A car is more hassle than it’s worth in New York, but Hawk keeps ownership of the Blue Elephant, which began as a sky blue Cutlass S convertible, but is now a combination of cars, to which Seymour keeps grafting parts. The car feels like home, and in a pinch it has been. Hawk lived out of it for a few months before he started caretaking Sammy’s loft. You could get a coffee at McDonald’s in the morning and wash off. There were winter months too when Fat Frankie gave him the key to a padlocked room at the IHOB, as long as he didn’t bring any other cold souls back with him from the bars.
For a year and a half Hawk drove a van as an off-the-books delivery man for a backgammon pigeon from the IHOB who owned a warehouse in Long Island. So many hours of his life went bye on the L.I. Expressway, brakelights igniting road slush for miles. Other than the traffic, it wasn’t a bad gig, crashing in the man’s warehouse when he needed to and harvesting a few bills off him at backgammon now and then playing heads-up for low stakes.
Hawk’d had the one picture he owned of his father dangling and spinning from the van mirror in a credentials holder. As a young man, his father had been a speed skater, and the shot was of him in tight black pants, leaning against the rink, a pair of speed skates around his neck. In Hawk’s faded memories he has a pot belly, receding hairline, and looks late for something. Now the picture’s pinned by magnets to his refrigerator, along with one of him and the b-gang with Sammy at Yankee Stadium.
Then there was a stretch before Hawk met Witold and started with the sausage cart when he owed everyone in the world at least four dollars so that when he walked into any neighborhood bar the drunks turned with that got mine? expression. They’d duck back into their beers when they saw how broke he was in his face.
Witold owned the cart outright but got a better job as a head janitor in a midtown office building. He had the stock all lined up and after Hawk got his vendor’s license all they had to do was wheel the cart out in front of the garage of Witold’s building and to the corner. Hawk just had to call when he felt like working and cash out with Witold at the end of each day.
“It was Seymour made me name the car,” Hawk told Carla on the way over to Seymour’s garage the day before for Hawk to pay for the repairs. “He says, ‘You gotta establish relationships with things.’”
“A sensible man,” Carla said.
“It’s more like his car anyway. Him and his boys. I use it when I need to. Why not? I never have to pay for parking.”
When Hawk, Carla, and Zoey entered the garage, Mikey and Seymour were immobile in front of a Go board. It looked to Hawk like the kind of game where you make a move every hour and recite mantras in between.
“Have a cup of red,” Mikey said. “It ain’t half bad.”
“This man’s a connoisseur of box wines,” Seymour said. “Pull yourself a chair, Carla. Mikey’ll get you a cup of the nasty.”
Carla picked up a blowtorch, spun it in her palm, flexed its neck.
“Carla makes signs,” Hawk said. “With neon.”
“You could use you a sign in here,” Carla said to Seymour, looking at the board with NUBIAN CZAR painted on it. “I could hook you up cheap. It would change the atmosphere in the place.”
“Maybe it would at that.”
“If you put a sign in here, someone gonna rip it off?” Hawk asked.
“It’d be okay.”
“Turquoise might look good,” Carla said, holding her hands up and moving them along the wall, then seeing it. “Yeah, there it is.”
Mikey handed Carla a plastic cup, red to the rim.
“‘Scuse me one second while I educate this novice at the ancient and honorable game of Go,” Seymour said.
“So how much do I owe you this time?” Hawk asked Seymour.
Seymour calculated in his head a minute.
“Four dollars and fifty cents, including parts and labor. Any form of cash payment accepted.”
Seymour nodded to Carla and grinned. Then he walked to a refrigerator by the sink and brought Zoey an Italian ice.
Zoey peeled off the cherry-coated lid and tore open the packet containing the small, flat wooden spoon.
“I could have that sign in two weeks,” Carla said, wincing at a taste of the wine.
“You know,” Seymour said. “I think we can work something out.”