The Spark and the Drive (7 page)

Bobby rode with me to the restaurant, and I speculated on how a woman so young could own such a car. I thought she was an actress—I was pretty sure I’d seen her on episodes of
The New Mike Hammer,
and maybe in
St. Elmo’s Fire.
Bobby just let me go on and on and was grinning when I looked at him. “I mean, what’s a car like that worth, you think?” I said.

The number he said so astounded me that for a second or two I wasn’t even driving my Nova, as if I’d fallen asleep, and I woke to find Bobby’s hand nudging the wheel back from the center lines.

Bobby started playing drums on the dashboard. “She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie,” he crooned, rolling the backs of his nails over the vents and flicking them against the window for a cymbal when he got to the payoff: “Cocaine.”

“She told you that?”

“She’s rich in Miami, bro. They got a meeting in New York tonight. Look at that big Dago she’s got opening her doors.” He drummed some more.

*   *   *

Not until the six of us were standing by the stucco arch in the foyer, waiting under the knotted strings of paper shades as the waiters sang “Happy Birthday” to a fat kid in a giant sombrero, did I really take a look at Dennis. His eyes drooped like a boxer’s (though it might have been Bobby’s calling him a Dago that made me think of Sylvester Stallone) and he was stocky with short, moussed hair that was the same black and ivory as his herringbone blazer. When Eve spoke to him he leaned in attentively, nodding with his brows lifted, and after she finished he turned and offered a brief reply I couldn’t hear, before returning to a spine-stiff military stance, hands clasped in front of him.

Bobby had told me what the ZL-1 was worth, and who else had that kind of money? I looked around and imagined men with Uzis splattering blood all over the cheap frescoes and mosaic tabletops.

Dennis left his blazer on when he sat, which made me think there was a shoulder holster under it that contained maybe a Bren-10 like Crockett wore on
Miami Vice.
But when he leaned forward to take a menu, his jacket opened, and I saw that all he was hiding was patches of dark that spread from the armpits of his shirt. I ordered a Negra Modelo like he did.

The day was fast turning into the strangest of my life, and every next minute distanced me from my innocent past. Five years ago I was at Milford Academy in my blazer and tie, and now I was here, watching in a daze as food was ordered, was brought to the table; we ate and drank.

I don’t remember what was talked about until Dennis broke his silence. He leaned toward Bobby and said, “Back in my knucklehead twenties, I did a job for some disorganized people that cost me twenty-eight months in North Dade. I say so because I notice how you got your arm around your plate.”

The dangerous moment came when they watched each other, each man frank and undaunted, and even after Bobby nodded there was a long, uncertain second before he spoke. “They got me on a stretch up here just about like that. Twenty-six months.”

Dennis leaned back from the table and sipped his beer, and when I saw that his inquiry was finished, I said to Bobby, “Tell them how you did it.”

Bobby set down his fork and tried to laugh it off with modesty that was only half genuine. “I’d like to hear it,” Eve said, and she held him with her big pale eyes as if no one had ever interested her as much.

Bobby looked away first, dragging a forkful of enchilada through his guacamole and leaning over for a bite. “Well,” he said, wiping a napkin over his mustache, “looks like I got the floor now. So back in my ‘knucklehead’ twenties,” he said, and Dennis gave a polite laugh, “I realized that about twice my paycheck was going into drink and drug. I had a girlfriend was working at the Howard Johnson’s in Hopeville, which is out of downtown, but not too far. You can’t see the parking lot from the street. It’s where a lot of secretaries and their bosses like to go for a nooner. It’s sort of famous for it.”

Bobby left out that everyone called the hotel “Blow-Jos,” and that he’d keep his story clean for a woman gave me the strange feeling of laughing inside. Often Bobby seemed remote and a little dangerous, a former taker of bad pills and a drunk, a former thief and convict, a current biker with biker friends, and whenever I saw a recognizable behavior—due to manners, in this case—I felt that we weren’t so different, that whatever made us different wasn’t more than the random matter of life experience.

“A guy I knew ran a chop shop over in Bunker Hill,” Bobby continued. “‘I’m always getting guys bringing me Town Cars and Audis,’ he tells me, ‘only I can’t unload ’em. What I need is Hondas, Camrys, Escorts, like that. Joe Lunchbucket rides.’”

“Because who gets high-end parts from a chop shop?” Eve said.

He opened out his hands in affirmation. “So I’ve got Melanie keeping her eyes open for couples that show up, no bags. Cash. They try to leave the make and model blank on the form, but Melanie tells them they’ll get towed. So when she gets a good one, she puts ’em in front so they can’t see the parking lot from their room. Then she gives me a call. I slim-jim it, hammer the steering column. I’m out in a minute and a half. Leave my own rig in the lot, pick it up later.”

“Oh my God,” Eve said. “It never gets reported.”

“Or if it does, they say it got took from work, or from Bradlees or somewhere. By the time it even comes over the radio that Camry’s in fifty pieces, VIN numbers ground off. And I’m out the door with a tax-free grand in my pocket.”

Nick and Ray were finished eating, and Nick lit a cigarette. Eve gave Bobby a chance to chew his food, but she never stopped watching him, and the way she just barely squinted made her eyes seem enchanted and capable of extracting all your secrets.

“You miss it?” she said.

“What, jacking cars?” He grinned, his forehead shining. “Nothing too severe. You get cocky, and in the clink you go. I keep that in mind. But I think about walking out of that place with my money, and knowing the car’s their problem now, and I wasn’t going to get caught. All you keep saying to yourself is, ‘It worked. Holy fuck, it worked.’ Yeah, that I miss.”

Though drugs were never mentioned that night, I couldn’t help thinking that these were serious felons, and I found myself putting on an act of casualness, shaping the ash of my cigarette on the rim of my plate or faking a yawn when I was certain they could all hear my heart banging like a Super Ball in a jar.

“You know what I’m good at?” Eve said, settling back in her seat after Dennis had lit her Benson & Hedges. The question was put out to all of us. Nick sat back and watched her, and even Ray looked earnestly curious, as if he’d never given a wise-ass answer in his life. “I understand customer demand,” she said. “It sounds simple, and it is simple. Miami right now is the place to have your midlife crisis. All you see are hot rods.”

“Everybody wants that bad B-body they couldn’t afford in high school,” Nick said.

“Go fast and go American,” Eve said. “Three shops in South Dade specialize in Ferraris—thank you, Don Johnson. But when I wanted someone I could trust with my Chevy big block, look how far I had to come.”

Nick stared at her a few moments—Mary Ann, I thought, would’ve killed to have his attention like that. And as if it had just materialized there, I noticed the stucco wall mural behind the booth: a hulking Aztec warrior carrying a sleeping princess over the desert. “There must be a few decent shops down there,” Nick said.

“But I wanted a genius. You know, Joe Meretti doesn’t shut up about you.”

Any last doubts about her line of business dissolved with the mention of Meretti. Not even thirty, he owned a Hemi Challenger, a Hemi ’Cuda, and a six-pack 440 Charger. He wore a gray fedora when he came to the shop, and was always stepping out to make a call at the pay phone on the corner.

“A month ago, I bought six bays in Coral Gables,” Eve said. “I’d like to turn it into a specialty shop. It’s virgin soil for good muscle car mechanics.”

“You let me know when you start hiring,” Bobby said.

“I will,” she said, her eyes intent on him as she paused to smoke her cigarette. “Bobby, I’m hiring. I need a crew. I want all of you. I see the potential for a franchise, two or three shops in the next ten years. Dade County alone.”

“You mean you’re taking old men, too?” Ray said.

“No old men,” she said. “But I want you.”

And now Ray, remarkably, looked away and blushed. He scooped up his bottle by the neck and fell back in his chair. “She’s one of a kind, this one,” he said to Bobby.

But it was Nick, shaking his head, who awakened us from our reverie of white beaches and speedboats. “Wouldn’t last ten years.”

Eve set her cigarette in the ashtray. “Okay. Tell me more.”

“If I opened a shop that fixed record players only, how long you think I’d stay in business? And you can still buy a record player. The last muscle car came out of Detroit in 1973.”

“Fuck you, EPA,” Ray said.

“The war on smog,” Eve said. She looked at Nick again. “So, tell me what you’re thinking.”

“It’ll happen again,” he said. “With computers and fuel injectors. Maybe some kind of intercooler system. You’ll get low-emission horsepower.”

“Ah, bullshit,” Ray said. “I don’t care what kind of computer you mash on a nine-to-one smog motor.”

“You sound like you’d rather be in the design room at GM,” Eve said to Nick, and he laughed, picturing himself, I thought, leaning over a draft table with a pencil behind his ear. “Once the science is there,” he said, “somebody’s going to have to modify it. Your computerized Firebird comes out of the factory with three hundred horsepower. The guy who owns it wants four hundred. How’re you going to get there? You can’t bore and stroke, or so long emissions. It’s going to be technology. Computer chips, sensors. Guys that only know carburetors are going to be dinosaurs.”

“But when motors aren’t mechanical, you won’t need mechanics,” Bobby said.

“You’ll need technicians,” Nick said.

Eve slid a manicured nail under the cellophane of her cigarette pack. “Tell me what a lasting specialty shop looks like.”

“You take in muscle cars now. You school everybody on computers—they’re already getting certified at GM. Start fooling around with computerized engines. Figure out how to modify them before anybody else, and there’s your virgin soil. There’s your million-dollar franchise.”

Eve picked up her Tom Collins and lifted it to Nick. It wasn’t really a toast, though I felt the impulse to pick up my glass. Before I could, she said, “And let dinosaurs go extinct.”

Gone from the night was any semblance of reality, and the future seemed limitless as we stood outside watching the black Suburban pull into the warm exhaust smell of East Main Street, when ironically it was Nick, the one I most associated with the abstract, who brought Miami back down to earth. He turned to the three of us, gathered under the bird shit–stained awning, and said, “Not a word to Mary Ann.”

It was going to happen. Nick was going to reinvent the American muscle car and redeem himself. He was already making plans for Florida, the most grave and radical of which was that he wasn’t going to bring his wife.

8.

April was still up, pouting in her time-out chair, when I came in through the kitchen door. I took off my boots and walked into a fizzling puddle of Sprite by the stove. “You could have warned me,” I said. She wanted a hug, and I bent down to her. “You’re all sticky.”

She peeled her arms from around my neck. “Because I shaked it up first, like you did.”

“That was outside. Where’s Mom?”

“In here,” I heard, and followed the voice. The lights were off in the living room, and the last speckled dusk drew back from the windows. At the far end of the couch she was still dressed for work, an elbow on the armrest and her temple in her palm. “I had one nerve left, and guess who found it.”

I took April upstairs for her bath and then untaped the soggy bandage from my hand while she played in the tub. One of the blisters had popped, and the skin bunched like wet tissue, while the other blister was at its waxy peak. April gently rubbed her bubbles on my hand and then kissed it, and I laid my cheek on the cool enamel. Bath time was a constant in my life, her urgent little voice tinny on the water, the humid perfume of Pert and Ivory, and I felt my shoulders drop as if they’d been unhooked.

Early one morning a few months after April was born, I found my mother facedown on the living room floor. Liquor was new to her, and I woke her trying to lift her legs, thinking I could carry her up to her bed. She got off the floor saying, “Your father blew it. No, he’ll come back. Hands and knees, you watch.” A few days later, I came in from the garage and saw the empty cocktail glass as she lathered April in the kitchen sink. I tried to project a sense of delicacy when I offered to start giving April baths for a bump in allowance—I was fourteen and saving up for a car. Mom was relieved. “You’re my rock,” she said, and she called me Rocky for a few days, until I told her to quit.

Now April shot at me with her rubber squeeze tomato.

“Keep it in the tub.”

“Did you know Mommy has a fuzz booty? When she goes potty.”

It took me a second to get what she was saying, and when I laughed she said, “What’s so funny?” in a slow, dramatic way that she must’ve learned from TV. “Sometimes I get a fuzz booty.”

“No, you don’t. You have to be a grown-up.” And finally it struck me that I was considering a move fifteen hundred miles away. The sense of doubt washed over me so strongly that I fell into a laughing fit to escape it, laugher that made my eyes run and caused April to stutter and howl in that genuine way kids do when they see adults laugh.

Mom was asleep on the couch when I came downstairs. I took a long drink of her Tanqueray and tonic and was just heading back upstairs to bargain with April—another book if she could go to sleep with a kiss from just me—when the phone rang. I picked up in the kitchen and was shocked to hear the voice of Lou Costa, the cop.

“You miss me yet?” he said.

“Hey,” I said, wishing I hadn’t picked up. “Hey, Lou.”