Budding Prospects (24 page)

Now, buffeted by the chattering exhaust, billowing fumes and dust devils, I snuck a look at Gesh and saw that he hadn’t exactly been exhilarated and revivified by the holiday either. He was staring out the window of the car, moodily sucking at his cigarette, stolid and silent as a rock. “Some bust of a weekend,” I said, without taking my eyes from the road.

Gesh merely grunted, but there was an unfathomable depth of bitterness in that grunt, and though he hadn’t said anything about his date with Yvette, I understood that it, too, had been a bust. He morosely tossed his cigarette out the window and into a clump of grass beneath a
FIRE
HAZARD
sign, and then turned to me. “You don’t know the half of it,” he said.

“Yvette?”

Gesh flicked off the radio. “I wasn’t going to tell you this—it’s embarrassing—but the more I think about it, it’s so pathetic it’s funny.” He paused to reach behind him and fumble through the cooler for a splinter of ice. “You know, right from the beginning I thought there was something strange about her—it was too good to be true, right? Paradise. A bar full of beautiful women and all of them hot. At first I thought she might be a hooker or something, the way she came on to me in the afternoon, but she wasn’t. We did some kissing and groping at a booth in back and she didn’t say anything so I asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else. ’I’ve got an appointment,’ she says. ’But I’m free tonight.’

“Okay. So I’m all pumped up and I go over to her apartment thinking I’ve got it made and she meets me at the door in a pair of jeans and a tube top. She looks fantastic, but there’s something about her that just doesn’t sit right. She’s big. Her shoulders are too wide. Then it hits me. But no, I think, that’s crazy, and I look at her again and she’s beautiful, stunning, like she just stepped off the cover of some women’s magazine.

“We have a drink. She starts coming on like a nymphomaniac but I’m holding back because of that funny feeling I had. I’m on top of her, I’m trying to get her top down and her hands are all over me. ’Listen,’ I say, ’I don’t know how to put this, I mean
I hope you won’t be offended or anything, and this is probably insane, but could you tell me something—it’s really important to me.’

“She looks up at me, cold green eyes, eyes like the water under the Bay Bridge when you go fishing. ’What?’ she says in this tiny little voice.

“ ’Christ, I don’t know: this is crazy. But tell me, do you … I mean, you wouldn’t happen to have a penis by any chance?’

“Suddenly her eyes look like they’re sinking into her head, her pupils shriveling up, and she looks like she’s about to cry. And then she holds her hand up in front of my face, two fingers an inch apart. ’Yes,’ she whispers, and I jerk back as if my shirt’s on fire, ’but it’s only a little one.’ “

It must have been around seven when we hit the outskirts of Willits. The sun was dropping in the west and igniting the yellow grass of the hills, trees began to leap up along the road, and we passed a succession of neat little houses, as alike as pennies. Gesh was asleep, his head propped up on one arm and playing to and fro like a toy on a spring. I was thinking of the summer camp, of the plants flourishing in the stark sun, of the candy man who was going to buy the whole crop—cash up front—and of what I could do with a hundred and sixty-six thousand dollars, when I noticed that the car in front of me, a VW Bug of uncertain vintage, was behaving erratically. The car had slowed to a crawl and seemed to be listing to the right, as if the road had given way beneath it. As I drew closer and swung out to pass, I saw that the car was mottled with primer paint, bumper-blasted and rusted, and that the right front tire was flat to the rim.

I was already accelerating, humping up alongside to roar past and reduce the crippled Bug to a dot in the rearview mirror, when I turned to glance at the driver. What I saw was arresting: eyes you could fall into, a nimbus of black ringlets, the long, sculpted fingers and the open palm waving frantically for help. There was a desperation in that face, a needfulness that made my heart turn over. What she saw in return could hardly have inspired confidence—i.e., the battered Toyota, Gesh’s big
lolling shaggy head, my intrusive eyes and sweat-plastered hair—but she waved all the harder. My foot fell back from the accelerator.

Having been raised in New York, I was accustomed to turning my back on all such appeals for aid from strangers. I routinely gave the stiff arm to panhandlers, slammed the door in the faces of Bible salesmen, Avon ladies and Girl Scouts, ground the receiver into its cradle at the hint of a solicitation and strenuously avoided all scenes of human misery and extremity. Ignore him, my mother would say of a man twisted like a burned root, the stubs of three crudely sharpened pencils clenched in his trembling fist. Don’t get involved, she’d hiss as a couple slugged it out over a carton of smashed eggs in the supermarket parking lot. But this was different. This was no half-crazed wino, wife-beater or terminal syphilitic—this was a flower, a beauty, a girl with a face that belonged to Amigoni’s Venus. She pulled over to the shoulder, her damaged wheel rim clanking like a cowbell, and I swung up just ahead of her.

She was agile, urgent, pouring from the car in a spill of flesh. Nike sneakers, satiny blue jogger’s shorts, a halter that left her shoulders and navel bare. Gesh had momentarily jolted awake as I rumbled up onto the shoulder, but now he drifted off again, snores ratchetting mechanically through his dried-up nostrils. I stepped out of the car.

“Oh, listen, thanks a lot,” she gasped, snatching for breath like a miler. “I’m really glad somebody stopped—have you got a jack?”

She was standing directly in front of me now, too close in her urgency, shoulders shrugged and palms spread in entreaty. Her mouth was wide, nose cut like an
L
, skin dark. Italian, I thought. Or Greek.

“Because I don’t know what happened to mine. I must’ve loaned it to somebody or something. Anyway, I’ve got a spare, and if you could just let me borrow your jack for a minute …”

I realized I’d been staring at her like a deaf-mute under sedation, and wrenched my face into a broad grin. “Sure, of course, no problem,” I barked, swinging round to work open the trunk.

“I hit something about three miles back,” she explained, peering into the trunk full of fast-food wrappers, rags, laundry, tools,
cans of spray paint, torn tennis sneakers, and lurid paperbacks. “I figured I could limp into town, but then the rim started to go on me and all of a sudden the car was shaking like a roller coaster or something. Well, that was it. I started to get afraid for my pieces …”

I glanced up inquisitively, jack in hand.

“My pottery. I’m a potter. In Willits?” She took the jack from me as casually as if I were handing her a canapéeA at a cocktail party. “I’m right on Oak Street—it’s just a little place, Petra’s Pots. Between the real-estate office and the barbershop.”

A mobile home the size of a DC-7 rumbled by as she bent to maneuver the jack under the frame of the VW and give the jack handle two quick twists. I stood above her, watching the coils of hair play across her bare shoulders, and then peered through the window of her car and saw that the back seat was stacked with flats of ceramic mugs and matching cream-and-sugar sets. Larger pieces—they could have been bongs or samovars for all I knew—were wrapped in newspaper and wedged into the floor space on the passenger’s side. “Need any help?” I asked.

She was squatting beside the wheel now, fitting the cruciform wrench to the first of the wheel lugs, and she paused to glance up at me with a wide white smile: “No, thanks,” she said, “I’m not the helpless type.” Then she turned back to her work, and I watched her arms harden as she fought the lug. It wouldn’t give. She strained until her shoulders began to tremble, then rose to her feet for better purchase.

“You’re supposed to spit on your hands,” I said, and she laughed.

Then she attacked the recalcitrant lug once more, throwing her entire body into it, teeth gritted, eyes clenched, halter bursting. Nothing. I watched her smugly, greedily—it was my right and privilege to study this beautiful woman, this stranger, because my stopping to help had forced us into an intimacy of purpose, and I knew it would be only a matter of moments before she would turn to me for the muscle she lacked. “Wow,” she said finally, “that’s a bitch,” and she stood to wipe her hands on her shorts.

“Mind if I give it a try?” I said, arms folded across my chest.

“It must be frozen on,” she said. “You know, rusted,” but she
was smiling softly, capitulating, and we both recognized that she was yielding ground, casting off the mantle of the woman warrior, if only for a moment.

As I bent to the wheel, I asked her if she was from Buffalo or Rochester, having detected a trace of vowel strangulation in her accent. “I was just curious,” I added. “I’ve got a lot of friends from up around there.”

“Chicago,” she said, flattening the
a.
“My name’s Petra, but I guess I already told you that.”

I smiled up at her, gripping the prongs of the lugwrench like Samson fastening on the jawbone of an ass, introduced myself in a gasp and gave the wrench a mighty jerk. Nothing happened. “Tight,” I grunted, flexing the muscles in my back.

“You from around here?” she said.

I jerked at the lug. It was immovable. With exaggerated care, as though the tool must be defective, I slipped the wrench from the lug and studied it.

“I mean,” she prompted, “you look familiar to me.”

“Oh,” I said, judiciously fitting the wrench to another lug and preparing to slip every disc, rupture every muscle, and herniate myself into the bargain with one murderous herculean thrust, “not really. We live in Palo Alto, actually. But we just”—I broke off to jerk savagely at the wrench—“but we just like come up on weekends to go, to go”—I was running sweat, furious, distracted, and I nearly shouted the final word—“fishing.”

“Looks like it’s really on there, huh?”

“No, no,” I said, bracing myself for another try, “don’t worry. It’s just”—again I heaved till I thought I could feel something give in my groin—“stuck, that’s all.”

It was at that moment, as if it had been choreographed by the Fates, as if all the hands of all the clocks that had measured time throughout history had been synchronized to mock that instant on that road on that day—it was then, when my guard was down and my passions piqued—that the CHP cruiser, revolving light aglow, glided silently up onto the shoulder behind us. I froze. Became a sculpture in living flesh:
Man Changing Flat.
Petra glanced up at the opaque window of the police car and put her hands to her hips.

The door of the car swung open and a glistening boot appeared. Then, six-two, one-eighty-five, as lean and tough as a strip of jerky and with every hair of his mustache clipped to regulation length, Officer Jerpbak emerged from the cruiser. He was carrying his summons book in one hand, and his mirror shades flashed malevolently. “What’s the problem here?”

“Nothing we can’t fix ourselves,” Petra said. Her voice had turned acid.

A pickup rattled by on the road, cloely tailed by a convertible that lurched into the outside lane with a blast of the throttle and then vanished in the distance. I straightened up—slowly, cautiously—still gripping the lugwrench and wondering what to do. Should I avert my face, throw my voice, drop the wrench and stroll casually back to the Toyota, start it up and drive off? The wrench weighed twelve tons, my heart was in my ears. Here he was, at long last, Jerpbak. Jerpbak the enforcer, Jerpbak the hound. In the flesh. “It’s just a flat tire, Officer,” I said, my voice hollow, withered, gone flat and out of key.

“Well,” said Jerpbak, ignoring me, “Miss Pandazopolos.” He sauntered up to the VW, put a foot on the bumper and thumbed through his summons book. “And her junk-wagon.”

“Oh, come on—get off my case, Jerpbak.” She flattened the final vowel until it trailed off in a bleat.

If to this point Jerpbak had seemed faintly amused, in the way of a nine-year-old with a bare wire and a pan of frogs, he turned abruptly serious. “In the car, lady,” he snapped. “I’m conducting a spot inspection of this vehicle right here and now.”

Petra fixed him with a stare of such intense, incendiary hatred I thought he’d burst into flame, and I realized with a thrill that she and I—that this fantastic, wide-mouthed, long-legged, dark-skinned, furious woman and I—had a bond in common. She opened her mouth as if to protest, but Jerpbak, impenetrable behind his shades, was already scribbling in his summons book, and she stalked round the car and slammed into the driver’s seat instead.

At this point, Jerpbak turned to me. “And who are you?”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you.”

“I’m nobody. I mean I, uh, just stopped to help when I, uh—?”

“You a local?”

“Me? No, no. Just passing through, never been here before in my life. I live in San Jose. With my mother.”

“Funny,” Jerpbak said, scratching meditatively in the dirt with the toe of his boot, “you look familiar.” And then he hit me with the question that gave me nightmares: “Ever been to Tahoe?”

“Where?”

“You hard of hearing? Tahoe. Lake Tahoe.”

Shit, I thought, and I felt something give way, a piece of elastic frayed to the breaking point. “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve been there.” And then: “Look, what’s this all about, anyway? You charging me with being a good Samaritan or what?”

There was a long silence. Jerpbak’s glasses were like the eyes of a predacious insect, huge, soulless, unfathomable. Drums thundered in my head, my chest was exploding, a truck shot by with a climactic whoosh. “I don’t like you,” Jerpbak said finally. “I don’t like your shirt or your shoes or your haircut or the tone of your voice. In fact, I like you so little that if you’re not in that piece-of-shit Toyota and out of here in thirty seconds flat, I
am
going to run your ass in. Don’t tempt me.” Then he turned his back: I was dismissed.

Jerpbak was hovering over Petra’s window now. She stared straight ahead, rigid as a catatonic. “License and registration,” Jerpbak said. She didn’t move. He repeated himself.