Driven, p.18
Driven, page 18
I’m at school by noon most days. The routine soothes me with its mix of newness and structure. In order to earn a small income, I’ve taken a position as a teaching assistant in a lecture class on early American literature. I sit to the side of the stage and click through PowerPoint slides while a teacher my father’s age reads from notes handwritten on yellow paper. The professor is, understandably, a bit of a Luddite. His slides are glitchy, and neither of us can figure out how to go backwards without quitting the whole program, restarting the computer, and forwarding through to the right slide. Every time one of our two hundred students asks to go back to the previous slide, it takes five minutes for me to reboot and shuffle to some note about humor and race in early Mark Twain.
My writing classes are the reason we came to Texas in the first place. They provide an oasis from the heat and grief that shape my days, but everything I write is stillborn. Without stories of Matthew, my creative bank is in the red. Though I spend every moment with him on my mind, I can no longer write about him. Never does it occur to me that I have stories of my own worth telling.
I search the yellow pages for Pierre’s shop but find no listing. I wait a week to take further action because of poverty and inertia, though during that week I do make time to examine every photo from my childhood, make four mix tapes of songs that remind me of Matthew, and replay the day of my brother’s death a hundred times—easy.
The next week, I call Lester. “I had my ’eighty-four Vanagon towed to you, and you had it towed to Pierre’s, but I can’t find a number for Pierre.”
“Oh, sure. Just head up Ranch Road twelve like you’re going to Wimberley. Turn at the drive about five miles out of town where you see all the foreign cars. That’s him.”
“But what’s his number? What’s the name of his shop?”
Lester laughs, privy to an inside joke. “Pierre don’t have a phone. You just gotta find him. He’s the only import guy south of Austin. You can go up to Austin, but they’ll take your whole paycheck.”
“I don’t have a paycheck.”
“Then you better talk to Pierre, darlin’. You got some kind of electrical thing going on. Them are two things I don’t do: Volkswagens and electrical.”
“You must love Saabs.”
Lester laughs again, and my spirits rise over a well-delivered car joke. It makes me feel, for a moment, like an insider.
On one of Josh’s days off, I take the Honda to search for Pierre’s place. Josh is six weeks into his eight-week training, which means he will soon become a certified prison guard. The closer he comes to that day, the less he sleeps, the more we drink, and the darker the circles grow under his deep-set eyes. With no way to fix what ails him, I shy away from his unhappiness the same way people avoid my rampant and regular tears. My distance enrages him: He needs my help, my love, my guidance, but my cup is empty. I can’t take care of myself or the van or the truck. I sure as hell can’t begin to mend what’s plaguing him. I fall into an emotional hibernation, inventing a future in which I leave for parts unknown. Though I don’t understand these urges, the outcome is a form of self-inflicted manslaughter: the annihilation of my old self, the one who’d rather die than outlive her older brother. His death makes change seem so possible, like I could step out of my old life and into a new one with no more consideration than I’d give a change of clothes.
My trip into the Hill Country in search of a Frenchman and a gathering of foreign cars brings me nearly to hives. I smoke and drive, half hoping to miss the place and have AAA tow the van up to Austin the next day—all so I won’t have to deal with the social anxiety of meeting a stranger. Before I can talk myself out of this adventure, I spot a sprinkling of foreign cars on the right side of the road. First, an early-eighties Mercedes wagon surrounded by tall, unbent grass. A quarter-mile later, a trio of MGs—parts cars, from the unkempt look of them. Finally, a driveway cutting through a field scattered with cars.
I steer down the dirt two-track, through a thicket of cedars, then pause for a moment to wait out a chicken in my path.
“Keep driving! They will move!”
I hear the voice but can’t locate the source. Ahead I spy the core of this complex: a small wooden house with a porch and a barn a stone’s throw away. The barn looks weathered by years, the house made more recently out of old materials. The work of an environmentalist.
“It’s okay—keep going!”
I take my foot off the brake and let the Honda—an automatic—crawl toward the compound. A small man stands in the doorway to the barn, holding a wrench and regarding me like an unexpected package.
There is no clear place to park, only dirt with patches of grass and tumbleweeds. “This okay?”
“Oh, sure. You know. Anywhere.”
The man raises his leather hat and smooths back shaggy brown hair. He has the kind of permanent tan that comes from years spent working in the sun. The sleeves of his faded button-down roll to the elbows, complemented by brown work pants, brown boots, a brown belt, and brown eyes. He is almost camouflaged against the brown barn and landscape. This man and place, I think, are my middle name in motion.
The vehicles offer the only color—a red Beamer, a yellow Fiat, an orange Peugeot—but layers of dirt mute their vibrant shades. This is an automotive dust bowl—a private depression from which it’s hard to believe any engine might emerge revived, but it is peaceful, too. A place to retreat, to surrender. Disappear.
I know two things instantly: that this is Pierre, and that I belong in this automotive sanctuary more than I belong anywhere. In a heartbeat I fantasize about folding down the rear seat in my van, making up the bed, and setting up camp without telling the world where I have gone.
I step out of the Honda and introduce myself. Pierre is somewhere in his forties and not much taller or wider than me.
“Follow me,” he says. We walk behind the barn where the van rests. I have missed her. Water stings my eyes for an instant before evaporating in the persistent heat wave.
“This is your van?” Pierre comes close but does not touch her.
“That’s her.” The sight of those round headlights calms me.
“What a piece of shit,” he says.
The word shit sounds like sheet in his heavy accent. I am stunned but smiling. This small Frenchman is talking smack about my ride. I reach for my smokes.
“Away with that junk.”
For a second, I think he’s talking about the van. Then he pulls a pouch of tobacco from his shirt pocket and rolls two cigarettes. “Those are nothing but chemicals. Poison. You are young and beautiful. You try this.” Pierre lights both smokes at once.
He called me beautiful.
“So you took a look at the van?”
My question seems to bore Pierre. He glances sideways at me, head aimed toward a gathering of Volkswagens segregated behind the barn. My van blends into the surroundings, though the coat of dust forming on her is thin compared to the accumulation on the three Beetles, two Squarebacks, one Fox, and a sweet Rabbit truck. He shrugs.
“You know. Not yet. But I will sniff around. These things are complicated.”
His accent bends the word sniff into sneef. My van is a piece of sheet. Pierre is going to sneef around.
I wait for him to ask what went wrong so I can tell the story of the breakdown, but he doesn’t. Matthew’s death has become a lesson in the things people don’t ask.
“She’s always been reliable—” I say.
Pierre laughs while blowing smoke out of his nose. “She? It is a van. This van does not look reliable to me. It doesn’t even start.”
I stand in silence, considering the facts. My van’s future is uncertain at best, but I decide to trust Pierre. After all, I am low on funds and in no hurry.
“Did you build your house?”
“I move here from France two decades ago. I followed a woman.” He notices my wedding ring, lifts my hand. “Why are you married so young? You can’t be twenty.”
“Almost twenty-six.”
“The woman left me, but I stayed. I bought this land. The barn was here, but the old house I could not save. I leveled it and built this.”
The porch wraps around two sides of the house. Sheets of galvanized steel serve as a roof, the siding a collection of graying wood, the windows mismatched. A few chickens peck around the fringes of this ragged loveliness.
Pierre talks for two hours, about the best years for Mercedes, about the way cars were once built to last, about obese Americans and overconsumption, about living off the grid—hydroelectric energy, solar power, composting toilets. It is nice to listen to someone talk, someone who doesn’t know much of anything about me, or what I’ve lost.
“I better get going,” I say.
Pierre raises an eyebrow and nods.
“When should I come back? I mean, when do you think you can take a look?”
He draws in a breath and stares toward the cluster of German outcasts. “I’ll sneef around. You come back next week. Yes?”
“Yes.”
I drive away slowly, pausing here and there to check out the cars. I love them, but they worry me too—all of them stranded, deteriorating. Peaceful but without purpose, if such a thing is possible. As I turn onto the highway, a Dylan lyric Matthew loved comes to mind: Those not busy being born are busy dying.
Consider this: Josh refused to move to Texas so you went alone, his fresh hurt the missing ingredient needed to push his garage band on to a mediocre level of success. Your brother came to visit, consoling you with cold drinks and loud shows. He ended up keeping you company for years.
Josh quits the prison gig during his final week of training.
“The boss-man gave me a speech about how much money they invested in my training, how I owe it to them to work for at least a year.”
We stand in the kitchen drinking beers that break a sweat even with the air on full blast. We are inching toward October—closing in on two months past Matthew’s expiration—and the highs still graze the hundreds most days.
“You don’t owe them shit.” I put my hand on his hand.
He needs a break. He needs to feel useful, valuable. I need an open-ended vacation, car keys, a map, and some cash. Instead, we have three dogs, a small house, and each other.
“I get my first paycheck in a week,” I tell him. “We’ll be okay.”
“I’ll find something.”
“I know.”
What he finds next is a better shitty job at a sports news website based out of Austin. He works from four in the morning until noon, which means he’s up by three to commute. His already fragile sleep patterns continue to deteriorate. Our love could still become the kind where we can lean on each other, if only I could keep myself from leaning away.
Some nights I stay up searching the Internet for clues to the Vanagon’s silent treatment. Is it the battery? Spark plugs? Fuel injectors? The starter? Alternator? The idea that I could fix a Volkswagen is ridiculous, but it’s something to focus on other than Matthew, who is beyond repair. I Google all leads and end up as confused and frustrated as Earl in one of his daily tail-chasing fits.
Some nights I squander listening to music and studying maps. On one such night, I’m so deaf with headphones on and a map of the States spread before me that Josh’s touch makes me jump.
“Oh fuck,” I say. “Fuck. You scared the fuck out of me.”
“Sorry. But what are you doing up? With that map?”
I look down at the states, the highways, the stars of cities, embarrassed. It’s like he’s busted me, but for what we won’t say.
“Just looking,” I tell him—a lie. Part of me has left already while part of me remains, and I want desperately to join myself.
This need to flee isn’t a choice. It came threaded in my DNA as far as I can tell. For me, move is to pain as pressure is to wound.
I was three the first time I got stung by a bee and I ran into the house screaming. Mom ran after me, terrified by the sound of me hurt. I remember it—how I ran into my parents’ bedroom and jogged circles around their bed, unable to stop moving, refusing to be touched.
You can’t help her, Mom said whenever she told that story. She won’t have it. Drives me crazy, but you just have to let her be.
She was right (and how odd it must have been—how odd it still is—to mother someone like me), but I had no more control over my running reflex than I had over the color of my hair, my middle name.
Six years from now, Josh will drive me from our home in southern Kentucky to the hospital in Nashville one June morning as the sun rises over the lush hills, my contractions two minutes apart, bare feet on the dash and PJ Harvey crooning from the radio, I think I’m a mother . . . Labor will only become a scary kind of painful once the car stops moving and I stop walking and the nurses make me sit motionless in bed while they take my vitals.
But then my son will arrive with his own little face and his uncle’s brown-black eyes and finally I will be still. I will want for nowhere but there, with him, my seven-pound mammal—anchor in my arms.
We’ll move back to Texas soon after, where my daughter will be born—a second tether to my heart. She renames herself Ladybird for her entire kindergarten year. By then, we’re back in Montana, the place I promised Josh we’d return to, which is also the place we’ll decide to divorce. The place where he leaves us for good.
It’s not that I won’t want to drive through that pain, to throw my belongings in a car or a van and chase the horizon until I forget my own name. It’s that my kids push me beyond my previous understanding of Ruth 1:16. I look into their faces—three years apart, same as Matthew and me—and I finally feel that verse.
For whither thou goest, I will go . . .
We are complete, the three of us a unit I want finally to travel with, not run from, no sight in the world worth seeing unless we see it together.
But no one could tell me, in Texas at the start of the millennium when all I want to do is run away, that the only way forward is through (slowly, and on foot).
Consider this: Your brother did die but returned to earth seven years ago, undercover. Tonight, he cried himself to sleep after his mother chastised him over a minor infraction. Stoned, with a jam jar of cheap wine in hand, you’ve crawled into his room to apologize and watch him breathe.
Eighteen
Stuck
Texas: 2000
A month or so after our first meeting, I return to Pierre’s. I’ve developed a theory about the breakdown over weeks of late-night research. The van has no engine trouble or cooling system trouble, which means her heart and circulatory systems are good. Starters tend to go out over time, but this malfunction was sudden, so it’s likely not that. The battery was good, charged by a healthy alternator, but she didn’t even try to turn over. And she wasn’t out of gas. The Internet says to check the computer—an electronic black box the size of a book, the brain of the vehicle. Without the brain, all systems fail. I want to run the idea by Pierre. Perhaps I will learn a thing or two, play Daniel-san to his Mr. Miyagi.
The heat has lifted at last, and I drive the truck (just home from Frank’s) half thinking my French mechanic a figment of my imagination. But the clusters of abandoned cars appear again, marking the way. Pierre emerges from his house as I park. He looks wary, and I realize he doesn’t recognize the Ford. His shoulders relax when he sees me.
“It is you, my friend.” He grabs my hand, holding it for a moment in both of his.
Friend. We are friends.
He rolls us some cigarettes and we smoke on the steps of his porch. I finally ask about the van. We approach her together, and I pause to open the door of a navy Squareback, the white vinyl interior a memory incarnate: Matthew.
“We used to have one of these,” I tell Pierre. “When I was growing up. Same color. A red one after that.”
“Someone traded me a Bug and two Squarebacks for a Peugeot. You should think about a Peugeot.”
I smile and shake my head no as we face the van.
“Yours is not bad for a Volkswagen,” he begins, resting a hand on the rearview mirror. I take his semi-praise as a sign that I have passed some mysterious test. As if the two of us—Pierre and I—are in this together.
“The problem is electrical. The engine, like I said, not so bad.”
“It was recently rebuilt.”
Pierre shrugs. “I sneef around a little more. You come back.”
“I did some research and I think it might be the computer.” My armchair diagnosis sends Pierre reeling.
“A computer? It could be a thousand things wrong. One thousand!” He scowls in a way that lets me know I have stepped on his toes, so to speak. Pissed in his barn. Attempted to steal his thunder.
“Just a thought,” I say, feeling stupid for playing mechanic. “I read some stuff online, you know, trying to figure it out.”
“Computer is an expensive part. There are simpler things. I will know more in a week. In the meantime, you have this truck, yes?”
“I do.”
“How did you get such a big American vehicle? A gas guzzler, they call them. But built to last.”
I find his reverence for the truck touching. Ford F-150s are the best-selling trucks of all time, and these seventies models were the first ones made, back when vehicles were composed of metal instead of fiberglass and plastic. I respect the truck, but I don’t really know her. I am merely her caretaker.
“I inherited it from my brother.” I look up at the sky—a recent trick I’ve mastered for keeping tears contained. The right eye is the problem. It leaks uncontrollably. I’ve learned to comfort people by claiming allergies—a legitimate ailment anytime of year in Texas.
“I see.” Pierre examines my face.
“Got his dog, too. Needed the truck to bring the dog back from Georgia.”
“How long?”
“A month or two. Just got it fixed.”
He puts a hand on my back. “Next week then. After I sniff around some more.”
