The Spark and the Drive (17 page)

This is what I mean when I say reading their minds: Most races are won or lost in the first two seconds, when a novice might dump the clutch at too high an rpm and break the tires loose. This happened with a big Fairlane Cobra, as Nick knew it would. Of course he wasn’t reading minds. He was just aware of how the kid revved the engine to clean the exhaust before the flag came down. Nick said to me, “He’s going to fishtail,” and then he launched us faster than he had before, faster than I knew the car was capable of launching—the front tires came fully off the ground and slammed back down after breathless floating seconds, when I saw that the Fairlane was not beside us, that its headlights were swinging through the corn, and I turned back to see the car’s rear end in our lane, pulling out of a fishtail that would have sideswiped us had Nick not gotten the fuck out of there.

I understand now that my complacency was irrational. Anything can happen at a hundred and fifteen miles per hour on a dark, unpainted road barely wide enough for two cars, and once we crossed the finish line he had only seconds to let off and start feathering the brakes so that by the time we stopped there was maybe fifty feet before the road turned to gravel and swung up through the big hardwood trees. But Nick was in his element. Watching him behind the wheel of the Corvette was even more exhilarating and holy than watching him work. Rather than driving the car, Nick plugged in to it, an infinite mind to an invincible body, and I had been naïve before, scheming in my clumsy way to rescue his marriage, to think that I could know what would make him happy again.

With a lesser driver behind the wheel, the Corvette would have been a suicide machine. A rush to half-throttle in any gear would send the rear end fishtailing. And who wouldn’t lose his shit when the tire grab lifted the front end right off the ground? The car was flashy, thundering, triumphant. It complemented Nick, picked up where the man fell short, and Nick, among all men, had the skill and discipline to be its master.

He never socialized for very long after the races, and I know he wasn’t racing for the money. Nick made my cut half, and he didn’t look at it more than to divvy up before cramming fifties and hundreds down in his front pocket like tissue he’d wiped his nose with. No, it wasn’t fame or riches, but every few nights it seemed he was calling me up to go back.

It was the intoxication of those thirteen seconds, and the stunning release that came next. When we stopped he would let off a sigh that was the end of his reserve, and then he was free and boylike again. His eyes pulsing, he’d slap me five then pound the steering wheel screaming, “You beast!”

*   *   *

After the races, I made it a point to stay close to Nick while he consoled the loser. But on the night of our fourth race, somebody called my name—three or four guys were facing us with their backs to the bonfire—and if I didn’t go over they’d think I was afraid.

As luck would have it, it was Dave Bowers, one of the few respected kids who never taunted me at school. That night he asked me about work, and I took a chance and really told him. A valve job on a 413 Wedge, a rebuild on a giant 830 cfm Holley mounted to a Tunnel Ram. He took it all in, interrupting only with a breathy “Damn,” and “Jeeze,” and I felt safe shifting from engine specs to mechanic philosophy. “You’ve got the guy over here who has a big block but can’t work on it. So okay, he can drive, maybe he even races it. But then you’ve got the mechanic, who can make a car go, and knows
why
it goes. He can see the valves open and close in his head. The power stroke, the crank whipping through the oil. He knows when something’s off. He hears the car tell him what’s wrong. Which one of them you think gets more out of driving?”

“Sort of like if you play guitar, you probably get more out of the radio,” Dave said.

“Exactly.”

I was so caught up in his being caught up that it took a while to notice Ed Rawley watching me from the other side of the fire. As soon as I saw him, I looked away, then heard “Hey Bailey,” and ignored it. He said it again and I had to look at him.

“Costa still banging your mom?” he said.

“Rawley,” Dave said, answering him before I could get my voice. “I heard your old man got loaded and ran into Jack Zimmer’s kid.”

“Zimmer’s full of shit.”

“Go tell him he’s full of shit.”

“Why? Where is he?”

“Up at Wickersham’s,” Dave said, nodding toward a floodlit outbuilding on the edge of the cornfield.

Rawley smiled and the guys got quiet, and then a six-foot board fell out of the fire and Rawley hopped up and stomped it out, laughing and cussing. But it wasn’t a big deal, the ground was only mud and two other guys were closer. Rawley could have ignored it and said something back if he had something to say.

*   *   *

At the shop Bobby was suffering. He and Nick were drifting apart, as they had a year ago, but then it was different, there were no bad feelings between them, it was just that Nick was otherwise involved, and I didn’t mind it then because the person he was involved with was me. But now Nick’s preoccupation was Rod—Rod and his know-how with computers—and for Bobby it wasn’t just that Nick had a new favorite, but that the shop was evolving. Bobby was still under the illusion, as Ray had been, that we somehow wouldn’t have to adapt to the technology of the times.

Rod was a demoralizing omen for me as well, though not because he understood computers. I worried about his personality becoming a new paradigm. Mechanics could be daring and high-spirited as Bobby, confrontational and heedless as Ray, but they should never be self-important with their talents. Beyond his arrogance, I saw in Rod a tendency to recognize his own feelings and needs, which spoke to another unmanly quality of his character. He was uncool; I knew because every day for me was a battle with uncoolness. When Nick hired Rod over the dozens of good men who had applied, it undermined my conviction that mechanics shared a mystique anchored on self-possession and laid-back reticence.

Once in a while I’d see Bobby give up on a computer car. He wasn’t as dramatic as Ray had been. Usually Bobby would just go over to the boom box and slam his head to a song from
Master of Puppets,
which he played ten times a day. I’d look through the
Chilton’s
manual he was using, and pretty soon he’d wander back.

Once he yanked a wiring harness apart so hard its plastic clips went flying.

I straightened from the
Chilton’s
manual. “They’re a pain in the ass. But if you get the tip of a screwdriver right there in the seam—”

He went over and turned off the music. “What do the directions say now?”

“I’m not trying to be a dick.”

“Just say what now before I sledgehammer the fucking thing.”

My plan had been to ask if he could recommend a good AA meeting for Mom, but now I didn’t want to piss him off. I was pretty sure that the problem with the car he was working on—the idle racing and the bucking—was the TPS, the throttle position sensor, but I pretended to be no further along in my diagnosis than he was.

Rod came over after a while and said, “Where y’at?” which was some kind of Cajun greeting, to which we were supposed to answer, “Ah-rite” but never did. Rod was one of those guys who are hard to like because he thoroughly and erroneously believed himself to
be
well-liked, and so unless you put in the effort to be blatant with your contempt, he would go right on thinking he was your friend.

“
Quid Aere Perennius
?” he said. “Man, is that a strange-ass motto.” He poured Skittles in his hand from one of the pound bags that he said helped with his sugar craving from not drinking. He offered them around, and I betrayed myself and ate some.

“That your motto?” I said.

“Naw, man, it’s yours. Waterbury’s. You got it right on the back of the building there. Don’t y’all ever look up?”

Bobby straightened from the opposite fender and lit a cigarette.

“In English,” Rod said, “it goes, ‘What is more lasting than brass?’ And where’s all the brass factories now? Ironic, ain’t it?”

“‘Dickis in the rectumis,’” Bobby said. “Go carve that somewhere.”

Rod laughed and skimmed the work order for Bobby’s car. “Sounds like a bad TPS,” he said.

21.

A car slowed in the street. Through the living room window I heard but didn’t see it, and though it could have been the Brockmeiers, who we shared a driveway with, or someone visiting them, I knew it was Mary Ann, I sensed it was her.

She was standing by her Malibu when I came out, and I could tell already that she was less sure of herself. “It’s cute. It’s charming,” she said, taking in our house, which was only a vinyl-sided split-level with a black eagle on the screen door, red window shutters, and a well house in the front yard painted to match. “Like a Christmas-card house,” she said. She reached in the car window for her purse, her foot lifting out of a cork-soled sandal, her lightly tanned leg bare up to the hem of a whitish-bluish tie-dye dress. She came to me brushing the hair out of her eyes and then for a moment didn’t seem to know where to put her hand, and I knew that I loved her, and loved her achingly, though I was afraid to say it so soon.

Her arms under mine, we hugged with an urgency just shy of pain. I lifted her and turned her most of a circle. When she laughed, I felt it in my own chest.

Mom was washing a plate when we came into the kitchen. Earlier she had changed into capri pants and a sleeveless button blouse, and though she looked ready for company, I was nervous about this first meeting. I wondered if they’d be able to talk at all, if Mom would feel daunted knowing that Mary Ann had lost her baby, and if Mary Ann would feel daunted knowing that Mom was only one week sober.

I missed my cue on the introductions. Mom was drying her hands, and there was this sweet awkward moment when Mary Ann said, “Hi, Mrs. Bailey,” and waved from five feet away. But as if Mary Ann were every pretty girlfriend I’d never brought home, Mom instantly became the warm hostess she had been in our years with Don, turning a handshake into a hug as she told Mary Ann, “Carol, honey. I’m Carol.” In five minutes she had brought up her own miscarriage, the baby who should have come between me and April, and both of them teary, they hugged again. But the pleasure of witnessing their bonding ended for me when I thought of the lie I’d told about Mary Ann’s husband leaving her.

“It’s almost quarter of, Mom,” I said, and she went out to have a quick cigarette before a three o’clock AA meeting at Prince of Peace Lutheran.

*   *   *

“We call it quiet time,” I said as Mary Ann followed me up the stairs. “It’s not really a nap anymore.” In the hall I walked lightly to April’s door and put my ear to it. “Because lions start with L and turtle starts with T,” she was saying musically. She liked to line up her stuffed animals across the floor.

When I put my hand on the knob, Mary Ann touched my elbow. “Aren’t you going to knock?”

“She’s four.”

She smirked and reached around me to knock. “It’s me,” I said through the door.

April said, “Oh.”

“Can I come in?”

When I pushed open the door, April, naked, hollered, “Ah,” and ran into her closet.

“Where are your clothes?” I said. I wasn’t mad—she did this a lot—and in fact I liked the chance to quell some drama in front of Mary Ann. I went to her closet, where she’d half-closed the door.

“In the hamper,” she said. “It was too hot.”

“It’s not that hot up here.”

She wanted me to dress her in the closet. When we finished I said, “Come meet somebody,” and she held up her arms.

“Hold me.”

Mary Ann was sitting on the floor behind a row of stuffed animals that reached from wall to wall. She looked up as she might have if April were our own daughter.

“Are all these alphabetical?” Mary Ann said.

April nodded, still facing away. “Even I put fish before fox.”

“I am so impressed,” Mary Ann said, and though it wasn’t April’s most impressive effort—the raccoon was behind the peacock, et cetera—I could tell that Mary Ann meant it. I sat with April on the floor.

“April, do you ever notice how dirty Justin’s hands are?” Mary Ann said.

April turned around, and I showed her my hand, dirty certainly for an accountant or a cook, but the only way to get the black out of your knuckles and cuticles is to stay away from engines for a month.

“Maybe we should draw his hands,” Mary Ann said. “Do you have paper and crayons?”

I set April down, and she brought over the spiral notebook from her bookshelf. “I can’t have crayons in my room,” she told Mary Ann. “I drawed on the wall one time.”

Mary Ann found an eyeliner pencil in her purse, and they went to work tracing my hand. They made three sketches, which Mary Ann turned into porcupines and dinosaurs.

“April is a very pretty name,” Mary Ann said. “Is that when your birthday is?”

“April sixth.”

“Eighth,” I said.

“Sixth.”

“She likes to draw sixes,” I said.

“Is I’m your favorite month?” April asked Mary Ann.

“Positively,” Mary Ann said. She started tracing my hand again. “April, do you know what they put in makeup to make it shiny? It’s really gross. They use bat poop.”

“Eww,” April said, and I jerked back my hand, but Mary Ann caught it. “Like it matters,” she said. “Anyway, I think it’s only in mascara.”

22.

“Take it, it’s a good deal.” Bobby and Rod at the peg hooks. “You work on new cars, give me the old ones.”

“Plus you do all my oil changes,” Rod said.

“Fuck you.”

“You’ll have to wine me and dine me first.” Rod chewed a toothpick and seemed not to see the cold murder in Bobby’s eyes. I would’ve offered to take on Bobby’s computer jobs myself if they didn’t hurt my daily commission, they took me so long to fix.

Later that morning Bobby knocked over a trash can backing a computer car into the oil-change bay.

I found Nick diagnosing a convertible and leaned over the fender opposite him.

“I think Rod could start showing Bobby some, I don’t know, some compassion,” I said.