Fire Year

by Jason K. Friedman

  Spenser Estates Metalry was named for the plantation that stood there in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, after which the gray brick house with its porticos and terraces and stables collapsed under the weight of neglect and the rice fields reverted to marsh. When Artie started working for him, Blaustein called ahead and, avoiding Lefkowitz, talked to the girl, who laughed when he called her pet names such as Pecan Pie and Brown Sugar. Blaustein asked if they had this or that part. The girl couldn’t say what was left in which car, but she could tell him which cars they had. There was no way to reserve a part, so when Blaustein hung up the phone he shouted at Artie to go!

  One of the mechanics had taught Artie how to pry out various parts without damaging them or the rest of the car. Blaustein sent him for everything big and small: seatbelts, the rod that held up the hood, a door handle, mirrors, a fuel gauge, entire engines. Artie did as he was told. Blaustein came into the shop one morning feeling different, and it took him a while to realize he had fallen asleep the night before without drinking his NyQuil. He had slept almost till dawn. When Artie came in he was about to embrace him—but then he saw he was carrying a grocery bag. “What’s this?” Blaustein asked. “A big lunch?” “Headlights,” Artie replied, opening the bag. “I can see what they are,” Blaustein said. “Who the hell authorized you to get them?” “We always need headlights. Th-th-these are compatible with—” “They’re compatible with,” Blaustein said mockingly. “Who told you that, a little birdie? Don’t tell me, Lefkowitz!” he cried, seeing in his mind the junk man falling from his heights to that metaphysical place where rich charlatans and thieves dwelled.

  Still, it was Artie he blamed. He damned him to hell. He gave him a choice—either pay for the lights out of his own pocket or watch his crippled toches get tossed out onto the street. But when that very afternoon Tanyetta the AAA dispatcher called him with a wreck just a few blocks away in the historic district, an Oldsmobile stationwagon in need of new headlights (among other parts), Blaustein told Artie he was lucky, he was given a reprieve and might not need to return as that faygeleh Martin’s golem and apprentice faygeleh, if, that is, the position was still even open.

  Soon Blaustein stopped calling the scrapyard ahead of time. Artie took on the job of going out to the yard first thing each morning, just to see any new cars before they were picked over, in case there was something worth taking. After only a few months he had developed such an eye that when he came back empty-handed, Blaustein could be sure there was nothing to get. In the summer Artie returned with air-conditioning units, naturally, but also with bumpers and grilles and headlights and those auto body parts that were most likely to need replacing after an accident on the highway down to Florida or up to the Blue Ridge. Blaustein had no place to store these parts and certainly wasn’t going to lay out a dime to rent a space. But Artie had the knack for knowing what to bring in when, so that parts were available when they were needed and nothing sat around for more than a week. So that Blaustein rarely had to appeal to that most hated of figures, the dealer.

  II

  Demon shriek of metal tearing metal, stink of burned meat, turd heaps of fanged beasts that patrolled the yard by night. The scrapyard agreed with him. The Dobermans in their cage nudged him with their muzzles. The machine that swallowed cars and streamed sorted metals was interesting to watch. The hotdogs were Isaac Gellis. Here a junked car was a treasure chest. Here the men, some of them, who came to pick and pay were no finer physical specimens than he was. Armed with a box of tools, every man, no matter how lame or sound of leg or tongue, had the same challenges of finding what he was looking for and prying it out. It was hard manly work. Various parts of Artie’s body were early casualties. Acids splashed along his arm, transmission fluid spurted into his eye. Fingers bent back and wedged in, tendons and muscles strained, and once even an eternity of fear when he lay poking at the undersides of a car and the car, which like every other one in the yard was not jacked up but instead balanced on welded rims, began to topple.

  Artie was even threatened with violence. One day he had his head under the hood of a Plymouth Valiant; the man next to him was under a LeMans. It was only eight in the morning but already so hot and humid that Artie’s eyes stung. The man next to him was a blur—a red blur on top of his head, a blur of dark hair covering his face, a blur of pale blue denim going down. Artie kept at his task but noticed something pink going down into the blue. He turned and saw the man’s hand sticking one spark plug into the front of his jeans and then another.

  “Hey!” Artie said.

  The man in the red cap looked down at him. Then he ducked his head back into the engine.

  “You have to p-p-pay,” Artie said.

  “Oh yeah?” the man said, his head still under the hood.

  “Yeah,” Artie confirmed. “T-t-twenty cents each.”

  “Is that right?” The man reached down under the car and rose up hugely, holding a tire iron over his head.

  Artie blocked his head.

  “You ever come across a car that someone died in?” the man asked.

  Artie peeked through his arms. The man set the tire iron on the engine block.

  “You come across it from time to time,” the man said. “Bloodstains on the interior and bits of bone and hair and whatnot. Now I don’t think that’s right, putting a car that somebody died in on display like that. What do you think?”

  Artie tried but nothing came out.

  “Cat got your tongue?” the man asked.

  “N-n-n—” Artie tried.

  “Want me to fucking waste you in this car?” the man said, grabbing the tire iron again as Artie, in his hobbling way, fled. “Because I will waste you,” the man shouted after him, “you ree-tard, you bitch.”

  It was a rude apprenticeship but it had passed. Artie learned how to locate and extract parts so quickly that he had time to feed the birds at the dump and be back before Blaustein even expected him. The dump had its own smells, of course, but also its own shrieks—the seagulls that dropped straight down onto the mountains of garbage as if they were attached by string and pulled by an invisible hand. They were aggressive, swarming Artie as soon as he stepped out of the truck. Every now and then a wading bird hopped out from among the trees, pecking at the mist that lay like manna on the ground. The gulls set upon the outsider but Artie shooed them away, sometimes with a rock, and made them wait their turn. Finally, he shook out ends of challah and crusts of sliced rye, he laughed when the birds closed in around him.

  But Artie didn’t like going to the Crystal Decanter, though it was easy, a cinch, involving neither picking nor paying. Here it was a reversion to the days before self-service; staff outnumbered clientele. And though Artie prepared something to say before he went in, practicing p’s and f’s and making sure he never even had to attempt an article, he rarely had to say a word, for after the first time he went in, his ongoing mission was known to the employees, who treated the agent of Blaustein like the emissary of a king. Several times during the year Artie left with cases of good whiskey; before holidays bottles were wrapped individually, in gold boxes and bags of purple velvet tied with a gold rope. But the very fact that he didn’t have to talk announced how hard it would have been for him, there in that place where the bright light illuminated the grease stains on his clothes. Where every one of his imperfections was magnified in the mirrored walls, the cut-glass decanters and silver trays everywhere, the chandelier that hung in the middle of the room.

  What did the Crystal Decanter have to do with the garage anyway? Artie always left the place, nice as it was, with a confusion in his head. The parts from the scrapyard went into the cars. The bottles from the liquor store got locked up in the metal cabinet in the office. But that cabinet like all others was finite in space. The bottles went in but Artie never saw them going out, and this made his head hurt even more. Blaustein should have had two assistants, Artie muttered in the truck. He should have been two men.

  When Artie
wasn’t schlepping used car parts or fine spirits, he stood around the garage waiting. Blaustein spent his days talking to clients and insurance adjusters in his office, so Artie stayed on the garage floor, watching the mechanics. Inevitably one day one of them asked him to hand him a wrench. Soon what Artie had learned to take out, he believed he had learned to put in, though he had never tried it himself. Prying out parts had taken time to learn. Artie believed that putting parts back into cars, once he actually began doing it, would also take time to learn but could not possibly be as hazardous as the other way around.

  “Since when do you have the experience to be a mechanic?” Blaustein asked.

  Artie was standing in the office with the door closed. Blaustein was looking over his bifocals at a bill.

  “S-s-since I started working with you,” Artie said.

  “As what? A mechanic? Or a golem that I send to a junkyard?”

  Artie began to pace.

  “Sure, help the guys out if you want, I don’t care,” Blaustein said. “But you can’t expect me to pay you. I’m a small businessman and practically a senior citizen.”

  “We are s-s-same age.”

  Blaustein used a tanning light to control his psoriasis, an archipelago of pink ashy-beached islands in the orange sea of his forehead and neck. And so it was hard to tell when the tidal wave of angry blood rolled across his face. But Artie could tell, flinching even before Blaustein opened his mouth. “Goddamn you,” Blaustein said to his face. “Goddamn you to hell. I’ll fire you today.”

  “Hey, wait a minute.”

  “No, you wait a minute. If you think you’re going to put me in the poorhouse—I put up with all that dreck you bring back from the yard, but a man has his limits.”

  There was a rapping at the door and through the milky security glass Blaustein appeared to recognize his visitor. He opened the door and there stood a young man in a pale blue short-sleeve shirt and yellow tie. He wore khakis and brown dress shoes. He had pens in his shirt pocket and carried a clipboard. “Mr. McCloskey!” Blaustein exclaimed, putting his arm around the young man. “Mr. Blaustein,” McCloskey said, a little bashfully. Artie saw no way to escape and so he stood there, trembling with rage and trying to think of something to say if he needed to.

  Blaustein escorted McCloskey in and told Artie he could go.

  Artie sat at the desk outside Blaustein’s office. It was no one’s job to sit here, though everyone kept an eye on it, since this is where anyone who came into the garage would go first. Blaustein didn’t like Artie to sit here. Artie sat anyway, watching the two shadows on the other side of the door. Murmur of voices, louder laughter. The adjusters were treated like dignitaries here, and not just by Blaustein. The mechanics deferred to them, maintaining a respectful distance. They never said a word against them, though the adjusters did little more than circle the cars they were adjusting, scribbling on their clipboards. But no new cars had been brought in today.

  The door opened. McCloskey left with his clipboard and, cradled in the other arm, a paper bag.

  A few months later, Blaustein called Artie into his office. Blaustein put the bottle of bourbon that Artie himself had fetched on the desk between them. Artie remembered it because it wasn’t one of the brands of liquor he usually brought back. It had not come in a gold box. A black bird perched on the label. “Sure, I’ll take a little,” Blaustein said. “Happy Chanukah. You’ve earned it.”

  Artie opened the bottle and Blaustein took out two glasses from his desk drawer and poured. “L’chaim,” he said.

  “L’sholom,” Artie warily replied.

  They drank and Blaustein refilled their glasses. He leaned back in his chair and put his alligator shoes up on the desk.

  “Yep, we did all right,” Blaustein announced. “Two boys from the Twenty-seventh Street School, that’s what we were. And here we are. I’m sitting on this side of the desk and you’re sitting on the other, but we both ended up in the same place. And that’s all right. To each according to his talents, to each according to his—I think that was in the Torah. Go ahead, I’ll have another little drop.”

  Blaustein nodded at Artie to pour.

  “This is a great business, isn’t it?” Blaustein went on. “You know you really help me. You’re a wonderful golem. I’m kidding you! But I can spend more time with the adjusters now. I love that McCloskey. Scotch is what he likes to drink. Single-malt Scotch whiskey. Personally, I like bourbon. The sweetness of it. But compared to a goy, what does a Jew know about liquor? Single-malt Scotch. Well, he earned it. That last job, twelve hundred dollars is what it came in as, and I did it for under three. And people wonder why their insurance premiums are so high.”

  Artie cocked his head like a dog. “So that’s why.”

  “Hah? What are you implying?”

  “I’m not implying nothing. You said people wonder why th-th-their insurance premiums are so high.”

  “What did you say to me? I didn’t say that.”

  A confusion was in Artie’s head, it expressed itself on his face. He stared at the walls, which were covered with naked-lady calendars and Chamber of Commerce plaques and pictures of Blaustein with local bigwigs in front of the custom cars he procured for the St. Patrick’s Day parade.

  “Are you accusing me of being a ganef?” Blaustein asked. “Go ahead, yes or no? Is that what you think of me?”

  “I’m n-n-not accusing. Just understanding.”

  “Do you think I can pass along those costs to my customers?” Blaustein asked. “Sure, maybe once—then I’ll never see them again. Do you think I can make a profit that way? What do you think pays your salary?”

  Artie sat there feeling his brain move in the sea inside his head.

  “I don’t even know why I’m arguing with you,” Blaustein went on. “You don’t have a clue, you putz. You have no idea how the world works. How could you? Do you think all of my competitors don’t do the same thing? If I started sending you to the dealer,” he said with disgust, “how would I be able to compete? Is everyone bad and you’re the only one honest in the world? Is that really the way that little brain of yours works?”

  The brain, the sea—Artie couldn’t get anything out.

  “Frankly, I think you’re a little spooky,” Blaustein said. “Don’t they say golems have supernatural powers? How is it you know what accident is going to happen before it does? Hah? I don’t know if I should report you to the police or what.”

  But now they were stirring, the words, swimming up through the thick dark water and into the light. “Go ahead.”

  There’s Hope for Us All

  Angelo Veneto, painter of young gentlemen, was having his first one-man show. It had taken nearly five hundred years. “Only five hundred years,” Adger Boatwright liked to say. “I guess there’s hope for us all!”

  Adger Boatwright was the curator of Atlanta’s Harrington Collection and he tried out the joke on each of the Ladies of the Board. It was the Ladies’ Coca-Cola money that had paid for the Collection’s Twenty Renaissance Gems, which included Angelo’s portrait, circa 1515, of a smooth-cheeked young nobleman with a Mongol cast to his eyes and a dangerous gaze. The tail feathers of the canary are completely stuffed in this cat’s mouth, sealed by a mildly belligerent smile. He’s gripping a fat stick—say anything and he’ll use it on you, though really he’d rather not. The Ladies were famously particular but Portrait of a Gentleman in a Red Cape was an easy sell. “Just look at him,” Adger said to them, one at a time, in the darkness of the Collection’s screening room. Each lady stared at the larger-than-life-size projected image, but Adger never took his eyes off the lady. He could see the fear in her, he could see she couldn’t turn away. “Do you not find him beautiful?” he asked.

  His powers of persuasion were such that the director of the Harrington gave him full access to the Ladies. Curators and directors could be water and oil, but Adger’s interest in greasing the machinery that made the Collection run rivaled that of his boss, who comple
mented his curator’s efforts by spending weekends golfing with the Ladies’ husbands. Even if he could have afforded it, Adger would never have been admitted to the Club.

  He was a large doughy man whose parents had met on the assembly line of the fruitcake factory in Claxton. He made it through the trial of high school by spending weekends with “friends” in nearby Savannah, where he was really being educated in pederasty, neoclassical American objets, and the magic of the society portrait. By the time he obtained his degree in art history from Emory, his accent was a liquid Low Country and the fruitcake-assembling parents no longer figured into his family story or his life. (A somewhat ruined but functioning silk plantation on the coast did appear in the boyhood part of the story, and no one ever pointed out that by the end of the eighteenth century the hope in silk had declined; by the end of the nineteenth, the silk plantations had all burned to the ground; and by the middle of the twentieth, the remaining mulberry trees were cut for timber, the dispossessed blue-blood silkworms obliged to fend for themselves.) Pederasty too had fallen away, in favor of innuendo and art. The Ladies loved Adger most especially because he never brought it up. He had a way about him that made it easy for them to agree with a man that yes, the taunting young aristocrat in the painting was, mercy, beautiful. A decade later, when the idea for the one-man show was taking shape and Adger told the joke to the Ladies—there were three more of them by now—they all laughed, and one by one removed their checkbooks from their purses.