“Issue?”
“… ten, yes…”
Now she was back, all the way, even if her eyes still sparked. If she’d wanted him to die before, as a sacrifice to an indifferent divinity, she no longer did. His value had diminished. It was over, and she buttoned up, confused and ashamed, and even the gurrls became appalled. “What are you, five years old?”
But what could he do? There was a difference between complacency and satisfaction. Opening a vein didn’t daunt him, but you had to draw the line. “Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, these are classics, cost me half my paycheck.”
“For that kid stuff?”
Of course they couldn’t understand, no more than he could see sticking sharp pieces of metal through your body or loving Anne Rice’s gay vampires or trying to be the goddamn Crow. You all came to fate on a different curve in the road. Lady deaths one and two were already done with him and marching up the street, fingers splayed as if hoping to find and disembowel a cat. Terry was half-smiling, maybe thinking him a fool or perhaps knowing they were off on tangents but heading to the same place.
He tried again. “Listen. This has age, this has presence. This is twice as old as you or me, it’s got wisdom. There’s muscle here.”
“You need to grow up, Cole,” she told him and, surprised as he was that she’d remembered his name, he also sincerely believed her. He remained exactly who he had been, and it gave him some pause.
He took the train back out to his mother’s place in Queens and let himself in. She was out as usual, working the night shift at the hospital. He went to the garage and leaned against his father’s workbench. The dust had piled up but the tools were still in their proper places. The hedgecutter, saws, levels, hoes, and coiled garden hoses all outlined in magic marker on the peg board.
The old man had moved out five years ago and hadn’t taken a damn thing with him. It intrigued Cole that someone could leave an entire life behind and begin a new one – a different wife, with two other kids already. Cole occasionally went by his father’s house and peeked in the windows, watching the kids on the couch next to him, laughing, everybody always smiling. It gave Cole a warm but somehow unpleasant feeling. Sometimes he fell asleep in the backyard, head propped against the new siding. He’d been arrested twice but the old man hadn’t pressed charges yet.
The sheet over Joe’s Mustang hadn’t been changed in six months but still smelled of bleach. He drew it off and gazed at the car.
It was a cherry red Boss 429, with 375 horsepower and 450 lb-ft. Sixty-nine, the year that the rivalry between Mustangs and Camaros became well-defined, with street races occurring every night up and down the highways across America’s midwest. In 69 the Stang became bigger, heavier and gained in its performance options. Increased height meant a jump in horsepower. Handling was much-improved. The famous running horse in the grille was replaced by a smaller emblem, offset to the right of the grille. There were four headlights now. The interior was more rounded off with two separate cockpits, for the driver and passenger.
He’d almost killed himself with the car before he’d ever driven it. The black depression came down on him at about the beginning of ninth grade, took him low in the guts for three or four days straight and wouldn’t shake free. He shut the garage door, started Joe’s Mustang up, lay on the cold cement floor near the exhaust pipe and listened to the engine thrum. It made him calm again. About five minutes into it the carbon monoxide got him high and he felt a lot better, shut the car off, puked, and watched the Nightmare on Elm Street series on video for the rest of the night.
It was an heirloom. He remembered his brother taking him down to the beach, Joe’s muscles rigid in the sun, wet and roiling in the surf with girls in bikinis. Cole would sit up on the sand and watch them in the water, the girls frolicking for a while before Joe led them away behind the dunes. Later, when he and his brother were taking showers in the locker room, the scent of salt and seaweed and manhood all around, Cole would tremble at the thought of the engine. When they got back into the Mustang, the seats too hot to sit on, Joe would lay their damp towels down, and they’d fly out of there.
The first time Cole had toyed with himself was in the back seat, imagining that he was watching Joe in the driver’s seat, roaring down Ocean Parkway, some bikini girl working in his lap. Cole had no idea what the hell he was even doing, it started so oddly, just as a way to get back to a place of peace in himself. Ten years old maybe and barefoot, still sort of wishing he was dead but not quite there.
This had muscle. This had age.
Joe had died in the Stang, bolting down Route 25a and dogging it out with a 78 Camaro, 327 intake, Turbo 350 and B &M shift kit. Four in the morning, two miles past the worst of the curves, and they both blew a red light too late. Some baker was off to make the morning donuts, staggering through a left turn in a Gremlin with only one headlight, putting along off a side street. Joe slammed the brakes and spun out, they said, completing three full circles before coming to a stop in a fog of smoking tyres. The Stang didn’t have a scratch on it and neither did his brother. Joes neck was broken.
Cole went inside and made a few calls. It was easy tracking Terry down. Everybody was still in touch on the grapevine, more or less. Three years out of high school and they were all still tearing themselves up about it, eager to talk, to find one another again. It was stupid the way the system did it. Let you spend 13 years surrounded by the same couple hundred kids, then punt you into the rest of the frenzied world. No wonder he had no fucking social skills.
He learned that she lived off St Mark’s Place and Third Avenue, around there, but nobody knew an apartment or phone number. Someone said it was over a T-shirt shop, but Cole knew there were about 20 of them on that block so the info was no help. Somebody else said she visited her mother most Sundays, maybe for a family dinner, maybe just to settle her nerves after a weekend of raving. She didn’t take drugs and hardly ever drank. There was a whisper that she’d gone a little nuts since her sister was shoved in front of the E Train.
Cole showered, shaved, and dressed the way they used to. Jeans, T-shirt, black riding boots, and Joe’s leather coat. It was still in style and always would be. He’d kept the Stang tuned, fuelled, charged. A part of him thought that even if he’d done nothing to it at all, the car would still be ready.
He got in, and it was like he’d never been gone.
The Stang started with a roar, the noise surrounding and filling him from the belly up.
He promised himself he was not going to get out of the car until he had her, and maybe not even then.
Cole prowled the area for two days, skulking along her parents’ block, living on drive-through, pissing in the extra-large drink cup, and forcing his bowels to back down. The Stang moved like a shark across the asphalt, heading through the Lincoln Tunnel and down through Jersey, gliding back into the city after the rush hour gridlock had eased.
Sunday, he parked up the street from her parents’ place, watching. He saw Terry come up out of the subway at around three and slowly walk along the sidewalk to the front door. She had a fluid grace about her that appealed to him. She’d toned the goth look down a little for Sunday dinner with the folks, but not by much. Cole sort of missed seeing the ladies’ death entourage, wishing they were here now to hear the tic of his engine. Terry would probably want to take the A Train back before it got dark, so he waited it out.
She ate and ran, sticking around for barely three hours. She was putting in her time, probably because Mom and Pop still paid her rent, or at least lent her cash when she cried for it. Cole threw the Stang into gear and eased up beside her as she made her way back to the subway station. He paced her for a few seconds until she finally looked over.