Carl, Under His Car

Christopher Chambers

Carl, under his car on a Saturday morning, stares at the bell housing of the automatic transmission that has settled heavily onto the left side of his chest, and he thinks about the conversation he had with his wife this morning. The argument was not unusual. This time Angel, their sixteen-year-old daughter, wants to go on a school trip to Washington, D.C. Carl is sure this is not a good idea—a bunch of hormone-crazed teenagers on a three-day trip to a big city with only a handful of chaperones. Three days also means two nights the kids will spend in a hotel. It isn’t just the money, though that is no small consideration. The thought of his Angel in a hotel room causes Carl to squirm, and when he does, a sharp pain shoots through his left side. Jesus Christ, he winces. Somewhere deep within him there is a twinge of guilt tinged almost imperceptibly with pleasure. Or vice versa. Sometimes it’s as if he’d never left Holy Cross High School.
    Gloria left this morning in a huff to spend the day shopping at the local mall. Carl retired to the garage to work on his project—a 1972 Buick Gran Sport in an early stage of restoration. A repair manual lies open on the workbench, grease-smeared fingerprints mark the page for automatic transmission removal and installation. Step 14. Remove the bolts that attach the transmission bell housing to the engine. Step 15. While using a pry bar to ensure that the torque converter stays firmly mounted to the transmission, pull the transmission off the engine.
     Carl doesn’t recall what the next step is. He does remember that the manual states that installation is basically the reverse of removal. And he is sure the manual does not have specific instructions for removing a transmission that is wedged between the engine and a hapless shade-tree mechanic, effectively pinning him under the car. He hears his dead father’s voice, the sneer in it when he says the words shade-tree mechanic. Carl’s father, the auto mechanic. Carl Sr., a real auto mechanic with a closet full of blue work shirts, long and short sleeve, with the Mr. Goodwrench patch over the left pocket and his name in script above the right.
     The garage door gapes open to a mild, sunny day, and Carl worries that one of his neighbors might happen by, see him under the car, and stop to chat. He does not want to chat with any of his neighbors right now, and as much as he would like to be out from under his car, he doesn’t much like the idea of asking, say, Bruce Edelbrock for help. He knows he would never hear the end of it. He imagines Bruce down at the Town Tap. There be was, I tell ya, pinned to the floor under his own car like a goddamn bug. I don’t know what woulda happened to him if I hadn’t stopped by. Huh. Huh. Huh. That laugh.
     The pain is not too bad, Carl thinks. Pressed to the oil-stained concrete floor, he can see the corner of his workbench, the open toolbox, a wooden shelf bowing under the weight of a row of old baby-food jars filled with nails, cotter pins, assorted nuts and bolts. He sees the Ridgid Tools calendar hanging on the wall among the hand tools and extension cords. Even though it is late March, Miss February still smiles warmly in an orange bikini. She stands in glossy living color next to a new Ridgid pipe threader, one hand on her bare hip, the other caressing the sleek machine. Carl looked ahead, into the future, and found Miss March, sultry with a twenty-four-inch pipe wrench, somehow less aesthetically pleasing, and so has been content to remain in February in his garage.
     Carl has worked a pipe threader like Miss February’s. His brother-in-law, a heating and plumbing contractor, has a similar threader, though his is filthy with cutting oil. It resembles the one on the calendar, well, about like Gloria resembles Miss February, Carl thinks, and immediately he feels a twinge of guilt that is not at all like the pain in his shoulder, nor tinged with pleasure of any kind. Carl loves his wife. He has worked with her brother since being laid off from the canning company, where he’d worked since high school, as he’d always expected to. He lugs the machine from and to the truck during the week and has come to resent the heavy threader.
     The underside of the Buick smells of used motor oil and automatic transmission fluid. Smells that remind Carl of his father. Carl, when underneath cars, has never quite shaken the feeling that his father is watching critically his every move. This causes him to try too hard with ratchets and pry bars, to lose his cool when a bolt won’t loosen or a wrench slips. Gloria teases that he can’t seem to change the oil on one of their cars without barking the skin off his knuckles. And she’s more right than Carl would like to admit. All the way back to auto shop. The sight of his blood trickling from a scrape, mixing but not mixing with the oil on his hands, the pain. There is something to this, flesh meeting metal. But Carl doesn’t analyze it. He finds peace in the garage, under his car. More and more, it is the only place in his house where he feels at ease. With Angel older, in high school now, Carl has become an outsider in a house of women. He never has understood women, he admits to himself, and they become more and more mysterious to him as time goes on. Carl’s mother died when he was a child, of a weak heart, his father told him.
     Carl feels fluid trickle slowly from his shoulder to the inside of his arm and into his armpit. It tickles some, and he hopes it’s transmission fluid, a bright viscous red that doesn’t look at all like blood. He’s afraid to move his arm. He grimaces at the tickle and imagines how he must look, under his car, grimacing while transmission fluid runs into his armpit, and he laughs, triggering a sharp pain in his chest, like the one he felt when he first tried to move after the transmission slipped off the floor jack onto him. The transmission didn’t really fall on him. He’d been almost snug beneath it, trying to free the torque converter with a pry bar when the jack kicked out, and the transmission, a Turboglide, settled into him like a bowling ball into a cheap mattress. Not to imply that Carl is anything like a cheap mattress, though Carl Sr. used to bowl league every Wednesday night at the Stardust Lanes.
     Carl closes his eyes to think. The concrete is cold beneath him, and he can hear small sounds. A whir that he identifies as the electric clock on the garage wall. He stole the clock from the plant when he was laid off after twelve years of faithful service. Grudging, but faithful. That was what, ten years ago now? How has it come to this? he wonders, the years flying by like mere passing thoughts, like faraway dreams.
     In the distance he hears a voice, constant and vaguely familiar. It’s Harry Carey, he realizes. Someone in the neighborhood is listening to the Cubs game. They’re playing the Reds today. Preseason. Carl thinks the pitching staff is looking better this year, but he isn’t too hopeful. Being a Cubs fan, he knows, means maintaining a stubborn glimmer of hope in the face of almost certain disappointment. He tries to make out the radio broadcast, but Harry’s words seem to be carried along on the breeze, and only the sound of them is blown into the garage. It would be nice to be able to hear the game while he lies here, he thinks. Carl is not given to panic, and he has not yet begun to worry. Not too much. He is short of breath, but Gloria will be home eventually. He can’t see the clock or the wristwatch on his immobilized left arm, but he figures it is close to noon. Which reminds him that he hasn’t eaten since a coffee and Danish this morning. His stomach rumbles.
     Carl tries to figure where Gloria might be, to determine when she might be coming home. He pictures her Leaving the house this morning. It must have been around ten. She would drive down Palisade to the thrift store, maybe pick up some work clothes for him, an alarm clock for her collection. Half an hour or forty-five minutes there. Then on to the mall. Carl loses her at the mall. He goes there once a year, at Christmas, and it gives him heartburn just to think about it.
     Hell, he has no idea where she is, or how long she’ll be. She might be out with Jennie Hurst for all he knows. Maybe she and Jennie are at the Continental Lounge across from the mall right now, drinking White Russians and talking about their husbands. Carl doesn’t want to think about that possibility. At the last neighborhood cocktail party, Jennie came up to Carl where he stood by the hors d’oeuvres, ran her long, manicured fingers lightly down his arm, and smiled.
     “When is that hot rod of yours going to be ready for a test ride, Carl?”
     All the while, Henry, her husband, stood across the room watching, leering at them. And Hurst, the school psychologist, will be one of the chaperones for the D.C. trip. Which gets Carl back to thinking about Angel. His Angel. Carl remembers like yesterday the day she was born, a little pink bundle in his wife’s arms and him feeling like he’d just come awake for the first time in his life, that everything up to this moment suddenly meant nothing. Everything beyond this moment an unwritten book. The universe shifted, and he was no longer at the center of it. This soft little bundle was. When he held her, he realized this was the most important thing he’d ever done, and he swore that he would always be there for her. Always.
     But now his Angel is like a stranger to him, listening to that goddamn hip-hop music. She rolls her eyes at him when he remarks on the music and the baggy pants, her bare midriff and the blue anodized ring in her pierced navel. She spends hours on the phone and can’t utter a sentence without using the word like a half a dozen times. He knows he sounds like his old man, but he can’t help himself.
     When some kid appears at the door to pick Angel up for a date, Carl makes a point of trying to scare the hell out of him. A dark look, a crushing handshake, his shirtsleeves rolled up over his tattooed, muscled biceps. He knows what is on these boys’ minds, and he doesn’t like it one bit. He remembers getting the same treatment from Gloria’s old man when he was their age, and it pains him to remember how ineffectual it was, how he had his hands up under her sweater or wedged between her legs before they were two blocks away.
     Carl had another GS back then. The love of his life. Red with white stripes. All the factory options. The big block 455. Early one February morning coming back from Wisconsin, where the drinking age was still eighteen, going too fast, he missed a curve on a wet country road and rolled the Buick three times. It only recently occurred to Carl that surviving the wreck was something like a miracle. The car was totaled. Carl and Bruce were both thrown free. Carl awoke half-buried in the wet soil and corn stubble, staring up at a fingernail moon and the white blur of the Milky Way arcing across the night sky. It took him some time to remember who and where he was. When he pulled himself up from the muddy field, he saw the twisted ruin of the Buick upside down above him, its headlights still dimly reaching out into the darkness. He felt as if he had died. Bruce lay back in the ditch, still drunk and laughing. Laughing like an idiot.
     A lifetime later, Carl saw an ad in the paper for a restorable Gran Sport, and it seemed like the answer to something. His desire for the car was more need than want, and he borrowed from the savings account for Angel’s college to get it. A long bad time with Gloria over that.
     An almost full can of Old Style sweats just beyond Carl’s reach. He picks up the half-inch ratchet handle with the extension and carefully extends it toward the beer can. He feels the pain in his chest again, and he lets the ratchet fall. He turns his head slightly and looks up to Miss February, still blessing the threader.
     A small crack of sound in the distance. At Wrigley Field, a baseball arcs high away from a swung wooden bat. The sound of Harry Carey’s voice rises in volume and intensity. Carl holds his breath, hoping that it means good news for the Cubs, a homer, runs scored at the least, a game-winning rally. But he can’t make out the words, and the sound subsides to a low murmur, color commentary, the lull between batters. For Carl, the long fly ball continues to hang in the sky, its flight unresolved.
     When he has calculated the reach, the foot-pounds of pull required to slide the can across the floor without tipping it, he again grasps the ratchet handle, reaches out, and slowly draws the can toward him with the care of a master machinist.
     When Carl has the can in his hand, he revels in its cool wetness a moment before tipping it over his mouth. Beer spills down his chin and soaks into his shirt as he drinks. He thinks again about lunch. The fried chicken left over from last night is in the refrigerator. He likes leftover fried chicken.
     He can see out the garage door a square of driveway, his mailbox, the top half of the duplex across the street, blue sky above. The Shelby kid rolls by delivering papers from a skateboard. The Saturday Tribune skips across Carl’s drive and into the holly bush. He almost yells after the kid but decides against it. This is not the time to get into it with the paper boy. Carl wonders where Gloria is now. How long can a person shop? He knows that in Gloria’s case unfortunately, the answer is a long goddamn time. He closes his eyes. The faint murmur of the ball game continues in the distance. The long fly ball still soars deep in center field. The clock on the wall whirs. Down the street a dog barks. And he hears footsteps coming down the sidewalk.
     Carl holds his breath. The footsteps stop, and then start up again, coming closer. He says a prayer-like please, oh God, but the footsteps come up the driveway. He opens his eyes. In the narrow gap between his feet and the gas tank of the Buick, he sees a pair of legs, faded blue jeans, athletic shoes, one untied, shuffling toward him. Not Bruce, he hopes. But it is Bruce, and now he hears the chuckle, low and suggestive. The sharp slap of an open hand on the top of the Buick.
     “The fuck you doing under there?” says Bruce.
     “What do you think?”
     “Taking a nap? Huh huh.”
     “Maybe.” Maybe I'm dreaming, thinks Carl, under his car. All of this a dream, dreamlike as it is. Only to awaken. To awaken, refreshed.
     “Listening to the Cubs?”
     “Yeah.”
     “Yeah?” Carl imagines Bruce looking around, seeing the radio on the workbench unplugged for the cord to the trouble light. The light hangs from the underside of the open hood, hooked into one of the ram-air induction scoops, and it casts a yellow light down around the big block V-8. Carl, with the exception of his right arm, is in the shadows.
     “I was. A while ago.”
     “I couldn’t stomach it neither. Got no pitching at all this year.” Bruce belches and shuffles over to the workbench. Carl can see the back of his head as he leans over to get a closer look at Miss February.
     “Wouldn’t mind running some pipe through that threader.” Bruce whistles. “Know what I mean.”
     “What do you mean, Bruce?” Carl says. Sharply.
     “You know, man. I mean—”
     “Forget it. I know what you mean.”
     “What’s up? You sound kind of weird like.”
     “Yeah?”
     “You need a hand?”
     “No. I'm thinking.”
     “Thinking about what?”
     “This tranny . . . and shit.”
     “Turboglide, right?”
     “Yeah.”
     “Them are good trannys.”
     “Yeah.”
     All I have to do is ask him to roll that floor jack back under here, Carl thinks, and we could get this thing up enough for me to get out from under it. But for some reason, he can’t ask. He and Bruce went to high school together, played on the conference champion baseball team together even dated a couple of the same girls. Carl remembers Bruce bragging once about tearing the clothes off that skinny little Muldowney girl in the bushes at a keg party, how she was so drunk she couldn’t walk or talk. And Carl remembers not saying anything and has never forgotten this.
     Carl remembers sitting up in a muddy field and staring at the wreck of his car, feeling like his life was over, and Bruce’s laughter ringing in his ears. That was what, twenty years ago? Christ, he thinks.
     “I’m going to the Tap. Come with and have a cold one,” Bruce says. He squats down and peers under the car at Carl, squints at him there in the shadows under the Buick.
     Carl looks at the big, sideways face of his old friend and feels a powerful urge to flail at it with the heavy ratchet that lies by his hand. The urge is to hurt. To cause bodily harm. He takes a deep breath. Exhales. Carl, calmly:
     “Nah. I’m in the middle of this here . . .”
     “Tranny?”
     “Yeah.”
     “All right. Anything you need under there before I go?”
     Carl thinks about the cardboard bucket of fried chicken in the refrigerator, the cordless phone, which could be anywhere in the house, the Cubs game and the unplugged radio. He thinks, for no reason at all, about Angel.
     “No. I’m all set,” he says.
     Bruce shuffles off down the driveway and down the street to the Tap, where Carl imagines the usual crowd sits at their usual places at the bar, watching the Cubs win or lose another game. Gloria, meanwhile, browses through paperback classics at the Books-it-Us outlet. Carl, still under his car, hears from a couple blocks away the deep thumping of a high-power car stereo system with the bass pushed all the way up. A buzzing begins on the workbench as the thumping gets closer. The tools in Carl’s garage begin to vibrate. Carl feels the low frequencies pulse through the transmission, through him, and through the concrete slab on which he lies. That Puerto Rican kid that Angel’s been seeing, no doubt.
     The kid drives a gleaming old Chevy Impala low rider with thirteen coats of hand-rubbed candy-apple lacquer, a trunk full of DieHards, and one of those hydraulic lift kits that drops the chassis down to within inches of the pavement and causes the car to hop up and down obscenely at stop-and-go lights. Carl can tell by the clatter of lifters from under the hood and the blue-black smoke from the tailpipe that the motor is on its last legs. He wonders what kind of person would paint a car that barely runs. The batteries and the shocks are likely worth more than the whole goddamn car. Stomach acid gurgles and threatens to rise in his throat.
     He refuses to learn the kid’s name. Ralph, he calls the kid. Or Rudie. Ra-hoolio, if he’s in a good mood. What does Angel see in a skinny, sorry-ass kid with the crotch of his pants hanging down almost to his knees. “She’s asserting herself,” Gloria tells him. “Let them be. They’re just kids.” That’s what worries Carl. He and Gloria were just kids, too. But they weren’t this stupid. Were they?
     The Impala bounces to a stop at the curb outside Carl’s house. The kid knows enough to turn the music down here, but Carl can still hear the insistent, muted thump of it, and the buzz and rattle of door panels and window glass. A car door opens then closes with a thunk. The sound of sneakers skipping up the sidewalk. Angel. The front door slams shut. Carl imagines her dropping her jacket on the floor in the hall. She will never learn. She runs to her room, maybe. He has always been uncomfortable there and will only stand in the doorway trying not to look too closely at anything in the fragrant, jumbled room. So much color and life. Carl hears water running through the pipes inside his house. Noises in the kitchen. The side door opens.
     “Daddy?”
     “That you, Angel?” Carl’s voice breaks slightly.
     “How’s your car coming?”
     “Fine, honey.” Carl can see her feet. Pink canvas high-tops poised. Her jeans taper and end mid-calf, revealing a hands width of thin leg, the graceful curve of ankle below. Carl has a great and sudden desire to hug his daughter, to hold her tightly in his arms for a long, long time.
     “Me and Raul are going to the park. To hang out, okay?”
     She’s lost to me, Carl thinks, and he feels his heart breaking, the weight upon it almost unbearable.
     “Okay,” he says.
     Angel skips toward the open garage door, and the sun-drenched, dangerous world. Carl struggles to follow the pink shoes in their carefree dance away from him.
     “Angel,” he calls out.
     She stops. Turns back, pink shoes pivoting. “Yeah?”
     “Be careful, honey.”
     And then she is gone. Carl lies under his car, eyes closed. The clock whirs. The world outside turns. It is Saturday, and spring is near. At Wrigley Field, relief pitchers warm up in the bullpen. Carl breathes and tries not to think about anything.

Carl looks up and sees Miss February move. Her head turns slightly so that she is looking down at him. She continues to smile, but in her smile is a look of pity and tenderness that he has not noticed before. The pipe threader beside her turns slowly, whirs smoothly, masking the faraway chatter of the Cubs game. Miss February steps down from the workbench and moves toward Carl, her bare feet gliding over the cold concrete. A warm glow fills the garage.
     She bends down beside the Buick, reaches under the car toward him. Carl in turn reaches out to her, his right hand outstretched, seeking her touch with neither thought nor hesitation. His right hand. He stares at her, transfixed by the vibrant, tanned skin of her arm, her hand, her fingers. Flawless, he thinks. Impossible. She touches him lightly, and in her touch Carl feels the sure knowledge that everything will be all right. He relaxes and only then realizes that he has been holding tension in his body, fighting against the weight that is upon him. He gives in to it. Accepts it. And it is lifted from him.

Later, when the pilgrims arrive to kneel in Carl’s garage at the shrine to Our Lady of Skokie, as Miss February is christened by the media, Carl drives to a bar in another neighborhood where no one knows him and watches the Cubs with strangers. The Buick sits at home in his driveway in an arrested state of partial restoration, covered with a tarp. Gloria sits inside the garage door in an upholstered chair she brought out from the family room, making change and crocheting another afghan or a sweater for Carl. The pilgrims pay five dollars to kneel at Carl’s workbench and pray to the Ridgid Tool calendar.
     Some of them believe they see Miss February’s smile broaden, a light brighten in her eyes, a slight, sympathetic downward nod of her head as she looks upon them, one hand on her erotic, virginal hip, the other on the holy threader. Some reverently touch the stain on the garage floor where Carl lay pinned beneath the Buick before he was saved by Our Lady. They anoint themselves with the slick trace of the transmission fluid that coats the tips of their fingers. Some purchase small souvenir wrenches adorned with an enameled picture of the Virgin Mary. (After consulting with the parish priest, Gloria decided against using the image of Miss February on the souvenirs; a letter from the Ridgid Tool company threatens legal action if its calendar or its model is used in any type of marketing campaign. The church itself withheld judgment on the alleged miracle, issuing an ambiguous statement confirming that God does indeed work in mysterious ways, and that anything that increases faith is good, whether or not it is officially miraculous.)
     Gloria takes the money to the Savings and Loan to deposit into the account for Angel’s college education. For the first time in years, Carl and Gloria do not argue about money or about Angel. Carl gives Angel his blessing to go on the trip to Washington, D.C. He sees her off to O’Hare and hugs her for a long time in the terminal while the rest of the kids crowd toward the boarding gate. Angel hugs him back.
     Carl, back to work with his brother-in-law, threads pipe and daydreams. On the job site, Carl runs the threader with a new proprietary air. He savors the smell of the cutting oil,the faint metallic taste in the back of his throat. Sometimes he stands next to the threader with his hand on the filthy motor casing in the same manner in which Miss February stands beside her threader.
     By August the pilgrims will have dwindled away, or Gloria will be forced by the city council (already the neighbors are complaining about the traffic and parking) to close the shrine. The Buick, freshly painted and rebuilt, will be back in the garage where Carl will work on the interior. A new headliner, carpeting, the seats reupholstered. Carl will install a new radio himself. He has a glow-in-the-dark statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus for the dashboard. He will take Gloria for a drive on a Saturday night in the fall, park by the lake where they can smell the water and hear the hush of it lapping at the beach. Tune an oldies station in low. Her head on his shoulder, her hand on his chest. Carl will close his eyes and feel what it is like to have everything he ever thought he wanted and then realize that it somehow isn’t like he imagined it would be. And still it will be all right.

Or perhaps Gloria arrives home from the mall and walks into the garage, her arms filled with shopping bags. She sees Carl, under his car. She frowns at the Ridgid Tools calendar hanging above the workbench.
     “Why is your calendar still on February?”
     “Huh?” Carl, shaken from a bizarre reverie. “Gloria?”
     “Are you all right?”
     “Gloria . . .”
     “Just a minute. I have to set these bags down before I drop something.”
     Gloria goes into the house, and Carl hears her shoes click across the linoleum. The radio comes on. The Rolling Stones singing “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Carl hears Gloria singing along. Her voice gives him chills. She will return soon. She will position the floor jack to lift the transmission up off him. She will stay calm. He has always admired her ability to handle a crisis.
     In high school when the Weber kid almost drowned in the pool, when everyone else stood there staring at the limp body on the stark, white concrete, it was Gloria who rushed up, knelt down, and breathed the life back into him. Carl thinks this might have been the moment when he fell in love with her. He remembers being paralyzed, the smell of chlorine, water running down his face, his chest, his legs. And the image of Gloria, her slim, graceful fingers clamped over Weber’s nose and spread flat on his thin chest. To place her mouth over his, in front of God and everyone. To breathe into him. Her wet hair flat against her head, clinging to her freckled shoulders. A drop of chlorinated water hanging off the end of her nose like a jewel. In between breaths she straightened up, counting, oblivious. Her bathing suit was blue. Her breasts, small and nearly perfect, rose and fell, and with them a new ache in Carl’s chest. The desire to be saved by her. A wail from far off like a siren. Yes, Carl thinks. That was the moment.
     Gloria will insist on calling an ambulance, and she will ride in the back with him. While he waits for her to return to the garage, he thinks to ask her to bring along the bucket of leftover fried chicken. He can see by the change in light out the garage door that the sun is setting. It will be dusk by the time an ambulance arrives. He imagines lying under a clean, white sheet on a stretcher, looking up at the reflections of the lights flashing on the roof of the ambulance.
     The morphine is working. The IV drips slowly, each translucent drop hanging like a textbook curveball before dropping down into the graceful tube that arcs into Carl’s arm. The ambulance driver has the Cubs game on the radio, turned down low, under the static of the two-way radio. It’s the bottom of the ninth, all tied up. Jose Cardinal steps up to the plate. My man, Jose, Carl cheers silently. Gloria sits beside him and holds a cold drumstick to his mouth. He takes a bite of the chicken leg and chews slowly. The taste is incredible. Heaven. It’s as if he has never truly tasted anything until this moment, and he thinks that maybe everything will be this incredible from this moment on, out from under his car, saved.

Or perhaps Carl, under his car, still, thrown from the Buick as it rolled and flipped into a cornfield in northern Illinois on a cold night in February 1978. In the terrible, suspended flight, he saw in flashes of vivid imagination his future and all that it would have held, lived this life in the brief moments before he came to rest in the damp soil and corn stubble where he would lie pinned beneath the car he loved and had destroyed, thinking about his father, about Gloria and their plans together. He would wait for a beautiful woman to save him. An angelic woman filled with light who would reach out to him a graceful, flawless hand, lift the heaviness weighing upon him, fill him with her miraculous breath, and raise him up, up, and up.

“Carl, Under His Car ” appears in our Spring 2001 issue.