T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

“Because I don’t know what happened to mine. I must’ve loaned it to somebody or something. Anyway, I’ve got a spare, and if you could just let me borrow your jack for a minute …”

I realized I’d been staring at her like a deaf-mute under sedation, and wrenched my face into a broad grin. “Sure, of course, no problem,” I barked, swinging round to work open the trunk.

“I hit something about three miles back,” she explained, peering into the trunk full of fast-food wrappers, rags, laundry, tools, cans of spray paint, torn tennis sneakers, and lurid paperbacks. “I figured I could limp into town, but then the rim started to go on me and all of a sudden the car was shaking like a roller coaster or something. Well, that was it. I started to get afraid for my pieces …”

I glanced up inquisitively, jack in hand.

“My pottery. I’m a potter. In Willits?” She took the jack from me as casually as if I were handing her a canapéeA at a cocktail party. “I’m right on Oak Street — it’s just a little place, Petra’s Pots. Between the real-estate office and the barbershop.”

A mobile home the size of a DC-7 rumbled by as she bent to maneuver the jack under the frame of the VW and give the jack handle two quick twists. I stood above her, watching the coils of hair play across her bare shoulders, and then peered through the window of her car and saw that the back seat was stacked with flats of ceramic mugs and matching cream-and-sugar sets. Larger pieces — they could have been bongs or samovars for all I knew — were wrapped in newspaper and wedged into the floor space on the passenger’s side. “Need any help?” I asked.

She was squatting beside the wheel now, fitting the cruciform wrench to the first of the wheel lugs, and she paused to glance up at me with a wide white smile: “No, thanks,” she said, “I’m not the helpless type.” Then she turned back to her work, and I watched her arms harden as she fought the lug. It wouldn’t give. She strained until her shoulders began to tremble, then rose to her feet for better purchase.

“You’re supposed to spit on your hands,” I said, and she laughed.

Then she attacked the recalcitrant lug once more, throwing her entire body into it, teeth gritted, eyes clenched, halter bursting. Nothing. I watched her smugly, greedily — it was my right and privilege to study this beautiful woman, this stranger, because my stopping to help had forced us into an intimacy of purpose, and I knew it would be only a matter of moments before she would turn to me for the muscle she lacked. “Wow,” she said finally, “that’s a bitch,” and she stood to wipe her hands on her shorts.

“Mind if I give it a try?” I said, arms folded across my chest.

“It must be frozen on,” she said. “You know, rusted,” but she was smiling softly, capitulating, and we both recognized that she was yielding ground, casting off the mantle of the woman warrior, if only for a moment.

As I bent to the wheel, I asked her if she was from Buffalo or Rochester, having detected a trace of vowel strangulation in her accent. “I was just curious,” I added. “I’ve got a lot of friends from up around there.”

“Chicago,” she said, flattening the a. “My name’s Petra, but I guess I already told you that.”

I smiled up at her, gripping the prongs of the lugwrench like Samson fastening on the jawbone of an ass, introduced myself in a gasp and gave the wrench a mighty jerk. Nothing happened. “Tight,” I grunted, flexing the muscles in my back.

“You from around here?” she said.

I jerked at the lug. It was immovable. With exaggerated care, as though the tool must be defective, I slipped the wrench from the lug and studied it.

“I mean,” she prompted, “you look familiar to me.”

“Oh,” I said, judiciously fitting the wrench to another lug and preparing to slip every disc, rupture every muscle, and herniate myself into the bargain with one murderous herculean thrust, “not really. We live in Palo Alto, actually. But we just”—I broke off to jerk savagely at the wrench—“but we just like come up on weekends to go, to go”—I was running sweat, furious, distracted, and I nearly shouted the final word—“fishing.”

“Looks like it’s really on there, huh?”

“No, no,” I said, bracing myself for another try, “don’t worry. It’s just”—again I heaved till I thought I could feel something give in my groin—“stuck, that’s all.”

It was at that moment, as if it had been choreographed by the Fates, as if all the hands of all the clocks that had measured time throughout history had been synchronized to mock that instant on that road on that day — it was then, when my guard was down and my passions piqued — that the CHP cruiser, revolving light aglow, glided silently up onto the shoulder behind us. I froze. Became a sculpture in living flesh: Man Changing Flat. Petra glanced up at the opaque window of the police car and put her hands to her hips.

The door of the car swung open and a glistening boot appeared. Then, six-two, one-eighty-five, as lean and tough as a strip of jerky and with every hair of his mustache clipped to regulation length, Officer Jerpbak emerged from the cruiser. He was carrying his summons book in one hand, and his mirror shades flashed malevolently. “What’s the problem here?”

“Nothing we can’t fix ourselves,” Petra said. Her voice had turned acid.

A pickup rattled by on the road, cloely tailed by a convertible that lurched into the outside lane with a blast of the throttle and then vanished in the distance. I straightened up — slowly, cautiously — still gripping the lugwrench and wondering what to do. Should I avert my face, throw my voice, drop the wrench and stroll casually back to the Toyota, start it up and drive off? The wrench weighed twelve tons, my heart was in my ears. Here he was, at long last, Jerpbak. Jerpbak the enforcer, Jerpbak the hound. In the flesh. “It’s just a flat tire, Officer,” I said, my voice hollow, withered, gone flat and out of key.

“Well,” said Jerpbak, ignoring me, “Miss Pandazopolos.” He sauntered up to the VW, put a foot on the bumper and thumbed through his summons book. “And her junk-wagon.”

“Oh, come on — get off my case, Jerpbak.” She flattened the final vowel until it trailed off in a bleat.

If to this point Jerpbak had seemed faintly amused, in the way of a nine-year-old with a bare wire and a pan of frogs, he turned abruptly serious. “In the car, lady,” he snapped. “I’m conducting a spot inspection of this vehicle right here and now.”

Petra fixed him with a stare of such intense, incendiary hatred I thought he’d burst into flame, and I realized with a thrill that she and I — that this fantastic, wide-mouthed, long-legged, dark-skinned, furious woman and I — had a bond in common. She opened her mouth as if to protest, but Jerpbak, impenetrable behind his shades, was already scribbling in his summons book, and she stalked round the car and slammed into the driver’s seat instead.

At this point, Jerpbak turned to me. “And who are you?”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you.”

“I’m nobody. I mean I, uh, just stopped to help when I, uh—?”

“You a local?”

“Me? No, no. Just passing through, never been here before in my life. I live in San Jose. With my mother.”

“Funny,” Jerpbak said, scratching meditatively in the dirt with the toe of his boot, “you look familiar.” And then he hit me with the question that gave me nightmares: “Ever been to Tahoe?”

“Where?”

“You hard of hearing? Tahoe. Lake Tahoe.”

Shit, I thought, and I felt something give way, a piece of elastic frayed to the breaking point. “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve been there.” And then: “Look, what’s this all about, anyway? You charging me with being a good Samaritan or what?”