In the morning farmyard the yellow peace van, like a giant pumpkin in the garden, sat dew-covered and silent. Alongside the van, suspended in a hammock, was the dark outline of Is. He looked like a string-bean pod. On my way to work, I let the truck coast down the driveway so as not to awaken the guests.
“Are the Volkswagen parts here yet?” my mother asked.
“No.” I told her about the matter of cash up front.
She was silent. “Rising Moon and I have had some good talks. She’s really very nice.”
At the Shell station the traffic was heavier now as June tipped toward July. There was a quickened flow of station wagons jammed with coolers, tents, sleeping bags, plus boat trailers filled with inner tubes and water skis and outboard motors. Windshields were crazy entomology experiments. Iridescent insect heads and the brittle gauze of dragonfly wings, trapped in the angles of windshield-wiper arms, crackled and broke as I swept them away. Fragments of monarch butterflies and hulking yellow bumblebees—some still alive and flexing—clung to bumpers and grilles. Wasps were hardiest; half of one
stung me through my damp leather windshield chamois.
At noon that day, when, magically, the tourists had all stopped somewhere else for ice cream and toilets, when everyone in Hawk Bend sat eating a plate of hot beef and gravy, when I alone watched the intersection, the shiny Leikvold station wagon pulled in.
Peggy. She wore a polka-dot bathing-suit top and short-shorts. “Hi, Paul.”
Paul. My own name from the lips of Peggy Leikvold.
“Dale,” she continued. “Have you seen him lately?”
My shoulders sagged slightly. “I guess so, yes,” I said, pretending to think back.
“When?” she said quickly.
“A few days ago.”
“A few days ago when?”
“On Thursday.”
“Darn,” she breathed. She looked through the windshield.
In the back of the station wagon were pom-poms, and orange-and-black wool marching-band outfits as well as the tall silver hat and skinny baton of her father, the bandleader.
“We were gone all week for these stupid parades,” she said, “in these stupid towns with their stupid summer festivals and their stupid floats.” She was assistant bandleader, helping out her father one last summer. Her brown cleavage swelled with each “stupid.”
“Sorry,” I said.
She didn’t hear me. “Well, what did he say?”
I paused. “He said, ‘Tell her I asked if she asked about me.’”
She stared. “That’s all?”
I nodded.
She pinched the tip of her tongue between her teeth as she thought about that. I watched as her blue eyes glazed over. A flush began in her cheeks, dropping like a slow, crimson movie curtain down her neck, then spreading its fine red tassels down her chest.
“Listen, Paul,” she said suddenly. “Do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
“Call him for me?”
“Call him? I guess. Okay.”
She nodded. Her shiny eyes were locked on mine.
“What do I say?”
“Tell him … tell him … I asked if he asked if I asked about him.”
I smiled. “Okay. When?”
She looked through me, to somewhere I couldn’t see. “Call him right now.”
Inside the office I dialed the number of Bender’s Sawmill. I did not have to look it up—she knew it. Just the two of us at the telephone, Peggy leaning close to the receiver, and me taking in all her midsummer bouquet of scents: hair spray, antiperspirant, chewing gum on her faintly coppery breath.
The phone rang twelve times. I turned to her.
“No, wait,” she whispered urgently.
“Yeah?” someone said on the twentieth ring. In the background I could hear the wail of a saw.
“Is Dale there?”
“Yeah. Who needs him?”
“This is … the Shell station in town. He’s got a … fan belt here.”
“Hang on.”
I handed the receiver to Peggy. Her eyes widened and she pushed it back to me.
“Yeah?” Dale said in the same voice as the other speaker.
“This is Paul,” I said, speaking loudly, “at the Shell station?”
In the background the saw’s whine dampened; something clattered as the door closed.
“Sutton,” Dale’s voice said, closer now. “So what’s new?” In the black curve of the receiver I saw his grin, his dark waterfall of hair.
“Peggy came in. She has a message for you.” Beside me Peggy leaned closer, a firm, oblivious breast on my bare arm.
“So what was it?” Dale said.
“She said to tell you that she asked if you asked if she asked about you.”
There was silence. Then I heard him laugh. “She said that?”
“Word for word.”
“What was she wearing?”
“Wearing?” I looked at Peggy. She leaned back self-consciously.
“A polka-dot bathing-suit top and white short-shorts.”
“Did she look good, Sutton?”
I looked straight at Peggy. “She looked great. Tops, believe me.”
Peggy covered her mouth and laughed. Her eyes dropped, for a moment, to the name tag sewn on my shirt.
“A bathing-suit top and short-shorts,” Dale said. “Damn.”
Outside, the driveway bells ding-dinged. “Listen, I gotta go.”
“Sutton—wait,” Dale said. “Tell her I want to see her.”
“Okay. When?”
“Soon. Today.”
“Today. Where?”
There was silence. “It’s got to be on the sly,” Dale said. “Her old man, this damn town—you know how it is.”
Outside another car pulled up.
“Meet her here at the station,” I said. It just popped out, but it only made sense—plus somebody had to take charge.
“You nuts, Sutton?”
“If you go uptown, somebody sees you. You drive outside of town, someone sees you for sure.”
“Yeah, it’s always that way. I’m listening, Sutton.”
“Here at the station you’re a customer, she’s a customer. If there’s no one around, you can talk in the back room.”
There was silence. “I owe you one, Sutton.”
“Four o’clock this afternoon!” Peggy blurted into the phone.
“Hey!” Dale said. “Hey!”
She hung up the phone and hurried off, leaving me to a driveway of impatient tourists.
At a quarter to four I heard Dale’s car come through the intersection. He drove a 1955 Chevy stripped and primed in flat gray. Its stock 283-cubic-inch block had been jerked, the engine compartment torched wider, and the motor mounts strengthened for the 409 block—which itself had been bored, stroked, and blueprinted in a Minneapolis machine shop. The transmission was a Hurst four-speed, the drive train beefed up, the suspension stiffened, the rear-end differential geared at 4:68 for maximum quarter-mile time—said to be in the low thirteen-second range. It was the engine’s camshaft, however, direct from a speed shop somewhere in California, that gave the car its signature note: a rough, throaty idle that the mechanically uninformed mistook for an engine in need of tuning.
I looked up from the tire machine as Dale’s Chevy trembled by. Only its thickened rear tires—six-inch slicks—gave it away. No stupid flames or racing stripes
painted down the sides, no leaf-spring risers for a jacked-up rear end, no bright hubcaps. Dale, casing the station, nodded once at me. A jerk of his sharp chin. There was no sign of Peggy, and he was early, so I made a brief, circling motion with an upraised index finger. He nodded again ever so slightly, and headed uptown to make a loop down Main Street.
At precisely four o’clock Dale rumbled up to the back-bay doors and killed his engine. I went over. He was freshly scrubbed, wore a clean white T-shirt, and smelled strongly of English Leather cologne.
“You seen her?” he said. His voice was stiff and throaty.
“Not yet.”
He looked around nervously, then popped his hood and pretended to check his oil—which allowed me a good look at the engine: its gleaming chrome valve covers; the two four-barrel carburetors that jutted upward like raised aluminum fists. “She was there, Sutton, on the damn phone when you were talking,” Dale said accusingly.
“She didn’t want to talk to you. What was I supposed to do? Give me a damn break!” I said. Dale turned and raised one dark eyebrow at me. My eyes widened slightly.
“I guess,” he muttered. His stare went to the back room, where Kirk’s legs, on a creeper, protruded from beneath a Pontiac. A scattering of muffler clamps and bright pipe lay alongside, and his air hammer rattled. The second
bay, the car wash, was occupied. And the driveway was rapidly filling with tourists. “I thought you said we could talk here. How the hell we gonna do that?”
“The busier the better.” I shrugged.
He narrowed his eyes to consider that.
At that point Mr. Davies came out carrying his bank deposit bag and the mail.
“New tires?” I said loudly. “Certainly, Dale. Let’s take a quick look in the warehouse.”
Mr. Davies nodded. “Keep up the good work, Sutton.”
Tucked behind the station was a small log building, one of the town’s original structures, I suppose, and now used as a warehouse for tires and cases of oil. Its thick walls made it thief-proof. Dale Bender followed me through the low door. I pulled the lightbulb chain. The building was close with the smell of fresh black butyl. Long tunnels of tires, stacks of tires in the corners, tires rising to the ceiling, thirteen-inch boat-trailer tires to fifteen-inch Oldsmobile rims, even hard-rubber sixteen-inch tires for Model-T Ford rims, now used mainly on homemade trailers. I turned to Dale and gestured at the shadowy spaces of the warehouse. “You can talk back here.”
“You nuts, Sutton? She ain’t gonna come back here.”
“Well, the car wash, then,” I said, annoyed.
Dale looked at me.
“Take it or leave it,” I heard myself say. “I got customers.” Astoundingly, Dale did not deck me.
“Maybe she ain’t coming,” Dale muttered.
“She’ll come,” I said.
When we returned, the Leikvold station wagon sat at the far pumps, facing away as if for a quick exit.
“Geez, Sutton, you’re right—there she is,” Dale breathed. “What do I do?”
“Pretend to work on your car.”
He turned to his engine.
I hurried across the drive, starting gas on two other cars, then went to Peggy.
“He’s here!” she said even as I approached; there was fear in her eyes. She looked through her rearview mirror at Dale’s Chevy. “What do I do?”
As I looked back, a car emerged, dripping and shiny, from the wash bay. I looked down at the tidy, dust-free Ford Safari wagon. “Car wash today, miss?” I said, and saluted.
She looked back into the wash bay with its tall open door. Water dribbled from little nozzles and the big mechanical mops hung trembling and wet. She grinned at me. “Yes,” she murmured. “Definitely.”
As I worked the pumps I watched her pull up to the wash-bay door. Dale’s Chevy stood just a few feet away. He pretended to fiddle with his engine, but I guessed they were talking. Then Dale glanced around and slipped inside the Ford wagon. Peggy accelerated sharply into the bay. The door rattled down over the rising hiss of water; then, starting slowly but gathering speed, the spinning brushes began their slappa-slappa-slappa.