The Spark and the Drive

by Wayne Harrison

  I took a Mercury for a test drive to Kmart, where they copied the key while I waited. This was the nerve-wracking part, playing the odds that Bobby wouldn’t go down to check the key while I was gone. The odds were well in my favor—we weren’t supposed to take the car until Wednesday night—but I started getting diarrhea cramps right in the store. Bobby was where I’d left him when I got back, on a stool at the bench nearest the radio, and I went downstairs, copied the address, and stuffed everything back into the wall.

  I couldn’t focus that day. I needed more caffeine, but I didn’t want to go out to the lobby and face Mary Ann, who had come in so that Nick and Rod could meet with a salesman about a new Sun Scope that interfaced with onboard computers.

  I did a lot of staring from a distance, mostly at Bobby. He would take out tools and lay them on a fender mat, light a cigarette, and then go back to his tool drawer and say things like, “Where’d you go, you little cocksucker” for a minute or two, and then find that he’d already set the thing he wanted on the fender mat. Once, he dug his grimy fingers in his mouth, retrieved a wad of Bit-O-Honey and said to it, “You sure are a chewy motherfucker.” He was always moving except when he was looking at the scope, and then it seemed to take a long time to interpret what he was seeing.

  My head was killing me that morning. I couldn’t quit yawning. I thought maybe I could take about a quarter of whatever Bobby was taking and see what it did.

  I never would’ve asked, but I figured the shop was going to close down soon because Nick would be in jail. I couldn’t say for sure if I’d ever see Bobby again. Fuck it, I went up to him and said, “You got anything I can stay awake with?”

  “Get the fuck out of here.”

  “No, really, Bobby. Just give me one. I’ll pay you.”

  He stepped closer and slapped me. “How’s that?” He did it again, and I fell back against the air filter shelving, out of his reach. “There’s your fucking wake-up,” he said. “Quit being a punk.”

  “Asshole,” I said.

  “All right. I’m an asshole then.”

  I ended up running across the street for some NoDoz and a large Brazilian Bold from 7-Eleven.

  I took a Firebird out to the address Pam had written down. By chance the three hundreds were only a few blocks from the west entrance to Fulton Park. Chase was a big double-lined street, residential on one side, commercial on the other—Dunkin’ Donuts, a repair shop, a locksmith. The houses on the west side were all little capes with low stone walls and tiny elevated yards. Their cracked driveways carved into the rises of yellow lawns, and the single-car garages were pushed in like drawers under the front windows. I found the house, and there was the hunter green LX Mustang parked in front of it. My throat closed.

  I only meant to scope the car, but all at once it became clear that now was the time if I was going to steal it.

  My plan had been to come at night and then stash it in a parking lot, hoping no one found it before I came back the next morning, when Nick and Mary Ann were working. But wasn’t that too risky? What if the car was found? What if Mary Ann stayed home tomorrow?

  I swung into the lot of a Food Mart and parked out of sight of the register. It had to happen now. I heard my breathing, and it had to happen now. Go. Take the keys. Leave the Firebird here and come back across the park for it. Three o’clock. Plenty of time.

  I left the car and then I left my body. This is the way it happens. I saw how people committed the highest and lowest acts of humanity—the most virtuous and wicked and vile and noble acts—by imagining the extreme, by staring at it in your mind and finally dragging it out of the abstract. Then it is simply a matter of obeying, of keeping it going. I had never been this far inside a moment—even making love to Mary Ann hadn’t put me in this far.

  Trombones in my ears. I had a hundred minds. My feet had minds, my legs, arms, eyes. React. Keep it going. I saw myself from above.

  Last night in the basement I’d made a fire and with the stove door half opened, so I could exhale my cigarettes inside, I came to understand, the way you understand the truth of everything staring into fire, that Mary Ann would spend the last of herself on Nick, not knowing that he wasn’t even able to accept, much less return, her love. She would try too hard with him and afterward be too broken. She’d be gone beyond my ability to help her. I saw her eyes charred and dim with Mom’s evening stare, not knowing how to make herself happy again. With that image, all other thoughts fell away.

  I would give Mary Ann a different afterward. When Nick was in custody, I’d tell her that he’d wanted me to lie and say he was working late at the shop if she’d asked. I assumed he’d been racing the Corvette, Mary Ann, but my God. This is what he’d really been up to. The rechecks had been costing him too much business, and even the racing money wasn’t enough … My God.

  And who knows? Maybe he’d believe he’d really done it. Maybe it would finally be the escape I was certain he’d been longing for.

  To not be seen from the house, I went south to the deli and crossed the street there. A paper Frankenstein, three weeks early for Halloween, hung on the front door of the house. I blocked out the idea that these were good people who decorated, who brought some festivity to the dismal neighborhood. I wasn’t hurting them, not really. If it wasn’t me now, the real repo guy would come soon. This was just speeding up the inevitable. The blinds were down on the windows directly over the garage, and the Mustang was parked there a few feet from the cinder-block retaining wall.

  I got in the car but didn’t want to close the door in case it didn’t start and someone came out and I had to run. But it was only a year old, and of course it started on the first crank. The seat was so far back I was barely on it as I dropped the floor shift into reverse. I backed up and the open door scraped along the retaining wall, bending back with a sickening creak, and in the seconds it took to realize the door would come off if I didn’t pull forward, I saw him come out of the house, and I pulled my cap over my eyes, jumped it forward until I could pull the door closed, but it wouldn’t close all the way—something was bent—and I slammed it into reverse again and swung around in the street as the big, bearded man came down the steps, his arms swinging wildly. I held down the horn, which jolted him, and he fell on his ass on the sidewalk, and in the road an oncoming car swerved around me, blaring its own horn. I saw the big man in my rearview mirror cutting over the grass and then finally stopping at the end of his little yard and watching bent over with his hands on his hips, heaving for air.

  I turned down different streets in case I was being watched or followed. I needed to get off the road before I passed a cop, who would be able to see that I was only holding the door closed with my hand.

  * * *

  I eased off Cooke into Nick’s driveway, where I pulled right up to the garage and shut it off. One second became another second, and then I was out and running full speed over the cement to the side door. I found the key under the brick, opened the door, ran around shoving toolboxes against the walls, heaving milk crates and chains and a folding chair out of the way, then looped around back to the garage door, twisted the handle to unlock it. The door was heavy with disuse, the rollers squealing and scraping until I had it as high as my chin, which was plenty, and I ran under, got in the car, fired it up, and pulled it in. I yanked the door back down, and then I was able to breathe.

  I found a rag and started wiping down everything I had touched. I was amazed by how fierce and streamlined my thoughts were, how acute my senses. As I was coming around to shut off the light, I saw two of Nick’s wrenches covered in black fingerprints, and the idea came to me fully mature, as if someone else had spoken it. With electric tape I lifted prints off a wrench and stuck them on the door handle, around the steering wheel and shifter. I couldn’t tell if they had transferred, but why wouldn’t they? And what else would the cops need? How could Nick talk his way out of it now? And how could Mary Ann believe any scenario other than the obvious one?

  From
Nick’s I ran across the park and back to the Firebird. I unplugged the mass air flow sensor to set a trouble code, and I was back at the shop less than an hour after I’d left. Rod came up to me as soon as I stepped into the bays.

  “What’d you do, go take a nap?”

  “It kept cutting out,” I said. “I had to let it cool off.”

  “Any codes?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Mass air flow,” he said. “Tell him he needs a tune-up on top, and you got yourself a pretty righteous ticket.”

  35.

  “There’s a stolen Mustang, license number 7-1-5-G-L-E, at 161 Cooke. Look in the garage.” In the parking lot of Burger King, I said it in a deep voice with a rural drawl, and then like a New Yorker, and then like a Brit. Burning in my front pocket was the number for the Waterbury police department, and since I didn’t know if they traced incoming calls (my research had yielded only that grand theft auto landed you one to five in real jail time) I planned to make the call from the pay phone on the sidewalk when I finished eating.

  I forced down one French fry at a time and was still partially outside my body, catching myself staring curiously at what my fingers were doing.

  Bobby would hate me; that was a fact I needed to live with. I’d say I must’ve mentioned it all to Nick, even where the key was. Bobby would either think I was a jackass or he’d think I was much worse. But what was he going to do? He couldn’t save Nick without incriminating himself. I tried not to care as my intestines kinked and cramped, and then I was across the lot and inside the restaurant men’s room, landing on the seat just in time.

  I was in there for fifteen minutes. I felt weak, the way even mild sickness can seem like a punishment, can make you wonder what kind of person you are at heart. What you deserve and don’t deserve, the karma you create. I remembered the look of puzzlement when Nick had a car come back, as if he didn’t recognize where he was. That was the expression I saw when they led him in handcuffs down an echoing hallway, that was his face—not even suspecting me, not bearing hatred for anyone except himself—as he sat on his bunk locked away somewhere. When he got out and Mary Ann was gone and his shop was gone, he’d be the disheveled, unshaven bum on the sidewalk, sitting in the park, standing at the rail of the bridge, old and mute at forty, nothing running through his mind but the constant-loop movie of what went wrong.

  I couldn’t do it. He deserved whatever he deserved, but it wasn’t this.

  Tomorrow morning early, before work, I’d come to the house and tell him. I’d say I was jealous of him and Rod, which was half true, and leave Mary Ann out of it. We’d get rid of the car somewhere. Wipe it down. I’d make sure to wipe it all down.

  But Christ, I couldn’t wait. What if tonight was the night Mary Ann let him go in the garage again? Why wouldn’t he call the cops, who would then find his prints on the wheel and shifter and wonder why he was lying about not having driven the car?

  It was full dark when I left Burger King. Daylight savings time was next weekend, after which night would come on before five. I looked at the dim blue clock numbers on the radio. They’d be done with dinner. Maybe I could signal to Nick in the window, and Mary Ann would never have to know.

  I parked in the street so they wouldn’t see my headlights. The light was off in the kitchen and I went around to the window I’d looked in before, its buttery light casting a long rectangle on the driveway. Nick was alone on the futon, and I glanced back to make sure the Nova was there beside his car. It was. She was somewhere in the house.

  I could see Nick pretty well from my angle. In the soft light of the overhead fixture his face was sunken and loose as he leaned over a legal pad on the coffee table, working something out with a pencil. I saw a flash of the picture when he held it up, some kind of a Venn diagram it looked like. Suddenly and in one deft motion he leaned forward and pushed the legal pad under the couch. He must’ve heard something I couldn’t, with the street sounds and, farther off, the highway sounds. And then he stood up and looked directly at me. I ducked down. I’d lost my focus watching him and wasn’t ready to speak. I closed my eyes for a few moments, and then whispered what I was going to say.

  The familiar blue flickering appeared on the side of the garage, and I could hear TV voices. I don’t know how long I waited, but my toes were starting to tingle. I straightened, and at the exact second I looked in the window, Mary Ann appeared in the hallway parallel to the futon.

  Her hair was wet and combed straight back, and she wore only a towel wrapped around it, which she held with her hands crossed over her chest. She stopped at the threshold, looked at Nick, at the TV, at Nick again. He hadn’t seen her yet, and her look, as she watched him, seemed uneasy, brooding. She blinked slowly, her eyes made up with liner and shadow, and then she swallowed and drew a long breath. “Here I am,” she said, the exact words she’d said to me from my bed, and she smiled what seemed a brave smile. When Nick turned to her she let go of the towel and stepped toward him.

  And, oh, her body, pink from the heat of the shower. The twin moles, the deep navel, the curveless, girlish hips and thighs. Around her neck she wore a silver chain from which a small blue stone, a sapphire, hung over the valley between her breasts, where I’d never seen jewelry before, and she had trimmed her pubic hair to almost nothing for him, a stripe down the center. The glass between us and the distance made her seem like a version of herself, a lookalike whom I could touch no more than I could a woman in a photograph.

  Nick had fallen back against the futon, and she took the remote control from his thigh and turned off the TV. She tossed the remote to the side and straddled his legs as she reached down—it all happened in one continuous motion—to hold his face on either side with her open hands, forcing him to look into her eyes as she had never had to force me, and kissing him. His arms thrown back, one hand compressed the corner of the futon mattress as if it were only a towel, but she was determined and he went limp in the kiss, letting go of the mattress corner, which sprang back to shape, and finally lifting his hand to her waist.

  I watched without a specific emotion but with all emotions, frozen and pulsing, consumed. She was holding his face and kissing him from one angle and then another; his big rough hand on her waist was softening, patting, caressing. His legs unbent and slid forward. She drew back and began to speak words I couldn’t hear but that I knew were about the love I’d tried to make myself believe no longer existed, never existed.

  Then he turned his head and started pushing her away, lightly at first, but his eyes became wide, the way they do when you sense danger in the dark and are trying to see it. She brought her face to his ear and spoke to him, and I saw her hand reach down between her legs, between his, and Nick tried to stand. He pushed against the back of the futon, which tipped a few inches into the wall, and Mary Ann yelled, “No!” and wrapped her arms around his neck.

  Nick stood despite her weight and was only handicapped from a normal stride by her legs holding around his waist and her feet pushing into the backs of his thighs. He took a few steps toward me before he swung around and folded forward over the futon, holding himself by the back frame. But she wouldn’t let go. Her face was buried in his collarbone. With one hand he pried her arms off, and as she was falling she tore out his hair and he jumped back.

  He stumbled, rubbing his head, and at the bookshelf he grabbed a little car, a metal model of the 1905 Olds Runabout, the first American production car, and he threw it at the framed picture of Cape Blanco Lighthouse, where they had been married. The little car splintered the glass, but somehow the picture didn’t fall.

  “Look at me,” Mary Ann was saying. She got off the futon staring at him, and then stepping toward him as in a crime drama. Please just hand me the gun.

  “You don’t get to hate me, Nick. Look at me. What did I do wrong?”

  Before she could reach him, Nick grabbed a ceramic bowl from the shelf and hurled it at the opposite wall. And she kept coming. He pulled the shelf over so that it
fell between them, so that it crashed and exploded and shook the house—I felt it with my face against the siding.

  She backed away, shaking her head. “What did I do?” She collapsed on the futon. Nick left the room. “What did I do?” Mary Ann called, rocking side to side, knees balled up to her chest. Had he hit her? Had I somehow missed that?

  The kitchen door pulled open ten yards away and I fell back into a rhododendron bush. Nick came out, trying to light a cigarette with matches. He ripped off three or four and cupped the small torch, walking the whole time toward his car. I watched him from my cover. I was a coward, nothing compelled me from the heart. He dropped into the driver’s seat, and the outline of his dark head nodded and shook. Then the high whirr of the starter on a strong battery, the rumble from the tailpipes, and I started ripping out the sausage leaves of the rhododendron and kicking at the gravel. I came out as he was backing up. In the street he didn’t pull away—he’d seen my car and wasn’t moving. I ran down the driveway.

  When I was in his passenger seat he rolled the car forward and banged into the curb. He slapped the shifter back and forth in neutral. All he could say was, “What? What?” He rolled down his window and threw out the cigarette. “Sometimes … you’re here. I don’t know if I’m awake sometimes.”

  “You’re awake. Trust me.”

  He looked back at the house, then at the park, where there was no sound, as if he were on some drug that heightened or distorted his senses. He was holding his stomach. “She wants a baby again,” he said. “I can’t. I should have told her I can’t. But you’re here now. I don’t know why you’re here.” He didn’t look at me as he spoke. I could see that he was nearing a place where the possible becomes unlimited, where the laws of nature don’t hold. I tried to steer him back.

  “You could’ve broken her foot with that bookshelf,” I said.