October rolled around and things at the car wash started to slow down. Saturdays were still sort of busy – as long as the sun was shining. But during the week – nothing. I usually got to work by 3:30; but when I got there all the guys were just sitting in the break room, waiting. That was the thing about at the car wash: we only clocked in when there were cars in the dock and we only got paid when we were on the clock. My checks weren’t that much – barely enough to cover gas – but that didn’t matter. I was still pocketing lunch money, and she’d been giving gas money on top of that. She never explained. I never asked. It was what it was. That meant, though, that there was a lot of down time; so I usually took a book with me. Not school books, since I never spent much time doing homework. St. Augustine’s Confessions. Plato’s Republic. Keats. Shelly. Byron. Thomas Carlyle. The only school book I ever took to work with me was Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath; we were reading it for College Prep English. As far as I could tell, I was the only one who actually read the book. Everybody else bought Cliff’s Notes.
Of course, that only made Vance and the other guys at the car wash hate me more; if they read anything it was an old issue of Hot Rod, and mostly all they did was talk about how each and every one of them would drill the whorishly draped models and how they wished to God that their wives were built like that. Eventually, Russ started sending me home when there was no work for me. I left and the carpenters stayed until the last minute – whether they were on the clock or not.
One Friday, I got to work and all the guys were working. It was late October. Fall had set in. It was a cloudy day. I was a little surprised that the car wash was so busy; but I figured it meant more money, so I wasn’t too disappointed. I even thought about taking some tips that day – instant gas money. On my way to clock in, Vance stopped me.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” I answered. “Looks like business picked up.”
He smiled. “Those are ours.”
“You’re paying to get your cars washed?”
Vance kept smiling and shook his head. “We’re washing them for free.” Then he told me Russ was gone – off at some corporate meeting in Mariemont. He said Russ would be gone all day. Then he asked me if I wanted to wash my car. He was watching me to see how I reacted; he looked like he expected me to tell Russ. He never knew that I had found out about them taking tips from customers; if he had, maybe he wouldn’t thought I’d rat him out to Russ.
I told him I’d like to run my car through because I couldn’t remember the last time it had gotten washed. That made Vance smile. But it was a lie. Dad was recovering at home from his second to last hospital stay, and he said the car was filthy and that he wanted to wash it. But he wasn’t allowed to do anything really physical, and he didn’t like taking the car to an automatic wash because he said they always missed spots. So he told me to do it. And while I was out in the driveway washing the car, he sat on the front porch, drank iced tea, and watched me. He wasn’t critical and didn’t tell me I’d missed spots, though I was sure I did. He just sat and watched me and he had this funny little smile on his face. He hadn’t smiled in a long time – not since he’d gotten really sick. The only things he said the entire time was “Don’t forget to lift the wipers when you clean the windshield,” and “Make sure you clean that front grill good and get all the dead bugs out.” It was a pretty day, early in the summer. The sun was shining. Since he was smiling, I tried to put out a little more effort to wash the car the way he liked.
Before he got really sick and had to go to the hospital, mostly all we talked about was my grades. I never did badly in school; but I never did as good as he thought I could. I maintained and did much as I had to in order to get by – except in math, which was always my worst subject. Dad always told me he knew I was just being lazy. He had already tried punishing me. He’d tried NOT punishing me. He even tried paying me for higher grades; but since I always pocketed my lunch money, I didn’t really need it. So mostly he yelled and lectured. There had been a time, back before he first started getting really sick, that he might’ve taken the belt to me; but he only ever really did that in extreme situations, like when he caught me lying or if I talked back to him or Mom. When he lectured, he told me he wanted me to go to college and make something of myself, and that all any father wants is for his kids to have an easier life than he did. I think that was why he never showed me how to work on cars and why he and Mom pushed into college prep classes in high school when my friends were taking shop. When he lectured and told me these things, I always told him I understood even though I didn’t. And even if I had understood what he was trying to tell me, it wouldn’t have mattered. I was young and stubborn and nobody could tell me anything.
I remembered that was the last time the car got washed because three nights later he woke up screaming in pain. Mom drove him to the hospital in his car. That trip was his last one. I sat up that night and watch TV. An old black and white movie was on – The Mark of Zorro.
Vance stood with me and watched the Pontiac roll through the wash. He seemed pleased. When it was done, I pulled it out front and dried it off. I made sure to lift the wipers when I cleaned the windshield with the blue window cleaner, and I put an extra shine on the rims. Russ came back later that day to close everything down. By then we’d all pulled our cars around back where we normally parked. He didn’t say anything; but he told me to take Saturday off since I stayed the entire time that day.
The following Monday I got out of dad’s recliner and got ready for school. I made coffee, but it wasn’t enough. I was out of cigarettes and I couldn’t find my ephedrine – though it had stopped working, anyway. I had to take four pills instead of one just to keep my eyes open. When I walked outside, there was a thin layer of frost on the windshield. I should’ve turned the engine over and turned on the defroster and waited; but the defroster took forever to work. Besides, I was running late and I still needed to stop to buy gas and mini-thins. My first class was Algebra – and while I knew that I’d never understand it, I couldn’t nod out during class because the teacher Mr. Auger would throw erasers at anybody who slept. I tried washing off the frost using the wipers and wiper fluid. It would clear off for a second and then the wiper fluid would start to freeze and make perfect crystalline structures on the windshield, then everything would fog up.
But I still had to haul ass to get to school on time; I didn’t really do anything while I was there, but I hated being late. The road we lived on was narrow and windy, but I’d driven it so much that I figured I could still make it. I hit ever curve like I was driving in the Indy 500; the car left the ground after every little dip in the road. My mind was on getting to the gas station; if the right person was working I could buy a pack of cigarettes and not have to worry about being carded. Half way between home and the main road into town there was small bridge over a dried out creek. I had never seen water in the creek, even after it rained. That bridge had been a boundary back when I first started riding my bike. It was barely wide enough for two cars, but I knew that time of day there’d be no one coming the other direction.
As I came around the corner right before the bridge, the windshield was starting to ice over and fog up again. I took one hand off the wheel to turn on the wipers. Right then I hit a small dip in the road and because I only had one hand on the wheel, when the car bounced I lost control and went off the road. When I pulled on the wheel to put the car straight, I pulled too hard and went off the road, off the bridge, and into the creek bed.
I woke up with the emergency brake lodged in my back. I didn’t feel hurt, even though I hadn’t been wearing my seat belt. I kicked the door open and stood up. car had gone over the bridge and hit a tree stump. The stump had taken out the grill, the radiator, and was lodged between the axle and the engine. Green coolant was dripping into the creek bed. I looked around. The nearest house was up the hill. There wouldn’t be anybody driving by. So I walked up to the house on the hill, knocked on the door and asked the little old lady who answered if I could use her telephone. The first thing I did was call the police. Then I called Mom at work and told her. She cried and asked if I was ok.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said. “But the car…” I didn’t want to tell her, but there was no getting around it. “The car’s totaled I think.”
She didn’t seem to care. She blubbered and cried and said that things didn’t matter. The car didn’t matter. That wasn’t what Dad would have said, but I didn’t tell her that. Between the police report and waiting for the wrecker, I was two hours late for school. When I got there, I had to fill out an excuse form. I wrote “Totaled a car” and the secretary gave me a funny look. During lunch I called Russ and told him what happened. I told him I quit. He wasn’t happy, but he couldn’t blame me, either. He said he had to let Vance and the others go because of theft and so he had a whole new crew. When he told me that I wondered if he fired Vance to his face or if he did it over the phone. I hung up and went back to lunch. When school was over, Mom picked me up and drove me home. She looked like she’d been crying all day. I wanted to apologize for the car; but she wouldn’t let me. I guess she had other things on her mind.
