The Spark and the Drive

by Wayne Harrison

  “I can feel him cold,” Nick said. He was on his knees with his chin on the fender, as if in prayer to the tremendous achievement of the engine, and crouching over him I tried to absorb every sound he made. What I managed to understand was that he had been plagued by bad dreams the night Joey died. Something compelled him upstairs, and in the still light of dawn he leaned over the crib rail.

  “But babies in China never get it,” he said.

  “Never get what?”

  “Hardly ever, compared to here. It’s in a magazine I didn’t read until after. They sleep on their backs in China. They don’t die in their sleep. Here, they think they’ll choke on spit up, but no. They turn their heads. It’s instinct. I never put him on his back.” His voice made a tinny echo against the underside of the hood and the firewall.

  “Nick, my little sister slept on her stomach. That’s not why. Doctors don’t even know why.” I put my hand over his hand. There was no bone or knuckle, only the relaxed padding of muscle under skin as rough as cinder block. If he felt my touch there was no sign.

  “In Scientific American. Right next to the couch. Two weeks it sat there waiting to get read.” He pulled his hand from under mine and reached over now, as if the magazine were on the fender, and I was terrified.

  He sniffed, and then he shifted his legs, swinging around and off the fender, and his knees clicked. He stood on the pavement, his thick hair parting in the warm night breeze, and he lifted his face a little into it, looking up at the night sky behind me, sky that must’ve been as low and starless as the sky I could see.

  18.

  I mixed myself a Tanqueray and tonic, a strong one, and turned on Nickelodeon for April. Then I joined Mom outside on a gift of an August evening, seventy-eight degrees by the ladybug thermometer, with a dry gentle easterly breeze. Mom was stretched out on a strap vinyl lounge chair, soaking up the late sun in a faded Tigger shirt from one of our old Christmas vacations to Orlando.

  Allowing me to drink at home was in accordance with an unspoken agreement that I wouldn’t add to her stress with my problems, and she wouldn’t add to my insecurities by trying to be a father to me. She first let me mix her a drink when I was sixteen, and eventually I was tasting them to make sure the blend was right. A month before my high school graduation I asked if I could mix myself a weak one. By then she was trying to extract herself from Lou Costa, and her resistance was low. “Promise me you won’t drive,” she said, “and I mean promise.”

  Our relationship had since chilled to one centered on respect and the right to privacy, but sometimes on these gin-softened afternoons, we talked like old friends. April couldn’t work the safety knob on the kitchen door, and on the back deck we’d drink and smoke cigarettes, trading confessions, and sometimes in the morning, a little hung over, we’d be shy with each other after the things we’d said.

  “I go in the ladies’ room in the Sunday school building,” she’d told me. “They have AA out there, and you can hear right through the wall. ‘I’m so-and-so, and it’s been fifty-two days.’ They all sound older. Drinking for twenty-five years, thirty years. And I’m thinking how late I got started. In my thirties, my late thirties. But how many times have I quit? I mean, which reset is going to be the real one? I know I’m getting pretty sick of it.”

  Then I’d said something like, “Junior year, this guy in homeroom wanted to kick my ass. I had to wait by the flagpole until Mrs. Bannister pulled in, and then talk to her about watercolors because she was a painter. I had to pretend I painted just so we could walk into homeroom together.”

  On this mild August evening, she told me that Costa had come by in his cruiser, and she had hidden with April in the basement. “He went around back and looked in the windows, can you believe that?” she said. “I tried to make it a game with April, but I know she had to be terrified. I just wasn’t in the mood for him today. He’s like something—sticky. Did you ever lead a girl on? I’m kidding. You wouldn’t do that. I know I get what I deserve.”

  I was more embarrassed than I should have been to hear her belittle herself, but I waited to see that she was done before I changed the subject.

  “So Don wants to start having lunch with me.”

  “He told me that. Are you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe just phone calls. I don’t want him coming to Waterbury.”

  After a moment she sighed and looked uninterested, though there was a hint of effort, a tightening in her jaw. “I know he hopes you’ll forget what he put you through the last five years. He thinks he’s smart and the world’s stupid. Same old Don.”

  As I watched her drink, I remembered growing up, seeing Don many times with a drink in his hand—at publishing parties or the Milford Yacht Club, where we had dinner most Saturday nights—and seeing him walk away from a half-full glass, something that didn’t seem strange until I started drinking myself. I had never seen him drunk. I often wondered if Mom was only trying to be like him in the beginning, before the Tanqueray in half gallons.

  She was only forty-one and still pretty with her feathered hairstyle and turquoise earrings a shade lighter than her eyes. Her skin was shiny and red from the sun. Tonight she reminded me of when I was twelve and all the guys at school had a crush on her.

  “What if we had someone come over to help out with April?” I said. The idea had been taking shape ever since I saw Mary Ann watching the babies, and now with the gin and the coppery light, it all came together as a plan.

  “Honey, I can’t even pay you to watch her.”

  “Somebody I know might do it for free. She’s a friend.”

  “She?”

  I felt my cheeks warm. Kimberly had never wanted to come to my house, and I never pushed her to—I imagined her uneasy and guarded while Mom made small talk. Mom always did me the favor of never asking why I didn’t have girlfriends.

  “A friend of ours?”

  “Just mine,” I said, and then I should’ve kept talking. She was three or four drinks in and mistrustful. After watching me for some time she said, “Do people think I’m unfit to watch her? Is that it?”

  “Nobody thinks that, Mom. It’s just if you needed a break.”

  “Are they starting a charity?”

  “It would help her, too,” I said. “My friend.” I hadn’t planned to, but I told her Mary Ann had lost her baby and her husband was leaving her. And I didn’t say more but let the implication stand that friend was a euphemism for lover.

  “That poor woman,” Mom said. “Does she drink?”

  “Not really.”

  “That poor woman,” she said again. She looked at the glass in her hand and set it down. “God knows I could use some time.”

  I went in to check on April, who was dancing around she had to go potty so bad. She didn’t want to miss her show. “Go,” I said in a booming voice I hated to use on her.

  When I came back out, Mom was leaning forward watching hummingbirds needle into her hanging fuchsias. She looked at me for a few moments in such a way that I expected her to say she loved me, but instead she said, “Don’t be a drunk, Justin.”

  “You’re not a drunk,” I said, and it was hard not to look away, because I was starting to feel above her, my own mother. When she was still married to Don and happy, she would talk me down from my hormonal rages with patience and reason. Now I didn’t want her to think I was better than she was, and I sure as hell didn’t want to be better than she was. Yet I couldn’t say that Mary Ann and I were … I didn’t even have a word to use in my mind. Dating? Involved? It wasn’t that Mom cared what people might say about seeing me in the yard with an older woman. She was too busy working and watching April and trying to replace Don to ever care what anyone said. It wasn’t her, it was me. I wanted to feel proud, but I didn’t know how.

  “You get a few afternoons like these,” she said, “with the sky and the honeysuckle, and you think it’ll be this way every time. But mostly it’s just getting dizzy, and then sick and ashamed, and suddenly you ha
ve the whole morning to get through. That’s the worst part. You remember how much I used to love mornings?”

  I did remember. She’d run seven miles of beaches, Oyster River to Fort Trumbull and back, before I sat down to breakfast. Alternating weeks teaching aerobics at dawn. The Milford Marathon.

  Suddenly she went to the railing and threw the glass over the fence into the clumpy wetlands. “I don’t know if that’s it,” she said, “but I hope that’s it.”

  “It’s a good start,” I said.

  She smiled and went in the house, coming back out in a minute with the quarter-bottle of gin, some vodka, two wine coolers from the fridge, even the sherry she used for cooking. They all went over the fence. The airplane bottles from her purse I side-armed for distance, little spinning blurs, and when I brought out the big unopened bottle of Tanqueray from the pantry she said, “Hey, I can return that. Let’s not get crazy.”

  19.

  At the end of the week a new sign hung in the lobby. NO CUSTOMERS ALLOWED IN BAYS WITHOUT A TECHNICIAN. I went out to share the good news with Bobby, who was depressed over a dumb thing he’d done to keep his ex-girlfriend from taking him to court. Expecting a pay raise in Miami, he’d promised in writing to increase his child support by three hundred dollars, starting in October.

  I told him to go out and read the sign, but when he came back, holding a fresh coffee and smoking a fresh cigarette, I had to stop him from just walking right past me.

  “They can’t come out in bays anymore,” I said. “Fucking righteous.”

  He turned and leered at me. “So all of a sudden we’re technicians,” he said.

  * * *

  Mechanics from all over the state and into Massachusetts applied for Ray’s old job, and Nick interviewed the gearheads one at a time back in his office. Bobby and I were swamped. Over fender mats we held sandwiches in black fingers (I missed the mind-balancing spell of a good hot hand washing). What I saw of Mary Ann was only in glimpses when I dashed to the lobby for coffee. She’d be standing behind the counter cashing out a customer or explaining a line on a job application.

  The gearheads’ boycott of Out of the Hole began with conversations like this: “How many guys named Rod you ever heard of that wasn’t queer?”

  “I guess he went to car school.”

  “Nick can fuck himself if that’s who he’s going to hire.”

  And in the space of a week all of Nick’s disciples abandoned him.

  Rod Thibodeaux was an APEX tech school graduate with experience in computer engine controls. He was between Bobby and me in age and taller than the six-foot booms of the oscilloscopes, but he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and fifty, his long forearms flat and square as two-by-fours. He had a twangy drawl that was sort of southern hippie. “Jew-ly,” he said for July, “Mun-roe,” the Louisiana town he was from. Instead of “hi” he said “hey now.”

  The first job he pulled in was a late-model Pontiac Fiero, a low two-seater he had to unfold himself out of. I strolled over behind Bobby.

  “I dig them tats,” Rod said to him.

  Bobby turned his arm to show the full sleeve. The central character was a biker riding through a desert between cow skulls and rattlesnakes, and a cougar that seemed to be racing the chopper into the sun.

  I read over the work order for the Fiero. “It’s only an eighty-four. Why doesn’t he go back to the dealer?”

  “Over on mileage,” Rod said.

  Bobby looked at the complaint. “Intermittent stall,” he said. He turned his face down to the engine and flattened his lips.

  “Bobby,” I said, thinking he might spit on it. I must’ve sounded urgent, and he watched me for a second after I told him never mind. “Has to be some kind of computer fuckup, right?” he said to Rod.

  “That’d be my guess,” Rod said.

  “I mean, before computers, I never even heard of ‘intermittent.’”

  That was almost true. Occasionally we’d get a muscle car in with, say, a cracked distributor that only misfired when it rained or a wire that contacted a ground over bumps, but, in general, mechanical systems either worked or they didn’t.

  “Once in a while you get a guy,” Bobby said, speaking to the engine it seemed, “milking the warranty, trying to make shit up. ‘It’s not doing it now, but every couple days…’ Them cars I don’t even bother pulling in. ‘Come back when it’s happening.’ But now, with computers, who the hell knows?”

  If he hadn’t been staring hatefully at the engine, Bobby would have seen how indifferent Rod looked, his arms loosely folded, his attention half on Bobby and half on traffic at the intersection. It didn’t seem right that upon meeting senior employees, whose house he was in, Rod wouldn’t be a little more obliging and eager to make friends. I thought of how wildly earnest I had been in my first weeks here. My first months.

  Rod turned to me unexpectedly and said, “Give that mass air flow sensor a knock for me, would you?” I looked at the idling engine and adjusted the fender mat where the corner had folded over, anything to buy time, glancing sideways at Rod, who I knew was testing me. Bobby cut in, “I can give you a little ass air flow,” and Rod chuckled and pointed to where the sensor was on the intake hose. I gave it a hard rap with my knuckles, and the car stalled.

  “Bing-o was his name-o,” Rod said. “They short out right around fifty thousand. I just made ten bucks commish for five minutes’ work. That’s two a minute, if my math’s any good.”

  “He got you on commission already?” Bobby said.

  “I don’t take a job without it.” Rod started the car again and went up to the scope, where he looked at the emissions readings and started a cylinder balance.

  With my brows up, I looked at Bobby—see? computer jobs make money—and he frowned. “Swapping pieces of plastic.” He looked at what Rod was doing. “It’s the wave of the future, I guess,” he said. “Computers telling motors what to do.”

  “Engines,” Rod said. “Motors are electric.” He pushed the KV button and looked at one of the hanging leads. “I like Sun Scopes better,” he said. “These here, you can’t even interface.”

  There was a big uncertain moment before Bobby sighed, finally, and said, “Just came over to say hey.”

  “Right on,” Rod said. Bobby held out his pack of cigarettes, but Rod shook his head. “Long story,” he said. “I’m an alcoholic. Trying not to be, I mean.”

  “It’s a cigarette,” Bobby said.

  “I light that, next thing I’ll be on a packy run. No thanks, friend. You can keep it.”

  * * *

  Two days later I was ditching behind oscilloscopes to avoid him. Not only was he overbearing, but there were tendencies toward exaggeration and self-promotion that went against my idea of mechanics or men, but his skill under the hood gave me an opportunity. When I had asked Mary Ann if she could babysit April, I told her I could help cover the counter, since Rod was turning over jobs at least twice as fast as Ray, and there were more breaks for me. I found myself speaking rapidly, nervously, and when I was finished she seemed not to have heard, looking up from a stack of checks and smiling as you do when you’re pretending to understand a foreigner.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I have to think about it.”

  But the next morning she called me at home and said she would love to watch April. I fell into a kitchen chair and started to laugh, and then she asked what I was doing today, what my plans were, if we could meet somewhere in the country.

  “Great,” I said. “It’s supposed to be hot.”

  “Then maybe we could swim.”

  * * *

  There were two popular lakes in Levi, with beaches and rope swings and fire pits, that I’d explored in the early spring when kids from school weren’t around. Most of my swimming I did from a blow-up mattress on a mile float down the Pomperaug. Occasionally there were trout fishermen running spoons through the nervous water on the upper stretch, but farther down, between wooded banks that bordered soybean and
alfalfa fields, I was certain enough of my privacy to jump naked into the pools. I could live in my fantasies in that slow-winding isolation, the still water amplifying sound so that even my foot splashes would surprise me. In places where the river got wide it smelled like a sweating body and drying mud and even like the little rainbow trout they stocked every spring. The deeper water had its own cool mineral smell, and I’d pass through bands of honeysuckle that sent me into spinning dreams of love and sex.

  At the end of the float was a bedrock shelf hanging ten feet over the water. Two years ago, the summer before junior year, I spent a solid month under the shelf dredging leaves and muck and pea gravel, wrestling pillow-sized rocks off the bottom for a dam I made on the downstream rim. When I needed more rocks to fill in the spaces I took them from one of the mossy stone walls you find in the hardwood forests of northern Connecticut—two or three feet high, perhaps dating back to little Pilgrim neighborhoods. When my work was done I had a chest-deep pool, into which I could jump from the ledge and lightly tap the bottom with my heels.

  I hadn’t been there in more than a year, and that morning the path from Skunk Hollow Road was wider than I’d remembered. Knobby tire tracks had ripped through the carpet of plant life to the rocky dirt, and at the end of it the shelf was littered with hook wrappers, Styrofoam worm cups, webs of monofilament, cigarette boxes, candy wrappers, beer cans and tins of Copenhagen snuff, a little fire pit full of all matter of half-burned crap. I didn’t have a trash bag with me, so I ran armloads into the woods and made a heap behind a rotting stump. It took more than an hour to get it like I wanted, and then I had to haul ass to the Levi Shopping Plaza, where Mary Ann was parked in front of Harrison’s Hardware, having a cigarette in the shade of an ornamental tree.