What the hell was he thinking about? He’d dumped his Robo-Wash two years before. A mistake from the first. Strictly a novelty. A place to give kids the illusion — sitting in their cars while foamy water shot at them from all directions — that they were snugly drowning in the sea, and the illusion, as giant brushes like rolls of carpet rose up from the floor and left the wall, that they were being softly crushed. A novelty. A ride. Family entertainment. And never mind the self-creating traffic jams, not that there could have been that many. He’d picked a lousy location. Washington was black. Those people cared for their cars, polished them like flatware, either doing it themselves or, going the other way, springing for two-fifty and three-dollar jobs. He couldn’t have had the Robo a year.
He’d gone to Kitty with the proposition, told her the money — what had it cost him? under $12,000 probably — wasn’t significant enough to trouble the sibs with, and asked her to co-sign for him personally.
Kitty, the bed wetter, had never married. She did not think it fair to ask her husband to sleep on rubber sheets. Strangely, she never pissed her sheets during an afternoon nap or when she dozed off reading in a chair or watching TV. Only at night did she lose control, at night when the dreams came. The dreams, Flesh thought, the dreams she must have!
“This is really something, Kitty,” he’d said on their way to the place in Queens where he had first seen the Robo-Wash. “Wait, you’ll see.”
“Ben, it isn’t necessary. You know I trust your judgment. We all do. I don’t have to see the car wash. If you say it’s good, I believe you.”
“No. You have to see it. I want you to know just what you’re getting into. After all, I’m asking you to guarantee the loan personally. I want you to get an idea of the potential.”
“That’s the part I don’t understand. Why come to me? If it’s all that great, my brothers and sisters would go along with it as a matter of course, and you say the money isn’t significant.”
“Well, that’s the point. See, this is what I have in mind, Kitty. Up to now I’ve hit you kids collectively because the sums more often than not have been considerable, but suppose we do this, suppose I start up a series of small businesses and approach you one by one. We might all make more money.” Years before he had begun to cut them in, as co-signers of his loans, for a small share of the profits, though they had never actually had to put up a penny. He’d argued that they were entitled to it. Under the terms of their father’s will he was not obliged to do this, but he insisted. The sibs, though well off, were none of them making the fortune their father had made. Some, profligate, had already gone through a good deal of their capital. And that, of course, was the argument he had used to convince them, for they truly had not wanted to change an arrangement which had never actually cost them anything. “Look, Gus-Ira, I know you don’t need it. You’re a doctor, you do very well, but Oscar, the rock band, the bus he paid for and outfitted to travel in, what about him? Until he cuts a hit record he could really use the money. What the hell, even if it only pays the gas and oil for one of those trips he makes to the rock festivals, it would come in handy.” In this way, addressing the generosity of each, he had finally gotten them to accept the six or seven hundred dollars a year apiece that he gave them.
“Well yes,” Kitty said, “but I don’t know anything about business. I trust your judgment.”
“I just want you to see. I don’t want you to trust my judgment. You shouldn’t go into things with your eyes closed. Wait, Kitty, it’s just a bit farther. We’re almost there.”
He turned off Queens Boulevard and went out Jamaica Avenue. They had to go more slowly now. There was much traffic. It was a densely commercial street. He honked at the double-parked trucks. They drove along under the elevated tracks, saw the shower of sparks from passing trains burn themselves out like meteors, shooting stars. They proceeded past Laundromats, $5 a pair shoe outlets, gas stations, Chinese restaurants, taverns.
“Where is this place?”
“It’s only a few more minutes.”
And turned into the Robo-Wash. He maneuvered the Cadillac carefully into place, guiding it gently as he could to the struts and chocks. They were in an odd cinder-block building like a tiny covered bridge, the walls tapestried with machinery, the ceiling veined with pipes that ran overhead like rods for shower curtains. Flesh read the instructions:
1. Make certain front wheels are properly aligned with T-bar. Both tires must be in contact with metal chocks.
2. Turn off ignition.
3. Car must be in neutral.
4. Lower window on driver’s side and insert 50¢ in slot. Quarters or half dollars only.
5. Raise all windows! Do not touch brakes or steering wheel.
“You’ve got to watch this, Kitty. You’ve never seen anything like it.”
He slipped seven quarters into the machine.
“But that’s $1.75. It says fifty cents.”
“This will give us a better opportunity to see what it can do. Raise your window. Is your window up?”
“Yes.”
“Here we go then.”
They heard a subterranean growl as some sort of metal hook rose below them, engaged and grappled the axle. “She’s locking it,” Ben said. “It’s amazing. It adjusts universally. Like the tone arm on a phonograph that mixes ten- and twelve-inch records.”
Then there was a long hiss like the sound of air escaping from a tire.
“Oh, Ben,” Kitty said.
And then, as the car began to be pulled forward, sheets of water, panes of it — the extra dollar and a quarter, Ben thought happily — slapped at them from every direction at once, like waves, like a riptide, and so thick that the illusion was they were indeed in the sea under water, Kopechne’d. Detergent added now, dropping like snow, foaming the windows, frothing their vision, Kitty grabbed his hand and squeezed.
“Something’s wrong,” she said, “the extra money you put in, you must have jammed it or something. Oh, Ben.”
While the car rocked back and forth — he had not turned off the ignition, had left it in drive; it was being tugged back as it strained against the hooks; Kitty, of course, hadn’t noticed — the heavy brushes came out of the walls, closing in on them like the trick rooms of matinee serials. The timing was off, the brushes embracing the car even as the water continued to shoot out of every pore in the pipes, crushing the detergent against the windshield, twirling, lapping at the car like the bristled tongue of some prehistoric beast. Kitty had both arms around his neck. “Please, Ben. Oh God. Please, Ben. When does it stop?”