Monster Behind the Wheel

by Michael McCarty

  Caitlin stared out the window, white knuckles in her lap. “We’re driving in blood,” she said, gazing at the road with dark red water in the places countless tires had toughed out.

  And I thought, Well, it is Memorial Day. All about the passed ons in life, like Mom. The bloody roads seemed somehow symbolic of that. Caitlin hadn’t even known Mom, so it was really nice of her to come with me. I mean, the highlight of our day would be traipsing through a cemetery in Wichita Falls to visit the grave of a woman who used to make me pralines and lemon chess pies and who was now a dessert for worms. A woman who had smelled of Ivory soap but who now stank of rot. A lady who would hug me tight but not too tight. Now her bones were just sad sticks.

  I looked out and down, and for a second—just a nanosecond, really—I saw faces reflected in one of the crimson tire canals beside the car. It’s funny how something you see for a flash can register quite solidly in your mind, as if you’d been observing it for hours. The faces were deteriorated, ravaged, awful. Dead people.

  Land of the Dead folks, visible because it was a road, and I had first come into contact with them through a road. I might have been unconscious, but I remembered the streets there had been awash with blood, troughs of it running along the curbs.

  My nose wrinkled. I smelled death somewhere. It’s a stench you never forget.

  There was a large raccoon in the middle of the road, pretty well pulped and a few days gone. Follow the carrion road. Follow the carrion road. Fallatha-fallatha-fallatha-fallatha follow the carrion road. Toto, I don’t think we’re in freaking Oz anymore. Maggots and horseflies and ants, oh my.

  The dead faces in the canal seemed to have perked up what noses they had left, sniffing, sniffing out that dead raccoon. Sniffing. Sniffing.

  This time I shivered. I rolled the damned window up.

  The school year was drawing to a close. I was thinking of taking summer school classes at Richland College, but I was barely staying afloat with my finances. I would have to wait until fall to continue with college. Summer was going to be a hiatus of saving up, or I wouldn’t even be able to go then. It was at times like these that a young man’s fancy could turn to a life of crime. There had to be an easier way to make a buck.

  Not that I was serious, but a few times I caught myself wondering how easy it would be to sneak into one of those rich homes in Highland Park for a shiny bauble or two. I also considered how hard—or easy, actually—it would be to commit armed robbery along the hiker and bike paths at White Rock Lake. There had been a string of driveway robberies where the thief waited until somebody arrived home, buzzed up the garage door, and hadn’t yet put it down again. Usually nobody got hurt and nobody got caught.

  Christ. I wasn’t serious. I was just daydreaming. Like when I pondered getting Internet info on how to make a bomb, because I already had the addresses of certain insurance companies. Lots of injured people getting the shaft mused about that, I’ll bet. Not that we would ever in a million years follow through with such a thought. It was harmless escapism, that’s all. Harmless dream-scape revenge. Only the brain-dead wouldn’t have it cross their minds as a way to pretend they had some autonomy in this shit-eating world.

  Anyway, I tried to persuade my boss, Mr. Getz, to give me more hours for the summer. Since the accident, things had been tense at work between my employer and me. First they had to change my position, and then there were all the phone calls from the various insurance companies, including Mr. Pizza’s carrier.

  Mr. Getz cut back my hours about a month before. He’d said, “This is a slow time of year. Most of the hours have to go to the delivery drivers and cooks.”

  You know, the guys who actually do stuff around here?

  I think my boss was hoping I’d volunteer to deliver pizzas. Or maybe he was trying to steer me toward quitting. He was too cheap to fire me, and if I resigned he wouldn’t have to pay for unemployment. The whole thing reminded me of that play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams. In this case, I was the cat and Mr. Getz was waiting for me to leap off the Mr. Pizza rooftop. Knowing my luck, I wouldn’t land on all fours. I’d end up being kitty roadkill, with big black crows pecking at my pretty eyes.

  Mr. Getz also said he’d caught me on a couple of occasions spending a little too much time in the bathroom. He’d walk in, and I’d be standing in front of the mirrors above the sinks, my shirt off, gazing at my healed back. It was looking good now. And was I wrong, or did I actually have a few new muscles? I didn’t know physical therapy could make me buff, at least more buff than I’d been before. But I guess it was possible since they worked the muscle groups. I did more exercise after my accident than I’d ever done in my whole life.

  Still, the muscles were supposed to have been badly damaged. Not that I was some steroid sex machine or anything. I only had whispers of biceps and triceps and whatever else they were called.

  I told myself, Keep this up and you’ll get another girlfriend. You’ll have women all over you.

  Mr. Getz had just scowled. “You were supposed to be all cut up. You tryin’ to pull a fast one on the insurance company, boy?”

  “I was all scarred, honest,” I replied. “I mean, see? My face still is. And I’ve got scars on my arms and legs. But my back just did this. They think it’s a medical mystery. Cool, isn’t it?”

  He calmed down a bit. Probably thinking of the publicity Mr. Pizza would get if I ended up on TV. Maybe they could change the name to Miracle Pizza. “Miracles, get your miracles here with a side order of garlic bread sticks and cheddar cheese dipping sauce . . .”

  Rochelle and my doctor had been talking about my phenomenal recovery like I was the bionic man but without the hydraulics. Maybe Dr. Carlson would take me off light duty so I could become a cook. Cooks made a better hourly wage than drivers. They didn’t get tips like drivers, but they didn’t have to depend on tips, either. Lots of folks never gave gratuities to pizza boys, except maybe in porno movies—and I was already getting a little older woman action.

  Anyway, back to the automatic teller.

  The container with my cash in it finally came zipping back. I received what I’d come for, so I turned to wave at the guy in the MGB. Hey, we both owned classic cars. It was like two men walking down the sidewalk, each with a gorgeous blonde in a miniskirt. These guys nod and smile at one another, because obviously they’re in the same I-got-me-some club. Damn, but it was nice to belong to an exclusive group.

  I pulled Monster out of the parking lot. I drove to where I could get onto Fascination Street, then headed toward Dallas.

  I turned on the radio and caught the tail end of the Santana song “Black Magic Woman.” Mike Carabello’s crazy congas complemented Carlos Santana’s liquid guitar solo.

  ZZ Top’s “La Grange” was next. The guitar riff and vocal style were an homage to the master of the electric postwar blues scene, Muddy Waters himself. Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, Steve Winwood, and about a thousand others had been inspired by Waters. My grandmother had been born the same year as him: 1915. I couldn’t believe anyone from that far back could be so cool. Waters, that is. Not Grandma. The ancient were supposed to like Perry Como or something.

  I often felt that KDBN was the church of ZZ Top: two bearded Bible-thumping string players and a mustached drummer-preacher who played the blues for a congregation of rock ’n’ rollers. Hard to believe these guys were as old as my father.

  I glanced in my rearview mirror and was startled, thinking I saw an older guy. Just the eyes and hairline. But I blinked and it was gone. Made me chuckle, wondering which of them I’d seen: Z, Z, or Top?

  I pulled off Plano Road and then took a quick left onto New Church Road. I drove to the last house on the left, which had a huge fix-it shop with the sign Gramp’s Garage over the entrance.

  Gramps had been a mechanic for thirty years. He’d retired a couple years ago and started repairing cars at home.

  My appointment was at high noon. Gramps was sitting in a lawn chair inside
the garage drinking a can of Mountain Dew.

  “Hey, kiddo, you ever hear the one about the guy who wondered what the hell was in this here stuff?” Gramps asked, indicating the soda. “He sent a sample of it to a lab. They sent him a report sayin’, we got good news and bad news. The good news is, it ain’t toxic. The bad news is, your horse has diabetes.”

  Gramps lived up to his name, being one older than dirt geezer. He looked like Santa Claus in greasy overalls—overweight, a long white beard and short white hair. With the long beard, he might have looked like Z or Z (probably not Top, though) if he lived to be seventy. Behind him was a badly oxidized car door with the words Rust in Peace spray-painted on the side. I guess that was his idea of humor. Very punny.

  “I heard you’d been in a wreck,” he said, eyeing Monster as I pulled inside. “I’m glad you got rid of that piece of shit Ford. A Barracuda . . . You’re movin’ up in the world, boy. Must’ve collected a helluva settlement to buy a beaut like this here.”

  I got out of the car. “Nope. I just got lucky and found a gal who wanted to unload this one for cheap. The insurance companies are dragging their feet.”

  Gramps took another swig of his Mountain Dew, swallowed, then choked, hawking out a green lump. He wasn’t sick; it was just an old man clearing his pipes. “Yeah, those insurance fuckers are like that. Always have been, always will be. You know, a deer totaled my truck down near Austin.”

  “Oh,” I said. I gave him a once-over, seeking signs of injury. There were none. “You okay?”

  “Shit,” he said, chuckling. “That was a long time ago. Long before your daddy popped your mama’s cherry. I was still poppin’ them myself in those days. Anyway, I was down there fishin’ at Lake Travis. No deer up here in Dallas so I didn’t really ’spect one to come boundin’ out of the trees. I took the dead deer and threw it in my freezer in the basement. I thought that maybe the insurance company might need proof or somethin’.

  “First, I had to file all kinds of nonsense papers. You know the drill they hand you. Then the insurance company said they’d send out one of their evil minions to get an estimate for them.”

  “An appraiser.”

  “Yeah, one of them dog-fuckin’ bastards. Well, I kept waitin’ and waitin’, thumb up my butt, and they didn’t send nobody. It must have been about a month since I bashed that Bambi, and my temper was soarin’. So I got my son to fetch his Polaroid, and I took the deer out of my freezer. We went to the insurance agent. I strode into his office as bold as you please with the deer hung across my shoulders like Errol Flynn in that old movie Robin Hood. I plopped the carcass onto his desk. It was still mostly frozen but was beginning to thaw. Stinky juice seepin’ out the holes here and there all over his papers. I got me a check for a new truck the next day.”

  Gramps pointed out a framed photograph of a man in a white shirt and a tie, seated at a desk behind a dead deer, blood and other secretions spattered across his button-down Van Heusen collar, his face a mask of disgust and horror.

  Gramps beamed with pride. “Ever see that movie The Godfather where they put a horse’s head in the bed of the Hollywood horse’s ass? I just love that part, but I did this here before they did that there.”

  I chuckled.

  He looked me up and down, remarking, “Musta been a helluva accident, boy.”

  I shrugged. “Yeah. Totaled my car, nearly totaled me.”

  “In my years of fixing up cars, you see all kinds of ’em get smashed flat, banged up, and crunched into modern statuary like this. I’ve wiped blood off glove compartments, pulled bone splinters outta steerin’ wheels, and once I even found a severed toe the ambulance people missed. Only then do you realize how dangerous cars are. The automakers are always preachin’ safety features this and safety features that, seat belts and air bags. There’s no way to be safe from a car when boom time comes along.” Gramps drained the last of the soda and then crushed the aluminum can in his hands. “Cars. Ya gotta fear and respect ’em.”

  I noticed he said “from a car” instead of “in a car.”

  Gramps walked around the front of Monster. He bowed his head a moment as if in reverence. “Pop the hood.”

  I did so, and he gazed at the engine for a few minutes.

  His already grizzled forehead wrinkled. “Hello there,” he said to the engine. “I know you.” He grunted. “I’ve seen this car before. At a car show. Yeah. It used to belong to a cop.”

  A cop? It occurred to me that I’d never asked Connie what her late husband did for a living.

  The old mechanic sighed, his blunt and permanently oil-stained fingertips brushing a curve of carburetor. His entire body language was one of deference. Like maybe what a queen’s physician would show when it was time for Her Majesty’s yearly pelvic examination.

  “Detroit sure as hell don’t make ’em like this anymore,” he said. “Hearty V-8 engine, tough I-beam suspension, all-American steel construction—not like that goddamn plastic shit the foreigns use. And that car they make in . . . what? Yugoslavia? Some kind of fancy cardboard, I hear. How the hell’s that supposed to stand up in a skull splitter on the turnpike? Cardboard’s only for shoe boxes, the kind ya bury turtles and kitty cats in.”

  He hawked and spat again. “But this. Virtually indestructible. The kind of car God Himself would tool around in.”

  I nodded. “Or the devil.”

  Gramps laughed and slapped his knee. “Can you imagine if that scary-book feller Stephen King had written—what was it called? Christy? Christine? If he’d used one of them crappy cardboard Yugos? End of story real quick. That goddamn piece of shit car would’ve melted to pulp in the first strong rainstorm.”

  Monster was soon above me, as the hydraulic lift made my car ascend in the air like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, only with a nicer set of wheels.

  Ninety minutes later, Gramps had changed the oil, tuned up the engine, and flushed the radiator. I wasn’t planning on having the last thing done, but he pointed out that it needed doing, so I agreed.

  As I prepared to leave, he told me, “Remember, kiddo. Fear and respect. Fear and respect.”

  The Bachman Lake area of Northwest Highway was some miles off, but I was free for the afternoon. So I’d called Darrin Wagner to tell him I’d stop by. I pulled into the tacky strip mall and walked into his office.

  Judy, the busty receptionist who’d been so heavily into “Achy Breaky Heart,” wasn’t there.

  Darrin peeked cautiously from behind the partition, like a man who wanted to see without being seen. “Oh, it’s only you.” He grabbed a jacket and his briefcase. “Let’s go next door.”

  I followed him into the Titsup Topless Bar. The bouncer waved Darrin through but asked to see my license. I took it out of my wallet for him. Actually, I was rather pleased. I’d thought the scars on my face made me look a lot older. That, and the flesh memory of pain.

  I mean, who would ask Frankenstein’s monster for his ID? He may have been born on a table yesterday, but he looked like a senior citizen.

  The place for customers to sit was dark and cramped, not much larger than Darrin’s cave of an office. The biggest thing there was a long stage with a brass pole in the middle. It dominated the otherwise shrunken room, Christmas tree lights strung all over the walls. Definitely not a classy gentlemen’s club like the ones frequented by football players and movie directors. There was a small bar on the side and eight tables straight out of a sleazy seventies disco.

  Darrin sat at the table closest to the stage and looked expectant.

  I glanced around. “They wouldn’t put on a show just for us, would they?”

  The bouncer’s pierced eyebrows met above his nose. He said to me, “The Titsup has a policy. If there are two customers in the room, a dancer has to perform. Usually this early in the afternoon, we don’t even get two customers. Thanks for stopping by.”

  I let my gaze stray back to the stage. “Oh.”

  A tall, skinny, bleached-blonde woman in her early thirtie
s came over to our table. She looked terminally bored as she nodded to Darrin.

  “Hey, Candy,” the lawyer said.

  “Your usual Bud?” she asked.

  “You betcha.”

  “And what would you like?” she asked, blinking at me.

  I didn’t feel like a beer, but hard liquor was out of the question this early, and a shot was a worse idea. I cleared my throat. “Uh, I’ll have the same.”

  She moved off toward the bar. The bouncer was also the bartender. He had the beers waiting for her to pick up. Chances are he was the owner, too. A few moments later she returned with the Buds, and Darrin paid her. She went back to the bar and turned on some music.

  The persistent percussion was as rhythmic as pelvic thrusts and relentless fists. Candy strutted onto the stage, lax expression and tired body suddenly coming alive. She danced as if all eight tables had been filled. Actually danced as if she were in a real theater with hundreds present, instead of just us measly two.

  She took off her sequined top. Her breasts were small with big purplish nipples. Then she unzipped her cutoffs, under which she wore only a purple thong. She had several intense tattoos on her torso. Skulls and blood-dripping fingers. A handsome, naked vampire rising from the center of a rose. A sleek black car driving out of her pubic hair.

  Death freak. Goth.

  “So, how’s school?” Darrin asked, taking my attention away from her swaying body.

  “What?” The music was loud.

  Darrin leaned a little closer. “How’s school?”

  “Almost finished,” I said as I took a sip of beer.

  “That’s good,” he said, studying the stripper.

  At this point, after several surprisingly athletic whirls around the pole, Candy did a handstand.

  Darrin started clapping and I joined him. I was staring, trying to make out what seemed to be a string of words tattooed around her entire waist. But I was too far away to read them.

  “Did you get a chance to talk to Cait about me? Do you think she’d like to go out with me?”