Skaters: A Novel

By Xlibris US

The Strathmore Hotel ballroom once hosted presidents, but is now home to the feral boys of Warren Falls who skate the hills of the old New England mill town at night following Boy, a charismatic young leader without a past, animated by the shadows of the brutality of the towns colonial history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499077407

Book preview

COPYRIGHT © 2014 BY WESLEY A. BLIXT.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER:                2014920482

        ISBN:                  HARDCOVER                        978-1-4990-7741-4

                                    SOFTCOVER                          978-1-4990-7742-1

                                          EBOOK                                    978-1-4990-7740-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 11/18/2014

Xlibris

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Contents

Chapter 1     Fat Air

Chapter 2     Room Surface

Chapter 3     Wise Guy

Chapter 4     Just Enough

Chapter 5     Black Dog

Chapter 6     Columbus Day

Chapter 7     Eastern Standard Time

Chapter 8     Veterans’ Day

Chapter 9     Thanksgiving

Chapter 10   Indian Summer

Chapter 11   Crystal Night

Chapter 12   Christmas Day

Chapter 13   New Year’s Eve

Chapter 14   Dear Dad

Chapter 15   Mail Call

For Sarah and Nick, with all my love.

In memory of Steven Chase and

Lawrence Reynolds Henry.

and with thanks and praises

to Shelby Hearon.

The underlying foundation of life in New England was one of profound, unutterable, and therefore unuttered, melancholy, which regarded human existence itself as a ghastly risk, and, in the case of the vast majority of human beings, an inconceivable misfortune.

—Harriet Beecher Stowe

Oldtown Folks, 1868

A good lycee is one that teaches patricide.

—Paris street slogan

May 1968

My darling son … My dear boy …

What a morning it is, my love, the sky just turning a rose pearl, the heat already seeping into the walls. I’ve just covered you, pulled a sheet over you, and tucked it around your neck like a dinner napkin while you slept, scowling as you always seem to into your pillow, the sheets ripe with the smell of little boy.

CHAPTER 1

FAT AIR

The road gets funny. The later it gets, the funnier it gets, and you can see it start to happen even now, when the sun hits the top of hills and the low spots start to cool.

The pavement changes in the dark, gets almost liquid. It holds the heat and shifts under your wheels as you drop down the fall line. You don’t even see the ruts and debris. The rubbers, the spent butanes, the sprung cassettes. After a while, you don’t feel them either. You hit the fall line down Elm Street toward the center of town. Take it in a tuck, screaming the last couple hundred yards, since you can’t stop anyway. The cars don’t count after sundown. You can see them when you need to, see the lights. They can’t see you, but you can see them. You just plummet until you hit the bump at the bottom of Elm. It’s a natural ramp, and you can’t even see it coming. You don’t even know you’ve hit it until you’re in the air. Fat air.

That’s the thing about street skating. Not like the skate park, where you pick the splinters and pebbles off the ramps, sweep the butts off the pavement, make it all just so. On the street, you take what you get, and you don’t gripe. You just go all out, hell bent on whatever comes. You take every little crack and disaster, every kick-in-the-ass, every dead squirrel, and every piece of somebody else’s rotten exhaust system. Take’m like you planned it that way, and fuck’m. Or bless’m. Either way. That’s how Dad taught me.

Truth is, we were boys together, Dad and me. God, he was a beautiful kid back then, and we were just a couple boys. You never know how these things are going to turn out.

This is him. Dad. Gotta be, I figure, since I don’t know whether I want to punch him or kiss him. Either way. It doesn’t matter. You could spend your whole life just deciding which way to go. You could shoot your whole wad just trying not to fuck up, being a good citizen. And what would you have? Either way.

Either way, I can’t get hold of him most of the time. Too much static. It’s not until he steps out of the shadows and I see him standing right there that I know this is the Guy: double-breasted in a striped silk bow and bone buttons, Egyptian 80s count two-ply white cotton—good cloth—just this side of purple in the glare of the fluorescents. It’s like the Guy has puffed himself out for the occasion. He’s getting hot around the gills where that stiff collar chafes at his neck. You can see it. You can still see the boy.

I knew I should have taken it to the dealer, Dad says. Next time, I don’t care how far it is, I’m taking it to the dealer … What do you mean you couldn’t find anything? I heard you people could do this kind of work.

I’m still wearing my black cotton gloves, and I run a soft rag over the quarter panel of the Saab while Dad moves in on Jerry Moore. Jerry, our assistant manager, just looks at the floor.

Jerry lets it all hang there for longer than most people could stand. Like with skating, when you hit the lip of a good half-pipe and everything just freezes vertically, two, three.

I don’t know, says Jerry. Don’t know what to tell ya. Ya know, if it ain’t broke.

Daddy’s beside himself. Well, something’s broke … broken. Anybody could hear it. And the book said …

Yup, if’t was me, I’d just drive it. You know, if it starts to do it again, you can always bring it back … or you can bring it back next week when we got more time … but I ain’t saying we can tell you any more next week than we can right now. All depends.

On what?

Just depends. What happens and stuff.

Look. Do I have to break down some night out on the interstate before you people find out what’s wrong?

Hope not.

It’s sweet to watch a pro like Jerry at work, especially when he’s working an asshole like Dad. Talking about the book, that’s what put Daddy on the mat. These guys always spring extra for the Honest-to-God-Professional-Factory-Approved-Technical-Manual. I could have told him that’s not even the real book. I could have told him to leave the book out of it. There is no real book, not that these guys will ever find, but they keep looking anyway. Course, it was you people that finished him off. You can always tell a guy is done for when he starts talking about you people. One, two, three. Fat air. Like I said, it’s sweet.

Now I know this guy is not all that much older than I am. Twenty-five, maybe thirty tops. It’s hard to tell with Dads. They’re ageless. This would stand to reason, though, since I’ve been thinking that me and Dad were boys together. He was one beautiful kid. Dad was, let me tell you, a sweet guy. Who knows what happens to people?

This guy doesn’t look anything like me. He’s got that starchy soft look, clogged-up veins under buttery skin. Me being dark and wiry, that would be Ma’s doing. Or maybe it was Mommy. Either way. Who cares? But this is Dad’s face for sure, a wonderful face. Daddy’s, a face you punch silly, a face that would give and compress and absorb your best shot.

Either way, like I said. It doesn’t matter.

Course, I could be wrong. I usually am. And it’s hard to keep them straight, these folks who used to come only in the summer. All of a sudden, they decide once and for all old Warren Falls really isn’t that far from Boston after all, and they move here for keeps if not for good. Year round. We got hills. Ocean’s not too far. Boston’s not much further. These are the folks who are always leaving their cars with some totally spooky problem and some kind of totally bogus maintenance nobody here even heard of.

Most folks would be happy if you could save them a couple bucks. But not Dad. Guys like Dad are more than happy to pay you for some attention, to tell them everything is going to be okay. You charge them just enough that they feel they musta got something out of the deal.

Or at least that’s what the boss, Mickey Morton, says. These are Mickey’s people, and he should know.

It won’t hurt you to hold their hands, to tell them you’ve never seen anything quite like it, Mickey always says. You tell them it’s a good thing they got some help. You tell them it’s going to be fine, that it’s a beautiful automobile, and that you’re glad they know how to take care of it.

More often than not, Mickey himself handles this. But if he’s busy or if cocktail hour has started, he’ll let Jerry dish out his downstreet treatment, which, if you ask me, is a whole lot sweeter. Jerry looks at the customer like he’s dealing with a totally new language. Then he looks at the floor and shrugs and grunts like a nine-year-old getting yelled at for shoplifting. Then all of a sudden, he breaks into a smile for no reason at all. He wanders away, and that’s what finally drives a guy like Dad over the edge—especially a guy with a Saab 9000 sitting there with its door chimes bonging away like an elevator.

Me, I’m like the altar boy, I guess. When it’s time for the clients—which is what Mickey says we have to call them—to pick up their automobiles—not cars, says Mickey—I pull the old black cotton gloves out of my leather vest and slip them on as sweet as you please, and I start jockeying the cars in from the back lot. I never leave smudges.

Boy! Mickey will call. Boyden LaChance—but most people don’t even know that, and those that do know better than to say it. All I’ve ever been called is Boy. Here, Boy. Hurry up, Boy. Stand up, Boy. Shut up, Boy. Get fucked, Boy. Kiss my ass, Boy.

Sure thing, I always say. It doesn’t matter to what. Either way, sure thing.

Boy, Mickey will say, Be a good lad and bring that Saab up, will you? Sure you will. The man’s on his way over now.

Some of the other guys here have been known to get a little loose behind the wheel of a nice import. Banging the gears a couple times in the hundred yards between the back lot and pumps, cranking the sound system, and generally treating a $60,000 automobile the way they do their own beaters. I know. I might have done that myself one time. Just once.

Just once because it’s like beating a dog. You feel so bad afterward you want to cry. You do it once, and you swear you’ll never do it again. Wham, the rear end jumps, and if the suspension is really tight, it doesn’t slide more than an inch or two before it comes back down again, and you feel the tires take a big bad bite out of that pavement. You feel it in the steering wheel, the stick, the doors. You feel it in the seat, in your own ass. A really good car does what you tell it to do even when you’re killing it. Like a dog, it makes you want to cry. But that was last time I did it because that was when I realized for the first time that I understood the car, that I understood how things are put together. How things work. I can’t fix them for shit. Can’t explain them to anyone else. But I understand them. I understand almost everything about a car just by hearing the sound of a well-adjusted latch smacking itself into place, kissing the catch, just from feeling the crunch of well-conditioned leather upholstery. That tells me everything—everything I need to know to let the clutch pedal off just so no slip, no jump; everything I need to know to take the two turns through the back lot with just the right acceleration, no lean, no squeal; everything I need to know to slide the car weightlessly into its spot near the office. Then I leave the seat and the mirror just the way I found them, and most important, I never leave a smudge. That’s what the gloves are for. That was my own idea.

Somebody throws the switch on the perimeter light, and the lines of the Saab come alive. Trailers and tracers in the halogen glare, all mixed up with the red glow of the evening, ’scuse me while I kiss the sky. ’Lectric trips. For free. It’s the 9000. The Turbo.

Jerry is gone, drifted away I guess, off toward a big old suburban with a cracked axle, leaving me standing there holding the door of the Saab for Dad. By now, Dad knows he’s done for. The only thing he can do is get out quick. He knows everybody’s going to stand around and talk about what a dickhead he is after he goes. The only thing he can do is go quick.

I wouldn’t worry about it, I tell him as he throws himself into the front seat. I think it’ll do just fine by you. It’s a beautiful automobile.

You bet it is, Dad says. He slams the door and opens the window. I’ll tell you what. You save your pennies, work real hard, and maybe—just maybe—you’ll get yourself one someday. He starts the engine, holding the key too long so that the starter grinds against the flywheel, and then he shoves fiver into my hand. Like maybe in a thousand years.

His face disappears behind the tinted glass, and the Saab lurches off, old Dad fighting the clutch every inch of the way. I look at the bill, a new one. I stuff it into my vest. A thousand years.

Fella’s a dickhead, says Jerry from under the Suburban. Don’t let it get to you, Boy. I spit in his crankcase. I should have pissed in it. Come on. I’ll buy you a drink.

I have to remind Jerry this guy is my old man.

Say what?

That guy, I tell him again, he’s my Dad. I’d recognize him anywhere. We were kids together, me and Dad. I haven’t seen him in ages, but that’s Dad, all right.

Jerry grunts and crawls out from under the car. Yeah, well, you’re crazy, and your old man is a dickhead. And I need a drink.

Yup, I sing to myself, and I punch the button to close the overhead bay door. That’s for true. My old man is a real-l-l dickhead. I like the sound of that and figure it’s another song coming on.

Just then, Mickey Morton comes rumbling out of his office, dabbing at his nose with a greasy rag. Ten minutes to cocktail hour. Let’s go then! he shouts. One more day I find myself alive. Boy, be a good lad and shut down those pumps first, will ya? Sure you will.

Like I said. Sure thing.

*     *     *

Tish and Minnie hold court down by the town war memorial. Tish and Minnie both have pretty long hair that they wear in stringy veils across their faces. Minnie’s being blonder and coarser and Tish’s being redder. Until recently, they both wore barrettes in their pretty long hair and were known as Patty and Marion. But that was before they started holding court down at the town war memorial, holding forth on such issues as cigarettes and blow jobs and other things, mostly things they don’t know about. Sometimes Tish starts making it up as she goes, which pisses Minnie off because, as Minnie points out again and again, Tish can’t lie for shit. When Tish lies, her nose runs, and when Tish starts snuffling, Minnie starts laughing, and pretty soon, the boy starts drifting away, and then it’s just Tish and Minnie again, howling like a couple old cats in the twilight by the town’s war memorial.

But when Tish and Minnie have their signals straight, and their timing is just right, they can hold a crowd right through dinner. The boys roll up on their mountain bikes and skateboards as the dark begins to gather under the chestnut trees around the granite spire, and they totter away hours later under the streetlight, late for supper, all shaken up, and lost in a completely new way.

It’s that slack time when the college girls have already left town, and the summer crowd has packed it in, and the kids who are left behind cut back their work hours. They go back to the high school or the community college and start trying to figure out who’s left.

I’m pretty careful about watching them as they gather over on the common, careful not to be too obvious. I would never sell to them, not my acid, no matter what. Never. If they get it, and some of them will, they won’t get it from me. But it’s hard not to watch them sometimes. I watched the group take shape over the summer, slowly glomming around these two girls who took over this one bench every afternoon, no matter how hot it was, the redhead finally getting rid of her big eyeglasses one day in mid-July, and the two of them trading the same pale blue halter top between them every other day.

Like nobody’s going to notice.

Now that school’s started, the group usually changes as the afternoon wears on. There’s an inner circle to the group, and another circle on the outside made up of the pretenders. Now with the sun falling behind the old brick buildings over on the Benson Block, they huddle closer together. Sometimes one of them leaves and comes back a few minutes later with a jacket or sweater.

As I punch the garage door, I could swear the redhead looks over at me.

*     *     *

When it comes to cocktail hour at Morton’s Service, there’s red-label days and there’s black-label days. Mickey himself takes both colors very seriously. Today is a black label, and Mickey is pouring another round of Johnny Walker’s best for himself and Herb Pine, the sheriff’s deputy, and for Bill Sigourney who has six children and a huge old Country Squire with a really bad front end.

Mickey is just finishing a lecture on ball joints, Bill Sigourney’s ball joints in particular, and the first thing I notice is that Sigourney looks like he’s about to cry.

I just don’t want to have to send the wrecker out there some night to find you and your lovely family covered with those horrid white sheets, Mickey is saying, raising his glass. To your health and safety … and to your ball joints.

Everybody laughs, ’cept for Sigourney and me. I get it, but it’s not that funny.

Hear, hear, says Pine.

Mickey’s garage is a regular stop on Pine’s daily rounds, which Mickey says is all part of his plan. Pine is a retired air force colonel, and Mickey says he’s looking to build some kind of a political power base in Warren County. For what, I don’t know.

Gentlemen! You are unfashionably late, Mickey calls as we make our way around all the crap. But since we aren’t exactly fashionable around here, we’ll serve you anyway. And that will give my good friends, Mssrs. Pine and Sigourney here, an excuse for a dividend. Gentlemen?

Jerry slaps his greasy cap down on the counter. Make it a double, Unc. No, make it a triple. I’m gonna wind up killing that fucker, whassis-name.

Who? Pine asks. Jerry tosses his drink back.

You know, dickhead, says Jerry. This time he picks up my drink and throws it back the same way.

Weston, I tell them, Mr. Weston with the 9000.

Ahhh, says Pine.

Uh-oh, says Mickey.

The guy gave me endless shit, Jerry says, Like he knows what the fuck he’s talking about. And that breath of his. Would you tell me why a guy who drives a $45,000 car walks around smelling like he’s been chewing on shit all afternoon. And then he throws a fiver at Boy here like he’s some kind of, I don’t know, a dog or something.

I throw the five out on the bench, and right away, it springs back open. New money. For the kitty. What’s wrong with a Dad helping his boy out a little anyway?

Boys! Mickey waves his finger at the ceiling while he slips two fresh ice cubes into his glass. Boys! he says again, giving himself just enough pause for another sip. "Boys, boys, boys.

We’ve talked about this. These people are the reason we aren’t selling freeze-dried burritos, orange Slurpees, and lottery tickets for a cabal of California Republicans over at the self-serve. These people are why we still have cars to work on. Real cars, boys, not digital remote gas pumps. Wham. He slams his glass down, just getting himself cranked.

Now all these people ask from us in return is a little reassurance. These are not bad people. Some of them are even quite beautiful and intelligent people. And they drive rather beautiful and intelligent automobiles. Isn’t that right? Bill, you’re not even listening. I said, isn’t that right?

He tops off Sigourney’s glass again. I hold mine out, but he passes right over it. He’s on a roll.

And all they want to hear from us is that they did well to invest a great deal of money in Northern European automotive excellence. That it’s just the ticket for capital preservation. They just want to hear some guy with grease under his nails and nary a pot to piss in tell them that they did the right thing. They just want to hear a guy like my good friend Jerry here say, ‘Shucks, I’d do the same thing myself if I had half a chance.’

Now is that a lot to ask, boys?

I decide to pour myself a tall one, but I cut it short when I look over and see Pine giving me a dirty look. It’s okay. I’m pretty choosy about who I drink with anyway, which usually means I drink by myself. And drunk or sober, I always like sitting here listening to Mickey. Like Pine says, Mickey knows his market. He looks more like an old golf pro than a grease jockey. This time of year, he wears turtlenecks under his white lab coat and carries a clipboard around the garage, especially during drop-off and pick-up hours. The coat comes from some brother-in-law who worked over in the meat department at Stop and Save, but it’s great for the look that Mickey’s trying to get across. A big brain surgeon of a guy with thick gray eyebrows who just happens to run a garage for the fun of it. That’s what keeps them coming back. That’s what keeps them happy, Cept for guys like Dad. Nothing keeps Dads happy.

Yah, says Jerry. So he had that thing what, like six months, and then goes and gets it painted?

He didn’t. But that’s okay.

Boy, say that again! Mickey shouts, rising up off his stool.

I didn’t know I said it. But I say it again anyway. No, he didn’t.

You’re damned straight he didn’t. Say it again, Boy.

He didn’t paint it. It’s a new car. The other one was a white 94 CD. This is a 95 Turbo. Citron.

And that is my point exactly, says Mickey, turning to the other guys, including Sigourney, whose head is now slumped on the tool bench. You, Jerry, should have been the first to realize and acknowledge that. To honor that. Hell … celebrate it! The other car was a white CD. This is a Champagne Turbo.

Citron, I tell him again. A lot of people call it Champagne. But it’s not. It’s Citron.

What the fuck, says Jerry. I don’t see what …

The point is, says Mickey. The point is that it obviously made a difference to Mr. Weston. The point is that Mr. Weston truly believed that he needed that 95 Turbo … excuse me, Citron 95 Turbo. On some level, some very important level, Mr. Weston found the burden, the uncertainty—nay, the accelerating depreciation—of his 1994 Saab 9000 CD to be at the very least troubling, even threatening. Perhaps even sad. Every bit as sad, dare I say it, as our good friend Mr. Sigourney here finds the diminishing prospects for his new furnace, thanks to the albeit untimely deterioration of the ball joints on his fine Ford Motor product. A better idea, indeed. Now drink up, everyone. Let us lubricate the little Saint Guillotine.

Bill Sigourney’s shoulders start heaving, and he lets out this high shit-faced wail.

*     *     *

Before I leave every night, I fold the sandwich boards out front, and I put them just inside the garage. I lock the big rolling doors and sweep the concrete pad outside the office. Sometimes on a night like this, I’ll smoke a bone, if I have one, which isn’t all that often anymore. Mickey doesn’t care. The air this time of year is still sweet, fat air, almost like the whiskey, and a bone tastes especially good. It’s going to be a perfect night for a ride—later on, when I have a buzz and the streets are just dark enough to make it interesting. I grew up on a board, but now I just ride skates, and I skate the hills, up