The Spark and the Drive (23 page)

Bobby shook his head, grinning. “Jesus,” he said. “I can’t believe it’s you I got out here doing this.”

Typically I would have defended myself against the implication that I was just some innocent kid, but out here now, fifty yards from being an accomplice in a felony, I groped for my innocence. I wanted to hide in it.

I could hear Bobby digging under his thumbnail. “What happened to her Malibu?” he said.

I looked at him, and after a long second he shook his head.

“Man, you think I ever would of brought you out here? I mean, there’s not a whole lot of corrupting you anymore.” It was Tom Carter who saw us. He used to deliver parts for NAPA but now worked at Harrison Hardware, where Mary Ann had parked the day we went swimming and where I had kissed her in between our cars.

“He’ll keep his mouth shut,” Bobby said. He didn’t say more, and the truth was just there without my having to confess to it.

“I love her, Bobby,” I said. I felt myself rocking in the seat.

“Nobody’s saying you don’t, Romeo.”

“Nick did something to her,” I said. “Right after they lost Joey. He wanted another baby. You get it? He wanted to and she didn’t.”

Bobby sighed and swore quietly as he opened and closed his hands on the steering wheel. “It’s what he got cut for?”

“So he wouldn’t try to get her pregnant again.”

The sound of his breathing filled the car as he glanced now and then at the window. I felt sick. It was this nobody-ever-say-a-fucking-thing bullshit macho ethic of holding it in. “He’s not God,” I whispered. “Everybody acts like he’s God.”

“He’s a friend, is what he is.”

I thought about that. Bobby had told me stories about prison, stories that just seemed entertaining at the time. Like they’d bet who could go the longest without jerking off, money bets that relied on each man’s honesty. How a prison thief was the lowest scum, because what a man owned in jail was all he had left of his life. Bobby followed a kind of honor code, I realized, but I didn’t fully understand until now that he expected me to follow it, too.

“Watch your dick,” he said. “I know a guy doing a life sentence over his dick, and I knew the guy he shot up.”

I breathed to calm myself, and after a moment I said, “Her Malibu’s gone.”

“Nick told me. Stolen?”

I nodded, and I had to sit on my hands. Just minutes ago, I’d been trying to communicate with him telepathically to change his mind about stealing the car, and now there were all these hot, defensive impulses crowding out everything else. “I love her, Bobby,” I said again.

“Keep your voice down.” He stared out the windshield for a while, and without requiring more explanation from me he slowly began to nod. “This is just how we get there,” he said. “Next time I get on the wagon, it’s for good. I’m doing this right. I get this shop going, and then no more. No stealing, no dope, no drink. No fucking around with married gals.”

“What if she’s divorced by then?”

“Then I guess maybe I’ll have to grandfather you in.”

Finally now I could laugh, it just fell out of me. I was still shaking.

“All right,” he said. “Shh.”

And then the thought of working for Bobby felt pure and wholesome, even in its first inception in my mind, though we didn’t mention it again that night. My stomach unclenched for the first time since I saw him waiting for me in front of his apartment that night, and I had to take a leak. Suddenly all I wanted was to be done with this so I could go piss behind a Dumpster somewhere. “Let’s do it, if we’re going to do it,” I said.

Bobby clapped a hand on my knee without taking his eyes off the window. He got out and eased the door closed. On the sidewalk, he stuffed his hands in his pockets and became just another insomniac out for a stroll. He looked at his wrist where the cuff of his jean jacket ended, and then he brought his wrist up to his ear, as if he had nothing on his mind except why his watch had stopped working. I slid across into the driver’s seat. Bobby cut between the Taurus and the car behind it, taking careful sidesteps in the tight gap, and he had the keys out (he’d even thought to put them on his keychain) when he reached the door.

I stared at him intently for any false gesture, but he was all the way—there could be no doubt to any passerby but that the car Bobby slid the key into belonged to him.

And then he was inside, closing the door silently at the same moment he started the engine. Three back and forths to get out of the tight parallel spot, and then lights on and he was rolling down the hill. A full two-second stop at the sign—my cue to leave the scene. But I waited a little longer than I should have. The street was silent again, and it felt like there was supposed to be something more.

*   *   *

Bobby planned to meet the chop-shop guy alone, in case there was any trouble, and I’d see him at work in the morning. On Wolcott Avenue, which after two miles intersected I-84, I drove exactly the speed limit and intended to do so all the way to Levi. The light at the intersection in front of the shop was blinking red at this hour, and though I typically coasted through blinking reds I stopped for this one, still wired with the residue of a felony still on me.

In the dim security light I spotted movement. I eased past the shop and then cut fast into the People’s Bank next door. Up through the side alley I saw that the door was partially opened. I reached for the handle but stopped myself, imagining some crackhead thief caving in my head with a pry bar. Or was it an associate of Eve’s looking for the Corvette? I climbed on one of the junk engine blocks and looked in through the chicken-wired glass of a casement window.

There was nothing for a few seconds, and then she walked over from the drill press. In the bay under the window she opened the hood of the Z-28 Nick had just finished that afternoon.

Sabotaging a car is something few people know how to do without getting caught. Any decent mechanic can spot sugar in the carburetor bowl, or a line cut with a blade, or every drop of oil drained without bad seals or gaskets. Then it’s just a matter of figuring out who your enemies are. But with metal shavings, you can wreak your havoc anonymously. When the owner takes the car, knocking and smoking, to the garage, perhaps suspecting his enemy of sabotage, the mechanic will diagnose a plugged oil port or a spun bearing from a high-rpm rev. The final insult comes when the mechanic assumes that the damage was caused by owner neglect.

Mary Ann had what looked to be half a cup of shavings she’d collected under the drill press. I watched her remove the fill cap from the valve cover of the Z-28 and dump the tiny shrapnel into its virgin oil. When the cup was empty she wrapped it in a paper towel then dug through a trash can to bury it deep.

I dropped onto the foul gravel of the alley, sitting and lurching and falling back, wavering between pardoning her and catching her in the act. I imagined saying, “It was you all along?”—but no, I’d let her have this revenge. One act of sabotage for every heartbreak he’d dealt her, was that the cost? And this one, so catastrophic—a full rebuild on a collector’s engine—in retaliation for the night he could never take back?

I imagined one day she’d confess it to me. And I’d tell her I understood.

When I looked again she was checking around the engine with a droplight. She wiped a shop rag over the valve cover, and then abruptly she turned and marched away from the car. Her impetuousness made my heart race. Unexpectedly I was angry and couldn’t let her get away with it. As fast as the impulse came to me, I pulled open the side door at the same moment there came a crash inside. I dropped behind the fender of a black Cyclone in Bobby’s bay. Another crash and I slid under the car, stomach-down on soggy cat litter, and knocked my head on the driveshaft as I inched forward to see into the locker room.

One of the louvered metal doors was still shivering as it flapped itself closed. Mary Ann was leaning against the bathroom door, her arms folded severely, as if she were forcing herself not to wipe away or touch the tears on her face. She stared into the sink mirror. I thought she was about to say something hateful to herself, and I waited a long time to hear what it would be.

But in fact she spoke only once, when she sniffed sharply and said, “Okay.” It wasn’t with relief or reassurance, but more of a cold announcement to no one and to everyone that it was over now.

When she came out to the bays I mashed my face on the backs of my hands, holding my breath as she walked past. I considered changing the oil in the Z-28—if that would even matter; you couldn’t get out every crumb without taking the engine back apart—but then she slammed the side door behind her, and in that resolute burst of wood and metal I heard the sound of her leaving Nick for good.

31.

Nick came in on Wednesday, and whenever I sensed him approaching—keenly receptive, as I’d become, to the reward of his attention—I shied away, and finally in the locker room he threw me a casual “Hey” as I washed my hands.

The loathing I tried to feel was, as soon as I felt it, hollow and manufactured loathing. I looked within myself for Mom’s outrage when she’d been wronged, but then I could only nod with the usual craving that he like me and say “Hey” right back.

He leaned against a locker and hung his thumbs in his front belt loops, his forearms hard and everything else gone fleshy.

“Do you know what happened to her car?” he said. “She’s not saying.”

I shook my head and stared at the grimy wall over the sink, Jackson Pollocked by years of dissolved grease—all shades of black and gray—flung on it. After a while I turned off the water and ripped two feet of paper towel from the dispenser.

Nick brought his hands to his hips and looked like he wanted to exhale but didn’t know how. I dried my hands, balled up the paper towel, and lobbed it into the trash. As I started by him, he said, “You got a couple minutes?”

I followed him toward the side door to the alley, my mind racing with sudden crazy thoughts—that he’d have seen my cigarette butt and ass-print in the gravel and ask why I’d been sitting there—but no, he turned the other way outside and we went down toward the parking lot.

Just then Rod came up and handed Nick a coffee. “Blonde and sweet,” he said, and then he turned to me. “Lucky son of a gun.”

Nick tore the tab off his coffee lid. “I was just about to tell him.”

Rod led us down to the gravel parking lot, where his Duster was backed in next to a gorgeous vinyl-top 1970 ’Cuda.

“We won it last night,” Rod said.

“You took him to Wickersham’s?” I said to Nick, my voice close to breaking.

Nick shook his head.

“Behind the airport in Oxford,” Rod said.

“You don’t even have the title,” I said, and it was pathetic—it only gave Rod the opportunity to say, like some Hollywood badass, “Don’t matter, long as they think you do.”

“It’s quick,” Nick said. “It’s a Hemi.”

A Hemi. I wanted to say “Good for you” and be unbothered and sincere, but it was impossible. I should have been in the passenger seat when he beat his first Hemi.

“You can have it if you want it,” Nick said to me, and I lost my breath. A Hemi? If I want it? The engine NASCAR moguls banned from racing for a season because nothing could touch it? I can
have
it if I want it? I heard his voice again, as if it were coming out of the intercom upstairs. “Give Mary Ann your Nova, you take this. We’ll call it even.”

Rod patted me on the shoulder, and I tripped over my boot and sprawled out in the weeds. He helped me back up. “You feel that earthquake?” he said. “That had to be like a nine on the sphincter scale, no?”

It took half the morning to finish a tune-up. I had trouble following one thought to the next, and all of a sudden my leg would start shaking. When I saw Mary Ann in the lobby, I spun in the rest of my spark plugs with an air ratchet so that I could bring her the work order and stare at the side of her face as she punched numbers on the calculator.

I’d planned to tell her about the ’Cuda, that would be my opening, but when she saw me her eyes fluttered closed and she pressed her temple. We were back in Holy Land again. The same ice dread filled my chest.

“I thought you’d want to know that he told me,” I said.

She glanced around and then stared at the paper in front of her. “Lower your voice.”

“I thought you’d want to talk about it. That’s all. Or I wouldn’t have said anything.”

“You’re nineteen,” she said. “You couldn’t wait.”

“We need to talk, Mary Ann.”

“See?” she said. “You just can’t wait.” She took a work order off the counter and walked around me and out to the bays to hang it on the peg hooks. I went to the window that faced the bays and leaned my face up on the glass. I liked it when she didn’t know I was watching her, when I didn’t have to think about how I looked or what I was going to say, and all of my energy was in my eyes. She was the one I knew I’d always compare other women to. I had the strange regret of never having carried her in my arms. If I had done that, it somehow seemed that she would still want me.

Through the window glass I could hear the roar of a car on the chassis dyno, that outlandish scream of engine and high-pitched whine of tires that should never be heard indoors, and I thought at first it was this sound that had frozen Mary Ann. She had put up the work order too long ago to still be standing there. Then I looked where she was looking, and of course it was Nick, who had just opened the hood on the Z-28 she had sabotaged and was walking around to the driver’s door. When I looked back at Mary Ann, she had a hand pressed over her mouth.

Had the car behind him not been racing on the dyno, I wonder how long it would have taken Nick to hear the metal shavings scuff and gouge and destroy the engine he’d spent three days rebuilding. He put a sniffer in one of the tailpipes, and then came back and kicked down the fast idle with a snap of the throttle. He went up to the oscilloscope to do a final emissions check, and that was when the racing stopped and the bays were quiet again.

I couldn’t hear the knocking where I was, but instantly Nick lunged away from the scope to save the engine. His foot kicked out, and he was on his side on the floor by the time Mary Ann got to him. “Shut it off,” he screamed, and she ran around and killed it. Nick got off the floor limping a little as he went over to the car, where he stared down at the engine—the crankshaft scored, the bearings and maybe the cylinder walls ruined—and then dropped onto his knees and lowered his head to the grille.