“So you’re saying basically no chance?” Marcus usually avoided the word “basically,” which was both overused and obvious, but there was something basic about his situation that allowed him to make an exception.
“I’m saying if you need a ride somewhere, it would be best to get your insurance to pay for you a rental. Or go on ahead and buy you something new. If we’d’ve found it, it would have been within a couple hours of you reporting it, and you didn’t report it for at least a couple hours after it got jacked, am I correct?”
“Well, see, I had to walk up to the road. My phone was in the truck.”
“You might better get yourself a new phone, too.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to wait a few days?”
“If it were me I would not wait if it meant not having no truck and no phone.”
“Well, I guess if it turns up I can always get my money back for my new phone and my new ride.”
“I would not put too much into thinking what you are going to do when it turns up. That’s just me, though. You can do what you want.”
After Marcus thanked him and hung up, he had already decided he would like to be the man who answered the phone at the Border Patrol because the man had seemed so sure of what he would do if it were he. Marcus was never all that sure what to do in most circumstances, and he felt particularly anxious about what to do in his present circumstances. So he took another shower and sat naked on the couch making lists, the first of which was titled
All I Have in This World
• jeans 3 2
• shorts I never wear because I read somewhere men over forty ought not to wear shorts or sandals
• work boots (one pair) and running shoes (one pair)
• several faded pocket tees and one button-down, frayed collar
• socks and underwear for three days
• my health, praise be
• bottle of passable zinfandel
• toiletries (I hate that word)
• a not insubstantial roll of purloined cash
And then on a separate but equally yellow page of legal pad:
Most Pressing Needs
• transportation
• warmer threads for high desert nights
• cheaper and maybe longer-term digs
• gainful employment
• redemption
• breakfast
• flytrap seeds locked in the glove compartment
• that song “Badge” by Cream, so I can crank up the part that goes, “I told you not to wander around in the dark / I told you ’bout the swans, that they live in the park / I told you ’bout our kid, now he’s married to Mabel”
• because I do not deserve native cuisine, having behaved unthinkingly, a greasy grilled cheese with chips and a Coke?
• call Annie?
Marcus got dressed and, in a diner down the street from the hotel, slightly revised his list by ticking off lunch first in the form of a BLT and cheddar, a tolerable substitute for grilled cheese, before moving on to “transportation.”
WHEN MARIA SAID SHE needed a car, her mother said, “You can use the Cherokee.” When Maria said that she needed her own car, that she did not want to have to depend on her mother, that her mother had far too much to do to taxi her around town, her mother said she wished she would have known, she let one of the girls at the motel who wrecked her car have Ray’s truck.
“Good,” said Maria. “I know she appreciated it.”
“But here I gave it away and now you’re needing it.”
“I have some money saved up,” said Maria, but she was wondering, again, was this the thing that would bring back the tensions of their past? That her mother had been so accommodating, in her terse way, about her plans for the restaurant only made Maria more anxious. More likely the falling-out would occur over something like a cereal bowl allowed to sit unwashed in the sink until supper, which her mother, scrubbing hardened flakes from the bottom of the bowl, would see as emblematic of Maria’s unworthiness.
“Let me call one of the Keplers. They went to school with your daddy. They run a used lot off Presidio Street. Bobby, I believe, is the younger one. He’ll do you a good deal, I bought the Cherokee from him.”
Maria knew better than to turn down her mother’s offer. This was the way it worked here. If you wanted something, you called someone you went to school with or married the cousin of or worked with at the Dairy Queen in high school. Besides, what did she know about buying a car? She’d never owned one. She’d always taken the bus or walked. Randy loved cars. He drove a Nova. Endless and incomprehensible was the list of modifications he’d made to the stock engine, and the fact that she even knew to say “modifications” or “stock” was shocking to her after so many years. But since she had been back, all sorts of details had shown up from somewhere she feared forever lost. She remembered the hours Randy and his cousins and his friends spent crawling around under cars on oily concrete slabs. She’d head over to his house after school and there he would be, in the drive, cut off to the waist, his head swallowed by the gaping hood. Good God, the hours wasted while Randy talked cars with her father. From her bedroom window she’d see Randy pull into the drive, and her father would be out watering or tinkering under the carport, and Randy would barely have the door open before her father would sweep up on him, and through the open window she’d hear her father say, “Okay, Rand, let’s see what all you did to her last weekend.” Then the pop of the hood latch, the creak the hood made as it rested its weight on the rod that propped it open, and she knew it would be thirty minutes before Randy would ever make it into the house, and most of the time he would not make it, she’d have to go out and stand around while Randy and her dad spoke a language made up entirely of car-part names and the histrionic verbs of sports writers, which they used to describe either the things their cars had done or the things they wanted them to do, along with sound effects that would have made her laugh had she not been so bored.
Later, alone in the car, she would make fun of him for caring so much about something so inconsequential and he would grin as if this was all he wanted in the world, a woman to stay on his case night and day for the next sixty years. But she did not want that. She did not want to nag, and so why couldn’t he stop doing those things that caused her to nag?
“Just come over a half hour early,” she said to him once. “Like, if we’re supposed to be somewhere at seven, come at six thirty and talk your boring car talk with him until seven. That way we can be on time.”
Randy said she was cracking him up, telling him when to show up and how long he could talk about the thing he loved besides her.
“But you love me more, don’t you?”
“More than my ride?” Randy pretended to give it thirty seconds of thought. “It’s in a different column, a car and a girl.”
“What are you talking about, a column?”
“Like at school when they make you classify things in lists. And you have to put up top of the column what the category is.”
“So you have a column for girls and one for cars?”
“Not girls, girl. Girl without an s. But yeah, cars plural because I like more than one car and I plan on owning way more than this one. Unlike in the girl column.”
“Are you saying you own me?”
“Yeah, Maria. I purchased you at Dollar General. I still got the receipt, so maybe you better stop picking at me, trying to trap me into saying something stupid, like I want more than one girl or I own you or some shit like that.”
They were pulling into the parking lot of Dairy Queen, where they would waste another night leaning on cars with their friends. Maria had wanted to go see a movie or something, anything but hang out for hours at Dairy Queen, and maybe her boredom was what caused her to be so prickly that night.
“I’m not trying to trap you. You were the one who started talking about columns. You know you love me more than all the items in your stupid car column. So why don’t you show it?”
/> “By coming to pick you up a half hour early, you mean? By cutting your daddy off in the middle of a sentence just because you’re ready to go?”
“For God’s sake, don’t you dare disrespect Daddy by not finishing a sentence y’all have already exchanged six thousand times. No telling what he might do.”
“Your daddy is a good man.”
“I wouldn’t know. He hardly ever talks to me. Why should he? I couldn’t point out a carburetor if my life depended.”
“Good thing your life don’t, then.”
Maria got out of the car and went inside and sat in a booth with her friends, and Randy stayed outside in the parking lot, sitting on a lawn chair in the back of his best friend Johnny’s pickup all night and glaring at her through the streaky plate glass. Finally Maria grew tired of her friends and their conversation and she went outside and announced to Randy that she was ready to go, and all his friends looked in another direction because it was obvious that Randy and Maria were “in a fight.”
On the way home, Randy said, “Why do you have to be like this, you know I love you to pieces,” but she did not say anything even when he pulled into the driveway. As she knew he would, he left what he called “some rubber” on the highway in front of her drive. The next day at school she pushed a note into the slot of his locker that read, “We broke up,” and after the next class, she found a note in her locker that said, “No, WE didn’t break up, YOU broke up.” Both “WE” and “YOU” were underlined so angrily that the lines punctured the page. The next class, biology, they had together. She did not look at him but she could feel him in the back row with his friends, slumped in his desk chair, the anger coming off him like the flame under the Bunsen burners. After three days of this—Randy calling her house nightly, Maria telling her mother and father she did not want to speak to him, her mother telling Maria, “I’m not going to lie for you. If you want me to tell him you’re not here you better go off somewhere,” and her father asking her what was going on, why was she mad at Randy, what in the world had happened—Randy dispatched her best friend, Connie, to argue his case.
“He’s acting crazy, Maria. He got so drunk last night he threw up this morning after history.”
“That’s supposed to be my fault?” said Maria.
“He told me to tell you he loves you,” said Connie. “Since I don’t got anybody telling me they love me, all I got is boys saying they want to do it to me, not even with me, to me, I would say you got it pretty good.”
Maria said, “How does he even know what love is? He just misses being seen with me. All he’s got now is his car. That’s all he cares about, anyway.”
“You don’t love him?” said Connie.
“What do I know about love? I’m only fucking seventeen. I don’t know, Connie, don’t you think it’s different?”
“Don’t I think what’s different?”
“The way we say we love each other in the parking lot of the Dairy Queen and the way people say they love each other, I don’t know, in college? Or after college?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Connie. “That’s what I’m saying. Nobody’s telling me they love me, and plus I am not in college and nobody is going to pay for me to go off to college, so I don’t get to compare it.”
“You could go to college,” said Maria. “They have scholarships.”
“Whatever, Maria, all I’m saying is, he looks so sad. He told me to tell you that you are his heart.”
“Well, (a) what does that even mean? And (b) why does he have to send you to tell me?”
“Because you’re ignoring him?”
“I’m not ignoring him. We broke up. I didn’t realize that breaking up meant doing the same things you did when you weren’t broken up.”
“Everybody is jealous of y’all.”
“Everybody?” said Maria.
“You’re such a bitch sometimes,” said Connie.
“Because I think everybody ought to be able to figure out that when they see me and Randy riding around town after school, that isn’t, like, destiny?”
“What do you want me to tell him?” said Connie. “’Cause I’m not about to go telling him what you’ve said.”
“Why not?”
“He couldn’t take it.”
“He’s just being dramatic. Trying to get everybody to feel sorry for him. It’s not your job to tell him anything.”
“So will you talk to him?”
“When I’m ready.”
By the weekend they were back together. The next week after school she took off her bra in the Airstream after fixing Randy a ham and cheese. But what she remembered most about that time was his telling her it was good that her life did not depend on her being able to recognize a carburetor.
She had thought about that a lot over the years, and she realized, when she learned to cook and discovered how much she loved doing it, that in a way, his life did depend on it, even more than he was allowed—or allowed himself—to realize. What she found in food was further proof that she really did not belong where she’d been born. Fennel made her feel worldly, and in time it no longer brought to mind the black braids of licorice her father used to buy her when they went to get gas at Stripes. She’d started out as a sous-chef, no culinary school, just endless hours on the line, heat and sweat and a surprisingly high tolerance for both the machismo and the irascibility of three-quarters of the chefs she encountered. She shrugged them off and met the mad pace of dinner rush. She was unflappable and efficient, and when she earned enough respect to move up the line, she proved inventive, even fearless with ingredient and variation. She learned a little French. The way it felt to feed an entire restaurant of hungry people and do it again the next night, to plan the menu and find the ingredients, the pleasure she got from it: Randy wasn’t exaggerating. And if she ever doubted it for herself, all Maria had to do was look to her mother and the motel.
On her way to buy a car, Maria decided that cars weren’t even cars to Randy but a way to make himself feel a part of something, a way to keep moving forward, even if it meant dismantling things and coming home greasy and smelly. He took care to understand them, to know how they worked, and at such a young age, and was there anything that she understood, that she could take apart and put together again, anything in her life, whose mysteries she had the patience to spend hours attempting to demystify? Only her own feelings, and it turned out she knew them only in the way you know a hailstorm pelting a tin roof: thunderous as it is, it passes over quickly. There were so many things it turned out Randy knew that she never thought him capable of knowing. This did not mean she wanted to have his baby at seventeen. It meant that for all those years away, she had not even considered buying a car, because if anyone had asked her what kind of car she’d bought, she would have said, It’s gray with four doors. She would not defile his passion with what she realized was snobbish indifference.
That there were no buses in Pinto Canyon was immaterial, and her mother was right, they could have gotten by with just her Cherokee, they could have made it work. But she was here and she had decided to linger here, and because she needed to, because so much depended on it, she was going to buy herself a car.
Cleveland, Ohio, 1984
Selling a car in a city known to the world for its flaming river called for tactics far beyond the slick skills Witherspoon had picked up from his father and uncles when he was a boy. Back then he’d worked on the lot daily, after school and on weekends, keeping even the antennas of the fleet of Buicks and Oldses so clean that the briefest glint of Cleveland sun would turn the slender rods into magic sparkling wands. The Cuyahoga on fire and then that boy-mayor Kucinich putting the city in default, GM and U.S. Steel pulling out: you would think the lot would be cleared weekly by people wanting the hell out of such a miserable city. But jobs were so scarce, money so tight, that anyone leaving the city—and according to an article Witherspoon had read in the Plain Dealer, nearly half the population had fled since 1950—would have to hoof i
t.
His father and uncles had relied on their pitch, and it was true that they had the skills, could gab you right inside the office and put a pen in your hand, but these days the hard sell was not enough. Witherspoon had a half dozen of the best salesmen in the city on the lot, handpicked not for their upright personalities. He was no saint himself, but he liked to think his mediocrity as a salesman stemmed less from his timidity than from his standards. He had a few principles left. It was hard to hold on to them in this business, in this economy. The crew he had out there now, good God: drunks, liars, philanderers. He couldn’t keep a girl under fifty and even passably attractive, married or not, in the office. The boys—that’s what they were, even though most of them were middle-aged and married with kids, put them together and they behaved like boys on a school yard—came back from lunch reeking sweetly of beer and could not keep their hands in their pockets, their filthy mouths clamped. He’d had to hire his girls based on a kind of reverse discrimination: only the homely and overweight were suitable.
Which got Witherspoon to thinking about the fact that half the city was black, and the blacks seemed to favor a Buick or an Olds. That he knew of, there was no black dealership selling new cars in the Midwest save for maybe in Chicago. Which is what led him to a used lot on a corner down in Glenville. He hadn’t been over there since the shootings. He’d grown up playing in Rockefeller Park, but after the riots that part of the city was one a white man wouldn’t want to find himself in, night or day.
So a white man showing up in a brand-new LeSabre (which he made sure to park directly in front of the lot, so no one would make off with his hubcaps) was obviously something of an event. For five or ten minutes the men inside the former gas station watched him through the wide, slanted plate glass, which was fair enough to Witherspoon’s mind, since this is exactly what his boys would do if a black man turned up in their lot.
Finally a man in a gold suit and a wide green tie and well-shined boots emerged from the office. He whistled as he made his way over to where Witherspoon stood studying an Eldorado.
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