Billy Twiggs was an artist with a spray gun but could never paint sober. My father
had no sympathy for a drunk—if Billy wanted the work
he’d have to pull the dent from the driver’s side door before he took his first toddy
of the day. “I’ll give her a try,” Billy’d told him,
and I wondered if every artist looked this beleaguered of a morning. The dent was
my doing, the first of a million mistakes
it was up to me to make right, a sixteen-year-old wild at the wheel of the family
Ford. Billy did his prep work under a shade tree. The rotting roof
of the shed he used for a spray room sagged like a tent canvas. When the car rolled
out again, it was only up close that you could see
each shaky pass of the paint gun, a grainy texture to the finish. Billy was all I could
afford. God knows what he aimed to fix
self-medicating with Ten High bourbon and RC Cola, but that’s a repair that won’t
last long. A few years later I took my own car to him
after a nearsighted neighbor put a crease down it with her Buick on a narrow
residential street in Memphis. Billy was still the best
body man in that end of the state if you caught him at the right time of day, and the
cheapest. What’s on the surface is all
we’ll ever lay hands on. Impossible to match the faded paint of a hard-driven
automobile but his eye could get it close. I wasn’t about to tell a man
how to do his job. I’d held a few jobs by then and knew that to stay on the payroll
you had to find a way to keep getting the work done. The quarter panel
he mended looked like it’d been factory dipped, so new again and so beautiful how
could it ever blister or check? He was weaving a little
in his walk but it was his hands that did the fixing, and they were still steady when
I paid him with teller machine twenties, counting out
more than he’d asked for, a fair enough price to slow the rust for another year, until
the transmission went and I sold the car for scrap.