B. takes a seat beside the Cougar woman and stares down at the form in his hand as if it were a loaded .44. He is dazed, still tingling from the vehemence of the secretary’s attack. The form is seven pages long. There are questions about employment, annual income, collateral, next of kin. Page 4 is devoted to physical inquiries: Ever had measles? leprosy? irregularity? The next delves deeper: Do you feel that people are out to get you? Why do you hate your father? The form ends up with two pages of IQ stuff: if a farmer has 200 acres and devotes 1/16 of his land to soybeans, 5/8 to corn and 1/3 to sugar beets, how much does he have left for a drive-in movie? B. glances over at the Cougar woman. Her lower lip is thrust forward, a blackened stub of pencil twists in her fingers, an appointment form, scrawled over in pencil with circled red corrections, lies in her lap. Suddenly B. is on his feet and stalking out the door, fragments of paper sifting down in his wake like confetti. Behind him, the sound of collective gasping.
Out in the corridor B. collars a man in spattered blue coveralls and asks him where the Imports Division is. The man, squat, swarthy, mustachioed, looks at him blank as a cow. “No entiendo,” he says.
“The. Imports. Division.”
“No hablo inglés—y no me gustan las preguntas de cabrones tontos.” The man shrugs his shoulder out from under B.’s palm and struts off down the hall like a ruffled rooster. But B. is encouraged: Imports must be close at hand. He hurried off in the direction from which the man came (was he Italian or only a Puerto Rican?), following the corridor around to the left, past connecting hallways clogged with mechanics and white-smocked technicians, following it right on up to a steel fire door with the words NO ADMITTANCE stamped across it in admonitory red. There is a moment of hesitation … then he twists the knob and steps in.
“Was ist das?” A workman looks up at him, screwdriver in hand, expression modulating from surprise to menace. B. finds himself in another hangar, gloomy and expansive as the first, electric tools screeching like an army of mechanical crickets. But what’s this?: he’s surrounded by late-model cars—German cars—Beetles, Foxes, Rabbits, sleek Mercedes sedans! Not only has he stumbled across the Imports Division, but luck or instinct or good looks has guided him right to German Specialties. Well, ha-cha! He’s squinting down the rows of cars, hoping to catch sight of his own, when he feels a pressure on his arm. It is the workman with the screwdriver. “Vot you vant?” he demands.
“Uh—have you got an Audi in here? Powder blue with a black vinyl top?”
The workman is in his early twenties. He is tall and obscenely corpulent. Skin pale as the moon, jowls reddening as if with a rash, white hair cropped across his ears and pinched beneath a preposterously undersized engineer’s cap. He tightens his grip on B.’s arm and calls out into the gloom—“Holger! Friedrich!”—his voice reverberating through the vault like the battle cry of some Mesozoic monster.
Two men, flaxen-haired, in work clothes and caps, step from the shadows. Each grips a crescent wrench big as the jawbone of an ass. “Was gibt es, Klaus?”
“Mein Herr vants to know haff we got und Aw-dee.”
“How do you say it?” The two newcomers are standing over him now, the one in the wire-rimmed spectacles leering into his eyes.
“Audi,” B. says. “A German-made car?”
“Aw-dee? No, never heard of such a car,” the man says. “A cowboy maybe—family name of Murphy?”
Klaus laughs, “Har-har-har,” booming at the ceiling. The other fellow, short, scar on his cheek, joins in with a psychopathic snicker. Wire-rims grins.
Uh-oh.
“Listen,” B. says, a whining edge to his voice, “I know I’m not supposed to be in here but I saw no other way of—”
“Cutting trew der bullshit,” says Wire-rims.
“Yes, and finding out what’s wrong—”
“On a grassroot level,” interjects the snickerer.
“—right, at the grassroot level, by coming directly to you. I’m getting desperate. Really. That car is my life’s breath itself. And I don’t mean to get dramatic or anything, but I just can’t survive without it.”
“Ja,” says Wire-rims, “you haff come to der right men. We haff your car, wery serious. Ja. Der bratwurst assembly broke down and we haff sent out immediately for a brötchen und mustard.” This time all three break into laughter, Klaus booming, the snickerer snickering, Wire-rims pinching his lips and emitting a high-pitched hoo-hoo-hoo.
“No, seriously,” says B.
“You vant to get serious? Okay, we get serious. On your car we do a compression check, we put new solenoids in der U joints und we push der push rods,” says Wire-rims.
“Ja. Und we see you need a new vertical stabilizer, head gasket and PCV valve,” rasps the snickerer.
“Your sump leaks.”
“Bearings knock.”
“Plugs misfire.”
B. has had enough. “Wiseguys!” he shouts. “I’ll report you to your superiors!” But far from daunting them, his outburst has the opposite effect. Viz., Klaus grabs him by the collar and breathes beer and sauerbraten in his face. “We are Chermans,” he hisses, “—we haff no superiors.”
“Und dammit punktum!” bellows the snickerer. “Enough of dis twaddle. We haff no car of yours und furdermore we suspect you of telling to us fibs in order maybe to misappropriate the vehicle of some otter person.”
“For shame,” says Wire-rims.
“Vat shall we do mit him?” the snickerer hisses.
“I’m tinking he maybe needs a little lubrication,” says Wirerims. “No sense of humor, wery dry.” He produces a grease gun from behind his back.
And then, for the first time in his life, B. is decorated—down his collar, up his sleeve, crosshatched over his lapels—in ropy, cake-frosting strings of grease, while Klaus howls like a terminally tickled child and the snickerer’s eyes flash. A moment later he finds himself lofted into the air, strange hands at his armpits and thighs, swinging to and fro before the gaping black mouth of a laundry chute—“Zum ersten! zum andern! zum dritten!”—and then he’s airborne, and things get very dark indeed.
B. is lying facedown in an avalanche of cloth: grimy rags, stiffened chamois, socks and undershorts yellowed with age and sweat and worse, handkerchiefs congealed with sputum, coveralls wet with oil. He is stung with humiliation and outrage. He’s been cozened, humbugged, duped, gulled, spurned, insulted, ignored and now finally assaulted. There’ll be lawsuits, damn them, letters to Congressmen—but for now, if he’s to salvage a scrap of self-respect, he’s got to get out of here. He sits up, peels a sock from his face, and discovers the interior of a tiny room, a room no bigger than a laundry closet. It is warm, hot even.
Two doors open onto the closet. The one to the left is wreathed in steam, pale shoots and tendrils of it curling through the keyhole, under the jamb. B. throws back the door and is enveloped in fog. He is confused. The Minotaur’s labyrinth? Ship at sea? House afire? He can see nothing, the sound of machinery straining at his ears, moisture beading along eyebrows, nostril hairs, cowlick. Then it occurs to him: the carwash! Of course. And the carwash must give onto the parking lot, which in turn gives onto the highway. He’ll simply duck through it and then hitchhike—or, if worse comes to worst, walk—until he either makes it home or perishes in the attempt.
B. steps through the door and is instantly flattened by a mammoth, water-spewing pom-pom. He tries to get to his feet, but the sleeve of his coat seems to be caught in some sort of runner or track—and now the whole apparatus is jerking fprward, gears whirring and clicking somewhere off in the mist. B., struggling to free the coat, finds himself jerking along with it. The mechanism heaves forward, dragging B. through an extended puddle of mud, suds and road salt. A jet of water flushes the right side of his face, a second pom-pom lumbers out of the haze and pins his chest to the floor, something tears the shoe from his right foot. Soap in his ears, down his neck, sudsing and sudsing: and now a giant cylinder, a mill wheel covered with sponges, descend
s and rakes the length of his body. B. shouts for help, but the machinery grinds on, squeaking and ratcheting, war of the worlds. Look out!: cold rinse. He holds his breath, glacial runoff coursing over his body, a bitter pill. Then there’s a liberal blasting with hot wax, the clouds part, and the machine turns him loose with a jolt in the rear that tumbles him out the bay door and onto the slick permafrost of the parking lot.
He staggers to his feet. There’s a savage pain in his lower back and his right shoulder has got to be dislocated. No matter: he forges on. Round the outbuildings, past the front office and on out to the highway.
It has begun to get dark. B., hair frozen to his scalp, shoeless, the greatcoat stiff as a dried fish, limps along the highway no more than a mile from the garage. All around him, as far as he can see, is wasteland: crop-stubble swallowed in drifts, the stripped branches of the deciduous trees, rusty barbed wire. Not even a farmhouse on the horizon. Nothing. He’d feel like Peary running for the Pole but for the twin beacons of Garage and Lot at his back.
Suddenly a fitful light wavers out over the road—a car coming toward him! (He’s been out here for hours, holding out his thumb, hobbling along. The first ride took him south of Tegeler’s about two miles—a farmer, turning off into nowhere. The second—he didn’t care which direction he went in, just wanted to get out of the cold—took him back north about three miles.)
B. crosses the road and holds out his thumb. He is dancing with cold, clonic, shoulder, arm, wrist and extended thumb jerking like the checkered flag at the finish of the Grand Prix. Stop, he whispers, teeth clicking like dice, stop, please God stop. Light floods his face for an instant, and then it’s gone. But wait—they’re stopping! Snot crusted to his lip, shoe in hand, B. double-times up to the waiting car, throws back the door and leaps in.
“B.! What’s happened?”
It is Rita. Thank God.
“R-r-r-r-ita?” he stammers, body racked with tremors, the seatsprings chattering under him. “The ma-ma-machine.”
“Machine? What are you talking about?”
“I-I need a r-r-r-ride. Wh-where you going?” B. manages, falling into a sneezing jag.
Rita puts the car in gear, the tires grab hold of the pavement. “Why—to work, of course.”
The others smack their lips, sigh, snore, toss on their cots. Rusty, Brown Suit, the Cougar woman. B. lies there listening to them, staring into the darkness. His own breathing comes hard (TB, pleurisy, pneumonia—bronchitis at the very least). Rita—good old Rita—has filled him full of hot coffee and schnapps, given him a brace of cold pills and put him to bed. He is thoroughly miserable of course—the car riding his mind like a bogey, health shot, job lost, pets starved—but the snugness of the blanket and dry mechanic’s uniform Rita has found for him, combined with the country-sunset glow of the schnapps, is seducing him off to sleep. It is very still. The smell of turpentine hangs in the air. He pulls the blanket up to his nose.
Suddenly the light flicks on. It is Rita, all thighs and calves in her majorette’s outfit. But what’s this? There’s a man with her, a stranger. “Is this it?” the man says.
“Well, of course it is, silly.”
“But who are these chibonies?”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? They’re customers, like yourself, waiting for their cars. The man in brown is the Gremlin, the one with the beard is the Citroen, the woman is the Cougar and the old guy on the end is the Audi.”
“And I’m the Jaguar, is that it?”
“You’re more to me than a machine, Jeff. Do you know that I like you? A lot.”
B. is mortally wounded. Enemy flak, they’ve hit him in the guts. He squeezes his eyes shut, stops his ears, but he can hear them just the same: heavy breathing, a moan soft as fur, the rush of zippers. But then the buzzer sounds and Rita gasps. “A customer!” she squeals, struggling back into her clothes and then hurrying off through the Geriatrics hangar, her footsteps like pinpricks along the spine. “Hey!” the new guy bellows. But she’s gone.
The new guy sighs, then selects a cot and beds down beside B. B. can hear him removing his things, gargling from a bottle, whispering prayers to himself—“Bless Mama, Uncle Ernie, Bear Bryant … “—then the room dashes into darkness and B. can open his eyes.
He fights back a cough. His heart is hammering. He thinks how pleasant it would be to die … but then thinks how pleasant it would be to step through the door of his apartment again, take a hot shower and crawl into bed. It is then that the vision comes to him—a waking dream—shot through with color and movement and depth. He sees Tegeler’s Big Lot, the ranks of cars, new Tegelers, lines of variegated color like beads on a string, windshields glinting in the sun, antennae jabbing at the sky, stiff and erect, like the swords of a conquering army….
In the dark, beneath the blanket, he reaches for his checkbook.
(1977)
ZAPATOS
There is, essentially, one city in our country. It is a city in which everyone wears a hat, works in an office, jogs, and eats simply but elegantly, a city above all, in which everyone covets shoes. Italian shoes, in particular. Oh, you can get by with a pair of domestically made pumps or cordovans of the supplest sheepskin, or even, in the languid days of summer, with huaraches or Chinese slippers made of silk or even nylon. There are those who claim to prefer running shoes—Puma, Nike, Saucony—winter and summer. But the truth is, what everyone wants—for the status, the cachet, the charm and refinement—are the Italian loafers and ankle boots, hand-stitched and with a grain as soft and rich as, well—is this the place to talk of the private parts of girls still in school?
My uncle—call him Dagoberto—imports shoes. From Italy. And yet, until recently, he himself could barely afford a pair. It’s the government, of course. Our country—the longest and leanest in the world—is hemmed in by the ocean on one side, the desert and mountains on the other, and the government has leached and pounded it dry till sometimes I think we live atop a stupendous, three-thousand-mile-long strip of jerky. There are duties—prohibitive duties—on everything. Or, rather, on everything we want. Cocktail napkins, Band-Aids, Tupperware, crescent wrenches, and kimchi come in practically for nothing. But the things we really crave—microwaves, Lean Cuisine, CDs, leisure suits, and above all, Italian shoes—carry a duty of two and sometimes three hundred percent. The government is unfriendly. We are born, we die, it rains, it clears, the government is unfriendly. Facts of life.
Uncle Dagoberto is no revolutionary—none of us are; let’s face it, we manage—but the shoe situation was killing him. He’d bring his shoes in, arrange them seductively in the windows of his three downtown shops, and there they’d languish, despite a markup so small he’d have to sell a hundred pairs just to take his shopgirls out to lunch. It was intolerable. And what made it worse was that the good citizens of our city, vain and covetous as they are, paraded up and down in front of his very windows in shoes identical to those he was selling—shoes for which they’d paid half price or less. And how were these shoes getting through customs and finding their way to the dark little no-name shops in the ill-lit vacancies of waterfront warehouses? Ask the Black Hand, Los Dedos Muertos, the fat and corrupt Minister of Commerce.
For months, poor Uncle Dagoberto brooded over the situation, while his wife (my mother’s sister, Carmen, a merciless woman) and his six daughters screamed for the laser facials, cellular phones, and Fila sweats he could no longer provide for them. He is a heavyset man, my uncle, and balding, and he seemed to grow heavier and balder during those months of commercial despair. But one morning, as he came down to breakfast in the gleaming, tiled expanse of the kitchen our families share in the big venerable old mansion on La Calle Verdad, there was a spring in his step and look on his face that, well—there is a little shark in the waters here, capable of smelling out one part of blood in a million parts of water, and when he does smell out that impossible single molecule of blood, I imagine he must have a look like that of Uncle Dagoberto on that sunstruck morn
ing on La Calle Verdad.
“Tomás,” he said to me, rubbing his hands over his Bran Chex, Metamusil, and decaffeinated coffee, “we’re in business.”
The kitchen was deserted at that hour. My aunts and sisters were off jogging, Dagoberto’s daughters at the beach, my mother busy with aerobics, and my father—my late, lamented father—lying quiet in his grave. I didn’t understand. I looked up at him blankly from my plate of microwave waffles.
His eyes darted round the room. There was a sheen of sweat on his massive, close-shaven jowls. He began to whistle—a tune my mother used to sing me, by Grandmaster Flash—and then he broke off and gave me a gold-capped smile. “The shoe business,” he said. “There’s fifteen hundred in it for you.”
I was at the university at the time, studying semantics, hermeneutics, and the deconstruction of deconstruction. I myself owned two sleek pairs of Italian loafers, in ecru and rust. Still, I wasn’t working, and I could have used the money. “I’m listening,” I said.
What he wanted me to do was simple—simple, but potentially dangerous. He wanted me to spend two days in the north, in El Puerto Libre—Freeport. There are two free ports in our country, separated by nearly twenty-five hundred miles of terrain that looks from the air like the spine of some antediluvian monster. The southern port is called Calidad, or Quality. Both are what I imagine the great bazaars of Northern Africa and the Middle East to have been in the time of Marco Polo or Rommel, percolating cauldrons of sin and plenty, where anything known to man could be had for the price of a haggle. But there was a catch, of course. While you could purchase anything you liked in El Puerto Libre or Calidad, to bring it back to the city you had to pay duty—the same stultifying duty merchants like Uncle Dagoberto were obliged to pay. And why then had the government set up the free ports in the first place? In order to make digital audio tape and microwaves available to themselves, of course, and to set up discreet banking enterprises for foreigners, by way of generating cash flow—and ultimately, I think, to frustrate the citizenry. To keep us in our place. To remind us that government is unfriendly.