splat chapter nine

The wheel wouldn't turn when she started the car up the next morning. More power steering fluid. Her brakes had started pulling to the right when she slowed. Hot air blew out of the vents when she turned on the air conditioner. The engine sometimes overheated, always when she was in traffic. And the clutch was starting to slip. All multiple hundreds of dollars if she were to take her car to a regular mechanic. Luckily, she had Nelson, but she couldn't take all of these problems down to him at once. He was way too busy to tend to more than one thing at a time. She had to do triage on her car every time she went to see him, presenting only the most urgent symptoms for consideration.

But first, she had to make a quick trip to the hideout in order to rework her costume. She'd already tossed the tights, and immediately found the plastic shorts intolerably sticky. She passed a cheap curbside sign on her way down Moreland. Get Ur Message Across. This started her thinking. How are the perps on the road supposed to know she was trying to teach them a lesson?

If only she could carry those roadrage.com signs that said, Get Out Of The Fast Lane, Moron, and I Hope That Cellphone Gives You Cancer. But she didn't think it was a good idea to be flashing cards while aiming, and she didn't want to call attention to herself. If only she could shoot a pamphlet at them. If only she could stuff a message into the paintball, or spell out Roadhog or something in paint on the side of their car.

She sat in the clearing and deliberated. But mosquitoes interrupted her thoughts, and when she checked the clock it was after One, so she looked through her bag of spare costume parts, and in the end, never minded all of it and put on her Superman t-shirt. Then she made a dash for Riverdale.

She got to Nelson's, and found that half the boys hadn't shown up. It was just Nelson and Cindy and Nathan. And two black women dressed in black pants and white blouses, standing next to their car, fuming. Suzie nodded when she came in through the back, and they gave her measured looks, and then slowly nodded their heads.

Nelson was rushing around dealing with a pickup in the southeast bay, behind which sat a red minivan with its hood up, hooked to the air conditioning machine. The women's car was a black Volvo sedan. It was parked in the south bay at the moment. There were no cars over the oil change pits that spanned the southwest and northwest bays, and Nathan was just backing up a white SUV onto the emissions ramp in the northeast bay. Cindy went rushing around bringing new clipboards out to Nelson, consulting with him about the price and extent of repairs, checking to see how he was handling the women.

The two women were standing around their car, waiting for something. Suzie couldn't tell what stage the relationship was in, whether they were just talking with Nelson about what was wrong and what he wanted to do to fix it; or whether it was a later stage there was something wrong with their repair, and they were back in the shop trying to get him to make it right. Or it could be that they'd been in on a daily basis, asking why it wasn't ready, being told that it was a part they were having trouble getting; or that it was another part than they'd originally thought, or that it was something else entirely. Or they could be regular customers, and know damn well they'd have to stand over the boys to get the work done right.

Suzie hung out behind the emissions console, where Nathan was entering the SUV's information into the system. Nelson came back to the console, muttering, and picked up a computer cable from the back of the machine. He dragged it over to the women's car, and draped it over the edge of the door into the driver's side.

'Will this fix it?' one of the women asked.

Nelson nodded and said, 'Let's hope so,' and ducked into the car to plug it in somewhere under the dashboard. He stuck his head out. 'How long has the check engine light been on?' he asked accusatorily.

The woman shook her head. 'I don't know,' she admitted. Nelson frowned, and ducked back into the car. The woman was muttering now. It sounded like an inventory of car parts. Nelson continued to fiddle with her car, then stepped back, went over to the console, pushed some buttons, and read some results.

Then he went over to the women and had a conversation Suzie couldn't hear a word of. He stood there, towering over the women, bending down to achieve eye contact while he told them something they plainly didn't want to hear.

And then he walked off to work on someone else's car while they talked it over. He moved like an alien, lurching and correcting, his head swiveling, his eyes staring. Suzie wondered what was going through his mind.

Suzie started feeling uncomfortable when the women meandered over to where she was perched on the driver's side fender of the Goat with her bare feet bouncing off the tire. The woman whose car it was looked to be in her early forties, little but strong, her hair tightly pulled back into a bun; someone you wouldn't want to mess with while she was serving you a hot plate of food. Her friend was younger, plump, and had a nice smile, which she displayed whenever she spoke.

The friend had on a Red Lobster nametag that said Latonya. Together they all watched Nathan punching up results on the console. Latonya kept asking what it said. She was squeezed into a small corridor between the front of the Goat and the back of the slick and greasy toolbox that formed one of the internal divisions of the garage. The owner read them out: 'Complete, complete, complete, incomplete, incomplete, incomplete, incomplete...'

Latonya wanted to know what was complete and what was incomplete, and the woman began to read out the categories. Nathan reached out and turned the monitor away from her. 'What does it matter?' he grumbled.

The woman had been waiting for an opening. 'Well, it's reading more incompletes than before you replaced all those things.' She turned to Suzie. 'Why don't they just tell a person that they don't know?'

Suzie smiled carefully. 'It takes weeks sometimes,' she said, thinking she was making a joke, feeling more and more uncomfortable as it became apparent that she'd walked into the middle of a dispute.

The woman stared back at her for half a minute, and then she started a litany, her voice low. 'It's not supposed to take weeks. I've been home from work for two days now, trying to get this thing to pass. I can't afford to be out of work.' Latonya nodded fiercely, smiling.

Suzie reconsidered her smartass remark, but the damage had been done. The woman continued, 'I don't see why they don't just come out and tell me they don't know what's wrong and can't fix it. Why don't they tell me to go take my car to a real mechanic so I can find out once and for all what the matter is? All I'm getting is maybe it's this and let's replace that, and I'm tired of it. I can't pay $374 for this. That's what I make in a week. I can't afford this.'

Her voice was rising steadily. Nathan was not looking at her, and when Nelson came up, he wasn't looking at her either, but treating her as if she was a tank of compressed gas standing on the shop floor.

She was looking for a fight, and saying things loud enough that pretty soon the boys wouldn't be able to pretend they weren't hearing. But she wasn't really willing to escalate her complaints. She'd already learned that Nelson and Cindy thought of her as the problem, and she wasn't a million percent sure they were cheating her, but she was real suspicious.

However, there was her car, in the hands of a mechanic, and it's never wise to piss off the guy holding the keys. Suzie could see her fighting with herself. She'd been taught not to cause a stir, but she felt she was being ripped off, and in order to complain she had to face down a whole shop full of white people.

She turned to Suzie again. 'I should take it to a real mechanic, someone who can tell me what's wrong with it for real.' She turned back to glare at Nelson. 'And what about taking the lottery tickets out of my glove compartment?'

Latonya grinned, her nice smile at odds with the anger she must be feeling. 'Whoever took them should let us know if they hit.'

The woman scowled. 'I mean, I didn't know they's a bunch of thieves here.'

Nelson fiddled at the table for a moment and went away, not listening. The next time he came up, he looked her in the eye while she gave him shit in a low voice. 'But you know you got to get those wires,' he interrupted, in a reasonable tone. 'You knew it when you come in here. That other fella told you you're gonna have to get wires. So don't be yelling at me cuz your car didn't pass.'

She snarled at him.

Suzie looked down at the ground as Nelson slunk off to the other end of the garage. There was a handful of bright shiny pennies on the floor. Some of them were face up. So she got up off the edge of the car, and bent down to pick up the heads. She gave one to the woman. 'There's a lucky penny for you.'

The woman instinctively tried to smile, but all that happened was that she drew her lips tighter over her clenched teeth. She looked down at the penny in her hand. 'This won't do me no good. I need thousands more of these to pay for my car not getting fixed.' She threw it back onto the ground.

Suzie looked; it was tails. She said, 'Excuse me,' and ducked between Nathan and the woman. She slipped around the SUV up on the emissions rack, and made her way to the southeast side where a water fountain sat wedged into a spot between the office window and the door to the customer waiting room.

The fountain was coated with dust and grime, crusty wherever the water splashed. There were bunches of keys on the splash guard. Sets of keys, labeled keys, loose keys, keys that had been there forever. There was a half-empty bottle of bright green dye the boys would put into the radiators instead of flushing them, when the old fluid wasn't convincing enough. There was a clipboard with the details of some car on the ticket.

Suzie shifted a couple of wayward bunches of keys, picked up the clipboard, and used the edge of it to depress the slimy button so she could get a drink of water. After letting the water run cold, she drank her fill, and spilled a little into the palm of her hand to wipe on her brow and the back of her neck, and then walked over to the door to hang out and look at the sky.

Suzie loved watching the sky. It was from driving with her dad all those years. What she loved the most when she was little was lying on the passenger seat beside her dad while he drove through the night. She'd plump up her pillow and put her arms behind her head and look out at the stars, her little feet pressed up against the glass, watching the sky move as he steered through an invisible landscape. Once she was older, she noticed the countryside more, but still, looking at the sky at night was always her favorite thing.

Watching the sky during the day was a close second. Landscapes take miles to change, sometimes hundreds of miles. The forested slopes of Mississippi are a lot like the forested slopes of Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. And that gets just a little tedious. The little farms were always at the same places on the road, and a break at a truckstop was always the same number of hours from the last one.

But the sky. The sky changed every few minutes, every few miles. And she used to watch it hour after hour all day long. She watched the sun arc from one side of the windshield to the other. She watched fronts rolling in from the northwest; she watched thunderstorms build up on windless days over one spot and stay visible until it was dark; she watched pretend thunderstorms puff up over a parched countryside and blow away laughing in 85 degree heat. She watched the purple gunge thickening on their approach to big cities. She watched ex hurricanes come stomping through the countryside. And she watched day after day of blue sky and searing sunshine, where nothing changed except the angle of the sun. On those days she watched the hawks and vultures circle.

That day's sky was gathering clouds, starting off with hazy white filaments high up in the blue; thickening, lowering, and darkening as the hours passed. Could be a hundred-mile area of rain. Could be a line of thunderstorms. Could be it'd all fade out as the sun went down. Suzie hoped for rain, for a good rousing thunderstorm with heavy downpours and some really close lightning. So she stood outside for awhile, looking into the cloud for hints of the weather to come.

And because she also wanted to avoid those two women. Nelson came up to finally deal with the van waiting for air conditioning. Suzie wandered back to the fountain to get another drink. 'Are you having a bad day?' she asked said as she walked past him, feeling how put upon he must feel with customers ragging on him.

'Yes, I'm having a bad day.' He looked at her and made his chin quiver, half joking.

Cindy came up asking about some part she needed to order. Nelson twisted a dial on the freon machine, then flipped a switch. A kerchunk noise occurred, and a whoosh of moving gases. He seemed satisfied, picked up a wrench, and stuck his head into the engine compartment.

'Are you having a bad day?' she asked Cindy.

Cindy grimaced. 'It's not that horrible.' She nodded toward the two women. 'Some people are never happy, though,' she said, looking at Nelson protectively.

His head came up again. He looked wise and mischievous at the same time. 'I told them they needed to go ahead and get the wires.'

Cindy turned to Suzie. 'It's a Volvo, what do they expect? The wires are a hundred bucks to us. To us,' she repeated, because Suzie knew their markup was somewhere from half again to double the price. She turned back to Nelson. 'I got an awl change.'

'Give it to Nathan.' He finished tightening something. 'Yep. Those women don't got the sense God gave animal crackers.' Nelson waved the wrench. 'It ain't gonna pass no matter what we do until she replaces the damn wires.'

Suzie walked off and returned to the wooden table to rummage around for a recent newspaper. She didn't want to be involved in a standoff. Both sides thought the other was wrong. Nelson thought the woman was just trying to get out of putting money into her car to pass inspection, and she thought he was ripping her off.

And they were both right. He'd replaced one thing after another on her car, telling her he was trying to save her money in case the smaller things would make a difference. When they didn't, it wasn't his fault if she wouldn't pay for more parts. According to Nelson, you could never tell what was the real reason a car wouldn't pass. High emissions levels could be caused by a dozen different things, especially in the newer cars with all those damned sensors.

Sometimes it came down to replacing everything until you found whatever was wrong. And on older cars, you reached a point where nothing was going to cure their dread dusease and you just had to accept it. Then it was a matter of getting the owners to pay the legally mandated $600 in repairs, and then the car passed by default.

There was a third way, and Nelson was the master of that. King of the falsified emissions test. If you approached him the right way, you could get him to sell you a genuine fake emissions certificate, guaranteed to pass scrutiny at the Department of Safety .

But these women didn't ask him the right way. They got all pissed off about how much it was costing, and asking him was he stealing shit out of their car, and he was offended, and wouldn't have passed their car if they'd have been sweet as pie. Not after that.

Nelson finished refilling the minivan's freon, then went to check on Nathan's progress failing the SUV. It had failed, as expected. The guy had known it was going to fail, and was desperate for a miracle. He was visible now, pacing in the parking lot in front of the office, poking his head around the corner like a sentinal every time he made a turn.

Nelson went out to talk to him, and came back a few moments later. Suzie and the two women ignored each other. Suzie was feeling awkward. She was automatically on Nelson's side, but she didn't like to see them so angry. So when they approached her again and started complaining about the way things were run around there, she searched for something to say that would make the woman feel less victimized, and remembered something Nelson had said. 'Some cars never pass. It's that ''Service Engine Soon'' light. It's planned obsolescence. The car companies...'

The woman looked at her sharply. 'Ain't no car company messing up my car. It's happening right here, this place where don't nobody tell you what's wrong and you just have to keep shelling out money.' She had her arms folded over her chest, her chin out. Her eyes were squinted down into slits. She was as angry as she would have been in the restaurant if one of her customers walked out without paying the check and the manager took it out of her pocket.

So Suzie gave up trying to make her feel better, and retreated to her car parked in the back lot, where she found a few bits of paper to clean out of the back seat, and inspected the Lake of Doom simmering in the sun the sludge was lime green and purple that afternoon. The clouds were a little darker now, a few miles closer. It definitely looked like rain. Maybe it would hold off until she was at work. Maybe she could avoid having to drive through a downpour.

Nelson was taking to the women, standing next to the emissions console and slouching down to their height. 'I tell you what,' he said earnestly. 'We still got the parts we replaced. What we can do is, we'll just take the new ones out and put in the old ones, and then you can take it somewhere else, and we won't charge you.' He straightened up and smiled at them. 'How's that sound?'

The woman looked like this was not what she wanted to hear. But it was something. So she nodded. Nelson said, 'Good. It'll just take a minute. Why don't you go sit down in the waiting room?'

But they didn't budge. Cindy had already been out to tell them they had to wait in the customer lounge for safety reasons. Liability issues. DOT rules. But they refused. They wanted to watch their car in case someone stole something else out of it. So they stayed.

Nelson went off to fix whatever was wrong with the pickup in the southeast bay. Nathan pulled a car into the southwest bay for its oil change. Then he pulled another car behind the women's, blocking the door. 'Pop the hood,' Nelson called, and the hood went up, and both boys bent their heads and ducked into the engine compartment for a look-see.

Suzie wondered how long it was going to take Nelson to replace those parts in the woman's car. She wondered if she was going to get her air conditioning done this afternoon. She wondered if Nelson was going to have any time for her at all. Suddenly weary, she picked whatever parts of the paper she'd managed to gather, and climbed into the front seat of the Goat. She fiddled with the radio knob hopefully, but the battery wasn't connected, and there was nothing coming out of the speakers. The women stayed away from her once she was in the car.

She flipped desultorily through the paper, uninterested beyond the headlines. There was a picture of babyfaced Ralph Reed on the front page, up to no good in Georgia these days.

Bird Flu blah. West Nile Mosquitoes blah. Fed Says Rates Must Rise Soon. Bush Vows More Resources Against Iraqi Insurgents. Soccer Moms Urge President To Bring Home Troops. Cost Of Hurricane Damage In Gulf blah.

There was a long article on the airport expansion project, starting on the front page and continuing in the business section. Suzie's attention was drawn by the picture of the new, unfinished runway bridge over I-285. The caption said it would be 1,200 feet long and 500 feet wide. The largest airport construction job in the world at the world's busiest passenger airport. The picture showed trucks and cars barreling down 285 into a concrete canyon maybe a hundred feet high, the crews walking around at the top look like dots on the scaffolding. Cranes hovered over the scene.

On the front page of the business section was a graphic showing the yearly salaries of Atlanta's richest CEOs, ranging from a paltry three million to over forty million dollars. Topping the list were the heads of Home Depot, Coca-Cola, Georgia-Pacific, Scientific-Atlanta, healthcare giant Aflac, and BellSouth, all giving their bosses over ten million a year. Nineteen other firms paid their heads relative pittances, a few million each, including Southern Company, Coca-Cola Enterprises, Equifax, and SunTrust Banks. Suzie felt jealous.

She threw the paper down in anger and got out of the car. Nothing to read. No news. Just this crap. She wondered how many members of the White Magnolia Club were on that list.

Nelson was still working on three cars at once. Right then he was doing something to the SUV that failed the emissions test. It was pulled out of the way in the back parking lot so Nathan could still get cars in and out for inspections. The women were still there, still waiting, still standing around looking discontentedly at their car, still blocked in. Cindy was running in with more oil changes for Nathan, who was going back and forth between the oil pit and a green VW in for an emissions test.

It felt like she'd been there for three hours. The clouds were closer, the sun was covered by thicker fuzz and giving out less heat. The breeze was stiffening and getting half a degree cooler every ten minutes. Suzie's hair began to blow about her head as she stood at the wooden worktable, taking it all in. She was incredibly bored. There was nothing she could to do straighten up, or to help out, or even to break things if she felt like it. She could lean, she could perch, she could sit, she could walk around. Or she could leave.

But she still hadn't said more than four words to Nelson, and she really wanted him to recharge her air conditioner. So she waited some more. Like in high school, those last ten minutes of class that took an hour to pass every day. Was it Algebra class? Or History? One of them was interminable; she used to sit there convinced that time was actually passing slower than normal, trying to devise tests to catch it.

The ladies edged into their car as Nathan moved the one that was blocking them in. Suddenly they started up and squealed the tires as they backed out into the parking lot. Nelson didn't look up. Suzie caught a glance at Latonya's face; finally the waitress Can I Help You smiley face was gone and she showed frustration and anger. The older woman's face was in shadow, but her silhouette was squinched up and hard. She drove around the building, and when she got to the road she stood on it. The car screeched like an angry buzzard.

Work went on in the garage. Nelson added some kind of fluid to some intake in the SUV's engine. Nathan started it up and revved it with a lead foot. Black smoke billowed and hurled out of the tailpipe. Suzie picked her way through the wind-whipped smoke to the back of the shop where they were. Nelson wrenched away a plastic duct that lay worm-like on top of the engine and threw it on the floor, out of the way. Nathan came by and stepped on it. Suzie heard it crack. Nathan looked at her and grinned: it was okay, that piece wasn't going back on anyway.

The engine was filthy. Oil had sprayed up into the hood over time and the color scheme was a dark green gray blue with russet overtones. It smelled like fried oil. Not french-fry oil, like at Suzie's job, more like the burnt oil of crushed dinosaurs. An intensely organic inorganic odor. Congealed fumes. Suzie's nose wrinkled up in an effort to filter out the larger airborne particles of liquid pollution.

Nelson had his hands full. The car wouldn't pass, the guy was going to pay him extra personally to get it to pass, and so he was trying all the little tricks he knew. Just like he did with the woman's Volvo. But the guy was treating him like a god, and so if the tricks didn't work, he might could do something a little bit irregular with the emissions computer.

Suzie peered into the engine compartment from a safe distance. 'What happened with the women?'

Nelson had a ratchet in his hand, detaching some device on the side of the engine. 'They didn't want to wait.' He sounded unconcerned.

'You were going to leave them there until closing, weren't you?' She'd suspected that this was his intention by the way he'd told them it would only take a minute. Nothing only took a minute in Nelson's shop.

'And then I was going to tell them to come back tomorrow. The nerve of them accusing me of stealing from them. I never done a dishonest thing in my life, I swear to God.' He stood up straight, brought himself to his full height, and swung his fists to his chest, the ratchet like a little flag in his hand.

Nelson liked to play innocent. He could work himself up. But Suzie looked him in the eye, and he grinned. Cindy came out of the office with a clipboard. A Camry having trouble starting. Nelson looked at the clock. 3:35. He shrugged, sure, still time to get a part and get it in there before quitting time. Cindy went back into the office, and he leaned back over the engine.

'Um, Nelson, I don't guess you have a few minutes to give me some freon,' Suzie observed, feeling like a junkie.

He stopped, stood up, and turned to face her, stricken, the ratchet limp at his side. 'Oh, baby, if you had picked any other day. I've got two men out and we're just overrun with customers.'

She sagged. 'Well...'

He slung his arm around her, engulfing her shoulders. 'You know I'll take care of you. You just come back tomorrow and we'll fix your car first thing.' He squeezed her tight. 'And then we'll go off and ride around, just you and me.'

Suzie gave in, hung around for a few minutes longer, and then got in her car and left, Nelson coming after her at the last moment for a quick squeeze and a sorrowful look before heading back to try something else on the SUV.

She felt frustrated. She felt beaten. She felt hurt. She felt neglected. Mainly, however, she felt hot. Sticky. She felt the sweat blooming on the skin of her arms and neck the moment she got in the car. She felt she would never get the air conditioning to work again.

But once she was out of the parking lot and moving, the breeze kicked in immediately. The sky to the north was as dark as twilight and deep brown purple; black under the clouds near the horizon. The wind was lovely; cool and strong, fresh smelling with that ozone tinge that speaks of lightning. Or of smog.

 

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next chapter, fresh paint runs in the rain