The Spark and the Drive (13 page)

“Big block?” Heller said now.

A long moment passed before Nick said, “I’m not used to having to say.”

Motts laughed. “Fuckin’ A. He got you, Heller.”

“Yeah, but you got Brainiac,” Heller said, and God how I despised that nickname. I thought of how in school, by the myth of familiarity that a nickname implies, I’d fooled myself into believing that these people would someday be my friends.

“He knows what I got,” Heller said to Nick. “You’re one up on me.”

“It’s a big block,” Nick said. “Four twenty-seven.”

“Nitrous?”

Nick shook his head.

“I can smell it,” Motts said. “Giggle gas smells like rock candy.” A guy I didn’t know, standing suddenly beside Motts and holding a bottle of Bacardi, said, “You’re a fucking goon, Motts,” and Motts spat his snuff juice and said, “You laugh like you got rubber bands on your balls.” Motts looked at me, grinning, and with no choice except to take his side I grinned back and dared myself to speak. “You guys having a party back there?”

“Anderson’s old man croaked,” Motts said. “Everybody brought shit to burn.”

“I wouldn’t of burnt a good fishing pole,” the guy with the Bacardi said. “Reel and everything. Like a reel’s gonna burn.”

They set the race at three hundred dollars. Since the Corvette was lighter than the Charger, I would ride with Nick while Heller raced alone. Nick agreed to the condition reluctantly and looked a little irritated when the guys explained the fairness of it, which was all pool-shark strategy. Nick didn’t know it, but his attitude of not giving a damn about making friends was going to make him friends. From his wallet he counted out twenties and fifties. Motts came to his window and as he took the bills he said, “That first red oak after the finish line, start laying on the brakes. You got around a thousand feet before it turns to dirt, and then it’s your fucking funeral.”

A kid who’d been a year or two behind me, sipping a Sam Adams, called over, “You know what that Chevy cross is for?”

I looked at Nick. “I think he means the bowtie.”

“It means you’re getting crucified,” the kid said.

Nick started the car without seeming to acknowledge the comment, but the word “crucified” sent a chill through me. It suggested death, and death is what there was out here. You could smell it rising from the pavement, that vinegary haze of drying rubber, and in the strange chemistry of fire smoke and carbon monoxide. In seconds I would look into the face of death as the too-dark dark of the woods rushing toward us at speeds in the triple digits. It was the dark of pre-civilization, where cars didn’t belong, gnats and mosquitoes exploding in the two puny cones of headlights, and the end of everything in the shimmering tree trunks if Nick didn’t find his brakes in time.

But then, cheating death was the whole appeal. That was why in the cafeteria at school, where conversation topics rarely lasted longer than a few bites of pizza, where you were a sucker if you cared too much about anything, the races at Wickersham’s were timeless talk. Year after year, freshman through senior, it made the most unexcitable guys blush and stutter.

Eavesdropping from another table, I’d heard about the close calls—fishtails at the start, locking brakes at the finish, stupefied raccoons scampering out in between—and was amazed that no one had ever been killed out there. But tonight it seemed a little less by dumb luck than by design that wrecks were minimized. There were two rules pertaining to safety, though of course the rationale was explained as keeping the cars in one piece, which was a more manly concern than not getting hurt. The track had to be kept clean. To this effect there were two push brooms nearby, and when someone mindlessly flicked his cigarette sparking onto one of the lanes, he was slapped across the back of the head and told to get his ass over there and pick it up. The second rule was that if you were there to race, you stayed away from the keg. Sheriff Reynolds had donated a Breathalyzer for this reason, and everyone took a blow on it before money on the race was even discussed.

Motts used the fanned-out bills as a flag, and when he brought it down there was only thrust. Nick jumped forward and eased off, letting Heller up to the front fender with a lazy shift to second, more concerned with the illusion of neck-and-neck than with winning. Most of the race, my door was even with the back quarter-panel of the Charger, and in the last seconds Nick bumped ahead to win.

After we stopped, Heller came running over to us. Instinctively I slid my elbow over and locked my door.

“Goddamn it, that was close!” Heller yelled. “I missed third a little, did you hear it? That was fucking inches.” He started laughing. He might have been hollering that he’d won.

On the drive back to my car, Nick handed me a hundred dollars for thirteen-seconds’ work. “You plugged us in,” he said and glanced at me. “You don’t mind taking their money?”

I couldn’t say no emphatically enough.

“They your friends?”

“Just guys from school.”

Nick shifted gears, and then he did something unlike him, something Bobby might do. He reached over and patted me on my thigh. It wasn’t a hard pat or a soft one, but exactly the right impact to say to hell with all of them. “They’re goofball hicks,” he said, and it was the most insulting thing I’d ever hear him say, making me ashamed of all I’d ever done to try to win their assholing approval. He squeezed my thigh once and took his hand back.

“Was it enough money?” I said.

“It’s plenty.”

We both needed cigarettes, but he didn’t want to smoke in the Corvette, so I directed him to a wide shoulder by a suspension bridge over the Pomperaug. We got out and leaned over the iron railing, looking down at the moonlit water as we smoked. “We could have taken him by a second or two,” Nick said.

“Jesus.”

“It’s an embarrassment for a car like this to be in their company.” When his ash fell, his gaze followed it, but you couldn’t see where it hit the water. We stayed on the bridge longer than I’d expected, Nick lighting a second cigarette and a third. And then out of nowhere he said, “You know what they say is proof we’ll never make a time machine?”

I watched him for a moment. “A time machine? Like H. G. Wells?”

“Figure it out,” he said. “You’re smart. What’s the proof it can’t be done?”

My mind was blank, and then the answer was just there. “Because nobody ever came back from one.”

He nodded. “If they figure out how to do it, we’d see somebody come back. There was a NASA guy in the sixties doing research, but the funding got cut. Just like when the EPA said no more high compression. Could you imagine what kind of horsepower we’d be seeing today? Or if NASA kept going with time travel. What good does it do anybody, we landed on the moon?” Animated now, he leaned over the bridge rail.

“There’s a rock ledge down there,” I said, afraid that in his mania he might jump.

“There’s a way it could happen.” He flicked his cigarette away, and in the same second it hissed in the water he had the pack out of his shirt pocket and was getting another. “It’s going to be about gravity. Figuring out how to make it and concentrate it. A passage of some kind. But the thing everyone gets wrong is, you won’t be able to go back to any different time than what you already lived. And you won’t know you’re reliving it. You just will.”

“I don’t know what that means, Nick.”

“Say they get it so you can go back to an exact year. An exact day. You want to go back to Disney World when you were ten, or the night you lost your cherry. You step into that passage and you’re there again. But you don’t know you went back. You’ll live your life exactly like you did all the way up to when you go into the time machine. You have to, or you get the paradox. You’d maybe kill your grandfather by mistake. And you can never
not
get into it. It always ends the same way. It has to.”

“What happens to you after you go into it? Where does your body go?”

“It just goes. You disappear. You don’t live after that second you step in. But you live forever. Get it? You keep living that ten or twenty or fifty years over and over. You got cancer? You got six months to live? You got tragedy? Get in. Go back to the best part of your life forever. Isn’t that better than a flag on the fucking moon?”

16.

On my day off I got a roll of quarters and called Miami from a pay phone. I half expected to hear Lieutenant Castillo’s lifeless voice say, “Vice Division,” but it was a woman who routed me to a detective after a five-minute wait. I told him I had information on Eve Moore, and there was a silence. I wondered if they were putting in the trace. “Do you know who that is?” I said.

“Yes.”

“She’s a drug dealer, right?”

“Can I have your name?” he said. I dared myself to wait, and then in a sharper, less friendly voice he said, “Who is this?”

I hung up the phone.

Ironically, the mystery was solved with the help of Don two nights later. Not long after Eve disappeared I had called and asked him to save me his
New York Times.
It was a random shot, and I’d forgotten all about it until I came home to find ten newspapers on the front stoop under one of Mom’s decorative stones. It was in the “Metro Briefing” section four days after they were supposed to come back for the car.

I read the article aloud the next morning in the locker room. “A man and woman found in an abandoned panel van parked on East 13th Street were identified by police as Dennis Faverau, 44, and Eve Moore, 31. Mr. Faverau had been arrested for burglary and Ms. Moore had been arrested twice on drug-related charges. An autopsy determined that both victims had been shot. Anyone with information about the deaths are asked to call the Crime Stoppers hotline—”

“They wanted to send a message back to Miami,” Bobby said. “Else the bodies never would of been found.”

“Jesus. God,” Ray said and dropped onto the bench where we pulled on our shoes. “I figured, maybe…” He shook his head at the ground. Nick slumped on the wall. Bobby fell into a kind of child’s squat and brushed the concrete floor with three fingers. Ray held his face in his hands.

“They say where she was shot?” Nick said. I shook my head.

“It was pros,” Bobby said. “Head and chest. Had to be.”

“Then maybe she didn’t suffer too much,” Nick said.

“If she told them where the car was, they would’ve been here already,” I said. The way Nick looked at me made me feel insensitive to have thought of that, but it was just that I was twelve hours ahead of them in dealing with the news.

We all felt helpless that day, but Ray took it the worst.

After lunch he kicked over an antifreeze bottle that left a running splatter like green blood on the wall. Then diagnosing a Mustang GT he half-shouted, “Work, you whore.” All the bay doors were open, and in the parking lot the Mustang’s owner flicked his cigarette away and came inside. I intercepted him.

“What’s with that guy?” he said.

“Air compressor’s on the blink,” I said. “Grab yourself some coffee. He’ll come get you soon.”

When I came over, Ray didn’t look up from the Chilton book. The radiator fan was ruffling the pages. “When it won’t set codes, what do you do?” he said. “You go wire by wire on every shitting little sensor. It’s guesswork. Switch this, see what happens, switch that. Bullshit. I’m done. I’ll go sit behind a counter at Carquest.”

“Let me see,” I said.

“You go ahead. Fuck it, I’m getting out when I can still remember real cars. Real motors. Not this dicking around pricking wires.”

“What’s up?” said the owner, behind me all of a sudden.

Ray straightened from the fender. “I want you to see something, now,” he said to the guy. “Take a look over here. You see all these little idiot sensors everywhere?”

“Ray,” I said.

“They can’t take the heat and short out. Here’s what’s making it stall. It’s this thing.” He jiggled a sensor on the side of the fuel injector. “No wait, it’s this thing. Hang on, it’s really this.”

He let go of a harness and swung his hand around, and with a sickening ding of fan blade two of his fingers came off at the knuckle. He held the hand in front of him as if he didn’t understand what it was, the bones emerging white before blood sprayed from them with the pumping of his heart. In my peripheries the shape of one glistening finger lay by his boot, but I couldn’t make myself look at it. He squeezed down over the stumps with his left hand as the fan sprayed his blood back at the car. The last thing I saw after Ray was carried off in the stretcher was Bobby Windexing the bottom of the windshield.

*   *   *

In Mary Ann’s car I stared down at Ray’s finger, gray now where it wasn’t splotched with grease, the nail chewed to the quick. I felt tested and proven. After the moment of panic I’d picked up the finger and even considered washing it, but then I thought I might lose some of his nerve endings down the drain. We didn’t have ice so the finger was lying on a can of Dr Pepper, cold out of the machine, in a gallon Ziploc on my thigh. The middle finger had been sucked in the fan and exploded into the radiator fins. With mixed feelings I realized that just that morning I’d seen him flip the bird right-handed for the very last time.

It wasn’t cardiac arrest but unstable angina brought on by trauma and forty years of smoking. The prognosis was good, and the doctor congratulated me on my job with the finger, which they were sewing back on. Ray would have to stay overnight for monitoring. I’d called his ex-wife in Hartford, and she was on her way.

One nurse said we could see him and another said we had to wait. I didn’t care. Time had stopped and I was getting paid to be here with Mary Ann, my sudden lover and friend. The accident was tragic but not for us, and though we cared about Ray he wasn’t family, so we weren’t sedated with grief like the other couples in the ER waiting rooms, or moping in prayer for an end to suffering like the children of very old people, or confused and miserable like the uninsured sick waiting for one of the urgent-care doctors to see them. We were temporarily stranded, unneeded, smiled at by nurses and ignored by receptionists with phones pressed to their ears.