You Only Get Letters from Jail (7 page)

“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.

“We used to have a dog,” Ruby said. “But Casper had to let him go. He got the taste for chickens.” Behind us the grass crept up toward the garage, long grass with tall furry blades that looked like they'd be rough if you tried to roll around in them. “The chickens are gone, too.”

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.”

“Sonny'll be at that age someday,” my mother said. “Right now he just cares about being in his bedroom. That's it. Just him alone in his room, building things. Isn't that what you do, Sonny? Put things together?” When I was younger, I had put together models, classic cars, and
I wanted to tell her this, remind her that it had been years since then, but she didn't pause for an answer. “I had to buy him something in order to get him to spend time with his own mother.” She hiccupped and laughed. “I mean, I found him a car, flew us out to pick it up, and I am paying for the road trip to drive it home. The experience of a lifetime. And look at him. Nothing.” She paused while everyone stared at me. “Anyway, you ever seen that cop movie where the bad guys crash that helicopter into the Golden Gate Bridge?” She had both elbows on the table and was leaning forward over her plate so that she could hold her beer with both hands. Her cheeks were pink, as though she had just stepped inside from the cold. “You know, and there's the car that catches on fire and when the people jump from the bridge they don't realize that they're jumping into shark water?” She looked around the table. I picked the dark meat from a small window I had torn in the crisp skin of a thigh. My mother had fucked somebody famous when she was younger. He hadn't been famous then, but he used to hang out at her apartment and drink red wine and talk about foreign films. Whenever she met new people, she couldn't keep from dropping his name, even though it had all happened eighteen years ago—a few weeks in the summer—when he was still in college and she thought his lips were too thin to date him seriously.