T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

“Hurt yourself?”

B. lies there silent — frustrated, childish, perverse.

“B.? Answer me — are you all right?”

He will lie here, dumb as a block, till the Andes are nubs and the moon melts from the sky. But then suddenly the cavern blooms with light (a brown crepuscular light, it’s true, but light just the same) and the game’s up.

“So there you are!” Arms akimbo, a grin on her face. “Now get yourself up out of there and stop your sulking. I can’t play games all night, you know. There’s eleven sets of pumps out there I’m responsible for.”

B. finds himself sprawled all over an engine block, grease-slicked and massive, that must have come out of a Sherman tank. But it’s the hangar, lit like the grainy daguerreotype of a Civil War battlefield, that really interests him. The sheer expanse of the place! And the cars, thousands of them, stretching all the way down to the dark V at the far end of the building. Bugattis, Morrises, La Salles, Daimlers, the back end of a Pierce-Arrow, a Stutz Bearcat. The rounded humps of tops and fenders, tarnished bumpers, hoods thrown open like gaping mouths. Engines swing on cables, blackened grilles and punctured cloth tops gather in the corners, a Duesenberg, its interior gutted, squats over a trench in the concrete.

“Pretty amazing, huh?” Rita says, reaching out a hand to help him up. “This is Geriatrics. Mainly foreign. You should see the Contemp wings.”

“But what do you do with all these—?”

“Oh, we fix them. At least the technicians and mechanics do.”

There is something wrong here, something amiss. B. can feel it nagging at the edges of his consciousness … but then he really is dog-tired. Rita has him by the hand. They amble past a couple hundred cars, dust-embossed, ribs and bones showing, windshields black as ground-out eyes. Now he has it: “But if you fix them, what are they doing here?”

Rita stops dead to look him in the eye, frowning, schoolmarmish. “These things take time, you know.” She sighs. “What do you think: they do it overnight?”

The back room is the size of a storage closet. In fact, it is a storage closet, fitted out with cots. When Rita flicks the light switch B. is shocked to discover three other people occupying the makeshift dormitory: two men in rumpled suits and a middle-aged woman in a rumpled print dress. One of the men sits up and rubs his eyes. His tie is loose, shirt filthy, a patchy beard maculating his cheeks. He mumbles something — B. catches the words “drive shaft”—and then turns his face back to the cot, already sucking in breath for the first stertorous blast: hkk-hkk-hkkkkkkgg.

“What the hell is this?” B. is astonished, scandalized, cranky and tired. Tools and blackened rags lie scattered over the concrete floor, dulled jars of bolts and screws and wing nuts line the shelves. A number of unfolded cots, their fabric stained and grease-spotted, stand in the corner.

“This is where you sleep, silly.”

“But — who?”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it? They’re customers, like yourself, waiting for their cars. The man in brown is the Gremlin, the one with the beard is the Cougar — no, I’m sorry, the woman is the Cougar — he’s the Citroen.”

B. is appalled. “And I’m the Audi, is that it?”

Suddenly Rita is in his arms, the smooth satiny feel of her uniform, the sticky warmth of her breath. “You’re more to me than a machine, B. Do you know that I like you? A lot.” And then he finds himself nuzzling her ear, the downy ridge of her jawbone. She presses against him, he fumbles under the cheerleader’s tutu for the slippery underthings. One of the sleepers groans, but B. is lost, oblivious, tugging and massaging like a horny teenager. Rita reaches behind to unzip her uniform, the long smooth arch of her back, shoulders and arms shedding the opalescent rayon like a holiday on ice when suddenly a buzzer sounds — loud and brash — end of the round, change classes, dive for shelter.

Rita freezes, then bursts into motion. “A customer!” she pants, and then she’s gone. B. watches her callipygian form recede into the gloom of the Geriatrics Section, the sharp projection in his trousers receding with her, until she touches the light switch and vanishes in darkness. B. trundles back into the closet, selects a cot, and falls into an exploratory darkness of his own.

B.’s. breath is a puff of cotton as he wakes to the chill gloom of the storage closet and the sound of tools grating, whining and ratcheting somewhere off in the distance. At first he can’t locate himself — What the? Where? — but the odors of gas and kerosene and motor oil bring him back. He is stranded at Tegeler’s Big Garage, it is a workday, he has been sleeping with strangers, his car is nonfunctional. B. lurches up from the cot with a gasp — only to find that he’s being watched. It is the man with the patchy beard and rancid shirt. He is sitting on the edge of a cot, stirring coffee in a cardboard container, his eyes fixed on B. My checkbook, my wallet, my wristwatch, thinks B.

“Mornin’,” the man says. “My name’s Rusty,” holding out his hand. The others — the man in brown (or was it gray?) and the Cougar woman — are gone.

B. shakes the man’s hand. “Name’s B.,” he says, somewhere between wary and paranoid. “How do I get out of here?”

“Your first day, huh?”

“What do you mean?” B. detects an edge of hysteria slicing through his voice, as if it belonged to someone else in some other situation. A pistol-whipped actress in a TV melodrama, for instance.

“No need to get excited,” Rusty says. “I know how disquieting that first day can be. Why Cougar here — that woman in the print dress slept with us last night? — she sniveled and whimpered the whole time her first night here. Shit. It was like being in a bomb shelter or some frigging thing. Sure, I know how it is. You got a routine — job, wife at home, kids maybe, dog, cat, goldfish — and naturally you’re anxious to get back to it. Well let me give you some advice. I been here six days already and I still haven’t even got an appointment lined up with the Appointments Secretary so’s I can get in to see the Assistant to the Head Diagnostician, Imports Division, and find out what’s wrong with my car. So look: don’t work up no ulcer over the thing. Just make your application and sit tight.”

The man is an escapee, that’s it, an escapee from an institution for the terminally, unconditionally and abysmally insane. B. hangs tough. “You expect me to believe that cock-and-bull story? If you’re so desperate why don’t you call a cab?”

“Taxis don’t run this far out.”

“Bus?”

“No buses in this district.”

“Surely you’ve got friends to call—”

“Tried it, couldn’t get through. Busy signals, recordings, wrong numbers. Finally got through to Theotis Stover two nights ago. Said he’d come out but his car’s broke down.”

“You could hitchhike.”

“Spent six hours out there my first day. Twelve degrees F. Nobody even slowed down. Besides, even if I could get home, what then? Can’t get to work, can’t buy food. No sir. I’m staying right here till I get that car back.”

B. cannot accept it. The whole thing is absurd. He’s on him like F. Lee Bailey grilling a shaky witness. “What about the girls in the main office? They’ll take you — one of them told me so.”

“They take you?”

“No, but—”

“Look: they say that to be accommodating, don’t you see? I mean, we are customers, after all. But they can’t give you a lift — it’s their job if they do.”