I come back to the table with the pile of jeans and t-shirts, and long-sleeved shirts, held in my outstretched arms, afraid to acknowledge that they are indeed meant for me. My mother is sitting up now, her sunglasses in her hands and she too, keeps her eyes fixed on the clothes.
“Thought you might like to freshen up that look of yours, Mal. And besides, you lean over that hose one more time in those ratty old shorts, you’re gonna split them wide open. And that isn’t something that any of us want to see, Mal, believe me.” He’s watching me and smiling as he says it, barely paying attention to the fish at all.
I put my hand on top of the pile of clothes and hold them tight. The smell is even better than the smell of the salmon. I want to rub the new fabric against my face but make do with just feeling it touch my hand.
“It’s his father’s responsibility, George. I told you that. It’s the agreement that I have with his father. We should not be buying him clothes. That wasn’t agreed to, not at all.” She’s not really angry with him, I can tell. She has her angry face on, but her voice isn’t raised and her expression remains steady as she reclines back into her lawn chair.
For once George ignores her and turning from the grill, he looks straight at me as though she isn’t even there. “Go on, go try them on, or you’re gonna drop them all over my absolutely perfectly barbecued salmon fillet.”
He ruffles my hair and pushes me away when I thank him. It’s not until I’m in my room that I hear pieces of their conversation. I can’t hear what my mother says but George’s response is loud and forceful enough that it can’t be missed.
“The boy works hard for the little money that he gets, Agnes. Let him enjoy his new clothes. God knows, he deserves it.”
I don’t want to hear anymore. I want that to be the last thing said about me and my clothes for the night, so I do what I’ve learnt to do. I hum. I lay out the clothes on my bed and quietly hum to myself, concentrating on the words from the Bruce Springsteen song that is playing in my head. It works; I can’t hear any more of the conversation outside. My imagination takes me to the world that he sings about mixed up with my own world. It’s a world of fast cars, and washing cars, and girls, and of course new clothes that smell like they’ve never been worn. The cars in my mind are always sparkling clean and never really need to be washed, and the girls always look the same. I’ve tried to change my mental image of them when I’ve performed this exercise before, but it never works. It’s always the same girl. She always has flaming red hair and tremendous assets and she’s smoking. She’s always smoking that cigarette and waving her arm around while her assets bounce up and down, over and over again.
CHAPTER 8
The weeks turn into months and as July becomes August, summer finally begins to appear. The days of rain and wet change to warm days, and the cars at Mr. Allister’s car lot get dusty instead of grimy. The salesmen get grouchier in the heat, and a certain secretary wears less and less clothing. Terry and I continue to monitor Marvin and her whenever we’re able, and of course inspect our shed for any signs of illicit activity. Terry is a year older than I am and seems to know what he’s looking for as he checks whether our boxes of rags or buckets of chemicals have been disturbed. I only lift things up and put them back down, pretending that I know what would be involved with their secret encounter.
“Try to be careful with that stuff, Malcolm. It’s still not done.”
It takes me a moment as I hold in my hand a crudely fashioned length of pipe that seems to have pinholes all through it before I realize that I am holding the “it” that Mr Allister asks his son about every day. I place the pipe back on a pile beside the other pieces that have the same holes in them and the same odd shaped fittings attached to their ends, and realize that Terry is almost holding his breath while watching me.
I don’t need to ask the question; somehow I know that he’ll tell me. We’ve washed enough cars together and spied on enough salesmen and secretaries for some kind of a bond to have been formed, so I pick the piping back up and hold it carefully, waiting for an answer.
“You can’t tell anyone, Malcolm, not George, not Marvin, not any of the asshole salesmen, no one.”
“I don’t talk to Marvin, Terry, you know that, and if you don’t want anyone to know then don’t tell me.”
“It’s not that I don’t want you to know. It’s just that it’s not done yet, Malcolm. I can’t get it done by myself.”
And with that statement and the famous Allister smirk, Terry enlists me in helping him finish his project.
We work after the office closes in the evening, when there is only Marvin or one of the other salespeople up front, sitting with their feet on their desks. They can’t see us from the dealership, as the shed is in the way, and we’re in the open area at the far end of the lot. George actually sounds disappointed when I tell him that I’m going to spend some time with Terry after work, and that Mr Allister will give me a ride home. He’s quick to recover though, probably glad to be spending some time alone with my mother. Grinning, he tells me that it’s okay to get into a little bit of trouble but not too much, and turns the music up, backing his car out onto the road.
It takes two nights of climbing ladders and assembling pipes and fittings and brushes and wires before it begins to take shape and I start to see what we’re building.
“I can’t believe you don’t see it, Malcolm. It’s pretty obvious to me, and to anyone else that might stumble by here.”
I think I know what it is, but I’m enjoying teasing my friend and his 8 foot high by 20 foot long contraption far too much. “Well, if I could see the plan, Terry, then maybe I’d have a clue, but I’ve yet to see the plan.”
“It’s all up here, Malcolm,” he says pointing at his head with his finger and smiling, “I see things that I want to make but there’s never a plan. They’re always just in my head.”
It isn’t until he asks me to get a couple of scoops of the green soap from the shed that I realize I can’t keep pretending any longer.
“Oh, Terry. It’s brilliant. What a great idea.”
I rush back with the soap from the shed, not bothering to close the already open door, and stand back, admiring his creation. We’ve built an apparatus with pipes and hoses running along the roofline and walls. There are two pumps, one at each end, and a bucket, that is raised to the roof, where we place the soap. There are brushes attached to cables that are in turn attached to an old steering wheel. There’s no provision for drying them but if it works the way he says it works in his head, then his unsightly structure will wash and rinse the cars automatically. At the edge of Mr Allister’s car lot, tucked behind our shed, we’ve built a car wash.
Although he isn’t old enough to drive on the roads legally, Terry is allowed to drive the cars around the lot, and he pulls a dirty, black station wagon carefully under the rows of suspended pipes and hoses.
“I’ll plug it in, Malcolm. I want to wire in a switch and then hard wire it all, but for now I’ll just plug it in to test it.”
I think of the cartoons that I watch with George on Saturday mornings. The Roadrunner will flip a switch or turn a dial, then wait for mayhem to strike. Something always blows up or catches on fire and it never, ever, works out the way it should. Terry’s invention doesn’t operate that way. It does everything that it did while it played in his head. The water comes out and completely rinses the car when we turn the fitting to the first position. We pull on a rope and the soap drops from the bucket and suds up the vehicle. He calls for me to wind up the old steering wheel and the brushes firmly scrub the vehicle down. Then, when we turn the fitting once more, the car is rinsed perfectly clean. The whole process takes about ten minutes and the car looks as clean as if we had scrubbed it ourselves.
I’m giddy and can hardly contain myself. I haven’t jumped up and down in many years, so I just clap my hands and laugh and congratulate my friend on the perfection of his homemade car wash.
“I don’t like the
pressure on the final rinse, Malcolm. I think we need to regulate that a bit. If I can get the PSI’s up a bit then it’ll shorten the wash time.”
“You dumb shit, don’t you know what you’ve done here. You’ve probably invented the world’s first homemade car wash and you’ve done it with old parts that your dad had lying around. You should be happy; this is a very, very good thing that you’ve done.” I’m still laughing, and my frustration at my friend’s reluctance to celebrate is only half-hearted.
He stands back and looks at it proudly. “It does look good, doesn’t it? You know I have these things in my head and I see them so clearly sometimes that it almost hurts. I just know that I have to get them out; it’s the only way for it to stop hurting. So I make them, or I try to anyways. This is the biggest one though, for sure. This is definitely the biggest one.”
It occurs to me that we’re looking at the car wash as though we’re parents fawning over our first-born, or at least a proud master watching his dog give birth to pups. “You should call it something; you should give it a name.”
He laughs but it’s a Terry laugh, a warm, generous laugh. “You’re right, you’re right. I was just thinking that. It’s Brutus. We’re going to call it Brutus.”
“That’s a good name. That’s a very good name for a car wash, Terry. It’s a Brutus.”
Still smiling his infectious grin, he corrects me. “Nope, it’s not a Brutus, Malcolm. It’s Brutus, just Brutus.”
It’s hard to turn away from Brutus but we know that Mr Allister will be sounding the car horn soon and driving around the front of the showroom, waiting to take us home, so we start to clean up the assorted spare parts that are lying around. It isn’t until we’re within a few feet of the shed, our arms loaded down with parts and tools that we realize that the door is ajar with the padlock lying on the ground.
“You left it open when you went to get the soap. It doesn’t matter; I doubt that anyone is going to be back here at night anyways.”
As I lay the equipment outside the shed, I try to mentally retrace my steps and remember exactly how the door looked when I had come to get the soap. “Yeah, you’re right, I did leave it open but you know what? It was open when I got here. We must have left it that way when we started working tonight. It definitely was open when I got the soap. I would have been too excited to get the lock undone.”
It takes a moment before we realize what has happened and Terry is up the little step and into the shed before I am. “Dirty bastard, dirty old bastard. He’s been in here. He’s been in here with her, and we missed it. I can smell the sex. I know I can. I know damn well that I didn’t leave that door unlocked. I know that I locked it up. Dammit, he’s been in here and we missed the whole thing.”
All I can smell are the damp rags hanging from the rafters and the same smell that always seems to be in the old shed, but Terry seems certain as he stomps around without touching anything.
I try to think if there had been anything out of place when I came back earlier, anything that might not have seemed right. I’m sure that I would have noticed, sure that I would have seen another person. The only area that looks different is on the floor where the parts for Brutus had previously sat. “Maybe there, Terry, if anywhere, they might have been there.”
“You’re right; you’re right, look at the bag of rags stacked there, they used that as a pillow, didn’t they? There’s no way that was there before, no way.” He takes a minute and I know that it’s not anger on his face, just frustration. It isn’t about catching Marvin doing something in his Dad’s car lot that he shouldn’t be doing. It’s about something else. It’s about a certain secretary and her assets and perhaps even catching a glimpse of those assets. I know this because it’s exactly the way that I’m feeling, and even though we don’t admit it to each other; I know that it’s a shared feeling.
A strange flicker of excitement flashes across his face, the same flicker that happened when I first saw him talking to his father about his invention. “You know what. I’ve got an idea. Don’t touch a thing. Just leave it all there. Let him think that we don’t know. Let him think that he’s gotten away with it. You and I are going to come back tomorrow night and the night after that too if we have to. We’ll pretend that we are still working on Brutus. I’ve got a way; I’ve got a way that’ll catch both of them.”
He built a car wash from a picture in his head using junk that was just lying around, so there’s no doubt in my mind that we’re going to catch them. I just don’t exactly know how. I imagine a hidden camera with a huge screen set up on the back wall so that we can view it while sitting on our overturned buckets, or a tape recorder hidden in a hollowed out soap bucket. He doesn’t seem to be frustrated now; he just looks like he’s processing. His eyes come alive as he puts away the leftover parts that Brutus didn’t need and he’s excited again, excited and alive, probably picturing his next invention in his head.
We make absolutely certain this time that the padlock is in place on the door when we lock it for the night, and by the time we reach the front showroom, Mr Allister is leaning against his car, listening to Marvin as he tells him about his latest conquest. It’s difficult to tell from the partial conversation that we overhear whether Marvin is talking about a woman that he’s had his way with or a deal that he’s closed.
“I’m telling you, Bill, when it’s there, it’s there. It just takes the right man to push her buttons. And let me tell you, I knew exactly where her buttons were.” Marvin is leering and his body bends at the waist in an unnatural manner as he tells his story.
Mr Allister seems relieved to see us as he turns away from Marvin, “Here they come, the two amigos. How was your evening, guys? Interested in stopping for some pizza on the way home?” His smile is different from the one he gave to Marvin while listening to his story. It’s friendlier, more genuine.
“Pizza sounds good, Dad. It’s hungry work getting this thing up and running. Just another night or two and we’re all set. Just a couple more nights of Malcolm and me working and it will be all done.” He sounds a bit insincere to me, but no one else seems to notice as his father mockingly punches him on the shoulder and grins. Marvin stands back, teetering from one long, skinny leg to the other and sweating, sweating even though the sun disappeared an hour earlier. Even as we climb into the car, he still stands there, sweating and leering. Terry smiles and waves, then flips his middle finger in the salesman’s direction but it doesn’t faze him one bit. He just keeps watching as we drive away. He’s not watching Terry and his rude gesture though. He doesn’t seem interested in him at all. He’s staring hard, directly at me, only at me, of that I’m certain, absolutely certain.
CHAPTER 9
My father calls every Saturday night. Even though he’s thousands of miles away, it’s easy for me to picture him, pacing back and forth on the creaky floorboards in the upstairs neighbour’s house. His strong Scottish words come through loud and clear. George politely says, hello Alex, to him, then tries to hand the phone to my mother who waves her hands, and mouths the words, Malcolm, give it to Malcolm.
He tells me about Celtic’s latest fitba game that he’s heard on the radio, and then asks if I’m eating enough and getting enough sleep. He’s stiff and formal on the telephone as though his conversation is being listened to by many, and in a way it is, as his booming voice reaches everyone in the room. We’re in the family room, which is the Canadian room that holds the television and stereo, and George has politely turned the volume down in order for me to speak to my Dad.
“Your voice is changing, Malcolm. It’s cracking, you sound different to me. You sound like a Canadian.” He’s disappointed and bemused at the same time. I know my father. I can hear the emotions in his voice.
“I’m no, Dad. I’m still the same.” I easily lapse back into my Scottish accent and leave the newly acquired Canadian one alone for a moment. George smiles, while my mother mocks me by mouthing my words. And then I do something that I’ve never done. Ma
ybe it’s an aftermath of hearing her talk about my new clothes, or maybe it’s the way she’s trying to ridicule me to George. I hand her the phone, and tell her that my Dad wants to talk to her.
George sits up straighter, but still keeps his eyes on the television set, as my mother hesitates, then angrily pulls the phone from my hand. “Yes, Alex, he’s well. All is fine here, nothing to worry about at all. He’s such a smart boy, a smart, smart boy.” She says the words harshly, while looking at me as though she’s trying to expel something distasteful from her mouth.
“It’s the discipline that the masters instil in him here, Agnes. They put up with no guff, none at all. He’s always top of his class in his studies,” I overhear my father saying back to her.
My saving grace has always been my studies. The answers come easily to me. While my classmates struggle, I seem to have this ability to go from problem to solution with little effort. I sometimes feel as though I carry a map, and the rest of them are searching for signposts. Whereas Terry can build things after seeing them in his head, my strength is numbers. I seem to instinctively know how to find the answers, without knowing the precise formulas that have to be learnt in order to get me there. My mother usually takes little interest in my marks or grades, but I know that this time she won’t give credit to my father, or Scotland and its schools for that matter. She’s out of her chair now, standing upright and very straight, and is quick to respond to his proud boasts.
My Temporary Life Page 5
