Taking Off (12 page)

I was waiting there when Raskol pulled up in the sputtering truck.

“Something wrong with it?” I asked.

“Ahh, my father doesn't take care of this thing,” he said, shaking his head. “The engine keeps quitting on me.”

It did.

“See what I mean?”

“I do.”

“Might be points, plugs, points
and
plugs, the coil. I don't know. You got any money?”

“Some.”

“We'll stop at the all-night gas station and see what they can do.”

It was the coil. There were no coils for an old C-Cab pickup in stock at the garage. The mechanic suggested that we get one at Majestic Salvage and Wrecking.

“As it happens,” muttered Raskol, “that's where we're headed.”

“Midnight discount?” asked the mechanic.

“Yeah,” said Raskol.

We lurched off in the reluctant truck, Raskol urging it on, alternately threatening and cajoling it. When the engine quit again and we were sitting in the dark, letting it rest before he tried restarting it, he said, “I bet this sends a little shiver down your spine.”

“What?”

“The way the engine quits unexpectedly.”

“Not particularly—” I began.

“Doesn't it make you wonder what would happen if your engine quit while you were sky-high over St. Louis?”

It hadn't until then.

“A little, I guess,” I said, shrugging in the manner of a kid with a lot of nerve. Later, when he had the truck on the road again, I began wringing my hands.

*   *   *

WHEN WE NEARED Majestic Salvage and Wrecking, Raskol turned the headlights off, and then the engine, and we rolled into the parking lot as quietly as one can in an old truck with weak shocks, sagging springs, and a couple of clam rakes in the bed. We settled to a stop in front of a padlocked gate in a chain-link fence. Raskol reached under the seat and pulled out a paper bag.

“Midnight snack?” I asked.

“A sop for Cerberus,” he said.

“Huh?” I queried, if I remember correctly.

“There's a dog,” he said. “The junkyard dog.”

“Ahh,” I said. “The junkyard dog. A mythic figure in American life.”

“That's right, and his ancestor is Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guarded the entrance to the infernal regions.”

“Oh,” I said. “Of course.
The Æniad.
”

We got out of the truck, closing the doors so carefully and quietly that I would have thought no ear, not even a dog's, could have heard the sound, but no sooner had we done so than something dark, snuffling, and snarling lumbered to the fence near us, on the other side, the inside. Raskol quoted from Dryden's translation of the
Æniad,
whispering:

“‘No sooner landed, in his den they found / The triple porter of the Stygian sound…'”

“‘Grim Cerberus,'” I finished.

“I've been working on this dog for quite a while,” he whispered.

“Just in case?”

“Just in case,” he said.

“Amazing,” I said with deep and sincere admiration.

He called into the dark, hoarsely. “Cerberus. Here, boy.”

“His name is actually Cerberus?”

“Are you joking?”

“No.”

“How the hell would I know if his name is Cerberus?”

“I don't know. I thought, since you called him Cerberus—”

“It's what I call him. He answers to it.”

The dog, a single-headed dog, came bounding over. He didn't bark. He didn't growl. If he had not been so fearsome to look at, I would have said that he was glad to see us. Raskol reached into the bag and brought out a fistful of ground beef. He held it at arm's length like Yorick's skull and soliloquized: “‘The prudent Sibyl had before prepar'd / A sop, in honey steep'd, to charm the guard.…' In this case, the sibyl was my sister, Ariane. What she put in this, I don't know, but she told me she uses it to get away from guys who want stuff she doesn't want to give—you know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” I said, with a knowing chuckle, or, to be honest, a simulation of a knowing chuckle. Raskol tossed the meat over the fence. Cerberus watched it arc and leapt to catch it as it fell. It was my turn to quote: “‘He gapes; and straight, / With hunger press'd, devours the pleasing bait. / Long draughts of sleep his monstrous limbs enslave; / He reels, and, falling, fills the spacious cave.'”

Chapter 26

An Urge

“WHEN THE DOG WAS CLEARLY UNCONSCIOUS, we clambered over the fence and inside the yard,” I wrote. During the act of writing, while bringing the fence to mind and recalling our clambering over it, the thought occurred to me that today we probably wouldn't have been able to get beyond that fence. It would have concertina wire strung along the top, wire that bore, at intervals, projections in the shape of trapezoids, the inverted bases of decapitated triangles, razor-sharp, far sharper than the teeth of Cerberus, and a better deterrent to teenage midnight salvage. I got the urge—

As I age, I am continually amazed by the vastness of my ignorance. “I got the urge” is another example of it, an expression that I have taken for granted, and I see now what a limp one it is. Mr. MacPherson, wherever you are, you will, I think, be happy to know that I looked it up. The origin of
urge,
the Latin word
urgere,
“to press, force, or drive,” suggests something much more active than the expression does. It suggests that there is a someone or something doing the pressing, forcing, or driving—a god, perhaps. I'll try again—

Urge, the Roman god of curiosity and shopping, powerful and compelling, beloved of Pandora, entered my bedroom through the open window and began pressing me to drive out to Long Island, beyond Babbington, to see what the junkyard might look like now. Did it still exist? Had it been replaced by a gated community of “luxury” condominiums? Something called, say, Majestic Acres? Or Mirabasura? Albertine and I could pack a lunch, drive out, find the junkyard or its replacement, and then picnic on the beach, weather permitting.

“Are you asleep?” I whispered, softly, in Al's direction.

“No. Do you want to read?”

“Actually, I was thinking about going for a drive.”

“We don't have a car.”

“We could borrow one.”

“From whom?”

“Just kidding,” I said, as if the whole thing had been the best I could manage in the way of a joke in the middle of the night.

I hadn't really been kidding, though. I think that, inspired by my memories of the midnight discount escapade, I must have been playing with the idea of finding a car that we could appropriate for a couple of hours in the middle of the night, when its owner wouldn't notice that it was gone, someone who would be as unknowingly openhanded with his car as Raskol's father had been with his truck. I astonished myself. Perhaps you think that I was astonished and a bit ashamed to find that I was even thinking of “borrowing” someone else's property. I was, a bit, but I've been living in Manhattan for a while now, and my sense of the rightness of ownership has decayed. I was more astonished to recognize that I did not possess the skills required to borrow a car without license to do so. I didn't even know how to jump the ignition. How could it be that I had gone through an entire youth and young-adulthood in the United States of America in the twentieth century without learning such a skill?

“We could rent one,” I suggested.

“Or,” she said sleepily, “here's an idea—you could build one—”

“Hey.”

“—out of the parts of abandoned Pinch-a-Penny projects.”

“Ouch.”

“Not such a bad idea, really.”

“Come on, Al.”

“It could be a real city car.”

“Is this a joke?”

“It was, but now I'm wondering.”

“Wonder on.”

“Room for two, and room for shopping bags—”

“Shopping bags, of course.”

“—shelter from the rain and snow—”

“This is starting to sound like—”

“That little white plane you were looking at this afternoon.”

“How often are you looking over my shoulder?”

“When there's a picture on your screen, it's hard to resist.”

“That was the Mistral, that little plane.”

“It was attractive, chic, sleek, like a shoe.”

“It's French.”

“Ah! I should have known.”

“It is a sleek little thing.”

“Very. And when I saw it, I thought at once that it would make a beautiful little city car, without the wings.”

“It's really just one wing.”

“It's not as sleek or chic as the rest of the plane.”

“You're right.”

“It's so big, and so rectangular.”

“I was thinking the same thing myself.”

“That it would make a good car?”

“No. That the wing looked clumsy compared to the rest of it.”

“So, subtract the wing—”

“—and lop off the tail, which sticks out like an afterthought—”

“—something tagging behind—”

“—like a trailer—a dog on a leash—”

“—a clerk in a shoe store who hovers when you want to browse the stock at your leisure, raising each shoe, assessing its heft, fingering its heel—”

“Good night again, my darling.”

“Good night.”

I lay there for a long while, imagining a flight in the sleek Mistral, out to Long Island, for a low overflight of Majestic Salvage and Wrecking. I was pleased to see that it was still there. There was no razor wire. Two kids, the age I once was, were clambering over the fence. They froze when they heard the Mistral humming overhead and ran when I buzzed them. I don't know why I buzzed them. It was just an urge.

Chapter 27

Majestic Salvage and Wrecking

WHEN THE DOG WAS CLEARLY UNCONSCIOUS, we clambered over the fence and inside the yard. Raskol had a flashlight. He switched it on, then off again at once. “The motorcycles are over in that direction,” he said, meaning the direction in which he had shone the beam.

“How do you know?” I asked, not because I doubted him but because I wondered how he knew.

“I come here during the day now and then and buy something. It gives me a chance to browse.”

“Wow,” I said, in deep admiration of his thoroughness and foresight and, I think I realize now, his daring and his audacity in taking such a step toward an outlaw's life.

The night was dark, but after a few minutes I could see the vague outlines of masses of things, and plenty of them, though I couldn't have said what most of them were. We had to step carefully as we made our way in the direction of the motorcycles. Everywhere in our path lay items awaiting salvage. Junk, one might say, but why demean it by calling it that? What should properly be called junk, I think, is only what is useless, nothing more than trash, but what surrounded us in such looming profusion was useful stuff. That is, it was
potentially
useful. All of it had outlived its original use, but it was waiting here in limbo for a new life, waiting to be salvaged, put to a new use, the way memories that seem to have been forgotten wait in the dark recesses of the majestic salvage and wrecking yard of the mind, patient in that limbo until they are salvaged and put to a new use.

I remember seeing in
Impractical Craftsman
an article that told how to make a power saw out of an engine block and another that featured a potter's wheel made from the guts of a washing machine. Nothing is ever completely useless: that was the
IC
creed. If you looked at things with that
IC
mind-set, there was no such thing as junk. Everything that had lost its original value, that was no longer fit for its original use, had another potential use. It was the philosophy of reincarnation applied to anything too old and worn and broken to do what it was accustomed to do, but not dead yet if someone would come along and recognize the potential within it, recognize that it was not a piece of junk but an object awaiting salvage and re-employment.

One might have been able to establish a religion on the
IC
philosophy, a religion that asserted as doctrine the continuing usefulness of everything, the Doctrine of Perpetual Utility.

Proust might have become a congregant. He wrote, in the Overture to
Swann's Way,
“I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some … inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to … obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognized their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.”

He had the
IC
spirit, Marcel. All the objects we have ever encountered in life, even simulacra of the objects we have encountered in life, have the potential of enjoying a second life. When we recall them we resurrect their original significance, and when we recount for others our experiences with them we construct a new significance for them, we revivify them. In the weltanschauung of
Impractical Craftsman
and
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu,
and
The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy,
there is no junk.

“What is all this stuff?” I asked in an awestruck gasp. It seemed to me a chaotic profusion of unidentifiable masses, a landscape made of who knew what.

“Cars over there, stacked on top of one another. Trucks there. The bodies, that is. Engines over there. Transmissions behind them. Drive-shafts, axles, wheels. Appliances in that section. Stoves, refrigerators, washing machines…” He shrugged and did not continue. The enumeration would have been too much and, he suggested in the shrug, unnecessary, because it would have amounted to the enumeration of all the mechanical devices one might have listed as the machinery of human life in the middle of the twentieth century. He left it to me to continue the list on my own if I wished.