The Spark and the Drive (15 page)

“You know, I never had steady girlfriends,” he said. “All through high school. I couldn’t ever figure out what to say. Nobody taught me. My old man used to polish valves at the dinner table. Carburetors, shit everywhere. I got on the school bus smelling like gas. Nick-oline, they called me. I knew car talk, but there’s a lot better talk.”

“So start now,” I said, meaning talk to Mary Ann, but then meaning—no, find someone else. Start over.

“Yeah,” he said, far away. “Yeah.”

I reached for the second window crank El Caminos have, the one that opened the triangle vent. “Mary Ann saw the babies,” I said, watching the little window open. “In the maternity. That’s part of why she’s upset.”

When Nick turned to me, I wasn’t ready to see such a look of concern, and after a long indecipherable moment he opened his door and got out.

He had the hood up by the time I came around the front. Using the fender as a pillow, he reached over the engine—only a 327 (Bobby had likened it to Hendrix playing acoustic) but a perfectly tuned four-bolt 327. The fan pushed back his hair, and closing his eyes he turned the mixture screw until the idle imbalance, so minuscule you didn’t notice it until he fixed it, had smoothed. Afterward, he clung on to the air cleaner as if it was giving him something necessary to his life and he couldn’t unplug himself from it yet.

I was so used to seeing him in this exact pose, listening for the soft personal voice of an engine, that it surprised me when he opened his eyes and turned, not looking at my face but looking to see that I was there. And if he was going to kill himself he would do it by lunging into a radiator fan, throwing himself into the very machine that called to him. It was like Russian roulette, his face so close to the fan blades—I went around and shut the engine off.

“I can feel him cold,” Nick said. He was on his knees with his chin on the fender, as if in prayer to the tremendous achievement of the engine, and crouching over him I tried to absorb every sound he made. What I managed to understand was that he had been plagued by bad dreams the night Joey died. Something compelled him upstairs, and in the still light of dawn he leaned over the crib rail.

“But babies in China never get it,” he said.

“Never get what?”

“Hardly ever, compared to here. It’s in a magazine I didn’t read until after. They sleep on their backs in China. They don’t die in their sleep. Here, they think they’ll choke on spit up, but no. They turn their heads. It’s instinct. I never put him on his back.” His voice made a tinny echo against the underside of the hood and the firewall.

“Nick, my little sister slept on her stomach. That’s not why. Doctors don’t even know why.” I put my hand over his hand. There was no bone or knuckle, only the relaxed padding of muscle under skin as rough as cinder block. If he felt my touch there was no sign.

“In
Scientific American.
Right next to the couch. Two weeks it sat there waiting to get read.” He pulled his hand from under mine and reached over now, as if the magazine were on the fender, and I was terrified.

He sniffed, and then he shifted his legs, swinging around and off the fender, and his knees clicked. He stood on the pavement, his thick hair parting in the warm night breeze, and he lifted his face a little into it, looking up at the night sky behind me, sky that must’ve been as low and starless as the sky I could see.

18.

I mixed myself a Tanqueray and tonic, a strong one, and turned on Nickelodeon for April. Then I joined Mom outside on a gift of an August evening, seventy-eight degrees by the ladybug thermometer, with a dry gentle easterly breeze. Mom was stretched out on a strap vinyl lounge chair, soaking up the late sun in a faded Tigger shirt from one of our old Christmas vacations to Orlando.

Allowing me to drink at home was in accordance with an unspoken agreement that I wouldn’t add to her stress with my problems, and she wouldn’t add to my insecurities by trying to be a father to me. She first let me mix her a drink when I was sixteen, and eventually I was tasting them to make sure the blend was right. A month before my high school graduation I asked if I could mix myself a weak one. By then she was trying to extract herself from Lou Costa, and her resistance was low. “Promise me you won’t drive,” she said, “and I mean promise.”

Our relationship had since chilled to one centered on respect and the right to privacy, but sometimes on these gin-softened afternoons, we talked like old friends. April couldn’t work the safety knob on the kitchen door, and on the back deck we’d drink and smoke cigarettes, trading confessions, and sometimes in the morning, a little hung over, we’d be shy with each other after the things we’d said.

“I go in the ladies’ room in the Sunday school building,” she’d told me. “They have AA out there, and you can hear right through the wall. ‘I’m so-and-so, and it’s been fifty-two days.’ They all sound older. Drinking for twenty-five years, thirty years. And I’m thinking how late I got started. In my thirties, my
late
thirties. But how many times have I quit? I mean, which reset is going to be the real one? I know I’m getting pretty sick of it.”

Then I’d said something like, “Junior year, this guy in homeroom wanted to kick my ass. I had to wait by the flagpole until Mrs. Bannister pulled in, and then talk to her about watercolors because she was a painter. I had to pretend I painted just so we could walk into homeroom together.”

On this mild August evening, she told me that Costa had come by in his cruiser, and she had hidden with April in the basement. “He went around back and looked in the windows, can you believe that?” she said. “I tried to make it a game with April, but I know she had to be terrified. I just wasn’t in the mood for him today. He’s like something—sticky. Did you ever lead a girl on? I’m kidding. You wouldn’t do that. I know I get what I deserve.”

I was more embarrassed than I should have been to hear her belittle herself, but I waited to see that she was done before I changed the subject.

“So Don wants to start having lunch with me.”

“He told me that. Are you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe just phone calls. I don’t want him coming to Waterbury.”

After a moment she sighed and looked uninterested, though there was a hint of effort, a tightening in her jaw. “I know he hopes you’ll forget what he put you through the last five years. He thinks he’s smart and the world’s stupid. Same old Don.”

As I watched her drink, I remembered growing up, seeing Don many times with a drink in his hand—at publishing parties or the Milford Yacht Club, where we had dinner most Saturday nights—and seeing him walk away from a half-full glass, something that didn’t seem strange until I started drinking myself. I had never seen him drunk. I often wondered if Mom was only trying to be like him in the beginning, before the Tanqueray in half gallons.

She was only forty-one and still pretty with her feathered hairstyle and turquoise earrings a shade lighter than her eyes. Her skin was shiny and red from the sun. Tonight she reminded me of when I was twelve and all the guys at school had a crush on her.

“What if we had someone come over to help out with April?” I said. The idea had been taking shape ever since I saw Mary Ann watching the babies, and now with the gin and the coppery light, it all came together as a plan.

“Honey, I can’t even pay you to watch her.”

“Somebody I know might do it for free. She’s a friend.”

“She?”

I felt my cheeks warm. Kimberly had never wanted to come to my house, and I never pushed her to—I imagined her uneasy and guarded while Mom made small talk. Mom always did me the favor of never asking why I didn’t have girlfriends.

“A friend of ours?”

“Just mine,” I said, and then I should’ve kept talking. She was three or four drinks in and mistrustful. After watching me for some time she said, “Do people think I’m unfit to watch her? Is that it?”

“Nobody thinks that, Mom. It’s just if you needed a break.”

“Are they starting a charity?”

“It would help her, too,” I said. “My friend.” I hadn’t planned to, but I told her Mary Ann had lost her baby and her husband was leaving her. And I didn’t say more but let the implication stand that friend was a euphemism for lover.

“That poor woman,” Mom said. “Does she drink?”

“Not really.”

“That poor woman,” she said again. She looked at the glass in her hand and set it down. “God knows I could use some time.”

I went in to check on April, who was dancing around she had to go potty so bad. She didn’t want to miss her show. “Go,” I said in a booming voice I hated to use on her.

When I came back out, Mom was leaning forward watching hummingbirds needle into her hanging fuchsias. She looked at me for a few moments in such a way that I expected her to say she loved me, but instead she said, “Don’t be a drunk, Justin.”

“You’re not a drunk,” I said, and it was hard not to look away, because I was starting to feel above her, my own mother. When she was still married to Don and happy, she would talk me down from my hormonal rages with patience and reason. Now I didn’t want her to think I was better than she was, and I sure as hell didn’t want to
be
better than she was. Yet I couldn’t say that Mary Ann and I were … I didn’t even have a word to use in my mind. Dating? Involved? It wasn’t that Mom cared what people might say about seeing me in the yard with an older woman. She was too busy working and watching April and trying to replace Don to ever care what anyone said. It wasn’t her, it was me. I wanted to feel proud, but I didn’t know how.

“You get a few afternoons like these,” she said, “with the sky and the honeysuckle, and you think it’ll be this way every time. But mostly it’s just getting dizzy, and then sick and ashamed, and suddenly you have the whole morning to get through. That’s the worst part. You remember how much I used to love mornings?”

I did remember. She’d run seven miles of beaches, Oyster River to Fort Trumbull and back, before I sat down to breakfast. Alternating weeks teaching aerobics at dawn. The Milford Marathon.

Suddenly she went to the railing and threw the glass over the fence into the clumpy wetlands. “I don’t know if that’s it,” she said, “but I hope that’s it.”

“It’s a good start,” I said.

She smiled and went in the house, coming back out in a minute with the quarter-bottle of gin, some vodka, two wine coolers from the fridge, even the sherry she used for cooking. They all went over the fence. The airplane bottles from her purse I side-armed for distance, little spinning blurs, and when I brought out the big unopened bottle of Tanqueray from the pantry she said, “Hey, I can return that. Let’s not get crazy.”

19.

At the end of the week a new sign hung in the lobby.
NO CUSTOMERS ALLOWED IN BAYS WITHOUT A TECHNICIAN.
I went out to share the good news with Bobby, who was depressed over a dumb thing he’d done to keep his ex-girlfriend from taking him to court. Expecting a pay raise in Miami, he’d promised in writing to increase his child support by three hundred dollars, starting in October.

I told him to go out and read the sign, but when he came back, holding a fresh coffee and smoking a fresh cigarette, I had to stop him from just walking right past me.

“They can’t come out in bays anymore,” I said. “Fucking righteous.”

He turned and leered at me. “So all of a sudden we’re technicians,” he said.

*   *   *

Mechanics from all over the state and into Massachusetts applied for Ray’s old job, and Nick interviewed the gearheads one at a time back in his office. Bobby and I were swamped. Over fender mats we held sandwiches in black fingers (I missed the mind-balancing spell of a good hot hand washing). What I saw of Mary Ann was only in glimpses when I dashed to the lobby for coffee. She’d be standing behind the counter cashing out a customer or explaining a line on a job application.

The gearheads’ boycott of Out of the Hole began with conversations like this: “How many guys named Rod you ever heard of that wasn’t queer?”

“I guess he went to car school.”

“Nick can fuck himself if that’s who he’s going to hire.”

And in the space of a week all of Nick’s disciples abandoned him.

Rod Thibodeaux was an APEX tech school graduate with experience in computer engine controls. He was between Bobby and me in age and taller than the six-foot booms of the oscilloscopes, but he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and fifty, his long forearms flat and square as two-by-fours. He had a twangy drawl that was sort of southern hippie. “
Jew
-ly,” he said for July, “
Mun-
roe,” the Louisiana town he was from. Instead of “hi” he said “hey now.”

The first job he pulled in was a late-model Pontiac Fiero, a low two-seater he had to unfold himself out of. I strolled over behind Bobby.

“I dig them tats,” Rod said to him.

Bobby turned his arm to show the full sleeve. The central character was a biker riding through a desert between cow skulls and rattlesnakes, and a cougar that seemed to be racing the chopper into the sun.

I read over the work order for the Fiero. “It’s only an eighty-four. Why doesn’t he go back to the dealer?”

“Over on mileage,” Rod said.

Bobby looked at the complaint. “Intermittent stall,” he said. He turned his face down to the engine and flattened his lips.

“Bobby,” I said, thinking he might spit on it. I must’ve sounded urgent, and he watched me for a second after I told him never mind. “Has to be some kind of computer fuckup, right?” he said to Rod.

“That’d be my guess,” Rod said.

“I mean, before computers, I never even heard of ‘intermittent.’”

That was almost true. Occasionally we’d get a muscle car in with, say, a cracked distributor that only misfired when it rained or a wire that contacted a ground over bumps, but, in general, mechanical systems either worked or they didn’t.

“Once in a while you get a guy,” Bobby said, speaking to the engine it seemed, “milking the warranty, trying to make shit up. ‘It’s not doing it now, but every couple days…’ Them cars I don’t even bother pulling in. ‘Come back when it’s happening.’ But now, with computers, who the hell knows?”