“And I’ll do that. Soon. But for now-”
“Yeah, sure. Just be careful. Things may not be as easy as they used to be. Some of it comes back, some doesn’t.”
Driver looked around. His couples were gone. A younger crowd seemed to be moving in now, wagging their iPods and cellphones behind them, fatally connected.
Why had he called Manny in the first place? We talk up our problems to others, odds are high we’re doing it either to reassure ourselves that what we’re doing is right or to talk ourselves into doing something we know is stupid.
Yeah, he thought-that about covers it.
Wondering about motivations, why he or anybody else did what they did, was something he did his best to steer clear of. How the hell could you ever know? Act, when it was called for. Otherwise, hang back.
And the next act here, for him, had to be wheels.
There was, of course, a huge parking lot filled with cars just outside, any one of which could be his. And he wouldn’t hesitate, if it became necessary.
But for now it wasn’t.
I should have figured this out a long time ago, Bill thought. Life could have been a hell of a lot simpler. Now he could say and do as he pleased. The manners he’d been raised with; that sensitivity stuff he’d later had to learn, having to put up with other people’s shit whether he wanted to or not-all of it was out the door, down the block and gone.
Now he could just stare at Wendell when he asked if Bill would be wanting to go out and sit with the others, watch some TV, play cards, they’d like that. Didn’t have to react at all if he didn’t want to. They’d put it down like everything else to Mr. Bill’s not quite with us today. The Alzheimer’s or whatever it was they thought he had.
In a way they were right. The world out there, the one they lived in, was just pills and bad food and waiting. It smelled bad. But the world he carried around with him, that one was rich with people he’d known, places he’d been, things he’d done. The pictures there still moved.
Thing is, he liked Wendell. And he wondered if maybe Wendell knew what was going on with him. Sometimes when Bill sat there not responding, Wendell would look him in the eye and grin. Like a month back, something like that, when the “weekly entertainment” was a folk singer. Bill hated the fucking sixties, and here it was, standing in front of him. Long hair, tie-dye shirt, a smile that made you want to knock him silly. Sillier than he already was. Laughing at his own jokes. Pretending to flirt with the old women in the front row.
The guy’s first song started ‘My life is a river,’ Bill thinking the hell it is, my life’s like my head, nothing but dry fallen leaves in there. It’s not over, Eli said again and again, his oldest friend and the only one besides Billie who visited him. But it was, or well nigh.
He’d looked over and seen Wendell watching him.
Still, last night had been, by their standards, huge. Roommate Bobby’s daughter had smuggled in Bobby’s favorite, Girl Scout cookies and a pint of Early Times bourbon. It wasn’t in the rule book, but they weren’t supposed to have alcohol here. The list of reasons went on and on: confusion, dehydration, medication interactions, livers already sorely abused. Bill and Bobby finished the cookies in short order, drew out the bourbon, one sip at a time.
Now Bill sat watching the garbage truck start-and-stop down the street outside. Liquid poured out its backside. Looked like a giant snail, extruding a track of slime behind as it moved slowly along.
Three hours till lunch.
The car came off a lot hanging on to the edge of Tempe by its toenails. He’d been buzzed by two salesmen, one twentyish and enthusiastic, all but bouncing on his toes, the other with something of the crocodile about him, ageless, enduring, who dropped away as he moved ever deeper into the used section. What you want is a ride that doesn’t show its colors, one that never growls, just snaps. As he came back the second time to a Ford Fairlane, a young tire kicker in fatigues and baseball cap hollered over at him: “Hey, zero to sixty, with that one you might wanna take a book along, read while you wait, you know what I’m saying?”
He popped the hood again. Moments later a pair of well worn khaki trousers came into view. The crocodile. He waited till Driver straightened, then smiled. “I’m afraid someone’s been under the hood there, kinda messed it up some.”
Driver had the hood back down and was counting out money before he finished his sentence.
Someone had been under there all right, someone who knew what he was doing. And what that someone had started, Driver finished up in a garage at the butt end of Van Buren.
Half a century ago the main drag for Phoenix and a watering hole for those travelling U.S. Highways 70, 80 and 89, Van Buren was now a dusty long drawl of swayback motels, streetwalkers, abandoned storefronts and vacant lots overgrown with rubbish, the very image of everything used up, worn out, cast off. The city had moved on and left this dry husk behind.
Boyd’s Garage hadn’t fared a lot better, but it had held on-since 1948, according to the sign whose ancient letters and numbers had been recently overpainted. This was done free-handed, so that crescents and dimples of aqua ghosted the tomato-red edges. In harsh sunlight the new brush strokes showed wide and crude.
Inside, afloat on the reek of grease, cleanser, exhaust fumes, gasoline, hair oil and male cologne, all was untouched by the years passing outside. The wall by the office (long unused, to judge by the stacks of boxes inside) was shingled with girlie calendars, some of them dating back to WWII. The top of the antique Coke machine opened onto horizontal steel slats. You put your money in and slid a bottle along slats to the gate, fished it out by the neck. The bottom was filled with cool water of uncertain vintage. Didn’t pay to look too closely, no telling what might be swimming down in there.
The Fairlane was a street car, no doubt about it. And the owner had taken pains to make it look unprepossessing, which made Driver wonder if the owner could have been someone like him, someone doing, in some shape or form, what he used to do. Just as he wondered how the car came to wind up on that lot among the sheep. And why no one had recognized it for what it was.
Or had they?
Once Driver had paid for the car, he asked to see a mechanic.
“You do understand-”
“I just want to talk to him. And not a service manager. One of the guys with grease lines in his hands he can’t get rid of.”
He’d driven the car around back and gone in. Luis glanced at the car over his shoulder, then gave Driver a look before nodding.
So he knew.
Driver asked, and Luis told him about Boyd’s. Man named Matthew Sweet owned it, Sweet Matt everyone called him, him and his wife Lupa, they’d rent out time, a bay, tools, whatever he needed. Good people there, he said. To go with your good car.
It all took Driver back: the smells, poking about in the Fairlane’s innards, sliding under and out and under again, tearing a gash in his hand when a wrench slipped, Spanish tumbling off the walls around him. Back to his early days, when he was first finding his skills in garages much like this one, and at the makeshift track in the desert between Tucson and Phoenix. Herb was the beginning of it, an outsider like him who he befriended at school and for whom engines, transmissions, and suspensions were living, breathing things. Then Jorge and his family and the family’s friends, which amounted to most of the population of South Tucson. That had been the first time Driver ever felt like he fit in anywhere.
He remembered Manny back when he was on one of his favorite harangues about words and misuse of same. They were drinking in a dive out by LAX, a self-styled blues bar, some guy playing guitar with his teeth at two in the afternoon for an audience of four dedicated drunks, a hooker, a couple of Japanese businessmen in suits, and them. Manny’d slammed back another glass of wine and taken a sudden turn.