The Spark and the Drive (12 page)

“Last Thanksgiving, there were guys in army jackets up here,” she said. “Vietnam vets. They made a fire and had a turkey cooking on a spit. It snowed, remember that?” She looked around as she described the flocked buildings, the vets using the park for cover in a snowball fight, and it occurred to me that Thanksgiving was only days after Joey died. I looked around through her eyes of mourning, imagining a kind of comfort she’d found in all the wreckage.

Rather than looking like a tiny burrito, the marijuana joint was carefully rolled into a funnel shape. The wide end was twisted into a fuse and the narrow end had a small tube of cardboard wrapped inside, to keep the contents dry from saliva, I assumed. I turned it lightly in my fingers, appreciating the street skills of criminals.

“What are your plans for that?” Mary Ann said, and my surprise at the question embarrassed me. I didn’t know anything about this illegal twig in my fingers. At the age when I would’ve been open to experimenting I transferred to Northwest, where pot smoking, with its associations of laziness and pinko Democrats, got you labeled a burnout. I closed my mind to the few stoners and learned how to hustle laughs from the farmer kids with slit-eyed Cheech impersonations. (“Fifth time I’m late to work dis week, and it’s only like Tuesday, man.”)

I gave her the joint and lit it with my lighter, and like the song says she smiled before she let it go. I’d never actually watched someone smoke, and when her eyes softened and glassed over with almost sexual delight, I let go of four years of prejudice in a second or two. Her eyes were lighter than I’d realized, gold-flecked with the early afternoon sun, under eyebrows that were thick and exotic—foreign, though she was half Klamath Indian and more American than I was. Her nose wasn’t wide and flat like a girl I knew who said she was Cherokee, but thin and straight-edged and delicate. But it was her eyes first and the close, unselfish way she watched you.

“That’s not bad,” she said. She hit from the joint again, and I tried it when she offered—a puff diluted with air that took me right to the brink of coughing. I gave it back and waited to see what happened.

Across from us, the Real Photograph of Jesus Christ was sun-faded and shellacked with grime, but the Hitler mustache and swastika earrings stood out in a throbbing gold. At the top of the hill behind Mary Ann were three crosses, white in the sun. Jesus hung on the middle one, his body missing from the waist down, and for the time I had an odd sense of piety up here. “My mom works at a church,” I said.

“Does she?”

“It’s Methodist.”

“Are
you
Methodist?”

“No. She isn’t either. It was after they got divorced. She went one Sunday for service and came back with a job.”

After a third toke she tapped the end of the joint and set it on the table between us. “I hope she found some answers,” she said. “Or peace of mind, at least.”

I looked past her, to the surrounding neighborhood of triple-decker houses with TV antennas sticking up, to where the I-84 lunch-hour traffic had loaded up the exit ramps. In between billboards and rooftops flashed the green leaf canopies of distant hills. “Not really,” I said. “You can’t just plug into it. You think you can, but you can’t.”

Mary Ann smiled easily, the pot working the way it’s supposed to. “You can ask me anything,” she said. “I promise to tell the truth.”

“If you want me to pretend nothing happened, I will,” I said.

“Is that what you think I want?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure what Nick means to you anymore.”

“I know what he means to you,” she said. “And if
you
want me to pretend nothing happened, I will.”

I nodded cautiously. Her look was soft and didn’t challenge me to say anything, but long seconds passed when I was afraid to speak. She scraped moss from the rutted tabletop with a flake of stucco. “You can never predict how you’ll be,” she said. “My sister came out. She was with me every minute for a week. But Nick went back to work. Back to his cars. He should have had people around him and he had machines.” She looked up at me and sighed. “I know, Ray and Bobby and all his minions. I don’t mean them, I mean real people. And I’m sorry to sound cruel. I should’ve closed the shop. But that’s the only part I blame myself for. I said I’d give it a year. But what’s it costing? We don’t touch anymore. We don’t talk. If you asked me what he wants from his life, I honestly couldn’t tell you. The man I’ve lived with for seven years.”

As she said all this her voice drew taut and at times was tearful, and the sudden wash of emotion both stunned me and made me feel close to her. I put my hand over hers. Words seemed weak now, and there was nothing I needed to know.

“So that’s what he means to me, Justin. Less and less.”

Everything she said was so far removed from what I’d expected to hear that I felt dizzied by it. Suddenly I was in the rarefied place of sitting across from her while she seemed to want to prove something to me.

She made a circle of her thumb and forefinger and sent the burnt-out joint spinning into the weeds. “You want to stay friends with Nick,” she said. “I don’t blame you. I think it’s sort of noble, actually.” This she said without sarcasm, and I thought about love and loyalty, how one can get in the way of the other, and it felt like the secret to the good life was in making the two compatible.

We stood and held hands. As we walked back toward the cars there was a laugh from nearby, a woman’s laugh, and Mary Ann stopped and turned. From inside the Beit Shearim Catacombs a light flickered. It went out and that was all—no voices, no sexual sounds that I found myself listening for, imagining a couple looking by matchlight at themselves lying in the cave.

“I like how it blurs together up here,” she said, and I understood that blurring to mean the holy and the unholy, the right and the wrong.

PART TWO

15.

Eve didn’t show up for the Corvette the next day, or the day after, or the day after that. The mood around the shop darkened as the idea that she and Dennis were really Jimmy-Hoffa gone evolved from an outside possibility into a likelihood. Talk went around about calling the police, but what would be the point? The killers were certainly contract pros who got to be that way by not leaving evidence, and all that would happen, the cops would confiscate the Corvette and auction it and keep the money.

I was mourning the Miami dream for my own reasons. Surely if Eve had come back Nick would have told Mary Ann by now that he was leaving her. And in that time of selling the shop, selling the house, they each would have moved into their own apartments. Would Nick hold it against me if I started seeing her before the divorce went through? I even let myself think, wouldn’t he be grateful I was there for her?

On the eighth day Nick disappeared after lunch, and I found him in the Dungeon. The chamois-lined car cover was off the ZL1, and in front of the car Nick was slumped on a milk crate like a string puppet set down. Antifreeze drained out of the radiator into a catch pan. He noticed me with a casual glance. After a moment he said, “Imagine being the guy that breaks in and gets his hands on this sucker. Doesn’t even know what it is.”

“What’re you doing?”

“I can’t sell it without the title. Whatever I can get for the engine is it.”

I went in the passenger side and opened the glove box, but it was empty. “Over there,” Nick said, jutting his chin at the workbench. The vinyl envelope contained the registration and insurance card. Eve Moore. No address and the same P.O. box as she gave on the work order. I wondered if her last name was really Moore. I got out and came around to the front of the car.

I don’t know how the idea came to me, just from staring at the car, I guess. “You think anything could beat it in the quarter mile?”

*   *   *

After work that evening I stayed in Waterbury, waiting to meet Nick. I had dinner at a Greek diner on Franklin, walked around Kmart for a while, and then got carded at the Scoreboard, so I went through the new McDonald’s drive-through window. Sucking on a milkshake I watched the light stream of traffic. About every third car on Wolcott had its headlights on.

Nick was waiting in the Corvette when I pulled into the lot at nine thirty. Seeing him down low in the awesome car, I realized I had been doubting all along if he’d show up, and now there was a burst of shivering anxious energy, of myself in charge of the night, as I pulled up to his window.

“If she asks,” he said, “you and me are finishing up that Charger. That okay? She doesn’t want me out racing.”

We could’ve gone 84 to 63 to 6, three right turns into Levi, but instead I took him over the Seven Hills and through the rolling farmland, from Breakneck Hill to White Deer Rock, glancing at his headlights as I held a casual speed so that he might find enough peace in an untroubled drive through the country to reflect upon his intention to leave Mary Ann—the course he’d made inevitable, I thought, when he got the vasectomy.

In Levi I pulled into the parking lot of the Arco
ampm,
the only place still open in town except for two restaurants, and Nick parked beside me. I told him to wait in the Corvette while I went inside.

Walter Maze was working the counter, as he had every night shift since years before I moved to town. I used to revere him, the keeper of tobacco and
Hustler
magazines who used to sell some of the Northwest kids beer. Then a few months ago I’d stopped in and brought a six-pack up to the counter. “You got that wrong,” he said, and as if a mask had come off I saw him for what he was, an inbred in his late thirties, still cashiering at
ampm,
still with his folks, balding, hollow faced, a monster truck on his cap though he drove a ’72 Gremlin—a rust box with a bumper sticker that said
I LIKE TO SNATCH A KISS AND VICE-VERSA
.

I hadn’t come back since, even for gas.

“Anybody out at Wickersham’s tonight?” I asked as I paid for a pack of Marlboro Lights.

His eyes skimmed the aisles behind me before he opened the register. “Probably,” he said, which was code for yes. If nobody was there, he’d say, “Doubt it.”

*   *   *

There was a story behind the quarter-mile racing at Wickersham’s. When Sheriff Reynolds was new on the job ten or so years ago, he engaged in the high-speed pursuit of a Ford Galaxy full of teenagers who had been drag racing on the Route 6 flats north of the high school. The chase ended with the Galaxy plowing into another car at ninety miles an hour where Rail Tree Hill intersected 317. Legend had it they had to go in with a cherry picker to get bloody limbs out of the trees. Four dead. His first month as sheriff.

Reynolds knew he wasn’t going to stop the kids from drag racing. At Northwest they learned how to trick out engines, and in the evenings after their farm chores, they went out to the machine shed to work on their own hot rods. Reynolds’s brother-in-law, Al Wickersham, owned a section of farmland that was cut by Peacock Lane, a half-mile stretch of blacktop paved and then abandoned by a developer in the ’70s. Nobody used it except hunters in the fall, who continued after it became a single-lane dirt road at the base of Sawpit Hill. Reynolds put out the word that as long as there was no other racing around town, he wouldn’t send his deputies out to Peacock Lane, though it was understood that Wickersham would keep an eye out and report any trouble. By the time I went through Northwest, Wickersham’s (it was cooler than saying “Peacock Lane”) came up as often in conversation as Arco or the drive-in in Wolcott.

I’d been there a few times in the daylight just to see it. Start and finish lines had been painted in reflective white a quarter mile apart, and kids patched and resurfaced the asphalt as it was needed. It was actually one of the smoothest stretches of road in Levi. They’d even put in a telephone pole with a streetlight hanging over the start line.

When Nick and I arrived that night in the Corvette, having left my car in the Arco parking lot, a bonfire was going on a stony crust of mud behind Wickersham’s alfalfa field. I saw backlit silhouettes tipping bottles that were bigger than beer bottles, and things that weren’t logs were getting thrown in the fire, sending up sparks.

In the dirt turnaround I recognized Tim Heller’s Charger and Mickey Burke’s Monte Carlo. “That’s one of them,” I said to Nick, in answer to his earlier question about which cars to take seriously.

“The Charger,” he said.

“It’s got a four forty Magnum.”

“One four or three twos?”

“Just a four-barrel, I think. The Monte’s got a four fifty-four.”

Nick didn’t seem interested in the Monte, and neither of us bothered to mention the other cars—two smog-era Firebirds and a Nova that was a year newer than mine. Nick slid the shifter up to neutral and slowed. “Just pull up?” he said. I nodded, and as Nick began rolling down his window the smell of bonfire conjured the same jittery dread that had crippled me in high school. Three guys came over and blocked our way as if it were private property, and Nick eased to a stop.

Billy Motts wore canvas suspenders over bare skin like he had on the first day of school, when he dropped on one knee in front of my desk and jabbed a hand at me to arm wrestle. He was missing a finger—that nub of flesh still had some small, clammy movement—and beat me after half a minute or so, though I’d been afraid to try all the way.

Except for a glimpse around town, when I usually turned to avoid the potential embarrassment of waving and not having the wave returned, I hadn’t seen anyone from school in more than a year. “A lot of these guys are dicks,” I said. I don’t know what response I was trying to elicit, perhaps just that he have more awareness of his words and gestures, but his expression didn’t change at all. He was staring at the cars.

When Tim Heller started looking over the front end of the Corvette, I saw that Nick had removed the 427 emblems from the hood.

Nobody introduced themselves. I’d made a fool of myself at Northwest when, still in the mind-set of Milford Academy, I’d walked up to a circle of them trying to kick a hacky sack with steel-toe work boots and said, “Hey, guys, I’m Justin.”