He got up and walked through the door that leads into his workshop. Several mechanics were clanking away under hoods and cars. He headed to a side door that lead outside to what few cars he fixed up and sold for retail. Then he stopped, glared down at a motor canked sideways on the floor.
“Hey,” he said, “who left this lying on the floor?” He shook his head, knelt down, wrapped his massive arms around what looked like a 350 block, stood up. He looked at me, no stress in his face or voice. “Mind setting that cart over here.” I glanced around, found some clean, red shop rags, then holding the rangs I positioned the cart the way he wanted, then watched as he set the block down.
I don’t think it was hurting the motor the way it had been set on the floor. Frankie just liked showing off his muscles. Perhaps he was making a show of force so I’d quit calling him ‘Frankie’.
“Glad to help, Frankie.”
He set his hammy hands on his hips. He’s built like a tree stump, and the way he stood there, he kind of looked like a tree with broken limbs.
“You know,” he said, taking a cigar out of his pocket, lighting it, blowing the first basketball of smoke at me, “you didn’t know all that kung-fu moo-shu crap, I’d kick you ass right now.”
I coughed. He knew how much I hated smoking. “Yeah,” I said, waved the cloud of smoke away, then pivoted, brought up my right leg, bent, flicked out my foot, kicking the fresh glowing ash off the tip of the cigar, “but I do know that kung-fu moo-shu crap.”
He never flinched. He calmly took the cigar out of his mouth, looked at it, took out his lighter again, lighted it again, blew the acrid smoke at me again, smiled, turned and walked outside.
I followed. Brothers. What can I say?
He stopped at an old ‘67 Chevy Van, new white-painted job, only one window on the side panels, two in the back, all dark smoked glass. The age was not good, but it was clean and sharp and shouldn’t cause more than one extra glance, especially after I put a ’Frank’s Pestilence Eliminations Services’ magnetic sign on the doors.
“How much?”
He canted his head at me, smiled. “A box of those fine Cubans your friend Chan seems to always have around.”
Now, he knew this was goading me to the max. Not only would I have to ask a close friend a favor, but I’d also have to give ‘smokes’. Frankie knew I hated smoking more than anyone. Why he didn’t - since our mother had died of cancer when we were kids - I couldn’t understand.
I said, “I’ll try.”
“No try, grasshopper, just do,” he said, laughing. He tossed me the keys and turned and walked away. I’d left my Charger keys in the car. I knew Frankie would pull it behind the fence for me before he closed for the night. This was scary. If the engined sounded a bit off, Frankie would take it upon himself to tune it up…charging me for it, of course.
I climbed into the van, cranked it up. Purred like a kitten. If Frankie ain’t a font of charm, he is a damn fine mechanic.
IDLE TIME
It is a fact that I have an I.Q. of 149. One point shy of Mensa acceptability. Yet, I have no High School Diploma - only a General Equivalency Diploma that I’d gotten in order to join the Army. Scored one-hundred percent on the G.E.D.
It is a fact that I wonder about this whenever I have idle time, waiting behind my desk with feet propped up and hopefully nice-enough weather to have the window open at my back. I didn’t really have nothing to do. I had a job that was highly motivated by a winning Pick 5 Lottery ticket just waiting to burn a hole in my pocket.
It was late afternoon, and the window behind me was yawning and a nice breeze tickled my neck. Lucy had left an hour ago. She’d spent two hours trying to sucker me in, and it was so fine a performance that now I sat in conflict with having to sneak into the woods behind her house and tape and record her life for the next few days.
I wondered what made Lucy Lucy?
I knew the why of me. Even with an I.Q. such as mine I was nothing more than a lowly Private Eye. Mechanics get more respect. Hell, presidents get more respect, even though these days I was as likely to be spying on their disgusting behavior as a Milkman’s miscreant sleeping with another man’s wife.
Even with that kind of I.Q., here I sat. Threadbare in lifestyle, nearly as much so in spirit.
At times like this I played ‘what if?’ Like, what if Mom hadn’t died? What if I had gone to that callback for the Texas Boys’ Choir? What if I hadn’t married at 17 and quit school? What if I hadn’t joined the Army? Become a Cop? Become a Dick?
Those are all the things on which I blamed my discrepant life. And of course I could only accept that they were - but for one - choices I had made.
But why was Lucy Morris Lucy Morris? What were the points in her life that resulted in a constant search for the destruction of other’s lives? Perhaps her paper trail didn’t portray her reality accurately.
I reached down and slid open the bottom drawer of my desk. I took out the unopened fifth of Tequila. I looked at it a hard long time.
Then put it back.
It was not that I was an alcoholic. It was just against my beliefs to use any type of drugs to soothe the pain of the spirit.
I thought about Lucy too much, and not enough about my client. I had a bad feeling wash over me. Utter darkness. Utter despair. Utter lack of the presence of God. Utter evil.
It only lasted a split second. Yet I broke into a hot sweat, and my body was wracked with cold chills.
My mind wandered as it did at these times of leisure. And I wondered if that split second was what a man named Yehoshua Ben David had felt in a certain Garden some nineteen hundred-or-so years ago. I thought of having that feeling for a solid hour.
I knew I could not make it to the bathroom, but a wastebasket was nearby - a gray metal can that matched my Government Auction desk - and luckily I managed to up-chuck the entire contents of my stomach into it, and not onto the floor.
Later, weakly, I made it to the sink to wash my face and mouth. I bent over, left the water running cold, and splashed my face again and again.
Yeah, you could say I had a very bad feeling about this whole mess.
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY….
“Yeeee Hawwwww,” I screamed, laughing, as the van bucked me around after going a wee bit too fast through the dip where the Belknap Street bridge kisses flat ground again. Somebody ought to fix that thing. Then again, maybe the dip was designed to slow down cars zipping into downtown Fort Worth off the 121 Freeway.
Then a couple of rises and twists, and I came into downtown proper, the grand granite courthouse there, a hundred yards or less from the bluff that gazes north across the Trinity River, a hundred yards straight down. I hooked the first left past the courthouse, cut through the valley of buildings a couple miles ‘til I got to the Iron Works building, my office on the second floor.
I had to park in the motel garage next door. The manager, a nice blond lady who unflinchingly flirted with me at any opportunity. Perhaps she thought she had the right stuff to wipe the perpetual frown from my face.
I went upstairs to my office. The second floor was quiet. The new neighbor across the hall ran a dating service. Maybe if my relationship - if you could call it that (“I just need some room”) - with Beth didn’t work out, I could work out a deal with the dating service. Do background checks for her clients, in exchange for a run-through in her computer.
I opened the door to my extra room next to the office. An old Army bunk, dresser, closet, and an Army trunk with my special gear at the foot of the bunk greeted me with about as much enthusiasm one could expect from inanimate objects. I’d started taking pictures of my kids, hanging them on the ugly bare walls