Middle C (54 page)

Joey had parked the car alongside a vacant lot a few blocks away and well out of Miriam’s customary lines of sight. There it had sat for some weeks, out of commish, he insisted, to smooth out the scowls of doubt from his mother’s face. It really was a field of metal weed. The car’s soft tires demonstrated fatigue; its pale orange color had the pallor of weak rust. It did seem abandoned, and Joseph hoped the neighbors would complain, so it might then be towed away by the city to serve as spare parts. More than once he had dreamed of the organs and other elements of his body being distributed like prizes among the maimed. A shoulder here, for someone to cry on, a liver for an alcoholic writer, a spare ear for a tone-impaired musician, a tear to repair a dry eye, each part and appendage arriving promptly at their posts, ready to take up, anonymously, their new duties. These were pleasant dreams, the sort his mother once nightly wished for him as he began his brief encircle of the earth.

Was he not a criminal and the Bumbler his getaway car? In answer, Joey had left behind nothing of himself. He imagined he had wiped the seats and dashboard free of any previous owner’s mischief, and the wheel clean of incriminating prints. Maps that might have given away habitual routes, grocery lists, and other trash had been removed. A soda bottle that had been thrust into a door pocket, because Joey couldn’t bear to touch it, remained until Joseph, with a gloved hand, achieved its extraction. Despite these precautions, an umbrella lay neglected in the trunk. The Bumbler’s slide backward into a humiliating dent had made it very difficult to retrieve the jack. There was no spare.

The days when the car was of great service were over. It had allowed itself to be driven between Woodbine and Urichstown for nearly a year. The word “driven” seemed supremely appropriate. Joey felt the need to remind his mother, when discussing their vehicle’s parlous condition, that the Bumbler had been backslid

down a hillside                             
over snow and ice

during the early edge of night

                      by a screaming Major,

only to return

to Woodbine, its tail in a crook. Subsequently it was compelled to journey in petulant jerks around the county over a period whose conservative measure was several college semesters. Joey claimed to have lost count of similar treks the Bumbler had bravely undergone, its body full of fear, its engine of trepidation. Why did we risk mechanical failure or suffer the threat of arrest, my dear mom? To visit the smug new weds and their freshly harvested seed? To run errands of no need and less import? To satisfy selfish and sentimental wishes called love? Of no need because the Boulders had a far better car than the Bumbler and could safely make the required round-trip. As for weekly duties, the grocery store was an unimpeded downhill walk and, in its pleasant old-fashioned way, filled orders and made deliveries in the grateful light of late afternoon when its boy was out of school. So it needn’t be driven to. Or in parallels to park. Of less import because grandmotherly visits to their last offspring will scarcely alter the spin of the planet. The kid will grow up in a nation perpetually at war and indifferent to the safety of its citizens. Cars will carry guns and fly flags. The kid is going to be an important part of my world, Miriam said firmly, as if she had already thought about it. Even if he is a Boulder, the boy is the best thing that has happened to our family since we arrived in this country. We shall never know what the best thing is, Joseph declaimed with an emphasis that stepped equally on every word. Are you going to ferry me to the farm so I can hear this baby talk and chortle, to see him walk, or not? Why do you speak of “world,” Professor Skizzen replied, when your glimpse of it is like that straw mat of hall light that sneaks under your door at night. Hah! Miriam scornfully said, we inhabit a hotel now, do we? What of the world I don’t see I shall ring for!
DO NOT DISTURB
hangs on all our hearts, Joey shouted, shocking both of them into laughter. As a consequence of Miriam’s bullyraging, the Bumbler’s humiliating servitude, dangerous to itself, its driver, and the road, lasted two years longer than anyone expected. Despite that, the poor wreck was cursed instead of praised, its wounds scorned, as if, again, it had fought in the wrong war.

Now his sister—
his
sister—had a baby big as its bellow. Joey called Debbie a cow to draw attention to her milk-heavy breasts, but his mother put an outraged stop to that. Honor the mother! honor the sister! older than you! properly married! suitably respected! And my small pleasures should receive your smile! No more of your excuses! Don’t you forget
I mothered you! held my breasts to your greedy mouth! You weren’t a baby when you were a baby—your father took away your childhood and gave you war instead—but you’ve grown into one—that’s right, an infant—spoiled as last year’s apple—to be jealous of your sister’s sweet sunny cuddlesome cutie. Miriam’s tone had slipped into a croon but in a moment recovered itself. He sleeps through the night. Can you say the same! I’ve heard you scratching about the house for something missing. Miriam would bring in her voice for a landing and then, without a gear newly engaged, go on to boast of the boy’s fat legs, his rolling eyes, and squeals of astonishment.

Joey had visions of his car going conk in the middle of a cornfield. He drove in fear of the police and his own lack of education at the wheel. Every year he grew more apprehensive about the day—in every other way quite ordinary—in which Authority would come and take him suddenly, in shame and chains, to the clink. The cause would be an accident, an arrest, an account overdrawn, a signature faked, a vengeful pupil, a person from his past, a colleague, out of curiosity or suspicion, who had researched his file, an innocent clue … a … who knew? He had once wanted bank accounts and credit cards; to have ID was a victory; but now he saw the wisdom in cutting as many connections to the Machine of Modern Life as he could sever. Sometimes Joey dreamed, not of dismemberment (he’d let that happen in his sleep), but of jollity and a little peppy music set to a rhyme relentless as sirens—

The Machine of Modern Life

will insist you have a wife,

will demand you vote for strife—

the bomb the gun the knife—

but especially wed a wife

with whom to spend your life,

and tho with troubles rife

continue to be blithe

in the grip of modern life.

These lines should be repeated incessantly but each time accompanied by a different solo instrument. And animal illustrations of the text held up for listeners to see: a muskrat running from a potato peeler.

Joey’s plan, which had gradually matured until it received Joseph’s okay, was elegant in its simplicity and design. He would drive the car back to Lowell and to the scrap yard where he’d found it. He would seek out Miss Spiky and ceremoniously return the Bumbler to her with his thanks. Then he would pop on the bus that passed that point on its way from Urichstown to Woodbine. The car would thus, like a South American protester, disappear. This escapade, as he saw it, would be a big step back, but the step would take him even more deeply into anonymity and its protections. It would also force Boulder to fetch and carry Miriam on her grandmotherly visits. Better yet, it would lessen the need for his attendance at these deeply humiliating gaga occasions.

Once the Bumbler decided to move, the trip to Lowell went without incident. That, to Joey, was a minor miracle and the car’s last gift to him. At Lowell, however, matters began to sour. The yellow oil drum had a deep crease across its middle that made it bend as if kowtowing, and rust had eaten through its base. A wire fence had been planted along the front of the yard, but in places its stanchions danced perilously close to the ground. The Airstream still stood on its cinder blocks, but it appeared to have been idle for a long time, and ignorant of company. The side screen door hung from one hinge, while the wooden steps to the entry had sagged and seemed suspended now from the few tougher grains in its board. There was no line of cars to face the highway, only untidy patches of resilient weed and puddles so filled with oil they couldn’t evaporate. They gave the sky an iridescent leer. With a groan Joey drove Bumbler over a low point in the fence and left the car where it stalled.

One thing went to Joey’s satisfaction. Once enmeshed, Bumbler looked at home.

The scrap in the scrap yard seemed scrappier than he remembered; the large piles of metal were now small and ate slowly at one another like couples in a lengthy marriage. There were still a few gatherings of running boards, bumpers, and grilles, as well as melted cardboard boxes from which spilled wipers, hinges, and latches. What a desolate place, Joey and Joseph thought. Unlike buildings after bombing, these remains had no dynamics, inertia was their god. Rainbow-colored water was that deity’s substitute for incense. Professor Skizzen rapped on some tinny-looking pieces, but there was no spring in their response, no music in this mess of messes. All things have their demise, even stone its catacomb.

Of Miss Spiky there was no evidence. Professor Skizzen had saved up a sigh appropriate for cemeteries, and he used it now. He did not regret missing Miss Spiky in this place of her business, though his intent had been to see her, because she made him uneasy and ashamed of the feeling. Where did you stand, he wondered, to expect the bus.

While he waited, wishing he had brought a suitcase he could sit on, Joseph Skizzen suffered several sorts of reverie. Cars would rise over the nearby hill and rush down toward the spot he had chosen. Drivers must think him an odd hitchhiker, with his funny cap, his young goatee, and his black-and-white knickers. Joseph’s vacant gaze rose for no reason toward the ridge. Traffic was light and shot indifferently past Lowell, whose old church spire you could barely see beyond the trees that formed the rear of the junkyard. He felt slightly chilled and quite alone. Wasn’t this what he had feared: to be broken down, inappropriately dressed, on a country road far from any viable town? The light for that day had realized its age, and was feeling its weakness. Most bushes, trees—all feisty replacement growth—were leafless now, revealing their skeletal configurations. Joey, Joseph, and the professor stood in their own puddles of stupidity and noted the time between trucks. The still air had some heaviness though the shadows through which it passed had given it a slight bite. Wasn’t he sporting his best duds just to impress Miss Spiky and elicit her laughter? There were other hints of winter, he observed. Cars raced their reflections up and down the hill, the shadows shrinking or enlarging as they ran, and seeming faster, to Joseph’s eye, than they really were—always ahead, never behind—so that when the highway emptied, he felt he was being painted into his posture.

Professor Skizzen imagined that beneath each heap of wheels or side-view mirrors or backseat springs there lived a singing spirit and that during the earliest edge of dawn any unlikely visitor could hear them, as a chorus, making a mournful moaning punctuated by Miss Spiky’s contralto—she the secret conductor of these ritual performances—in an oratorio of the discarded, the used up, the forgotten, those standing alone at the side of an empty road always just before dawn … always before or, at twilight, always after. What would that stack of tires behind the Airstream contribute? or that pile of bruised bumpers near the collapsing shed? because these were, after all, pieces that once composed the American dream—the automobile—that freed us to leave, move,
travel, get around. Should these stacks sing of the speedometer that had made us equal, the backseats that had offered us sex, the accelerator that had given us power, the wheelbases that had conferred prestige? Or should they complain of their fate, like the Bumbler who had been left pinioned in a tangle of wire, the driver’s window not quite closed, so a bird might fly in, an animal enter?

Leave them to their fate, the professor said, and tried to mean it, because, were all the pieces in these piles reassembled, what you would display here would not be an advert for used cars but a quite ordinary murderers’ row.

Joseph thought that the highway needed repair. The asphalt, without a good curb, was being slowly squeezed thin at the edges, and places where pots would form by next spring were visible, even from where he was standing. This stretch, at any rate, needed work, its no-pass yellow line as faint as a cola straw; but roads like this one only trickled from town to town so the concern for them was equally meager and intermittent. You could tell he was marooned in small farm country because of the frequency of light trucks, many of which looked as if they were ready to be returned to this dump where they might have been bought. Debbie’s husband (Joseph forced himself to think “Boulder”) doubtless had a red one parked in his potato barn.

Joey dreamed that he ran to the middle of the road like an old-time highwayman, flagged down a truck with a (providentially provided) wimpy driver, whom he dragged unceremoniously out of his cab, to drive the rig to Woodbine at reckless speeds with whoops of glee. He wanted out of this place where he was presently cold, had the need of a pee, feet that were tired, a heart that was fearful, and a revulsion for scrap yards, cinders, and fat people. When the light failed he’d have to shortcut through the lot to reach the road into Lowell, and there he could expect … what? I’ve never been there, he thought, but it is hardly even a dot upon the map, a dim dot, at that. The warehouse that lived a vacant field away had burned some time ago and was only now a dark smear; the gas station had gone up in the same fire; and the nearby store was boarded and apparently abandoned. It was altogether not a nice spot for a picnic. Yes, here he’d put pee before picnic. The sign for the trailer farm remained, however, like an old-fashioned storyteller who never tires.