The Highway Kind

by Patrick Millikin

  I was at a good part of the book, the part where Lou Ford talks about his childhood and what he did with the housekeeper, but the book would always be there waiting. When I went over, the man shook my hand like I was grown and helped me climb in.

  “I’m setting the timing now,” he said. “When I tell you, I need for you to rev the engine.” He held up the timing light. “I’ll be using this to—”

  I nodded just as Daddy said, “He knows.”

  To reach the accelerator I had to slide as far forward in the seat as I could, right onto the edge of it, and stretch my leg out straight. I revved when he said, waited as he rotated the distributor, revved again. Once more and we were done.

  “What do you think?” the man asked Daddy.

  “Sounding good.”

  “Always good to have good help.”

  “Even for a loner, yeah.”

  The man looked back at me. “Maybe we should take a ride, make sure everything’s tight.”

  “Or take a couple of beers and let the boy get to his work.”

  Daddy snagged two bottles from the cooler. Condensation came off them and made tiny footprints on the floor. I was supposed to be doing extra homework per my teachers, but what was boring and obvious the first time around didn’t get any better with age. Lou and the housekeeper were glad to have me back.

  Daddy and the man sat quietly, sipping their beers, looking out the bay door where heat rose in waves, turning the world wonky.

  “Kind of a surprise, seeing you here.” That was Daddy, not given to talk much at all and never one for hyperbole.

  “Both of us.”

  Some more quiet leaned back against the wall waiting.

  “Still in the same line of work?”

  “Not anymore, no.”

  “Glad to hear that. Never thought you were cut out for it.”

  “Thing is, I didn’t seem to be cut out for much else.”

  “Except driving.”

  “Except driving.” Our visitor motioned with his bottle, a swing that took in the car, the rack, the tools he’d put back where they came from. “Appreciate this.”

  “Any time. So, where are you headed?”

  “Thought I might go down to Mexico.”

  “And do what?”

  “More of the same, I guess.”

  “The same being what?”

  Things wound down then. The quiet that had been leaning against the wall earlier came back. They finished their beers. Daddy stood and said he figured it to be time to get on home, asked the man if he planned on heading out now the car was looking good. “You could stay a while, you know,” Daddy said.

  “Nowhere I have to be.”

  “Don’t guess you have a place...”

  “Car’s fine.”

  “That your preference?”

  “It’s what I’m used to.”

  “You want, you can pull in out back, then. Plenty of privacy. Nothing but the arroyo and scrub trees all the way to the highway.”

  Daddy raised the rattling bay doors and the visitor pulled out, drove around. We put the day’s used rags in the barrel, threw sawdust on the floor and swept up, swabbed the sink and toilet, everything in place and ready to hit the ground running tomorrow morn. Daddy locked up the Caddy and swung a tarp over it. Said while he finished up I should go be sure the man didn’t need anything else.

  He had the driver’s door open, the seat kicked back, and he was lying there with eyes open. Propped on the dash, a transistor radio the size of a pack of cigarettes, the kind I’d seen in movies, played something in equal parts shrill and percussive.

  “Daddy says to tell you the diner over on Mulberry’s open till nine and the food’s edible if you’re hungry enough.”

  “Don’t eat a lot these days.”

  He held a beer bottle in his left hand, down on his thigh. The beer must have been warm since it wasn’t sweating. Crickets had started up their songs for the night. You’d catch movement out the corner of your eye but when you looked you couldn’t see them. The sun was sinking in its slot.

  “Saw the book in your pocket earlier,” he said, “wondered what you’re reading,” and when I showed him he said he liked those too, even had a friend out in California that wrote a few. Everything about California is damn cool, I was convinced of that back then, so I asked a lot of questions. He told me about the Hispanic neighborhood he’d lived in. Billboards in Spanish, murals on walls, bright colors. Stalls and street food and festivals.

  Years later I lived out there in a neighborhood just like that before I had to come back to take care of Daddy. It all started with him pronouncing words wrong. Holdover would be “hol’over,” or noise somehow turn to “nose.” No one thought much about it at first, but before long he was losing words completely. His mouth would open, and you’d watch his eyes searching for them, but the words just weren’t there.

  “Everyone says we get them coming up the arroyo,” I said, “illegals, I mean.”

  “My friend? Wrote those books? He says we’re all illegals.”

  Daddy came around to collect me then. Standing by the kitchen counter, we had a supper of fried bologna, sliced tomatoes, and leftover dirty rice. This was Daddy’s night to go dancing with Eleanor, dancing being a code word we both pretended I didn’t understand.

  That night a storm moved toward us like Godzilla advancing on poor Tokyo, but nothing came of it, a scatter of raindrops. I gave up trying to sleep and was out on the back porch watching lightning flash behind the clouds when Daddy pulled the truck in.

  “You’re supposed to be in bed, young man,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  We watched as lightning came again. A gust of wind shoved one of the lawn chairs to the edge of the patio where it tottered, hung on till the last moment, and overturned.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Daddy said. “Most people never get to see skies like that.”

  Even then I’d have chosen powerful, mysterious, angry, promise unfulfilled. Daddy said beautiful.

  It turned out that neither of us could sleep that night. We weren’t getting the benefits of the weather, but it had a hold on us: restlessness, aches, unease. When for the second time we found ourselves in the kitchen, Daddy decided we might as well head down to the garage, something we’d done before on occasion. We’d go down, I’d read, he’d work and putter or mess about, we’d come back and sleep a few hours.

  A dark gray Buick sat outside the garage. This is two in the morning, mind you, and the passenger door is hanging open. What the hell, Daddy said, and pulled in behind. No lights inside the garage. No one around that we can see. We were climbing out of the car when the visitor showed up, not from behind the garage where we’d expect, but yards to the right, walking the rim of the arroyo.

  “You know you have coyotes down there?” he said. “Lot of them.”

  “Coyotes, snakes, you name it. And a car up here that ain’t supposed to be.”

  “They won’t be coming back for it.”

  “What am I going to see when I look under that hood?” Daddy glanced at the arroyo. “And down there?”

  “About what you’d expect under the hood. Down there, there won’t be much left.”

  “So it’s not just more of the same. I’d heard stories.”

  “I’m sorry to bring this on you—I didn’t know. It’s taken care of.”

  Daddy and the man stood looking at one another. “I was never here,” the man said. “They were never here.” He went around to the back. Minutes later, his car pulled out, eased past us, and was gone.

  “We’d best get this General Motors piece of crap inside and get started tearing it down,” Daddy said.

  We all kill the past in our own way. Some slit its throat, some let it die of neglect.

  Last week I began a list of species that have become extinct. What started it was reading about a baby elephant that wouldn’t leave its mother’s side when hunters killed her and died itself of starvation. I found ou
t that 90 percent of all things that ever lived on earth are extinct, maybe more. As many as two hundred species pass away between Monday’s sunrise and Tuesday’s.

  I do wonder: What if I’d not been born as I was, what if I’d been back a bit in line and not out front, what if the things they’d told us about that place had a grain of truth? Don’t do that much, but it happens.

  “When the sun is overhead, the shadows disappear,” my physical therapist back in rehab said. Okay, they do. But only briefly.

  And: “At least you knew what you were fighting for.” Sure I did. Absolutely. We steer our course by homilies and reductive narratives, then wonder that so many of us are lost.

  A few weeks ago I made a day trip to Waycross. The water tower is gone, just one leg and half another still standing. It’s a ghost town now, nothing but weightless memories tumbling along the streets. I pulled in by what used to be my father’s garage, got my chair out and hauled myself into it, rolled with the memories down the streets, then round back to where our visitor had parked all those years ago. Nothing much has changed with the arroyo.

  You always hear people talking about I saw this, I read this, I did this, and it changed my life.

  Sure it did.

  Thing is, I’d forgotten all about the visitor and what happened that night, and the only reason I remember now is because of this movie I saw.

  I’d rolled the chair in at the end of an aisle only to be met with a barrage of smart-ass remarks about blocking their view from a brace of twenty-somethings, so I was concentrating on not tearing their heads off and didn’t pay much attention to the beginning of the movie, but then a scene where a simple heist goes stupid bad grabbed my attention and I just kind of fell through the screen.

  The movie’s about a man who works as a stunt driver by day and drives for criminals at night. Things start going wrong, then go wronger, pile up on him and pile up more until finally, halfway to a clear, cool morning, he bleeds to death from stab wounds in a Mexican bar. “There were so many other killings, so many other bodies,” he says in voice-over near the end, his own and the movie’s.

  After lights came on, I sat in the theater till the cleaning crew, who’d been waiting patiently at the back with brooms and a trash can on rollers, came on in and got to work. I was remembering the car, his mention of Mexico, some of the conversation between my father and him.

  I’m pretty sure it was him, his story—our visitor, my father’s old friend or coworker or accomplice or whatever the hell he was. I think that explains something.

  I wish I knew what.

  THE TRIPLE BLACK ’CUDA

  by George Pelecanos

  OF THE TWO of us, my brother, Ted, was the good one. I know my father felt that way, though he didn’t say it in my presence, at least not while Ted was alive. He didn’t have to say it, because I knew. Being second place in my father’s eyes was something I struggled with for a long time. I’m still carrying it, and I’m damn near sixty years old.

  I grew up in a mostly white, leaning-to-ethnic neighborhood. Polish and Russian Jews, Italians, Greeks, Irish Catholics, and a smattering of Protestants. No blacks or Spanish. Only a few of our fathers wore ties to work, but they all worked, and if the marriages were unhappy, as surely many of them were, most of the homes remained unbroken.

  Pop was an auto mechanic at an Esso station a half mile from our house. He woke up early and read the newspaper, front to back, every morning before making sure we got off to school. Then he was on his feet all day, bent over, working under hoods in a to-the-bone cold garage. Which is why he already had arthritis and hip problems in his forties. At night he sat in his recliner, drank beer, smoked Viceroys, and read paperback novels. People assumed he wasn’t smart and paid him little attention until they needed him to work on their cars. Then he was their hero.

  When I was still in high school, in the early seventies, Ted, who was three years my senior, enlisted in the Marine Corps and did a tour in Nam. The ground campaign was winding down, so the risk factor was not as high as it had been a few years earlier. It was a rite-of-passage thing for him. Also, our father had fought in the Pacific, and Ted knew that by serving he would make Pop proud. Pop was not a supporter of the war, or Nixon, but he thought even less of hippies and the protest movement, and gave Ted his blessing.

  I was pissed off when Ted left for boot camp. I had never lived without him, and I felt that he had deserted me. Also, in the back of my mind, I knew that joining the Corps was another feather in his cap, something that my father would talk about with pride to his friends. Though I loved my brother, at that point in time I resented him a little bit too. I’m not proud of that, but there it is.

  Ted had kept my wild streak in line when he was home, but when he headed overseas I went unchecked. I don’t mean to suggest that I was like those guys in my high school who carried knives and beat up weaklings. Most of those cretins dropped out before graduation, died on the highway, entered the penal system, or became career military and were never heard from again. That wasn’t me. But I did like to fight. Maybe because I was undersized, and I felt like I had something to prove. Whatever the reason, anger was my dominant mood. My fantasies, more often than not, involved violence rather than sex. How do I explain it? I was a boy and the wires inside my head were scrambled. I didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. On top of that I liked fast cars.

  Muscle cars were the big ticket then. I coveted a maroon, 350 square-block Nova that I’d had my eye on all through high school. A graduating senior was selling it before he went into the Coast Guard, but with nothing in my pocket I couldn’t make it work. There was a Vega GT going cheap at a used lot over the city line, and the dealer was offering a loan, but a Vega GT was a girl’s idea of a muscle car, and there was the matter of the color: canary yellow, for Christ’s sake, with white interior. The sight of it would have drawn laughs from my gearhead crowd. So I settled for a ’68 pea-green-over-pea-green Dart with the legendary Slant 6 engine. My father, a diehard Mopar man, approved. An old lady on our street who was blind as Stevie Wonder sold it to me for much less than it was worth and let me pay on it monthly. It was a good, dependable vehicle, but dependable was not what I wanted. A guy’s dick should get hard when he gets under the wheel of his first car. Driving that Dart was like taking your sister to the prom.

  To pour salt on my wound, my brother was soon to own one of the coolest rides on the street. How that came about shouldn’t be much of a surprise, as cars were always passing through my father’s garage. When he saw one that was cherry, and he knew, he’d sometimes make an offer to the owner, mostly for grins. That’s what happened when the ’70 Barracuda pulled in for an oil change. Ted was about to come home from his thirteen-month tour, and Pop wanted to do something special for him upon his return. My father used some of Mom’s life-insurance money and his own savings to buy the car.

  With the 1970 E-body Barracuda, Plymouth had introduced a new-platform vehicle meant to compete with the Mustang and Camaro. Through ’69, the Barracuda had basically been a glorified version of the Valiant, but in ’70 its look was completely redesigned and made available in all varieties of muscle. The car my father bought for Ted was a customized 383 with a four-barrel Edelbrock carb, dual-exhaust, a Slick Shift, console-mount automatic transmission, and after-market Cragar mags. It wasn’t the 440 Six Pack, the holy grail for enthusiasts, but it was plenty fast. And though it was offered in period-popular neon-bright hues like Lime Light, Curious Yellow, and In-Violet, this one’s color scheme was strong and classic: black body, black interior, black vinyl roof. Triple black.

  I was a senior in high school and working as a full-service pump jockey at my father’s gas station when Ted returned from Nam. His wasn’t a hero’s welcome, exactly, but where we lived there was none of the spitting-on-veterans thing you’ve heard about. Toward the end of the war most Americans had begun to understand that the young men who’d served in Vietnam were not at fault for the darker aspects of the confli
ct but, rather, were victims of it. It’s not like Ted had committed any atrocities. To my knowledge, he hadn’t even fired his M16 after basic training. But he’d served his country, and he was a Marine, and in my neighborhood that meant something.

  My father owned a slate-blue Belvedere with a 318 engine and a posi-rear. The day Ted came back we took Pop’s car to the airport, picked up my brother, had lunch at our town’s Greek diner, and drove back over to our street. Ted almost cried when he saw the ’Cuda parked in the driveway. “It’s for you, son,” my father said. Ted was still in uniform and it’s hard to forget the way he looked, tall and handsome, and how he hugged our father, the way they held each other, on the sidewalk that day outside our house. I wasn’t jealous. I only wanted my father to look at me with admiration, the way he looked at Ted. I just didn’t know what to do to make that happen.

  Ted moved into his old room and settled in. He registered for the upcoming semester at our community college, a couple of classes to ease into it, and got a job as a salesman at a store that sold high-end audio equipment, which was something of a craze at the time. He had always had an interest in electronics, loved rock music, and had bought a tube-amp stereo when he was overseas, so the gig was in his wheelhouse. Despite the fact that he was somewhat introverted and not a guy you’d think could talk someone into it, Ted seemed to like the job.

  When Ted wasn’t working or in his room listening to records, he was washing, polishing, checking the fluids, or driving his ’Cuda. He was rarely alone. He’d had a girlfriend, Francesca, since tenth grade, and they’d survived the usual infidelities (him with Southeast Asian whores, her with a couple of local guys) during his deployment. Francesca took care of her invalid father and worked in the box office of a single-screen movie theater up at the shopping plaza, so she was frequently occupied. When she wasn’t riding next to Ted, I was in the shotgun bucket beside him. Since he’d returned, we’d gotten pretty tight.

  The summer after I graduated was a good one. Gerald Ford, a decent man, had stepped in as president, the war had ended, and a kind of calm was in the air. I wasn’t going on to college, but I had worked hard to earn a high-school diploma, and I felt as if I had accomplished something. Pop told me that I could shadow him in the garage, and if I took the courses offered to Esso employees, I could eventually become a certified mechanic. Also, I was going around with an older girl named Diane, who had been graced with raven-black hair, lively green eyes, and curves. She was patient, taught me how to last, and showed me what a woman liked. We saw each other a couple times a week, and when we didn’t, she never asked why. I was relaxed and free.