The Narcissist's Daughter (6 page)

“See, it’s like he got this fascination with death. Couldn’t leave it alone even after he got back.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Fuck it is.”

“Somebody at Hydramatic knew Ted Kessler?”

“This guy was in, too.”

“Korea?”

“The Corps. I don’t know if he was over there.”

“So how’d he know him?”

“He knew of him. He heard shit.”

“A guy knew someone who knew someone who knew someone.”

“It was in the newspaper.”

“But not about him killing people with his bare hands.”

“Shit,” he said, and looked out the window again.

I felt as frightened as he was angry, though not because of some stupid story he’d heard. It was crazy, what I’d done with Joyce. I had good grades and I knew I’d smoke the MCATs when the time came, but even so I wasn’t the choicest med school applicant anymore. Twenty-three was getting old, I’d be utterly dependent on loans and grants and whatever else they could provide, and I had no connections, no doctors in the family circle making calls and buying drinks on my behalf. Ted could wash all of that away. Or he could shit can me.

Brigman tipped what was left of the beer into his mouth, set the can on the floor and said, “It’s down here. Turn.”

It was a tight little frame house, one corner of which was braced up by cinder blocks stacked on a sheet of plywood—the man was always home, I gathered, collecting government checks while his wife worked. Out back was a garden of weeds and a saddle-backed garage with half-raised doors that hadn’t moved in years and three dogs that I could see and as many kids, and there slowly dissolving in the dirty snow this faded lemon yellow ’Cuda. It was a ’71 340, not the bulkiest of the muscle cars but it had nice lines with its hiked-up rear end and the tight linear body that narrowed as it swept down to the grill. This one was beat, though; it made me tired to think of what it would take to bring it back.

Brigman walked around and pushed against it, opened it up and peered in. I could smell the must from where I stood.

“You keep lookin,” the man said, “you should just buy it.”

“Problem is,” Brigman said, “I got nowhere to work. Too damn old for curb work.”

The man looked around and took a deep breath and brought something up from inside his chest and gathered it for a moment in his mouth and then hocked it out onto the ground. “Work on it here, you want,” he said.

“Where?”

“N’a garage.” He pronounced it gay-rage.

It was stuffed with thirty years of shit, shit that flowed out of every opening it could find. It was an older cousin to our living room.

“How’s that?” Brigman said.

“Clean it there, a space. ’Course it’d be some rent.”

“Like what?”

The man shrugged. “Twenty-five a month.”

“That include electric?”

The man pondered it a moment, then nodded.

“It’s a good deal,” I said, and Brigman glared at me. I knew better than to comment in front of the seller, but I never thought he was seriously negotiating. This was verboten stuff, the fix he had denied himself for six years.

“You take it?” the man said. I watched his fat ruddy whiskery face as he looked around at the grim landscape, the sagging power lines and broken roads and weedy lots and falling down houses and the socked-in sky sitting on top of it all like some sadistic god wrestler pinning the world yet again. He tried to show nothing, as if the whole matter bored him, as if Christmas wasn’t looming, and almost succeeded. I could see, too, in Brigman’s face how he ached to put his hands on that machine, to make something work again.

“Gotta see about the money,” Brigman said. “Make sure if I can swing it.” But he hadn’t found a job (I doubted he’d looked) and besides he had no way of getting himself over here except the buses, which would take an hour each way with the downtown transfer. I still wasn’t sure why we’d come except that look he got when he touched it made him seem in some way as he’d once been.

The man nodded. “Don’t come back here and look no more,” he said, “less if you’re gonna buy it.”

We were headed back the way we’d come when Brigman said, “You know how he lost his hand?”

“Ted? Yeah, he told me.”

“Really?”

“I said I knew him pretty well.”

“So how?”

“He cut it pretty bad and it turned gangrenous before he could get in and have it taken care of. They had to amputate it.”

“That’s not what I heard.”

“Oh, well then, he must’ve been bullshitting me.”

“I heard he was at Chosin Reservoir when the Chinese made their big counter. He was in a building that collapsed. His hand was caught under a bunch of debris and he was gonna be dead if he didn’t get out so he cut it off. Himself. Took that knife he carried and hacked his own fucking hand off. And now you work for the guy. Weird, huh?”

“I don’t know how you can believe that garbage.”

“I believe it,” he said. “He probably
was
bullshitting you. Those guys don’t talk about shit, you know, unless you’re one, too. Less you seen it. Ask him sometime if that’s not how it really happened.”

“I’m not going to ask him that.”

“Take me down there. He’d tell me.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“Fucking gook-killing machine. Wasted dozens of them little bastards.”

When we came off the bridge and I turned into the lot of a Big Boy, Brigman said, “What’re you doing?”

“Can you find the monthly?”

He was quiet a moment, then said, “Yeah. Unemployment goes another six weeks, then I’ll find something.”

“And you’ll be okay with this again?”

“I don’t want to drive it. Just work on it.”

“
I
get to drive it sometimes.”

“Shit, boy, you can drive it all you want long’s you don’t race. You sure? You gotta have the dough for school, don’t you?”

“I have enough for next semester. Almost. But there’s one more thing.”

He looked at me and shook his head in resignation.

I said, “Let’s just get it going, see how it is. That’s all. It’s doing no good sitting there getting old.”

“I don’t want her getting in trouble with it, is all, racing all over hell, doing…stupid shit in it.”

“It won’t hurt to see if it runs.”

He nodded. I looped around and headed back over the river again to the east. The man came down fifty on his ask and agreed to take twenty for the rent. We stayed nearly an hour after I wrote a check for the car and the first month, me watching while Brigman pored over the engine, and the man swearing and kicking at one of the garage doors, trying to get the sumbitch piece-a-shit crap heap bastard open.

D
onny drove Chloe to the mall one afternoon that week before Christmas ostensibly to do some final shopping but we knew she was also going to apply at the pretzel shop. This happened without Brigman’s blessing but also without his expressly forbidding it—Chloe had continued to bug him about it until he finally stopped reacting at all and she could take his lack of response, pro or con, as tacit permission.

In the meantime Brigman, true to his word and with an eye toward a Christmas deadline, began fussing with my mother’s Skylark. In a day he had it coughing, and a day or two after that running pretty smoothly. Then he had me back it out and test drive it with him in the passenger seat. We stopped first to get new tires (which were my Christmas present to Chloe), then found a big empty parking lot where he could take it around. He immediately ordered us back home, tore the wheels off to do an entire brake job including new drums, and also dropped in a new clutch. Chloe flitted about like a mother bird—her face would pop up in a window, then she’d be on the stoop, then in the garage, then back in the house again. Donny wandered over at one point and poked his head under the hood. When, upon seeing the modest six-cylinder 225, he mentioned that he knew where we could pick up a small-block V-8 four-barrel 383 with a high performance shaft, Brigman turned to him and said something either profane or threatening enough that Donny turned red and left a minute later.

But seeing them even for a moment with their heads together under a hood made me feel dizzy with nostalgia and dread. It had once been their fraternity. Brigman must have been thirty already when Motorhead formed around him, but it was as if only then did he find the place in the world that fit him, and ironically it was never a place at all—Motorhead had to move to stay alive, so you never knew where it was going to be until it happened. They came, Brigman and the others, to breathe and boast and let themselves out of themselves to burn through the nights of the city. They lived there in a way they could not live in the other places of their lives because they knew that anything was possible—fires or gunshots or knifings, revelations, acquisitions, wrecks, of course, arrests, the discovery of solutions to intractable problems, love, or other disasters they could none of them envision—and these possibilities sharpened the air and made it come alive in a way I imagined nothing else ever had for any of them. The noise itself felt dangerous, the simultaneous revving of two or three dozen magnum engines, big and bored-out and retrofitted and chromed-up and super-charged, each one generating over 350 horses or it didn’t count, and the searing of rubber that went along with it, and shouting and laughter, the screams of girls getting chased by boys who knew them some and wanted to know them better, and the pounding of rock and roll from amped up Tri-Ax’s, and often enough that eerie rising and dying of police sirens coming in. The lights, too, had edges, headlights and dome lights and street lights and lighters and flashers and store lights if it was in a parking lot and fires burning in garbage cans if it wasn’t.

I was thirteen the summer of my first Motorhead and remember it as little more than a swirl of images and sounds and especially scents—the air laced with the smell of raw leaded gasoline and of the exhaust fumes of leaded gasoline, of raw rubber and of burned rubber, of the heated fusion of oil and metal. It was the smell of an industrial land, the same category of scents that strikes you in the factories where transmissions and glass and springs and batteries and the thousands of minute pieces that hold vehicles together and allow them to run are synthesized and stamped and welded and cooled and stacked and boxed, or in a garage or a trucking warehouse or a machine shop where the parts are tooled to minute specifications so they will all fit as they’re designed to do. Even today I can step into a certain sort of building and be immediately transported back to the high heat and unlimited possibilities of those lost nights, though I remember little of what actually went on there.

Brigman taped a red bow to the Skylark’s hood and left it in the driveway for Chloe to find Christmas morning. We all went along for her first drive, Brigman riding shotgun and Donny and me in the backseat (the two of us farting around pretending to be scared for our lives until Brigman gave us a look). It was not an easy drive, that car, with its pre-synchro-mesh three-on-the-tree shifter, and I thought at first that maybe Brigman should have waited until Chloe had a little practice before putting in the new clutch. You could practically smell it smoking. But he was patient, remarkably so—I saw them out nearly every day even in the slush crawling around the block until, soon enough, she was cruising smoothly and in the new year he let her take it out for the first time alone (and stood in the front door watching and smoking the entire half hour she was gone).

One night in early January Phyllis had off, so Ray was acting supervisor and Kathy Rudner (with whom, remember, I’d been working a couple mornings a week on Organic—I’d pulled that A with her help the first semester and felt primed for the second) was pulling OT. She didn’t like to work with Ray but needed the extra money for Christmas bills. She held down hematology and the blood bank and when it was slow dozed on the donor couch in the back, but it wasn’t slow that night, it was a wild ride: a girl awake and blinking at us with her scalp torn cleanly and completely off by a windshield, a sickler in crisis, two infarcts, an OD, and a rule-out Reyes. And that was all prelude to the flight that brought in a nighttime janitor who’d gotten caught by the sleeve in a shredder. Word was he’d managed to reach his knife and cut through whatever flesh was left of his upper arm, the bone being broken through already, and that if he hadn’t done that it would have taken him all the way in. It brought to mind Brigman’s story about Ted, and later that would gnaw at me but then it didn’t have time—I was tied up there for an hour while Kathy cranked out units of blood and Ray ran all the other tests, jogging back and forth between Chemistry and Hematology.

After that it slowed and I dozed until a code came down around four from the ICU. It was the janitor. The senior resident running it spoke his orders in a low calm voice—in the ICU at night everyone stayed pretty cool. I stood hands in pockets away from the foot of the bed, watching them compress the man’s chest and pump the bag while someone squirted conductant on the paddles and rubbed them together. Even then I was conscious of that place around me, its order and cleanliness. When the resident placed the paddles on the man’s chest and popped him, everyone paused a moment to watch the new green blip on the monitor.

“Hey, you.” Joyce stood beside me. “How’ve you been?” Her skin was so dark that the lab coat she wore over her scrubs seemed to glow against it. It made me feel sick how good she looked.

“All right.”

She looked up and put her hand on the back of my arm. “I was just worried. I wanted us to have a chance to talk…after. You know. But it’s been so busy.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m a big boy.”

“Yes,” she said. “I noticed that.” She squeezed me.

“Bloods,” someone said, and they broke into motion again and I came into the circle of light and felt for a radial pulse.

“It’s awfully thready,” a nurse said. “Can you?”

It was there, a distant flowing, more a vibration than a pumping, but as long as I felt it at all, I knew. “It’ll come,” I said. “Just slow.”

“Get it,” said the resident.

I uncapped the needle of a gas syringe and aimed it into a gauze and shot out the excess heparin, then felt again. I pushed the needle in and felt it cut through gristle and flesh, adjusting it as it traveled toward that distant flow, that tiny tide. The blood that came was dark, the color of ripe black cherries, and hardly strong enough to push the plunger back, but it came.

“Damn,” someone said.

I sheathed and unscrewed the needle and capped the syringe and pushed it down into the glass of ice someone handed me, and left. In the hallway Joyce leaned into the ice machine.

She said, “How’s your morning look?”

“Pretty open.”

“Buy you a drink?”

“Okay.”

I watched her walk back toward the unit. She’d taken off the lab coat and I could see all the contours of her round and substantial ass moving beneath the thin cotton of the scrubs.

I took a booth at Sobecki’s instead of my usual spot at the bar. I’d just lit a smoke when the door opened and the tocking of footsteps approached across the wooden floor. Joyce wore a white sweater, a denim skirt, navy stockings, and clogs with wooden soles. She slid in across from me and smiled and lit a cigarette.

“Special occasion,” I said, and she smiled. She took the tin of Quaaludes out of her purse and swallowed one and offered them to me, but I shook my head. Later, after a couple of drinks, she said, “I don’t need to sit in a bar all morning. Can we go somewhere else?”

We came out into the sunlight of the morning and crossed the small weed-cracked parking lot to the 280Z. She unlocked the door, then looked up at me. I stood close enough to smell the wintergreen breath mint she’d taken, and her perfume, which was sharp, not soft and floral at all but vivid and vexing. It reminded me of Halloween, all orange and black.

“Do you feel like another drink?”

“Sure.”

“It’s just I don’t want to have more and drive. My house isn’t far. We could go there.”

I nodded.

“Follow me.”

A library lay on one side of the cool dark foyer complete with a sliding ladder to reach the higher shelves, and an emerald parlor with a tall silver Christmas tree still up on the other. I’d never been in a house that smelled so clean, not the antiseptic smell of the hospital but more the absence of any odors at all with just the hint of some underlying scent, not of cleansers or air fresheners but of a kind of flower maybe that I had never smelled before or some spice I couldn’t have named. The dark garland-laced walls of the central hallway were covered with rows of photographs in matching brass frames. One, taken onboard a large boat, was of a smiling Dr. Kessler, shirtless and tanned, with his arm around a ten-or-so-year-old Jessi, but almost all the rest of them seemed to be of Joyce. Joyce as a very young woman, maybe twenty, Joyce pregnant, Joyce graduating from nursing school, Joyce with Jessi as a baby, and so on.

We passed through a huge dining room with a wooden table long enough to nearly span it, and into a wide bright kitchen of new stainless steel appliances and a glass table in a glass alcove.

“Sit,” she said and crossed to the refrigerator and opened it and leaned in. She was built nothing like the women I’d been with. She was substantial in ways they had not been, in the breasts and the shoulders and neck, in the pelvis and thighs, in the belly, yet there was a kind of lightness in the way she carried herself. In the inebriating warmth of the light falling through the wide window, it occurred to me how simple about it they were, Ted and Joyce, how ignorant the walls and luxuries they lived behind had made them. What did they know really of the world? He had fought in a war and been injured, I’d give him that, and she got her hands dirty caring for the dying, but beyond that they lived terribly sheltered privileged lives, the dirt of the street, the rawness of the world, alien to them, at most a long distant memory. But not to me. I knew it and was certain I was smarter about this than they could ever be.

She set two Heinekens on the table then turned a chair out and sat down so close to me that when I faced her our knees brushed. She put her hand on my thigh and said, “It’s okay.”

“Is it?” I said.

She got up and stood behind me and said, “You need to relax.” She began to knead the muscles along my shoulders and in my neck, squeezing, then driving a knuckle in until a great warmth flowed to my head and I did not feel light there anymore. I grunted and leaned back so that my hair brushed her. I let my head fall until it rested against the cushion of her breasts and as she continued to knead I reached around and rubbed her leg. She tilted my face back and when she leaned over and smiled and touched the end of her nose to mine it released something in me—I felt suddenly calm and voracious; I stopped trembling, my breathing deepened and slowed and the tension ran out of my shoulders and back. I slid my fingers into her hair and pulled her forward and placed my mouth over hers and we kissed in that upside down manner until she pulled away and said, “Wait here.”

I listened to her clogs on the wooden staircase and drank and looked out the wide window at the yard. Soon she came back down, held her hand out and said, “Come.” She led me upstairs and back to what I thought was a small TV room until I realized it was only the antechamber to the master suite. It held a black leather sofa, two end tables, and a bookcase with a television on one shelf, a Betamax player on another, and a row of videotapes.

She stopped here and turned and threw her arms around my neck and kissed me again. For a moment she was like a young girl giddy with excitement, then she stepped away and held out her hands. She pulled her sweater over her head, undid the skirt and let it drop, and slid the stockings down and took them off so that she wore nothing but a white bra and white panties cut high up on her hips. She walked backward, facing me, into the bedroom proper.

It was mammoth, this room, running the entire breadth of the house. The rear of the ceiling angled downward with the roofline and beneath that lowered part sat the bed, king-sized with a heavy gold spread. The walls were the yellow-green color of avocado flesh. Ted’s bureau was nearest the door. Her dresser, wider and lower and with a huge mirror mounted over it, lay beyond it, the two of them separated by the entrance to a walk-in closet. Across from the foot of the bed, along the inside wall, stood a huge oak-colored armoire, with its doors slightly opened. At the far end was a separate grouping of furniture—a suite of ornate matching armchairs and love seats.