CARS

My first car was a ’55 Chevy, mine when my father died. Bingo’s mother called both of us orphans. It was a harsh word as she said it, loaded with scenes of derelict rooms and hard winds. But we took it proudly, as though called to make our own stand.

I wedged two-by-fours in the shackles of the Chevy to give it a rake. I laminated wood for a shift knob, combed the junkyards for dual exhaust and glass-pack mufflers. I etched my name, Swift Henry, Bingo’s version of Henry Swift, on the dash in glitter and Day-Glo. It was a car for idling out of the school parking lot, for whipping the turn through the gate and burning rubber on the straight quarter mile to the drive-in. It was a car for runs to the desert on weekends, friends wedged four in back, three in front to share gas, with Bingo at shotgun leaning out into the wind.

The rings on the Chevy wore thin, bearings began to thump, and I fell for a newer model, a ’62 Chevy with white pearlescent paint, tuck-and-roll seats, and a Road Runner decal in the window. Bingo said in a week I could choose from more girls than I’d dreamed of. He found me a job at the Richfield station where he worked, and said he’d help with the payments. My mother cosigned.

I rubbed it out, gave it five coats of wax and detailed the chrome. I took up with Carla, a redhead, a judge’s daughter. She wore white hot angora sweaters, and her fingers tapped nervously on my chest as I drove. After midnight her father ran out threatening and grabbed for the door handle while Carla dove out the shotgun side. I jacked the clutch and left him to choke on fumes.

But Carla was a virgin and determined to stay one, so I ditched her for Sandi, the secretary of the student council, who had turned me down once before. Now she called herself foolish, walked me to classes, and made me promise I wouldn’t tell anyone our secrets. We rolled in prickly weeds, ran through pine hills to soft meadows, told her mother we’d marry in a year, then asked for the key to her father’s trailer on the beach below the border. I spent my paychecks on gas and fast food, missed work too often, and got Bingo fired, for filling my tank. He took it hard. Work was important, he said. Like slaves, we had to earn our freedom.

I traded the equity for a stock ’50 Chevy, a wagon with frayed seats and oxidized paint. Sandi eased away, but I took it lightly. Bingo and I bought squirt guns, tracked her down in the halls each morning, and drenched her teased hair. The school counselor called us mean.

So we forged sick slips, started the summer a week early, and shined shoes at a convention to buy tires for the Chevy. For the summer, at beach camps up the coast, we borrowed surfboards, climbed the cliffs and perched like eagles on the ledges, and toyed with Chicano girls down from L.A. with their families, on straw mats away from the bonfires.

Then we’d spin off inland to check the mountain roads, coast back home on our last tank to mow lawns and trim trees, to sell off old bicycles, phonographs, and baseball gloves for gas money and trunks full of groceries. Bingo brought along his brother’s volumes of Nietzsche and read them while I drove. Bingo said Nietzsche was the master of our age, the prophet of strength, willpower, and obedience to our dreams. We vowed to take charge of our destinies.

Back at school I signed up for auto shop and brought in the Chevy to give it a valve job. First the head disappeared, then the cam, then the tires and the radiator. I posted threatening notes on the bulletin board, but nothing came back. I sold what was left for junk and dragged my feet, skipped classes, kicked dents in lockers as I raged through the halls. I found unlocked cars in the parking lot and slumped behind the wheels, smoking and waiting for a change. I told my French teacher where to deposit his verbs. I butchered a dozen frogs in biology. In the counselor’s office I spit on the floor. My mother begged them to let me stay until graduation, pleading I had been troubled since my father died.

On Friday nights Bingo and I found rides to the beach and climbed the cliffs by the naval cemetery. We sipped wine and watched the fog light turn on the point below Bingo’s father’s grave. He had drowned long ago on a test flight. After a pint, Bingo forecast the day he’d buy a new car, a Lotus or Ferrari, and drive it out of all he’d ever known, banging shifts and sliding curves to outrun even the hounds of hell. We lofted the bottles and watched them crash on the craggy rocks where Bingo said Spanish galleons had once gone down. Then we foot-raced to a tavern, hot-wired a new V-8, blasted back up the hill, and two-wheeled turns so the tires whined like the ghosts of sailors who, Bingo said, knew everything about everything, from crossing datelines and standing night watch on Arctic seas. On his first run Bingo cut three minutes off my time.

I begged my mother for $1,000, so she took out a loan. We found a stripped Model A roadster with street slicks and a basket Corvette motor. Bingo took a job at a parts house and charged what we couldn’t afford. We had it on the boulevard by Christmas vacation, racing the straightaway from the main light to the turn, a solid mile, against Mustangs, Falcon Sprints, and Jaguars. I drove the setups, Bingo the hard runs, with Rhonda, my new girl, between us and squeezing us both, her thighs tight and spread to clear the floor shift. In a month we owed money everywhere. Our bet was $50 the night a patrolman lay waiting. We had wine in the car, and my license was already suspended. I grabbed Rhonda and ran, yelling at Bingo to leave the roadster, but he waved us away. In the morning his mother called, just home from juvenile hall. She cussed at me and yelled that Bingo’s troubles were all on account of my cars.

In a week he was out of the hall. We sold the roadster to pay off our debts and the parts we had charged. What was left bought us a ’46 Chrysler limousine. I ripped out the middle seat, Bingo found a German radio, Rhonda covered a floor pad with velour. Bingo took the Chrysler on Fridays, Saturdays were mine, and on weeknights we doubled. Rhonda demanded the pad. She claimed the buttons on the front seat bruised her. Bingo’s girls were not so dainty. They were sullen, lovely, and loud.

We found high times through the spring, evenings up the coast in Laguna Beach and Hollywood, Bingo in the chauffeur’s cap he ordered by mail. But the summer approached ominously, as Bingo spoke of leaving town and of fates we couldn’t control.

On the way to the beach from the after-prom with Rhonda asleep in my lap, I dozed at the wheel and hit a parked Mercury. Rhonda broke her arm, the Chrysler was totaled, and I was knocked senseless. Bingo was safe, sprawled on the mat. He arranged to pay for the Mercury, to keep us out of court.

With school out I took a job washing dishes, mornings and evenings, six days a week. Rhonda spent her days at the beach, and before her arm healed she found new friends. Bingo found work driving for a rental agency, delivering cars to Palm Springs. On my days off I rode along, quizzed him on where we could go and how we should live now that the future had come. He told me to find my own way. In Palm Springs he kept to business, refused to go out the nights we stayed over, tuned a jazz station on the motel radio instead, and sat watching the streets from the window. He was a world of private motives. He left in a Pontiac wagon the day after we paid off the Mercury in the evening just as August came. He folded the seats down and tossed in the pad from our Chrysler and a trunk he said held all he owned. He said he would drop the wagon at a rental affiliate in Las Vegas and write me in a few weeks from the East Coast.

As he pulled away, deserting me, I shouted, “Loser.”

I can still see him between the lines of the news, on the grade above Barstow bound flat-out for the Nevada line, the windows open and sand in his eyes, whistling loud harmony to the radio, hunched over the wheel, watching the road ahead for a thousand miles, seeing it all but the Santa Fe that clipped his rear end, lofted him through the windshield, and planted him in the sand headfirst beside a Joshua tree, his legs spread, his spine broken backward.

I sat in my room, took my meals there, listened to the thud of my heart and the soft scrape of tires outside the closed drapes. Bingo couldn’t speak and his legs were paralyzed, but he’d live. His mother called and told me to visit, to see him stiff and drooling, the empty blue of his eyes, and she blamed me because I taught him to drive, then let him go alone. I left the phone hanging and went back to my room. My mother talked to me for hours in a monotone of sympathy, which grated my pride like a kick between the legs, until I had to leave.

I packed a bedroll and a suitcase and dragged them to the interstate. I rode in a thousand cars through states I couldn’t remember when I left them, working transient jobs, calling home for money. I was swindled by a sheriff, hustled by a barmaid and her boyfriend, robbed while I slept at a bus stop. Bingo would’ve called me a fool. I looked for him alongside roads and everywhere, in a hazy stupor so long as I was moving.

Back home, years older in the weariness of my dreams, I went to his ward. I passed fat nurses with rouge on their cheeks, blind idiots grinning, senile men slapping the walls, and found Bingo faced to the corner in his wheelchair. “Stand up, partner,” I whispered, “and I’ll take you out of this place. There’s a park down the street, girls sunning, crazy kids chasing dogs, old farts batting flies with their canes.” His neck twitched, he stiffened his shoulders, so I turned him around. He was all there, his hair strangely thinning, his nose still bent from a fight we had lost, his high cheeks still freckled and brown. He chewed a name tag on a chain. “I’ve been gone, Bingo,” I whispered. “That’s why I didn’t come. Shall I tell you about all those places, the Ozarks and Florida, the Cuban who hired me to steal a fast boat. . . .”

Rita didn’t have a car. She was refined and old-fashioned, honest and kind in the way that she laughed at the hick grammar I chose to use and the fervor with which I argued. She seldom drank, smoked, or took pills. We drove my Volkswagen to Yuma to be married. We honeymooned up the river in a clearing with motor homes and pickups towing dune buggies. Dirt bikes skidded through our camp, severed our tent lines, and spun wheelies up the bank through the night, so in the morning the air was littered brown. We floated downriver on the inner tube from a truck tire, picnicked and balled in the mud where willows overhung the shore. I told her I was relentless and uncompromising, traits Bingo said made a man strong.

Rita despised cars. She called them a menace, a corruption of time, frivolous and counterproductive. “You have to fight these needs, Henry,” she told me, “and simplify your life.” She wanted to live in an apartment above her uncle’s warehouse, where we could both work and save. But I fought with her uncle, so we moved to the suburbs. I traded the Volkswagen for a ‘59 Volvo with rope for a door latch and a radiator that boiled in five miles. I sopped Liquid Wrench on the bracket bolts, tapped them just so, then leaned on one with a socket-and-breaker bar. The bolt snapped, and I tore my knuckles against the radiator core. I slammed a hole through the radiator, beat the grille to chrome splinters, knocked the carburetor to deep center field. Rita nodded as though she understood. In bed she told me we were all bound to change.

I managed a loan and bought a newer MG. I learned to tune the fuel injection and rented a garage to park it. Rita blamed the car that I was gone so many nights, suspecting I was road racing in the hills or running slaloms in parking lots. But I was with friends in bars with nude dancers and only raced there and back, like the night I turned off to a vacant lot to test it in the dirt, then lost it on a right-angle turn, slid through a fence, and drowned the front end in a backyard swimming pool. “God, Henry,” Rita said. “You want to cause your own apocalypse.”

We collected insurance and moved back to the city. I worked overtime at a Shell station, but we lived off Rita’s pay, and saved all we could. I told Rita, “Bingo said a child moves out from his home to his neighborhood, to his town, to his country, to the world until he knows them all, then he owns them all and makes them what he is. If he stops he stays a child and owns nothing but a strict and provincial mind.”

I arranged for a drive-away to the East Coast, a ‘70 Ford Torino automatic, air-conditioned with power seats and a 429. Over vacant southern highways it held the white line as true as an oath, and the cab rode so smooth we could’ve played dominoes on the glove box door. We dropped the Torino at a warehouse in New York and caught a cab to the airport. I trembled behind the driver, watching the jets fall from the sky. Their speed and their promise were terrifying.

In Luxembourg, outside the American Express, we found a Volkswagen bus with international plates and rust holes through the doors. We highballed through Germany and France and down the coast of Spain, taking on riders to share gas and the fees for campgrounds. Some told of Israel and the Himalayas, others boasted of how long they had traveled. Rita called them aimless.

In Morocco we parked on a beach in a row of buses, wagons and cars with tents. Beside us was a ‘54 Renault that had ferried from Australia to Indonesia, crossed to India and come overland to Belgium and south. I sat on the fender with Lee, the Australian, talking of places, money schemes, and vapor lock, while Rita and her friend walked a mile down the beach for shells and privacy. In the evenings Lee and I ran the Renault to the next camp for kif and opium.

In the salt air, rust spread like fungus on the bus. Rita said we should stay and let it rot, but I wouldn’t allow it, so we took the bus inland to Marrakech. Rita turned homesick and said she was lonely. Offended, I left her alone, smoked in alleys, haggled over nothings in the bazaar, sought out arguments in tea shops. Rita called me tormented, but I denied it. She called us incompatible, and I agreed. She could sit still while I had to move, she wanted to lounge in bed while I passed through like a freight at a mail stop, she was kind and I was foul tempered, she was a throwback and I was a man of my time.

I dealt us a three-way trade that gave us a Land Rover, gave the Land Rover owners two camels and the camel owner our bus. I followed the camels to the foothills of the Atlas Mountains, then turned back and cracked the frame of the Land Rover leaping a gully. No welder in Marrakech, Algiers, Constantine or Tunis could bind the frame for good, so it snapped for the last time in Sicily, breaking the transmission mounts and leaving us pinned to an intersection. We dropped the plates in the Strait of Messina.

In Athens I found a deal on a Fiat and a job tuning Volkswagens. During the days Rita explored the ruins and museums, and on the weekends we drove up the coast past Marathon and as far as Delphi. Rita wanted to stop at every pile of rubble. I found high ground and looked east. “Bingo told me about the wars with the Trojans,” I said, “who lived out that way across the Aegean Sea. Soldiers marched for weeks or shipped over in galleys. The Greeks were a restless gang.” Rita held me from behind. “They were soldiers. They only did what they had to,” she said. “You’re a romantic, Henry, and sometimes stupid.” She loved the thieves’ market near where we lived, the Acropolis view, the pushcarts, balconies, and blocked-off streets. She would’ve stayed behind if she hadn’t been pregnant.

We sold the Fiat in Luxembourg and caught a drive-away home from New York. Rita slept across the Great Plains, cradling her belly. At home we bought a ‘65 Datsun, traded up for a Ford Courier, then a ‘70 Dodge van with a bed and a butane stove. When Nico was born and wouldn’t sleep, I drove her on the circle of freeways around our city, watched her rocking beside me above the front wheels, told her stories as if she could understand, and sang her lullabies. When I parked at our house she woke again.

Rita refused to work at first, but our bills overwhelmed her, the payments on the van, on the tract house we managed to buy because she wanted a home for Nico, on toys and blenders, on a piano and a juice machine. I argued it our poverty wasn’t my fault, but the times, the banks and inflation. I said we could sell everything and live well in Mexico. She called me nearsighted, impractical, insensitive. She held Nico late into the nights and cried too often when she had to go to work. We found a childcare center just off the freeway.

We saved for the summer and drove on a vacation to the northwest. When Nico fussed I propped her on my lap between me and the steering wheel. Rita called it dangerous, but I held firm and Nico got her way. In campgrounds she ran wild on her strong bowed legs, making friends while I followed behind and Rita watched from the van. I took Nico on a raft in the Klamath River while Rita watched from the shore. Rita and I didn’t talk much, it seemed there was nothing new to say, but we covered a lot of ground, Washington, Oregon, Idaho.

I hadn’t seen Bingo in more than two years. I rehearsed outside the sanitarium. “Bingo,” I would say, “I’ve tried, like you coached me, to keep the world off-balance, to spin around it and spar, to turn into the skids, gas gently when the wheels start to spin, to live with the times though they’re not what we’d choose, but it’s hard. Rita calls me a boy and she’s turned spiteful. But I’ve outrun history when any cold room seemed grand comfort compared to the drudgery of putting one foot before the other, when the bitterest nagging, the cruelest silence, seemed better than moving. I’ve passed the days when a man would turn back to a home he despised, lie down with a woman whose sorrows have scarred his heart and soul, who has tired of everything he is and left him with nothing to give. So I’ll find a car that jumps off the line, a five-speed, overhead cam with tinted glass and wheels that can whip a U-turn in a driveway. I’ll never stop driving, Bingo, no matter how futile . . .”

Inside the rest home, the windows were shaded, the rooms in twilight and the hallway in darkness. I flinched from men who grabbed my arm hoping I had brought whiskey or come to take them away. At the end of the hall, I found an exit to a patio, then a locked gate on a high chain fence around a playground. Behind the fence were basketball hoops, jungle bars, and Bingo in his wheelchair.

His legs were withered thin, but his arms and shoulders were massive. He was spinning laps along the fence, skirting the basketball poles, pumping as if he were running scared. “Bingo!” I shouted. “It’s me, Swift Henry.” But he only picked up speed. “You can watch me leave now with no regrets except Nico. But fathers are a luxury these days. It’s a world of orphans.” He angled his chair and slammed the fence at my knees. He was tan as in our summers, but his hair was shaved to stubble and receding. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, and kept them there. “Shall I tell you about airplanes?” I whispered. “I’ll try for a job at an airport and fly for free. Up there you can’t feel the speed.”

His head cocked sideways, then he turned away and pulled his laps slowly, like a children’s pony in a play land. I wished to God Rita were there, to hold me.

End