by Peter Carey
In any case, fuck them, they made him angry almost every day of his life. Now he was going to piss the salesman off. He did not want to fight. He was sick of fight, sick of his body being a mass of stretching ropes. All he wanted was to be someone with a Garage, not a Service Station, not a Dealership, not a Franchise, but a Garage with deep, wide, oil stains on the floor and a stack of forty-four-gallon drums along his back fence, a Garage in a country town. There was one in the paper this week, at Blainey – $42,000, vendor finance. Blainey would be good enough. You could be the guy who drives the school bus, delivers the kerosene and fuel oil, cuts the rust spots out of the school teacher’s old car, fixes the butcher’s brakes with used parts, is handy with a lathe, is a good shot, a good bloke, a scout master, the coach of the football team, someone who, when looking for a screw or bolt, upturns a drum full of old saved screws and bolts on to the workshop floor and can find – there it is – a ⅜-inch Whitworth thread with a Phillips head.
Instead he had one kid lost to a cult, the other with severe learning difficulties and the belief he was a genius. He had a $567,000 debt to GMAC and a tax audit which, maybe, who knows, would put the lot of them in jail.
He stepped around the puddle on the end of the lane-way and crossed by the petrol pumps. There, twenty metres ahead of him, standing in front of the Audi Quattro, was the striking blond-haired young man in a glistening grey suit, the salesman. He was flexing his knees, holding his yellow-covered guide to auction prices behind his back. When he turned and looked him straight in the eye, Mort felt a sexual shiver which made him speak more harshly than he had planned.
‘Get your arse out of here,’ he said.
‘You promised,’ the salesman said, but he turned and walked away, swinging his shoulders and wiggling his butt like a frigging tom cat. My God, it was an embarrassment, the way he moved.
‘And don’t come back,’ he said. Even as he said it he recognized his son. He wanted to cry out, to protest. He felt the blood rise hot in his neck and take possession of his face. He stood in his overalls in the middle of the yard, bright red.
His phone was ringing – loud as a fire bell. He walked towards it, shaking his head. In any other business of this size, one where the sales director was not wasting half her time trying to be a Country singer, there would be a service manager to answer the phone and soothe the customers. There would also be a workshop manager to co-ordinate the work flow, and a foreman to diagnose the major problems, work on the difficult jobs, do the final road tests and then tick them off on the spread sheet. Mort did all of these jobs. So even while he worried what the hell he would do about his embarrassing son, he also knew that three Commodores on the spread sheet were in for a fuel pump recall. General Motors graded this job as 4.2 which meant they would pay Catchprice Motors for forty-two minutes’ labour, but they made no allowance for the time it took to drain the tank. He tried to cover himself by using Jesse, the first-year apprentice, but each recall still cost the business fifty dollars. That was Howie’s calculation. He had said to Howie: ‘What you want me to do about it?’
Howie said: ‘Just help us keep Benny out of Spare Parts, Mort. Benny loses us more in a day than you could in a week.’
Mort walked into the Spare Parts Department to ask Cathy would she hold his calls for half an hour so he could help out on the fuel pumps. She should be standing in the showroom, but she never would. She had a handwritten sign there, saying please come over to Spare Parts and now she was on the phone making a parts order, doing Benny’s job in fact, probably fucking up as well.
Howie was on the phone too. He was meant to look like Elvis’s original drummer, D. J. Fontana. This was bullshit. He looked like what he would have been if Granny Catchprice had never hired him – a country butcher. He had a tattoo on his forearm and a ducktail haircut, always four weeks too long. He had his pointy shoes up on the desk, and the phone wedged underneath his chin. He had smoke curling round his hair, and clinging to his face. He stank of it.
‘Listen, Barry, no: I went in there personally and asked them for it. They haven’t got the record in stock. It’s not even on their damn computer.’ He paused. ‘I know.’ He paused again and nodded to Mort to sit down. He lived his life surrounded by radiator hoses and shock absorbers but he acted like he was in show business. It was pathetic. He wore suits, probably the only spare parts manager in Australia to do it. The suits all came mail order – with extra long jackets and padded shoulders.
‘We were number eight. That was two days ago. If you can’t keep the record in the shops, we’re dead meat.’
He took his feet off the desk but only to flick ash off his trousers.
‘I’m sympathetic, of course I am.’ He was a slime. He was dark-haired and pale-skinned and he closed his heavy-lidded eyes when he spoke to you. That made you think he was shy, but he was a slime. Before he came into their lives, Cathy never fought with anyone.
When Howie put the phone down, Mort said: ‘They tell me the Tax Department is upstairs with Mum.’ He was pleased with how he said it – calm, not shaky.
‘It’s an audit,’ Howie said. He had the desk covered with papers. Mort saw the record company logo – nothing to do with Catchprice Motors.
‘So what’s that mean?’ Mort asked. ‘An audit?’
Howie opened his drawer and pulled out a pink and black pamphlet. He stood up and brought it over to the counter. Mort took it from him. It was titled Desk Audits & You. ‘They tell me Benny’s gone blond.’
‘What’s it mean?’ Mort tapped the brochure on the counter.
‘It means ooh-la-la,’ Howie said.
‘What’s it mean?’ Mort could feel himself blushing. ‘Are we in the shit or aren’t we?’
‘Mort, you’re blushing,’ Howie said.
He could not walk out. He had to stay there, enduring whatever it was that Howie knew, or thought he knew, about his son.
9
You did not need to like a car to sell it. A car was a pipe, a pump for sucking money from the ‘Prospect’ before you maximized it. You did not need to feel nothing, but Benny loved that fucking Audi. It looked so polite. It had its suit on, its hair cut, but it could take you to hell with your dick hard, and it would be no big deal to sell it. It could sell itself to anyone who liked to drive.
Of course seventy-five grand was a lot of money. So what? There were plenty of different ways to skin the cat, cut that cake, parcel it, package it, make it affordable for the ‘Prospect’ and profitable to the business, and he – dumb Benny – knew these ways.
He had, right now, the missing spare key in his pocket and the first ‘prospect’ who came his way, he was going to demo it, licence or no licence. This would surprise the Catchprice family, who were so worried about scratching it they would not even let him wash it. What would they do when he handed them the paper work – the sale made, the finance pre-approved by ESANDA? What would they say? No please, don’t sell the Audi, Benny? No please, you’re only sixteen and we’d rather pay four hundred bucks a week? They had dropped their bundle. Lost it. They had a jet black Audi Quattro sitting in the star position in the yard and instead of thanking God for giving them such a beautiful opportunity, they blamed each other for having it and worried that the floor plan payments were going to send them broke.
He could see Bozzer Mazoni across the road checking for change in the public phone box which held up the boot-maker’s collapsed veranda. Bozzer had orange, red and yellow hair, a huge star ear-ring, maroon boots with black straps and a fence chain wrapped around his ankle. He looked across and saw Benny standing there. Benny raised his hand in a formal wave. Bozzer squinted and ducked his brilliant head. You could see him thinking fucking yuppy. He did not have a clue who Benny was.
Then the woman from the 7-Eleven came out of the drive-way with her Commodore. She knew Benny, too, from the time she tried to get him and Squeaker Davis done for shop-lifting in fourth year. As she came along the service road, she slowed down, and Benny wa
ved at her. She frowned, and waved back, but you could see it – he was transformed – she had no more idea who he was than Bozzer had.
He waited for Vish, but Vish would not come down from Gran’s flat. He was hiding, praying like a spider in a web. He was scared of that fucking car yard, but if he would only look out of the window, he would see – Benny had the power, Vish could have it too. They could stop being nerds. They could be millionaires, together.
Benny could feel this power, physically, in his body, in his finger tips. He was so full of light, of Voodoo. He could feel it itching on the inside of his veins. If he opened his mouth it would just pour out of him. He straightened his hard penis so it lay flat against his stomach. He felt so incredible, waxed all over, free of body hair, full of clean-skinned possibility, that he did not even know what to think about what he thought.
But nothing would stay constant. The power ebbed and flowed as it had all morning while the rain had kept him locked in the front office. You looked at the feeling, it went. You thought about the plan, you got scared. When he heard his father’s feet on the gravel the hair on the nape of his neck bristled and he wanted to put his hand across his navel and hold it. It was so hard to keep his hand behind his back. His body was already doing all the things it did when it was scared. It was sweating at the hands, and the arsehole. The heart was squittering in its cage. He made himself turn and look his father in the eye.
‘Get your arse out of here,’ his father said. He had what the boys used to call ‘the look’ – bright blue peas, crazy lasers. If you were a dog you would back away.
Benny lost it.
‘Get out of here,’ Mort said, ‘before I throw you out.’
Benny walked back to the front office, and shut the door. When his father walked back down the lane-way to the workshop, Benny sat behind the grey metal desk and shut his eyes, trying to get his power back. He did the exercises he had learned from ‘Visualizing, Actualizing’. He exhaled very slowly and he laid his pretty, long-fingered hands flat on the desk.
He could see his own reflection in the glass in front of him and once again he was astonished by himself. I look incredible. He had moved so far beyond the point where Spare Parts could be an issue in his life.
He wondered how he looked to someone who had never seen him before, someone walking past the petrol pumps on the way to A.S.P. Building Supplies. He imagined himself seen framed by the arched windows and barley-sugar columns. He thought he would look religious or scientific. He was pleased to think he was a most unusual-looking person to be in the office of a car dealership.
He unlocked his desk drawer and removed a magazine. The viewer would have no idea what this religious or scientific person was looking at. It was unimaginable. When Benny had first looked at it, he had felt a numbness, a dizziness, like a new piece of music that he must somehow own or name. It was shiny and thrilling, as if something that had always been a part of him was now being revealed.
It was a women being fucked up the arse. She had short blonde hair. She had a thin waist and a plump arse that was as smooth and round as something in a dream.
Whoever looked in the window would not know this. They would not know how clean he felt, so clean that he could feel the thin, shiny scar-skin on his arm as it brushed his poplin shirt. He smelt of Pears shampoo. He had no hair on his arms, his legs, not even the crack of his arse.
The woman’s legs were bound with woven metal straps. They looked like battery straps from a fifties Holden, but where the terminal points would be, they disappeared into some fabric – it was unclear how they were attached.
The woman was held at the shoulders and arms. She was held at the top of the calves and the ankles. The base was made of moulded fibreglass. It was more or less in the shape of a shallow ‘n’, not a hard thing to make, really easy. You could do it in your back yard, your cellar. The end result was that her arse stuck up in the air and she could not move. She could not fucking move.
You could not see the man’s face, just his torso and cock. There was a pic of him putting Vaseline on his cock. They showed it close and it was good quality printing – you could feel the coolness of grease on the knob.
Benny thought: this is not nothing.
It was now sunny. Steam lay along the borders of Loftus Street. The traffic continued between these hedges of steam, unaware of the lives inside Catchprice Motors.
Benny thought: they could not imagine me.
When he heard a boot scrape on the concrete floor of the Spare Parts bays, he slipped the magazine into the drawer and locked it. He turned in his chair (only his tumescent lips could have betrayed him) and as he turned he saw Jesse.
Jesse was only five foot five inches tall. He was fifteen years old and had a freckled, scrunched-up little face, but he was fast and graceful. He was the wicket-keeper in the Franklin XI. He was Mort’s little mate. He had carrot-coloured, springy straight hair. He got his job because Benny failed his apprenticeship, and he thought – they all thought, Cathy, Howie, Granny Catchprice, the men, the cleaners – they all thought it was because Benny was dumb. They thought they were above him.
Jesse had been fitting new fuel pumps to the recalled Commodores. He had been standing in the pit, soaking himself in petrol. He feinted a light punch to Benny’s shoulder and then tried to grab his nuts with his grease-black hands.
Benny jumped back from the greasy hands as if they were 240 live. He stood in front of the window. He put his legs astride and held his Aloe-Vera’d hands behind his back and looked Jesse in the eye.
Benny was older. Benny’s family were Jesse’s employers. Benny was taller. None of this counted. The first thing Jesse said, he tried to put Benny down.
‘You reckon you’re a salesman, that it?’
Benny smiled. ‘You got no future, Jesse.’
This was new territory for both of them. Jesse blinked three times, quickly, before he spoke. ‘You got fired, not me.’
‘Fired?’ Benny said. ‘Do I look like I am fucking fired?’
It was then he saw Mort coming back up the lane-way from the workshop, swinging his arms. Jesse said something but Benny did not hear him. He folded his arms behind his back and stood right in his father’s path. The heavy aluminium door swung and hit his shoe, but Mort did not even look at him. He walked straight to the bookshelf behind the desk where young Jesse was looking through the dusty spares catalogues for old Fords and Chevrolets. He did not ask Jesse what he was doing there and why the fuck he was not getting the fuel pumps changed. He put his big hand on the apprentice’s shoulder. It fitted round it like a ‘U’ bolt. ‘How’s tricks, titch?’ he said, and stood beside him, right against him, looking at the old Chevrolet catalogue.
‘Stephen Wall done another oil seal,’ Jesse said.
Mort was red and blotchy on his neck. He didn’t seem to hear what Jesse said. When he looked up at Benny his eyes were frightened and angry and his trunk was already twisting towards the door. ‘Who in the fuck do you think you are?’ he said.
Benny looked at his father with his mouth open.
Mort walked out the back door, into the Spare Parts bays.
He came back in a second later.
‘You look like a poof,’ he said and banged out of the office and into the yard.
Benny felt like crying. He wanted to tie his father up and pour water over his face until he said he was sorry. He felt like a snail with its shell taken off. He was pink and slimy and glistening. Even the air hurt him. He felt like dying. It was not just his father. It was everything. He could feel depression come down on him like mould, like bad milk, like the damp twisted dirty sheets in the cellar. He wanted to go to the cellar and lock the door.
‘If anyone’s a poof,’ he said to Jesse, ‘it’s him.’
But Jesse was so dumb. He looked at Benny and grinned. ‘That’ll be the day,’ he said.
‘You’re a fucking baby,’ Benny said.
‘You got mousse on your hair?’
‘No I haven’t.’
Jesse considered this a moment. ‘You look pretty weird, you know that? You looked better before. How do you get it to stand up like that if you don’t use mousse?’
‘Gel.’
‘You’re going to do that every day now? It must take you an hour to get ready to come to work to sell petrol.’
‘Listen, little bubby,’ Benny said, ‘you’re going to remember me, I’m going to be famous and you’re going to remember that all you could do was worry about my fucking hair.’ He knew already he would be sorry he had said that. Jesse would tell the others and they’d fart and hee-haw like about Bozzer and his bullshit story of his father who was meant to be a yuppy with a 7 Series BMW.
But if he had to be sorry, he was fucked anyway. I cannot be what I am. In the corner of his eye he saw something. He turned. It was Maria Takis, walking slowly back to her car. She waved at him. Benny liked her face. He liked her wide, soft mouth particularly. He waved back, smiling.
‘Christ,’ he said, ‘that’s all woman.’
‘That’s all woman,’ Jesse mimicked. ‘You’re a poof, Benny, admit you’re a poof.’
Benny heard himself say: ‘She’s mine.’ He meant it too. He committed himself to it as he said it.
He watched the Tax Inspector getting into her car. He had a very nice feeling about her. He had had a nice feeling about her this morning, the way she spoke, the way she looked at him. He took an Aloe-Vera facelette and wiped his cheeks.
Jesse said: ‘You want to fuck a whale?’
Benny looked at Jesse and saw that he was very young, and very short. He had soft, fair, fluffy hair in a line from his ears down to his chin. Benny felt his power come back. He felt it itch inside his skin.
He said, ‘When you’re grown up you’ll like their bellies like that.’
‘You don’t like girls, Benny.’
‘Their tits get big,’ Benny said. ‘Their nipples too. They like you to drink their milk while you fuck them.’ He was smiling while he spoke. He felt his skin stretch. His face was full of teeth.