splat chapter two

Suzie was sitting in the passenger seat of a 1964 GTO convertible, her legs up on the dashboard, bare feet wiggling, sipping sweet tea and reading the paper that rustled slightly in the breeze. The Goat was baby blue, one of only 6,644 convertibles made the first year John DeLorean produced the very first muscle car for GM.

It had shown up in the shop over a year before, needing something to do with the carburetor, but Nelson was always vague about which exact part, and how long it was going to take to order, and nobody but him knew whose car it was anyway. And the guy never showed up, and the part never came, and Nelson had it parked in the middle of the shop, in the north bay, and opened the door behind it every day to get the breeze, and locked the garage around it every night; and it stayed there and grew legs, like a big comfy couch.

Sometimes when Suzie was hanging around the shop, she got tired of standing around, sitting up on the stool, leaning against the worktable, or pacing around outside watching the sky. And she'd grab the paper and go sit in the Goat and read. But she didn't like to sit and read the paper. Because it annoyed her. Reading the paper.

Nelson was her boyfriend, and he was the manager at Stone's Auto Repair, a stand-alone cement-block building along a strip of services heading down Tara Boulevard on the way to Jonesboro, Griffin, and the Atlanta Motor Speedway.

Both sides of the road for miles were gas stations, fast food places, used car lots, strip malls, failing suburban ventures, storage places, and other assorted nondescript businesses. Here at the very beginning of the middle of Nowhere, Georgia, they catered to the needs of the motorists, and they were serious about snagging them. If zoning permitted, they would have had massage parlors, spas and topless bars.

The sign out front actually said Stoners Ato Repar, because of the peeling paint, and because Suzie had brought in a paint pen and written an R right where the apostrophe was. She thought it looked good. Nobody else noticed. It was starting to fade in the sun, though, and she might think about touching it up when she had nothing to do.

Which was a joke. There was never anything to do when she was hanging out at Nelson's. She couldn't work on cars, even though she could if she had to, because the boys wouldn't let her pick up a tool.

Today they were moderately busy. It was getting on for three o'clock. The lot was full of cars, but that meant nothing. Some of these cars stood around for weeks before the boys were finished with them. Others were in and out the same day, and the owners of those were sitting in the tiny, gray, cramped, cold, tile-floored waiting room with three-year old magazines and a pot of free coffee nobody ever fell for.

She sat around on the only stool, or leaned on a clean part of the worktable, or paced, or sprawled in the Goat with her feet up. She cleaned out her car and checked all the fluids and pressure readings. She watched the boys do emissions tests, oil changes, tune ups, minor engine repairs. She saw customers wander back to ask questions and get escorted right back out by a greasy mechanic waving a greasy rag in front of their face so they wouldn't get a good look at what the boys were doing to their car. And though she might be there for half the afternoon, she only spent about seven minutes in any kind of conversation with her boyfriend; most of that during test drives in customer's cars.

And until Nelson got a few moments and they could go drive around the mall, she was stuck reading a newspaper, or watching clouds go by. And of the two she preferred the clouds. The news was always stupid and trivial, or important and fabricated, and it just made her mad. It was just one version of the truth, and it served interests that were very different from her own.

Suzie was a socialist anarchist, or that's as near as she could get to politics. The State should pay for everybody, and everybody should be able to go off in search of their exalted destiny even if it wasn't all that economically viable. The poor should be lifted up and the rich reined in so that everybody got to the trough.

And it was a reasonable position for her to hold. Because there she was, with not much of a job, and not enough money to go into debt and rise to the next level. Maybe by the time she was middle aged she'd look around and notice that she'd become middle class, and she'd have a mortgage and vote Republican and be paying on an SUV. But right now she didn't have any obligations, no hooks, nothing to strive for. So she was pretty solidly anti-class, anti-money, anti-power and influence, anti-establishment, anti-the-way-things-were.

So this newspaper article she was reading was driving her nuts. 'New Law A Solution To Homeless Problem.' It was about a brand new law banning homelessness in Atlanta. It drove her nuts because the homeless guys just sat in the shade talking and minding their own business, and there on the front page of the Journal-Constitution they were being accused of being depraved criminals, lying in wait to rob honest people. The paper was absolutely certain about it, no doubt at all that they were right, no room to look at it any other way.

Suzie found herself growling. Her dad had taught her to see the world from all sides, and she was offended, and scared. She could see a whole newspaper-reading population going right along with the Journal's attitude without spending a single moment thinking about the issues.

Suzie put the paper down and climbed out of the car over the closed door, sliding her legs over the side and standing up next to a fifty-gallon barrel of oil. She had to be careful about getting her pants dirty. Everything in the place would leave greasy shiny streaks if she came close to it in her white work pants.

Stupidly, she'd changed clothes first thing, dashing into the customer bathroom to get out of her costume. It chafed something horrible, and Suzie already knew she was going to have to do a serious rework right away. Summer was coming.

The garage's metal roof pinged and snapped in the sun. The loblolly pines waved feebly in the breeze; sixty-foot tall weeds. Even in May it got really hot in the garage when the wind died down; even with north and south bay doors open practically all the time.

Stoner's Auto Repair was a typical concrete standalone with a flat metal roof, fifty feet square. Concrete blocks were painted two tones of gray with a stripe of yellow. It was maybe thirty feet high, with a suspended ceiling stuck full of pens flung up there by the boys.

Allen, a buddy of Nelson's fresh out of jail, was over in the southwest bay, down in the pit doing an oil change. Nubby was working on a white minivan in the southeast bay. Nathan was out in the parking lot bringing a customer's car to the northeast bay for emissions.

Nelson was standing at the south bay door looking out at the traffic, silhouetted, motionless. He looked like a preying mantis, one arm raised up and leaning on the wall, one foot crossed over the other, knees and elbows akimbo. He looked like Danny Kaye, only tall and skinny, stretched out to somewhere around seven feet and dangerously underfed, with a massive Viking head, sunken eyes, a hooked nose, a huge chin, and curly used-to-be red hair thinning on top.

Suzie could see his thoughts floating out around his head, his concerns, his responsibilities, his plans and schemes. But though she could see his thoughts, she still couldn't read them. Nelson was deep, and nobody really knew what was going on inside him. Sometimes it seemed like he was trying to confuse things on purpose. Sometimes she thought maybe he was a psychopathic liar, but she could never be sure.

Nathan pulled the car into the emissions bay and ran it up onto the ramp, braking sharply when it got to the rollers at the top, the frame of the car teetering at the very edge. He got out of the car with a big sheepish grin on his face, and nodded at the edge of the car. 'Almost went for a trip, eh?'

Nathan was over six feet and was pretty thick around the middle. He was somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties, though he had lots of lines on his face so he could have been in his forties, except that he didn't act old enough to actually be grown up. Little things made Suzie think he was younger. Like that grin. And the fact that his crew-cut hair was bleached blond like some surfer dude with a beer gut. Compared to the other mechanics in the shop, he had perfect teeth, broad and white and filling his mouth. Perhaps that's why he grinned so often.

The car he was going to test was old, from sometime in the early '90s, and it was painted a curious shade of dark blue. The paint had been put on with a paint roller, and featured visible brushstrokes and waves and dips where it covered patches of bondo. Although not designed to draw attention, the paint job was notable for its raw energy and expressionistic flair.

Nathan was very attracted to it. He stood up from the stool in front of the console where he was entering the car's data into the computer, and studied the car for a long moment. 'You know, I think if I were going to paint a car like this, I'd take paint and splatter it on the car.' He made flinging motions at the car, white there, green there. Very artistic. It would have looked good, especially glazed over with a thick coat of clear varnish.

Nubby passed by with a greasy rag in his hand and had a quick look at the car. 'This is house paint, not car paint,' he said, straightening up. 'See, you can scratch it with a fingernail. And when winter comes and it gets cold and damp out, it'll pull off in sheets.' Nubby was short and skinny and didn't say much. He wore his hair in a mullet, thinning on top with a long ratty braid running down his back. He was about thirty, short and skinny with bad teeth; quiet, a hard worker with a wife and a baby at home.

'How would you know about that, Nubby?' said Nelson, coming over to see why his people were clustering together at one end of the shop.

Nubby came back and they all stood around the car. 'Cuz I did some house painting once, and this other guy on the crew just came back from robbing a liquor store and used it to disguise his car, is how come. It worked for a couple of days, but then it started cracking, and it didn't last more'n two months. He never got caught for the robbery, though, so maybe it worked after all.' Nubby stood wiping the greasy rag over his wrench, thoughtful. 'He died. Robbed another liquor store, and the cops chased him. Ended up in a ditch.' He shook his head. 'Gas tank blew up. Not much left to bury.'

'Serves him right,' Nathan snorted. 'He'd have been better off robbing a diner. There're fewer guns under the counter than they used to be, and the cops are bent on eating in peace.'

'Let me tell you something,' Nelson spoke up. 'Best thing would be to rob a bank. Nobody expects that these days, not since the '80s. You just get you a good disguise and be all nice and polite about it, and have you a good exit plan, and you'll be fine, because the tellers have strict orders to just hand the money over.'

Allen the new guy spoke up, stepping into the middle of the circle and shaking his head. 'No,' he said, the voice of experience. 'You can't do that anymore. They've got all sorts of ways of monitoring banks, and restaurants, too.'' He looked sad. He acted like he was throwing cold water on a pack of dogs.

Then he smiled kind of wistfully, his big bushy moustache snarling up at one end. 'No, drugstores is what you want to rob these days. There's lots of boys want to buy anything you can carry away from there. Times you don't get no money from the registers, you've got all these class A drugs sitting behind the counter. And cough syrup. I knew this guy'

Allen was getting ready to tell them about someone he was in jail with who masterminded the biggest heist in the South, and they could see it coming, so the boys edged away. Nubby abruptly turned and walked back to the car he was messing with, as if trouble was an infectious disease Allen carried.

'Aight.' Nelson spun around on the balls of his feet to look them all in the eye. 'Everybody get back to work. We don't need to stand around jawing about the best way to make us some money. That's what we got jobs for. We do the work we've got in front of us, and I for one go home with plenty.' He grinned like a showman, and grabbed the clipboard for the hand-painted car. 'Who's doing this?'

Nathan raised his hand, grinning. He grinned whenever he was the center of attention. Mainly because he spent so much time getting yelled at. But maybe he was trying to make a friendly moment of it as a way of feeling better about himself. Whatever, it tended to set Nelson off. Maybe he didn't like seeing that many healthy teeth. His were stained and jumbled up together near the front of his mouth, but he had most of them, and that was better than Nubby or Allen.

Nelson looked at the clipboard again. 'This says retest?'

Nathan leaned over and looked at the paperwork. He nodded. 'Yep.'

Nelson did a double take for the audience. 'Nathan, tell me something. Did you ever see this car in here before?'

Nathan started to say that he could have seen it before its paint job and just not recognize it in its current state.

Nelson could tell what he was going to say and jumped in, his arm flailing at the test results. 'No, Nathan, we've never seen this car before. And that's the God's honest truth. So why are you giving them a retest if they haven't paid their twenty-five dollars for the first one?'

Nathan shrugged. 'They said they were bringing it in for a retest, so I'm retesting it.'

Nelson ran his stained fingers through his hair. 'You didn't check. Nathan, you've always got to check.' Nelson blinked and started off toward the office with a lurch, and then dashed back. 'I'd like to get the guy out of here, so I'm gonna let you go ahead and do the work to make it pass.' He paused and jerked his head. 'Nathan, you listening to me? I don't want you running the test on the computer. Let me fix it first. Can you remember that?'

Nathan nodded distractedly, his eyes darting around and beyond Nelson's face. He'd decided to check the glove box for proof (or not) that the car'd been tested somewhere else. Maybe it would mollify Nelson a little to know that Nathan was at least half right. So he climbed back in the car and ransacked the glove compartment, taking a sheaf of loose papers and receipts out of it and sorting through them, letting papers slip through his fingers and fall to the grimy floor of the shop. He singled out a couple of sheets of crumpled paper and spread them out, tossing the rest on the passenger seat. 'Looks like this guy failed at two other places.'

Nelson walked back over from another part of the shop and took the papers from Nathan, shaking his head. 'So yeah he might have a retest coming, but not from here, because you only get the retest A,' he ticked it off on his fingers, 'if you get some work done to make it pass, and B, if you've already paid that particular shop. And you can see right here,' he said, waving the papers at Nathan, 'that he didn't. So go ahead and finish entering him into the system,' he repeated patiently, ' and go ahead and make him pass, but I don't want you finishing it, because we've got to make sure to make him a new bill and get him to pay us.'

Nelson walked off again and left Nathan to finish entering the VIN and other input and run the test, confident that Nelson would know how to get around the rules. Suzie hung out watching Nathan. She'd appropriated the barstool while the boys were admiring the van gogh car, dragged it over to the edge of the wooden worktable that separated the GTO from the emissions bay, and perched on the unfinished wooden seat. Nathan had to enter the seventeen-digit VIN twice, and then twice again when the numbers didn't match.

She had her shoes off beneath her stool, and kept sliding her bare feet over the rungs gingerly trying to find a spot worn bare of grease. Her butt was beginning to ache and she was going to have to get up and walk around soon. She always felt kind of lethargic when she was hanging out at Nelson's.

Nathan was muttering to himself. 'Make it pass. He wants to make it pass. I'll show him passing.' He ran tests. He pressed the hydraulic lift button and the front end of the car rose up six inches or so. Then he got in the car and ran it up to sixty for awhile, watching the monitor that he'd turned so he'd be able to see it from the car. Then he got out and punched up some other test, and got back into the car and ran it at half speed for awhile, his face going blank, his mouth hanging open, hunched over inside the little toy car. Maybe he was a football player in high school. He was very jock-like, being not too swift and always inclined to just stand in the way and let everyone go around him. Maybe he was a fullback.

Nathan was a relative of Nelson's, and Suzie was not really sure how close a relative, maybe his sister's kid, maybe his aunt's. He wasn't the brightest bulb God ever screwed into a lamp, but he tried, and he was enthusiastic about his job, and he loved working on cars. Well, not really. In fact, when Suzie asked him, he insisted that he hated working on cars. But when she asked him what he'd rather be doing, he never said; he just muttered for a few minutes about how much he hated it, using vague unfinished sentences and waves of his hand. So maybe he didn't love working in a garage. But he certainly tackled his work with vigor.

Suzie sat there watching Nathan. Nathan sat there watching the monitor. Time passed. Nelson came up to the window of the car to check on what Nathan was doing, and for awhile she watched them both watching the monitor, the same mesmerized look coming over their faces.

After a few minutes of this, a black dude in a white t-shirt and long red shorts came cruising in through the back of the shop and strolled up to Nelson. A customer perhaps. Nelson conferred with him, stepping away from Nathan's window, and then they drifted off and walked through the south bays and disappeared around the corner to the side of the front parking lot.

She was thinking of the boys as the three musketeers, or stooges, or Marx brothers. Nelson, Nathan, and Nubby. Three J's Garage. They made that name up themselves one day after pulling off some audacious fraud against the owner and rolling up cigar sized joints to celebrate. They'd puffed ceremoniously until they were coughing, and did complex handshakes using mostly their fists. With some sort of rebel yell once they got their breaths back.

Suzie sat there watching them and suddenly saw them all lit up, as if surrounded by an aura. They were a team of total country misfits doing their best against the odds, being their own loser selves and getting away with it. She felt proud of them, like their teamwork meant something, and wanted to applaud them in public.

She spent some time fantacizing the logistics of coming around one night to tag the building with their caricatures and Three J's Garage. There was only one place to paint it: around back, away from the road. People would only notice it when they drove around, so it would be a private tribute. The boys were proud of the work they did on the side and the scams they worked. They deserved a tribute.

Suzie's butt hurt, but it didn't help to shift on the stool. She considered getting off it and going outside to look at the sky. But she stayed and watched as Nathan did another test with a tailpipe monitor, and then a test with the gas cap. He looked around for the barstool, saw Suzie sitting on it, shrugged and grinned, and went over to stand at the console to punch up the results.

He bent over his work, bobbing with the silent rhythm of some song he wasn't quite humming, his bleach-blond crew cut waving slightly with each nod. He peered at the printout as it came out. 'It didn't pass, Nelson,' he called cheerily. 'Duh.'

Suzie could see that he'd been thinking about how to fix it so it would pass. He'd taken a bunch of readings, and stood there and thought about it for a few minutes. During which time Nubby changed spark plugs in the minivan; Allen did another oil change; Nelson and the black guy came sauntering back through the shop, said a few happy things to each other, and did the fist handshake thing, and the guy went back to his car and left. Suzie sat there the whole time, perched on the barstool, leaning forward to take the pressure off her butt, with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands.

Nathan jumped into the car and took a close look under the dash, his feet kicking outside the door as he came up with a radical, exciting idea. He jumped out and went to the shelf that ran the length of the west wall and rummaged around for a fuse. 'A big fucking fuse. This'll fix it.' He ducked back into the car and replaced some smaller fuse with one lots more powerful. And then he ran the reading again, and was all smiles. 'Make it pass, he said. Hey Nelson, I'm making it pass!'

Nelson didn't hear him because he was in the office making a phone call. Nathan took the opportunity to run the retest so that he'd have something printed out to show Nelson when he came to check on it. Nelson would think he was finally getting the point of doing emissions tests, and would be really proud of him for figuring out how to make it pass.

'It passed, Nelson,' he said when Nelson emerged from the office and closed the door behind him. Nathan was bursting to tell him what he'd done. Because making cars pass an emission tests was a very complicated science. Nelson might know most of the tricks, but Nathan was sure he'd come up with a new innovation himself, and Nelson would finally see that he wasn't as dumb as everyone thought he was. He handed him the certificate as it came off the printer.

Nelson frowned. 'What's this?' Nathan pointed to the part where it said Passed, smiling broadly. 'No, what is this?' Nelson asked again, pointing to the part where it said Retest. 'Nathan, didn't I tell you to let me do it? I swear you never listen to a thing I say.' He looked pained.

Suzie made a sympathetic noise as he walked past her to check on Allen. As he passed, he brushed her shoulders with the back of his hand, which was almost clean. It was the only notice he'd given her for half an hour. 'I don't know what I'm going to do with that boy,' he said loud enough for Nathan to hear him. Suzie made a questioning noise. 'He loses me a little bit of money every time he touches anything, is all.'

Nathan grinned, looking like a big Garfield. 'But I got it out of here, it passed and now it's leaving.' That's what Nelson had told him to do. Suzie could see how proud he was, and that he was totally oblivious to Nelson's displeasure.

She wandered over to the front of the shop to stand in the shade of the overhang and look off south into the sky. There were great views to the south and the north, and you could stand anywhere in the shop and see weather coming in. But there was no weather coming in.

The sky was bright blue behind puffy little clouds that had no rain in them. There was a tease of a breeze wicking through the shop, and the air was cool, but it was hot out there in the sun. It was hot out in the sun even in the winter, something Nubby complained of every time he went and stood outside for a cigarette, like he was doing at that moment.

Suzie went to join him. 'So smoke inside,' she said as he swore between puffs. He shook his head. 'It's not like you couldn't smoke in the shop. I mean, there's nothing flammable in there. Just the aerosol cans, really.'' Suzie turned to survey all the oil and grease, the tires stacked against the far corner, the filthy floor and the wads of paper trash everywhere, the big bottles of pressurized gasses, the fifty-gallon drums of oil and transmission fluid.

Nubby took another drag and nodded his head toward the inside of the shop. 'I just need a break from all the aggravation.' They stood and watched the sky while he smoked. Nubby's dad had some land when he was a kid, and he'd spent lots of time wandering the fields and woods. He was saving up to buy a few acres to put the trailer on, further away from Atlanta, and for a guy who didn't speak much, he loved talking about the country, and would it rain, and how hot it was getting.

He ground out the butt under his boots and went back to the minivan. Suzie went back to her post near the worktable, past a sign on the wall that said Only Legal Emissions Tests Are Done Here, Any Requests To The Contrary Will Be Reported To The EPA. She'd drawn a winking eye on it when they'd first put it up, and Cindy, the owner, had replaced it and yelled at Nelson about it. But she drew a wink on that one, too, and after a few replacements, Cindy stopped noticing it and the sign stayed tagged.

Nathan had reclaimed the barstool and was getting ready to test another car, a white pickup. 'So, Nathan, what did you do to make it pass?'

'I put in this big fucking fuse, and now it's fixed.'

'But, isn't that just hiding the problem?'

'Who cares?'

'And doesn't putting in too big a fuse cause a fire hazard?'

He shrugged. 'So what? It passed, and that's what counts.'

Nathan wasn't concerned with the twenty-five bucks the customer didn't have to pay for the test, either, because that was office stuff, and he didn't want to know. Cindy, Glenda who worked in the office when Cindy wasn't there, Nubby, and Nelson all worked the register and wrote up jobs. Nathan just did the little stuff that Nelson told him to do.

He didn't even have to go to the bank to cash his paycheck. He could get paid right out of the till. It would just be more to think about if he had to know prices or deal with the customers. And it was a whole nother computer system in the office. Out in the shop there was just the emissions machine and the dashboard computer thing they could plug in to download shit from the car. That was more than enough. They couldn't pay him to learn any more than he already had to.

Suzie was tired of hanging around with nothing to do. The soles of her feet hurt, and she had to be at work in an hour and a half. Her butt still hurt from sitting on the stool. She had actually come by to see if Nelson could do something about her air conditioner. He'd filled it with freon the last time she'd been here, but it had already escaped into the upper atmosphere, so she needed some more.

It was just too hot driving around in the sun with the windows down. It was really sweaty in all those costume layers, sitting in Atlanta traffic with no breeze, and now that she had a good job she had to make sure not to come in dripping wet. At sixty miles an hour, eighty-degree air might be slightly cooling, but when she was in stop-and-go traffic there wasn't enough breeze to keep her from breaking out into runnels of salt water down both sides of everything.

Nelson must have read her mind. He came over and stood behind her, rubbing her shoulders for a moment with the backs of his wrists, then leaned over and said conspiratorially, 'Let's go for a spin. These boys about to drive me crazy.' So Suzie straightened up from her position against the worktable and stretched, then went off to use the bathroom in the office. Because Nelson might say right now, but he still had things to do before slipping away, and she knew she had maybe ten minutes before he'd dash to the car and fuss at her for not waiting there the whole time.

All mechanics have pictures of naked women somewhere. This place had porn mags strewn all over the shop floor bathroom which were perfectly safe from discovery because nobody has ever seen a filthier bathroom.

The outside of the door had years of greasy handprints on it, and the doorknob was so slick that the boys had to use their shirt tails to twist it open. Every surface was grimed; there was a scuffed-clean path to the toilet from the door. There was no toilet paper, just old newspapers dashed into the corner. You wouldn't want to wash your hands or even rest anything on the lip of the sink, and don't even think about looking at the underside of the seat.

Should a customer open the door by mistake, they'd never notice the porn mags. The horror would show on their face and in the way they backed off, and you'd be able to see them thinking that they'd better get their car away from the shop as soon as possible.

Suzie used the customer bathroom instead. She pulled open the door to the office and was hit by a blast of air conditioning, cooling the waiting room to a frigid fifty-eight degrees even though it was only spring. She made her way past the front counter, past Cindy, and past the sullen, angry stares of customers waiting for their cars, and slipped into the bathroom, which was spotless compared to the shop floor bathroom. This bathroom's only flaws were a hastily patched wall where someone had gotten angry and put their fist through it, a constantly dripping sink, and a pile of paper towels spilling out of the waste basket which she scooped up and stuffed back in - her contribution to tidiness.

Suzie didn't like to be in the shop when Cindy was around. She'd give him hell for having his friends there during business hours. So she only ever nodded when she had to deal with Cindy, who scowled back in that Southern, cold-eyed smiley way. Cindy was a nervous little woman who was always afraid of being made a fool of or ripped off. She'd thought she'd get rich owning a franchise, but she was in way over her head. She was too nice, too middle class, too clueless. She should have just let Nelson run things his way and take what profit he could generate without prompting.

But she was adamant about doing the right thing, and so she came in twice a week to oversee everything, and that meant she'd be looking at the books and asking questions and wanting the boys to work more and faster. Cindy might have done well being an office manager in a small place, or working in a parts store, because she micromanaged. But the boys were allergic to scrutiny and didn't respond well to management techniques, so when she came in they hustled around and added a little more energy to their movements so they'd look busier and more effective and she'd stay off their backs. It drove everyone nuts.

Even Nelson looked more efficient and seemed to get more done when she was there. But he was the star of the shop, so Cindy never said much. Maybe she was a little intimidated by him. A little charmed. The more she looked up to his genius, the more his methods slid. In fact, as long as they made money and the books were straight, she didn't have much to complain about. Nelson was always there on time, came in on his day off whenever they could get hold of him, handled customers with charm, and had the benevolent air of a master at work. He was the perfect employee. Except he was ripping her off at every opportunity.

Nelson was a mechanic's mechanic. Not in the sense that other mechanics looked up to him and studied his skillful way with an engine, but in the sense that anything he touched had to be gone over later by another mechanic, making more work for everyone. He fixed anything that came into the shop, anything the customer wanted done, whether it was necessary or not, and whether the repair was actually done or just approximated, and whether or not he'd done that kind of repair before.

To Nelson, nothing mechanical was a mystery, just a big pain in the ass. He always figured he was a born inventor, not a technician, and this led to some creative repairs that it was best the customers didn't know about.

Suzie came back out and found him yelling at Nathan for something new. She waited around until he was through, and then he washed up at the back sink, and they got into some customer's red Camry that was sitting out back.

It had been sitting in the sun, and its black interior felt like the inside of a toaster oven. There was a fine covering of dust on everything. The inside of the windshield was filthy, with streaks and splotches from imperfectly wiped condensation and spilled coffee. The car had a CD hanging on the mirror by a thread, a full ashtray, and paper trash all over the floor - newspapers, McDonald's bags, discarded mail, drink cups, water bottles, cigarette packs.

She had to move a bunch of papers from the passenger seat, and glanced in the back as she got in. There were clothes scrunched in the corner of the back seat, and car parts and cans of car fluids taking up the foot room. Nelson was already revving the car and was impatient to get away before Cindy noticed him gone.

Nelson started the car up and they headed down Tara Boulevard to the first subdivision and snaked around the streets. It was a maze built in the '60s, called Camelot. It had a Tudor look, sort of. She looked at him fondly and relaxed into the seat, gently sweeping her hand over to his side of the car, hoping he wanted to hold hers and be close. But he had something else in mind, and turned his hand over to reveal a joint he'd palmed back in the shop.

Nelson smoked a lot of weed. He smoked it all day long, and always had a huge big joint ready to smoke when they'd take a break. Suzie couldn't stand getting high all day long, but there was no refusing Nelson, and he never asked her if she wanted to smoke, just handed her the joint.

It was the size of her thumb, and she held on to it while he fished around in his pockets for the lighter. Then she handed it back, after duly admiring the tightness of the roll and the enormous amount of weed it contained. He pulled a half-smoked cigar out of his pocket and put it in the ashtray, so he'd have some camouflage in the unlikely event a cop stopped them. Then he lit the joint, bellowing smoke as he took the first drag and rolled the window down a crack so he could see where he was going. He started to cough, his 7'4'' frame convulsing tightly as he let out great hacking sounds that reminded Suzie of an end-stage lung cancer patient. She looked at him with concern as he passed her the joint, but he had turned his attention back to the road and didn't see her face.

'Great stuff,' he said, once he caught his breath. 'Taste that. That's the measure of good pot, you know, how hard it makes you cough.'

Suzie was dubious. 'I'm not sure there's a connection between the amount of THC and how resinous it is.' Because she rather thought it wasn't.

'Nah, it's a well known fact.' He took another hit, and the coughing continued. 'Seriously, did you know that the pot we smoke today has twenty-three times more THC in it than what you could get in the '60s? Even the field-grown strains are stronger. That's why it costs so much more.'

'That and maybe the general rate of inflation?' Suzie was not easily satisfied with Nelson's explanations. They were so absolute. So she usually tried to bring out other facts that might influence the subject so they could have a discussion. Suzie had trouble talking to Nelson because he knew so much about everything, and though she could see flaws in his logic and holes in his evidence, she always understood that it was because he'd already factored in their relative influence on the matter, and was expecting her to see that.

'I'll tell you something else. The CIA, who - believe it - have been genetically engineering pot all this time for maximum effect, have also been setting the price to the dealers. And that's really why the price is so high.'

She blew out her lungful of smoke a fraction of a second early. 'Now don't tell me that the CIA is entirely behind the drug trade.' Everything Nelson said sounded plausible when he said it. But when you got away from the shop and thought back on it, parts of the vast conspiracy it always ended up being didn't quite hold together. So she was always a bit skeptical. Or tried to be, to bAllence the thrill of emotion she got whenever she thought about a huge vast conspiracy to control the world.

'It's the God's truth. The CIA took it over from the mob in the early '60s.' He waved the joint with energy, pointing to the windshield, indicating an imaginary Southeast Asia spot on the lower right, then sweeping over to Europe and South America and Mexico on the left.

'Yep, they got into heroin and then they got into coke, and they only recently took over pot because turns out it's the most profitable.' He looked wise, glancing at her, driving the car with his left hand, his elbow draped all the way out of the window, his head within millimeters of the roof, his knees right up beside the steering wheel, poised to take over the driving should he happen to drop the joint and have to fish for it.

Nelson was of Scandinavian heritage, one of the few spots in the world where humans still intermarry with giants. His every move was a dart and a jab as he wheeled and pivoted on stilts for legs and mop handles for arms. And yet, for all his 8'3 '', he weighed 92 pounds. You could see his spine through his belly, swear to God. He always spoke with a great animated rush, completely enthused by the thoughts he needed to communicate, possessed by the immediacy of his truth.

'Yeah. And let me tell you something else.' He said quickly. She looked at him as he paused with dramatic emphasis to take a deep drag and commence coughing again. He was so noble looking, so intelligent. Beautiful in a really ugly way, with his big sunken eyes, his big toucan nose, his massive jaw, those enormous Buddha ear lobes and batwing ears, and almost-red wiry hair looking like the grass in an Easter basket.

He loomed in her direction. 'The reason it's still not legal is because the CIA can fund its entire black operations budget with the price of pot today. It's the highest return on the dollar of any option, legal or not. The drug companies are killing themselves trying to come up with patentable uses for pot, that's how profitable it is. And the government doesn't want the competition, and doesn't want to license it, because the only revenue they'll get is tax, which is a fraction of what they're getting now.'

He sat back and passed her the joint, proud of his razor-sharp insight, pleased at having revealed the damning truth.

Suzie was trying to become a skeptic by nature. But get her high and she had no problem believing in secret societies, hidden organizations, master plans. The thought frightened her, because if they were running things, then things were being run into the ground.

'See, my dad was a Mason,' Nelson said as he reclaimed the joint, which was getting small and sticky. He held it with the tips of his fingers so it wouldn't burn him when he took the next hit. 'My dad told me some shit. All sorts of secret societies are running things you would not believe. The CIA can control the weather. They've got big machines. I'm not shitting you. But the Masons don't need machines. The highest Masons get together and use these magic powers they spend all their time developing, and they can make it rain or snow anywhere they want to.'

Suzie thought of Glinda, Good Witch of the North, making snow fall to wake Dorothy and the Lion. She'd heard stories about her mom's crowd, conjuring thunderstorms in a drought. But what Nelson was saying sounded a little far-fetched. If they can't even predict the weather, how can anyone control it?

She burned her fingers on her last turn with the joint, so she waved it away when Nelson handed it back to her. He happily kept it and took several short drags, but choked it all out immediately in another long fit of coughing.

'Let me tell you something else about the weather,' Nelson said. 'I been reading about this. Back in the '70s the CIA built a Tesla machine to control the weather. They like studied Russian weather patterns and found some sort of pressure point, a spot up in the North Atlantic where all the big storms came from. And they turned this machine on and made the whole earth, like, tingle, and focused it on that one spot and made a wave of turbulence. It instantly affected the weather, and Russia was hit with storm after storm for months. Ruined all the crops.' He stopped for another coughing fit. Suzie watched with concern as he grew red in the face and didn't seem able to stop coughing even to draw a breath.

Gradually the hacking diminished, and he eagerly put the butt end of the roach up to his mouth for a last hit. 'Thing about that is, it fucked up America's weather, too, and they had to stop.' He turned to her earnestly. 'But don't think they've stopped trying to control weather. They've just moved on to other methods. Like electrifying the atmosphere to power airplanes and monitor the earth and control the clouds and shit.'

Suzie wanted to hear more about this latest claim, but Nelson turned into the parking lot of the garage and handed her the smoldering roach. 'Here, put that out and let me get back to work.' He pulled to a stop and lunged over for a kiss, then was out the door and bouncing off into the back of the shop while she was still trying to find her shoes among the debris on the floor of the Camry.

She turned her mind to work. The thought of going off to work and leaving the breezy garage reminded her that she wanted him to fix her air conditioning.

Cindy wandered out from the office, carrying a clipboard and calling, 'Awl change,' like she was selling newspapers on the street. Nelson was back at work, and she knew it was going to be another hour and a half before he'd be willing to pay attention to her again. She'd just spent all her available time with him talking about conspiracy theories instead of asking him when he was going to get around to looking at her car. She didn't bother approaching him to ask about it. She knew what his answer would be: 'Come see me tomorrow and we'll fix it first thing.'

So, fine, she thought. Whatever. Let's just go and maybe get to work on the early side.

* * *