The Highway Kind(33)

I’m pretty sure it was him, his story—our visitor, my father’s old friend or coworker or accomplice or whatever the hell he was. I think that explains something.

I wish I knew what.





THE TRIPLE BLACK ’CUDA


by George Pelecanos

OF THE TWO of us, my brother, Ted, was the good one. I know my father felt that way, though he didn’t say it in my presence, at least not while Ted was alive. He didn’t have to say it, because I knew. Being second place in my father’s eyes was something I struggled with for a long time. I’m still carrying it, and I’m damn near sixty years old.

I grew up in a mostly white, leaning-to-ethnic neighborhood. Polish and Russian Jews, Italians, Greeks, Irish Catholics, and a smattering of Protestants. No blacks or Spanish. Only a few of our fathers wore ties to work, but they all worked, and if the marriages were unhappy, as surely many of them were, most of the homes remained unbroken.

Pop was an auto mechanic at an Esso station a half mile from our house. He woke up early and read the newspaper, front to back, every morning before making sure we got off to school. Then he was on his feet all day, bent over, working under hoods in a to-the-bone cold garage. Which is why he already had arthritis and hip problems in his forties. At night he sat in his recliner, drank beer, smoked Viceroys, and read paperback novels. People assumed he wasn’t smart and paid him little attention until they needed him to work on their cars. Then he was their hero.

When I was still in high school, in the early seventies, Ted, who was three years my senior, enlisted in the Marine Corps and did a tour in Nam. The ground campaign was winding down, so the risk factor was not as high as it had been a few years earlier. It was a rite-of-passage thing for him. Also, our father had fought in the Pacific, and Ted knew that by serving he would make Pop proud. Pop was not a supporter of the war, or Nixon, but he thought even less of hippies and the protest movement, and gave Ted his blessing.

I was pissed off when Ted left for boot camp. I had never lived without him, and I felt that he had deserted me. Also, in the back of my mind, I knew that joining the Corps was another feather in his cap, something that my father would talk about with pride to his friends. Though I loved my brother, at that point in time I resented him a little bit too. I’m not proud of that, but there it is.

Ted had kept my wild streak in line when he was home, but when he headed overseas I went unchecked. I don’t mean to suggest that I was like those guys in my high school who carried knives and beat up weaklings. Most of those cretins dropped out before graduation, died on the highway, entered the penal system, or became career military and were never heard from again. That wasn’t me. But I did like to fight. Maybe because I was undersized, and I felt like I had something to prove. Whatever the reason, anger was my dominant mood. My fantasies, more often than not, involved violence rather than sex. How do I explain it? I was a boy and the wires inside my head were scrambled. I didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. On top of that I liked fast cars.

Muscle cars were the big ticket then. I coveted a maroon, 350 square-block Nova that I’d had my eye on all through high school. A graduating senior was selling it before he went into the Coast Guard, but with nothing in my pocket I couldn’t make it work. There was a Vega GT going cheap at a used lot over the city line, and the dealer was offering a loan, but a Vega GT was a girl’s idea of a muscle car, and there was the matter of the color: canary yellow, for Christ’s sake, with white interior. The sight of it would have drawn laughs from my gearhead crowd. So I settled for a ’68 pea-green-over-pea-green Dart with the legendary Slant 6 engine. My father, a diehard Mopar man, approved. An old lady on our street who was blind as Stevie Wonder sold it to me for much less than it was worth and let me pay on it monthly. It was a good, dependable vehicle, but dependable was not what I wanted. A guy’s dick should get hard when he gets under the wheel of his first car. Driving that Dart was like taking your sister to the prom.

To pour salt on my wound, my brother was soon to own one of the coolest rides on the street. How that came about shouldn’t be much of a surprise, as cars were always passing through my father’s garage. When he saw one that was cherry, and he knew, he’d sometimes make an offer to the owner, mostly for grins. That’s what happened when the ’70 Barracuda pulled in for an oil change. Ted was about to come home from his thirteen-month tour, and Pop wanted to do something special for him upon his return. My father used some of Mom’s life-insurance money and his own savings to buy the car.

With the 1970 E-body Barracuda, Plymouth had introduced a new-platform vehicle meant to compete with the Mustang and Camaro. Through ’69, the Barracuda had basically been a glorified version of the Valiant, but in ’70 its look was completely redesigned and made available in all varieties of muscle. The car my father bought for Ted was a customized 383 with a four-barrel Edelbrock carb, dual-exhaust, a Slick Shift, console-mount automatic transmission, and after-market Cragar mags. It wasn’t the 440 Six Pack, the holy grail for enthusiasts, but it was plenty fast. And though it was offered in period-popular neon-bright hues like Lime Light, Curious Yellow, and In-Violet, this one’s color scheme was strong and classic: black body, black interior, black vinyl roof. Triple black.

I was a senior in high school and working as a full-service pump jockey at my father’s gas station when Ted returned from Nam. His wasn’t a hero’s welcome, exactly, but where we lived there was none of the spitting-on-veterans thing you’ve heard about. Toward the end of the war most Americans had begun to understand that the young men who’d served in Vietnam were not at fault for the darker aspects of the conflict but, rather, were victims of it. It’s not like Ted had committed any atrocities. To my knowledge, he hadn’t even fired his M16 after basic training. But he’d served his country, and he was a Marine, and in my neighborhood that meant something.