For K.
B. stands at the side of the highway, helpless, hands behind his back, the droopy greatcoat like a relic of ancient wars. There is wind and rain—or is it sleet?—and the deadly somnolent rush of tires along the pavement. His own vehicle rests on the shoulder, stricken somewhere in its slippery metallic heart. He does not know where, exactly, or why—for B. is no mechanic. Far from it. In fact, he’s never built or repaired a thing in his life, never felt the restive urge to tinker with machinery, never as a jittery adolescent dismantled watches, telephone receivers, pneumatic crushers. He is woefully unequal to the situation at hand. But wait, hold on now—shouldn’t he raise the hood, as a distress signal? Isn’t that the way it’s done?
Suddenly he’s in motion, glad to be doing something, confronting the catastrophe, meeting the challenge. He scuttles round to the front of the car, works his fingers under the lip of the hood and tugs, tugs to no effect, slips in the mud, stumbles, the knees of his trousers soaked through, and then rises to tug again, shades of Buster Keaton. After sixty or seventy seconds of this it occurs to him that the catch may be inside, under the dashboard, as it was in his late wife’s Volvo. There are wires—bundles of them—levers, buttons, handles, cranks and knobs in the cavern beneath the steering wheel. He had no idea. He takes a bundle of wire in his hand—each strand a different color—and thinks with a certain satisfaction of the planning and coordination that went into this machine, of the multiple factories, each dominating its own little Bavarian or American or Japanese town, of all the shifts and lunch breaks, the dies cast and what do you call them, lathes—yes, lathes—turned. All this—but more, much more. Iron ore dug from rock, hissing white hot vats of it, molten recipes, chromium, tall rubber trees, vinyl plants, crystals from the earth ground into glass. Staggering.
B. jolted from his reverie by the harsh plosive, spasms of amber light expanding and contracting the interior of the car like the pulse of some predatory beast. Looking up into a lean face, slick hair, stoned eyes. “I was ah trying to ah get the ah latch here—”
“You’ll have to ride back in the truck with me.”
“Yeah, sure,” B. sitting up now, confused, gripping the handle and swinging the door out to a shriek of horns and a rush of air. He cracks something in his elbow heaving it shut.
“Better get out this side.”
B. slides across the seat and steps out into the mud. Behind him, the tow truck, huge, its broad bumper lowering over the hood of his neat little German-made car. He mounts the single step up into the cab and watches the impassive face of the towman as he backs round, attaches the grappling hook and hoists the rear of the car, spider and fly. A moment later the man drops into the driver’s seat, door slamming with a metallic thud, gears engaging. “That’ll be forty-five bucks,” he says.
A white fracture of sleet caught up in the headlights, the wipers clapping, light flashing, the night a mist and a darkness beyond the windows. They’ve turned off the highway, jerking right and left over a succession of secondary roads, strayed so far from B.’s compass that he’s long since given up any attempt at locating himself. Perhaps he’s dozed even. He turns to study the crease folded into the towman’s cheek. “Much farther?” he asks.
The man jerks his chin and B. looks out at a blaze of light on the dark horizon, light dropped like a stone in a pool of oil. As they draw closer he’s able to distinguish a neon sign, towering letters stamped in the sky above a complex of offices, outbuildings and hangars that melt off into the shadows. Eleven or twelve sets of gas pumps, each nestled under a black steel parasol, and cars, dark and driverless, stretching across the whitening blacktop like the reverie of a used-car salesman. The sign, in neon grid, traces and retraces its colossal characters until there’s no end and no beginning: GARAGE. TEGELER’S. BIG. GARAGE. TEGELER’S BIG GARAGE.
The truck pulls up in front of a deep, brightly lit office. Through the steamed-over windows B. can make out several young women, sitting legs-crossed in orange plastic chairs. From here they look like drum majorettes: white calf boots, opalescent skirts, lace frogs. And—can it be?—Dale Evans hats! What is going on here?
The towman’s voice is harsh. “End of the road for you, pal.”
“What about my car?”
A cigarette hangs from his lower lip like a growth, smoke squints his eyes.
“Nobody here to poke into it at this hour, what do you think? I’m taking it around to Diagnosis.”
“And?”
“Pfft.” The man fixes him with the sort of stare you’d give a leper at the Inaugural Ball. “And when they get to it, they get to it.”
B. steps into the fluorescent blaze of the office, coattails aflap. There are nine girls seated along the wall, left calves swollen over right knees, hands occupied with nail files, hairbrushes, barrettes, magazines. They are dressed as drum majorettes. Nappy Dale Evans hats perch atop their layered cuts, short-and-sassies, blown curls. All nine look up and smile. Then a short redhead rises, and sweet as a mother superior welcoming a novice, asks if she can be of service.
B. is confused. “It … it’s my car,” he says.
“Ohhh,” running her tongue round her lips. “You’re the Audi.”
“Right.”
“Just wait a sec and I’ll ring Diagnosis,” she says, high-stepping across the room to an intercom panel set in the wall. At that moment a buzzer sounds in the office and a car pulls up to the farthest set of gas pumps. The redhead jerks to a halt, peers out the window, curses, shrugs into a fringed suede jacket and hurries out into the storm. B. locks fingers behind his back and waits. He rocks on his feet, whistles sotto voce, casts furtive glances at the knee-down of the eight majorettes. The droopy greatcoat, soaked through, feels like an American black bear (Ursus americanus) hanging round his neck.
Then the door heaves back on its hinges and the redhead reappears, stamping round the doormat, shaking out the jacket, knocking the Stetson against her thigh. “Brrrr,” she says. In her hand, a clutch of bills. She marches over to the cash register and deposits them, then takes her seat at the far end of the line of majorettes. B. continues to rock on his feet. He clears his throat. Finally he ambles across the room and stops in front of her chair. “Ahh …”
She looks up. “Yes? Can I help you?”
“You were gong to call Diagnosis about my car?”
“Oh,” grimacing. “No need to bother. Why, at this hour they’re long closed up. You’ll have to wait till morning.”
“But a minute ago—”
“No, no sense at all. The Head Diagnostician leaves at five, and here it’s nearly ten. And his staff gets off at five-thirty. The best we could hope for is a shop steward—and what would he know? Ha. If I rang up now I’d be lucky to get hold of a janitor.” She settles back in her chair and leafs through a magazine. Then she looks up again. “Listen. If you want some advice, there’s a pay phone in the anteroom. Better call somebody to come get you.”
The girl has a point there. It’s late already and arrangements will have to be made about getting to work in the morning. The dog needs walking, the cat feeding. And all these hassles have sapped him to the point where all he wants from life is sleep and forgetfulness. But there’s no one to call, really. Except possibly Dora—Dora Ouzel, the gay divorcee he’s been dating since his wife’s accident.
One of the majorettes yawns. Another blows a puff of detritus from her nail file. “Ho hum,” says the redhead.
B. steps into the anteroom, searches through his pockets for change, and forgets Dora’s number. He paws through the phone book, but the names of the towns seem unfamiliar and he can’t seem to find Dora’s listing. He makes an effort of memory and dials.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Dora?—B. Listen, I hate to disturb you at this hour but—”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine.”
“That’s nice, I’m fine too. But no matter how you slice it my name ain’t Dora.”
“You’re not Dora?”
“No, but you’re B., aren’t you?”
“Yes … but how did you know?”
“You told me. You said: ‘Hello, Dora?—B.’ … and then you tried to come on with some phony excuse for forgetting our date tonight or is it that you’re out hooching it up and you want me—if I was Dora and I bless my stars I’m not—to come out in this hellish weather that isn’t fit for a damn dog for christsake and risk my bones and bladder to drive you home because only one person inhabits your solipsistic universe—You with a capital Y—and You have drunk yourself into a blithering stupor. You know what I got to say to you, buster? Take a flyer. Ha, ha, ha.”
There is a click at the other end of the line. In the movies heroes say “Hello, hello, hello,” in situations like this, but B., dispirited, the greatcoat beginning to reek a bit in the confines of the antechamber, only reaches out to replace the receiver in its cradle.
Back in the office B. is confronted with eight empty chairs. The redhead occupies the ninth, legs crossed, hat in lap, curls flaring round the cover of her magazine like a solar phenomenon. Where five minutes earlier there were enough majorettes to front a battle of the bands, there is now only one. She glances up as the door slams behind him. “Any luck?”
B. is suddenly overwhelmed with exhaustion. He’s just gone fifteen rounds, scaled Everest, staggered out of the Channel at Calais. “No,” he whispers.
“Well that really is too bad. All the other girls go home at ten and I’m sure any one of them would have been happy to give you a lift…. You know it really is a pity the way some of you men handle your affairs. Why if I had as little common sense as you I wouldn’t last ten minutes on this job.”
B. heaves himself down on one of the plastic chairs. Somehow, somewhere along the line, his sense of proportion has begun to erode. He blows his nose lugubriously. Then hides behind his hands and massages his eyes.
“Come on now.” The girl’s voice is soft, conciliatory. She is standing over him, her hand stretched out to his. “I’ll fix you up a place to sleep in the back of the shop.”
The redhead (her name is Rita—B. thought to ask as a sort of quid pro quo for her offer of a place to sleep) leads him through a narrow passageway which gives on to an immense darkened hangar. B. hunches in the greatcoat, flips up his collar and follows her into the echo-haunted reaches. Their footsteps clap up to the rafters, blind birds beating at the roof, echoing and reechoing in the darkness. There is a chill as of open spaces, a stink of raw metal, oil, sludge. Rita is up ahead, her white boots ghostly in the dark. “Watch your step,” she cautions, but B. has already encountered some impenetrable, rock-hard hazard, barked his shin and pitched forward into what seems to be an open grease pit.
“Hurt yourself?”
B. lies there silent—frustrated, childish, perverse.
“B.? Answer me—are you all right?”
He will lie here, dumb as a block, till the Andes are nubs and the moon melts from the sky. But then suddenly the cavern blooms with light (a brown crepuscular light, it’s true, but light just the same) and the game’s up.
“So there you are!” Arms akimbo, a grin on her face. “Now get yourself up out of there and stop your sulking. I can’t play games all night, you know. There’s eleven sets of pumps out there I’m responsible for.”
B. finds himself sprawled all over an engine block, grease-slicked and massive, that must have come out of a Sherman tank. But it’s the hangar, lit like the grainy daguerreotype of a Civil War battlefield, that really interests him. The sheer expanse of the place! And the cars, thousands of them, stretching all the way down to the dark V at the far end of the building. Bugattis, Morrises, La Salles, Daimlers, the back end of a Pierce-Arrow, a Stutz Bearcat. The rounded humps of tops and fenders, tarnished bumpers, hoods thrown open like gaping mouths. Engines swing on cables, blackened grilles and punctured cloth tops gather in the corners, a Duesenberg, its interior gutted, squats over a trench in the concrete.
“Pretty amazing, huh?” Rita says, reaching out a hand to help him up. “This is Geriatrics. Mainly foreign. You should see the Contemp wings.”
“But what do you do with all these—?”
“Oh, we fix them. At least the technicians and mechanics do.”
There is something wrong here, something amiss. B. can feel it nagging at the edges of his consciousness … but then he really is dog-tired. Rita has him by the hand. They amble past a couple hundred cars, dust-embossed, ribs and bones showing, windshields black as ground-out eyes. Now he has it: “But if you fix them, what are they doing here?”
Rita stops dead to look him in the eye, frowning, schoolmarmish. “These things take time, you know.” She sighs. “What do you think: they do it overnight?”
The back room is the size of a storage closet. In fact, it is a storage closet, fitted out with cots. When Rita flicks the light switch B. is shocked to discover three other people occupying the makeshift dormitory: two men in rumpled suits and a middle-aged woman in a rumpled print dress. One of the men sits up and rubs his eyes. His tie is loose, shirt filthy, a patchy beard maculating his cheeks. He mumbles something—B. catches the words “drive shaft”—and then turns his face back to the cot, already sucking in breath for the first stertorous blast: hkk-hkk-hkkkkkkgg.
“What the hell is this?” B. is astonished, scandalized, cranky and tired. Tools and blackened rags lie scattered over the concrete floor, dulled jars of bolts and screws and wing nuts line the shelves. A number of unfolded cots, their fabric stained and grease-spotted, stand in the corner.
“This is where you sleep, silly.”
“But—who?”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? They’re customers, like yourself, waiting for their cars. The man in brown is the Gremlin, the one with the beard is the Cougar—no, I’m sorry, the woman is the Cougar—he’s the Citroen.”
B. is appalled. “And I’m the Audi, is that it?”
Suddenly Rita is in his arms, the smooth satiny feel of her uniform, the sticky warmth of her breath. “You’re more to me than a machine, B. Do you know that I like you? A lot.” And then he finds himself nuzzling her ear, the downy ridge of her jawbone. She presses against him, he fumbles under the cheerleader’s tutu for the slippery underthings. One of the sleepers groans, but B. is lost, oblivious, tugging and massaging like a horny teenager. Rita reaches behind to unzip her uniform, the long smooth arch of her back, shoulders and arms shedding the opalescent rayon like a holiday on ice when suddenly a buzzer sounds—loud and brash—end of the round, change classes, dive for shelter.
Rita freezes, then bursts into motion. “A customer!” she pants, and then she’s gone. B. watches her callipygian form recede into the gloom of the Geriatrics Section, the sharp projection in his trousers receding with her, until she touches the light switch and vanishes in darkness. B. trundles back into the closet, selects a cot, and falls into an exploratory darkness of his own.
B.’s. breath is a puff of cotton as he wakes to the chill gloom of the storage closet and the sound of tools grating, whining and ratcheting somewhere off in the distance. At first he can’t locate himself—What the? Where?—but the odors of gas and kerosene and motor oil bring him back. He is stranded at Tegeler’s Big Garage, it is a workday, he has been sleeping with strangers, his car is nonfunctional. B. lurches up from the cot with a gasp—only to find that he’s being watched. It is the man with the patchy beard and rancid shirt. He is sitting on the edge of a cot, stirring coffee in a cardboard container, his eyes fixed on B. My checkbook, my wallet, my wristwatch, thinks B.
“Mornin’,” the man says. “My name’s Rusty,” holding out his hand. The others—the man in brown (or was it gray?) and the Cougar woman—are gone.
B. shakes the man’s hand. “Name’s B.,” he says, somewhere between wary and paranoid. “How do I get out of here?”
“Your first day, huh?”
“What do you mean?” B. detects an edge of hysteria slicing through his voice, as if it belonged to someone else in some other situation. A pistol-whipped actress in a TV melodrama, for instance.
“No need to get excited,” Rusty says. “I know how disquieting that first day can be. Why Cougar here—that woman in the print dress slept with us last night?—she sniveled and whimpered the whole time her first night here. Shit. It was like being in a bomb shelter or some frigging thing. Sure, I know how it is. You got a routine—job, wife at home, kids maybe, dog, cat, goldfish—and naturally you’re anxious to get back to it. Well let me give you some advice. I been here six days already and I still haven’t even got an appointment lined up with the Appointments Secretary so’s I can get in to see the Assistant to the Head Diagnostician, Imports Division, and find out what’s wrong with my car. So look: don’t work up no ulcer over the thing. Just make your application and sit tight.”
The man is an escapee, that’s it, an escapee from an institution for the terminally, unconditionally and abysmally insane. B. hangs tough. “You expect me to believe that cock-and-bull story? If you’re so desperate why don’t you call a cab?”
“Taxis don’t run this far out.”
“Bus?”
“No buses in this district.”
“Surely you’ve got friends to call—”
“Tried it, couldn’t get through. Busy signals, recordings, wrong numbers. Finally got through to Theotis Stover two nights ago. Said he’d come out but his car’s broke down.”
“You could hitchhike.”
“Spent six hours out there my first day. Twelve degrees F. Nobody even slowed down. Besides, even if I could get home, what then? Can’t get to work, can’t buy food. No sir. I’m staying right here till I get that car back.”
B. cannot accept it. The whole thing is absurd. He’s on him like F. Lee Bailey grilling a shaky witness. “What about the girls in the main office? They’ll take you—one of them told me so.”
“They take you?”
“No, but—”
“Look: they say that to be accommodating, don’t you see? I mean, we are customers, after all. But they can’t give you a lift—it’s their job if they do.”
“You mean—?”
“That’s right. And wait’ll you see the bill when you finally do get out of here. Word is that cot you’re sitting on goes for twelve bucks a night.”
The bastards. It could be weeks here. He’ll lose his job, the animals’ll tear up the rugs, piss in the bed and finally, starved, the dog will turn on the cat…. B. looks up, a new worry on his lips: “But what do you eat here?”
Rusty rises. “C’mon, I’ll show you the ropes.” B. follows him out into the half-lit and silent hangar, past the ranks of ruined automobiles, the mounds of tires and tools. “Breakfast is out of the machines. They got coffee, hot chocolate, candy bars, cross-ants and cigarettes. Lunch and late-afternoon snack you get down at the Mechanics’ Cafeteria.” Rusty’s voice booms and echoes through the wide open spaces till B. begins to feel surrounded. Overhead, the morning cowers against the grimed skylights. “And eat your fill,” Rusty adds, “—it all goes on the tab.”
The office is bright as a cathedral with a miracle in progress. B. squints into the sunlight and recognizes the swaying ankles of a squad of majorettes. He asks for Rita, finds she’s off till six at night. Outside, the sound of scraping, the putt-putt of snowplow jeeps. B. glances up. Oh, shit. There must be a foot and a half of snow on the ground.
The girls are chewing gum and sipping coffee from personalized mugs: Mary-Alice, Valerie, Beatrice, Lulu. B. hunches in the greatcoat, confused, until Rusty bums a dollar and hands him a cup of coffee. Slurping and blowing, B. stands at the window and watches an old man stoop over an aluminum snow shovel. Jets of fog stream from the old man’s nostrils, ice cakes his mustache.
“Criminal, ain’t it?” says Rusty.
“What?”
“The old man out there. That’s Tegeler’s father, seventy-some-odd years old. Tegeler makes him earn his keep, sweeping up, clearing snow, polishing the pumps.”
“No!” B. is stupefied.
“Yeah, he’s some hardnose, Tegeler. And I’ll tell you something else too—he’s set up better than Onassis and Rockefeller put together. See that lot across the street?”
B. looks. TEGELER’S BIG LOT. How’d he miss that?
“They sell new Tegelers there.”
“Tegelers?”
“Yeah—he’s got his own company: the Tegeler Motor Works. Real lemons from what I hear … But will you look what time it is!” Rusty slaps his forehead. “We got to get down to Appointments or we’ll both grow old in this place.”
The Appointments Office, like the reward chamber in a rat maze, is located at the far end of a complicated network of passageways, crossways and counter-ways. It is a large carpeted room with desks, potted plants and tellers’ windows, not at all unlike a branch bank. The Cougar woman and the man in the brown suit are there, waiting along with a number of others, all of them looking bedraggled and harassed. Rusty enters deferentially and takes a seat beside Brown Suit, but B. strides across the room to where a hopelessly walleyed woman sits at a desk, riffling through a bundle of papers. “Excuse me,” he says.
The woman looks up, her left iris drowning in white.
“I’m here—” B. breaks off, confused as to which eye to address: alternately one and then the other seems to be scrutinizing him. Finally he zeroes in on her nose and continues:”—about my car. I—”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No, I don’t. But you see I’m a busy man, and I depend entirely on the car for transportation and—”
“Don’t we all?”
“—and I’ve already missed a day of work.” B. gives her a doleful look, a look charged with chagrin for so thwarting the work ethic and weakening the national fiber. “I’ve got to have it seen to as soon as possible. If not sooner.” Ending with a broad grin, the bon mot just the thing to break the ice.
“Yes,” she says, heaving a great wet sigh. “I understand your anxiety and I sympathize with you, I really do. But,” the left pupil working round to glare at him now, “I can’t say I think much of the way you conduct yourself—barging in here and exalting your own selfish concerns above those of the others here. Do you think that there’s no one else in the world but you? No other ailing auto but yours? Does Tegeler’s Big Garage operate for fifty-nine years, employing hundreds of people, constantly expanding, improving, streamlining its operations, only to prepare itself for the eventuality of your breakdown? Tsssss! I’m afraid, my friend, that your arrogant egotism knows no bounds.”
B. hangs his head, shuffles his feet, the greatcoat impossibly warm.
“Now. You’ll have to fill out the application for an appointment and wait your turn with the others. Though you really haven’t shown anything to deserve it, I think you may have a bit of luck today after all. The Secretary left word that he’d be in at three this afternoon.”
B. takes a seat beside the Cougar woman and stares down at the form in his hand as if it were a loaded .44. He is dazed, still tingling from the vehemence of the secretary’s attack. The form is seven pages long. There are questions about employment, annual income, collateral, next of kin. Page 4 is devoted to physical inquiries: Ever had measles? leprosy? irregularity? The next delves deeper: Do you feel that people are out to get you? Why do you hate your father? The form ends up with two pages of IQ stuff: if a farmer has 200 acres and devotes 1/16 of his land to soybeans, 5/8 to corn and 1/3 to sugar beets, how much does he have left for a drive-in movie? B. glances over at the Cougar woman. Her lower lip is thrust forward, a blackened stub of pencil twists in her fingers, an appointment form, scrawled over in pencil with circled red corrections, lies in her lap. Suddenly B. is on his feet and stalking out the door, fragments of paper sifting down in his wake like confetti. Behind him, the sound of collective gasping.
Out in the corridor B. collars a man in spattered blue coveralls and asks him where the Imports Division is. The man, squat, swarthy, mustachioed, looks at him blank as a cow. “No entiendo,” he says.
“The. Imports. Division.”
“No hablo inglés—y no me gustan las preguntas de cabrones tontos.” The man shrugs his shoulder out from under B.’s palm and struts off down the hall like a ruffled rooster. But B. is encouraged: Imports must be close at hand. He hurried off in the direction from which the man came (was he Italian or only a Puerto Rican?), following the corridor around to the left, past connecting hallways clogged with mechanics and white-smocked technicians, following it right on up to a steel fire door with the words NO ADMITTANCE stamped across it in admonitory red. There is a moment of hesitation … then he twists the knob and steps in.
“Was ist das?” A workman looks up at him, screwdriver in hand, expression modulating from surprise to menace. B. finds himself in another hangar, gloomy and expansive as the first, electric tools screeching like an army of mechanical crickets. But what’s this?: he’s surrounded by late-model cars—German cars—Beetles, Foxes, Rabbits, sleek Mercedes sedans! Not only has he stumbled across the Imports Division, but luck or instinct or good looks has guided him right to German Specialties. Well, ha-cha! He’s squinting down the rows of cars, hoping to catch sight of his own, when he feels a pressure on his arm. It is the workman with the screwdriver. “Vot you vant?” he demands.
“Uh—have you got an Audi in here? Powder blue with a black vinyl top?”
The workman is in his early twenties. He is tall and obscenely corpulent. Skin pale as the moon, jowls reddening as if with a rash, white hair cropped across his ears and pinched beneath a preposterously undersized engineer’s cap. He tightens his grip on B.’s arm and calls out into the gloom—“Holger! Friedrich!”—his voice reverberating through the vault like the battle cry of some Mesozoic monster.
Two men, flaxen-haired, in work clothes and caps, step from the shadows. Each grips a crescent wrench big as the jawbone of an ass. “Was gibt es, Klaus?”
“Mein Herr vants to know haff we got und Aw-dee.”
“How do you say it?” The two newcomers are standing over him now, the one in the wire-rimmed spectacles leering into his eyes.
“Audi,” B. says. “A German-made car?”
“Aw-dee? No, never heard of such a car,” the man says. “A cowboy maybe—family name of Murphy?”
Klaus laughs, “Har-har-har,” booming at the ceiling. The other fellow, short, scar on his cheek, joins in with a psychopathic snicker. Wire-rims grins.
Uh-oh.
“Listen,” B. says, a whining edge to his voice, “I know I’m not supposed to be in here but I saw no other way of—”
“Cutting trew der bullshit,” says Wire-rims.
“Yes, and finding out what’s wrong—”
“On a grassroot level,” interjects the snickerer.
“—right, at the grassroot level, by coming directly to you. I’m getting desperate. Really. That car is my life’s breath itself. And I don’t mean to get dramatic or anything, but I just can’t survive without it.”
“Ja,” says Wire-rims, “you haff come to der right men. We haff your car, wery serious. Ja. Der bratwurst assembly broke down and we haff sent out immediately for a brötchen und mustard.” This time all three break into laughter, Klaus booming, the snickerer snickering, Wire-rims pinching his lips and emitting a high-pitched hoo-hoo-hoo.
“No, seriously,” says B.
“You vant to get serious? Okay, we get serious. On your car we do a compression check, we put new solenoids in der U joints und we push der push rods,” says Wire-rims.
“Ja. Und we see you need a new vertical stabilizer, head gasket and PCV valve,” rasps the snickerer.
“Your sump leaks.”
“Bearings knock.”
“Plugs misfire.”
B. has had enough. “Wiseguys!” he shouts. “I’ll report you to your superiors!” But far from daunting them, his outburst has the opposite effect. Viz., Klaus grabs him by the collar and breathes beer and sauerbraten in his face. “We are Chermans,” he hisses, “—we haff no superiors.”
“Und dammit punktum!” bellows the snickerer. “Enough of dis twaddle. We haff no car of yours und furdermore we suspect you of telling to us fibs in order maybe to misappropriate the vehicle of some otter person.”
“Vat shall we do mit him?” the snickerer hisses.
“I’m tinking he maybe needs a little lubrication,” says Wirerims. “No sense of humor, wery dry.” He produces a grease gun from behind his back.
And then, for the first time in his life, B. is decorated—down his collar, up his sleeve, crosshatched over his lapels—in ropy, cake-frosting strings of grease, while Klaus howls like a terminally tickled child and the snickerer’s eyes flash. A moment later he finds himself lofted into the air, strange hands at his armpits and thighs, swinging to and fro before the gaping black mouth of a laundry chute—“Zum ersten! zum andern! zum dritten!”—and then he’s airborne, and things get very dark indeed.
B. is lying facedown in an avalanche of cloth: grimy rags, stiffened chamois, socks and undershorts yellowed with age and sweat and worse, handkerchiefs congealed with sputum, coveralls wet with oil. He is stung with humiliation and outrage. He’s been cozened, humbugged, duped, gulled, spurned, insulted, ignored and now finally assaulted. There’ll be lawsuits, damn them, letters to Congressmen—but for now, if he’s to salvage a scrap of self-respect, he’s got to get out of here. He sits up, peels a sock from his face, and discovers the interior of a tiny room, a room no bigger than a laundry closet. It is warm, hot even.
Two doors open onto the closet. The one to the left is wreathed in steam, pale shoots and tendrils of it curling through the keyhole, under the jamb. B. throws back the door and is enveloped in fog. He is confused. The Minotaur’s labyrinth? Ship at sea? House afire? He can see nothing, the sound of machinery straining at his ears, moisture beading along eyebrows, nostril hairs, cowlick. Then it occurs to him: the carwash! Of course. And the carwash must give onto the parking lot, which in turn gives onto the highway. He’ll simply duck through it and then hitchhike—or, if worse comes to worst, walk—until he either makes it home or perishes in the attempt.
B. steps through the door and is instantly flattened by a mammoth, water-spewing pom-pom. He tries to get to his feet, but the sleeve of his coat seems to be caught in some sort of runner or track—and now the whole apparatus is jerking fprward, gears whirring and clicking somewhere off in the mist. B., struggling to free the coat, finds himself jerking along with it. The mechanism heaves forward, dragging B. through an extended puddle of mud, suds and road salt. A jet of water flushes the right side of his face, a second pom-pom lumbers out of the haze and pins his chest to the floor, something tears the shoe from his right foot. Soap in his ears, down his neck, sudsing and sudsing: and now a giant cylinder, a mill wheel covered with sponges, descends and rakes the length of his body. B. shouts for help, but the machinery grinds on, squeaking and ratcheting, war of the worlds. Look out!: cold rinse. He holds his breath, glacial runoff coursing over his body, a bitter pill. Then there’s a liberal blasting with hot wax, the clouds part, and the machine turns him loose with a jolt in the rear that tumbles him out the bay door and onto the slick permafrost of the parking lot.
He staggers to his feet. There’s a savage pain in his lower back and his right shoulder has got to be dislocated. No matter: he forges on. Round the outbuildings, past the front office and on out to the highway.
It has begun to get dark. B., hair frozen to his scalp, shoeless, the greatcoat stiff as a dried fish, limps along the highway no more than a mile from the garage. All around him, as far as he can see, is wasteland: crop-stubble swallowed in drifts, the stripped branches of the deciduous trees, rusty barbed wire. Not even a farmhouse on the horizon. Nothing. He’d feel like Peary running for the Pole but for the twin beacons of Garage and Lot at his back.
Suddenly a fitful light wavers out over the road—a car coming toward him! (He’s been out here for hours, holding out his thumb, hobbling along. The first ride took him south of Tegeler’s about two miles—a farmer, turning off into nowhere. The second—he didn’t care which direction he went in, just wanted to get out of the cold—took him back north about three miles.)
B. crosses the road and holds out his thumb. He is dancing with cold, clonic, shoulder, arm, wrist and extended thumb jerking like the checkered flag at the finish of the Grand Prix. Stop, he whispers, teeth clicking like dice, stop, please God stop. Light floods his face for an instant, and then it’s gone. But wait—they’re stopping! Snot crusted to his lip, shoe in hand, B. double-times up to the waiting car, throws back the door and leaps in.
“B.! What’s happened?”
It is Rita. Thank God.
“R-r-r-r-ita?” he stammers, body racked with tremors, the seatsprings chattering under him. “The ma-ma-machine.”
“Machine? What are you talking about?”
“I-I need a r-r-r-ride. Wh-where you going?” B. manages, falling into a sneezing jag.
Rita puts the car in gear, the tires grab hold of the pavement. “Why—to work, of course.”
The others smack their lips, sigh, snore, toss on their cots. Rusty, Brown Suit, the Cougar woman. B. lies there listening to them, staring into the darkness. His own breathing comes hard (TB, pleurisy, pneumonia—bronchitis at the very least). Rita—good old Rita—has filled him full of hot coffee and schnapps, given him a brace of cold pills and put him to bed. He is thoroughly miserable of course—the car riding his mind like a bogey, health shot, job lost, pets starved—but the snugness of the blanket and dry mechanic’s uniform Rita has found for him, combined with the country-sunset glow of the schnapps, is seducing him off to sleep. It is very still. The smell of turpentine hangs in the air. He pulls the blanket up to his nose.
Suddenly the light flicks on. It is Rita, all thighs and calves in her majorette’s outfit. But what’s this? There’s a man with her, a stranger. “Is this it?” the man says.
“Well, of course it is, silly.”
“But who are these chibonies?”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? They’re customers, like yourself, waiting for their cars. The man in brown is the Gremlin, the one with the beard is the Citroen, the woman is the Cougar and the old guy on the end is the Audi.”
“And I’m the Jaguar, is that it?”
“You’re more to me than a machine, Jeff. Do you know that I like you? A lot.”
B. is mortally wounded. Enemy flak, they’ve hit him in the guts. He squeezes his eyes shut, stops his ears, but he can hear them just the same: heavy breathing, a moan soft as fur, the rush of zippers. But then the buzzer sounds and Rita gasps. “A customer!” she squeals, struggling back into her clothes and then hurrying off through the Geriatrics hangar, her footsteps like pinpricks along the spine. “Hey!” the new guy bellows. But she’s gone.
The new guy sighs, then selects a cot and beds down beside B. B. can hear him removing his things, gargling from a bottle, whispering prayers to himself—“Bless Mama, Uncle Ernie, Bear Bryant … “—then the room dashes into darkness and B. can open his eyes.
He fights back a cough. His heart is hammering. He thinks how pleasant it would be to die … but then thinks how pleasant it would be to step through the door of his apartment again, take a hot shower and crawl into bed. It is then that the vision comes to him—a waking dream—shot through with color and movement and depth. He sees Tegeler’s Big Lot, the ranks of cars, new Tegelers, lines of variegated color like beads on a string, windshields glinting in the sun, antennae jabbing at the sky, stiff and erect, like the swords of a conquering army….
In the dark, beneath the blanket, he reaches for his checkbook.
(1977)