Breaking the Fall (7 page)

I turned my head to acknowledge Mr. Milliken, feeling cheerful, nervous. Little Dung made the tiniest noise clearing her throat.

The car surmounted a hump at the ridge of the parking lot, and the road was littered with scraps of eucalyptus, tree trash all over the place. The air smelled wonderful. I found the lane with the car, and let the car's momentum take one curve after another, downhill and easy.

“Too slow,” said Tina.

That night I sat up straight, and put my hand out into the dark.

I whispered Jared's name, and listened. It would be just like him to steal into my own room as I slept, right into my bedroom, just to prove that he could do it.

But there was no sound, or only the normal sounds of the trees in the backyard making a fine, soft breathing noise in the wind.

15

“I think I made a mistake, Stanley.”

I did not respond. I was waiting for Sky, and felt both confined and honored to be in the garage. “Dad told me so. He said, Two hundred and twelve thousand' and laughed.”

Tu leaned over the engine of his car. He held a wrench, which made a pleasing ratcheting sound as he spun it around and around. “God damn,” he said, seriously and without sounding angry, the two words separate and careful. “Too many miles.”

Perhaps he misunderstood my lack of response as a macho no-comment way of agreeing with him. It was true that the afterglow of my student driving was still with me. It takes more than a few hours for something like that to wear off. But I could not trick myself into believing that I had cars figured out.

“Bad carburetor,” said Tu. “Bad everything.”

“There must be something good about it,” I offered.

“What do you think?” asked Tu, almost challengingly. He had, like his sister, a slight accent. His
t'
s sounded just slightly like
d'
s, and his words were delivered slowly, each syllable with weight.

I shook my head, meaning: I wouldn't know.

“A piece of junk.” Tu grinned painfully, misunderstanding my blank look for something more manly and more dignified.

He tossed the wrench, and it hit in a place on the workbench padded with cloth so the tool made a soft thump. Tu spun the butterfly nut on top of the engine, and tossed it to me. My baseball reflexes snatched the little winged nut from the air before I could think.

Tu lifted away a big circular device, a car part grimy and gray, and set it aside.

We both looked into the exposed engine. Tu prodded a valve with his finger. The small trapdoor made the slightest squeak.

“I don't know anything,” I said. “At all.” My words were not the simple confession I intended. They were naked statements, and I hurried to add, “About cars.”

Tu worked his fingers into a rag. “I think the car has a good heart.”

“Cars are a little mysterious,” I suggested cautiously.

He looked me in the eye. “Not so mysterious, Stanley.”

I thought for a moment he was criticizing me.

“Sky has volleyball practice,” he said, working a flap in the engine that was uneasily bright amidst the grime of the rest of the machine.

I wanted to say: I know. I wanted to clear my throat and say something about how good she was at sports. We both knew she was late.

“She doesn't understand,” said Tu. “About things. She doesn't understand the way guys think. Girls are different. They think about other things.”

“I like Sky,” I began.

Tu looked at me and shook his head, leaning toward me. He was a senior and only a year older than I was, but there was something about his bearing that gave him dignity. “You don't know Sky very well yet,” he said.

The “yet” sounded promising, I thought. Or hoped.

“You should know a couple of things,” he said.

My expression must have silenced him, or perhaps it was the weight of what he had to say. He bit his lip for a moment. “Sky knows some people.”

This was hardly news, but I went dry inside.

He gestured with a hand, perhaps missing the wrench to play with. “A lot of people at our church.”

He wiped his hands on his jeans. “And she has a boyfriend already, Stanley. A big boyfriend. Goes to Hoover.”

I wanted to lean against something.

“I like him okay,” Tu said. “But I don't really like him all that much.”

My voice was a thin little noise, barely human. “What does Sky think of him?”

Tu leaned against the car and gazed at the engine. “I think she likes him, Stanley.”

The sunlight through the open garage door was an ugly bleached yellow, hard on the eyes.

Tu lurched around the car and flung himself into the front seat. The big old Ford slumped to one side with his weight. “Okay,” he called, “open that valve. Like I was doing. That little valve.”

I moved in small jerks, thinking: you don't have to explain which valve. I'm not a total idiot. I was also thinking what a loud voice Tu had, and how he really ought to work on keeping it down so it wouldn't sound so annoying to people.

The engine made several distinct sets of squeaks as his foot depressed the accelerator before he turned the starter. The absence of engine rumble made the smaller hinges and connections of the car click and squeak.

I blocked out the garage for a moment, thinking of those other car sounds I had heard in the house with green shutters. Those other little car sounds, those hushes and thuds. My chest went tight and I felt weak at the memory, which was not a memory at all but a physical and present fact, like my skin or my bones. I felt dizzy.

The blast of the engine made me jump back. The big machine chattered, and was powerful, even dangerous, the fan blade spinning so fast it was a blur. Then the engine whirred into silence.

“Use a tool or something, Stanley,” said Tu from inside the car. “Hold it open. The car needs lots of air.”

I had to force my attention into the engine and poke the screwdriver where it belonged, holding open the trapdoor valve as Tu clicked the ignition. The car made that robot laugh old cars make when they have trouble starting. And then the engine caught, rumbled, and Tu pumped the roar, played it, until the big car idled.

“We're doing okay,” called Tu. “We got power after all, Stanley,” he said. I smiled at him through the dust of the windshield, as exhaust crept forward from the rear of the garage. Power after all. The phrase seemed political, or like something from an ad, and Tu laughed, aware that he had been quoting something, or misquoting.

I thought: tell Tu. Tell Tu all about Jared and the game.

I needed to talk to him, and hear what he would say.

I needed to tell someone.

Tu climbed out of the car, and the car settled back again. There was satisfaction on his face as he held out his hand so I could drop the butterfly nut into the creases of his palm.

Tu slammed the hood by lifting it a little higher to disengage the hinge and then throwing the hood down hard, back where it belonged.

We both coughed against the exhaust, and Tu smiled. “You want to drive?”

I shrank. I began to say that I didn't know how to drive, that I had missed Driver's Ed as a sophomore because of my ligament, that I didn't even have a learner's permit. And just as quickly I thought, sure. Why not?

But Tu was already in the front seat, and the car was rolling, and as we made our way down the driveway, Sky stopped at the sidewalk, gazing at us with her head held slightly back, an empress enjoying the sport of her subjects, her eyes nearly closed, telling her brother: so you got it moving.

It caught me, how well they knew each other.

“Hey,” Tu called, “get in the car. We're going for a ride.”

And the way he said it made it sound like we were going to go for a drive into the afternoon sky, over the sea.

“This is no car,” she said scornfully, and more than that, lovingly.

We drove to the intersection by the video store, and the big white car stuttered and rolled silent. Tu leaned his head on the steering wheel.

“It's okay,” said Sky from the backseat.

A car behind us honked, and Sky turned back and called out so clearly I knew the driver could hear, “Our car is broken. Don't you have any sense?”

The car honked again, belligerently, and then the tires squealed and the car passed us.

Sky put her hand on my shoulder. “Come on, Stanley,” she said, her breath in my ear, her hair tickling my neck. “Let's push.”

16

My mother had a black carry-on over her shoulder. It was leather, the shiny, soft leather that makes a silky noise when it moves.

She was slipping a map into a side pocket. “Don't put so much salt on the popcorn,” she said. “And if you use the microwave popcorn, make sure you open the packet away from your eyes. You might get blinded by the steam.”

I was in my dad's chair, looking, as he often looked, at the blank television screen.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “I thought for a second there was another person in the room, someone with ears who spoke English.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Christ.”

The television screen was a peculiar color when you really took a moment to look at it. It was gray-green, a flat, empty green like nothing alive.

As so often before, the words came before I could stop them. “You feel guilty,” I said.

She tugged at a zipper, and did not respond.

“You feel bad,” I continued, hating to hear myself talk. “You worry about me eating enough fiber because you're running away all the time.”

She let her black bag drop. “This is very interesting, one minute before my cab gets here.”

“Never mind.”

“Your basic form of conversation is sneaky, you realize that? You think communication is a long-running argument. You save up wise things to say. Reality as a sort of baseball game. You score points.”

“Runs.” I clamped my teeth on my tongue.

“I'm going to spend the night drinking coffee on the plane and finishing a report, have breakfast, look fresh and cute, and then I'm going to get on a plane and fly back here to an empty house.”

I glanced at her, expecting an irritated, impatient person. Instead, I saw that she was near tears. “And you think you're so smart,” she said, her voice soft and cutting. “Completely disengaged. Just a passenger on this trip. You have nothing to do with anything.”

I ached. I wanted to put my arms around her. I wanted to hide. “I'm sorry,” I said, lips numb, my voice a rasp. I wanted to add a dozen other questions, but I gripped the arms of the chair. There was a honk outside.

“Sorry,” she echoed, and I could sense her measuring me, wanting me to be a different sort of son, wanting her life to be something it wasn't.

She moved fast. She flung the carry-on over her shoulder, and only looked back from the door. “It's a disaster,” she said, so calmly that it made her statement into a statement of fact, ugly and beyond dispute. “A complete disaster.”

And she was gone, just like that, her eyes glittering with things she wanted to say, or was afraid to say, and I sat there, my words drying up, gazing after the closing door.

I made a point of eating with my father that night, an uncommon event. We had Mrs. Paul's clam crisps and a spinach soufflé in a plastic bag that looked like a green rock until you cooked it. I asked how things were going at the foundry, hoping to hear about molten steel and gigantic drop forges slamming out axles or exhaust manifolds.

“Our dental plan has fled the country,” said my father.

He said this with just the slightest wry tone, so I knew I was supposed to ask for more information. I was slow that night.

“I have spent the afternoon talking to the world's rudest dental receptionists, those sweet ladies who reassure you when you lose a filling.” He put down his fork. “I knew there was trouble,” he said, “when Macroplan wouldn't answer the phone for two months.” He let air out through his teeth. “I should have played it differently. Finessed it somehow.”

I got ready to ask him to tell me all about it, but when I looked at him, I really studied him. He was tired, dark smudges under his eyes, and he hadn't shaved very well that morning. There was a little stand of whiskers under one nostril. He had a handsome, craggy face, and looked exactly like what he was—a smart man with many worries. He was drained, and not just from recent struggles. He was getting used up.

“You know what life comes down to,” he said with a little smile. It wasn't a question. It was one of those topic sentences my father liked to use in conversation: “you know what really pisses me off” or “you know what the problem with unemployment insurance is.”

I gave him a look of interest, a hopeful smile.

“A good filing system.” He laughed, an ironic sort of laughter I did not feel invited to join. “Isn't that depressing?”

I made a little questioning sound.

“Depressing because you expect life is a question of courage or brains or love or something. But the guy who knows where he put things, where the money is, where the facts are, and who can put his hands on the hot numbers the quickest is the winner. It wins wars. It wins hearts and lives. It cures the halt and the lame. Not genius. Not the tireless, merciful soul. Those are nothing compared with a good information retrieval system.”

He chewed, and I said: “Mother isn't happy.”

His answer was quick. “Happy,” both ironic and a little sad. He thought for a while. “That's my point.”

He regarded me. “She's in Boston,” he said, and I wanted to say that she was nowhere at all, really. She was in flight, finishing a report, but then it stung me: he didn't really know where she was, he was guessing, hoping that I knew. She hadn't told him.

After a long while, he said, “We may not make it.”

My throat constricted and I stopped chewing. I had tears, blinding, quick tears, and I looked away so he wouldn't see.