You Only Get Letters from Jail Page 5
I went downstairs and my dad was sitting on the couch with cartoons on but the sound too low to hear and it didn’t matter because he had music playing anyway. He was dressed in a white undershirt and a pair of shorts, and his dark hair was standing up on one side and creased flat on the other. He was drinking a beer and his wallet was on the coffee table and it was unfolded and spread apart and looked empty, and I didn’t know if it was empty by accident or on purpose.
“She left,” he said. He did not turn to look at me right away, but when he did his beard looked like an eraser had rubbed out pencil on his face and he looked old and hard to recognize.
The needle on the turntable lifted up, moved back and dropped to the beginning of the album. I knew all the words to the song, and so did my dad, and so did Nadine now, I figured, since we had sung it over and over again last night under the hard circle of bright dining room light and the beat of wooden spoons on cheap metal pots.
“I hate this fucking song,” I said.
I picked up my backpack from the floor by the front window, and I rolled back the lock on the door and pushed the screen and the air smelled like cut grass and sprinkler water. “Hey, Floyd, wait,” my dad said from behind me. “Wait a minute. We can get some breakfast together.”
I didn’t slow down. The Vette was gone from the driveway and my dad’s Ford sat there looking dirty and used. I hit the sidewalk and kept walking, crossed the street and turned right at the corner. Even though it was early there was heat underneath the morning air and I could tell it was waiting to break through and take over for the day. My legs loosened up and warmed to the motion and I felt as if walking had never felt this good before, as if I had never felt it like this with my feet connected to the pavement and me just following along. If I crossed the park I could go back to the old house and see Jerry, but instead I stayed on the sidewalk and followed the street. Ronnie lived a couple miles away and he had my Salinger book. I had lent it to him before I made the switch to Kafka, but now I wanted my book back.
CATCH THE GREY DOG
There had been rain and everything was washed clean, colored knife-sharp and throwing back hard sunshine. There was still the cupboard smell of potatoes—dank and dark—from the dirt that hadn’t dried between the yellowed patches of grass that were trying to get a foothold in the gravel. My mother was leaning into the open yawn of the hood of my car, pointing at colored wires with a filed nail, careful to poke without touching so she wouldn’t spoil her manicure with sticky grease. I didn’t have to look at her to know that she was doing this. There was a man standing beside her, a tall man in dirty jeans, and I knew what kind of show she’d be putting on for his benefit. I knew she was asking questions in her high-fret guitar-string voice, and that she wasn’t listening for the answers. What she knew about cars I could fit into the corner of my eye, pick out with my finger, and wipe across my pants, and I was glad that I didn’t have to listen to her.
Ruby touched my arm as she spoke. “This is my favorite rabbit,” she said.
Ruby had taken it upon herself to tell me her name without asking for mine and walk me over to the sheet-metal garage so she could show me the badly weathered and leaning rabbit hutches that had been built along the outer wall. On this side of the garage I couldn’t see the driveway; the sun was blocked and the air was cooler. I could open my eyes without trying to rub the glare out of them. The separated cages were faced with thick, dense wire mesh that was too tightly bunched to squeeze a finger through, but Ruby put her hand up to the front of the third cage and tried to coax the rabbit forward with a weak wiggle of her pinkie through a hole.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“I turned sixteen last month,” I said. “What about you?”
“Twelve,” she said. “I wish I was thirteen.”
“There’s nothing great about being thirteen,” I said. I could remember being thirteen and in eighth grade, afraid of having to take a shower in PE, but being forced to anyway, standing naked in a group under a shower and trying not to look down.
“I just don’t want to be twelve anymore. I feel like I should be older. I look older, don’t I?”
She turned to face me and my eyes landed on her chest for a second, on the small bumps under her T-shirt that weren’t quite boobs, but were bigger than what my friend Robbie called “mosquito bites.” Robbie had told me that he’d had his hand on some mosquito bites once and when he’d tried to rub the nipples between his fingers, he’d gotten lost, slid off the mark without realizing it, and had spent the next several minutes trying to find his way back to second base. “Never again,” he’d said. “I could’ve been pinching at a mole for all I knew.”
“Well?” she said.
I leaned down and tried to look through the wire at the rabbit in the corner of the cage. “You could be older, I guess,” I said.
Ruby turned toward the cage and pushed in next to me so that our shoulders were touching. She smelled like maple syrup. “Her name is Thumper,” she said.
“That’s a great name,” I said. Original, I thought, but I didn’t say it. Maybe out here in the middle of Podunk they didn’t have a copy of Bambi. I looked at Ruby and the bulk of bra under her shirt, and I knew she was too old to really have an attachment to a rabbit’s name from a baby’s cartoon. Maybe she didn’t know that Thumper was a boy rabbit, what with his absence of animated balls and the whine in his voice through the entire movie—it was easy to be confused. Maybe she had hoped for a boy rabbit, mistaken a wad of fur between his legs, and had been strapped with a girl.
“I’ve had her for over a year now,” Ruby said. “She’s had a lot of babies. Mostly we sold them, but some of them we kept. These all belong to her. That one right there is her son, Blackie.” She pointed at the last cage, where a big black rabbit sat on its haunches and rubbed at its head with its front paws.
“Let me guess,” I said, “that one right there is Whitie.” I pointed at the white rabbit sleeping in the first cage.
Ruby laughed and pulled her finger free from Thumper’s wire. “No, silly. That’s Jezebel. She likes to get out of her cage and run around loose. I think her boyfriend is one of the wild rabbits from the field. A jackrabbit, you know.”
I grinned and kicked at the damp dirt around the legs of the hutch. There were green pellets spilled on the ground and swollen fat like sow bugs. “Let me guess. Jack, right? You call her boyfriend Jack.”
She looked at me and squinted hard, so that wrinkles nearly swallowed her narrowed eyes. “I don’t name the wild ones,” she said. “That would be dumb.” Her eyelashes were dark and long and kissed the tops of her cheeks as she talked. She made a clicking sound with her tongue and Blackie hopped to the side of his cage so he could be closer to her. “Quit begging for food,” she said. “He eats way too much.”
I looked at Thumper lying on her side against the hay bottom and saw that she was panting despite the cool air in the shadows. Her nose kept up its steady twitch, testing the wind with whiskers stiff as broom straw. She rolled her eyes without lifting her head to watch us. I put my finger up to the wire like Ruby had done, but my finger was too fat to poke through.
“I’d let you hold her,” she said, “but she’s gonna have babies any day now and it’s not a good idea to touch her. Sometimes she bites when she gets like this.” There was weak green diarrhea puddled under her and the entire cage smelled like a grass stain. I dropped my hand.
Ruby unclipped the water bottle from the front of the cage and unscrewed the top. “I take care of all the rabbits,” she said. “I get up before school and feed them, check their water, and then when I get home, I do it again. Casper says it’s my responsibility, taking care of the animals. These are all that are left.”
I looked at the small row of cages. The hutches had rope knotted around their legs in places, and the rope was attached to various car parts that lay discarded on the ground—a rusted bumper with a headlight still attached, a red door without a window.
I stepped out of the shadow and looked toward the driveway. The man in jeans had straightened up from poking at the engine of my car and now he was leaning sideways against the front fender, lighting a cigarette. My mom had her hip pressed against the driver’s side door and was laughing at something the man said. He was smiling, the cigarette pressed into the corner of his mouth, his eyes squinted against the smoke. My mom waved her arm toward me. “Sonny, come here,” she called.
Ruby was around the back corner of the garage where a pipe rose out of the ground. She was holding the water bottle under a hose and trying to force a thick stream through the narrow opening without getting back-spray on her pants.
“Gotta go,” I said.
She looked up from the hose and smiled at me. Her shoes were shiny with water.
I walked back across the gravel. My mother was telling a story about the time her fan belt broke on the highway and the man who pulled over to help her asked if she was wearing pantyhose stockings, which she was, and she sat in the car and took one off and the man knotted it and used it as a fan belt for her, so that she could drive the rest of the way home without paying for a tow.
“Have you ever heard of anything like that? He saved me at least a hundred dollars,” she said. “Maybe more. A three-dollar pair of stockings was well worth the cost, but I never would’ve thought of doing that. Not in a million years.”
The man held his cigarette up and blew ash off the tip so that the cherry glowed. “The heat from the engine binds it together somehow,” he said. “Makes it solid and keeps it from tearing. It’s an old trick.” He watched me walk up from the garage.
My mother threw her arm around my shoulders and pulled me into her even though I tried to step back and get beyond her reach. I could smell the sweat in the underarm of her T-shirt, and her body was all around me so that I felt smothered and short of breath. “And this is my son, Sonny. He’s the lucky one I bought the car for—all of this is for him.” She pulled me closer to her so she could sweep her hand over the trunk, the dusty blue paint thick with Bondo where the rust had bubbled through.
“Sonny, this is Casper,” she said. I looked at the man in jeans. He was younger than my mother, or maybe the same age, it was hard to tell. His face was windburned and peppered with scruff beard, as though he didn’t shave often or well. He had long eyelashes, like Ruby, and those sharp eyes, and when he hit his cigarette, he curled back his lips and held the butt with his teeth so that I could see that they were straight, but not very clean. “He’s our savior, no doubt about it, we’re damn lucky we pulled in here. Of all the driveways we could’ve turned down, he’s the one who happens to be a mechanic. I’m telling you, my luck is always too goddamn good to believe.”
“Except for the fact that you bought a car that broke down,” I said.
“Oh, you,” she laughed. She pushed me away from her so that my tennis shoes kicked up loose gravel. “Always quick to point out every little thing. Mr. Negative. That’s what I should call you. Don’t you think, Casper? Mr. Negative right here, with his ungratitude and giving his mom a hard time when all she did was buy him a classic car just like he wanted.”
Casper looked at me and blew smoke up toward the watery sky. I wanted to tell her that this wasn’t the car I wanted. I wanted a ’69 Camaro and what I ended up with was a 1970 GTO. It wasn’t even the right color. But the worst part about the whole thing was that I didn’t care about having a car at all. It had been her idea and I had been forced to go along with it.
“Well, broke down can be fixed,” Casper said. “This is one hell of a car. If I was a kid, I’d give up my left nut for one of these.” My mother covered her mouth and laughed like she was still in school and had never heard the word “nut” said out loud before. He flicked his cigarette and it landed at the edge of the gravel near a pile of bald tires. I watched the smoke trail and weaken and die. Casper turned back around and leaned over the open hood. “You’ve got the four-hundred cube engine that should put you at three hundred and fifty horses.” He leaned over farther so that his left work boot lifted from the ground and I could see that the laces were untied. “And a sixteen-valve V8.” He dropped back down and turned on me. His eyes measured me from my ragged shoes to the too-long hair that touched the collar of my shirt, and I knew the distance came up short. “One hell of a muscle car for a boy.”
“But can it be fixed?” my mother asked. Her arm was raised against the hardtop and I could see the sweat I’d smelled.
Casper cleared his sinuses and tipped his greasy auto-parts cap back on his head. “To be honest with you, I don’t know much about Muncie transmissions. Don’t see ’em anymore, and never worked on one. But that’s where your grind is. The trannie’s dropped and you’re running stripped.”
Reverse had gone out on us first, and then we were trapped in second gear for somewhere near forty miles, the engine wound high and my mother talking too loud, and me trying to keep my right foot balanced at forty miles per hour. That’s when we’d rolled up to Casper’s, looking for a phone, and instead we’d found a mechanic with a garage in the middle of acres of farmland, almost like a reverse mirage, the shimmering sheet metal throwing back solid sunshine in lush, green, water-heavy flatland—only to find that he didn’t know about my transmission and couldn’t fix the car.
“Too good to be true,” my mother said. “The catch at last.”
“See, I wasn’t being negative,” I said.
“Now hold up.” Casper eased back against the fender again and put a hand in his front pocket so that I could see him fingering loose change or scratching the left nut he was willing to give up for a car like mine. “I said I maybe couldn’t fix it. I didn’t say that it couldn’t be fixed. My boy, Boone, he’s real good with cars and knows a hell of a lot about these older ones. That’s all them guys drive up in Lincoln. I can get him to come over and take a look and maybe between the two of us we can get you back out on the road again.”
My mother clapped her hands together and then brought them up to her face in a gesture of prayer. “Thank you, Casper. Thank you and thank you again. I don’t care what it costs. I just want the car fixed so we can get home.”
“We should be able to get her back on the road,” Casper said. “There ain’t a reason in hell this car shouldn’t make it home.”
Fifteen hundred miles to go, I thought. Not fucking likely. I seriously doubted that I would see asphalt, streetlights, and the comfort of my bedroom anytime soon.
Ruby came out from the side of the garage and walked to where we were standing. “Thumper’s getting close,” she said to Casper. “I bet the babies come tonight.”
“Babies?” my mother said. “You got a cat out there in the barn?” I looked out at the empty green field behind the garage, at the nothingness.
“Rabbits,” I said. “She’s got rabbits in cages over there against the garage.”
“That is so sweet,” my mother said. “Baby bunnies. I just love little bunnies. They make me think of Easter, and all that candy everybody gets, those little chocolate bunnies and those hard candy eggs . . .”
“Why are your shoes all wet?” Casper said. The sharpness in his voice came out of nowhere, like the bottom of a broken bottle overturned in the sand.
Ruby looked down at her shoes and the darkened hem of her pants where the water had crept up the fabric. “Thumper’s water was empty so I had to fill it up. I guess I had the hose on too hard.”
“I don’t pay money for you to wear your good shoes out here to tend the animals,” Casper said. He looked at Ruby and she flinched, but only a little.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll go take them off.”
Casper’s hands were
gripped around the fender and his knuckles were white. “Go take out some more chicken to thaw for dinner while you’re up at the house.”
Ruby walked past us. “We don’t want to impose on you,” my mother said. “Sonny and I can get a taxi and find a room in town.” She looked down the driveway toward the road and the fences and the grass that had started to bend in the rising wind. “There is a town here, isn’t there?”
Casper loosened his hands from the fender and I half expected to see blue paint on his palms. He shook another cigarette from the crumpled soft pack in the front pocket of his shirt. “It ain’t a problem for both of you to stay until my boy can get over here. Me and Ruby could use the company,” he said. “It’d be a real good change.”
I sat on the porch and watched the light change colors until dinner was ready, and we ate around a big oak table—Casper’s fried chicken with too much salt and my mother’s mashed potatoes with dirty gravy that Casper had made from the drippings left in the pan. He drank beer while they cooked, and didn’t slow down with dinner. My mother joined him, bottle for bottle, and the conversation started to seep like the grease. Casper tried to call Boone several times, but there was no answer. “It’s not likely that he’s home if it’s dark outside,” he said. “Him and his buddies are probably on the hunt for girls.” He looked over at me while he talked. “You know how boys are. Always sniffing around.”