Everybody Loves Somebody (18 page)

Bob is deep in thought, preparing the story he will tell his wife about the deer, and at first he feels the uneven motion
of the car as an inevitable thing. Instead of moving smoothly, the MG is bouncing like it had bounced over the potholes back
in the parking lot. But Bob doesn’t have to be told that he isn’t driving across the parking lot. He’s traveling along a smooth
road, a road without potholes, yet still the seat is shaking on its tired old springs, and Bob has to grip the steering wheel
to keep himself from bouncing out of the car.

He’s reluctant to stop along the side of the road here, in the middle of nowhere, so he keeps bouncing, trying to convince
himself that he’s not ruining the rim of the tire that must already be flat. The fact is, the spare mounted in the trunk is
flat, too. It’s been flat for months. He’s been meaning to have it repaired or replaced, but he hasn’t had the time.

The MG limps along in second gear. A black hardtop Mustang tailgates for a while, and as it speeds up and passes, the driver
signals at Bob with a thrust of his fist. Bob ignores him and continues urging his car forward, the flat tire slapping the
road with a steady rattling.

Miraculously, he reaches a gas station before the MG’s steel disc wheel falls off entirely. The garage doors are open, and
when Bob turns off his car he hears the whir of a drill. After examining the flat front tire, he enters the garage with a
loud greeting. The whirring ceases, and from behind the front end of a Buick a man emerges, his white face striped with wide
smears of grease.

“Hiya,” he says, extending a hand almost too oily for Bob to grip.

“Can you fix a flat for me?” Bob asks, motioning to his car.

“You got a flat?”

“I have a tire flatter than...” He pauses, momentarily at a loss for words. “Flatter than a crepe,” he says emphatically.

The man echoes in bafflement, “A crap?”

“A French pancake, I mean.”

“You French?”

“I’m talking about a flat tire.”

“You got a flat tire?”

Bob, who isn’t the bristling type, feels like bristling. Instead, he admits that the spare is flat as well, and he finishes
with a sigh to express humility, which seems to please the mechanic, who wipes his hands on the dirty rag he’s holding and
says, “Let me take a look.”

“You, T Rex!” a man yells from the office next to the garage.

“You, Cyril!” T Rex yells back.

“Willa’s on the phone.”

“Tell Willa I’m busy.”

“You tell her.”

T Rex gives his round belly a pat. “My Willa’s on the phone,” he explains. Bob signals him to answer the call and follows
T Rex into the office.

“Cyril, we got a foreigner here,” T Rex says, picking up the phone and repeating, “Willa, I got a foreigner here. What? French.
What?” He covers the mouthpiece of the phone for a moment and asks Bob, “Willa wants to know, are you real French or Canadian
French. She just wants to know.”

“I’m not French.”

“You’re not French?”

“I’m from Larchmont.”

“Willa, he’s from Larchmont. What? England, I guess. No, I made a mistake. What? Now? Right now? Can’t it wait? What? Why?”

While T Rex is talking to Willa, the second man, a younger man with an ample blond beard, leans across his desk to offer his
hand to Bob. “Name’s Cyril,” he says.

“Bob.”

“Hiya, Bob.”

“I’ve got a flat.”

“We’ll help you out.”

“Yeah?”

“Sure thing.”

“I got to go bring Willa some eggs,” T Rex says, handing the phone back to Cyril. “She’s baking a cake.”

“My wife’s baking a cake, too,” Bob announces abruptly.

“That so?” Cyril says with interest that is obviously feigned.

“I’ll be back,” T Rex promises.

“Sure thing, go on,” Cyril urges. When T Rex has gone, Cyril explains, “He had to go buy eggs for Willa.”

“Oh,” Bob says, as though he only now understands.

“You got time to wait?”

“Well”

“’Cause you’re gonna be waiting.”

“Fine.”

“Have a seat.”

“Thanks.”

They sit in the office in silence for a few minutes while Cyril pages through a magazine. Bob eyes the phone, wondering if
he should call Trudy and tell her he’ll be late.

“Ever eat muskrat?” Cyril suddenly asks.

“No.”

“It’s not bad.”

“Really?”

Cyril reaches into the deep drawer on the lower side of his desk and pulls out a bottle and two plastic cups. He fills one
with two shots’ worth and gives it to Bob, then fills a cup for himself. “Bottoms up,” he offers. Bob takes his first gulp
out of courtesy and his second because he’s pleasantly surprised at the quality of the triple malt.

“Thank you, sir,” he says, feeling less in a hurry.

Cyril waves away the gratitude. “Ever eat moths?” he asks, refilling the cups.

“Moths?”

“Moths. Mayflies. Grubs. The fact is, you can’t starve if there are bugs around. Though I have to admit, I’m not partial to
ants. Bottoms up.”

“Cheers.”

“Did I hear you say you’re French?”

“I’m from Larchmont.”

“Mmm.” Cyril flips the pages of the magazine, then looks up at Bob with renewed interest. “I hear in France they pay more
for frog meat than for prime beef. That true?”

Bob pushes his empty cup toward Cyril, who generously refills it.

“I don’t really know.”

While Cyril browses through his magazine, Bob sips the whiskey and gazes contentedly at the tear streaks of dirt on the window.

“You ever find yourself lost and hungry in the woods, you can try salamanders,” Cyril says.

“Good idea,” Bob replies.

By the time T Rex returns from bringing eggs to his Willa, Bob is feeling warm inside and happier than ever. While Cyril pages
backward and forward through his magazine, Bob wanders out to watch T Rex work on his car.

“You musta run over a bottle full of nails,” T Rex says without looking up.

“I guess.”

“Don’t know why you never patched the spare. I can patch the spare for you. Too bad you didn’t stop sooner. You did a job
on it, mister. But don’t you worry. I can patch the spare.”

“Well, thanks, thanks a lot.”

“Won’t take me no time at all.”

Bob watches in a pleasant daze as T Rex unbolts the spare. After a few minutes he wanders back into the office. Cyril is nowhere
in sight, so Bob sits at his desk, fills a cup with another swallow of whiskey, and picks up the phone, meaning to dial home.
But when he sees Cyril plugging the gas nozzle into a car, he decides he’d better ask for permission to use the phone.

“Hey, Cyril,” he calls.

“Hey, Bob, you doing okay?”

“I’m doing fine.”

Bob decides to put off calling Trudy and wanders outside again to watch T Rex, who, with unexpected alacrity, has already
started to patch the spare. Bob considers the remarkable skills divvied up among the population:
Everyone’s an expert in something,
as his own dad used to say.

“You mechanics,” Bob says. “You’re amazing. I’m very grateful.”

T Rex declares matter-of-factly, “Wait till you get the bill.” He slaps the tire and lifts it off the mount. Bob follows him
back to his MG, making feeble gestures to help as T Rex loosens the bolts of the damaged tire. “That’s all right,” T Rex says,
waving him away. As he watches T Rex work, Bob feels deeply, but without embarrassment, the irrelevance of his own skills.

“Willa is baking a cake,” T Rex announces, grunting each word as he jerks loose a bolt.

“I know.”

“You know?”

“You told me.”

“That’s all right. I bet you’re wondering why my Willa is baking a cake. I’ll tell you why. She’s baking a cake to celebrate
her ex’s birthday.”

“That so?”

“The thing is, her ex is dead. Been dead for twelve years.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not.”

Bob watches in thoughtful silence as T Rex lifts off the flat. Soon the patched spare is in place, the jack has been disassembled,
and Bob is in the office, writing Cyril a check.

“I mean it, you guys are great. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”

“Take care, fella.” Cyril’s expression suggests that he’s eager for Bob to leave. The ringing phone helps to hurry things
along. Cyril picks up the receiver before the end of the first ring. “Hey, T Rex, Willa’s on the phone. Yeah, he’s coming.
What? Sure, if you want me there. When? That’s impossible!” He waves impatiently to Bob, and Bob backs out of the office,
bumping into T Rex on the way.

“Hey, thanks, thanks again.”

“That’s all right.”

Though the MG goes through its usual opening sputters, Bob isn’t worried. If the car stalls and refuses to start again, then
there’s a good man named T Rex who will take the time to fix it. Bob’s sense of relief swells as he thinks about the luck
of finding this garage, where whatever might go wrong can be fixed.

Soon enough the laboring motor settles into a steady purr, and Bob is speeding along the road again, enjoying the power of
the modern B series engine as though it were his personal accomplishment. He’s proud to be the owner of a snappy red car that
handles curves so efficiently. Yet as the minutes pass he becomes aware of his growing discomfort. His throat stings with
dryness, and the warmth from Cyril’s whiskey has already cooled inside him. The miles ahead are beginning to seem as endless
as time seems short, with the dusk darkening rapidly into night. He wants to be home. He misses his family and feels a foggy
awareness of regret for not calling Trudy to warn her that he’ll be late.

He’s wearing glasses, but still his eyes are tearing from the wind, and the double line in the middle of the road blurs into
a single cord of yellow. Everything is beginning to blur, including the recent past. How much whiskey did he drink back at
the gas station? Intoxication is a hypothesis that he can disprove with careful calculations. But how can he be careful when
he’s seeing one line where there are supposed to be two?

It helps, he discovers, to picture sobriety as a bright white seashell visible through a few feet of murky water while he’s
swimming—it’s right there in the sand, but for some reason he can’t find it when he dives. Isn’t this always the case? Then
he will try again, or at least he will enjoy imagining the sensation of swimming underwater. That’s all right, as T Rex would
say. He’s heading home. Hit the road, Jack. He sings the few lyrics he remembers from a song, then fiddles with the knob of
the radio. Unable to find music, he settles on what he thinks at first is a sportscaster’s appraisal of a game, the voice
almost shouting, as though competing with the wind.

“...Result is bound to be apocalyptic terror attended by plagues, conflagrations, seven-headed beasts, and the flaming horsemen
of hell. It’s the same hysterical old Pollyannas and their liver-lillied calamity howlers who called Eisenhower a baboon and
Wilson a Casanova and will tell the average American to hold even our Holy Savior in contempt. But you all out there making
up the majority of our great country know how to think. You, my fellow average Americans, know how to use your brains. You
are the equals of Jefferson and Hamilton and can be certain of the virtue of...”

The radio is replaced by static as the road dips between two steep slopes, the crackling sound reminding Bob of the leaves
blowing across the parking lot back at the tavern. How many beers did he drink at the tavern? He can’t remember. For the moment
he can’t remember much of anything.

“...The wide popular supp...” The voice fades in and out of static. “...Including the United Na...as idiotic an assump...I
believe...that justifies America...government being an instru...what you can to pro...the apparition of...arouses no” As the
MG reaches the summit of the hill, the voice emerges from the static with a new clarity: “The gutters awash in blood.”

An interlude of harp music follows the final pronouncement. Perplexed by the broadcast, Bob turns off the radio. It’s a strange
world, he muses, where you can drive along a blurry country road and listen to a stranger spout opinions that make no sense.
He is surprised to find himself imagining a face to go with the voice—a pasty, wide face of a man who has made all the wrong
choices and has nothing better to do than whine into a microphone about anything and everything.

In an attempt to sharpen his focus, Bob lets his thoughts travel ahead of him along the winding country route. He considers
how darkness is like seawater—murky and vast, penetrated rather than illuminated by artificial lights. Fear belongs to the
night; violence belongs to the day. And then, at the end of the meeting, Bob will hand you the pen. Please sign on the dotted
line. A quarter of a million dollars later, he can sit back and relax. But he can’t relax, not until he has figured out how
to get from here to home without any more delay.

Is he imagining it, or is the patched spare out of alignment, causing the right front wing to veer to the side? Or else the
road is tilting. He’s in a bowl made of mountains, the dark ridges spinning counterclockwise beneath the sky. Everything seems
to be moving in the wrong direction—except Bob. He’s driving from Oneonta to Larchmont. He’d be home by now, but he had to
stop to have a flat repaired. Trudy will understand. All he has to do is tell Trudy the truth.

Usually, the truth is what he says is the truth. Not this time. He’s not sure what to believe. That he will burn for all eternity
in hell? Nonsense. Oh, Willa, bake me a cake. A song beginning with the dream of a song. Everything makes sense, except in
songs.

He tries to remember the joke his client told him earlier—something about the Russians and their missiles. If, then. Which
will end first, the world or human consciousness? So what. If, in fact, Bob drank too much over the course of the day, with
every passing mile the alcohol’s effect is diffusing. Soon Bob will be home, and home is where he will be sober.

It strikes him as a fortunate coincidence that Route 28 merges eventually onto the familiar highway. He doesn’t even have
to wonder if he’s lost. Another car politely yields as he enters the right lane, and the whole world seems to click back into
place. Bob is beginning to feel like Bob again. After humming at least one verse of all the songs that come to mind, he reaches
his exit.