After The Flesh

by Colin Gallant

  Outwardly Freddy shared his father’s rage against the attack on Maybelline. Inside he was laughing. John spent the evening stewing over the damage – both to the car and his career. After speaking with Nathan, he began trolling body shops, attempting to get a price and a date. He was looking for low and soon and in that order. He got both.

  On Friday morning John went out to start the car. He and Maggie were going to run over to a garage on the north end of town. It was a small operation and the owner said he could make the scratch vanish for four hundred dollars – a hundred of which was going to pay for the custom paint. He said he needed to match blend. It required him to spray the whole quarter panel and fade it into the door and trunk lid. He promised John it would be undetectable afterward. John was willing to spend the four hundred and he did not mind working the overtime to pay for it either.

  Car guys name their cars. Car guys talk to their cars. Car guys cherish their cars. They believe a vehicle, like we say about a person, is more than the sum of their parts. A vehicle’s quality, a vehicle’s worth can be gauged by more than the engineers who design it and the people in the plant who build it. A car has a soul, a spirit and it thrives in a loving environment. John was a car guy and he believed this whole-heartedly. To him Maybelline was a member of the family. She was the member of the family who received the king’s share (or queen’s) of his love and respect.

  But Maybelline had been hurt. The scratch on her flank cut her deeply. When John turned the key that morning Maybelline only coughed, belching sooty clouds of unburned fuel out her tailpipes. John was not entirely surprised.

  “Gimme a minute,” he told Maggie who stood in the doorway, her purse on her shoulder and her keys in her hand. John popped the hood and began to tinker.

  Four hours later, about the same time as Freddy and his friends were splashing their way out into the Slough under a brilliant, blue sky, Maybelline roared to life. John came into the kitchen, his greasy hands buried in a shop rag. He was whistling, smiling and quite embarrassed.

  “Power valve was gone,” he told his wife. “It literally blew its casing. The friggin’ fuel was just pouring into the intake. No wonder she wouldn’t run. It was my fault,” he offered Maggie a sheepish smile, “I ran ‘er hard the other day. Didn’t let ‘er warm up first. She doesn’t like that.” He sounded happy and quite pleased with himself. I’m sure it was forced.

  Like I said, I have never known much about automobiles but I have never had much faith in the idea of a sentient vehicle. Freddy found his book on Holley carburetors. He figured out just how to mess with the Impala and make it look normal. Freddy was playing a game now and he was just warming up. The real sport had yet to begin.

  -

  John had his car back on Sunday afternoon. True to his word the body man made the scratch disappear – along with the balance in John’s overtime account. John was just glad it was fixed and if he couldn’t tell it had been there no one else could either.

  Fresh paint glittering in the sun and the repair John had done to the carburetor made Maybelline run like a top. John claimed the car had not run this well when it was twenty years newer. True or not, I knew it would not run well for long.

  Freddy was already preparing his next attack. He did not wait. That night once his parents were in bed, John’s heavy snores filtering out through the slit in the bedroom door, Freddy crept out to the garage again. He got me to stand guard. It probably was not necessary but Freddy would take no chances. If he was caught, John would do the math. If even one of the magazines was left on his desk for John to find, Freddy would have plenty of time to get used to eating that waxy chocolate pudding the hospital served – likely through a straw.

  For several weeks now Freddy had been contemplating his strategy. Only his lack of mechanical knowledge held him back. With John’s last attack ending with Freddy’s trip to the hospital, Freddy found the motivation he needed to tackle the subject. Every time he stood at the base of the stairs and saw the broken newel post his resolve hardened.

  In little more than two weeks Freddy had amassed an astounding amount of information on the subject of automotive mechanics. He had read it all and as far as I could tell he understood everything. He may not have John’s experience with wrenches but in terms of raw knowledge of how a car worked they were becoming more or less on par.

  Freddy recalled hearing his father mention a tune-up he had done on the Impala back in June. It involved replacing the spark plugs and other vital parts of the ignition system. At the time Freddy ignored him – I suppose he was more interested in figuring out how he was going to convince Carrie to follow him into the basement. He recalled the conversation and now he was prepared to use it to his advantage. Like the thing he did with the carburetor, he wanted whatever else he did to appear completely natural. The last thing he wanted was for his sabotage to be detected.

  With me at the door Freddy got down to business. He opened the hood and within moments he had the big, round air cleaner off and set to one side. After that I don’t really know what he did. For better than an hour he was bent over the engine. He only glanced up to ensure I was still at my post or to step back to hunt for another tool out of John’s big Snap-on box. When he was done, the air cleaner went back on and the hood clicked shut. Freddy tidied up the garage, eliminating even the slightest trace we had been there. We left, the darkness thankfully hiding the malicious grin twisting Freddy’s face into a mask of pure evil.

  -

  It was a twelve- or thirteen-kilometer ride out to Clausson’s on Monday afternoon. Freddy volunteered so that Maggie could finish her housework and get dinner ready. John called at noon wanting her to fetch him his tools. The car was acting up again (he called it ‘the car’ rather than Maybelline which Freddy noted with reserved glee). Maggie was lost, completely unsure of which tools John required and his descriptions only managed to confuse her further. She saw in the drawers of John’s tool box the same confounding mass I did. I saw the same thing when Freddy opened the hood of the car – just not as shiny.

  Luckily Freddy was home. He was watching a movie he borrowed from Çin that morning, one I knew he was looking forward to returning that afternoon. He took the phone from his mother and jotted notes on a novelty note pad politely titled ‘the fucking list’ that sat beside the cradle. He easily understood what his dad needed – even before John asked – but he feigned ignorance. He even went so far as to set the receiver down to run out to the garage to check something.

  John actually thanked him before hanging up.

  At just after four that afternoon Freddy wheeled into the big lot at Clausson’s. His legs burned nicely from the ride but his lower back felt rubbed raw in spots from his heavily-laden backpack jouncing around on his shoulders. He cruised through the parking lot with his eyes peeled for the Impala and found it quickly. He only needed to follow the path of scorched rubber burned into the pavement by John’s lost temper the previous Wednesday. Freddy rolled up, tipped his bike over and dropped his pack in a heap beside the car. He sat cross-legged on the grass to wait for his father.

  At twenty to five John came out shoulder to shoulder with several of his co-workers, laughing and joking, squinting into the brilliant, midsummer sunlight. John said his good-byes and slapped his big, old-school aviators in place. He was bouncing his key ring in his left hand as he strolled up to Freddy.

  “Hey, dad,” Freddy stood up and brushed the seat of his khaki shorts clean.

  “Hey, Freddy,” John replied. He made a quick survey of the lot, calling a greeting to someone, nodding to another and, with a grin, flipping the bird to a third. “You bring everything?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good.” John grunted. “Thanks for coming.”

  “No prob.” Freddy felt a sense of awe. He was not human. He was a monster with little care for the world around him. He could have killed John in his sleep. He could have frigged with the car’s brakes as easily as he did the carburetor or the igni
tion. He could even have wrapped his mother’s wagon around that light pole as he had in his daydream. Instead he chose to bleed his victim slowly, cutting here, opening a vein there, exsanguinating him drop by precious drop until death slipped up on him quietly and mercifully. Now, his blood pressure beginning to drop, his circulatory system collapsing, John was humbled. He did not yet even know he was injured. He did not even know the game was on but still he was not going to be a sore loser – at least not until he found out that he lost.

  Twenty minutes later John was not so gracious in defeat. He was cursing himself, he was cursing Maybelline and he was cursing his ratchet – which had just slipped and caused him to flay open two knuckles on the steering column. Two of the new spark plugs he had recently put in had somehow been cross-threaded. One was cracked and useless. The other had managed to back itself out and was now hanging limp and useless at the end of its wire. The plug was okay but the wire itself was half-cooked from contact with the exhaust headers.

  John pulled all the plugs while Freddy watched. Of the remaining six, two more needed to be re-gapped. He worked quickly – using a spare plug he kept in the glove box to replace the broken one and a tapered disc on his key ring to reset the gaps on the others. The one wire suffering from exhaust pipe burns was functional but John still cursed over it.

  “I just spent sixty bucks on that set,” John told Freddy.

  “If it works, what’s the problem?” Freddy asked.

  John stepped back from the opened hood and scratched his scalp. “Well, for starters, it looks like shit,” he replied with a snort, “and the wire isn’t gonna work properly. Also, it’ll probably corrode long before I need to replace the rest.”

  “Can you buy just one?”

  John nodded. “It’s not that big a deal but it shouldn’t have happened.” He turned to Freddy, a look of sage wisdom coming over him. “Don’t ever work on your car after having a few beers.”

  Freddy smirked.

  John smirked back. They were just good buddies then.

  The hood slammed shut and John hefted Freddy’s backpack. “C’mon. Let’s see if we can get that bike of yours in the trunk – it’ll be a long ride home if it don’t!” He laughed and slapped Freddy on the shoulder.

  Strangely and sadly I think that moment was the closest Freddy ever came to loving his father.

  -

  Two days later John went out to the garage to find Maybelline sitting on a flat, an old, rusty nail stuck deep in the fat treads of the nearly-new T/A he had only recently mounted. He put on the spare and got the tire fixed that day after work. The next morning it was flat again but when he took it back to the shop, they couldn’t find anything wrong with it.

  The last Friday in July is an infamous date for most kids as they realize with horror there are fewer days of summer ahead than there are behind. In Prince William Falls it is usually on or around this date we would begin to notice the ebbing flow of water into the Slough. In short weeks the dock would be brought in and the water that remained would begin to take on the swampy stink of a bog. Few people ventured into the water at this point and most that did would come out with leeches. Two weeks later it wouldn’t matter anymore. We would be in school once again.

  That same Friday was the day John finally hit his girl. Not his wife, whom he struck more often than I am comfortable telling, but his car. After the tire came the starter motor. Loose connections had caused the car to stall while crossing the railroad tracks on the west end of town. John diagnosed the problem easily enough but the next day the battery fell out of its cradle while he was taking a corner. The negative power cable snagged in the engine fan. The cable was severed and the fan was destroyed in the process. John was sure he checked the battery tie-downs when he fixed the starter problem. But he wasn’t positive. Still the problem was easy and cheap to fix and he dismissed it. Certainly, he recalled the fatherly advice he shared with his son about mixing alcohol and automotive repairs.

  It couldn’t have been two days later when the alternator crapped out. The unit wasn’t a year out of the box – In fact he still had the box with the old alternator out in the garage. When he went to find the old one, he couldn’t. Again, he could not recall whether or not he had returned it or not – for the core charge – but he was nearly positive he had seen it on a shelf since. The store honored the warranty and replaced the alternator free of charge. That same afternoon the battery again tipped over in the middle of the same corner with nearly the same results. This time John knew he had secured the ties. He even checked them twice to be doubly sure. When he checked on the roadside the ties were indeed secured but the post they held to had broken away from its mount. Chagrined, he again repaired everything. He double-checked everything once he was done then triple-checked to be absolute sure about it. He did not even have a beer until he was finished and the hood was closed. Impulsively, the untouched beer in his hand, he popped the hood again and quadruple-checked. Only then did he drink.

  The last Friday in July came and John was stunned into submission. His foul temper had given way to a kind of subtle fugue. At breakfast he seemed to come out of it, announcing that Clausson’s would be closing down for a much-needed refit. Everyone was going on a month’s lay-off starting mid-August.

  That by itself was no big shocker. The owners had been discussing it for almost two years and most of the staff had seen it coming. Their pay would be covered, their seniority and benefits would be maintained and they would all be retrained when the plant opened again. John’s next revelation was the real shocker.

  “I think I’m gonna use the time to sell Maybelline.”

  Freddy stopped mid-chew and glanced up. Maggie froze with a spoonful of Special K half way to her mouth. Both of them looked at John as though he had just announced he was dying of cancer.

  He looked at each of them in turn and nodded grimly. “She’s been a good machine but it’s time I got rid of ‘er.” On his plate, his breakfast sat mostly untouched. He stabbed a sausage link with finality and smiled. “I think it’s time I grew up. They’re saying gas is gonna hit fifty cents a liter – I should get rid of ‘er before it does. Buy myself something more practical. We should get rid of yours too,” he told Maggie.

  “Can we afford it?” Maggie asked in a small voice.

  “Sure,” John’s reply was immediate. “Sure, we can. I don’t think we can afford not to. Maybelline’s a classic – a rare classic. She’s worth almost as much as a new car today – numbers match and everything.” He jammed the sausage into his mouth, chewing vigorously. “Yeah, I’m gonna sell ‘er.” With that he attacked his breakfast, his appetite returning in force.

  Twenty minutes later John was back in the house with thunderclouds hanging around him. He was limping and cursing low under his breath. “Where’s your keys?” He asked Maggie.

  She knew him well enough to know the signs. Without a word she handed over her key ring and stepped back away from any impending attack.

  John said nothing further. He left without looking back. If he had I’m sure he would have seen the smirk fighting to twist Freddy’s lips into a laughing grin.

  When he was gone Freddy went out to the garage. What he saw caused him to retreat quietly to his room where he lay on his bed, clutching his sides and biting his lip to keep from laughing out loud.

  Freddy had of course committed one last act of sabotage. The previous night as I watched at the door, he had filed down the contact points on the distributor cap, carefully scorching each with his lighter before reassembling it. The result was a loss of current to the spark plug wires, consequently to the spark plugs themselves. With no current there was no spark, no spark meant no fire. No fire meant no-go. Maybelline was once again a four-thousand-pound lawn ornament.

  Freddy’s true joy came from more than just this, his last act of sabotage. In a fit of rage John slammed the car door after it would not start and then kicked it with enough force to stove in the sheet metal nearly four inches. It w
ould take a lot more overtime to pay for this latest damage.

  His joy was short-lived however. He did not manage to break John. Sure, he managed to make his father hate the car – a fact that, by itself, was a fair piece of revenge but John did not know what had caused Maybelline’s latest breakdowns and Freddy was not about to tell him. No, Freddy’s vengeance was not complete – not by half. John needed to know. He needed to feel powerless. Most importantly he needed to know that the power had been stripped from him. And he needed to know who had done it to him. Only one course of action lay ahead.

  I knew immediately what he was contemplating. His power over life, the gift he felt was his alone placed him above these other creatures of the world. The life he took from the dog set the stage. That life prepared him for what was to come next. He had killed since I knew – a few neighborhood strays. But I was not privy to the details – thank God. Still the step up from animal cruelty to premeditated murder was a monumental leap. I didn’t believe he was actually capable of killing his father. His fantasies aside, Freddy was not completely lost. I knew some light did on occasion soften the shadows of his mind.

  But Freddy wanted to kill his father now. He yearned to kill John nearly as much as he yearned to have Carrie – and to have her mother. Carrie was gone for now and her mother was still unattainable. John was right here and his throat was exposed. Still. Even as he contemplated taking a life he questioned as I did whether or not he could. A mongrel stray was forgotten by the world. A mongrel was easily overlooked. John was not.

  A cold shiver ran down my spine. Freddy’s greatest concern was not whether he was capable of plunging in the knife and, by doing so, taking a life. His concern was only that he would be caught. As to whether or not he was capable of killing a human being, it was answered before John even knew the specter of death was hanging over him. It was answered in the next weeks – sort of.