A Set Of Wheels Read online

  Yes, have to admit I’ve noticed that. But I thought it was just some sort of middleman disguise.

  Not at all, youngster. Not at all. They are the middlemen. That dope’s going to mansions, summer hideaways, the boardrooms of corporations. That’s what I mean, high-class. I got my standards, too. I don’t deal dope to impoverished areas, that’s my kind of code. Ghettoes, no; Shaker Heights, yes.

  I think you show definite Robin Hood tendencies.

  You got it, Dope to the rich, food to the poor. In time society’ll stabilize.

  Cora goes on the runs with me. Sometimes I let her drive, which makes her ecstatic. The one time some fuzz flushes us out, she’s driving, and she couldn’t be more delighted. She leads the cop car on a merry chase. Finally, she zips into one of the small rest areas, starts maneuvering around it, and maneuvers the cop car right into the wall of an abandoned information center. She laughs and returns to the expressway.

  I don’t get it, I say.

  Don’t get what?

  How you can get so gleeful over making a carful of fuzz crash into a building wall, and yet you make me feel guilty about what I did to Allen.

  I thought we weren’t going to talk about that.

  You’re not supposed to. All right if I mention it.

  You son of a bitch!

  She drives on, silent for a long time.

  Allen died, that’s the difference.

  Well, maybe some of the fuzz in that car back there have bought the farm.

  I didn’t see any of ’em die, did I?

  That makes no—

  You go by your rules, I’ll go by mine.

  Further driving on in silence.

  Anyway, anybody dead back there is a legit kill.

  How legit?

  They were chasing us.

  Allen was chasing us.

  You don’t see the difference, okay, then you win.

  I can’t get her to address the subject any more.

  Every second or third run I take the car to The Mech for further servicing. He always tells me the job is beyond his capabilities.

  I thought you could fix any car, I say to him.

  Sure, I’m the best, he says, but I’m afraid I skipped the class about mouth-to-mouth resuscitation back at Mech School.

  But he always takes the Mustang out of my hands and makes it run better. It even looks better. On the side, The Mech has been hammering out some of the dents and applying a dab of paint here and there. You can tell the parts he’s painted. The green is plenty lighter in color and tends to look like rash marks on the Mustang’s body.

  When Cora’s not around, I prefer to spend my time with the old man, Emil. The Mech and Chuck chat with me some, but I’m uncomfortable around them. They make me feel too inexperienced, too much like a kid they’re indoctrinating. Anyway, there is just too much mech in The Mech and we don’t have much to say to each other. As for Chuck—well, he’s just too efficient, too roadwise, too knowing. He never really talks to me like a friend, and if I’d needed an uncle I would’ve had warm relationships with my own uncles. So Emil is the only person I can feel natural around. He treats me like just another of the old men, as if we’re sitting around the town square beneath the statue of the forgotten hero and all that, except that we’re in a cavernous abandoned restaurant sitting beside the remains of a coffee urn. Emil hangs around the Savarin, rarely goes out on the road—if he does, he’s quickly back behind his post, the restaurant counter. He’s your typically tall old man, bent and gaunt in all the right places. Maybe I like him because for a short time years ago he was in show business like my Dad. A psychologist would make something out of that, I guess, but the hell with it. Emil’s just an old man and I’ve always liked old men so I enjoy his company. Old men, most old men, don’t treat you like a kid. Mostly they treat other old men like kids.

  Cora out on the road somewhere? Emil says.

  She never tells me where she pops off to, I say. But she’s probably riding a car somewhere, like you say. She can’t get enough of riding. And, if you let her drive, well then the circus’s come to town.

  She’s got the urge all right.

  What? What urge?

  What I call it. The urge. The urge to wander, the urge to be more than what you are, the urge to get somewhere even if somewhere’s just next door or back in your own backyard. It’s just Cora’s not really focussed on any one thing. She tell you anything about her background?

  Now that you mention it, no, not much.

  Thought so. She’s not talkative when it comes to that. Would you like some coffee?

  Normally this could be a trap. We all try to avoid Emil’s coffee. It is his special act of misanthropy to serve you his coffee. But today I’m lucky.

  We’re all out of coffee, remember?

  Yes, you’re right. That’s what’s been making me edgy. I don’t feel right if I’m not making coffee. Shall I tell you about Cora?

  I want to hear, but I say:

  Well, maybe you should respect her privacy, her right to secrecy.

  That’s true, but do you want to hear about it?

  Cora adores Emil. I’m sure she’d tell him more than she’d ever tell me, and I do need to know, so I nod yes. Emil looks awkward for a moment, as if he’s looking for some coffee to pour, then leans forward, puts his knobby elbows on the eternally sticky counter top.

  Cora’s not had what you’d exactly call a pretty life, he says.

  I figured as much.

  She grew up in one of those suburban havens blacks fled to before all the whites fled out. By the time she’d reached her teens, there wasn’t much left of the genteel middle-class respectability her folks had so strived for. Her mother was on the needle at least part-time, certainly popping pills most time. Her brothers and sisters, and Cora had a flock of ’em both younger and older, were all running free. Crime and dealing and agitating and everything. Cora ran counter to them and their life. She went to school, worked at a legit job after school so she could stay in school. She was the only one allowed into her father’s study. He’d read to her, she told me. The way she said it I gathered those were pretty happy moments. Her mother also seemed to have an amount of affection left for her. Whatever time she could spare from the needle and pills. Certainly she showed no love for her other children. It was as if, Cora said, the shreds of their respectability were still being maintained—but only for her.

  A car buzzes the Savarin. I hate the creeps who think the noise of their motor is some kind of proof that they breathe.

  So one day Cora came home from her part-time job and, well, what she found was everybody in that shaggily terraced rottingwood suburban home was dead. The whole family, all of them. Sprawled on the floors, it seemed, of every room. All her brothers and sisters lying bloody and dead from cellar to attic, some of them blown apart by gunshot after gunshot. In her parent’s bedroom she found both her mother and father lying separately dead on their separate beds. There was a whole damn arsenal of guns piled between the beds. They looked serene, she said, and she doesn’t know from that day to this whether it was her father who ran amuck and killed everybody, or maybe it was her mother. Nobody official ever had a yearning to discover who killed whom. The corpses were all the information they ever needed. Cora thinks maybe both of them ran amuck, though she’d rather believe all the killings were done by an intruder, though that’s doubtful, even she admits that. ,

  God, I say, I never realized. That’s how she wound up here then, fleeing from that?

  More or less. Nobody ever winds up here that simply. I think she tried to go back to school but it was no good for her any more. All I know is eventually she stole some wheels and showed up around here. She smashed up her wheels the first month, hasn’t had any since. I’m not sure, of course, but I think she may’ve smashed up the car on purpose.

  What?

  Just an hypothesis, youngster. I think she might’ve gotten into one of her moods, and she can get deeper in a mood’n anybod
y I ever saw, and she run the car against the abutment. But I’m no shrink. It’s just a guess. How could I know? Some coffee, Lee?

  We’re out.

  Oh, right, you told me.

  Cora comes in and she looks disturbed, as if she’s overheard what Emil’s been telling me. But it turns out she’s pissed off because Chuck’s told everybody not to let her drive for a while.

  That bastard! she says. He thinks he’s some kind of dictator, the rest-stop Mussolini.

  He say why he did it? I ask.

  Sure he did. He said I am too volatile. Volatile, that’s his word, volatile.

  Calm down, Cora, Emil says. Sit. Let your nerves unglue.

  Emil, you know better. Nothing’ll help.

  Sit anyway, lady.

  Cora sits. I put my hand on her wrist. She tightens her fist and moves her wrist around in my hand. I tighten my grip.

  He could not trust me behind a wheel, that’s what the shitprick said. Jesus, I can outdrive anybody. Anybody but Chuck, maybe. You know that, Emil. You know that, Lee—no you don’t know that.

  That’s not fair. I let you drive some—

  Oh, sure, let! When it’s all right with the Gestapo commissars, then I can have a piece of steering wheel. Well, screw off, all you guys. All you guys who think—

  Lay off me, Cora. Chuck’s the one who—

  I don’t fucking care who told me. You all told me. All you bastards with your own wheels told me. I’m leaving here.

  Her words frighten me. I don’t mind her mouthing off, even at me, but she can’t leave. I won’t let her leave. But if I say that to her, she’ll only hear the word let and leave anyway. Wait her out, that’s all I can do.

  Emil, she says, why don’t you have a car?

  I hate cars, you know that.

  Get one anyway. Just let me drive it.

  Sorry, Cora, can’t. Merely owning a car, even if I never saw it, would drive me crazy.

  She smiles at him. She has a way of smiling at Emil that’s like none of her other smiles. It has real love in it. I want her to smile at me like that. But it’s no good. Even if I try to shut my eyes and imagine her smiling at me like that, it doesn’t look right when pointed in my direction.

  Sure, Emil, I wouldn’t put you through that for anything.

  What can I get you? he says.

  Poison.

  Cora!

  I think I’ll go out to the garage and lie under a car with a bad radiator, drink the drippings.

  Emil leans on the counter and starts whispering in Cora’s ear, the ear turned away from me. I strain to hear what he’s saying, but I can’t make any of it out. Whatever it is, it works. Cora starts laughing. She kisses Emil on the cheek and hugs the arm closest to her.

  Emil, she says, you’re so far out of your tree you must be floating above redwoods.

  I’m certified, he says. Was, anyway.

  You get officially released?

  Nope, just walked out one day. Told the guard I had a shrink meeting in town. Might not’ve gotten away with it but I was asylum gardener and I was in my gardening clothes, so the guards figured I must be a doctor and passed me right through without even examining my fake I.D.

  You were, I say. You were, were—

  Spit it out, Lee, Emil says. I’m not gonna answer you unless you say the word.

  Forget it.

  No, I especially can’t forget it. Spit it out.

  Crazy.

  I am whispering when I finally say it.

  Crazy, Emil shouts. I was a loony! he says even louder. By definition I am still a loony. His voice echoes around the room.

  You don’t seem crazy to me.

  Emil laughs. Traces of madness in the laugh.

  The almost universal reaction: you don’t seem crazy to me. You know what you’re saying? Do you, Lee?

  No.

  You’re saying if you don’t perceive craziness in me, that it must not exist. You’re saying that if you had to recognize its existence in old Emil, you might have to recognize its existence in yourself.

  ‘ Damn it, Emil, I’m not crazy.

  I might judge that you’re not, but you see I’ve learned not to trust my perceptions. So I allow for the idea that you might be crazy. And if you happen not to be crazy, it does not make me any the less insane. Just as you’re not crazy for failing to perceive my madness.

  I take it back, Emil. You are crazy. I believe you.

  I can convince anybody.

  He laughs again as he says this.

  A voice behind me: Hey, Lee. I turn around and see Chuck standing in the doorway. Chuck filling the doorway. I sometimes forget how big Chuck is. He carries it so well that he seems normal height and weight to me. I can sense Cora’s body tense at the sound of Chuck’s voice. They’ve already had their fight and she is resisting the temptation to start it up again.

  What’s up, Chuck? I say.

  We’re scheduling a food run. You got to help.

  Sure, what’s it about?

  We’re going to town tonight. Arrangements’re all made. We’ll convoy to exit 12A, some of us’ll veer off there—you’ll be in that group. Others’ll split at other exits. We’ll rendezvous at the objective, do the raid, make tracks like hell outta there. You game then?

  Sure.

  I glance at Cora who’s now crouching over the counter, looking for a way out.

  Chuck turns in the doorway to leave, but I say:

  One condition, Chuck.

  You got it, Lee. What is it?

  We’ll use my wheels like you say, but Cora’s gonna drive.

  Chuck’s normally affable eyes suddenly become quite fierce with anger.

  C’mon Lee, he says. No power plays.

  I want her to drive. I’ve never done a food run. Need somebody with experience behind the wheel.

  All right, I’ll get you somebody. Mike, LeRoy, And—

  Nope. Cora. It’s my deal, my condition.

  Shit, Lee. It’s not possible. I know what you’re up to. You favor the old romantic gesture, right? But the run’s what’s important, goddamnit. I can’t let you ruin it just to impress your woman.

  I got off my counterstool, felt it still swinging against the back of my jeans.

  Fuck off, Chuck.

  Standing there, my spindly legs spread apart defiantly, I become very conscious of Chuck’s height. Why in the bloody hell can’t I stop myself from challenging him?

  Forget it, Lee, Cora whispers. It’s a stupid gesture like he says. I don’t want you—

  Never mind. You’re making the run, and you’re driving. I know the score, how much supplies are down. You need this run, Chuck, and you need every vehicle you can get, and we can do it on my terms or—

  Or what?

  Or my wheels’ll find some blocks to sit on while you idiots make your goddamn run.

  Chuck takes a couple steps into the room. I am about to escalate my offensive, call him a three-dollar-bill Hitler. But he looks at me, then at Cora, and his voice goes softer as he says:

  Maybe you got a point, Lee. Maybe you shouldn’t drive this one, after all. Not if it’s your first food run. But Cora—damn it, Cora, you toe the line. This is a mission, a mission, and you treat it like one. Nothing fancy, just get the job done. Drive the limit when you’re supposed to. Burn rubber only when the situation dictates. Any decisions relating to the mission, you let Lee make them.

  She takes a deep breath. She’s resisting obvious comments. The pause is so long I almost forget what we were talking about.

  I'll, um, toe the line, Chuck, don’t worry.

  Chuck contributes a long pause of his own. The two of them stare at each other. Their eyes could start fires.

  Well, Cora, Chuck finally says, guess I can trust you as much as I can the rest of the troops. Okay, we’ll do it your way. Briefing meeting at six, we’ll be on the road by seven, in the city by eight. Other words, just at dusk. Check in with The Mech before the briefing, okay? Okay. Well… happy trails.
>
  We all happy trails Chuck, even Emil, and Chuck walks out, still looking doubtful.

  I wait for Cora to thank me for getting her assigned to a driving gig, for letting her use my old Mustang. She remains crouched over counter, her fingers daintily ripping into shreds an old paper container of sugar. On the side of the package is a picture of some old Bird of America, probably extinct by now. All of the sugar packs in the Savarin are either Birds of America or Important Women in History.

  Well, I finally say, guess you’ll get in some driving time tonight.

  Don’t go into a lousy orgy of self-congratulation, Cora says. I recognize your generous impulses, but you’re just as stupid as Chuck.

  Cora, that’s not fair.

  Nope, it isn’t. But I won’t kiss your ass just so you can win points with me and yourself.

  I wasn’t trying any—

  Like shit you weren’t.

  Cora, I—

  She swings around on her stool, looks me right in the eye.

  You want to display your generosity? Show me what a keen dude you really are?

  What’re you talking about?

  Simple. I’ll believe you’re straight up if you do one thing. You want to hear?

  Sure.

  Give me your wheels.

  What?

  Give ’em to me. Let me drive ’em away so you never see either me or your Mustang again. How about that, Lee? Can you do that, Lee? Huh?

  Emil looks like he’d like to help me, but even his active and crafty mind can’t come up with a way of handling Cora in this kind of mood.

  Cora, I say, you know I can’t—

  Yes, I know that. All I’m really asking is for you to stop begging me to get down on my knees and lick your prick just because you’re such a fucking nice guy. That’s all I’m asking.

  I thought you’d like to drive tonight, that—

  Stop it, Lee. You never stop trying. I can lay it out in clear numbered instructions and when you get to the last number you still can’t understand what I said. Stop trying. I’ll be happy behind the wheel tonight, ecstatic. But you get no points, comprehend?

  Whatever you say, Cora.

  She groans.

  I give up. I really give up. He won’t ever change. I want to kill myself. Right now. Mix me a cup of your coffee, Emil.