The Narcissist's Daughter Read online

  “Okay, I guess. Why you asking me?”

  “I was just thinking about her and Sandy’s car.”

  “She was your mother. Why you call her Sandy?”

  “I don’t know. Why shouldn’t Chloe drive it?”

  He looked out the window. There was no good reason but that the thought of it ate at him and I didn’t know if it was because of his desire to keep the car safe and locked away, or to keep Chloe that way.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “I’d help you get it ready,” I said. “It’ll take some work.”

  “Some,” he said. “It’s pretty clean. I drained the gas out back when, so it ain’t gunked or nothin. Needs new rubber.”

  I nodded, surprised that he was even talking about it, then (stupidly) I pushed. “She really wants that job.”

  “She wants this, she wants that. What’s this all about?”

  “Why shouldn’t she work? She’s old enough.”

  “She’s got school to worry about.”

  “We’re talking about a couple nights a week.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “She needs to do something. Learn how to work. It’s time, don’t you think?”

  “You don’t even know, Syd,” he said. “You just—fuck.”

  He stared out the window, chewing on his teeth. A little later, he said, “So how’s the job?”

  “Fine.”

  “You like nights?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

  As we came onto the High Level, the great suspension bridge over the river, he said, “There a guy there who’s missing a hand?”

  It crawled down my back when he said it and burrowed in and turned around a couple times in my stomach. “What?”

  “A doctor. I remember an article in the paper when he first came on at St. V’s, one of those profile things. While ago. You were a kid. He lost it in Korea.”

  “Ted Kessler?”

  “I don’t know. He missing a hand?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You call him by his first name?”

  “Not to his face.”

  “But you know him?”

  “Pretty well.”

  “No shit.”

  “Why?”

  “He was 1st Marines.”

  This had some significance to Brigman. He’d been himself a marine in the later 50s, wedged in between the wars, so he saw no real action, though he went to the Philippines, I knew, and Cuba. He was booted with a dishonorable discharge after only a year but once in the club I guess you were in forever.

  “They were the first ones in over there. Talk about the Shit. And he had this rep, I guess, of being a real bad ass. He made major. He had this small platoon of guys who were as crazy as him. He could get them to do anything. And supposedly he carried this big knife and liked to whack gooks bare-handed. Quiet, you know.”

  “This was in the newspaper?”

  “Not that part. A guy at the plant knew him. After that article came out we were talking, he said he was this stone killer. Now he does autopsies and shit, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “See, it’s like he got this fascination with death. Couldn’t leave it alone even after he got back.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Fuck it is.”

  “Somebody at Hydramatic knew Ted Kessler?”

  “This guy was in, too.”

  “Korea?”

  “The Corps. I don’t know if he was over there.”

  “So how’d he know him?”

  “He knew of him. He heard shit.”

  “A guy knew someone who knew someone who knew someone.”

  “It was in the newspaper.”

  “But not about him killing people with his bare hands.”

  “Shit,” he said, and looked out the window again.

  I felt as frightened as he was angry, though not because of some stupid story he’d heard. It was crazy, what I’d done with Joyce. I had good grades and I knew I’d smoke the MCATs when the time came, but even so I wasn’t the choicest med school applicant anymore. Twenty-three was getting old, I’d be utterly dependent on loans and grants and whatever else they could provide, and I had no connections, no doctors in the family circle making calls and buying drinks on my behalf. Ted could wash all of that away. Or he could shit can me.

  Brigman tipped what was left of the beer into his mouth, set the can on the floor and said, “It’s down here. Turn.”

  It was a tight little frame house, one corner of which was braced up by cinder blocks stacked on a sheet of plywood—the man was always home, I gathered, collecting government checks while his wife worked. Out back was a garden of weeds and a saddle-backed garage with half-raised doors that hadn’t moved in years and three dogs that I could see and as many kids, and there slowly dissolving in the dirty snow this faded lemon yellow ’Cuda. It was a ’71 340, not the bulkiest of the muscle cars but it had nice lines with its hiked-up rear end and the tight linear body that narrowed as it swept down to the grill. This one was beat, though; it made me tired to think of what it would take to bring it back.

  Brigman walked around and pushed against it, opened it up and peered in. I could smell the must from where I stood.

  “You keep lookin,” the man said, “you should just buy it.”

  “Problem is,” Brigman said, “I got nowhere to work. Too damn old for curb work.”

  The man looked around and took a deep breath and brought something up from inside his chest and gathered it for a moment in his mouth and then hocked it out onto the ground. “Work on it here, you want,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “N’a garage.” He pronounced it gay-rage.

  It was stuffed with thirty years of shit, shit that flowed out of every opening it could find. It was an older cousin to our living room.

  “How’s that?” Brigman said.

  “Clean it there, a space. ’Course it’d be some rent.”

  “Like what?”

  The man shrugged. “Twenty-five a month.”

  “That include electric?”

  The man pondered it a moment, then nodded.

  “It’s a good deal,” I said, and Brigman glared at me. I knew better than to comment in front of the seller, but I never thought he was seriously negotiating. This was verboten stuff, the fix he had denied himself for six years.

  “You take it?” the man said. I watched his fat ruddy whiskery face as he looked around at the grim landscape, the sagging power lines and broken roads and weedy lots and falling down houses and the socked-in sky sitting on top of it all like some sadistic god wrestler pinning the world yet again. He tried to show nothing, as if the whole matter bored him, as if Christmas wasn’t looming, and almost succeeded. I could see, too, in Brigman’s face how he ached to put his hands on that machine, to make something work again.

  “Gotta see about the money,” Brigman said. “Make sure if I can swing it.” But he hadn’t found a job (I doubted he’d looked) and besides he had no way of getting himself over here except the buses, which would take an hour each way with the downtown transfer. I still wasn’t sure why we’d come except that look he got when he touched it made him seem in some way as he’d once been.

  The man nodded. “Don’t come back here and look no more,” he said, “less if you’re gonna buy it.”

  We were headed back the way we’d come when Brigman said, “You know how he lost his hand?”

  “Ted? Yeah, he told me.”

  “Really?”

  “I said I knew him pretty well.”

  “So how?”

  “He cut it pretty bad and it turned gangrenous before he could get in and have it taken care of. They had to amputate it.”

  “That’s not what I heard.”

  “Oh, well then, he must’ve been bullshitting me.”

  “I heard he was at Chosin Reservoir when the Chinese made their big counter. He was in a building that collapsed. His hand was caught under a bu
nch of debris and he was gonna be dead if he didn’t get out so he cut it off. Himself. Took that knife he carried and hacked his own fucking hand off. And now you work for the guy. Weird, huh?”

  “I don’t know how you can believe that garbage.”

  “I believe it,” he said. “He probably was bullshitting you. Those guys don’t talk about shit, you know, unless you’re one, too. Less you seen it. Ask him sometime if that’s not how it really happened.”

  “I’m not going to ask him that.”

  “Take me down there. He’d tell me.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Fucking gook-killing machine. Wasted dozens of them little bastards.”

  When we came off the bridge and I turned into the lot of a Big Boy, Brigman said, “What’re you doing?”

  “Can you find the monthly?”

  He was quiet a moment, then said, “Yeah. Unemployment goes another six weeks, then I’ll find something.”

  “And you’ll be okay with this again?”

  “I don’t want to drive it. Just work on it.”

  “I get to drive it sometimes.”

  “Shit, boy, you can drive it all you want long’s you don’t race. You sure? You gotta have the dough for school, don’t you?”

  “I have enough for next semester. Almost. But there’s one more thing.”

  He looked at me and shook his head in resignation.

  I said, “Let’s just get it going, see how it is. That’s all. It’s doing no good sitting there getting old.”

  “I don’t want her getting in trouble with it, is all, racing all over hell, doing…stupid shit in it.”

  “It won’t hurt to see if it runs.”

  He nodded. I looped around and headed back over the river again to the east. The man came down fifty on his ask and agreed to take twenty for the rent. We stayed nearly an hour after I wrote a check for the car and the first month, me watching while Brigman pored over the engine, and the man swearing and kicking at one of the garage doors, trying to get the sumbitch piece-a-shit crap heap bastard open.

  SIX

  Donny drove Chloe to the mall one afternoon that week before Christmas ostensibly to do some final shopping but we knew she was also going to apply at the pretzel shop. This happened without Brigman’s blessing but also without his expressly forbidding it—Chloe had continued to bug him about it until he finally stopped reacting at all and she could take his lack of response, pro or con, as tacit permission.

  In the meantime Brigman, true to his word and with an eye toward a Christmas deadline, began fussing with my mother’s Skylark. In a day he had it coughing, and a day or two after that running pretty smoothly. Then he had me back it out and test drive it with him in the passenger seat. We stopped first to get new tires (which were my Christmas present to Chloe), then found a big empty parking lot where he could take it around. He immediately ordered us back home, tore the wheels off to do an entire brake job including new drums, and also dropped in a new clutch. Chloe flitted about like a mother bird—her face would pop up in a window, then she’d be on the stoop, then in the garage, then back in the house again. Donny wandered over at one point and poked his head under the hood. When, upon seeing the modest six-cylinder 225, he mentioned that he knew where we could pick up a small-block V-8 four-barrel 383 with a high performance shaft, Brigman turned to him and said something either profane or threatening enough that Donny turned red and left a minute later.

  But seeing them even for a moment with their heads together under a hood made me feel dizzy with nostalgia and dread. It had once been their fraternity. Brigman must have been thirty already when Motorhead formed around him, but it was as if only then did he find the place in the world that fit him, and ironically it was never a place at all—Motorhead had to move to stay alive, so you never knew where it was going to be until it happened. They came, Brigman and the others, to breathe and boast and let themselves out of themselves to burn through the nights of the city. They lived there in a way they could not live in the other places of their lives because they knew that anything was possible—fires or gunshots or knifings, revelations, acquisitions, wrecks, of course, arrests, the discovery of solutions to intractable problems, love, or other disasters they could none of them envision—and these possibilities sharpened the air and made it come alive in a way I imagined nothing else ever had for any of them. The noise itself felt dangerous, the simultaneous revving of two or three dozen magnum engines, big and bored-out and retrofitted and chromed-up and super-charged, each one generating over 350 horses or it didn’t count, and the searing of rubber that went along with it, and shouting and laughter, the screams of girls getting chased by boys who knew them some and wanted to know them better, and the pounding of rock and roll from amped up Tri-Ax’s, and often enough that eerie rising and dying of police sirens coming in. The lights, too, had edges, headlights and dome lights and street lights and lighters and flashers and store lights if it was in a parking lot and fires burning in garbage cans if it wasn’t.

  I was thirteen the summer of my first Motorhead and remember it as little more than a swirl of images and sounds and especially scents—the air laced with the smell of raw leaded gasoline and of the exhaust fumes of leaded gasoline, of raw rubber and of burned rubber, of the heated fusion of oil and metal. It was the smell of an industrial land, the same category of scents that strikes you in the factories where transmissions and glass and springs and batteries and the thousands of minute pieces that hold vehicles together and allow them to run are synthesized and stamped and welded and cooled and stacked and boxed, or in a garage or a trucking warehouse or a machine shop where the parts are tooled to minute specifications so they will all fit as they’re designed to do. Even today I can step into a certain sort of building and be immediately transported back to the high heat and unlimited possibilities of those lost nights, though I remember little of what actually went on there.

  Brigman taped a red bow to the Skylark’s hood and left it in the driveway for Chloe to find Christmas morning. We all went along for her first drive, Brigman riding shotgun and Donny and me in the backseat (the two of us farting around pretending to be scared for our lives until Brigman gave us a look). It was not an easy drive, that car, with its pre-synchro-mesh three-on-the-tree shifter, and I thought at first that maybe Brigman should have waited until Chloe had a little practice before putting in the new clutch. You could practically smell it smoking. But he was patient, remarkably so—I saw them out nearly every day even in the slush crawling around the block until, soon enough, she was cruising smoothly and in the new year he let her take it out for the first time alone (and stood in the front door watching and smoking the entire half hour she was gone).

  One night in early January Phyllis had off, so Ray was acting supervisor and Kathy Rudner (with whom, remember, I’d been working a couple mornings a week on Organic—I’d pulled that A with her help the first semester and felt primed for the second) was pulling OT. She didn’t like to work with Ray but needed the extra money for Christmas bills. She held down hematology and the blood bank and when it was slow dozed on the donor couch in the back, but it wasn’t slow that night, it was a wild ride: a girl awake and blinking at us with her scalp torn cleanly and completely off by a windshield, a sickler in crisis, two infarcts, an OD, and a rule-out Reyes. And that was all prelude to the flight that brought in a nighttime janitor who’d gotten caught by the sleeve in a shredder. Word was he’d managed to reach his knife and cut through whatever flesh was left of his upper arm, the bone being broken through already, and that if he hadn’t done that it would have taken him all the way in. It brought to mind Brigman’s story about Ted, and later that would gnaw at me but then it didn’t have time—I was tied up there for an hour while Kathy cranked out units of blood and Ray ran all the other tests, jogging back and forth between Chemistry and Hematology.

  After that it slowed and I dozed until a code came down around four from the ICU. It was the janitor. The senior resi
dent running it spoke his orders in a low calm voice—in the ICU at night everyone stayed pretty cool. I stood hands in pockets away from the foot of the bed, watching them compress the man’s chest and pump the bag while someone squirted conductant on the paddles and rubbed them together. Even then I was conscious of that place around me, its order and cleanliness. When the resident placed the paddles on the man’s chest and popped him, everyone paused a moment to watch the new green blip on the monitor.

  “Hey, you.” Joyce stood beside me. “How’ve you been?” Her skin was so dark that the lab coat she wore over her scrubs seemed to glow against it. It made me feel sick how good she looked.

  “All right.”

  She looked up and put her hand on the back of my arm. “I was just worried. I wanted us to have a chance to talk…after. You know. But it’s been so busy.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I’m a big boy.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I noticed that.” She squeezed me.

  “Bloods,” someone said, and they broke into motion again and I came into the circle of light and felt for a radial pulse.

  “It’s awfully thready,” a nurse said. “Can you?”

  It was there, a distant flowing, more a vibration than a pumping, but as long as I felt it at all, I knew. “It’ll come,” I said. “Just slow.”

  “Get it,” said the resident.

  I uncapped the needle of a gas syringe and aimed it into a gauze and shot out the excess heparin, then felt again. I pushed the needle in and felt it cut through gristle and flesh, adjusting it as it traveled toward that distant flow, that tiny tide. The blood that came was dark, the color of ripe black cherries, and hardly strong enough to push the plunger back, but it came.

  “Damn,” someone said.

  I sheathed and unscrewed the needle and capped the syringe and pushed it down into the glass of ice someone handed me, and left. In the hallway Joyce leaned into the ice machine.

  She said, “How’s your morning look?”

  “Pretty open.”

  “Buy you a drink?”

  “Okay.”

  I watched her walk back toward the unit. She’d taken off the lab coat and I could see all the contours of her round and substantial ass moving beneath the thin cotton of the scrubs.