“What do you wear to a fire?” Tracy opened one of her drawers and pulled out one item after another: short pants, leather pants, suede skirts, cotton T-shirts. In the next half hour Tracy put together just about every ensemble imaginable, then suddenly turned around with a devilish smile. “Why don’t you wear nothing at all? Just a long gray raincoat and high heels.”
“I’m not a slut!”
“Yeah, but you want to be.” She laughed knowingly, holding up the brown suede halter top she swiped from her mom’s collection. “You’re as horny as a Prince song.”
“Should I make the first move?” I asked.
“Only if you have to.”
“When will I know?”
“You stare at that fire long enough and you’ll know.” Tracy handed me her baby blue angora sweater. Its hairs stood on end from static, wiggling with a cosmic life all their own. “Wear this,” she said. “It works every time.” She held the sweater over my chest. We both looked in the mirror.
“Do you think he’s Mr. Right?” I asked.
“I think he’s Mr. Right Now!” Tracy laughed.
MY MECHANIC
TIME crawled away with the helpless tempo of a traffic jam. The summer light seemed to last forever. Lingering through dinner, it was one of those never-ending sunsets that delayed drive-in movies—a swollen haze of pollen and air pollution, a glowing gaseous orange with wispy vapors of purple and blue.
I cranked up the volume of my hair, did some overtime in the t-zone, then painted my nails ultraplatinum. It was a night meant for high-beam gleam. I wanted to sparkle like waxed chrome under streetlight. After a couple of preliminary failures I settled on a sliver of metallic mascara and a light dusting of pearly pink iridescent powder. Clothing is never easy and it took several dress rehearsals, but I decided on blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and Tracy’s fuzzy blue sweater: something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.
It was only nine o’clock but I couldn’t wait any longer, so I went downstairs and told Mom I was going over to Tracy’s. I hate to lie but sometimes the truth is just impossible. I took the shortcut through the field, which was not a good idea, because it was dark and the weeds were sparking my fertile imagination. I’m not usually a paranoid person, but lately everything’s been getting a little weird. Whenever I’m alone I feel like I’m waltzing through a crime scene.
I landed at the Chicken Shack and ordered a small Diet Coke, then sat on a stool by the window and watched cars come and go from the gas station across the street. My mechanic went car to car, washing windshields, pumping gas, sometimes disappearing into the garage for a can of oil. He looked so sweet with that little pink rag drooping from the back pocket of his black jeans. Pushing a broom under bright white fluorescent light, he was my own private movie star.
I watched him wheel in the oil can cart, roll up the air hose, and measure the gas in storage below the surface with a long yellow pole until finally, a little after ten, the overhead lights were turned off. The gas station was closed. I coated my lips with a fresh dose of lip gloss, tossed my paper cup in the can, and strolled across the street. I tapped on the garage window and saw my mechanic turn with surprise. He walked over to the door and fumbled with the lock.
“You made it,” he said, then turned his back to me and bent over the sink to scrub his greasy hands. He wore a tight, gray short-sleeve T-shirt and black jeans pegged over steel-toe boots.
“Nice place ya got here.” I leaned against the Coke machine and slid my hands into my front pockets. The garage smelled like old motor oil. Hundreds of crushed cigarette butts littered the greasy black floor like little white bugs.
He turned off the water and dried his hands with a white paper towel. “It’s a job,” he said, shrugging his shoulders, then dropped the towel into the trash. “Where do you work?”
I stumbled on that one, my head swimming with responses. He turned around and pounded some quarters into the cigarette machine. “You got a job or you some kinda psychokiller chick who preys on gas station mechanics?” He picked up his cigarettes and tore open the cellophane wrapper.
“Heard about me, huh?” I gazed at my shoe.
Bobby tapped the cigarette pack against the palm of his hand, then tapped out two cigarettes and offered the first one to me. I pulled it from the pack, slipped it between my lips. He seemed tense under all that cool, his face didn’t seem as sure as his demeanor. I could tell there was some vulnerability under all that swagger. Silence swelled and sucked up all the air. He clicked open his silver lighter and ignited its blue and orange flame. I dipped my cigarette into the fire and inhaled. The lighter fluid was so rich it tasted like I was smoking gasoline.
“So, you still want to go see that big fire?” he asked.
My right leg took on a life all its own, swinging forward and back. I twisted my arms into a pretzel. “Isn’t much else to do,” I said. “You got any other ideas?” I flipped my hair away from my face.
He looked over my body and I returned the compliment. Bobby closed the bottom drawer of the desk with his knee, then turned around and grabbed his black leather jacket from the coatrack. “The fire it is.” He turned off the office light, opened the door for me, then locked it behind us.
The purple-flake paint job on his ’78 Charger glittered like the prizes in a gumball machine. The interior reeked of history—dead smoke and worn leather—somehow it already smelled familiar to me. This was my vehicle into the next chapter. I just wanted to be there, now.
My mechanic latched his seat belt and told me to do the same. He started the engine, pushed in a cassette, and the car burst to life. Nine Inch Nails crept out of the stereo. When he pressed the accelerator the first thrust of gasoline exhaust ripped through the tailpipes and the engine’s sweet rumble turned to a fearsome roar. He shifted into gear and peeled out of the lot.
I slipped my hand under the black vinyl seat, feeling for trinkets like lost earrings, bottle caps, or torn condom wrappers, anything that might help me look into the past or predict the future. My mechanic concentrated on the dark road, shifting through the gears, both hands locked on the wheel. Sometimes his eyes squinted or his head tilted, as if he saw something lurking in the black perimeter. He looked so intense driving. I was speechless.
Bobby’s face was dominated by large lips and long sideburns. His nose was twisted as if it had once been broken and never reset. A thick purple vein bulged from his slender neck, his flat chin balanced the twitching muscles of his jaw. He looked powerful and reckless, like somebody who’s already tasted the pavement.
I rolled down the window, folded my arms over the windowsill, and let the warm wind blow through my hair. The scenery slid by like an ambient movie, a zillion frames a minute; white lines disappeared under the car, warped reflections peeled over the windshield. I saw the pink eyes of an opposum hunched over a dead raven in the gravel shoulder of the road. It stared into the headlights, then scampered behind the guardrail and into the weeds.
We passed the Johnsons’ abandoned farmhouse. The windows were broken, the weathered gray boards buckling. A large white billboard stood out front announcing the new development. The entire farm was mapped into tiny green squares with a black line snaking around the land in S-shaped curlicues. Mr. Johnson died last year and his farm was instantly swallowed up by some big-time developer. The cornfield already had sewer lines and streetlights in place. It all happened so fast, it seemed like they were waiting for him to die.
“So where are you from?” I asked.
“How do you know I’m not from here?”
“’Cause I’ve been here long enough to know.”
He turned and checked me out but didn’t say anything. I tipped my head back out the window, crossed my legs, and stared at his reflection in the windshield. The curve of his lips reminded me of the bending hills of a roller coaster. I closed my eyes and felt myself sliding down the first hill.
“I’m from Southern Illinois.”
&nbs
p; “What brings you up here?”
“Work.”
“They don’t have any gas stations down there?”
“Yeah, but they already have mechanics. Everybody down there is a mechanic. Up here everybody is a businessman. Businessmen don’t know shit about cars. They bring them to me and I charge whatever the hell I want.”
“You came up here to take advantage of us?”
“It’s called the redistribution of wealth.”
“Are you a Marxist?”
“Are you a spy? You sure ask a lot of questions. What do you know about this fire?”
“Saw it on TV,” I said. “Biggest celebrity in the area, I guess.”
We came over a ridge, and the fire everybody’s been talking about came into view. A huge petrochemical storage tank was on fire, and its plume of thick black smoke had burned a hole in the sky for about two days now. From across the canal it looked like the earth had cracked open and the entrance to hell was slithering from its hideaway. Fireboats projected lazy streams of water onto the steel casings of the nearby tanks. Old tires and half-sunk houseboats floated beside a rotting pier that sloped down under the oil-slick water.
“That fire is bigger than I expected. It looks so greedy and wild, like an angry ghost or something.”
“You believe in ghosts?” he asked.
“Sure, why not?” I looked over at him.
“You believe in UFOs too?”
“There wouldn’t be UFOs if UFOs didn’t exist,” I explained.
Bluff Road was clogged with double-parked vehicles. People were slouched on the hoods of their cars drinking beer. Everyone’s face was shaded with an orange glow, reflecting the fire’s leaping light. Bobby couldn’t find a parking spot and ended up being detoured into a long snaking line of sight-seers rambling over the canal bridge. A few people stood outside the lawn mower repair shop, one of them pointing up into the sky.
“Do you suppose that stuff’s dangerous?” I asked, sorta hallucinating in the swirling whirlwind of red, white, and blue emergency lights.
“If it was, somebody would of said so by now.”
“Yeah, but what if they didn’t? Maybe there’s something in those clouds?” I leaned closer to the glass to get a better look. “I don’t trust anyone these days, especially the government.”
“How do you know you can trust me?”
“That’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
“So you’re in a car with a complete stranger, but you’re worried about some little puffs of smoke drifting off into outer space.”
“Hey, it’s not as illogical as you make it seem, and those aren’t little puffs, they’re big black balls, thank you.” But then I had to think about it for a second. “You have to trust your instincts. What’s right is right,” I added. “You’re flesh and blood, who knows what that stuff is.” The cassette tape ended and it felt like a bell announcing the end of round one.
“Isn’t it weird how everyone seems so drawn to death and destruction,” I said, peering through the glass, trying to trace the trail of smoke. “Look at all those people!”
“It’s sort of religious actually, if you think about it, like passing in front of an altar”—he wiggled the gearshift—“people suddenly feel lucky to be alive.” My mechanic stared into the oncoming headlights as if he had a long line of thoughts racing to a finish line.
“This is way better than religon,” I said. “Church is so boring. And who’d want to go to heaven anyway? I can’t think of a worse party.”
“Who said you were invited?”
I looked at him with a strange sense of amusement, something I never felt with anyone else. He had the weirdest point of view and I can’t believe he mentioned religion; what a trip. Staring at him in this light he carried a warm alienish glow, and I wanted to believe he was an angel.
“Do you believe in God?” I asked.
“If there wasn’t a God, God wouldn’t exist.” He looked over at me and smiled.
Touché. What could I say? My mechanic was a spiritual Meisterbrau, a greasy white prince, a minister of machine parts. I felt myself twisting into a chain-link mesh.
The music blended with the wind and the roar of the Charger. The interior was colored by the oncoming blur of passing cars bending through the wide curves of the two-lane road. We drove past the UNOCAL petroleum refineries. Tiny white bulbs traced its skeleton of black and silver pipes. Three musty pill-shaped train cars were parked behind the chain-link fence. Power lines looped over the tree line, disappearing into the Black Partridge Woods.
A thick toxic scent filled the car. My breath was shortened and my face started burning. I tried to rationalize the concept that we had just driven through an industrial accident, that I might be the victim of toxic agencies already chewing through the fibers of my internal organs, that this was probably the beginning of the end. I rolled up the window, checked my reflection in the glass and the huge black plume of smoke pushing farther into the heavens.
“This must be the biggest thing to happen around here since the night they fried John Wayne Gacy,” I said, shifting on the bucket seat and trying to imagine myself in the electric chair: the first surge of electricity; my hair frying; my fingernails turning black and peeling back; my eyeballs popping out of my head.
“Did you go to that too?”
“No. That was a long time ago. Where are we going?” I asked him.
“My garage.” He coasted through a yellow light. “I gotta check in with some friends before we go anywhere else.” He looked over at me. “It’ll only take a minute.”
“Where’s your garage?”
“A few more lights,” he said, pointing ahead.
We sped through Lockport. Old brick bungalows and tar papered shacks lined Archer Avenue. The waterfront became a faint glow and then a shadow behind us. I saw a cigar tree, remembered smoking the long finger-shaped seeds when I was in grade school and getting sick as a dog.
Bobby accelerated through another yellow and I felt myself getting too comfortable in the seat, worried this date was going nowhere. We turned off Archer Avenue and wound through a thicket of trees and empty lots across the river from Stateville Penitentiary. In a hollow of trees stood a two-story wood building with the garage door open. A couple of guys were inside working on a dented-up race car. The car had big wide tires and was painted black and orange with a large white number 89 on the door. Behind the garage was a junkyard full of mashed cars. Two large German shepherds paced behind a fence, barking madly, their white teeth snapping, their paws pushing against the wilting chain-link.
“What’s that?” I pointed into the garage.
“My ticket out of here,” he said.
“You a race car driver?” I asked.
“Sometimes.” He shut off the engine. The car sputtered to a choking death.
“Where do you race?”
“Wherever they’ll let me.” He punched open his door. “Stay here, I’ll be right back.”
He got out and pointed at the dogs. “Jonesie, Maxie, down.” He snapped his fingers and the dogs dropped to all fours, then trailed him along the fence line, their tails wagging softly behind them. Bobby said something as he approached his two friends and they all started laughing. One of them looked back at me in the car, then they all disappeared into a doorway. I leaned against the window and stared at the prison across the water. At night, the complex looked like the dark side of Disneyland. All I could think about was all the creepy-crawlies locked inside.
When David and I were kids Mom took us to a prisoner art show. It turned out one of the painters was one of Mom’s classmates from high school. I had never seen a murderer before and remember being very excited. He was wearing leg chains and what looked like blue pajamas. He reminded me of those handsome Nazis in old war movies, so that even his good looks seemed sinister. At the time, Mom said he was a basketball player who suffocated a cheerleader with a pillow. We found out several years later that he was gay and that this gi
rl had laughed at him when he couldn’t get it up, that she threatened to tell the whole school about it. The weird thing is, I can’t remember anything about his painting.
A rusting BEWARE OF DOG sign dangled from the barbed-wire fence surrounding the junkyard. The sharp white teeth and shiny black eyes of the dogs cruising the yard were giving me the creeps. I turned up the Nine Inch Nails tape, closed my eyes, and tried to sink into Trent’s melodrama.
My mechanic turned out to be more complex and glamorous than I expected. I knew he seemed out of place pumping gas on the corner of Sixty-third and Main. The way he talked, his body language, almost everything he did seemed to hold a hidden agenda. Even now he has to have some secret meeting with his pals.
Whatever they were doing, it seemed to take forever. My stomach was practicing flip-flops. The car was getting cold. The dogs kept pacing, occasionally barking at a bird or some other critter crawling through the weeds. I locked my door as a precaution, then leaned over and locked Bobby’s too. The place reaked of urban legends.
Finally, mystery date popped out of the clubhouse and made his way back to the car. When the door burst open, the interior light and car buzzer set the dogs off in another barking frenzy. Bobby clicked himself into the seat belt, started the engine, and backed out of the driveway onto the narrow road. He shifted into first and squealed the tires. My head whipped back against the black vinyl seat.
“What kind of car was that?”
“An ’eighty-four Chevelle with a four-fifty-four engine. It’s a beater, but it always starts.” He laughed to himself.
“I can’t believe you race cars,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me?
“I didn’t know you were into cars,” he said.
“You never asked. Can I come see you race sometime?”
“I don’t see why not. It’s a free country last time I checked.”
Downers Grove Page 5