was just that Nick was otherwise involved, and I didn’t mind it then because the person he was involved with was me. But now Nick’s preoccupation was Rod—Rod and his know-how with computers—and for Bobby it wasn’t just that Nick had a new favorite, but that the shop was evolving. Bobby was still under the illusion, as Ray had been, that we somehow wouldn’t have to adapt to the technology of the times.
Rod was a demoralizing omen for me as well, though not because he understood computers. I worried about his personality becoming a new paradigm. Mechanics could be daring and high-spirited as Bobby, confrontational and heedless as Ray, but they should never be self-important with their talents. Beyond his arrogance, I saw in Rod a tendency to recognize his own feelings and needs, which spoke to another unmanly quality of his character. He was uncool; I knew because every day for me was a battle with uncoolness. When Nick hired Rod over the dozens of good men who had applied, it undermined my conviction that mechanics shared a mystique anchored on self-possession and laid-back reticence.
Once in a while I’d see Bobby give up on a computer car. He wasn’t as dramatic as Ray had been. Usually Bobby would just go over to the boom box and slam his head to a song from Master of Puppets, which he played ten times a day. I’d look through the Chilton’s manual he was using, and pretty soon he’d wander back.
Once he yanked a wiring harness apart so hard its plastic clips went flying.
I straightened from the Chilton’s manual. “They’re a pain in the ass. But if you get the tip of a screwdriver right there in the seam—”
He went over and turned off the music. “What do the directions say now?”
“I’m not trying to be a dick.”
“Just say what now before I sledgehammer the fucking thing.”
My plan had been to ask if he could recommend a good AA meeting for Mom, but now I didn’t wa
nt to piss him off. I was pretty sure that the problem with the car he was working on—the idle racing and the bucking—was the TPS, the throttle position sensor, but I pretended to be no further along in my diagnosis than he was.
Rod came over after a while and said, “Where y’at?” which was some kind of Cajun greeting, to which we were supposed to answer, “Ah-rite” but never did. Rod was one of those guys who are hard to like because he thoroughly and erroneously believed himself to be well-liked, and so unless you put in the effort to be blatant with your contempt, he would go right on thinking he was your friend.
“Quid Aere Perennius?” he said. “Man, is that a strange-ass motto.” He poured Skittles in his hand from one of the pound bags that he said helped with his sugar craving from not drinking. He offered them around, and I betrayed myself and ate some.
“That your motto?” I said.
“Naw, man, it’s yours. Waterbury’s. You got it right on the back of the building there. Don’t y’all ever look up?”
Bobby straightened from the opposite fender and lit a cigarette.
“In English,” Rod said, “it goes, ‘What is more lasting than brass?’ And where’s all the brass factories now? Ironic, ain’t it?”
“‘Dickis in the rectumis,’” Bobby said. “Go carve that somewhere.”
Rod laughed and skimmed the work order for Bobby’s car. “Sounds like a bad TPS,” he said.
21.
A car slowed in the street. Through the living room window I heard but didn’t see it, and though it could have been the Brockmeiers, who we shared a driveway with, or someone visiting them, I knew it was Mary Ann, I sensed it was her.
She was standing by her Malibu when I came out, and I could tell already that she was less sure of herself. “It’s cute. It’s charming,” she said, taking in our house, which was only a vinyl-sided split-level with a black eagle on the screen door, red window shutters, and a well house in the front yard painted to match. “Like a Christmas-card house,” she said. She reached in the car window for her purse, her foot lifting out of a cork-soled sandal, her lightly tanned leg bare up to the hem of a whitish-bluish tie-dye dress. She came to me brushing the hair out of her eyes and then for a moment didn’t seem to know where to put her hand, and I knew that I loved her, and loved her achingly, though I was afraid to say it so soon.
The Spark and the Drive Page 13
