A Set Of Wheels

by Robert Thurston

  I don’t get it.

  Business and emotion. Don’t mix. Old adage. Works, too. One of my girls gets emotional over one of the johns, that’s it. She might as well be put out to pasture if you can’t cure her. But, well, we can’t control our emotions, right? I can cope with it, it’s my job. I teach emotion, really, is what I do. The girls learn about emotion, they can control them, it becomes less of a problem. Good job, what the hell. And I got to get back to it. Hostess-time for me, I’ll have to get into my trick-suit.

  Trick-suit.

  My joke.

  Oh.

  Never was much good at humor.

  As she gets dressed, and I get my last glimpse of the mysterious scar, she hums to herself. She puts on her clothes as if she is no longer aware that I’m there. I feel like a voyeur. After she’s dressed, she sits on the edge of the bed, puts a hand on my thigh, almost in the exact same place she’d put it back at the meeting, except it’s a different thigh.

  Look, she says, you need anything, just ask. What I can do, I will. Promise.

  Sure.

  Just stay out of trouble. For real trouble, I can’t help, won’t help. Right?

  Well, okay. What kind of trouble do you mean?

  Nothing special. Just trouble.

  She stands up, makes a phantom gesture of straightening her levi’s, stuffs more of her sweater into the beltline. Wouldn’t have thought anything more’d fit there.

  Trouble, she says. Like the kind your friend Vicki can get you all into, if you guys don’t rein her in. That was a bum show she put on down there. God, Anton don’t usually show such bad judgement. Means he’s got the hots for your Vicki. Usually he keeps his hands off the girls. When he don’t, it means trouble. Rein her in, right? Keep her out of sight, is the best thing.

  I’ll do what I can, but Vicki isn’t exactly the easiest—

  Yeah. I know, I know. She might as well have a neon sign saying danger mounted on her forehead. Hey, keep smiling, right?

  If I could smile as nice as you, I would do just that.

  She gives me the smile I’m looking for, something Cora never did.

  You’re sweet, too sweet. I better keep away from you. I probably won’t, but I should. See you later.

  She walks across the room with a little extra bounce, a little extra briskness. I like her. Problem is, I don’t like her liking me.

  — 5 —

  Checked out the garage, Link says when I return to our room. Victor is sulking in front of the TV, watching a Daffy Duck cartoon with the sound turned off.

  What you find out? I say.

  Your car’s not in as bad shape’s we thought. Engine survived the abuse admirably, just a bunch of little things need doing. Most of the work’s hammering out the hood, back into something like its normal shape. We might blast outta here sooner’n we think.

  I get my teeth fixed first, Victor says without looking away from the cartoon. Without his teeth, he sounds a bit like Daffy Duck.

  You and your damn teeth, Link says amiably. Don’t sweat it. Dentist’ll be here tomorrow, car won’t be near fixed by then. Mechanics’ve already quit for the day.

  Find out anything else? I say.

  In a way, Link says. I know where the arsenal is. It’s locked pretty good but, we need it, we can probably find a way into it. How about you? Maria tell you anything?

  Yeah. She said to keep Vicki out of sight. Anton’s lusting after our little beauty, she said.

  ’Twas beauty killed the beast, Victor says.

  That’s right, says Link, but which one are you?

  Screw off.

  Link laughs. Which one am I? he says. Laughing, his mouth twists in a different slope from the angle of his head.

  I mope around the room a while. Victor’s program changes from cartoon to sitcom. Hard to tell the difference. I guess I make Link nervous. He says:

  Phone out in the hall.

  I saw it, I say.

  It works good. Better than any illegal tie-in I’ve seen yet. Anton’s work. Dial one-one-one then any number you want. Why don’t you go play with it a while?

  I don’t know, Link, I—

  Get outta here, all right?

  I get out. The phone’s an old Princess model. Pink. I stare at it for a long time, then fish out the number Emil gave me. If I get the recorded lady this time, I’ll—well, I better not get her this time. I dial the one-one-one, then Emil’s number, and listen to a lot of purposeful but indecipherable static. Then there’s a loud click, a buzz, and the ringing at the other end starts. It rings several times, and I keep hearing the recorded lady’s voice in my head. But when the ringing clicks off and someone answers, I know it’s got to be Emil or else the recorded lady’s caught a bad cold.

  It’s your nickel, Emil says.

  For a moment I’m too confused to talk. What’s a nickel got to do with anything?

  Anybody there? Emil says.

  Yeah, I say. Yeah. Emil, it’s me.

  You? Who’s you?

  Me, Lee. Lee Kest—

  I know which Lee. Ain’t but one guy named Lee ever blighted my life. How are you, Lee?

  Good. Fine. Well, maybe not so—

  You out west?

  Sure. It’s wonderful out here. Beautiful.

  Like the colors in the mountains?

  Well, I haven’t exactly gotten that far yet. Only a little farther and—

  You ain’t west yet then. If you’re in the flatlands, you ain’t west.

  No, I guess not. Encountered some obstacles, you might say.

  You mean you screwed up as usual?

  Not exactly that.

  But almost. I don’t want to hear about it. You’re not hurt or anything, are you?

  No, I’m okay.

  Well, that’s something. With you, I always worry you’re going to split your head open or something. Glad you’re okay.

  You okay, Emil?

  I hang on, you know that. You didn’t call to check out my health.

  Not exactly.

  Exactly why?

  Is Cora around? I’d like to talk to—

  No, she hasn’t been around here since her accident.

  My heart does stag leaps across my chest, and my stomach folds up. I’m afraid to ask Emil what he means.

  Accident? I say.

  Don’t fret, Lee. She’s all right. Guy she was riding with got back from jail and told her he was splitting with her and she stole his Duster. Ran it at top speed for miles, then slowed it down—or at least the report I got says she slowed it down first—and she aimed it at an abutment. Ran into the abutment once, the car was still running. She put it into reverse, ran into it again. Still running, she did it again, finally wrecked it. She’s got some determination, that girl.

  Why’d she wreck it? Why didn’t she just keep it?

  Ah, they wouldn’ta let her keep it. Somebody woulda tracked her down, returned the guy his car. Rules of the road and all that, you know. Anyway, you know as well as I do she’s got a penchant for wrecking whatever car she gets her hand on.

  She didn’t wreck mine.

  She never had to steal it from you. I detect a lonelyhearts sound in your voice. You miss her, am I right?

  Well, um, yeah, right.

  Come back here then. You don’t need to—

  No, I can’t do that.

  Suit yourself. Gee-odd in heaven, I’ll never understand young people.

  Maybe that’s cause you were never young, Emil.

  No, no, I was young all right. I remember it perfectly. Look, I don’t understand myself then. But at least I didn’t total cars on purpose or wander off on a fruitless odyssey westward.

  I ask Emil how things are going generally, and he says lousy and goes into his familiar speech about people abandoning the road and returning to the cities and all that crap. Finally we have a long silence and then he says:

  Glad to hear from you, Lee.

  I tried to call before, got this recorded lady all the time.
>
  Yes, know about that. Something went wrong with the machine. Chuck was by early today. He fixed it.

  How is Chuck?

  He kept looking transparent to me. I’m sure he’s a ghost. He says he’s heading west, too. Any day now. It’s the new fad. I’ve asked around about Chuck. Other people see him once in a while. Usually he gets people out of jams. When their cars are stuck or run down or when there’s fuzz around. You see him waving by the roadside and you know there’s danger ahead, that’s what they say.

  Maybe it’s what they used to call an alternative life-style, Emil.

  Maybe so. Death is certainly an alternative life-style all right.

  I’ll call you again, now I know your phone’s working.

  Sure, do that.

  He says this like he doesn’t expect me to call. I say goodbye but he just hangs up.

  I let time pass. It passes, and I dial one-one-one, then my father’s number.

  Noise. Click. Buzz. Rings. Another click. His voice:

  Hello.

  Hi Dad. It’s Lee. How you been?

  A long silence. But I can hear him breathing. He always did hold the mouthpiece awfully close to his mouth.

  Have you abandoned me, Lee? he finally says.

  What are you talking about, Dad? I’m just out west and I wanted to say hello and let you know—

  Son o’ mine. We thought you’d disappeared, faded into the gloom of—

  We? Somebody there with you now?

  A long pause. Heavier breathing.

  Dad? You there?

  No, I died. I died when you went out the front door. Right now i have decayed considerably and someone out in the hallway will soon detect the odor and call the—

  Stop it please! I’ m sorry I took off, I really am. I just had to get out, get away. There wasn’t any—

  Test your wings. Leave the nest. We thought you were testing your wings, that’s what I told her.

  Who are you talking about?

  Another long pause, breathing.

  Your mommy, of course, he finally says. She called me couple, three weeks ago, told me you’d gone outta your head, were now playing pirate or—

  Are you all right?

  Except for being dead, fine. How are you?

  Oh good, real good. It’s nice out here in the west, Dad. Nice. There’re mountains and pretty colors and—

  You’re lying.

  No, Dad, I—

  Let me give you piece of advice.

  I know all about doughnuts, Dad.

  What? What you mean?

  Nothing. Go on, pop.

  That’s another of the roles I play with him. Charlie Chan’s number-one son.

  I want to tell you about. About something. I forgot my lines, never used, forget my lines. Hundreds of plays, never dropped a line, missed an entrance. More’n I can say for some others. Remember one time I was doing repertory out in, I don’t know where, the boondocks somewhere. Buffalo, Stockbridge, Cincinnati, somewhere. Shakespearian troupe, real toney, except all the productions were stinkers. Nobody had an ounce of invention. An ounce of invention’s worth a pound of manure.

  That’s good advice, pop. Say, I’ve really got to get going, got a real line on a clue to—

  I am not through, son. Your interruptions are. Are distracting. And, far as your Keye Luke imitation goes, you’ve lost the rhythm. Catch one of the movies again. It’s the way he inflects the verbs, you used to have it, now you don’t.

  Gosh, sorry, pop.

  Now, about the. About. About, yes, the Shakespearian troupe. We were doing, I don’t know, some of the plays. Hamlet, yes, and. And. And Twelfth Night. There was this fellow. Fellow thespian. Always hated that word. He always used it, this actor I’m going to tell. You about. I always use thespian when I’m referring to those who cannot act. Like this actor I’m.

  Silence, breathing.

  Pop, you there?

  Just my corpse. I have left.

  You were telling me about—

  I know what I was telling you about. Just lost the picture for a minute. When you get old, memory’s like an old TV with tuner problems.

  Sure, pop.

  Condescending little bastard.

  I’ve really got to be—

  This actor. Let’s call him John Barrymore, for that apparently is who he thought he was. Whom he thought he was. Who, whom. Anyway, he thought he was John Barrymore. He used to enunciate with revolting nasality in I guess the way Barrymore used to sound to him. Offstage he drank and made epigrammatic little jokes that he pretended made sense. He got the best roles, the bugger, best roles. Everybody kissed his ass. Each bad review he got, and he got many bad reviews, everybody had to hold his hand and come up with tears to match his. Everybody except me. I kept my distance, except on stage. I was a professional.

  For a minute I’m afraid he’s going to go into his you-don’t-knowwhat-it-means-to-be-a-professional speech, but fortunately he doesn’t.

  This Barrymore used to upstage me, step on my lines, forget his own and make it look like I was the one at fault, invent his own variations on the lines. Vary Shakespeare’s words, mind you. He was. Was a stupid sonofabitch, he was. Well, about this time we were doing, as I said, Hamlet and Twelfth Night. You can always tell when a Shakespearian troupe’s in trouble. That’s when they resort to the surefire items. Hamlet and Twelfth Night. Three-quarters of your audience can’t tell the difference if they’re done badly or well. So—Hamlet was fine, okay. Barrymore was, naturally, essaying the title role, doing To Be or Not To Be as if it were a grade school question on logical positivism. I was doubling Polonius and Osric, which was all right with me—not so many encounters with our star attraction. He always managed to mess up the method in his madness scene, but I always managed, with a touch of hamminess to counter his, make it look to the audience like the man was really mad. And Osric, always liked Osric—doesn’t matter what the Hamlet does, Osric is a nice turn, a lark to play. But Twelfth Night,that was another. Story.

  Pause. I get scared because I can’t hear the breathing this time.

  Twelfth Night, pop.

  His voice comes back. He must’ve looked away from the phone for a moment.

  —fth Night. I played the clown. Feste. Sang my own compositions. Good songs, too. Should have. Kept them. Lost now. Barrymore was playing, naturally, Sir Toby Belch. A mistake. Didn’t look the part one whit. Thin, had to be padded with so much stuffing he always had to keep his hands somewhere on his costume, plugging up leaks. And his face. An Aguecheek face maybe, just the slightest maybe. But not Belch. Too villainous for Belch by a mile. Tiny beady eyes that looked at you from eye sockets that seemed to be circled in skin-folds. He always brushed his hair straight back, guess to make his forehead look higher, more intelligent. Just served to make him look like some hick who liked his hair brushed straight back. Later, when he went into the movies, they styled his hair, made it wavy. I knew the production was going to be shoddy, and resolved, as any actor worth his salt must, to make the best of my own opportunities. Well, came the official first night, official because we’d given some wretched previews in which everything had gone wrong. First night of Twelfth Night. First. Night. Of.

  Pause. A sound like small explosions coming through the static. Dad is chuckling to himself.

  Well, he resumes, the kind of arousal that can come to even a weak company when there are critics in the audience seemed to stir up our troupe that night. I was even enjoying my scenes with Barrymore-Belch. Oh, Maria missed one of her entrances by a few seconds, the actress playing Maria.

  He pronounces the name Ma-rye-a, not Ma-ree-a, as in our lovely one-eyed madam. Nevertheless, suddenly my Maria is onstage with my Dad in the odd scene that’s playing in my head.

  Maria, Dad says. Charming woman. Left me alone onstage and I salvaged that moment by improvising a song on the spot. Compietely in character. I went off from that scene feeling genuinely triumphant. Our brilliant Sir Toby, waiting in the wings, said some
thing like nice little bit but take care you don’t screw us up. His remark had exactly the effect he wanted from it—it made me edgy. Had trouble playing the next scene with him. Didn’t matter to him, he was getting the big laughs. I’d put the proper emphasis on a line, do a perfect Feste-gesture and quick little move on my feet, lifting a step or two from Aguecheek’s galliard, and there’d be no response from the audience, zero. But they loved Sir Toby, every little overplayed inch of him. Well, no matter, I thought. We’re getting a sense of ensemble in the production tonight, and that’s what’s important.

  Well, we came to the Sir Topas scene. I was beginning to get that anticipation I always got near the end of a performance, especially an opening night. There was just this one difficult scene to play, then a couple of easy turns in the last act, and that’d be it for the night. There’s a turning point in every performance when, unless all hell is breaking loose, you lose your fright, that fear which pushes you around the stage, and can relax into a characterization that you’ve been, after all, building for so long. I had reached that point just before the Sir Topas scene. It was perhaps the trickiest scene for me to play, since the master’s left little indication of the shift in Feste’s character at that point. Why does he turn so dam mean, with Malvolio at his lowest ebb? Not like him. A puzzle, but I’d found some business I could use to create a relationship with the Malvolio actor and in rehearsals we had worked well together, so the scene did not stir any great apprehension in me, and Barrymore-Belch could not make much use of his few lines during the sequence, so all was well. I thought. But all that’s well does not always end well.

  I’m getting shooting pains all over my arms from holding the pink receiver up for so long. I don’t know what he’s talking about. Sir Topas? Who’s Sir Topas? Was he just mixed up and drunk and calling this Sir Toby Sir Topas? I don’t know the damn play. Shakespeare, shit. I only like Richard III. I’ll be turned to stone by the time this call is over.

  In rehearsal and previews, Dad goes on, the actress playing Maria and I and Malvolio positioned ourselves stage-left while a scene that involved Barrymore-Belch was proceeding. He would make his usual overplayed angry exit stage-right, then work himself and his padding through the narrow backstage area to us, where he would wait to make his entrance just after ours. Usually he reached the stage-left point just as Maria and I made our entrance. Sometimes he was a second or so late and, eyeing the wings, I’d play my cue speech in a bit slower rhythm until I saw that he was in place. This time, as we waited, somewhere in the back of my mind I noted that, after the angry exit, I didn’t hear the usual rustling and bumping noises from the backstage area. I figured that he’d finally learned to manipulate himself and his padding through the narrow passageway. I was always an optimist, remember.