Way Past Legal (14 page)

 

 

White trash, that's what you'd think. I admit that's what came into my mind when we pulled up in front. Gevier came out—I swear he had on the same shirt he'd been wearing the day I met him—and stood blinking in the sun. Nicky popped out of the Jeep and walked on up to him. "Hi," he said. "Remember me?"

 

 

"Of course I do," Gevier said, watching Louis and me. "Hello, Nicky. Hello, Louis, and…" He looked at me, uncertain.

 

 

"Manny."

 

 

"Yeah, Manny. Fohd sent the right part, but for the wrong side of the van. I did a little screaming and yelling, they're gonna rush the other one out. They say. Supposed to be heah Monday. If it is, you should have yo-ah van Monday night. You fellas want to come inside?"

 

 

No, I thought, hell no, but Louis walked right up to the door. "Sure," he said. I've probably been inside the homes of at least a hundred people, mostly as what you might call an uninvited guest, and there are few things that fascinate me more, but I was a little worried, going through Gevier's front door, anticipating what I was going to find.

 

 

Man, was I off.

 

 

I don't always enter through the door the residents of the place habitually use most often, but when you do that, you almost always see a set piece. This is what they'd like you to think about them. They may be accountants or dentists but they love art, or they have a million pictures of their family (see, I do love them), or they're big Yankee fans, or whatever. I broke into a loft in Chelsea once, guy actually had a kayak hanging from the ceiling just inside his front door. I had been inside only two houses in Maine so far, so my sample was limited, but in both cases you walk through that door and you're in the kitchen. I guess that's because the kitchen was central to the lives of the people who lived there. In the domiciles I was used to invading, the kitchen was peripheral, off to one side.

 

 

Gevier's kitchen didn't have your normal kitchen layout, there's a shock. No cabinets, for one thing, the place was floor to ceiling shelves. One wall was devoted to food—canisters, jars, cartons, and all that. The wall next to that one was bare, the space taken up by the woodstove and the shiny copper-jacketed water heater. I wasn't sure how the water heater worked. All I know is that it had pipes running through the woodstove, two more that ran up to the solar panels on the roof. I didn't see a gas line, and there were no wires going to it. And the pipe that carried smoke out of the woodstove didn't go straight into a chimney like the Averys'did, either, it made a circle around the top of the kitchen and then ran off down the hallway. Gevier watched me looking at it the way a scientist might watch a rat that had displayed some unexpected trait, unusual intelligence or a gift for abstract reasoning, maybe. Not up to his level, of course, but beyond what he'd expected.

 

 

The other two walls were lined with books, a lot of thick, fat ones, too, a set of encyclopedia, engineering manuals, books of all kinds, some in what I took to be Latin and Greek. Louis told Gevier his tale of woe while Nicky and I admired the library. Nicky was too busy taking it all in to ask a lot of questions, which was a relief.

 

 

There was a certain order to the place. I started to pick it up after a while, even though I could not make out the logic behind it. The thing is, just because a guy is smarter than you does not mean he isn't crazy. You had to keep your eyes open when you talked to Gevier, you had to hold on tight to the context, or you wouldn't be able to use anything he told you. Rosario, my partner from Brooklyn, was just the opposite. With him you had to close your eyes. Sometimes I would picture his words typewritten in the air in front of me, all context removed, because Rosey had a serious Brooklyn accent, and he tended to chew up his words before he let go of them, plus he had this thing in his eyes, you wouldn't be surprised to see guys sneaking up behind him with a net. He was actually a pretty smart guy, but unless I could separate what he was saying from the way he looked and sounded I would always tend to discount it because he came across like such a maniac.

 

 

A girl came out of a back room. She looked like she was right on the edge of adulthood—it's that look that baby birds get when they don't know yet if they're going to be able to fly, so they stand there on the edge and look out with an intensity that the rest of us old crows have forgotten. She bore a certain resemblance to Gevier, but not too much, lucky for her. She was tall and thin and she had the kind of muscle tone you have to work for. She wasn't what you'd call beautiful. Handsome, maybe, if your taste ran that way. She had circles under her eyes. I'd never seen them on a person so young before.

 

 

"Edwina," Gevier said, "I want you to meet Manny and his son, Nicky."

 

 

She considered him icily. "My name is Edna." She turned in my direction. "If you ever call me Edwina, I will clean your clock."

 

 

Nicky couldn't say "Edna." "Hi, Ed…umm, Ed…" He shrugged. "Hi, Eddie. Do you live here? Did you read all of these books?"

 

 

She looked at me and shook her head. "I can't win," she said. She walked over and shook Nicky's hand. "I've read most of them," she said, "except the ones on rebuilding motorcycle engines." She glanced at her father in disgust. "We've got more in the other room," she said, turning back to Nicky, "better ones than in here. Would you like to go look at them?"

 

 

He looked over at me. "Can I go?"

 

 

"Yeah, sure," I said. "Don't break anything." I couldn't get used to him asking me permission for things, and I felt strange giving it. Funny how a five-year-old kid can feel the shape of a relationship before an alleged adult can. I watched the two of them go. She had a fine, taut rear end, but I didn't know if she was past the age of consent yet. I wasn't sure I wanted to go there anyway, you might come away bleeding. Better to admire from a safe distance.

 

 

"How's the bike coming?" Louis asked.

 

 

Gevier glanced in the direction his daughter and my son had taken. "Come on," he said. "I'll show it to you." He looked nervously in Edna's direction again.

 

 

"She give you a hahd time about it?" Louis asked him.

 

 

"A hahd time? A hahd time? She's making my life a living hell." He looked at me. "When I got out of Thomaston Tech, nine yeahs and some ago, one condition of my parole was no motorcycles. I get done with probation in eight moah months. I told Edwina, eight moah months and I'm bohn again, my scoot will be ready befo-ah that and I'm going. She ought to be off in college by then, if she's as smaht as they all say she is." He puffed a little. "Couple of schools offered her a full scholarship, all's she has to do is quit bitching and say yes to one of them."

 

 

"She don't wanna go?"

 

 

He shook his head. "Sweahs she ain't going. Says she'll stay right here and stahve to death when I leave. Trouble is, she's just about stubborn enough to do it. C'mon, let me show you the bike."

 

 

It was in a workroom at the end of the building. I've never been into bikes, there's enough ways to get killed in Brooklyn without looking for another one. Besides that, most of the bikes I'd seen were fancy, shiny, chromed fashion statements, usually owned by some orthodontist or lawyer doing the midlife crisis thing. Go get a bike, a tattoo, a leather vest, and a goatee. Give me a fucking break.

 

 

Gevier surprised me again. It was an old Triumph, not a Harley. The frame was black, no chrome on it anywhere, the front end was raked out about a foot farther than normal, no front fender, no front brake that I could see. The carbs were over on a bench in pieces, and there was no exhaust.

 

 

"You got the engine in her," Louis said. "What comes next, the tank?"

 

 

"I guess. I'm trying to stretch the job out, Louis. I could have her done in a weekend, but I'm afraid to." He looked back down the hallway toward the main part of the building. He shook his head. "I got to get Edwina settled before I can go."

 

 

You never know what guys are going to get hooked on. "Would you really chuck everything and take off on that?" I asked him.

 

 

"No," he said, lowering his voice. "But don't tell Edwina that or she'll stay right heah until she's a dried-out old prune. I don't know what's wrong with her. I suppose I never did understand her." He shook his head. "Anyhow, I thought I might take a ride down to Daytona one time, though, and maybe out to Sturgis, though I hear they're both getting pussified. Just to see if any of the guys I used to run with are still alive."

 

 

"Why don't you just look for them on the Net?"

 

 

"I ain't on any goddam Net. I been trying to get less connected, not moah. Besides, it ain't like I know any of their Christian names." He grinned. "You were looking for a guy named Dog-Eating Duane, you ain't gonna find him in the phone book."

 

 

"Dog-eating Duane?"

 

 

"Hungry and broke will make you a desperate man."

 

 

"No doubt. What year is this thing?"

 

 

"Engine's a sixty-three. Frame is original, modified by me. Front end is a Hahley springah, unknown vintage. Rest of it come from heah and theyah."

 

 

"You really think you can get this thing to run?"

 

 

"Had her running already, bettah than new." He launched into a long speech about the virtues of English engineering and the shortcomings of English manufacturing. After a while he must have noticed my eyes rolling back in my head, and he stopped. "Well, Louis," he said, "how are we gonna get yoah truck up to the garage? I could ride my bicycle up theyah and bring down the tow truck…."

 

 

Louis shook his head. "Don't know that she'd survive a tow," he said. "I was hoping you could bring your buzz box down heah and patch her together with some angle iron."

 

 

"Still have to ride the bicycle up to get the truck," Gevier said.

 

 

I took Hobart's keys out of my pocket and tossed them to Louis. "Take the Subaru," I told him.

 

 

"Well, then," Gevier said. "Let's go take a look, see what we need."

 

 

* * *

"How come he calls you Edwina?"

 

 

She was watching Nicky, who was sitting on the floor by her chair, paging through a picture book. "He's trying to get me mad," she said. She looked at me without expression. "He thinks if I get mad enough I'll go off to school and leave him alone."

 

 

"Would that be a bad thing?"

 

 

She gave me a little head bob and an openmouthed look of complete disbelief, like, How could you be such an ignorant jackass? "You saw him," she said. "Can you imagine him living on his own?"

 

 

"Looked way past twenty-one to me."

 

 

She had her mouth agape. "The man believes in astrology," she said, staring at me. "He plants his garden at night, under a full moon. Next thing you know he's going to be channeling Peter Fonda. I can't just go off and leave him."

 

 

I noticed that she had almost no trace of a down east accent. "Fonda's not dead yet."

 

 

"You think that matters?"

 

 

"I think your father has every right to hide out in the woods and do his hermit routine if that's what he wants, but it's stupid for you to do it with him."

 

 

"Oh, what do you know about it? Who the hell asked you, anyway? Besides, what would you do if it was your father?"

 

 

I looked down at Nicky, who looked lost in his book. I had no idea what he knew about where he came from, I didn't know what the Bitch might have told him, and I didn't know if he was listening, anyway. "I don't know. I never met the man."

 

 

"Oh," she said, surprised. She went on in a softer tone. "Your mother, then."

 

 

You think you've been through it all, felt everything there was to feel, you think you're done with it, but I suppose you never are. All I could do was shake my head.

 

 

"You didn't know her, either? You're an orphan?"

 

 

I watched Nicky for a minute before I answered. He was looking at pictures of desert landscapes, fiery sunsets over sand and cactus. His mouth was open, and he was touching the pictures with a finger, almost caressing them. "I, ah, I don't know who they were. Someone found me on the street, on a curb in Brooklyn. That's all I know."

 

 

"That must be so hard," she said. "You're the first person I've met who had it worse than I did. Were you adopted?"

 

 

It was safe for me to look at her by then. "No. I never caught on anyplace. I don't know why." I tried to laugh. "I thought I was over it. You know what I mean? I thought I was done with wondering where I belonged, and all that shit. How did we get into this, anyway?"

 

 

"I don't know," she said. "I'm sorry." She gestured at Nicky. "He's your whole family."

 

 

I just nodded. "Did you know your mother? Tell me about her."

 

 

She smiled then, but with only half of her face. "My mom," she said.

 

 

"It's all right if you don't want to talk about it."

 

 

She shrugged. "It's okay. I guess I don't mind. No one up here ever asked me about her." It was her turn to watch Nicky for a minute, to see if he was preoccupied. "I lived with her until I was ten. Down in Connecticut. She was nice, sometimes, but she drank a lot, and she had…" She sighed. "I guess she was manic depressive. You never knew, when you got home from school, if she would be winging dishes at you or trying to hug you and stuff. Then, when I was ten years old, she drove her car into the river. I never knew if she had an accident or if she did it on purpose…. Anyway, my dad had gotten out of jail about a year previous, he was living up here, so I came up." She looked at me, and some of her fierceness came back. "That's when it started, that's when they first wanted to send me away. When I transferred to the school up here, I brought a transcript with me from the school in Connecticut. I had been a pretty rotten student. Ds and Fs, but it wasn't my fault! What nobody understood was, I never had any time to study. My mom didn't do the laundry, she didn't clean the house, she didn't cook, she was either in bed with the covers pulled over her head or she was out spending money she didn't have." She stopped for a minute. "I guess it wasn't her fault, either. She was sick. But when I got up here, I had to take a test before they'd let me in school. IQ and all that stuff. Anyway, I've always tested well. I probably should have sandbagged a little, I guess, but I got interested in it, and I did better than I intended to. The guy who had given me the test, the vice principal, he came storming out of his office with the test in one hand and my transcript in the other, he was almost purple." She widened her eyes and screwed her face into an exaggerated scowling imitation of the man. "'You don't deserve the God-given gift you've been given….'" She was shaking her head. "They've beentrying to send me away someplace ever since. Well, I'm not going."