“You know what I’m so sick of?” she said. “Everything all wet with dew. Stinking like bonfire and either sweating or freezing your ass off. Like in twenty years I’m going to wake up in this same freaking shithole. The only bar I’ve even ever been in is the Fireside.” She reached down to slap a mosquito on her calf. “That’s just like being here but without getting eaten alive.”
Minutes later she was writing on a slip of paper, bent forward so that I could look straight in to where her breast lay in the formed pocket of her bra, I mean the whole thing I was looking at, its small spongy nipple the color of her lips (it would only occur to me later that she’d wanted me to see it, she spent so long writing her name and number), and I found my fingers cupping into the shape of her bra.
“Showtime,” Pabst called from the road, and he and Nick got in their cars.
“You think Nick can beat him?” she said. She handed me, as if I’d asked for it, the folded slip of paper.
“We’ll see,” I said. “I don’t know what he’s running.”
“A four fifty-four. My sister used to be friends with his sister.”
I nodded. “It’ll be close.”
“L6 or something,” she said.
I looked at her. “LS6?”
“Yeah, that’s it,” she said.
“Jesus.” I started to get up to go tell Nick that he needed to race hard, but then he started the engine, and I hesitated. Maybe it was too late to run over there. Maybe Nick would hear, when Pabst did a hole shot to clean the tires, how little rpm was needed to break them loose, and he’d know. Or maybe I just wanted to see Nick finally lose, I can’t say. I sat back down.
But after the race, when Pabst got out of his car at the far end of the strip, and the guys who’d called the finish came up around him, and I could hear yelling but not what was yelled, I was on my feet and running all-out, regretting that I’d let him race alone.
A quarter mile is a hell of a run when you’re fired up, and by the time I got there I could only manage a fast panting walk, my lungs on fire.
“Son of a bitch is running nitrous,” Pabst was saying. “What’s out there can beat an LS6?”
“He don’t have to show it, he don’t want to,” Burke said.
“Why can’t he just open the hood? Make me a liar.”
The guys around him—more had come over from where they’d watched the race halfway down—were shaking their heads and looking away, as if they’d already made their points.
Pabst looked at Nick. “The fuck you hiding, man?”
Nick could have looked around and seen that he had friends, but instead he stared at the pavement for a few seconds, and then he said, “Hell with it,” and went back to the Corvette. When he opened the door, I thought he was getting in, and I started for the passenger side, but as the thought occurred to me that we hadn’t been paid yet, he bent in and unlatched the hood.
Pabst came around the other side of the car as Nick lifted the hood from under the windshield—“Opens backwards,” someone said—and Pabst ran to his Chevelle and came back with a flashlight. He searched the fuel and coolant lines, looking for a nitrous hose, and then he rested the beam on the open-element air cleaner. “The fuck is that?” he said. “What kind of race car engine you got in here?” He touched the screen over the carburetor throat.
“No blowers and no nitrous is the only rules,” Burke said.
Motts came over finally with the money, and Pabst went up to him and said, “Here, gimme it back, just mine,” instigating a shoving match. Three guys flew on Pabst, and more ran over. There was a shotgun suddenly, held by a guy I didn’t know. He pumped it and a live shell flew out of the ejection port and hit me in the knee.
But that was the height of everything. In a few minutes Pabst got in his car and ran a hole shot that lasted almost the entire quarter mile, and he skidded to a sideways stop near the woman, who ran to the passenger door as if wolves were chasing her. Everyone was laughing and calling out, and the guy with the gun blasted orange thunder at the sky once before they told him to cut the shit, asshole, he was going to piss off Wickersham.
* * *
I could still smell the shotgun blast as Nick eased out onto 62, and I didn’t trust myself to swallow, certain that even my own saliva could make me puke.
“He’s either a cokehead trying to be a redneck, or the other way around,” Nick said. “If he knew how to handle an LS6, it could have been interesting.”
Nick was either simple or impossibly complex, I couldn’t decide, dismissing Pabst like that, no concern that he might try to find us, tear us in half with all that muscle, no acknowledging the nightmare scenarios possible with a shotgun on the scene. But when I asked myself why I couldn’t tell him about Mary Ann, Nick became complicated. I remembered running to save him—there were needles still in my lungs from having run so hard. Shouldn’t we at least have full honesty between us? If only I could have predicted his reaction a little more. If only I knew him the way I wanted to.
With six or seven country miles to go, and riding with a man for whom the rumble of exhaust was more satisfying than any radio station, I breathed and tried to empty my mind. I put my hand on my stomach and focused on making the air come from the diaphragm instead of the chest.
“She’s a good-looking gal,” he said.
“Who?”
“The one you were talking to.”
“I just knew her from school,” I said, and the small loosening I’d been able to accomplish now tightened back.
“When I was your age, it was all hippie girls. In Oregon, anyway. They won’t let you ever be quiet. They want to know where you’re coming from. All the dope going around was supposed to open up everybody’s mind, I guess.”
I’d lived for moments like these, when something about my company allowed Nick to talk freely, but now I couldn’t fully listen for thinking about Valerie. Without her here, without her fire-lit sandy hair and her Poison and her interest in me, I wondered what the hell I’d been doing. Given the opportunity, could I have betrayed Mary Ann?
“But man, you should have been around back then,” he said. “It was the pinnacle of everything, right? That’s the word. I’m thirteen when GTOs kick off the whole era. Then the Mustangs, Camaros, Chevelles. Super Cobra Jets are rolling off the lot when I’m your age. Hemis. LS6s. If the EPA never cracked down, we’d be living in a different world right now.”
“How did you meet Mary Ann?”
He closed his mouth and laughed to himself. “She was broke down. She had this meat-grinder Bel Aire, three forty-eight with a Rochester. I mean, it had to be all the way gone through. I offered to. Free labor, just the cost of parts. But she wanted me to teach her so she could do it. She used to be into motors. Long time ago.” He dropped his hand to the bottom of the wheel. “Long time ago,” he said again.
“She wants kids,” I said.
“She deserves kids, but I can’t. I got the operation.”
My pulse started to race. I wasn’t going to act surprised. “Then why don’t you get divorced?”
I braced for him to slam the brakes, but instead he began to nod. “Is she ready to?”
“How should I know?” It was a reflex answer, but after a second it was the only question I had for him. You know about us, Nick. Cut me loose. Tell me you know.
But his face stayed calm as he turned to look at me. “You two are friends,” he said, following the road without watching. I looked ahead as headlights approached fast.
“Are you asking if you should get divorced? Watch the road.”
The car passed with the sound of a small explosion. “She should,” he said, and I leaned over. We were doing seventy. “She should want to,” he said.
“It’s thirty, coming up,” I said. A station wagon appeared, and Nick passed it with a swerve out and back over the solid line, so fast the guy might’ve thought he’d imagined us. Then on a dotted-line straightaway he took on two cars with about thirty feet between them a
nd a towering four-wheel-drive in the oncoming lane. I had no voice. Even the cars we were passing held down their horns, and the pickup we were about to hit head-on whaled what sounded like a semi horn, and I was suddenly not a part of this, removed by some kind of merciful disengagement I guess you’re allowed right before you die.
I saw the tread pattern of the big truck’s left tire as we veered back. The pain was in my fingers, both my hands buried under the seat into the springs, and then a big pulse of nothing when I let go before a different pain, a reversal of some kind in the nerves. I squashed my hands between my thighs as two miles flecked past, and then he let off the gas at the same second he cut the wheel all the way.
Another car would’ve rolled, but like a freefalling cat its belly stayed down, and we turned a screaming one-eighty in the shoulderless road, all the fluids in my body letting go of gravity as he slammed second gear, baking the tires to cushion the momentum swing. The car could’ve done it forever, fishtailing across the lanes until the gas was gone or the rubber melted off, but we didn’t have forever because for all his flawless instinct of steering and acceleration, Nick couldn’t see into the future, couldn’t save us if a car appeared on the next rise.
I yelled his name, but only after it was too late to do anything—we rocketed over that rise in the wrong lane—did he let off the gas and shift.
For the next few miles he drove only twenty or so over the limit, and I took stock of my body, all the pounding happening inside it, trying to ease, ease, ease, and keep the breath going in and out and not cry. Nick finally turned on to a dead end shaped like a thermometer. Raised ranches were being built on either side, and there was a set-back farmhouse at the end, where he parked in front of a falling-down outbuilding of some kind. We were still three or four miles from the Arco station on Route 6, where the Nova was waiting.
He killed the engine and unwedged his cigarettes from under the emergency brake handle.
The minute that followed comes in strobe flashes. My feet are touching ground and the knowledge I am still alive and will keep living chills my lungs, I’m crawling on road sand, picking a rusted sheet metal screw from my palm, on my feet again. I can feel the howl in my throat. I’m at the outbuilding kicking a plank wall until my foot goes through, wrenching back the broken plank, the bent nails crying like small creatures until the plank breaks free.
A dog barks. At the glassless windows I’m knocking out wooden sashes with my bare hands.
“They’re probably calling the cops,” he says. I kick until something heavy falls over inside. The Corvette starts. I walk behind a construction site, cut across a back lawn.
On the long walk I tried to sift out fear from anger. Was it only the panic of a child whose father throws him into the air? Had I been safe all along—was Nick really that good? The great insect pulse of the fields at night helped me start to breathe all the way. I could feel the isolated soreness in my ankles and wrists, a stabbing in my right shoulder, as if I were waking from some violent episode of split personality, and I picked out splinters from my palm. In my mind I was asking Mary Ann to forgive me. If my love for her was stronger than Nick or Mom or Mary Ann herself had ever known—if it was real it should have made me resistant to temptation. I said the words, they hurt, but I said, Yes, I would’ve kissed Valerie. I would’ve fucked her, and you deserve better. I’m so sorry.
The giant Arco sign was unlit when I crossed Route 6. Twenty feet from my car I saw the Corvette backed in on the other side of it, the driver’s doors even, and Nick was watching me through his open window. I looked away instinctively, though for a moment I had to remember why I was mad at him.
It was strange that my door was locked. I’d been waiting a long time to be somebody whose car you didn’t fuck with, and I had left my door unlocked on purpose. When I went in the glove box for my emergency cigarettes—I’d smoked my pack on the walk—I found folded in half on top of my registration papers a stack of hundred-dollar bills. Nick had locked my doors.
I sat back and opened the bills in my lap, five of them, half the money we had won.
I put down my window, either to tell him that I didn’t want it or to thank him, I wasn’t sure. Drab yellow in the cone of streetlight, he smoked sedately, as if things were no different than when we’d gone to Wickersham’s.
“You left her by herself on Joey’s birthday,” I said.
The cigarette dropped out of his fingers, and from where I was I could smell the carpet burn. I ran around and hopped in the other side, broke the orange head to ash on the passenger floor. Nick faced me with the steering wheel as his pillow, staring not at the gray mess on the carpet, which he seemed unaware of, or at me, but out through my window.
His eyes were wide, his mouth open. It was a look of fear and it made me uneasy. “I thought the rule was no smoking in here,” I said. His eyes only shifted to me as if he’d forgotten I was there. “This was after,” he said, his head never moving, as if someone were holding it like that against the steering wheel. “A couple days after.”
He stopped, and I didn’t give him more than a glance to say I was listening; in the body language of dropping my shoulders and sinking back into the seat I said, Take as long as you need.
“We didn’t leave the house. It was … we couldn’t even change clothes. Her sister was coming the next day. There was a bottle of wine in the pantry we opened. We sat at the table, and it all let up. It was like he was just upstairs again. How he used to make this one sound. You’d think, here comes his first word, he’d pull in all his breath and then, ‘pwhat.’ Just that ‘pwhat,’ every time.”
A low hum rose in his throat, and twice, without heat, he beat his head against the top of the steering wheel. “We get in the shower together. We need one bad, it’s been days. We wash our hair, get each other washed. And the water … I’m holding her. And I know what can fix us. It won’t be so bad forever. Another baby. We can take care of him and be happy and live, a new baby, he can sleep with us always, I don’t care, just keep him in the bed. Keep him safe.
“I take her in the bedroom. We’re hugging, we’re on the bed. Then she’s … she stops kissing me. But we have to. We have to. She says, ‘Stop.’ She says, ‘Don’t.’ But I do. I don’t stop when she says.” With a soft choking sound, Nick closed his eyes. “She’s like she’s dead under me. We have to, Mary Ann. We have to. Don’t cry. Please.” He sniffed deeply and swallowed. “And then she’s laying there, not moving. She won’t say if she’s okay. She’s staring at the door. What did I do? Jesus God. I pull the blanket over her. I go out in the garage and stay there all night. In the morning I hear her calling for me. She comes in the garage and calls me. She has to get her sister at the airport. She can’t see me behind the boxes.”
That was all he said, and I looked away when I was sure he was finished. I felt sore and tingling. I entered a brief fantasy of being there that night so I could pull him off of her. He slumped in the seat, his hands turned over on his thighs, a finger twitching in toward his palm. He stared through the windshield, though the thing he was seeing, that was making him look afraid, wasn’t outside—he was still in their bedroom with what he’d done. When I realized I could have forgiven him, I pushed myself out of the car. I walked away with the sensation of emptying out and then refilling with hot, electric life. I started to run across the lot and then on the sidewalk. I was free of him, free of caring about him, and the shaking inside from before came back, and with it the cold-steel conviction that I never wanted to die or change.
25.
Mom wanted to do sobriety right, with twelve-step meetings and therapy, and some days she’d just drive up 91 to Massachusetts and southern Vermont, coming home with saltwater taffy and maple syrup, a full roll of film and, I hoped, some peace of mind. In the living room I’d look up from where April and Mary Ann were doing puzzles or playing with resurrected games that were interesting with a second person, and sometimes I’d catch Mom brooding at the doorway. Her new freedom
seemed to have brought with it a sense of guilt, unfair regret that she was more a guardian than a mother, making April dinner, folding her laundry, taking her places always with time as a factor.
One night Lou Costa called again. “I hear you’re turning wrenches for Nick Campbell,” he said. “What would he soak me for a rebuild on the prowler, you think? Some of these soup jobs I can’t catch up to anymore.”
“Depends,” I said. I turned in the kitchen and Mary Ann was watching me. After I rolled my eyes she took April out to the living room. “It ranges. I can ask.”
“I’d be obliged,” he said, and there was a short pause before he asked how I’d been. “One minute you’re in high school, and next thing I’ll be buying you a beer.”
We had a few minutes of small talk, and then abruptly he said, “Listen, when she gets in have her holler at me. I’m just farting around over here tonight. Be up late.”
The only thing I wanted less than to leave Mom the message was for Costa to find out that I hadn’t. And a few nights later she called me from the church where her meeting had gotten over and asked if she could go on a date.
That night after bathtime, I went downstairs and arranged three candles on my bed stand while Mary Ann brushed April’s teeth. On my way back I stopped near the door and listened to Mary Ann reading, her voice lowering and rising in pitch to accent the danger and triumph. I stayed there for a full minute. When I read to April I never paused, my mind always on whatever TV show I was missing downstairs. But Mary Ann had different voices for different characters, and she played the calm, discerning narrator in between.
The Gingerbread Man was in his annoying “Run, run, as fast as you can…” and Mary Ann couldn’t stop or look up but acknowledged my presence with a smile as she read. I sat on the lid of April’s toy box and watched them together, Mary Ann scratching April’s back and finger-combing her hair as she read.
The Spark and the Drive Page 15
