Downers Grove (7 page)

“Do you suppose that stuff's dangerous?” I asked, sorta hallucinating in the swirling whirlwind of red, white, and blue emergency lights.

“If it was, somebody would of said so by now.”

“Yeah, but what if they didn't? Maybe there's something in those clouds?” I leaned closer to the glass to get a better look. “I don't trust anyone these days, especially the government.”

“How do you know you can trust me?”

“That's a risk I'm willing to take.”

“So you're in a car with a complete stranger, but you're worried about some little puffs of smoke drifting off into outer space.”

“Hey, it's not as illogical as you make it seem, and those aren't little puffs, they're big black balls, thank you.” But then I had to think about it for a second. “You have to trust your instincts. What's right is right,” I added. “You're flesh and blood, who knows what that stuff is.” The cassette tape ended and it felt like a bell announcing the end of round one.

“Isn't it weird how everyone seems so drawn to death and destruction,” I said, peering through the glass, trying to trace the trail of smoke. “Look at all those people!”

“It's sort of religious actually, if you think about it, like passing in front of an altar”—he wiggled the gearshift—“people suddenly feel lucky to be alive.” My mechanic stared into the oncoming headlights as if he had a long line of thoughts racing to a finish line.

“This is way better than religon,” I said. “Church is so boring. And who'd want to go to heaven anyway? I can't think of a worse party.”

“Who said you were invited?”

I looked at him with a strange sense of amusement, something I never felt with anyone else. He had the weirdest point of view and I can't believe he mentioned religion; what a trip. Staring at him in this light he carried a warm alienish glow, and I wanted to believe he was an angel.

“Do you believe in God?” I asked.

“If there wasn't a God, God wouldn't exist.” He looked over at me and smiled.

Touché.
What could I say? My mechanic was a spiritual
Meisterbrau,
a greasy white prince, a minister of machine parts. I felt myself twisting into a chain-link mesh.

The music blended with the wind and the roar of the Charger. The interior was colored by the oncoming blur of passing cars bending through the wide curves of the two-lane road. We drove past the UNOCAL petroleum refineries. Tiny white bulbs traced its skeleton of black and silver pipes. Three musty pill-shaped train cars were parked behind the chain-link fence. Power lines looped over the tree line, disappearing into the Black Partridge Woods.

A thick toxic scent filled the car. My breath was shortened and my face started burning. I tried to rationalize the concept that we had just driven through an industrial accident, that I might be the victim of toxic agencies already chewing through the fibers of my internal organs, that this was probably the beginning of the end. I rolled up the window, checked my reflection in the glass and the huge black plume of smoke pushing farther into the heavens.

“This must be the biggest thing to happen around here since the night they fried John Wayne Gacy,” I said, shifting on the
bucket seat and trying to imagine myself in the electric chair: the first surge of electricity; my hair frying; my fingernails turning black and peeling back; my eyeballs popping out of my head.

“Did you go to that too?”

“No. That was a long time ago. Where are we going?” I asked him.

“My garage.” He coasted through a yellow light. “I gotta check in with some friends before we go anywhere else.” He looked over at me. “It'll only take a minute.”

“Where's your garage?”

“A few more lights,” he said, pointing ahead.

We sped through Lockport. Old brick bungalows and tar papered shacks lined Archer Avenue. The waterfront became a faint glow and then a shadow behind us. I saw a cigar tree, remembered smoking the long finger-shaped seeds when I was in grade school and getting sick as a dog.

Bobby accelerated through another yellow and I felt myself getting too comfortable in the seat, worried this date was going nowhere. We turned off Archer Avenue and wound through a thicket of trees and empty lots across the river from Stateville Penitentiary. In a hollow of trees stood a two-story wood building with the garage door open. A couple of guys were inside working on a dented-up race car. The car had big wide tires and was painted black and orange with a large white number 89 on the door. Behind the garage was a junkyard full of mashed cars. Two large German shepherds paced behind a fence, barking madly, their white teeth snapping, their paws pushing against the wilting chain-link.

“What's that?” I pointed into the garage.

“My ticket out of here,” he said.

“You a race car driver?” I asked.

“Sometimes.” He shut off the engine. The car sputtered to a choking death.

“Where do you race?”

“Wherever they'll let me.” He punched open his door. “Stay here, I'll be right back.”

He got out and pointed at the dogs. “Jonesie, Maxie, down.” He snapped his fingers and the dogs dropped to all fours, then trailed him along the fence line, their tails wagging softly behind them. Bobby said something as he approached his two friends and they all started laughing. One of them looked back at me in the car, then they all disappeared into a doorway. I leaned against the window and stared at the prison across the water. At night, the complex looked like the dark side of Disneyland. All I could think about was all the creepy-crawlies locked inside.

When David and I were kids Mom took us to a prisoner art show. It turned out one of the painters was one of Mom's classmates from high school. I had never seen a murderer before and remember being very excited. He was wearing leg chains and what looked like blue pajamas. He reminded me of those handsome Nazis in old war movies, so that even his good looks seemed sinister. At the time, Mom said he was a basketball player who suffocated a cheerleader with a pillow. We found out several years later that he was gay and that this girl had laughed at him when he couldn't get it up, that she threatened to tell the whole school about it. The weird thing is, I can't remember anything about his painting.

A rusting
BEWARE OF DOG
sign dangled from the barbed-wire fence surrounding the junkyard. The sharp white teeth and shiny black eyes of the dogs cruising the yard were giving me the creeps. I turned up the Nine Inch Nails tape, closed my eyes, and tried to sink into Trent's melodrama.

My mechanic turned out to be more complex and glamorous than I expected. I knew he seemed out of place pumping gas on the corner of Sixty-third and Main. The way he talked, his body language, almost everything he did seemed to hold a hidden agenda. Even now he has to have some secret meeting with his pals.

Whatever they were doing, it seemed to take forever. My stomach was practicing flip-flops. The car was getting cold. The dogs kept pacing, occasionally barking at a bird or some other critter crawling through the weeds. I locked my door as a precaution, then leaned over and locked Bobby's too. The place reaked of urban legends.

Finally, mystery date popped out of the clubhouse and made his way back to the car. When the door burst open, the interior light and car buzzer set the dogs off in another barking frenzy. Bobby clicked himself into the seat belt, started the engine, and backed out of the driveway onto the narrow road. He shifted into first and squealed the tires. My head whipped back against the black vinyl seat.

“What kind of car was that?”

“An 'eighty-four Chevelle with a four-fifty-four engine. It's a beater, but it always starts.” He laughed to himself.

“I can't believe you race cars,” I said. “Why didn't you tell me?

“I didn't know you were into cars,” he said.

“You never asked. Can I come see you race sometime?”

“I don't see why not. It's a free country last time I checked.”

“How long have you been racing?” I asked.

“Since ninth grade.”

“How old are you now?”

“Twenty-six.”

He didn't ask me how old I was. In fact, he didn't ask many questions at all. It was like a long game of truth or dare, only he kept responding “truth.” We crossed over the tracks and rode along Industrial Drive, a semideserted stretch of land bordering the petrochemical plants. Across the street stood a trailer park of bread box homes haphazardly spread among patches of waist-high weeds. We passed an old red barn that was tilted sideways with its roof sagging in the center.
THE TIME IS NEAR
was painted on the roadside wall in fading white letters.

“So how'd you learn to be a mechanic?” I asked.

“I had a beater in high school; a 'sixty-eight Fairlane. One day it started bleeding oil all over the driveway. I didn't have any money so I got the bright idea to take the engine apart and try to fix the leak. The first thing I learned is that it's a lot easier taking apart than putting back together.” He laughed to himself.

“So being a mechanic is sorta like solving a crossword puzzle, right?”

Unsure of the comparison, he looked at me like I was interpreting too fast. “Every car is different. They all have their own personalities.”

“Your friends, are they mechanics too?”

“I met those guys from towing in wrecks off the highway.
One night we sat down and killed a twelve-pack and they started telling stories about racing up in Wisconsin. They built that car out of used parts from the yard.” He made a left turn and was quiet while glancing into his rearview mirror. “The original driver kissed the wall and cracked his ribs. They needed a replacement and I needed the bread, so I volunteered.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Driving that shitbox is like square-dancing with a chain saw.” Bobby stared forward with the determination of a mailman pushing a cart of letters, sucking down one cigarette after another, riding a nicotine wire. From time to time he would space out, and you could tell he was watching his own movie, that he had a multiplex in his mind with never-ending showtimes. My brother was the same way. What is it with men and their glamorous brooding monster within? Bobby's face launched a thousand words but it was still Scrabble as far as I was concerned. Staring, waiting, I wallowed in his silences.

“Your family, they live around here?” I asked. “They all crazy as you?”

“You think I'm crazy?” He turned the music down a hair.

“I think you're unusual. Tell me about your grandfather. My mom says men are always like their grandfathers.”

“My grandfather?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, his name was Charley and he lived right near the Kentucky border. Neighbors used to call him Batman because bats would fly around his house at sunset. The big walnut tree in back was full of them.” He turned and looked over at me in a kinda boyish excitable way. “He was an ambulance driver
and a bootlegger, made most of his money running moonshine into East St. Louis and up north through college towns.”

“No way. Your grandfather?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Was he in the Mafia?”

“No.”

“Was he a good guy or a bad guy?”

“Depends on whose side you're on.”

“Did he ever kill anybody?”

“Just himself.” Bobby shifted, and the car sped faster. “He was racing in a cow field at some county fair. I guess that's all there was in those days. His brakes failed and he kissed the wall. The car went airborne and flipped upside down. The fuel tank burst.” He stared out the window. “That car had the aerodynamics of a yellow pig.”

“Oh my God, that's horrible.”

Bobby lit a cigarette. I leaned against the door and watched him smoke, wondering if he was aware of his own mythology. His body language said he'd visited that novel a million times before.

“Don't you ever get scared?” I asked.

“Driving makes me feel like what's behind me is always getting farther and farther away.”

I wanted to ask him what he was driving away from but was intimidated by the thought of old girlfriends, so I avoided the issue. “Does your dad race cars too?” I asked.

“My dad disappeared over in Vietnam.” He looked out the window, as if Vietnam was just beyond the next patch of trees. “He's MIA. They never found him.”

My endless questioning had just driven the wrong way down
a one-way street. I stared at my fingers, kept crossing and uncrossing them, rubbed my palms together, traced the heart line with my finger. “Do you think he's still alive?”

“Sometimes I like to think he just drifted off from the war and made himself invisible, but I doubt it. I don't have much to go on, just some photographs really.”

I didn't know what to say. Bobby was suddenly distracted by a rush of memories. I could tell by his blank stare that they were pouring in. “My dad was in the army too,” I said. “He came back, but then he left again.”

“Where'd he go?” Bobby looked over at me again.

“I don't know. He said he was leaving. Mom said okay, and that was that.”

Bobby's head tilted back and forth, as though he disagreed with what I just said. More silence chased our flowering friendship, but at least we finally had something slightly in common. I wanted to ask him about his mom, but I was worried I was asking too many questions, but then went on asking anyway. Silence=death.

“So how do I learn to race cars?”

“By driving. You'll have to get behind the wheel and scrape a few walls to find out what it's all about. There's no textbook.”

“Can't you give me a few tips or something?”

“Every driver has their own style, their own way of holding the steering wheel.” He shifted in his seat. “On a small track you gotta work the walls, everything gets congested down low, too many inexperienced Joes trading paint and getting stuck in the infield mud. Sometimes I spend half the night joyriding under yellow flags. There's no fast way through the corners,
you just throw the car sideways and try to keep it from sliding out of control. It's a gut feeling, you have to chase your instincts. Maybe it seems sort of risky, but right now it's the only hope I've got,” he said.