“What am I gonna do, man?” Jimmy’s voice was anguished. “I gotta have wheels.”
“Start savin’ your nickels,” Heintz suggested, and laughed.
“Dirty useless son of a bitch!” Jimmy yelled at his car in helpless fury. He kicked savagely at one of the tires, winced, and then began to pound on one of the front fenders with a wrench. “Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!” he raged.
Marvin went up and joined Heintz on the porch, and the two of them stood watching Jimmy pound on his car with the wrench. Finally he gave up and threw the wrench down. There were tears on his face when he turned toward the two men on the porch. “What am I gonna do, man?” he demanded. “I gotta have wheels. Maybe Leon can fix it:”
Big Heintz shook his head and belched. “Forget it, man. Nobody can fix that pig. The fucker’s gutted.”
Jimmy’s shoulders slumped in defeat. “I gotta have wheels. I just gotta.”
The idea had not really occurred to Raphael before. His injury had seemed too final, too total, and he had resigned himself to using public transportation, but now he began to consider the possibility. Driving, after all, was not really impossible. You only needed one leg to drive. The memory of the crash was still there, of course, but it was not something insurmountable. The more he thought about it, the more possible it all seemed.
He went back into his apartment and methodically began to draw up a list. The amount he would spend on buses and taxi fare in the course of a year surprised him, and when he added to that the wages he would lose on those days when the decision to go to work or not was weighted by his distaste for the bus ride, the number began to approach a figure he might reasonably expect to pay for reliable transportation.
He decided to think about it some more, but that evening he bought a newspaper and checked the used-car section of the want ads.
More than anything, what he wanted was a sense of independence. He had not particularly missed it before because he had not even considered the possibility of driving again, but now it became a matter of urgent necessity. “I gotta have wheels,” he said to himself in a wry imitation of Jimmy’s anguished voice. “I just gotta.”
The car was adequate-not fancy, certainly-but it had been well maintained, and the price was right. He was startled to discover how nervous he was when he test-drove it. By the time he had gone three blocks, he was sweating, and his hands were shaking. He had not thought that he would be so afraid. He set his teeth together and forced himself to continue driving.
After he had paid for it and brought it home, he went out onto his roof quite often to look down at it. He did not drive it to work or to his therapy sessions yet, but concentrated on growing accustomed to it and to driving in traffic again. The fear was still there, but he drove a little farther every day and inserted himself carefully into heavier and heavier traffic. His accident had made a cautious driver of him, but he managed to get around, and he finally worked up enough nerve to drive it to work.
Because Denise lived on the same bus route as he, they had usually ridden together when they got off work. On that first night, however, realizing that he was showing off his new toy, he gave her a lift home.
“Why don’t you come up?” she suggested hesitantly when he pulled up in front of her apartment house. “I’ll make a pot of coffee.” She blushed and turned her face away.
“Could I take a raincheck on it? I have to go grocery shopping tonight, and it takes me hours.”
“Oh,” she said quickly, “sure. Maybe next time.”
“You can count on it.”
She got out of the car. “See you in the morning, then. Thanks for the ride.” She closed the door and hurried across the sidewalk to her apartment building.
The shopping had been a lie, of course, but Raphael had not wanted to become involved in anything just yet. The implication of the invitation might have been wholly imaginary, but it was the kind of thing that he had to avoid at all costs. Still, he was just a bit ashamed of himself as he drove home.
Flood was waiting for him when he got there. “Where the hell have you been?” he demanded, leaning against the rear fender of his little red sports car with his arms crossed, “and what the hell are you doing in Spokane, for God’s sake?” His tone was matter-of-fact, as if they had seen each other only the week before.
Raphael crutched toward him, feeling a sudden surge of elation. He had not realized until that moment how desperately lonely he had been. “Damon! What are you doing here?”
Flood shrugged, his eyes strangely hard and his smile ambiguous. “The world is wide, my Angel,” he said, “but there are only a few places in it where my face is welcome.” The rich baritone voice, so well remembered, with all its power to sway him, to persuade, to manipulate him, had lost none of its force. Raphael immediately felt its pull upon him.
One of Heck’s Angels roared by, his motorcycle sputtering and coughing. “Come on upstairs.” Raphael was suddenly aware of the curious eyes of the people on the street, and he did not want to share Flood with any of them. He led the way to the stairs at the side of the house, and they went up.
“A penthouse, no less,” Flood noted when they reached the roof.
“Hardly that.” Raphael laughed. “More like a pigeon loft.” They went on inside. “Sit down,” Raphael told him. “I’ll make some coffee.” He needed something to do to cover his confusion, to get him past that first stiff awkwardness that was always there when he met someone again after a long time. He was quite suddenly painfully aware of his one-leggedness and particularly anxious that Flood should not think of him as a cripple, so he made a special show of his competence, even though he was aware at the time that it was childish to do so.
Flood had not changed much. His skin was a bit sallower, and there were circles under his eyes that had not been there before. His grin was still sardonic, and his eyes still had that same hard glitter, but he seemed less sure of himself, almost ill at ease, as if he had somehow lost control of his life or something important had gotten away from him.
“Why aren’t you in school?” Raphael asked, filling his coffeepot at the sink.
“I dropped out at midterm,” Flood replied, sitting on the couch. “The Reed experience got to be a bit overpowering. Scholarship was never one of my strong points.”
“How did your father take that?”
“He was moderately unenthusiastic-until I assured him that I wasn’t coming home to dear old Grosse Pointe. We struck a bargain. The old pirate will keep those checks coming as long as I stay west of the Mississippi. It’s a pretty good working arrangement.”
Raphael put the pot on and then crutched over to the armchair. “How did you find me?”
Flood shrugged. “It wasn’t that hard. I stopped by the hospital after Christmas vacation, but you’d already left. I talked with some of the nurses and that bald guy in the wheelchair.”
“Quillian?”
Flood nodded. “There’s a man with all the charm of a nesting rattlesnake.”
“He’s rough,” Raphael agreed, suddenly remembering all the sweating hours in therapy under the lash of Quillian’s contemptuous voice, “but he’s damn good at his job. You might not want to walk when he starts on you, but you’re damn well walking when he gets done.”
“If only to get away from him. Anyway, I finally wound up in the administration office. I seduced the name of your uncle in Port Angeles out of one of the file clerks-blew in her ear, that sort of thing. You really don’t want all the sordid details, do you?”
“Spare me.”
“Sure. Anyhow, I filed Port Angeles away for future reference, and then after I hung it up at Reed, I drifted on up to Seattle. There was a girl who got fed up with the Reed experience about the same time I did. We got along-for a while, anyway. I was thinking about San Francisco, but she convinced me that we’d have a ball in Boeing City. We went on up and set up housekeeping for a month or so. It didn’t work out, so I pulled the plug on her.”
“You’re still all heart, Damon.”
“I improved her life. I taught her that there are more important things in the world than rock concerts and political theory. Now she’s got a deep and tragic affair in her past. It’ll make her more interesting for the next guy. God knows she bored the hell out of me.” Flood had been speaking in a dry, almost monotonous tone with few of the flashes of that flowery extravagance Raphael remembered from the days when they had roomed together. The feeling was still there that something had gone out of him somehow, or that he had suffered some obscure and hidden injury that still gnawed at him. “I knocked around Seattle for a while,” he went on, “and then I decided to take a quick run up to Port Angeles to see how you were doing.”