Timothy Johnston - The Current

“Sorry to keep you from it.”

“Sorry I couldn’t help you. There’s two other garages in town, but I’m guessing you already know that.”

Yoder walked him back into the office, and there he paused, and Sutter paused too.

“How do you like that rig there, Sheriff?” He was looking at a grid of black bars over the office window. Raw steel frame bolted to cinderblock. Welds of dull pewter, unpainted. New-looking.

“I’d say you had you a break-in,” Sutter said.

“You’d say right. Twelve hundred dollars’ worth of hand tools, according to the insurance, walking right out that door. But you can’t buy those kind of tools no more. Those were my granddad’s tools.” He looked away. Then he looked back and said, “Not sayin nothin against your old deputy, Sheriff. But ever time I think of some son of a bitch walking around in here, taking his sweet time, and then walking right out that door with my tools…” He looked like he might spit, but spit where, on his own floor? “I know it’s just tools,” he said. “But I think I could kill a son of a bitch if I got the chance.”

BY THE TIME he pulled into the parking lot of the garage the cab of the van was no warmer than when he pulled out of his drive—or if it was warmer it was his own body heat that had warmed it—and Gordon left the engine running so there’d be no doubt, so no one could sit there running the engine for an hour before they could tell him what he already knew, which was that his goddam heater was shot.

He felt a little better for the day off, for the night’s rest without fever dreams, but still his eyes ached in the winter light and his body felt like he’d fallen down a flight of stairs.

Just a few other cars and trucks in the lot and none he recognized other than Wabash’s Ford pickup and the black Crown Vic he kept as a loaner. Anyway the garage opened for business at seven thirty so she would have already come and gone by now and would not return again until five o’clock to pick the boy up again, just as she’d done when the boy worked for him. That other lifetime. And he would go to another garage if he could find one within twenty miles that did not take twice as long and charge twice as much and do half as good a job and was somehow also run by Dave Wabash, a man he’d known since high school and who sent customers his way just as he sent them Wabash’s way.

He stepped into the office and stood there a full minute, waiting, tasting more than smelling, thanks to his jammed-up sinuses, the gasoline and tire rubber, before finally he pushed through the glass door, stained with many black handprints, into the garage and made his way toward the only sound, which was the ratcheting of a socket wrench—steady, rhythmic, like the call of a great bug. He tracked the sound to the far bay, where a man stood under a gray sedan, or did not stand exactly, as the lift only went so high, and there was no pit and a man had to stoop under the chassis or else scoot around in a chair on casters—Wabash too cheap to buy new lifts, which was fine by Gordon if it kept his prices down.

All he could see of this man was his dark-blue mechanic’s pants and his leather workboots, and Gordon said, “That you under there, Dave?” and there was a final turn of the wrench before the boots shifted and took a step and a face appeared. Not Wabash’s face or the face of any other mechanic he knew, but the face of the boy he’d not seen in ten years, and seeing it appear now from beneath the car did something to Gordon’s legs so that he had to take a step to get his balance. His heart rolling like a boat. Time rolling back.

But of course it was not that boy—he knew it before his heart or his legs knew it. It was the brother, Marky, who he’d seen maybe half a dozen times since those days, usually right here in this garage, the boy blurting out, Heya Mister Burke! as if he had no sense of time, no sense of history. And maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was the only one.

You could tell him from his brother by the eyes, always the eyes, if that’s all you had to go on: the lights on in there but a different kind of lights. You didn’t say retard anymore; there were other words, though Gordon hadn’t learned them. The boy had not been expected to live, once upon a time, and now here he was—twenty-nine, thirty?—big as a horse and working on a car. That was the thing, that was what threw him, and Gordon said without thinking, “What the hell you doing under there?” As if it was his place and not Wabash’s. As if he’d caught the kid trying to sweat copper in the back room of the Plumbing & Supply, trying to blow himself up and the whole building with him.

The boy grinned and said, “Heya Mister Burke!” and showed him the socket wrench and told him in a burst of Marky-talk, within which Gordon caught just enough English, that he was pulling the pan because the gasket was bad and Jeff had told him to do it… Gordon pinching his eyes shut against the pain the boy’s yammer put into his brain and saying, “Where’s Wabash, Marky? Where’s your boss?” to which the boy gave a big shrug and went on yammering.

“All right, all right,” said Gordon, “where’s Jeff, then?” and as he said it a door squawked open at the far end of the garage and Jeff Goss stepped out, tucking his blue shirt back in, behind him the sound of the refilling toilet tank Gordon himself had installed maybe twenty years ago, Goss looking down as he walked and then looking up and stopping—or almost stopping at the sight of Gordon standing beside the crouched and yammering Marky, and then continuing on toward them. No taller now than he’d been at sixteen, still looking up to look you in the eye. Not the worker Marky’s brother had been—or that Marky had been, for that matter—not even close. But he’d hired the three of them as a set, figuring three boys who were almost like three brothers would be stronger than three who weren’t. That the best of them would shape the other two and bring out something better in all three—or at least something better than had been there otherwise.

And then you wake up one day wishing you’d never set eyes on any one of them. Wishing they’d never been born. That they’d died all together in a car accident at sixteen.

“Hey there, Mr. Burke,” Goss said. Then, to Marky: “Big Man, give it a rest,” and the stream of Marky-talk abruptly stopped, as if by some valve.

“Wabash has got him working on cars now?” Gordon said.

“That ain’t work, Mr. Burke, he’s just draining the oil pan.”

Gordon turned to Marky again, the boy standing hunchbacked under the chassis still, looking from Gordon to Goss and cranking the wrench handle slowly with one hand as he held the socket in the other, as if to raise some tricky bolt from his own fist.

Gordon grunted and said, “Maybe you better tell him that. He thinks he’s pulling the whole goddam pan and changing out the gasket.”

Goss gave a small jerk of the head and put on a smirk. “He tell you that?”

“That’s what I heard.”

“Heck. He don’t know himself what he’s saying, Mr. Burke, you know that. He gets going sometimes he just can’t stop—can you, Big Man.” Goss grinning at the boy under the car until Gordon wanted to cuff him one to the back of his head and Marky standing under the old lift like he was just waiting for it to give out and squash him, the dope, and finally Gordon couldn’t stand it and, gesturing at the boy, he said, “Get out from under there already, you dope, you’re making me nervous,” and Marky came out from under the car and stood to his full height, somehow still looking like someone who was worried about cracking his head on something.

Gordon turned once more to Goss and said, “Where’s your boss?” and Goss told him Wabash was out on call with the wrecker, wouldn’t be back until after lunch, and was it something he could help him with? Gordon standing between these two boys, daylight burning, his head pounding… Jeff and Marky waiting, watching as their old boss took his forehead in his hand and shook his head and said, “Son of a bitch.” Then said to Jeff, “It’s the goddam heater,” and turned and walked back toward the office.