Drive Like Hell: A Novel Page 5

  “Well, that would be a good start,” Knox said. “And then I’d take away the TV. It’s a drug, just like the marijuana, cocaine, and heroin.”

  “He does watch too much of it,” Claudia said. “First thing he does when he gets home from school is turn it on. He’d stare at a test pattern if there was nothing else on.”

  I began to wonder if Claudia was trying to make everything worse. I tried to protest, but Knox cut me off.

  “Then get that idiot box out of the house,” she said.

  “It’s already gone,” Claudia said, “and I don’t plan on replacing it.”

  I felt like a wrestler who’d been double-crossed by his tag team partner. She might as well have picked up a chair and laid it across the back of my head. I wanted to remind Claudia that she was the one who’d gotten me hooked on the “idiot box” in the first place. And she needed it as much as me. She had a rock-bottom habit of her own with those soaps. While I’d gone cold turkey, she’d been watching General Hospital on the back-room TV at the fabric store.

  Knox finally dealt the punishment: one-year probation and a five-thousand-word essay on the importance of traffic laws.

  “You might want to buy a dictionary, Mr. Fulmer.”

  She offered a final warning. There would be no more chances to prove myself both willing and able to abide by the laws of Green Lake County.

  “I can assure you of one thing,” she said. “The correctional youth facility is not an enjoyable place.”

  She closed my file and set it on her desk. No mention of traffic school, or picking up trash along the highway. I thought I’d slipped the noose.

  Then she brought down the big hammer of injustice.

  “Six months suspended license.”

  She’d spun a masterful web, crippling me with the threat of prison time and then finishing me off with the license maneuver. My knees buckled like she’d just tossed me a nasty slider. I almost doubled over. I had to reach out with my hand and brace myself on the front edge of the desk.

  Claudia and Knox considered me with narrowed eyes. Knox held out her hand and waited for me to turn over the license. I just stood there, paralyzed. I’d only received the laminated copy the day before. The photo had turned out even better than I’d imagined: long hair, eyes ablaze.

  Claudia tapped me on the shoulder. Her expression was urgent. “Well, go on,” she said. “Hand it over.”

  With shaky hands I fished the license out of my wallet, took one last admiring look at my bad-ass head of hair (I’d had to get it cut short for the court date), and laid the plastic into the clutches of Judge Knox. It was like having to pluck my own heart out of my chest, a frigid wave of sorrow rushing in to fill up the empty space.

  And Knox wasn’t even finished. She reached into her drawer and pulled out the largest pair of scissors I’d ever seen. She could have cut off my dick with those things. Instead, she applied them to my license. She halved and quartered it like a bell pepper. She sprinkled the remains in her wastebasket. The pieces fluttered down into the dark canister like a sad little bale of confetti.

  As soon as we’d stepped out into the sunlight, I loosened the knot on my tie and fell back against the rough, unforgiving walls of the courthouse. Claudia immediately slapped me upside the head. It was way out of character for her to be upset like that.

  “You fix that tie right now,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m mad at you, that’s why.”

  I tightened the noose again. It was navy blue with little red profiles of Chief Noc-A-Homa, the Atlanta Braves’ mascot, on it. Evidently, Lyndell had bought it years ago when he needed a tie for a funeral. Between the tie, the boots, and the masking-taped pants, I figured my haberdashery had done little to swell Knox’s opinion of me.

  “What the hell are you so mad about?” I asked. “You stabbed me in the back in there. I’m lucky she didn’t just go ahead and send me to Alto.”

  Claudia snorted. “You have got to be kidding me. I was trying to save your ass in there.”

  “How? By telling her I’m lazy, that all I do is watch TV and act disrespectful? Jesus, you were eating right out of her hands.”

  She eased up a little. “Well, I didn’t know what to say.”

  “Didn’t you notice me? I wasn’t saying anything at all. That’s what Nick told me to do. He said, ‘Never incriminate yourself.’”

  Claudia leaned back against the wall beside me. A breeze kicked up and beat a long wave of hair across her face. An older man in a gray jacket was climbing the stairs in front of us. He let his eyes walk up and down her body, not even trying to hide it.

  All of the sudden, I felt sorry for her. She looked tired, defeated, and confused, like she was bobbing around waterlogged in the same boat as me. She fumbled in her purse for a Virginia Slims Menthol and fired it up with her Bic lighter.

  “I’m sorry you lost your license, Luke. I truly am.” She pulled her hair off her face and blew out a mouthful of smoke. “I wish I could have thought of something to say.”

  I reached out and patted her shoulder. This was no small gesture, seeing how neither of us was much for grand displays of affection. Hugs and kisses had never been Claudia’s thing, at least not the mothering kind. But I had never doubted that she loved me.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I told her. “And I hope that judge crashes her fucking broom on the way home.”

  Claudia smiled a little. “She really was a witch, wasn’t she?”

  I imagined myself dragging a key along the judge’s car. I had her figured for a LeBaron owner. Either that, or an AMC Pacer. Something boxy and slow, that’s for sure. I hated the woman. But then, at the same time, I had this swelling desire to make her think highly of me. I wanted to run back into her office and tell her that she had gotten me all wrong. Hell, I wasn’t a recidivist. I wasn’t a criminal at all. And I sure wasn’t coming back to her office with my toothbrush and underwear.

  The sky was just as bright and glorious as it had been on the day I’d wrecked the Maverick. I tried to focus my thoughts elsewhere, but there was no ignoring the obvious.

  “Six whole months without a license,” I said.

  Claudia sighed. “It’ll go by fast. You’re getting older, anyway. Six months shouldn’t seem that long to you anymore.”

  She made it sound like both of us were over the hill. It was hard to figure, seeing how, at forty-two, she could still pass for half her age. The way that she wore her hair long and went around dressed in her old jeans, snap shirts, and worn hat, people were always mistaking her for my big sister.

  She finished the cigarette, dropped the butt and ground it out with the toe of her pump. “Besides, it’ll give you some time to think about what you did. Maybe you’ll get your shit together before you turn fifty years old, unlike someone else we know.”

  She gazed down the steps, out at the parking lot and the rows of cars. The automobiles taunted me with their smiling grills.

  “I know you were out there driving where he used to go.”

  I shrugged. “It’s just a good place to drive, that’s all.”

  “Lyndell was always fun in a car,” she said. “That’s what we used to do when we first started dating. He’d drive around like a madman, making me laugh, saying all these crazy things.”

  “Yeah, he could say some crazy stuff.”

  “Like what?” she said. “What’d he tell you?”

  She looked at me, her face bright and expectant.

  There were plenty of things to tell her. I don’t know why I made the choice that I did.

  “He said he thought you’d had enough of him.”

  She stood there, considering Lyndell’s words while the morning sun rose higher above the trees, striking her eyes with its gauzy light and finally forcing her to look downward.

  “I guess I was a little mad at the time,” she said. “I guess I wanted to teach him a lesson. Of course, I didn’t understand a lot of things back then, especiall
y about people leaving.”

  Leaving went back a long way with Claudia, back to her own mother dumping her at the cousin’s house when she was just a baby. Her cousin already had a husband and two boys, but she took Claudia in. She fed her, gave her a bed and not much else. It was the woman’s husband who spent the most time with Claudia. He was a voice teacher, and he was the one who taught her so much about music. When he died, he left her an old gut-string guitar and his entire record collection. The cousin and the sons weren’t too pleased, but they turned them over to Claudia anyway. When I was a kid, she spent hours listening to those country records and playing along on the guitar. She even took music lessons through the mail. After Nick’s second brush with the law, when it looked like he might go away for a long time, she had to hock the records and guitar. Claudia had to get rid of a car, too, and some decent furniture in order to pay for a good lawyer. She never did get any of it back. That was the first time I’d ever really seen her do any amount of drinking. Not wild drinking with other people, but the quiet kind, at home, out of a tall bottle, just to go to sleep at night.

  People were streaming out of the courthouse, headed off to get their lunches. The smell of fried steak was drifting over from the cafeteria across the street.

  Claudia and I climbed inside the GLC and headed off to get a bite of our own. She drove and smoked, with the window rolled halfway down and the radio playing low.

  “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  She glanced over as if she didn’t have any idea what I was talking about.

  “About Lyndell,” I said. “What he told me. He was lit up pretty good when he said that.”

  She waved her hand like it hadn’t been such a big deal. “Wade Briggs says that ninety percent of the people in the world aren’t with the person they want to be with. He says that’s why there’s so many sad songs.”

  Claudia thought the world of Wade Briggs, even before he’d saved me some trouble by making the pot and the pistol disappear. He’d been through a lot of shit over the years, a broken marriage and a big-time drinking problem for starters. Green Lake was where he’d come for a new start, getting remarried and organizing the AA meetings at the local Baptist church. There was no ignoring some of the similarities between his comeback story and Lyndell’s.

  I asked Claudia if singing sad songs made her feel better.

  “Feeling better isn’t really the point.”

  We sat at a traffic light, waiting among the herd, neither of us speaking. I could tell that she was distracted. Kenny Rogers was singing “Lucille” on the radio. She hated Kenny and usually pounced on the dial before he could sing the opening verse.

  The light turned green, and she threw the stick back into first. She worked her way through the gears, looking like an old pro on the straight shift.

  I decided to change the subject. I asked if she really thought she could do without the TV.

  She snorted. “Of course I could. There’s nothing good on, anyway.”

  “Is that right?” I asked. “Then I don’t guess you’d know what’s been happening at the Campus Disco.”

  Her eyes darted in my direction. “No, I wouldn’t, as a matter of fact.”

  “Or how about Luke Spencer? I hear he’s on some sort of mob hit list.”

  “Haven’t heard anything about that,” she said.

  “Oh, come on,” I said, “anybody can see you’re lying. I tried to call you at the fabric store last week. Colleen up front said you’d been in the back room half the day watching that little black-and-white of hers.”

  Claudia frowned. “That bitch. Why couldn’t she just call me to the phone?”

  “So you’re admitting it?”

  “Yes, I’m admitting it. I’m full of shit. There’s no way I’m going without a TV set. I don’t care what that stupid judge thinks. But let me tell you something…”

  She took her eyes off the traffic and stared me down.

  “There are going to be some changes,” she said. “And I mean big ones. I’m not going to spend all my time worrying about you the way I have with Nick and Lyndell. You’re gonna get your little shit together. Do you hear me?”

  She finally realized Kenny was crooning on the radio. She snapped it off in an irritated sort of way, like me and the Gambler had been in cahoots together.

  “What kind of changes?” I asked.

  We’d rolled into the heart of the commercial strip, past the Holiday Inn and the KFC. The midday traffic was streaming in both directions. Claudia put on her blinker and eased into the turning lane. She was lined up for touchdown with the T-Bone King parking lot. The big red-roofed restaurant had taken the place of Wilson’s Auto Shop a couple years back.

  “Big changes,” she said. “I’m tired of floating through life without a plan.”

  I sat there, both expectant and a little apprehensive. I wanted to hear what a genuine plan sounded like. The closest I’d come to something along those lines was my decision to live in a trailer by the ocean.

  “So, what is it?” I asked her.

  She popped the clutch and toed the gas pedal, peeling across the opposite two lanes. The horn blared on a truck coming from the other direction. The driver shook his head like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The grill of the truck dipped, and smoke billowed off its back tires. The bearded driver swerved and barely missed clipping us.

  Once we were safe in the parking lot, Claudia slowed down. She swung into a parking space, killed the pitiful motor, and smiled. “You’ll see,” she said.

  3

  The T-Bone King was a favorite of ours, a steak-house chain that served up corn-fed beef and stuffed Idahos. It also featured the landmark (and trademarked) all-you-could-eat Mega Food Bar, a buffet board so long you could have landed a Cessna on it. Four ninety-nine pretty much bought squatters’ rights to the ribs, fried chicken, vegetables, and roast beef that spilled over the edges of the barrel-size chafing dishes. Unlimited trips to the make-your-own-sundae bar were also included in the fee. Needless to say, it was a hungry man’s wet dream.

  The clock hands pointed straight up to noon, and the restaurant hummed with conversation and the clatter of stainless steel cutlery. I could barely make out the song playing on the PA system, which was fine with me, seeing how it was Andy Williams singing “Una Paloma Blanca.” That line about how “no one can take my freedom away” struck a nerve, since I’d just been in the office of the very person who was capable of it.

  Claudia told the hostess we were meeting people, which was news to me. The woman led us over to a long table by the window, where Charlie Papp sat all by his lonesome. Charlie had recently taken the reins that had been yanked from Reggie’s hands, becoming Claudia’s interim boyfriend. Edging past sixty and sporting a gut and gray hair, he looked nothing like an outlaw, which is why I had him pegged as short-term material. I thought it was kind of a shame, too, seeing how Charlie had at least two things going for him that Claudia’s other boyfriends had always lacked. First off, he was a successful businessman, founder and owner of the liquor-store chain Six Pack City. Second, and most important, he was actually a decent guy, always eager to please Claudia, sometimes even a little too eager.

  Charlie stood to greet us. He had this nervous head-bobbing energy about him, like a big-footed dog. He also drank a lot, mostly scotch with a splash. He took my hand in both of his, squeezed it, and offered me a truly grave and sincere look, as though he were expressing condolences at a funeral.

  “Are you hanging in there, buddy?”

  “Yeah, I’m all right.” I had to look down at my hand so he’d let go of it.

  Charlie tried to hug Claudia, but she raised her hands and stopped him from getting too close. She turned her head and made a face like his breath smelled bad, only allowing him a little peck on the cheek.

  “I need a drink first, Charlie. Just give me some space.”

  After we’d taken our seats, she called to the waitress and asked for a Tom Collins. Charlie
raised his own glass and jiggled the ice for a backup.

  Charlie’s outfit was a somber one, at least for him: burgundy sport coat with brass buttons and a white golf shirt underneath. Claudia had taken to calling him Sport Coat Charlie behind his back, on account of the loud Hickey Freemans that he often wore. Sometimes, when he was walking up the driveway to the house, she’d look out the window and shake her head. “Good Lord,” she’d say. “Charlie’s done killed another sofa and put it on his back.”

  Charlie slid his chair back a little and reached over to massage Claudia’s shoulders. She rolled her neck around like it actually felt good, then pushed him away. She opened up her purse and rifled through it until she found her pill bottle.

  “It’s been a long day already,” she said.

  I’d just reached for a menu when I felt a hand touch my own shoulder. I turned around to find Nick standing over me with his girlfriend, Bev, beside him. Nick was squinting and puffing a Winston, looking like a guy who had been cool from day one, like he’d probably sawed his way out of his baby crib with a cigarette dangling from his mouth and a chain swinging from his diaper.

  “I’ve never been so damn disappointed in my life,” he said. “Stealing a fucking Maverick. What’s the matter, you couldn’t find a Pinto?”

  Bev laughed right away, then Charlie and Claudia. Nick grabbed me in a playful headlock and pulled me into his creaky leather jacket. All I could manage at the time was a halfhearted smile. Bev and Nick took the chairs on either side of me. Bev reached out and rubbed at the stubble on the side of my chin. “Damn,” she said, “you’re starting to look like a man.”

  “That’s my twelve o’clock shadow,” I told her.

  I had to take pride in what little hair I had left, even though the stubble had actually been the result of having not shaven for at least four days.

  Bev giggled. “Well, don’t shave it. I like that rough look in a man.”

  Bev was a tiny thing, stick-thin in her jeans and Allman Brothers T-shirt, long ringlets of strawberry blonde hair spilling onto her shoulders. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but she had a talent for sticking out in a crowd. I think it was this way of standing that she had, cocking her hip out to the side and smirking as though she’d seen everything at least once and was just daring you to impress her. She and Nick had been going together, off and on, ever since high school. It was the longest-running man-woman relationship I’d ever been around.