The Spark and the Drive

by Wayne Harrison

  “We only did about ten cars today,” I said.

  “I’ll come in tomorrow to work the counter.”

  “Can you talk?”

  “Not really,” she said. “Not now.”

  For the next three days, I couldn’t get her alone. After work she made the bank deposit next door and then went straight home to Nick. My own drive back to Levi, which I’d been making in record time the last few weeks, became a torturous slog in which I was only dimly aware of other drivers blaring their horns or flipping me off.

  One day Bobby invited me to Hog Wild after work, but I was afraid he’d want to talk about stealing our first car, and so I told him I had plans and then felt shitty for lying. At home, Mom had grown used to having her evenings free. She went out on dates with Costa, to movies and to restaurants in Southbury, and they did the circuit of late-summer carnivals, the ones guys from school used to get drunk at and then brag about in the fall.

  I tried spending more time with April, but my need for company seemed to drive her away. To my questions she gave short, testy answers, and it was hard to get her to look at me. If withstanding loneliness was a form of conditioning, then my high school years should have made me a marathon champion of being alone. But I hated not having her in the room. I sat with her through hours of lame cartoons, and at bedtime all she’d talk about was Mary Ann. Then the grief came flooding back, and I’d realize that on the outside I was acting, trying to live a rock ballad where dignity overcomes the heartache.

  “Is she coming back the next day after today?”

  “Tomorrow. I’m not sure.”

  “Because she’s supposed to,” she said. “And I really really really miss her.”

  * * *

  The Z-28’s owner wouldn’t let anyone one but Nick wrap up the job. In the lobby Mary Ann explained that Nick was home with a peptic ulcer, but the guy kept pressing. “Okay, fine,” she said and grabbed the phone receiver. “Let me just call and see if he’ll come in with his bleeding stomach and set your fucking idle.”

  The other customers looked up with alarm and curiosity, but Mary Ann stayed committed and unapologetic even as the poor slob backed away saying he’d call.

  One evening after the customers were gone I came out to the lobby as she was batching up the last work orders. She glanced at me, and her smile was really just a loosening of her lips from their taut line of concentration. My plan had been to tickle her, but instead I leaned on the wall behind her and watched her reflection in the bay window. She pulled apart the yellow sheets from the pink ones, and faintly I smelled her oils, pine and citrus, until the silence became corrosive. I imagined the many possible ways she could take anything I said.

  She looked at my reflection. “I feel confused,” she said. I knew she wasn’t crying but I hoped for a second that she might be. “It’s hard to take all these fucking changes, you know?”

  “Let’s go somewhere after work,” I said. “Just to talk.”

  “I can’t. We’ve got friends coming by tonight.”

  I nodded and stayed calm, but Jesus Christ, friends coming by? Wouldn’t Nick and Mary Ann pretend they were still happy in front of their friends? Couldn’t pretending lead to the real thing?

  I felt helpless. With Mary Ann, I had been more charitable and impulsive and funny than I’d been with anyone else in my life, but when she was away from me, I saw that my best wasn’t enough. Nick offered her something better that I didn’t understand. On a scrap of cardboard I’d started a list of everything he was and wasn’t. Not anxious, never hysterical. They say anxious people live in the future and depressed people live in the past, and it seemed that Nick’s quiet suffering was more deserving of sympathy, at least of Mary Ann’s, than my lingering unease. He was brooding and silent and uncynical, and all of these, especially not allowing himself the release of criticizing people who deserved it, were the very aspects of his personality that were probably eating away his stomach. He didn’t take care of himself, which I used to think was a plus in my column, but I didn’t work out for my health or for any noble reasons. I did it to impress or intimidate people. Nick, on the other hand, was exactly what he appeared to be.

  I wondered how he could see his life as being livable if a woman as good-looking and tragic and brave and thrilling and misunderstood as Mary Ann was subtracted from it. He didn’t fear what seemed, to me, looming—the regret of having not seen what his marriage was worth—and I had no idea why. But it was hard for me to keep pretending that Mary Ann didn’t find some or all of this irresistible.

  Now she stood staring at the floor, and her eyes seemed to soften. “Monday,” she said. “We can talk after work.”

  28.

  On my lunch break Monday I went to the package store and paid twenty-six dollars for a Pinot Noir from California; at Caldor I bought champagne flutes, a corkscrew, and a Jefferson Starship cassette that had “Miracles” on it, the most romantic song I knew. After work Bobby was lounging in one of the customer chairs with a Heineken resting on his thigh when Rod and I came out to the lobby. Bobby handed me a beer that I would’ve declined if he hadn’t opened it already. “Hey Nimrod,” he said, “bust some suds?” He held up what was left of the six-pack to Rod.

  “You’re cold, my brother,” Rod said. And I drank my beer against feeling bothered by this new tolerance, if not the first impulses of a friendship forged, between them.

  Mary Ann put together the night’s deposit with an amused awareness of us, like a mother doing dishes while her children run rampant in the kitchen.

  After work I pulled onto the shattered concrete lot at Holy Land. There were a few other cars and some guys standing around a low crackling fire. I parked facing where the sun would set on a pair of sugar maples already turning color. I decided to wait on the Starship song, which was after all a lovemaking song, and plugged in “Bell Bottom Blues.” Like “Layla,” Clapton had written it for Patty Boyd, who wasn’t as good-looking by a long shot as Mary Ann. I rewound the song and sat with the key off as long as I could before I had to get out and smoke a cigarette.

  The nights were cooler now, and over my street clothes I had on my brown shop jacket, which I hoped would have the same effect on the Latin Kings as my uniform. None of the parked cars was the Celica from the last time. The music was rap, which Ray used to call jungle boogie, and now I tried to decipher the rhythm so that I might nod a little with the bass beat. I brought out the wine and champagne flutes, hoping that anyone watching would see I was only waiting on a girl.

  When she turned into the lot I got back in my car. She parked beside me, and I leaned over to open the passenger door as she came around, clutching her purse.

  As I showed her the wine, I explained how coastal vineyards give the grape a long, cool growing season (I’d read it on the label—the guy at Liquor Mart barely knew red from white), and I couldn’t tell if she was impressed or just being polite when she said it sounded yummy. As I was pouring her glass she said, “That’s enough,” and I didn’t like the way she said that, so I pulled the bottle back with some drama.

  “Too much is going to put me to sleep,” she said. “But thank you.”

  We didn’t have a lot of time before the sun set. I was hoping the view would spark something for us, but Mary Ann yawned twice without apologizing, and I worried that each break in conversation would become her cue to say goodnight. She asked about April, so in return, and since it felt so goddamned formal between us, I asked about Nick. He was getting better, eating more, sleeping through the night.

  “I heard you won’t let him go out to the garage,” I said.

  She watched the sun, which was just getting liquid near the big cross, and sipped her wine. “A few days ago he went out to invent some kind of new distributor tool,” she said. “I heard him throwing up in the driveway.”

  “Well, he’s lucky he’s got you,” I said, intending next to say that he didn’t deserve her, but Mary Ann shrugged and said, “For better, for worse.”
/>   The only thing that kept breath in me was that I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic. “It seems like all you get is the worse,” I said.

  She stared for a few moments at a long frayed cloud soaking up the color before she looked at me. “Meaning I’m not supposed to have compassion?”

  “Does he?”

  She smiled bitterly, right at the peak of the sunset, and put her champagne flute on the dashboard. “Thank you,” she said. “This was fun.”

  “The answer’s no, Mary Ann.”

  “You’re pushing me, Justin. I know you’re nineteen. I know you think everything is your business.”

  And here it was all at once, the crossness, the implied giving up, that I thought she would never—even on those nights I dreamed of our marriage and children and hand-in-hand passage into old age—use on me.

  “You know the times you thought he was staying late at the shop? He was racing the Corvette for money. He didn’t want you to know. He lied and said I had to lie.” I stopped myself as the venom of having betrayed Nick yet again spread through me, but I didn’t take my eyes off her. She stared ahead, the sunset flattering her face almost more than I could bear.

  I’d stunned her, and now I wanted to keep stunning her with the truth. Showing patience hadn’t worked, and if I was going to lose her I was going to tell the whole truth first.

  “He used to race in Oregon,” she said. “I’d go with him, sometimes.” And she seemed almost relieved. Perhaps she’d thought I was going to say that he’d been out with another woman.

  I took a moment to breathe, to swallow. “He told me what happened that night. Before your sister came.”

  She turned and watched me. “We had dinner. I took a bath … what? You tell me, if you know everything.”

  “He told me, Mary Ann. In bed, when you didn’t want to. He told me.”

  She closed her eyes and breathed. Nothing happened for a second or two, and then she reached for the door handle. “Goodnight, Justin.”

  I started out my door, but then I looked back in the car because she was frozen there holding the handle, her door still closed. A tiny choking sound came from her throat, and she lunged forward. When I leaned back in and touched her she jerked away, mashing herself up against the door before she found the handle and got out.

  She didn’t close the door. The music outside seemed to be louder now. She walked around the Nova, hugging herself in the last of the sunlight. I didn’t know what was happening, and when I got out she went to the front of the Malibu and started kicking at the grille.

  “Don’t go back to him, Mary Ann,” I said. “You can stay with us.”

  She kicked out a headlight that burst with a firework pop just as I was getting to her. “I’m so sick of these fucking cars,” she said, kicking wildly. She stomped her heel through the grille, and plastic pierced the radiator, hot antifreeze spraying onto her pant leg. She swatted at the liquid as if it were a swarm of bees. I pulled her away, and when she was clear of the car she turned and pushed me off. “Who do you think you are? My God,” she yelled. She charged into the park.

  I caught up with her, but she was holding her head and didn’t know I was there.

  “Aw, shit,” called a silhouette moving near the fire. “She fucked that shit up.”

  I looked back at the cars. My passenger door was still open, and I jogged back, got the keys, shut the door, and then saw that her keys were still in the ignition. I got them and locked the Malibu, and when I turned back she was gone.

  I called her name, and the voice from before called back, “Watching you, home.” The light was draining, and a few of them might have been coming toward me. I took out the two ten-dollar bills I had in my wallet and jogged over to them. “Could you keep an eye on her car? I’ll be right back.”

  In the Nova I zigzagged along every narrow street around the park. They were neighborhoods of tar-shingled cape houses with rusted-out beaters at the curb. Dusk hung like silt in the air, so I had to pull up close to people—one shirtless psycho in camo pants hollered, “I got what you want!” and chased me off the street. Down at the river where she jogged, I scanned every foot of sidewalk my headlights touched, and then I turned around and started the route again, but she was nowhere.

  It was full dark when I pulled in to the Cumberland Farms on Cooke Street, two blocks from Nick and Mary Ann’s house. I parked away from where the cashier could see and cut through the park so that it was just a climb over chain-link into their side yard. I crept around Nick’s El Camino on the edge of lamplight thrown from the living room window. I darted in behind a half-dead rhododendron with my back against the house and caught my breath.

  I was standing under the window that looked out at the park. I inched up toward the glass, my stubble raking the aluminum siding with the sound of a wire brush on a cymbal, and I rested at the bottom corner to close my eyes and listen.

  A woman on TV said, “Calgon, take me away,” and I crept higher until I had an eye barely over the sill. Nick was crammed back into the corner of the futon, with his hand over his mouth, staring at the TV. He could have been engrossed in the commercial or he could have been deranged. I wondered if Mary Ann had let him know that she’d be late tonight. If he was capable of regret, I would say he was suffering from it profusely. I had an impulse to go around to the door and just tell him what had happened. Be ready, Nick. You shouldn’t have let this go.

  And then incredibly Mary Ann came out of the bedroom. She was dressed in a T-shirt and pajama pants. She must’ve jogged part of the way to have been there long enough to change clothes. She carried a pillow and the comforter from the bed.

  Nick didn’t look up as she walked by him, but just as she was at the stairs he said, “You don’t have to tell me, okay? I just can’t figure out if you’re hurt. Are you hurt?”

  She paused, looking up the staircase at Joey’s door, and I could see only her back, but I saw the shudder, and against it she hugged the pillow. When I thought she was over it, that she would go up without a word, was exactly when she dropped everything on the stairs and swung around—I dropped out of sight.

  “This is your world! You did this. Your bullshit silent world. Live in it!”

  I don’t know how it would’ve felt to have seen her face. It was terrifying, of course, but also thrilling to think of her yelling like that at me—to be hated and loved enough to inspire that kind of outrage.

  I stayed at the window for a long while after she went upstairs. I watched Nick go in the kitchen and come back with an ashtray and a glass of milk. He stared at the TV as he lit a cigarette. I prepared myself to jump back should he come to open the window, but he seemed too distracted to notice the room filling with cigarette smoke.

  He took out a card from his wallet, picked up the phone receiver from the end table, and dialed. “Is Justin there?” he said, and then he dropped his forehead into his open hand. “Can you ask him to give Nick a call?” He gave Mom his number and thanked her.

  Later he disappeared through the door to their room and brought out a pillow and a sleeping bag. I kept spying on him, feeling low about it at first, then rationalizing that I didn’t deserve any more surprises.

  It was after ten when I got back up to Holy Land. There were no cars anywhere and only a wide swath of pebbled safety glass shimmering in my headlights where, instead of jimmying the lock to the Malibu, they must’ve smashed a window and brushed out the glass.

  29.

  Don was making an effort to be my father again. He called once a week, and if I didn’t feel like talking he’d catch on after a lull or two and say he had to let me go.

  “What was it like telling people?” I asked one night, sitting on my bed with the door closed.

  “Remember the time you and Alan Tate stole the newspapers?”

  “It was like sneaking around?”

  “No, I mean after. When Mom made you go house to house to apologize. It was like I’d misbehaved, but they were going to be generous
and forgive me. It was relying on the kindness of strangers, except they weren’t supposed to be strangers.”

  “Mr. Percy?”

  “Sure, the Percys, the Vanns. All the dinners and parties and house-sitting for eight years. Did you know that Tom told me to stay away from his kids?”

  “I never liked that guy,” I said. “They act like they’re such great Christians.”

  “But they’re grown-ups. They can understand nuances like you or I can. If a book turns you into a zombie, close the goddamn book.”

  Zombie, I thought. That’s just what I’d been at Northwest. There was a transfer kid with a lisp who got called Fag Bag, and he didn’t last a month. No way could I let it get out that my father was gay.

  “But do you ever feel like you’re acting?” I said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Like when you talk to somebody, all you’re thinking about is how they might take it. If they’re still going to like you.”

  “Isn’t that the definition of in the closet?” he said. “Sure, I’ve done that. I still go out of my way not to mention my personal life. Once in a while I’ll pretend I’m straight.”

  “You do that?”

  There was a short silence. “I was in a cab in the upper eighties, and the driver saw a young lady in the crosswalk. He said he’d donate his right one to science after a night with her. He said…” He laughed voicelessly. “He told me he’d eat twenty yards of her shit just to see where it came from.”

  “Classy. What’d you say?”

  “I said, ‘Me too.’”

  “Come on.”

  “I mean, what could I say?”

  I laughed and could see his smiling face in the quiet afterward. Before I could stop myself, I was telling him about Mary Ann. Everything, more or less, came out, except the word “rape,” which I described as a bad situation. “But it’s like she doesn’t remember.”