All of them drank from football-player cans for a moment.
“Horn work?” Bob finally asked, breaking the silence apologetically.
“Sure.” Rocky hit the ring with his elbow. It emitted a feeble squeak. “Battery’s a little low, though.”
They drank in silence.
“That goddam rat was as big as a cocker spaniel!” Leo exclaimed.
“Kid’s carrying quite a load,” Rocky explained.
Bob thought about it. “Yuh,” he said.
This struck Rocky’s funnybone and he cackled through a mouthful of beer. A little trickled out of his nose, and this made Bob laugh. It did Rocky good to hear him, because Bob had looked like one sad sack when they had rolled in.
They drank in silence awhile more.
“Diana Rucklehouse,” Bob said meditatively.
Rocky sniggered.
Bob chuckled and held his hands out in front of his chest.
Rocky laughed and held his own out even further.
Bob guffawed. “You member that picture of Ursula Andress that Tinker Johnson pasted on ole lady Freemantle’s bulletin board?”
Rocky howled. “And he drawed on those two big old jaheobies — ”
” — and she just about had a heart-attack -”
“You two can laugh,” Leo said morosely, and farted.
Bob blinked at him. “Huh?”
“Laugh,” Leo said. “I said you two can laugh. Neither of you has got a hole in your back.”
“Don’t lissen to him,” Rocky said (a trifle uneasily). “Kid’s got a skinful.”
“You got a hole in your back?” Bob asked Leo.
“The laundry,” Leo said, smiling. “We got these big washers, see? Only we call ’em wheels. They’re laundry wheels. That’s why we call ’em wheels. I load ’em, I pull ’em, I load’em again. Put the shit in dirty, take the shit out clean. That’s what I do, and I do it with class.” He looked at Bob with insane confidence. “Got a hole in my back from doing it, though.”
“Yeah?” Bob was looking at Leo with fascination. Rocky shifted uneasily.
“There’s a hole in the roof,” Leo said. “Right over the third wheel. They’re round, see, so we call ’em wheels.
When it rains, the water comes down. Drop drop drop. Each drop hits me — whap! — in the back. Now I got a hole there. Like this.” He made a shallow curve with one hand. “Wanna see?”
“He don’t want to see any such deformity!” Rocky shouted. “We’re talkin about old times here and there ain’t no effing hole in your back anyway!’
“I wanna see it,” Bob said.
“They’re round so we call it the laundry,” Leo said.
Rocky smiled and clapped Leo on the shoulder. “No more of this talk or you could be walking home, my good little buddy. Now why don’t you hand me up my namesake if there’s one left?”
Leo peered down into the carton of beer, and after a while he handed up a can with Rocky Blier on it.
“Atta way to go!” Rocky said, cheerful again.
The entire case was gone an hour later, and Rocky sent Leo stumbling up the road to Pauline’s Superette for more. Leo’s eyes were ferret-red by this time, and his shirt had come untucked. He was trying with myopic concentration to get his Camels out of his rolled-up shirt sleeve. Bob was in the bathroom, urinating and singing the school song.
“Doan wanna walk up there,” Leo muttered.
“Yeah, but you’re too fucking drunk to drive.”
Leo walked in a drunken semicircle, still trying to coax his cigarettes out of his shirtsleeve. ” ‘Z dark. And cold.”
“You wanna get a sticker on that car or not?” Rocky hissed at him. He had begun to see weird things at the edges of his vision. The most persistent was a huge bug wrapped in spider-silk in the far corner.
Leo looked at him with his scarlet eyes. “Ain’t my car,” he said with bogus cunning.
“And you’ll never ride in it again, neither, if you don’t go and get that beer,” Rocky said. He glanced fearfully at the dead bug in the corner. “You just try me and see if I’m kidding.”
“Okay,” Leo whined. “Okay, you don’t have to get pissy about it.”
He walked off the road twice on his way up to the corner and once on the way back. When he finally achieved the warmth and light of the garage again, both of them were singing the school song. Bob had managed, by hook or by crook, to get the Chrysler up on the lift. He was wandering around underneath it, peering at the rusty exhaust system.
“There’s some holes in your stray’ pipe,” he said.
“Ain no stray pipes under there,” Rocky said. They both found this spit-sprayingly funny.
“Beer’s here!” Leo announced, put the case down, sat on a wheel rim, and fell immediately into a half-doze.
He had swallowed three himself on the way back to lighten the load.
Rocky handed Bob a beer and held one himself.
“Race? Just like ole times?”
“Sure,” Bob said. He smiled tightly. In his mind’s eye he could see himself in the cockpit of a low-to-the-ground, streamlined Formula One racer, one hand resting cockily on the wheel as he waited for the drop of the flag, the other touching his lucky piece — the hood ornament from a ’59 Mercury. He had forgotten Rocky’s straight pipe and his blowsy wife with her transistorized hair curlers.
They opened their beers and chugged them. It was a dead heat; both dropped their cans to the cracked concrete and raised their middle fingers at the same time. Their belches echoed off the walls like rifle shots.
“Just like ole times,” Bob said, sounding forlorn. “Nothing’s just like ole times, Rocky.”
“I know it,” Rocky agreed. He struggled for a deep, luminous thought and found it. “We’re gettin older by the day, Stiffy.”
Bob sighed and belched again. Leo farted in the corner and began to hum “Get Off My Cloud.”
“Try again?” Rocky asked, handing Bob another beer.
“Mi’ as well,” Bob said; “mi’ jus’ as well, Rocky m’boy.”
The case Leo had brought back was gone by midnight, and the new inspection was affixed on the left side of Rocky’s windshield at a slightly crazy angle. Rocky had made out the pertinent information himself before slapping the sticker on, working carefully to copy over the numbers from the tattered and greasy registration he had finally found in the glove compartment. He had to work carefully, because he was seeing triple. Bob sat cross-legged on the floor like a yoga master, a half-empty can of I.C. in front of him. He was staring fixedly at nothing.
“Well, you sure saved my life, Bob,” Rocky said. He kicked Leo in the ribs to wake him up. Leo grunted and whoofed. His lids flickered briefly, closed, then flew open wide when Rocky footed him again.
“We home yet, Rocky? We — ”
“You just shake her easy, Bobby,” Rocky cried cheerfully. He hooked his fingers into Leo’s armpit and yanked. Leo came to his feet, screaming. Rocky half-carried him around the Chrysler and shoved him into the passenger seat. “We’ll stop back and do her again sometime.”
“Those were the days,” Bob said. He had grown wet-eyed. “Since then everything just gets worse and worse, you know it?”
“I know it,” Rocky said. “Everything has been refitted and beshitted. But you just keep your thumb on it, and don’t do anything I wouldn’t d — ”
“My wife ain’t laid me in a year and a half,” Bob said, but the words were blanketed by the coughing misfire of Rocky’s engine. Bob got to his feet and watched the Chrysler back out of the bay, taking a little wood from the left side of the door.
Leo hung out the window, smiling like an idiot saint. “Come by the laundry sometime, skinner. I’ll show you the hole in my back. I’ll show you my wheels! I’ll show y — ” Rocky’s arm suddenly shot out like a vaudeville hook and pulled him into the dimness.
“Bye, fella!” Rocky yelled.
The Chrysler did a drunken slalom around the three gas-pump islands and bucketed off into the night. Bob watched until the taillights were only flickerflies and then walked carefully back inside the garage. On his cluttered
workbench was a chrome ornament from some old car. He began to play with it, and soon he was crying cheap tears for the old days. Later, some time after three in the morning, he strangled his wife and then burned down the house to make it look like an accident.
“Jesus,” Rocky said to Leo as Bob’s garage shrank to a point of white light behind them. “How about that?
Ole Stiffy.” Rocky had reached that stage of drunkenness where every part of himself seemed gone except for a tiny, glowing coal of sobriety somewhere deep in the middle of his mind.
Leo did not reply. In the pale green light thrown by the dashboard instruments, he looked like the dormouse at Alice’s tea party.