"Okay," Bob said, "but does it work without the brake?"
"Does it say anyplace in the motor-vehicle-inspection manual that it hasta?" Rocky asked craftily.
Bob sighed. His wife was waiting dinner. His wife had large floppy breasts and blond hair that was black at the roots. His wife was partial to Donuts by the Dozen, a product sold at the local Giant Eagle store. When his wife came to the garage on Thursday nights for her bingo money her hair was usually done up in large green rollers under a green chiffon scarf. This made her head look like a futuristic AM/FM radio. Once, near three in the morning, he had wakened and looked at her slack paper face in the soulless graveyard glare of the streetlight outside their bedroom window. He had thought how easy it could be--just jackknife over on top of her, just drive a knee into her gut so she would lose her air and be unable to scream, just screw both hands around her neck. Then just put her in the tub and whack her into prime cuts and mail her away someplace to Robert Driscoll, c/o General Delivery. Any old place. Lima, Indiana. North Pole, New Hampshire. Intercourse, Pennsylvania. Kunkle, Iowa. Any old place. It could be done. God knew it had been done in the past.
"No," he told Rocky, "I guess it doesn't say anyplace in the regs that they have to work on their own. Exactly. In so many words." He upended the can and the rest of the beer gurgled down his throat. It was warm in the garage and he had had no supper. He could feel the beer rise immediately into his mind.
"Hey, Stiff Socks just came up empty!" Rocky said. "Hand up a brew, Leo."
"No, Rocky, I really . . ."
Leo, who was seeing none too well, finally happened on a can. "Want a wide receiver?" he asked, and passed the can to Rocky. Rocky handed it to Bob, whose demurrals petered out as he held the can's cold actuality in his hand. It bore the smiling face of Lynn Swann. He opened it. Leo farted homily to close the transaction.
All of them drank from football-player cans for a moment.
"Horn work?" Bob finally asked, breaking the silence apologetically.
"Sure." Rocky hit the ring with his elbow. It emitted a feeble squeak. "Battery's a little low, though."
They drank in silence.
"That goddam rat was as big as a cocker spaniel!" Leo exclaimed.
"Kid's carrying quite a load," Rocky explained.
Bob thought about it. "Yuh," he said.
This struck Rocky's funnybone and he cackled through a mouthful of beer. A little trickled out of his nose, and this made Bob laugh. It did Rocky good to hear him, because Bob had looked like one sad sack when they had rolled in.
They drank in silence awhile more.
"Diana Rucklehouse," Bob said meditatively.
Rocky sniggered.
Bob chuckled and held his hands out in front of his chest.
Rocky laughed and held his own out even further.
Bob guffawed. "You member that picture of Ursula Andress that Tinker Johnson pasted on ole lady Freemantle's bulletin board?"
Rocky howled. "And he drawed on those two big old jahoobies--"
"--and she just about had a heart-attack--"
"You two can laugh," Leo said morosely, and farted.
Bob blinked at him. "Huh?"
"Laugh," Leo said. "I said you two can laugh. Neither of you has got a hole in your back. "
"Don't lissen to him," Rocky said (a trifle uneasily). "Kid's got a skinful."
"You got a hole in your back?" Bob asked Leo.
"The laundry," Leo said, smiling. "We got these big washers, see? Only we call 'em wheels. They're laundry wheels. That's why we call 'em wheels. I load 'em, I pull 'em, I load'em again. Put the shit in dirty, take the shit out clean. That's what I do, and I do it with class." He looked at Bob with insane confidence. "Got a hole in my back from doing it, though."
"Yeah?" Bob was looking at Leo with fascination. Rocky shifted uneasily.
"There's a hole in the roof," Leo said. "Right over the third wheel. They're round, see, so we call 'em wheels. When it rains, the water comes down. Drop drop drop. Each drop hits me--whap!--in the back. Now I got a hole there. Like this." He made a shallow curve with one hand. "Wanna see?"
"He don't want to see any such deformity!" Rocky shouted. "We're talkin about old times here and there ain't no effing hole in your back anyway!"
"I wanna see it," Bob said.
"They're round so we call it the laundry," Leo said.
Rocky smiled and clapped Leo on the shoulder. "No more of this talk or you could be walking home, my good little buddy. Now why don't you hand me up my namesake if there's one left?"
Leo peered down into the carton of beer, and after a while he handed up a can with Rocky Blier on it.
"Atta way to go!" Rocky said, cheerful again.
The entire case was gone an hour later, and Rocky sent Leo stumbling up the road to Pauline's Superette for more. Leo's eyes were ferret-red by this time, and his shirt had come untucked. He was trying with myopic concentration to get his Camels out of his rolled-up shirt sleeve. Bob was in the bathroom, urinating and singing the school song.
"Doan wanna walk up there," Leo muttered.
"Yeah, but you're too fucking drunk to drive."
Leo walked in a drunken semicircle, still trying to coax his cigarettes out of his shirt sleeve. " 'Z dark. And cold."
"You wanna get a sticker on that car or not?" Rocky hissed at him. He had begun to see weird things at the edges of his vision. The most persistent was a huge bug wrapped in spider-silk in the far corner.
Leo looked at him with his scarlet eyes. "Ain't my car," he said with bogus cunning.
"And you'll never ride in it again, neither, if you don't go and get that beer," Rocky said. He glanced fearfully at the dead bug in the corner. "You just try me and see if I'm kidding."
"Okay," Leo whined. "Okay, you don't have to get pissy about it."
He walked off the road twice on his way up to the corner and once on the way back. When he finally achieved the warmth and light of the garage again, both of them were singing the school song. Bob had managed, by hook or by crook, to get the Chrysler up on the lift. He was wandering around underneath it, peering at the rusty exhaust system.
"There's some holes in your stray' pipe," he said.
"Ain no stray pipes under there," Rocky said. They both found this spit-sprayingly funny.
"Beer's here!" Leo announced, put the case down, sat on a wheel rim, and fell immediately into a half-doze. He had swallowed three himself on the way back to lighten the load.
Rocky handed Bob a beer and held one himself.
"Race? Just like ole times?"
"Sure," Bob said. He smiled tightly. In his mind's eye he could see himself in the cockpit of a low-to-the-ground, streamlined Formula One racer, one hand resting cockily on the wheel as he waited for the drop of the flag, the other touching his lucky piece--the hood ornament from a '59 Mercury. He had forgotten Rocky's straight pipe and his blowsy wife with her transistorized hair curlers.
They opened their beers and chugged them. It was a dead heat; both dropped their cans to the cracked concrete and raised their middle fingers at the same time. Their belches echoed off the walls like rifle shots.
"Just like ole times," Bob said, sounding forlorn. "Nothing's just like ole times, Rocky."
"I know it," Rocky agreed. He struggled for a deep, luminous thought and found it. "We're gettin older by the day, Stiffy."
Bob sighed and belched again. Leo farted in the comer and began to hum "Get Off My Cloud."
"Try again?" Rocky asked, handing Bob another beer.
"Mi' as well," Bob said; "mi' jus' as well, Rocky m'boy."
The case Leo had brought back was gone by midnight, and the new inspection was affixed on the left side of Rocky's windshield at a slightly crazy angle. Rocky had made out the pertinent information himself before slapping the sticker on, working carefully to copy over the numbers from the tattered and greasy registration he had finally found in the glove compartment. He had to work carefully, because
he was seeing triple. Bob sat cross-legged on the floor like a yoga master, a half-empty can of I.C. in front of him. He was staring fixedly at nothing.
"Well, you sure saved my life, Bob," Rocky said. He kicked Leo in the ribs to wake him up. Leo grunted and whoofed. His lids flickered briefly, closed, then flew open wide when Rocky footed him again.
"We home yet, Rocky? We--"
"You just shake her easy, Bobby," Rocky cried cheerfully. He hooked his fingers into Leo's armpit and yanked. Leo came to his feet, screaming. Rocky half-carried him around the Chrysler and shoved him into the passenger seat. "We'll stop back and do her again sometime."
"Those were the days," Bob said. He had grown wet-eyed. "Since then everything just gets worse and worse, you know it?"
"I know it," Rocky said. "Everything has been refitted and beshitted. But you just keep your thumb on it, and don't do anything I wouldn't d--"
"My wife ain't laid me in a year and a half," Bob said, but the words were blanketed by the coughing misfire of Rocky's engine. Bob got to his feet and watched the Chrysler back out of the bay, taking a little wood from the left side of the door.
Leo hung out the window, smiling like an idiot saint. "Come by the laundry sometime, skinner. I'll show you the hole in my back. I'll show you my wheels! I'll show y--" Rocky's arm suddenly shot out like a vaudeville hook and pulled him into the dimness.
"Bye, fella!" Rocky yelled.
The Chrysler did a drunken slalom around the three gas-pump islands and bucketed off into the night. Bob watched until the taillights were only flickerflies and then walked carefully back inside the garage. On his cluttered workbench was a chrome ornament from some old car. He began to play with it, and soon he was crying cheap tears for the old days. Later, some time after three in the morning, he strangled his wife and then burned down the house to make it look like an accident.
"Jesus," Rocky said to Leo as Bob's garage shrank to a point of white light behind them. "How about that? Ole Stiffy." Rocky had reached that stage of drunkenness where every part of himself seemed gone except for a tiny, glowing coal of sobriety somewhere deep in the middle of his mind.
Leo did not reply. In the pale green light thrown by the dashboard instruments, he looked like the dormouse at Alice's tea party.
"He was really bombarded," Rocky went on. He drove on the left side of the road for a while and then the Chrysler wandered back. "Good thing for you--he prob'ly won't remember what you tole him. Another time it could be different. How many times do I have to tell you? You got to shut up about this idea that you got a fucking hole in your back."
"You know I got a hole in my back. "
"Well, so what?"
"It's my hole, that's so what. And I'll talk about my hole whenever I--"
He looked around suddenly.
"Truck behind us. Just pulled out of that side road. No lights."
Rocky looked up into the rearview mirror. Yes, the truck was there, and its shape was distinctive. It was a milk truck. He didn't have to read CRAMER'S DAIRY on the side to know whose it was, either.
"It's Spike," Rocky said fearfully. "It's Spike Milligan! Jesus, I thought he only made morning deliveries!"
"Who?"
Rocky didn't answer. A tight, drunk grin spread over his lower face. It did not touch his eyes, which were now huge and red, like spirit lamps.
He suddenly floored the Chrysler, which belched blue oil smoke and reluctantly creaked its way up to sixty.
"Hey! You're too drunk to go this fast! You're . . ." Leo paused vaguely, seeming to lose track of his message. The trees and houses raced by them, vague blurs in the graveyard of twelve-fifteen. They blew by a stop sign and flew over a large bump, leaving the road for a moment afterwards. When they came down, the low-hung muffler struck a spark on the asphalt. In the back, cans clinked and rattled. The faces of Pittsburgh Steeler players rolled back and forth, sometimes in the light, sometimes in shadow.
"I was fooling!" Leo said wildly. "There ain't no truck!"
"It's him and he kills people!" Rocky screamed. "I seen his bug back in the garage! God damn!"
They roared up Southern Hill on the wrong side of the road. A station wagon coming in the other direction skidded crazily over the gravel shoulder and down into the ditch getting out of their way. Leo looked behind him. The road was empty.
"Rocky--"
"Come and get me, Spike!" Rocky screamed. "You just come on and get me!"
The Chrysler had reached eighty, a speed which Rocky in a more sober frame of mind would not have believed possible. They came around the turn which leads onto the Johnson Flat Road, smoke spurting up from Rocky's bald tires. The Chrysler screamed into the night like a ghost, lights searching the empty road ahead.
Suddenly a 1959 Mercury roared at them out of the dark, straddling the center line. Rocky screamed and threw his hands up in front of his face. Leo had just time to see the Mercury was missing its hood ornament before the crash came.
Half a mile behind, lights flickered on at a side crossing, and a milk truck with CRAMER'S DAIRY written on the side pulled out and began to move toward the pillar of flame and the twisted blackening hulks in the center of the road. It moved at a sedate speed. The transistor dangling by its strap from the meathook played rhythm and blues.
"That's it," Spike said. "Now we're going over to Bob Driscoll's house. He thinks he's got gasoline out in his garage, but I'm not sure he does. This has been one very long day, wouldn't you agree?" But when he turned around, the back of the truck was empty. Even the bug was gone.
Gramma
George's mother went to the door, hesitated there, came back, and tousled George's hair. "I don't want you to worry," she said. "You'll be all right. Gramma, too."
"Sure, I'll be okay. Tell Buddy to lay chilly."
"Pardon me?"
George smiled. "To stay cool."
"Oh. Very funny." She smiled back at him, a distracted, going-in-six-directions-at-once smile. "George, are you sure--"
"I'll be fine."
Are you sure what? Are you sure you're not scared to be alone with Gramma? Was that what she was going to ask?
If it was, the answer is no. After all, it wasn't like he was six anymore, when they had first come here to Maine to take care of Gramma, and he had cried with terror whenever Gramma held out her heavy arms toward him from her white vinyl chair that always smelled of the poached eggs she ate and the sweet bland powder George's mom rubbed into her flabby, wrinkled skin; she held out her white-elephant arms, wanting him to come to her and be hugged to that huge and heavy old white-elephant body: Buddy had gone to her, had been enfolded in Gramma's blind embrace, and Buddy had come out alive... but Buddy was two years older.
Now Buddy had broken his leg and was at the CMG Hospital in Lewiston.
"You've got the doctor's number if something should go wrong. Which it won't. Right?"
"Sure," he said, and swallowed something dry in his throat. He smiled. Did the smile look okay? Sure. Sure it did. He wasn't scared of Gramma anymore. After all, he wasn't six anymore. Mom was going up to the hospital to see Buddy and he was just going to stay here and lay chilly. Hang out with Gramma awhile. No problem.
Mom went to the door again, hesitated again, and came back again, smiling that distracted, going-six-ways-at-once smile. "If she wakes up and calls for her tea--"
"I know," George said, seeing how scared and worried she was underneath that distracted smile. She was worried about Buddy, Buddy and his dumb Pony League, the coach had called and said Buddy had been hurt in a play at the plate, and the first George had known of it (he was just home from school and sitting at the table eating some cookies and having a glass of Nestle's Quik) was when his mother gave a funny little gasp and said, Hurt? Buddy? How bad?
"I know all that stuff, Mom. I got it knocked. Negative perspiration. Go on, now."
"You're a good boy, George. Don't be scared. You're not scared of Gramma anymore, are you?"
"Huh-uh," G
eorge said. He smiled. The smile felt pretty good; the smile of a fellow who was laying chilly with negative perspiration on his brow, the smile of a fellow who Had It Knocked, the smile of a fellow who was most definitely not six anymore. He swallowed. It was a great smile, but beyond it, down in the darkness behind his smile, was one very dry throat. It felt as if his throat was lined with mittenwool. "Tell Buddy I'm sorry he broke his leg."
"I will," she said, and went to the door again. Four-o' clock sunshine slanted in through the window. "Thank God we took the sports insurance, Georgie. I don't know what we'd do if we didn't have it."
"Tell him I hope he tagged the sucker out."
She smiled her distracted smile, a woman of just past fifty with two late sons, one thirteen, one eleven, and no man. This time she opened the door, and a cool whisper of October came in through the sheds.
"And remember, Dr. Arlinder--"
"Sure," he said. "You better go or his leg'll be fixed by the time you get there."
"She'll probably sleep the whole time," Mom said. "I love you, Georgie. You're a good son." She closed the door on that.
George went to the window and watched her hurry to the old '69 Dodge that burned too much gas and oil, digging the keys from her purse. Now that she was out of the house and didn't know George was looking at her, the distracted smile fell away and she only looked distracted--distracted and sick with worry about Buddy. George felt bad for her. He didn't waste any similar feelings on Buddy, who liked to get him down and sit on top of him with a knee on each of George's shoulders and tap a spoon in the middle of George's forehead until he just about went crazy (Buddy called it the Spoon Torture of the Heathen Chinee and laughed like a madman and sometimes went on doing it until George cried), Buddy who sometimes gave him the Indian Rope Burn so hard that little drops of blood would appear on George's forearm, sitting on top of the pores like dew on blades of grass at dawn, Buddy who had listened so sympathetically when George had one night whispered in the dark of their bedroom that he liked Heather MacArdle and who the next morning ran across the schoolyard screaming GEORGE AND HEATHER UP IN A TREE, KAY-EYE-ESS-ESS-EYE-EN-GEE! FIRSE COMES LOVE AN THEN COMES MARRITCH! HERE COMES HEATHER WITH A BABY CARRITCH! like a runaway fire engine. Broken legs did not keep older brothers like Buddy down for long, but George was rather looking forward to the quiet as long as this one did. Let's see you give me the Spoon Torture of the Heathen Chinee with your leg in a cast, Buddy. Sure, kid--EVERY day.