Interference & Other Stories (3 page)

“I don't sell air,” he told the kid while Mrs. Hanley's seventeen-year-old Ford levitated like the miracle it was. He paused, caught the kid's eye, and winked.

“I suck wind sometimes,” he grinned, “but I don't sell air.” He popped off the right front hubcap, reached for the compressor gun, and squeezed the trigger.
Brrrppt.

“But you're in business,” the kid stammered, “you're in business to make money. To make money. Right?”

Brrrppt.
He palmed the lug nut.
Brrrppt.
Another Reagan baby. A suit off the rack, a binder of information, a rap his boss had made him memorize.

“Look, kid, you're wasting time.” He dropped the lug nuts in the hubcap. “You're on commission, right? There's nothing here.”

The phone rang. “Walter? Walter, it's Donny, Donny D. Your sponsee?”

“Donny, listen. You can just say it's Donny. I only know one Donny.” Jesus, was that really even a word, outside AA? Sponsee? But Donny was easy to help; he always needed the same advice. You can only say slow down so many ways. Be patient. Chill out. Easy Does It. Donny was racing from this to that problem—his bad teeth, his bad marriage, his bad job. One day he might have to haul off and say, “Look, Donny. You destroyed your teeth, your marriage, and your career with booze; now fix what you can and quit your bellyaching.” Some sponsors would have done that already, but he sensed that Donny would come to that on his own, that in fact all his worrying was a kind of defense against that insight, and that it was better for him to be a little further along, a little further from his last drink, before he had to feel that particular gut punch.

So Donny was a good fifteen minutes. Then, as soon as he hung up, a cop came by to take a statement about a hit-and-run he'd witnessed two weeks earlier. That was nearly half an hour. When he went back into the bay, the kid was still standing there, sweating in his suit coat. “Just take a minute to look at these figures,” he said. He held out a page encased in plastic.

Walter pulled the right front tire, bounced it, and rolled it at the young man who dropped the page, jumped back, threw out his hands and caught it.

“Just roll that over there against the wall.”

The kid propped up the tire and turned, holding his blackened hands away from himself.

“Aw, I'm sorry. Don't want to get that suit dirty. Restroom's round the side. Pay in advance, though. Water's damned expensive these days. Mitts black as those?—about a buck a piece I'd say.”
Brrrpt.
He was working on the left front tire now. “But hey, tell me something. When you were a little guy, what did you want to be? An air salesman? Tell me. I'd like to know. I really would.”

“Screw you, Pops.”

“Now that's the spirit! Tell you what. For you? For you the water's free. In fact, I need a man out front for the full-serve pumps and to run the register. You give it some thought while you're washing up. Twelve bucks an hour, no overtime. Best I can do.”

When he had lowered Mrs. Hanleys Ford and parked it out front, he called to let her know it was ready. He decided to clean up before replacing the windshield on his daughter Nancy's VW Bug. His son-in-law, Cal, had brought it by that morning. One of the old Beetles, the classic, the windshield was a simple, flat panel held in place with a rubber gasket. The whole job wouldn't take more than an hour. He dipped three fingers in the tub of hand cleaner.

“Leave it to me to park it right under a foul ball,” Cal had said. He detailed the flight of the ball off the bat, the few fans in the bleachers on the first base side ducking and covering their heads with their arms, the crunching sound the ball made hitting the VW's windshield.

“Jesus, I was pitching! You can imagine the ragging I took from both benches. Everybody knew whose car it was.”

Walter had never learned how to talk to Cal, never knew what to say to him. Some of it, he was sure, had to do with the bizarre and ill-defined categories of son-in-law and father-in-law. Back when he and Emily were married, he never knew what to say to her father, either. Once, while they were visiting her parents' small farm, his mother-in-law, Maureen, had asked him to call her husband in to dinner. He had stepped out on the back porch and could see the man not far off, maybe thirty-five or forty yards away, in front of the barn, with his back to him. Wdter had actually raised his hand to the side of his mouth to yell before he realized he didn't even know what to call him. “Jim” was too informal. “Mr. McNulty” too impersonal. “Dad” was out of the question.
So
he walked there, tapped the man on the shoulder, jerked his head toward the house and said, “Time for dinner.”

But Cal seemed like a big kid to him, twenty-seven and still playing baseball in the summer, basketball the rest of the year for one team or another. Four jobs in as many years: driving a cab, a truck, renting office furniture, and now selling ad space for a magazine. As he worked the citrus paste between his fingers, he thought again of the kid who'd come to sell him on turning air to money—what the hell did he know about anything? What the hell does anybody know at that age? Air. Space. Walter shook his head. What a world when this is all the use we can think of for young men.

But Walter felt he was in no position to judge. “Good with his hands,” that was him. It was a nice way to say stupid. Why argue? If stupid is drinking yourself out of work, out of love, out of everything that ever mattered to you, then, well, he was good with his hands. He looked at them as he wiped them on a brown paper towel. Blackened and cracked, his knuckles were so scarred they would never tear again. Scars as good as callous when it comes to that, he thought.

The Mobil station was his refuge. When he'd bought it, three years into his sobriety, two years after the divorce, it was as if he'd withdrawn from the world, the repair bay an anchorite's cave where he spent his days with gears, wires, hoses, pistons, rings, pipes, belts, fuses. What people there were he could manage; their relation was clear. They brought their cars and their complaints: It won't go. It won't stop. It acts up. There were few occasions for rage. Everything was simple. Everything either turns the wheels or stops the wheels or steers the wheels. Never that awful unreason and terror he used to feel with people, a panic that found expression in putting his fist through plasterboard, through wooden doors, through glass. No further cause then for the sickening remorse he still felt sometimes, even twenty-five years later, for his violence, especially in his own home, as a husband, toward Emily. That was a hole you couldn't cover with a picture or a poster. He looked again at his hands and shook his head. Had he really once told Emily she was full of shit because she said he'd broken her jaw when in fact he'd dislocated it? That's how he had been quoted in a letter from her lawyer. He was supposed to have said it on their way home from the ER. Even with no clear memory of the event, he knew it was true.

The young salesman came out of the men's room and walked past the bay to his car. Walter shouted in his direction. “So I guess you're not interested then?”

The kid opened the car door, stared over the roof for a moment, and flipped Walter the bird.

Walter let it ride. He gathered up what he would need to install the new windshield: a length of 14-gauge insulated multistrand wire, a can of silicone spray, a utility knife, large screwdriver, towels, rags, and the new windshield and gasket assembly.

So long as his hands were busy. For more than two decades, so long as his hands were busy, he remained a man who had failed, not a failure. So long as his hands were busy, he was the man who had labored to transform himself, to grieve and go forward, to start again.

When he'd moved out—been thrown out, really—he hadn't had a drink in six months, but his rages, no longer tied to the daily rhythms of his drinking, were less predictable, so worse. He had taken nothing with him to the new apartment: three small rooms, white walls, a mattress on the floor. He tried to empty his life of everything inessential; he would bring things into his life, into his apartment, one at a time, nothing and no one uncertain or unimportant. He took a job at Jiffy Lube, went to AA meetings, and prayed. His sponsor had told him not to worry who or what he was praying to. “Just get down on your knees and ask for help. Leave the theology to the theologians,” he'd advised.

He bought a shallow box of sand, a “Zen Garden” the packaging called it, replete with a tiny rake and a book of views of full-sized monastery gardens. He stirred the sand this way and that, stared at the patterns, prayed to the trinity of sand and space and rake. “Gentle me,” he said to the white walls, “Please gentle me.”

The first time he'd brought Nancy to sleep at the apartment, when she was five, she hadn't even made it to the room he'd fixed up for her before she saw the Zen Garden, the only object in the living room, and ran to it, squealing, “Daddy! You have a kitty!”

There was something so deep and joyous and relieved in his laughter then that the five year old, even in her puzzlement, laughed too, and Walter scooped her up, still laughing, and asked, “Shall we go and buy ourselves a kitty?” And there and then they did.

That evening something else began. Walter never knew how to describe it, since it wasn't, strictly speaking, an event. A shift? A change? An understanding? It began when he was reading Nancy a book that Emily had packed for her. Nancy was next to him on the mattress he'd made up for her, and he felt her staring at the side of his face. When he turned, he was sure he saw his mother gazing from her eyes. It was completely irrational, he knew that. Still, a shudder passed the whole length of his body, and he nodded somberly at her.

“Daddy?”

“What, Sweetie?”

“Can we keep reading?”

Long after she was asleep, he lay awake and thought about it. It was night, he told himself, he was tired, emotionally stirred up, hyper as the kitten he could hear racing around in the bare living room where he'd closed it in for the night. He'd been reading too much of that reincarnation stuff. Who knew about such things?

Maybe he'd just been struck by a resemblance he hadn't noticed before. It was not as if he'd spent a lot of time alone with her. Besides, she was his mother's granddaughter; why wouldn't she look like her?

Or maybe, he decided, maybe he was simply seeing for the first time, soberly and clearly, the kind of look that passes between young children and their parents, and so he identified what he felt then with his mother, recalling a look in her eyes he'd seen when he was little. Yes, that was probably it.

He dozed and thought about his mother's thwarted life, her in-telligence, her frustration, her early death. Near morning he came to an understanding: it didn't matter if his mother had ricocheted around on some astral plane until she returned as his daughter. It didn't matter if the moment had been an illusion, a function of being tired and stressed. What mattered was making sure that nothing and no one would hold his daughter back as his mother had been. It was more than personal redemption, amends for his transgressions; it was a chance for the past and future to conjoin and make sense in a way they never had before in his life. It was a promise. A vow.

 

The tap-bell on the glass counter out in front of the station dinged several times. It was Mrs. Hanleys son, Marshall, come to pick up the Ford. As Walter approached him, the young man removed his headphones and kept them around his neck without turning them off. Walter could hear a tiny band playing heavy metal as Marshall fished out his credit card.

Walter swiped the card and waited while the winged horse on the blue LCD screen over the cash register reared, flapped its wings once, twice, and lifted off, over and over again, looking for all the world as if it was trying and failing to escape from a box. Finally, the printer spit out the ticket, Walter tore and offered it, and Marshall, having determined no interaction was required, placed the headphones back on his ears and signed it.

“The keys in it,” Walter said to his back as he walked away.

Time for the VW. The phone rang. Donny again. “Walter? Walter, its Donny D., I mean, you know, Donny.”

“Hi Donny.”

“From AA.”

“Donny, I'm busy. What can I do for you?”

“I'm in trouble, Walter. I'm in big, big trouble.” Walter refused to pump the information from him. He watched the Ford leave the station, fishtailing and peeling rubber.

“Walter?”

“I'm right here, Donny.”

“I got served. She fuckin' served me! Gave me a bunch of sweet talk just this week about don't worry, we just need a rest from each other to sort things out and then she fuckin' serves me! Divorce, man. Why am I working so hard to do the right thing, man? Whats the point? Who gives a shit?”

“Do you?”

“What?”

“Give a shit?”

“I just want her back, man.”

“Donny, look. This is about your drinking. This is not about her or what she said or what you thought she said. This isn't about what she did. It's about what you did. Now you're up against the truth, okay? I hate to sound like a hard-ass, but the main thing is to ride this out and not drink over it.”

Silence.

“Donny?”

“Been there. Done that.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“You're drinking now?”

“I can't just let her walk away like that!” Walter heard a sob.

“Why not? Why can't you?” It was coming clear to Walter, it was what empty men, what men with missing pieces did. He could see it like a diagram of a power train. Woman as missing part: ignition, clutch, voltage regulator, brake. He couldn't put it into words. Sobs on the other end of the line.

“Donny.”

“You're pissed at me, aren't you?”

“That's not the question either, Donny. What are you going to do?”