T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

“You mean—?”

“That’s right. And wait’ll you see the bill when you finally do get out of here. Word is that cot you’re sitting on goes for twelve bucks a night.”

The bastards. It could be weeks here. He’ll lose his job, the animals’ll tear up the rugs, piss in the bed and finally, starved, the dog will turn on the cat…. B. looks up, a new worry on his lips: “But what do you eat here?”

Rusty rises. “C’mon, I’ll show you the ropes.” B. follows him out into the half-lit and silent hangar, past the ranks of ruined automobiles, the mounds of tires and tools. “Breakfast is out of the machines. They got coffee, hot chocolate, candy bars, cross-ants and cigarettes. Lunch and late-afternoon snack you get down at the Mechanics’ Cafeteria.” Rusty’s voice booms and echoes through the wide open spaces till B. begins to feel surrounded. Overhead, the morning cowers against the grimed skylights. “And eat your fill,” Rusty adds, “—it all goes on the tab.”

The office is bright as a cathedral with a miracle in progress. B. squints into the sunlight and recognizes the swaying ankles of a squad of majorettes. He asks for Rita, finds she’s off till six at night. Outside, the sound of scraping, the putt-putt of snowplow jeeps. B. glances up. Oh, shit. There must be a foot and a half of snow on the ground.

The girls are chewing gum and sipping coffee from personalized mugs: Mary-Alice, Valerie, Beatrice, Lulu. B. hunches in the greatcoat, confused, until Rusty bums a dollar and hands him a cup of coffee. Slurping and blowing, B. stands at the window and watches an old man stoop over an aluminum snow shovel. Jets of fog stream from the old man’s nostrils, ice cakes his mustache.

“Criminal, ain’t it?” says Rusty.

“What?”

“The old man out there. That’s Tegeler’s father, seventy-some-odd years old. Tegeler makes him earn his keep, sweeping up, clearing snow, polishing the pumps.”

“No!” B. is stupefied.

“Yeah, he’s some hardnose, Tegeler. And I’ll tell you something else too — he’s set up better than Onassis and Rockefeller put together. See that lot across the street?”

B. looks. TEGELER’S BIG LOT. How’d he miss that?

“They sell new Tegelers there.”

“Tegelers?”

“Yeah — he’s got his own company: the Tegeler Motor Works. Real lemons from what I hear … But will you look what time it is!” Rusty slaps his forehead. “We got to get down to Appointments or we’ll both grow old in this place.”

The Appointments Office, like the reward chamber in a rat maze, is located at the far end of a complicated network of passageways, crossways and counter-ways. It is a large carpeted room with desks, potted plants and tellers’ windows, not at all unlike a branch bank. The Cougar woman and the man in the brown suit are there, waiting along with a number of others, all of them looking bedraggled and harassed. Rusty enters deferentially and takes a seat beside Brown Suit, but B. strides across the room to where a hopelessly walleyed woman sits at a desk, riffling through a bundle of papers. “Excuse me,” he says.

The woman looks up, her left iris drowning in white.

“I’m here—” B. breaks off, confused as to which eye to address: alternately one and then the other seems to be scrutinizing him. Finally he zeroes in on her nose and continues:”—about my car. I—”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No, I don’t. But you see I’m a busy man, and I depend entirely on the car for transportation and—”

“Don’t we all?”

“—and I’ve already missed a day of work.” B. gives her a doleful look, a look charged with chagrin for so thwarting the work ethic and weakening the national fiber. “I’ve got to have it seen to as soon as possible. If not sooner.” Ending with a broad grin, the bon mot just the thing to break the ice.

“Yes,” she says, heaving a great wet sigh. “I understand your anxiety and I sympathize with you, I really do. But,” the left pupil working round to glare at him now, “I can’t say I think much of the way you conduct yourself — barging in here and exalting your own selfish concerns above those of the others here. Do you think that there’s no one else in the world but you? No other ailing auto but yours? Does Tegeler’s Big Garage operate for fifty-nine years, employing hundreds of people, constantly expanding, improving, streamlining its operations, only to prepare itself for the eventuality of your breakdown? Tsssss! I’m afraid, my friend, that your arrogant egotism knows no bounds.”

B. hangs his head, shuffles his feet, the greatcoat impossibly warm.

“Now. You’ll have to fill out the application for an appointment and wait your turn with the others. Though you really haven’t shown anything to deserve it, I think you may have a bit of luck today after all. The Secretary left word that he’d be in at three this afternoon.”

B. takes a seat beside the Cougar woman and stares down at the form in his hand as if it were a loaded.44. He is dazed, still tingling from the vehemence of the secretary’s attack. The form is seven pages long. There are questions about employment, annual income, collateral, next of kin. Page 4 is devoted to physical inquiries: Ever had measles? leprosy? irregularity? The next delves deeper: Do you feel that people are out to get you? Why do you hate your father? The form ends up with two pages of IQ stuff: if a farmer has 200 acres and devotes 1/16 of his land to soybeans, 5/8 to corn and 1/3 to sugar beets, how much does he have left for a drive-in movie? B. glances over at the Cougar woman. Her lower lip is thrust forward, a blackened stub of pencil twists in her fingers, an appointment form, scrawled over in pencil with circled red corrections, lies in her lap. Suddenly B. is on his feet and stalking out the door, fragments of paper sifting down in his wake like confetti. Behind him, the sound of collective gasping.

Out in the corridor B. collars a man in spattered blue coveralls and asks him where the Imports Division is. The man, squat, swarthy, mustachioed, looks at him blank as a cow. “No entiendo,” he says.

“The. Imports. Division.”

“No hablo inglés — y no me gustan las preguntas de cabrones tontos.” The man shrugs his shoulder out from under B.’s palm and struts off down the hall like a ruffled rooster. But B. is encouraged: Imports must be close at hand. He hurried off in the direction from which the man came (was he Italian or only a Puerto Rican?), following the corridor around to the left, past connecting hallways clogged with mechanics and white-smocked technicians, following it right on up to a steel fire door with the words NO ADMITTANCE stamped across it in admonitory red. There is a moment of hesitation … then he twists the knob and steps in.

“Was ist das?” A workman looks up at him, screwdriver in hand, expression modulating from surprise to menace. B. finds himself in another hangar, gloomy and expansive as the first, electric tools screeching like an army of mechanical crickets. But what’s this?: he’s surrounded by late-model cars — German cars — Beetles, Foxes, Rabbits, sleek Mercedes sedans! Not only has he stumbled across the Imports Division, but luck or instinct or good looks has guided him right to German Specialties. Well, ha-cha! He’s squinting down the rows of cars, hoping to catch sight of his own, when he feels a pressure on his arm. It is the workman with the screwdriver. “Vot you vant?” he demands.

“Uh — have you got an Audi in here? Powder blue with a black vinyl top?”

The workman is in his early twenties. He is tall and obscenely corpulent. Skin pale as the moon, jowls reddening as if with a rash, white hair cropped across his ears and pinched beneath a preposterously undersized engineer’s cap. He tightens his grip on B.’s arm and calls out into the gloom—“Holger! Friedrich!”—his voice reverberating through the vault like the battle cry of some Mesozoic monster.