Brian Garfield: Necessity

I wonder what he thinks he’s proving?

She recognizes the jack and the tire iron with its socket-wrench end and its pry-bar end. These two-are they all the tools you need?

You changed a tire once, remember? Four o’clock in the morning after the homecoming game and the fraternity beer bust. Can’t remember that boy’s name. He was so stoned on grass he just lay back and laughed: “Far out !” And you changed the tire while he waved the flashlight around so that your work was illuminated as fitfully as a battlefield under artillery attack.

But I got it done, didn’t I, and drove the worthless kid home and left him asleep in his car and walked half a mile to the bus stop.

She’s thinking: how come you were so much smarter when you were eighteen?

Hard to breathe now: this air feels like sawblades in the throat.

Naturally it has to be the left front tire and this shoulder of sandy hardpan and gravel isn’t really wide enough; to change the wheel she’s going to have to get right out in the roadway with her hindquarters waving in the traffic.

What traffic? One pickup truck in the last two minutes. The hell with it.

The jack is an odd-looking device with a crank handle and at first she can’t tell how it’s supposed to work. She opens the door and gets into the car. It has become a furnace in here. She opens the windows before poking into the glove compartment, hoping to find an owner’s manual that will have illustrations and instructions.

No such luck. Nothing in the glove box except the Pennsylvania registration and the maps she put there herself. Startling her, a drop of liquid falls onto her wrist-sweat from her own forehead.

A huge truck goes by: a semi at great speed. The blast of its wind nearly knocks her off her feet. As it gnashes away she’s thinking about the likelihood of the truck driver’s calling in on his CB radio to alert the world of her predicament-thinking no doubt that he’s doing her a favor.

Must get out of here.

She studies the jack and the car. There’s what looks like the open end of a pipe directly under the door post at the side of the car. Is the jack meant to fit into that? Why not give it a try.

It fits, a male member into a female receptacle. She turns the crank and is pleased enough to smile when the side of the car begins to rise.

Another cluster of traffic goes by. She doesn’t ask for help; no one stops. After they’re gone she puts her weight against the crank handle and soon both left wheels are off the ground. She locks the crank in place and pries the hubcap off.

One of the lug nuts is so stiff she has to stand on the handle of the tire iron to break it loose but finally she has all five nuts in the upturned hubcap and she horses the flat tire off the car. Her hands are filthy and she’s ruined the damned dress.

She hears the crunch of gravel and looks up.

It pulls to a stop on the shoulder just behind her car: a Jeep or a Bronco, one of those outdoorsy four-wheel-drive vehicles-high and boxy, forest green. A man gets out of it.

His face is hidden inside a trim brown beard streaked with grey. He’s chunky and muscular in faded jeans and an olive drab tee shirt.

“Need some help?” His voice is pleasant enough. At least he’s not a cop.

She rises to her feet. She has the tire iron in her hand.

“I think I’ve got it licked. Thanks all the same.”

The man looks at the tire iron. He seems a little amused but she’s not sure-it’s hard to see what’s going on under the beard.

He says, “I had a flat tire on one of these Interstates a couple years ago. Discovered I didn’t have a jack. I waited seven hours for help and what I finally got was a ripoff artist in a tow truck, charged me fifty dollars just to borrow his jack and do the work myself. Ever since then, I see somebody broken down by the road, I see if I can do something.”

She’s trying to look icy. “Thanks for stopping. I really don’t need any help.”

He says, “I’m not a rapist, you know.”

“I hear you saying it.” She shifts the tire iron in her grasp: not an ostentatious movement but enough to remind him of it.

She says, “I appreciate the offer. It’s very kind of you. But I’m sure you’re on your way somewhere and I wouldn’t want to delay you. I’m fine. I’m not in any trouble.”

He watches her. She keeps her voice calm. “Please go.”

He looks at the tire iron. “I guess these days there just isn’t a whole lot of point trying to be a good Samaritan.” He turns with a reproachful snap of his shoulders and climbs back into his vehicle.

When he drives by he looks at her and she feels she can read his thoughts: independent liberated feminist bitch.

No good explaining it’s not because you’re a man and I’m a woman. It’s not even because you’re a stranger.

It’s because I don’t trust you. But you didn’t need to, take it personally.

It’s not you. It’s me. I can’t afford to trust anybody at all.

Los Angeles. A place for getting lost.

Is that a mistake? Why not Oregon or Idaho or Wyoming-somewhere miles from the beaten track?

The allure of somewhere rural and unpopulated is a valley of temptation; but on cooler second thought it would be much too easy for them to track her along those untrod paths. Newcomers never escape notice in such places, where gossip travels with the speed of a prairie fire.

Besides, she spent half her childhood in an Iowa plains village and they may expect her to return to such a setting.

Better to be swallowed amid the crowds. Better to leave one pair of footprints among the millions. Better to go to ground in the urban tangle with a thousand exit routes and ten thousand places to hide.

Hasn’t she always made excuses not to go along on trips to the Coast? Hasn’t she made a point of her contempt for Southern California? Citing at every opportunity Dorothy Parker’s (or is it Fred Allen’s?) line-“It’s a great place to live. If you happen to be an orange.” And Woody Allen’s dictum: “Los Angeles is a place where the chief cultural attraction is that you can make a right turn on a red light.” And the jokes she’s overheard somewhere and adopted as her own:

“How many Californians does it take to change a light bulb? Eight. One to change the bulb and seven to share in the experience.”

And: “The difference between yogurt and Southern California? One of them has an active culture!”

A week ago she concluded that it will be safe for her in Los Angeles precisely because they all know how much she reviles and ridicules the place.

Besides, she needs the big city’s facilities. There is so much to do and she has so little time. She’s got a deadline and it looms alarmingly close. If she misses it-

Let’s not think about that.

The city, then: Los Angeles. No further debate. Can’t afford doubts.

Yet misgivings corrupt her. Will they know what she’s planning? Are they one step ahead of her?

Quit it. Stop jumping at shadows. Get a grip on yourself.

Anyhow-face it, Jennifer-Dorothy. You turn up in East Tumbleweed, Utah, and you’ll draw the stares of every drooling bumpkin in town.

She has examined this from every angle and she is persuaded it has been a cool decision, not swayed by vanity: it makes sense that if you’re an unusually striking woman looking for a place to hide then you’d better seek out a place where there are a great many beauties, some of whose faces-like your own-have appeared in the ad pages of mass-circulation magazines.

The damnable wig has served well to disguise her on the road but it doesn’t go with her coloring or with her grey blue eyes. It’s hot and it itches.