“Your own men gossip?”
“Worse than your dressing room ever dreamed of.” A section of fender gets his attention. “Why do you think I know everything?”
The fleet sits in a long black row down the length of the building, and while he works he tells me about them, in trade for nothing, which is new. The big armored one I ride in, which he bought the week he took the chair, bulletproof, never once shot at. “The safest money I ever spent,” he says.
“Insurance works best when everyone knows you have it.” Three more like it in different sizes, a family portrait of hearses. Something long and low from the sixties that he calls the old man’s one weakness, which he doesn’t explain. I don’t push. At the far end, something crouches under a gray cover, and the shape of it is wrong for a Rolls, wrong for anything sensible at all.
“What was your first one?” I ask. “Car.”
“A dead man’s Mercedes.” He says it the way other people name a high school. “It came with the job I had at nineteen. Nobody else wanted it.”
“Because of the dead man?”
“Because of the upholstery.” He doesn’t elaborate. I decide with my whole heart not to ask. He catches me deciding, and thereit is again, that almost-thing at the corner of his mouth his face keeps filed under classified.
“What’s under the sheet?”
“A mistake I keep.”
“Can I see it?”
“No.” A pause, the cloth still moving. “Not tonight.”
I watch him work. It should be boring. Instead, watching his hands work is doing more for me than most men manage with a bed and an agenda. He does the whole hood in overlapping circles, then steps back and reads the light down the length of the paint like a pool shark reading a table, finds some flaw invisible to humans, does a section over. His hands are enormous. I was there for some of the things they’ve done. Right now they’re being so careful with a piece of painted metal that something in my throat pulls tight.
“Who taught you this?” I ask.
The cloth stops. Starts again. “Nobody. My father kept cars. He had men for them.” A breath’s worth of pause. “I wanted to know how things worked, so I watched until the men let me do it, then I did it until I was better at it than they were.”
“How old were you?”
“Eight. Nine.” He moves down the fender. “It’s good work. It travels. Any country, any year, a man can always wax a car.”
It’s the most he’s ever told me about being a child. Three sentences, all of them about wax, and I hold very still the same way I held still in the rose garden, because the wild thing has wandered close again. I don’t want it bolting back into the dark.
“Why this, though?” I keep my voice down where the moment is. “Of everything. You could be asleep. You could pay a machine to do this in twenty minutes.”
He’s quiet long enough that I figure the door’s shut. Then he straightens, looks down the black shine of the hood, and answers the paint instead of me.
“Nothing I do is ever finished. The money moves. The war moves. There’s no morning where any of it is done.” He tips his head at the car. “This is done in an hour. Nobody dies of it, and you can see your face in done.”
I sit with that. It explains more about this man than anything he’s said to me with the lights on, and he said it to a fender, which also explains more about this man than anything he’s said to me with the lights on.
“I used to tape my own ankles,” I hear myself say.
He looks over. Waits.
“Before competitions. Two hours early, every time. The venues had trainers who’d do it for you, good ones, and the other girls used them. I never let anybody wrap my ankles in my life. My coach thought I was superstitious.” I shrug, sock feet on a stranger’s stool, telling the dark a thing I’ve never once said sober.
“Superstition had nothing to do with it. It was the one part I could hold. You can’t make the judges score you right. You can’t make the other girls fall. The tape, though. The tape was mine. If it was done right, I did it right, and for two hours before every event, something in the whole screaming world was handled.”
The cloth has stopped moving altogether now.
“So,” I say, suddenly aware of every inch of myself. “Wax. I get it. That’s all I’m saying.”
He looks at me for a long moment, the gray eyes nearly colorless under the work lights, and there’s something in his face I haven’t seen pointed at me before. Not the desert look, not the count-room look, something worse for me than either. I’ve just read him back to himself in his own garage, in his own language, and the stillness on him says he heard it.
“The tape,” he says, “is why you read the whale better than men I’ve trained for years.”
