Her arms under mine, we hugged with an urgency just shy of pain. I lifted her and turned her most of a circle. When she laughed, I felt it in my own chest.
Mom was washing a plate when we came into the kitchen. Earlier she had changed into capri pants and a sleeveless button blouse, and though she looked ready for company, I was nervous about this first meeting. I wondered if they’d be able to talk at all, if Mom would feel daunted knowing that Mary Ann had lost her baby, and if Mary Ann would feel daunted knowing that Mom was only one week sober.
I missed my cue on the introductions. Mom was drying her hands, and there was this sweet awkward moment when Mary Ann said, “Hi, Mrs. Bailey,” and waved from five feet away. But as if Mary Ann were every pretty girlfriend I’d never brought home, Mom instantly became the warm hostess she had been in our years with Don, turning a handshake into a hug as she told Mary Ann, “Carol, honey. I’m Carol.” In five minutes she had brought up her own miscarriage, the baby who should have come between me and April, and both of them teary, they hugged again. But the pleasure of witnessing their bonding ended for me when I thought of the lie I’d told about Mary Ann’s husband leaving her.
“It’s almost quarter of, Mom,” I said, and she went out to have a quick cigarette before a three o’clock AA meeting at Prince of Peace Lutheran.
* * *
“We call it quiet time,” I said as Mary Ann followed me up the stairs. “It’s not really a nap anymore.” In the hall I walked lightly to April’s door and put my ear to it. “Because lions start with L and turtle starts with T,” she was saying musically. She liked to line up her stuffed animals across the floor.
When I put my hand on the knob, Mary Ann touched my elbow. “Aren’t you going to knock?”
“She’s four.”
She smirked and reached around me to knock. “It’s me,” I said through the door.
April said, “Oh.”
“Can I come in?”
When I pushed open the door, April, naked, hollered, “Ah,” and ran into her closet.
“Where are your clothes?” I said. I wasn’t mad—she did this a lot—and in fact I liked the chance to quell some drama in front of Mary Ann. I went to her closet, where she’d half-closed the door.
“In the hamper,” she said. “It was too hot.”
“It’s not that hot up here.”
She wanted me to dress her in the closet. When we finished I said, “Come meet somebody,” and she held up her arms.
“Hold me.”
Mary Ann was sitting on the floor behind a row of stuffed animals that reached from wall to wall. She looked up as she might have if April were our own daughter.
“Are all these alphabetical?” Mary Ann said.
April nodded, still facing away. “Even I put fish before fox.”
“I am so impressed,” Mary Ann said, and though it wasn’t April’s most impressive effort—the raccoon was behind the peacock, et cetera—I could tell that Mary Ann meant it. I sat with April on the floor.
“April, do you ever notice how dirty Justin’s hands are?” Mary Ann said.
April turned around, and I showed her my hand, dirty certainly for an accountant or a cook, but the only way to get the black out of your knuckles and cuticles is to stay away from engines for a month.
“Maybe we should draw his hands,” Mary Ann said. “Do you have paper and crayons?”
I set April down, and she brought over the spiral notebook from her bookshelf. “I can’t have crayons in my room,” she told Mary Ann. “I drawed on the wall one time.”
Mary Ann found an eyeliner pencil in her purse, and they went to work tracing my hand. They made three sketches, which Mary Ann turned into porcupines and dinosaurs.
“April is a very pretty name,” Mary Ann said. “Is that when your birthday is?”
“April sixth.”
“Eighth,” I said.
“Sixth.”
“She likes to draw sixes,” I said.
“Is I’m your favorite month?” April asked Mary Ann.
“Positively,” Mary Ann said. She started tracing my hand again. “April, do you know what they put in makeup to make it shiny? It’s really gross. They use bat poop.”
“Eww,” April said, and I jerked back my hand, but Mary Ann caught it. “Like it matters,” she said. “Anyway, I think it’s only in mascara.”
22.
“Take it, it’s a good deal.” Bobby and Rod at the peg hooks. “You work on new cars, give me the old ones.”
“Plus you do all my oil changes,” Rod said.
“Fuck you.”
“You’ll have to wine me and dine me first.” Rod chewed a toothpick and seemed not to see the cold murder in Bobby’s eyes. I would’ve offered to take on Bobby’s computer jobs myself if they didn’t hurt my daily commission, they took me so long to fix.
Later that morning Bobby knocked over a trash can backing a computer car into the oil-change bay.
I found Nick diagnosing a convertible and leaned over the fender opposite him.
“I think Rod could start showing Bobby some, I don’t know, some compassion,” I said.
Nick pressed his fingers against the valve cover, studying the vibration. “I never asked if he went to charm school.”
I stood there a few more seconds, though that was all he had to say. Later I wondered if there was some resentment toward me in that answer. Maybe he thought I’d coerced him into telling me about Joey, and now he didn’t like my having that secret.
I wandered over to the oil-change bay. Turning his cap back, Bobby brought his face up to the coil spring of the Grand National on the lift. He reached around the scorching manifold and flinched with the claustrophobia of plunging your arm to the hilt in a blind labyrinth of rusty metal, the scrape and the prickling coming right up through your spine. He swore as he contorted his body for leverage, twisting until a drizzle of black oil ran down from the loosened filter, and he jerked back his arm with two dull bumps of muscle and bone. I could see the red creases all the way down his forearm.
“Just don’t open your face,” he said to me.
“You shouldn’t be doing his oil changes.”
“I don’t mess with microwaves or TV sets, either,” he said. “You maybe got a brain that can handle invisible little pulses and flashes. I need to see it move.”
“The needle on an ohmmeter moves.”
“We did old school in here for three years. People clapping for us when the dyno goes up. Tipping us. We could retire on that if Nick gets right in his mind again.”
“Bobby, how many hot rods are still going to be on the road in ten years?”
“Go on back wherever the fuck you were.” He shoved his hand back up around the A-frame and spring. After a few seconds he yanked his arm back down, white where the scrapes were starting to bleed, holding a Fram filter that he turned in his fingers like a quarterback looking for the laces. Then he looked at me and side-armed the filter through the back window.
For the rest of the day, whenever I noticed the broken glass I looked over at Bobby and tried to think of a way to approach him. This is how I happened to catch him wiring a car.
We called it zapping, and what you did was cram some fourteen-gauge wire into the boot of an unhooked spark plug wire. You needed a spool long enough to run down under the engine so that your victim couldn’t see the wire. Carefully you snaked it in through the passenger door and between the driver’s seatback and seat with enough poking out for them to sit on. You cut off a few inches of insulation and splayed the wire threads until they were invisible on the seat.
Ray used to zap customers he didn’t like. “Hop in and crank it for me, would you?” he’d say. Those eight thousand volts closed a loop between your ass and your fingers on the ignition key—I’d seen guys jump up and bash their skulls on the headliner. Whether getting zapped would be enough to cure Rod of his blindness, I couldn’t say. By blindness I mean the way some people can’t see who their enemies
are. If you were to ask Rod what he thought of Bobby, I could hear him say, “Ah, he’s all right. He gives me a little shit, and I give it right back.”
At least Bobby might get something out of his system, I thought, as I got us a couple of coffees from the lobby and came out to watch. When I handed Bobby the coffee he said, “I need to check amps at the starter. Do me a favor and crank it over.”
Hearing that was like a jump into ice water, but if he saw the color drain out of my face, Bobby gave no sign. I went around to the driver’s door without feeling my feet touch the ground and sat on the wires. I owe him this, I thought, and I turned the key.
23.
It was during uneventful evenings at home that I fell in love the rest of the way. Mary Ann was coming over three days a week and staying through dinner. She cooked for me and came into my room, where no girlfriend had been before, with her smell and her soft voice, and looked at my posters and took down my books and beat me at Space Invaders on my little black-and-white TV.
“Where is he?” she said one evening, looking at a photo album page of me and Don.
“In New Haven. He’s gay, now. He turned gay.”
And oh, that it didn’t matter. She had gay friends in Oregon, and of course it was there, in permissive Oregon, that someone like Mary Ann could ever happen.
She ordered a book from there and read it to April on the living room floor. “But why is he Bigfoot?” April said when she finished.
“Because he has great big ears like Dumbo.”
“No,” April barked.
“Because he has a nose like a beach ball?”
April begged her to read it again.
“Can Justin help?” Mary Ann said.
I lowered myself off the couch to the floor with them.
“Did I ever tell you that Nick used to hunt Bigfoot?” Mary Ann said.
“Nick?” I said. I nearly said, “Our Nick?”
“Not gun hunting,” she said to April. “Picture hunting, like Toby in the book. He would hike way up into the Cascade Mountains.”
“But who is Nick?” April said.
“He’s my friend from Oregon, of course. And one day he asked me to go with him. How do you think that made me feel? I mean, should I be scared?”
“It wouldn’t scare me,” April said.
Mary Ann smiled. “I was excited.”
I was, too, and not only because she’d called Nick just a friend. I liked to hear about her past. I wanted to go back with her, to the time before Waterbury and her short tragic motherhood, so I could fall in love with that Mary Ann, too.
“But then I thought of a really good prank,” she continued.
“What’s—”
“A little joke you play on someone,” I said.
“I borrowed a tape player and made a recording of hitting logs together. Knock. Knock-knock. That sound.”
April started to bang her feet against the coffee table. “I have a tape player!”
“Shh,” I said. “Listen to the story.”
“It’s sort of the way Bigfeet use the telephone. Knock-knock-knock. So I recorded ten minutes of that. But I started after twenty minutes of blank tape so I could hide it in the woods and get away.”
“Very smart,” I said.
“Thank you. Then we hiked almost to the snowline and put up our tent. We found this little pond and sat there dressed up in camo waiting for a Bigfoot to come get a drink. But I guess he didn’t want to be famous. He never showed up.”
“But maybe they don’t like ponds,” April said.
Mary Ann took April’s hand and kissed it on top. “So we got in our tent at night, and in our sleeping bags, and then I sat up and told him I had to go pee—”
“You pee-peed outside?” April looked shocked.
“Like you never have,” I said.
“In the woods all there is is outside, but I didn’t really have to pee. I started the tape recorder, and then—run, run, run—I got back in my sleeping bag. Pretty soon here it comes, knock-knock-knock. Nick jumps up but can’t find his shoes. He had one of those giant Maglites that takes a hundred batteries, and it got left on, so he’s trying to change the batteries in the pitch black. Meanwhile the tape recorder stops, and I mean you can’t tell him it’s just a joke, he’s so excited now. He can’t even cuss, he’s so excited. He’s saying, ‘Oh come on, come on. Man, oh man,’ dropping batteries everywhere.”
“Why couldn’t he cuss?” I said.
She looked at me. “Haven’t you ever been like that? Something incredible happens and all you have are little-kid words again? I couldn’t cuss at the end of my labor, and that was pain there isn’t words for, and then you see this little cap of hair, and it’s true. He’s coming. Here he comes into the world.”
April sat forward. “Who’s coming?”
But Mary Ann was no longer with us. “Man, oh man,” she said, gazing at a memory up on the ceiling.
24.
Coming back one evening from the lake on Transylvania Road (our one outing that failed—a skin of yellow pollen kept us out of the water; Mary Ann got stung; April picked up a condom), I stopped for gas at Arco, and as a consolation for a lame trip Mary Ann took April inside for a Drumstick cone.
The lock on the pump handle didn’t work, and I was bent over the back bumper when a guy who’d once locked me in a corn silo swung his monster GMC off Route 6 and skidded to a stop at the pump opposite mine. “Bailey,” he yelled down from his window. He said a big-block Chevelle was coming out to Wickersham’s Saturday. “You guys could make some bank. He went for half a grand with Kimball’s old man.”
I looked at the numbers on the pump and let go right at $9.98. I had just a ten in my wallet. “Did he win?” I said, twitching in the last two cents.
“Barely. And Kimball’s old man drives like I fucking spit.”
* * *
Eight or nine cars were on the edge of the strip, a few more lined up in the field. We were waved to and I heard my name called like a stadium chant, “Bailee.” In a few weeks, Nick and I had gone from being nobodies to being the home team.
Fireflies pulsed in the corn and Hank Williams Jr. sang about getting whiskey bent and hell bound. It was the first night there were girls, and the rich exhaust and cooked-tire smells were interrupted by the occasional perfume of tanned bodies passing by with cigarettes.
The Chevelle was a ’70 with black SS stripes, five-spoke alloys, and a Cowl Induction hood. I couldn’t believe the owner was sitting on the lacquer fender, a tall redhead standing between his legs. He was talking with a guy who wasn’t very selective, who had even hung out with me a few times in the smoking area at school. When we got out of the Corvette the owner of the Chevelle bounded over to us with his hand out—Duane Pabst, from Torrington. He had a big handshake and sculpted arms that had to be the product of workout rooms with forty-five-pound plates and wall mirrors. He wore carpenter pants and a flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off, but he smelled like he was fresh out of the shower.
“Wrap your ass in fiberglass,” he said, walking around the Corvette. “You got a big rat motor in that beast? No, don’t tell me, don’t tell me, keep it like poker. Maybe it’s just a tuned-up mouse. I don’t need to know.”
I couldn’t tell if the guy was on something. His bright teeth kept flashing, and he had these long dimples pleating his cheeks. “I can do a grand,” he said to Nick. “You feel like doing a grand?”
I started over to conference with Nick, as we’d done before, to compare our vibes on the guy in private, but before I’d taken a full step toward him, Nick said, “Sure,” and Pabst grinned and clapped his hands. “This shit is on.”
It was agreed that Pabst and Nick would race alone, and when they walked over to the start line to give Motts their money, the redhead stood there by herself. The other girls didn’t talk to her. She looked like a city girl, smoking her designer cigarette with one arm wrapped in front of her short biker jacket. I said hi and could tell she apprec
iated it.
But then I was called over to the keg, where I was handed a cup of foamy beer and someone asked if I’d had in any decent Mopars lately, and when I was going to try a run in my Nova, and somebody yelled my name, and I forgot all about keeping the redhead company.
It was like these guys had been my friends all along but I’d just misunderstood them. It was my own fault, all the surrendering—who could respect that? They wanted to see Pabst lose. What the fuck did he need a grand for? It turned out his family were the ones who brewed the Blue Ribbon beer.
And in a few minutes I was with Valerie Wilson, who I’d pined for more fanatically than any of the other top-tier girls in my class. Valerie had once written our names in a heart on a chalkboard in one of the Ag buildings, and for two days I tried to be where she was in the halls. Before I found out that the Justin she meant was a twenty-three-year-old house framer, I approached her in the cafeteria line, where she stood with two of her friends, big-haired untouchable girls like herself, and I chickened out so that all that happened thank God was a moment of awkward silence before I turned and heard behind me, “Okay,” in a girl’s heartless sarcasm.
“How’s Waterbury?” Valerie said now. “I never go there, unfortunately.”
I pulled out a piece of straw from the bale we were sitting on and dropped the names of a few bars I said I knew. Skinny’s. The Shanghai. Hog Wild.
“God, I need an ID. Where do you even get one?”
I told her that Richie at Hog Wild would serve her, but I did have to warn her that it was a biker bar. “It can get kind of rough.”
“It sounds like heaven compared to here.” She gave a bleak glance at the fields, and in the same grim spirit she took my cigarette and brought it to that mouth that had never smiled at me before, leaving a lipstick print and giving it back, so that when I smoked it I was almost kissing her, and I had the impulse to put the filter in my pocket to keep, as I certainly would’ve done in high school.
The Spark and the Drive Page 14
