Other Worlds, Better Lives, A Howard Waldrop Reader Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003
Page 27
“Sorry I asked in the first place. God, I wish life was as simple as wondering whether I’m me!”
“Gal trouble?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Suit yourself.”
They watched the ocean in silence. Stewart finished his fries. “Well,” he said. “I better get back and check on Roger. Want to shoot some pool later?”
Roger was Stewart’s little brother, who hadn’t spoken in six years.
“Naw. I’d rather brood.”
“OK.” said Stewart. “You might want to check the news when you get back—you may not have heard out here on Despondence Slough Point, but some big-ass deal’s up in Washington, cars coming and going all day, Kennedy flew back from campaign-stumping for senators in the midwest. Not that I give a rat’s ass.” He paused. “And I wouldn’t go selling Dobie’s friend too short. Regiomontanus was a Krebs.” He got in his Merc and left.
Bobby brooded for an hour or two, then that lost its charm. He went back to the parking lot.
As usual, there were notes stuck under his windshield wipers, two under the left and one under the right. He pulled that one out. It said: “Don’t listen to those guys!! I’ll top any of their offers by $75. Call Spud,” then a phone number.
Bobby’s car was a 1946 Ford Super Deluxe wagon: pale green hood and fenders, black top, with light blond wood doors, sides and back, and rear door. It had a green Continental kit and whitewall tires.
Every gremmie and would-be ho-dad on the coast was always trying to buy it from him, so they could use it to haul their surfing-boards and beach-bunnies around in it and look cool. He tore up the notes and threw them in the park garbage can.
He got in, made sure the greasy rag was handy on the floorboard, the one that he used when the gears hung between first and second, when he would have to jump out in the street, open the hood, yank the shift-levers even, and start all over again. It was happening more frequently lately.
No matter. He put it in reverse, swung out, shifted and headed for home.
Trouble or not, his rod was not for sale.
MONDAY. “I Remember You”
Bobby came in from work, took a quick shower, and lay down on his bed, which was three steps from either the door or the shower.
He looked around at his place. What a dump. He had to make some more money, or something, and get out of here.
He looked up at the wall where there was a license-plate holder. Above, it said “DC Cab” and below “Call Lawrence 6 1212.” The license plate itself was number H0012. He’d gotten it when he was eleven. He remembered the day he’d gone to the cab company to get it, the day they changed all the license plates for the next year. It hadn’t cost him anything: by then everybody seemed to have forgotten everything that had happened.
He’d had it with him ever since, in DC at the boarding house; when he and his mom had moved to California for her new job in ’54, when his mom died in ’58 and he’d been out on his own.
He also remembered, back in ’51, that the first thing he’d done that summer night was to beat the shit out of Sammy, the neighbor kid, for putting the finger on Mr. Carpenter. “They was Army guys!” said Sammy that night as Bobby pounded some more on his snotty nose, “What could I do? Don’t hit me!” But Sammy knew he had it coming.
He turned on the radio. “—will make an address in about six more minutes. Meanwhile, here’s ‘Sea of Heartbreak’ by Don Gibson, from way way back last year in 1961—” The music came up.
There was a knock on the door, then Stewart came in. “Hey, turn on the box. Kennedy’s gonna blow off his bazoo in a few minutes.”
Bobby switched on the TV, fiddled with the rabbit ears and the tinfoil till Channel 9 came in as well as it ever did. Some afternoon game show was wrapping up.
Stewart fired up a Chesterfield with the flame-thrower Zippo he used.
“God, those things stink!” said Bobby.
“You don’t like smoking, move to another country.” said Stewart. He rebreathed his own smoke three or four times.
“That kind of smoking went out in the Stone Age.” said Bobby.
“The hell,” said Stewart. They heard a motor-scooter buzz up outside.
Gadge, who lived in the same apartments, came in the door with his books under his arms.
“Kennedy talking yet?” he asked, dumping his books all over the floor. “Pomphret’s busting our asses again.”
“That right? Well—”
The TV had gone to the network logo, and a “Please Stand By—Special Bulletin” card. The announcer said: “We take you now to the White House where the President of the United States will address the nation.”
Bobby looked at the clock. Four p.m. PDT. That would be 7 o’clock on the East Coast.
* * *
“—within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.
“This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba—”
* * *
It was weird listening to this. It was coming out of the TV. It was coming out of the radio that Bobby had forgot to turn down. The President was saying it. Nukes in Cuba, a few minutes flight away from DC. Bobby knew all the DEW radars were in Canada, Alaska, Greenland, pointed north, over the Pole, toward Russia. They fired those things off from Cuba, you’d be dead where you sat.
* * *
When it was over, and the quarantine—Kennedy’s word for blockade —was announced, Gadge said “Gee whiz!”
Stewart was quiet.
“Where’s the admiral?” asked Bobby.
“He had to get back to the Pentagon last Friday. Some big-cheese reunion of the old code-breakers or something . . . Hey, wait! I bet it had something to do with this!”
Gadge started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“Boy!” he said. “I just got a picture of Krushchev and Kennedy waving their dongs at each other, their hair all standing up straight . . .”
“Krushchev doesn’t have any hair,” said Stewart.
“He does on his back.” said Bobby.
“Yeah, well, it’s just a big-dick contest!” said Gadge.
“It’s a big-dick contest with H-bombs,” said Stewart.
“Hey,” said Bobby, looking at him, “you’re the one who’s usually a card. Why so glum?”
“I better get home,” said Stewart. “No telling how Roger’s taking this. See you guys later.”
“Lemme put this in perspective,” said Bobby, stopping him at the door while turning off the TV, and turning the radio back up, which was playing Bert Kaempfert’s “Wonderland by Night” from 1960. “Kennedy thinks he’s got problems, what with Russians and missiles and Castro in Cuba. Me, I gotta find a shifter gate collar for a ’46 Ford.”
* * *
After they had gone, Bobby put on the First Family album on his Silvertone record player. He listened and laughed. He liked the way Vaughn Meader, as Kennedy, said “Cuber.”
TUESDAY. “Wheels”
The junkyard was as crummy-looking as most, but it was bigger.
There was a parking strip, and a tiny office you had to go through, attached to a barn-size building with a couple of garage doors through which you could see the entire history of the internal-combustion engine and the transmission stacked up to the ceilings. Beyond that was about two miles of 10-foot-high fence topped with four strands of barbed wire with a sign every fifty feet saying “Patrolled by Vicious Dogs.” There was a big wrecker with the junkyard name on it, and
a smaller one made out of a pickup, dark blue with a dribble of pink paint on the left fender, that was unmarked. On one side of the garage-part, hoods of cars and trucks were stacked up like rental boats at a lake in the off-season. There were four or five cars out front when Bobby pulled up. He took out some wrenches and screwdrivers and went inside the office.
A fat guy was on the phone. His hands looked like he’d cleaned them last during the third Roosevelt administration. He held up one of them. He finished talking and hung up.
“First thing you do, kid, you go to that stack of pads there and you write your name and address and you sign and date it.”
“I thought I was at a junkyard,” said Bobby.
“Hoho. So you are, kid. This is for my insurance company. Something happens to you out there, and you’ve signed the form, I don’t care. You don’t sign it, you don’t get in on your quest for the perfect hot rod.”
Bobby stepped over to the pad of mimeographed forms, read it—the stan-dard “own risk” crap, wrote out his name and address, signed and dated it.
“Letting lawyers doing your thinking for you, aren’t you?”
The guy sighed. “You got cars, glass and junk, you get insects and worms. You get insects, including bees and wasps, and worms, you get birds and rats. You get birds and rats, you get snakes, many beneficent, but including the coast rattler, the copperhead and the mocassin. You reach for the headlight assembly on an El Dorado and grab a handful of coast rattler, you die.
“I really don’t have time for a nature lecture, kid. I just don’t want anybody asking me in county court why I let idiots in such a dangerous place. That is the short answer. You through?”
“Yes.”
“Happy hunting.”
* * *
The junkyard rose slowly toward the back of the place, up toward the hills maybe a mile away. Bobby assumed any Ford Super Deluxes they had had been stripped long ago; he’d have to look at any Ford made between ’46 and ’49, including pickups. He had a tracing of the shifter gate collar, top and side view he’d made after Kennedy’s speech yesterday; he figured while the thing was working at all, he’d better take it off, trace and measure it, and put it back on before he went to the junkyard. He’d had to hand-jerk the gears eight times today, including two blocks before he got to the junkyard. His hands weren’t much cleaner than the guy’s who ran this place.
* * *
An hour later and no luck. Every early postwar Ford he’d seen was stripped back to the firewalls, most missing the steering columns, even the wheel hubs. He’d found lots of wasp nests, and once thought he heard a snake under a car when he climbed up on the bumper—maybe it was just a lizard or frog or rat.
* * *
He was near the back of the place. Off to one side was a long pen full of the snarliest dogs he’d ever seen, ten or twelve of them. They were barking and bounding off the double-reinforced cattle fence that looked like it had been through a waffle-maker. The dogs’ feet never seemed to touch the ground. Geez.
There was a slow rise at the back of the place, mowed grass on it, a mound. In the middle of the mound was what looked like a bank-vault door. Above the door and to one side was a dark indented slit in the mound.
Bobby jumped down inside the front of a ’54 wagon, made, he knew, too late after they changed everything, but he looked anyway.
* * *
Some minutes later a truck pulled up through one of the narrow twisting lanes between the junkers and drove around to the back of the mound. The truck was from the Pure Water people; a guy got out, hooked up some hoses, and let Newton do the work, as Stewart was always saying when gravity was involved.
Bobby walked closer. He saw that the inset slit above the door contained the business end of a submarine periscope.
He knew then that he was looking at a pretty serious fallout shelter. So the junkyard guy was going to bunker-up during WWIII, instead of taking his chances outside with all the radioactive mu-tants. To each his own.
* * *
He found what he was looking for on a 1951 Chrysler. They weren’t supposed to have parts that would fit Fords. He checked the drawing twice and measured three times. Same adjustable screw sleeves and everything.
He tossed it up in the air and caught it a few times. He walked to the edge of the mowed grass around the fallout shelter. The water truck was long gone. The dogs were going crazy. The sun was heading down in the drink, and they were getting restless. Maybe they lived for each night, hoping just once somebody would be out in the place when they were turned loose. He saw there was a big lift-gate at the front of the pen, and a walkway above it so the gate could be pulled up and the dogs couldn’t get to whoever opened it. This was some operation.
* * *
He went back to the office just as the big back overhead garage doors of the engine and transmission graveyard opened, and a kid with sunstreaked-blond hair jumped back in another wrecker, towing a car that looked like a photograph of a wave on the hook. The car was all blue; all the glass had been spiderwebbed, and it was hilled and vallied in six places. It must have spun on the top, or gone under a moving van. Bobby didn’t see any blood as it went by him.
“Out in the 34 area,” the fat guy was saying to the kid. The kid nodded, looked at Bobby, bounced away.
“You look happy. What you got, kid?”
“Shifter gate collar.”
“Shifter gate collar? Well, normally that would be 50¢. But being how the world’s gonna end this week, that’ll be a quarter. You’ll need it to get up in the hills to the people who’ll steal and rob and kill you.”
“Thanks,” said Bobby, handing him two dimes and a nickel. “I see you’re ready.”
“That I am. But don’t come around when it happens thinking I’ll let the whole world and his uncle in. All my family’s ready too, ’ceptin’ that boy you saw there; he says he’ll take his chances.”
“Well, he may be right,” said Bobby. “Maybe people are more or less good. Maybe they’ll help each other if that happens.”
“Kid,” said the fat guy. “Prepare yourself for one big disappointment.”
* * *
There were two more names and phone numbers stuck under his windshield wipers. He crumpled them up, threw them on the seat. He jerked up the hood, undid the top screw from the old shifter gate collar, crawled under, backed the bottom screw out, pulled off the old collar, slipped the new collar over the column till it snapped into place, put in the bottom screw, climbed out from under, pulled the gear rods down, put in the top screw. He wiped his hands on the rag, got in, ran through the gears letting the clutch in and out. Smooth as silk. All that aggravation fixed for a quarter. He turned on the radio. The DJ was saying, “and now, here’s the Republican campaign song for 1964,” and Ray Charles came on singing “Hit the Road, Jack.”
Then Bobby noticed the fat guy and his sun-blond kid standing on the office porch looking at him.
“Hey, kid.” said the guy. “My son wants to know if you want to sell your car?”
Bobby cranked up and put it in reverse.
“Not for all the farms in Cuber,” he said, and drove away.
WEDNESDAY. “West of the Wall”
Roger, who was thirteen, was putting together an Aurora model of the Frankenstein monster. He had it standing up on its tombstone base, its left arm outstretched and in its shoulder socket, and the two halves of the right arm together and held with rubber bands while the reeking airplane cement dried.
“You okay, kid?” asked Stewart, coming in and putting his papers on the chair nearest his bed in the room they had shared for six years.
Roger shook his head yes.
“School okay?”
Roger shrugged.
“Yeah, I know what you mean. Neat Frankenstein.”
“I’ll bet you can hardly wait for your next allowance, huh?”
Roger smiled, then went back to gluing.
* * *
The hall phone rang and Miz Jones the housekeeper answered it. She talked a few minutes, then called Sarah, the admiral’s sister to the phone.
Sarah was upset when she came into the boys’ room. “It’s the admiral,” she said. “He wants to talk to Roger a minute, then you,” she said to Stewart.
Roger ran out into the hall. After a couple of minutes he came back in, pointing over his shoulder with his thumb.
Stewart picked up the receiver.
“You okay, Admiral?” he asked.
“Yeah, yeah, Stewart, I’m fine as could be. Eating good old Navy chow again, working with some of the old gang. Look, Stewart—” he said, then stopped. “I—”
“We’ll be fine, Admiral. It’s you we’re worried about.”
“Yeah, well, I was fine for about forty years before you was born, kid. I want you to know how—uh—”