All Wheel Drive

by Z. A. Maxfield

  “Have it your way. See you Sunday.”

  “I’ll be in touch. Same email?” he asked.

  “I’ll remember to check the old one, yes.”

  Healey stepped outside. A few more feet put him into the glow of an old-fashioned streetlamp. At night Bluewater Bay’s downtown was no longer a mistakenly nostalgic tourist trap, but a run down logging town whose genteel poverty hinted at problems with infrastructure like lighting and roads.

  Currently it was cold and spitting rain. Moisture brought the scent of tire rubber, dirt, and God knew what else up from the earth. He liked the musty smell.

  Rain washed everything clean.

  It sobered him up a little too.

  No. It woke him up. He was still good and drunk.

  Not one to wake others when he could do for himself, he let himself into the B&B, got a glass of water, and headed up to bed.

  Nash was already asleep, but apparently in the years they hadn’t lived together, he’d become a much lighter sleeper.

  “Didn’t expect you back.”

  “Shit.” Healey startled. “Diego doesn’t share his bed and the couch sucked. Plus, he has this clock with a fucking regulator. Tick-tock, tick-tock all night. Felt like a horror film.”

  Before Nash could respond to that, Healey left him to do a quickie wash up and brush his teeth. When he returned, he hoped Nash was asleep. No such luck.

  Nash yawned like a bear. “Did you have a good time?”

  “Yeah, Pop.” Caustic tone of voice for caustic words. “He fed me candy and soda and let me stay up way past my bedtime. But he kept trying to get me to call forth Satan. It wasn’t weird or anything.”

  Nash sat up. “Healthy sex rarely includes Satan, bro. I thought I taught you better.”

  “Fuck you. I’m just a little . . .” Healey sat down hard on the end of the bed and the whole bed frame levered up, nearly launching Nash off like a catapult.

  “Whoa!” People probably heard that on the first floor.

  He and Nash scrambled to redistribute their weight.

  “Off-balance?” Nash asked drily.

  “I’m still coming down from that test-taking feeling. You know how I always get nervous and—”

  “Sex is not a test.” The words could have been considered Nash’s mantra.

  “Not for you, maybe.” Healey toed of his shoes and let them fall to the floor one by one.

  “You gotta think of it more like a road trip than a test. I keep telling you.”

  “It’s not a road trip. On a road trip you don’t have to worry whether the countryside you’re traveling through likes you or not.”

  “What do I always—”

  “You don’t have to worry if your tourist face is ugly.”

  “Tourist face,” Nash chuckled. “That your ‘T’ face?”

  “If I fuck up on a trip, miss a connection, arrive too soon, or get totally lost and have to ask for directions, I don’t give a crap, because I’m not going to see any of those people again.”

  “I see one solution.”

  Healey sighed, long and drawn out. “What?”

  “How many billion people are there now?” Nash tried to kick him off the edge of the bed. “You have a lot to choose from. Say you only screw each person once. All the people in the world, not counting the women, not counting the ones who wouldn’t have you on a bet, it’d still keep you pretty busy for the next few days.”

  “Fuck. You.” Healey flopped beside him. His entire body ached.

  “You get weirded out by his SCI? Worried you’d hurt him?”

  “Know how Shelby gets? I try to be so precise with words, but I’m always going to say something stupid. I’ll go, ‘Don’t you walk away while I’m talking to you—’”

  “. . . And you make her cry.” Nash laughed.

  Healey mimicked her, “‘You know I can’t walk. How could you be such an insensitive dick?’”

  Nash nodded. “Shelby plays us. All except Fjóla. Those two are hashtag ‘RideNDie’ these days. Mama bear and her cub. Even Pop doesn’t make sudden moves around them.”

  “I guess,” Healey said into the darkness. Fjóla was strong and calm and fearless. Pop lucked out, finding someone like that. Healey yawned, already half-asleep.

  Nash didn’t let it go. “Now tell me what you’re really worried about.”

  “I like him,” Healey admitted. “I’m not ready to like someone. I don’t want to do that anymore.”

  “How come?”

  “Maybe I take things too seriously, or—” He let out a long, shuddering breath. “Maybe I just care too much, but I want to build a new world with somebody, not just show up and eat and fuck. Maybe to someone like Ford or Diego, all that energy feels suffocating. I want to be with someone without drowning them.”

  “If one dude can’t handle the intensity, find someone who can.” Nash turned, making the bed shift fractionally—enough for Nash’s shoulder to make contact with Healey’s. Enough for the warmth of Nash’s skin to permeate the T-shirt he was wearing. “Or do you think you’ll need more than one? Like a ménage?”

  “No.” Healey noticed the contact. Smiled into the darkness. “God no. I’m a one-man man.”

  “It’s going to be fine.” Nash’s breath stank. Toothpaste over a background of Flaming Hot Cheetos. “Don’t worry. I can fix anything.”

  Goddamn it. Healey was gone.

  Diego usually slept like a rock after fucking. This time, he’d woken with a strange sense of foreboding . . . He’d decided to check, and when he got to the living room, there was nothing on his couch except a neatly folded blanket and pillow.

  His insides did a funny stumble, like they expected solid footing and a sinkhole opened up instead. He rolled to the coffee table and looked it over. The neat stacks of papers he’d left were untouched, but Healey had looked through the photographs. He’d even written a note about one: “Best use of light. Interesting juxtaposition of ideas. Negative space.”

  Diego frowned at the image, a 4X6 of his mother with her first brand-new car.

  Negative space? Maybe.

  Maybe . . .

  Not the subject—he rolled to his desk and hit the switch on his workstation.

  “Let there be light, and fans, and monitors.” Getting an energy drink from the fridge, he added, “And caffeine.”

  The back of all his photographs bore a number he could use to find the image on his hard drive. He’d printed, scanned, and stored all his 35-mm work. When the right picture came up on the screen—his mother, relaxed and smiling, a hip-cocked badass leaning against her lipstick-red, ’92 Nissan Sentra.

  He let his mind drift.

  They’d been coming back from New Mexico, so the picture must have been taken somewhere along I-20. He’d had too much pop at the Cracker Barrel, where they’d eaten lunch.

  On the drive, he’d bugged her and bugged her and bugged her. “I have to pee.”

  Unconcerned, she’d shrugged. “Do you see a bathroom?”

  “I’m a dude, I can pee anywhere.”

  “Not on my watch, you can’t. What are you? Some kind of hoodlum? You’ll wait.”

  But he’d nagged at her and whined.

  As one does.

  Eventually, he’d worn her down so much, she’d said, “Ah, fuck it.”

  They’d pulled over to the side of the road . . . And parked directly in front of a Coca-Cola sign that read, Love, America.

  He’d been so relieved, he’d run off behind a rock and peed his brains out. Looking back, he couldn’t remember whose idea it had been to take the picture.

  Frowning, he zoomed in on the letters.

  There.

  Someone had carefully painted the “, America” in matching Coca-Cola red. The original sign simply read Love.

  Someone had gone to all the trouble of altering that sign—doing the 1992 equivalent of Photoshop on it.

  With ninja-level irony.

  Now that he looked closer, it was obviously
graffiti, and his mother was obviously posing with the sign, not the car. How had he missed that? It changed everything.

  Before he could stop and think about the consequences, he picked up the phone and dialed.

  Rachel answered with her usual rough-voiced charm. “What?”

  “Good morning to you, Harvey Fierstein. Can I please speak with my Aunt Rachey?”

  “I am not bailing your ass out of jail again.”

  He winced. “That was one time, and you were like twenty minutes away.”

  “By plane. I boarded a plane to come and save your ass. You’re welcome. What do you want?”

  “I think I found a theme.”

  His phone was silent for way too long.

  “Rach?”

  “Getting my bearings.” He heard footsteps, the tinkle and slosh of glass, ice, and liquid. “We should both be asleep.”

  They should.

  Why wasn’t he sleeping again? Oh, yeah.

  Healey.

  “So tell me.” She was finally back.

  “Emailing you a JPEG file,” he said. “See that? I don’t think that billboard is legit.”

  “You Photoshop that?” she asked.

  “Nope. Is there a way to find out if they ever made a billboard with that slogan? I didn’t think anything about it until someone pointed it out.”

  She typed while she talked. “Be a mess trying to find if it’s a real billboard, because they do alternative billboards at the holidays and I seem to recall a ‘Love’ one.”

  “Coke’s been around since the nineteenth century. I’ve pulled up a list of their official slogans,” he said.

  “I remember ‘Coke Is It!’”

  “Mami had coasters that said, ‘You Can’t Beat the Real Thing.’ When I was ten that was the dirtiest joke I knew.”

  “You’re such a brat. Tell me your epiphany, then. Spill. I need sleep.”

  “You can’t see it? ‘Love comma America’?”

  “Oh my God. Commas do save lives. What am I looking at here?”

  “I think that’s her work.” He hesitated. “No, I’m sure of it.”

  “What is?”

  “Taylor Swift’s latest album cover—what do you think? I think Mami painted that sign. And I’ll bet if I look through all my pictures, I’ll find other photographs that seem random like this, but aren’t.”

  In particular, he was remembering this one time when he’d taken a great picture of her, and she’d sent him back to get a picture of her and the wall of the barn she was leaning on . . . What had that barn wall said?

  “I thought she just liked—” He typed the word Nebraska into his search box and found what he was looking for. “Ah. Here.” He sent the picture to Rachel.

  His mother, standing in front of a likeness of George W. Bush with the words, Miss Me? Nyet.

  At some point, the sign had quite obviously read, Miss me yet?

  “She did these, right?” he marveled. “This is totally something she’d sneak out in the middle of the night wearing some dumbass Lucha mask to do.”

  “If she did, she never said a word to me.”

  “Me neither.” He looked for some trace of his mother’s touch in the paint and found nothing. “The joke? That’s all Mami. But why not take credit?”

  “Whoever altered the sign intended it to be sly,” Rachel guessed. “It’s hard to say if she painted them, or if she simply saw them and liked them. She did collect pictures of other artists’ work. And she liked kitsch.”

  She loved kitsch. Using the world as their classroom, they’d taught themselves to document the things that interested them in all sorts of different ways. He could almost hear his mother’s voice, “Get a picture of that, baby. I have to look it up when we get home.”

  Together, they’d created whole vacations around roadside attractions.

  Why not leave a little something behind?

  “One year, we spent two weeks driving old Route 66 looking for Muffler Men. I think she painted these signs. I think they’re like hidden Mickeys at Disneyland and she wanted us to find them later.”

  “Such a Gabbi thing to do. She’d get the last word in from the grave . . .” Rachel’s voice trailed off. “I’ll never believe she could keep a secret that big, though.”

  Oh, he could. Easily. She’d never felt safe. Not outside the bubble of the art world and the few men and women who protected her interests there.

  “She kept everything about her art a secret until you came along, Aunt Rachel. If she did these things, the reason was personal. She didn’t want credit. She just wanted to have her say.”

  “Now that I can totally believe.” Rachel yawned audibly. “Is that the time? Go to bed. Call me tomorrow.”

  “A’ight. Love to everyone.” He hung up, pushed himself away from the desk, and simply sat there, watching the screensaver float pictures into the void. He didn’t want to ghostwrite his mother’s memoir. He was too close to the subject. Plus, she’d wanted to remain something of a mystery. She’d been a phenomenon—yet there remained a part of her nobody had got to see, not even him.

  That hurt, at the time.

  Cecil and Rachel had no qualms about unearthing her secrets now. If they expected encouragement from him, they’d be disappointed. He didn’t want to write about who she’d kissed. He didn’t want to talk about the petty jealousies, scandals, the time she was bitter—when her faith deserted her.

  But if there was a legit story here about her career? If there was a hidden facet of his mother’s work no one knew about? He’d put aside his qualms, because that was a story he wanted to tell.

  After a while, he lay down. The couch where he’d left Healey the night before wasn’t uncomfortable. He used it all the time. It had to be his imagination when he discerned the faint hint of Healey on the cushions. The almond scent came from Healey’s hair. That fragrant, wavy, light-brown spill of hipster-camouflage.

  Ah, Jesus. He should call.

  He should, but it would mean admitting he’d woken up in the middle of the night worrying about Healey. It would mean waking Healey up and demanding answers he didn’t have any right to.

  Where are you?

  Didn’t you care for the accommodations?

  Are you all right?

  Did you call Nash for a ride?

  Does Nash think I’m a total dick now because I didn’t take you home?

  Did he even care what Nash Holly thought of him?

  “No, goddamn it.”

  He didn’t do boyfriend shit.

  He distinctly, succinctly, did not.

  He lay there feeling vindicated. Knowing there was no one in the world who could see he was acting like an ass, and there would be no evidence to prove it either.

  He wasn’t boyfriend material, and not because of any goddamn SCI.

  “Boyfriends are Labrador Retrievers named Jake,” he spoke the affirmation out loud. “They are precursors to marriage. To children. I am not looking for a boyfriend.”

  He closed his eyes.

  Smiled at the memory of some stupid shit Healey had said.

  Opened his eyes.

  Healey would call. Probably, he would.

  Or they’d bump into each other around town.

  Diego spent a lot of time at the ridge, where the cemetery looked over the water. That was right next to the B&B. Plus, you couldn’t help meeting up with people all the time in a town the size of Bluewater Bay. Even if you didn’t want to.

  He checked his phone. It would be dawn soon—time to decide whether to try to get a couple more hours’ sleep, or start his day. He was missing his favorite time, goddamn it.

  In the end, he packed his bag for the gym and donned the Every Day Is Arm Day T-shirt.

  By the time he’d dressed, gotten in the car, and driven through the silence of Bluewater Bay, faint light cracked the eastern horizon. He swiped his key card at the desk, and headed toward the nearly empty locker rooms.

  “Diego.” Ginsberg Sloan, one of th
e stunt men from Wolf’s Landing, was inside, wearing nothing more than a towel. “How’s things. Enjoying the hiatus?”

  “I’d rather be busy.” Diego shoved his things into a locker. “How about you?”

  “Just flew back from Romania, man. So fucking wet and cold all the time. I’m getting too spoiled for crappy location shoots and bad food and weather I don’t like.”

  “And an empty bed?” Gins was with Derrick, owner of the B&B.

  “Lumberjacks do have their uses.” Gins grinned and headed for the showers.

  “A’ight. I’ll see you later.”

  As he left the locker room, Diego congratulated himself on not asking Gins if he’d met the B&B’s new tenant. He’d handle things if he saw Healey. He’d play it loose. He’d decide if he wanted to hook up next time—if there was a next time—on the fly. Like always.

  Despite his resolve, he checked his phone again.

  “You going to use that machine? Or what?”

  Diego frowned up at the guy standing with his arms crossed, peering down at him. Dude had a lazy smile. Nice green eyes. Also, awesome full-sleeve tattoos. Diego’s first instinct had been to tell the dude to go fuck off and die, but he wasn’t going to war over an ab machine he didn’t plan to use.

  “Sorry, man. You take it.”

  Lazy-smile guy winked. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  “Should I?” He felt pretty safe saying so. He hadn’t slept with anyone in Bluewater Bay except Healey. Not that he only remembered people he slept with . . .

  “That’s okay. We only met once. You thought I was hogging the cream at Stomping Grounds.”

  “Ah God, yeah. I—” that hadn’t been one of his finer moments “—I’m real sorry about snapping that way.”

  “No, you had a point. I didn’t see you there because I didn’t bother looking down.”

  “I should have just said something instead of unloading on you.”

  “We’ve all done it. I’m known for my tats, not the sweetness of my disposition.”

  “They are nice.” The sleeves were inked with vivid, colorful tropical flowers. “I’m surprised I don’t remember those.”

  “I had on a long-sleeved shirt that day probably. Rigoberto Villa—Ringo—from Ink Bay.”

  “You’re an artist?”

  “Mm-hmm.” He looked Diego over. “I don’t see no ink on you. When you gonna bust your cherry?”