Kim Robinson: The Gold Coast

Jim follows him into the garage and sits on the floor to watch. Dennis slides back and forth on the floor-sled, putting all the screws in one spot, testing the magnetic function of all the points in the switcher… ah. Two are dead, two more barely functional, and commands are being transferred right on through to the right-turn points, which explains the problem. Small moment of satisfaction as he solves the little mystery, which wasn’t, after all, so mysterious. Anyone could have found it. Which returns him to his irritation with Jim. There he sits, spaced out in his own thoughts, not learning a thing about the machine he relies on utterly to be able to lead his life. Dennis sighs heavily. As he replaces the points with spares of his own (and they’re expensive) he says, “Are you doing anything about getting a full-time job?”

“Yeah, I’ve been looking.”

Sure. Besides, what kind of job is he fit to apply for? Here he’s been going to college for years, and so far as Dennis can tell, he isn’t qualified to do anything. Clerk work, a little marginal night school teaching… can that really be it? Dennis gives a screw a hard twist. What can Jim do? Well… he can read books. Yes, he can read books like nobody’s business. But Dennis can read a book too, and he didn’t go to college for six years to learn how. And meanwhile, here he is out on his back after an eleven-hour day, fixing the kid’s car!

Time to make him help. “Look here, take that point and reach down from above and insert it into this slot here,” pointing up with the screwdriver.

“Sure, Dad.” And Jim moves around the motor compartment, blocking the floor lamp’s light, and leans down into it, the point between his fingers. “There we go—oops!”

“What’d you do?”

“Dropped it. But I can see where it went—down between the motor and the distributor—just a sec—” And he’s leaning down, stretched out over the motor, blocking Dennis’s light.

“What’re you doing?”

“Just about—uh-oh—”

Jim falls into the motor compartment. His weight sinks the front end of the car abruptly and Dennis, flat on his back underneath it, is almost crushed by the underbody.

“Hey! For God’s sake!”

It’s a good thing the car has decent shocks—put in by Dennis himself last year—otherwise he would have been pancaked. Very carefully he tries to roll from beneath the car, but the edge of the body hits his ribs and… well, he can’t scrape under it. “Get your feet back on the ground and take your weight off the car!”

“I, um, I can’t. Seem to have my hand—stuck under this thing here.”

“What thing here. ”

“I guess it’s the distributor. I’ve got the point, but—”

“If you drop the point, can you get your hand free?”

“Um… no. Won’t go either way.”

Dennis sighs, shifts sideways until he tilts off the floor-sled, it bangs up against the car bottom and he slides down onto the garage floor, smacking the back of his head. A slow, awkward shimmy past the track pickups, which are pressed against the ground, and he’s out from under the car.

He stands, rubs the back of his head, looks at the waving legs emerging from under the hood of the car. It looks like the kid just up and dived headfirst into the thing. In fact that’s probably pretty close to what he did. Dennis takes a flashlight and directs its beam into the motor compartment; Jim’s head is twisted down and sideways against his chest.

“Hi,” Jim says.

Dennis points the flashlight at the end of Jim’s arm, where it disappears under the distributor. “You say you’ve let go of the point?”

“Yeah.”

Sounds like he’s had a clamp put on his throat. Dennis leans in, reaches down to the distributor, pulls the clips away and lifts the distributor cap. “Try now.”

Jim gives a sudden jerk up, his hand comes free and his head snaps back up into the hood of the car, knocking it off its cheap metal stand so that the hood comes down with a clang, just missing Dennis’s fingers and Jim’s neck. “Ow! Oops.”

Dennis looks over the frames of his garage glasses at Jim. He reopens the hood. He replaces the distributor cap. “Where did you say that point was?”

“I’ve got it,” Jim says, rubbing his head with one hand. With the other he holds the point out proudly.

Dennis finishes the job himself. As he screws the box back on he gives all the screws a really hard final twist; if Jim ever tries to get them loose (fat chance) he’ll know who screwed them in last.

“So how’s your work going?” Jim asks brightly, to fill the silence.

“Okay.”

Dennis finishes, closes up. “I’m going to have to be in Washington most of next week,” he tells his son. “Might be good if you came up an evening or two and had dinner here.”

“Okay, I’ll do that.”

Dennis puts the tools back in the tool chest.

“Well, I’m off now, I guess.”

“Say good-bye to your mom, first.”

“Oh yeah.”

Dennis follows him back in the house, shaking his head a little. Legs waving about in the air… kind of like a bug turned on its back.

Inside Jim says his farewells to Lucy.

“How come we haven’t seen Sheila lately?” Lucy asks him.

“Oh, I don’t know. We haven’t been going out that much, these last weeks.”

“That’s too bad. I like her.”

“Me too. We’ve just both been busy.”

“Well, you should call her.”

“Yeah, I will.”

“And you should give your uncle Tom a call too. Have you done that lately?”

“No, but I will, I promise. Okay, I’m off. Thanks for the help, Dad.”

Dennis can see him forgetting the promises to call even as he walks out of the door. “See you. Be careful,” he says. Try not to get stuck in your car’s motor compartment. As the door slams shut Dennis laughs, very shortly.

Jim tracks away angry. He forgets instantly about calling Sheila, about calling Uncle Tom; he’s too absorbed in his own feelings. Long minutes alone on the freeway, so much of life spent this way; thinking angrily, sifting and rearranging events until it’s all his father’s fault, until he’s angry only at Dennis and not at himself. That look over the glasses, after he managed to extricate himself from his damned car! Humiliating.

He parks in South Coast Plaza’s subterranean garage, takes the elevator up to the top of the mall, south end; some of the most expensive apartments in OC are up here. Through one soundproofed door comes the thump of percussion and a tiny wash of voices. In Jim goes.

Sandy and Angela’s ap consists of six big rooms, set like boxcars one after the next. Window walls in each face southwest; it’s a heliotropic home. Outside these windows a balcony extends the whole length of the ap. The balcony and all the rooms but the bedroom are filled with people, maybe sixty of them. It’s the nightly party, no one is too excited. Sandy’s not there yet. Jim walks into the kitchen, the first room. There are houseplants everywhere, giant ones in giant glazed pots. They look so healthy they might be plastic; people say Angela has a polymer thumb.

Jim sees no one he particularly wants to talk to, and continues through the kitchen to the balcony. He leans on the chest-high railing and looks down at the lightshow of coastal OC, pulsing at the speed of a rapid heartbeat. That’s his town.

Jim’s depressed. He’s a part-time word processor for a title and real estate company, a part-time night school teacher at Trabuco Junior College. His father thinks he’s a failure; his friends think he’s a fool. This last has been his angle, of course, he’s cultivated it because laughs are at a premium among his friends, and they’re all comedians; the fool routine keeps Jim from being nothing more than part of the laughtrack. But it can get old, old, old. How much nicer it would be to be… well, something else.