Tosk and Gearhart were in the middle of an operation.

"I find it unusual," Tosk said, "That the hideous bauglexer has been moved slightly to the right in the schematic of the newer model." He had his monkey wrench in his left hand and his grease monkey suit on with many extra oil stains. Tosk was a beefy man whose arms never fell quite to the sides of his body. They both always fell at a 45 degree angle from his chest, as if his muscles got in the way, as if he was trying to imitate a triangle with his entire upper torso.

"Hmm, but it is quite practical," Gearhart said in his slightly German accent, which had been polished away over time with his waiting but still stood behind him, like a pal, like a fantasy.

Walker just nodded and swept up some of the loose tools. Ever since his accident he had bad trouble with the shoptalk. Ever since they took the old stadium down and built a new one where the parkinglot of the old one was and built a parkinglot for the new stadium where the old stadium had once been, ever since then he could sweep but he had so much trouble joining in with the conversation.

"I see the problem now," Tosk said, his hand far under the hood, his head lodged deep in the motor and his beefy body growing out of the engine like some kind of fatty tumor. "I see what's wrong, sure. The manifold has an extra fold." He extracted it so he could take it over to his workbench and address it with a knife and a bobbin. "It reminds me of a prostitute I had, or once nearly had. I really dug her, but when we went up to her room she gave me this list of conditions. In other words, it wasn't going to be any fun for me. So I went ape-shit and started throwing things around in her room so her pimp gave me a couple free drinks and man, did I ever enjoy those."

Gearhart was testing the tank of the Speedster with a thermometer and a hydrometer. He had heard Tosk's story a thousand times. "Hmm, there appears to be a chemical imbalance here," he said, already mixing the buffer solution. "Hmm, could you give me a hand," he said to Walker as he made an incision with his scalpel. "Just rub it there to keep it happy."

Walker stroked the back bumper as if it was the tail of a fuzzy cat. He made calming sounds from the back of his throat. He remembered how to do that.

Tosk was putting the manifold back in. "I sat and enjoyed those drinks. I really did enjoy them. But it was always a tough day ahead of me, back then and even now. How's that slurry coming along?" he asked Gearhart.

"Hmm, I believe the balance to now be quite satisfactory," Gearhart said, stitching up the place where he made the incision. Walker could have stopped stroking the bumper minutes ago but he still did it. The others noticed this and chuckled in their hands.

"Do you want to test it out, old boy?" Tosk said, holding the keys out to Walker.

Walker stopped stroking the bumper and said, "I don't think so." The keys were catching too much of the sun when they jangled in Tosk's hand. Walker couldn't even really see them, they were just a stain of moving womblight, but he felt them in the jab and sound.

"Hmm. You do still drive, don't you?" Gearhart said, but not all that seriously because the answer could only be yes.

"Of course I do," Walker said, trying to be courageous. "But just not race cars, not since the accident."

The others just nodded and Tosk got in the Speedster 59 and started it up with a roar like the ripping sound of the mighty grandstand and he peeled the wheels, spinning them in place for the best of a second before hitting the road hard.

Walker wanted to correct him - Tosk could never win with such clumsy driving, but Walker kept quiet, for Tosk was only a grease monkey anyway and so was Walker in those days in his stained coveralls and white tennis shoes.

The path

To wisdom

Is not paved

To get from home to work was no small feat for Walker. He had to avoid the visible roadways, and where the bridge crossed the river the journey was particularly tricky. The first few times he walked on the pedestrian path deserted sidewalk and tried to disguise himself with the shadows and sounds but this was always a risky proposition, to be out so much in the open of the bridge. Most drivers fell for his aversion tactics but there were also ones who could see right into him and see him instead of thru him. This would never do, and all that was left was to walk beneath the bridge.

He had to balance on the beams. He had to walk it underneath the roadway as the river below him battered the rocks and battered his name as if they were laughing at him. The first time or two across he almost didn't make it, he almost didn't make it because he thought he might not make it and he had a moment of doubt each time at a certain point where he still kept his balance but he imagined it missing. He imagined himself slipping on the beam and his hands reaching at the air behind them as if there were shadow beams there but nothing to touch and he just fell and fell to the water and rocks below. But this didn't happen, it was just a strong moment of imagination, and he slowly put it out of his mind and crept across until the brown ground was waiting beneath him.

After the first waves of doubt the bridge beams of underneath just became his standard commute, and he did it twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening. He balanced on the beam below the roadway of the bridge as the river called its violent name far down below him, and when he did it so often it wasn't a challenge, it was just his daily commute and just a slight part of his whole day to day.

The path

To vision

Is not for tires

Sharing the bed at night a dark wind playing at their bedroom window, the clock hit four and Penny was wide awake, her eyes traveling the walls. Walker was beside her and asleep and in dreams but the bed could have been a car, her car, and she was driving it past the window and alone into the wind that blew the trees and houses but left her wheels be. If only she were driving right now, all night long, on some black highway that she could doze off and re-awaken. If only her dreams were a set of shock absorbers to guide her thru the night, to deaden her commute between the death of sleep and day.

A lonely

After midnight sound

A car blows down the road

"I can't even hear myself think with the constant sound of all the cars," Lydia says as she walks with Roscoe and Walker thru a spot where someone did some illegal dumping. There's a dresser and a mattress and a busted up desk and part of a sofa. It could be a living room or a bedroom out in the open, beneath the trees and the sky, and they have to walk carefully around the sharp parts of a broken this or a broken that.

"I can think alright," Roscoe says. "What I have trouble with is hearing. Sometimes I can get up real early in the morning and I can hear things, but when the cars start coming I can't hear them anymore. Maybe those things stop making noise when the cars all start up, or maybe they're still making those sounds but you can't hear them so much with the cars being so loud."

"Those things are still making their sounds," Lydia assures him. "I can hear well enough. I can hear all the car sounds and then if I listen carefully and concentrate I can hear all the other sounds too, but I really have to listen. What I can't do is think out what those sounds are coming from. I can't think that I'm even hearing them or trying to, or concentrating. I just can't think with that sound."

"Let's go this way," Walker says, but it's the only way they can go, really, as far as Lydia and Roscoe know. The path is taking them closer to a freeway, and the sounds of it, first hidden by the rise and fall of the weedy land around them, are let loose bit by bit, like dawn looking slowly the rush of weight behind it.

"Are you still thinking?" Roscoe says, and the sounds climb a notch.

"It's not that I can't think, it's that it's hard. And, yes, it's getting harder for me to think," says Lydia.

The three sit behind a hedge and watch the traffic thru the branches. It moves thick and slow, and its sounds are so present that they're so easy to forget all about.

Is it sound

Is it growling

Is it a car

He never knew the name of the child but he calls him Ball because it's nearly as good as a name, and because the ball came first, and then the boy, like a name usually leads before the body and the being. And there was his face in a cloud or a fence, and Walker can make a whole life for Ball, he can invent it as his mind wanders thru the sunlight, of the birth of Ball at the soccer game and his hand outstretched at the colors in a circle and pressing in his body to roll down the hillside of the park or the curve of the world that holds his feet and hands. And Ball could have a sweetheart, like Walker has his Driver, and maybe the sweetheart doesn't understand the heart of Ball, and maybe it's only eyes and a face like a frown but so serious that it has to be, and Ball and his girlfriend Circle must have to imagine each other, because they don't have the same class and they don't live on the same street but across town is where you will find some sympathy past the rooftops and the straight streets.

Walker sees Ball's face again in the wheels of the street. He sees Ball's body turning in both life and death. Ball might have moved in that shadow, it could have been his voice in the steady sound of cars, and maybe some day it will be so silent, and maybe someday it will be so empty.

Ball knows a few things, how to climb over that fence or under, how to hold his own in a game of marbles like tiny hard bouncing balls and how to see that line ahead where his legs will carry him down the sidewalk or across the park. Ball doesn't know how to drive yet but that may come if the tradition keeps its hold. He has eyes like a spyglass and a mind like a secret decoder.

A sculpture of explosion

The parts of the blown tire

On the roadside

"I'll drive," Penny offers. It's one of the rare times lately they've gone together in her car. Walker stares forward dreading every minute while Penny steers with abandon, as if she were heedlessly munching a bag of chips.

"How's your driving lately?" Penny asks him.

"Oh, fine," Walker says, but really he's thinking about his long illicit walks and the secret ways he knows to go places without being discovered.

"Of course your driving is going fine. Everybody's driving is going fine." The road between and underneath them. The black road with its white teeth stripes they know to keep between.

"Do you need a new car? Your old car must be close to getting worn out by now." She steals a glance at him. He grips tight to his seat because he's so uncomfortable in this tin vehicle. She just thinks her driving frightens him, and that's why he's tense. Maybe that and maybe more.

"I fix it if it doesn't work," he says, rubbing his pants to iron out the creases.

The road beneath them has its trousers. It has its shirts and its gloves and waders. It has a voice that your tires make: "Brrrr." It has a face, if you could stretch it out far enough in your mind.

Walker imagines the unroaded places in the city all around him. His legs march emptily in the well beneath his body.

And their lives together and their lives went on. Their marriage years were smoothed with the time, were smoothed with all the traffic. Their years together were all smashed down flat, their life together flattened as if it had been left in the road and ridden over by so many cars and trucks, and polished with all that movement, and pounded as thin as windy paper.

Drive too much

Drink too much

Live too little

"And that was the Freaks of First Grade with their new smash hit, 'I'm tall enough to dive if I stand on this box.' More hits coming up but - wait a sec, here I go. Fucking A - did I say that? Just hit a pedestrian. Good hit too but he was a big broad stud and I think he caused some damage. Gotta use my windshield wipers and fluid to brush off the blood and facial hair. What a jerk that guy was, what a moron. Well, I guess I taught him, his head is still rolling around back there and if you are a pedestrian and listening you just watch out because I'm gonna get you some day with the hits, with the rock, with the sounds of today and yesterday from my car stereo to yours, this is Super Livius and I'm freaking mad at the sidewalks. Here's the new hit song from the Newborn Baby Singers, 'They will know we are Christians by our Vanity Plates.'"

The wind blows

The sound louder

Distance cars

Penny notices things, like the wheels that look like they never turn and the dust that grows on top of his car like hair that shouts out to be cut. She makes small chalk marks on his tires and checks days later to see if they have moved. They are always in the same place. She notices this even when he is out and should be in his car, driving to where he is going but there is his car parked in its usual place just around the corner and looking sad and neglected.

She suspects, but what does she suspect? Could he have a new car, could someone else be giving him a ride, is he betraying her in some way or another? She taps her chin, she thinks one and then the other, but she doesn't think the thing that cannot be said, the thing that he would never do, he couldn't, no, that would mean too much shame, that would be much too bad, unthinkable, and she goes there no further. He must be getting rides from somebody else, he must have gotten another car that he never lets her see, it must be more expensive than they can afford and he doesn't want her to know.

With her hair and scarf sweeping in the breeze those were the days, when they first just met again, when they had to spend time together so that she could get the proper feel for the series of advertisements that she was writing. He took her for rides on the open road and on the speedway when a proper race was not in session and she took notes in her notepad and she took notes in her legs and to her seat. And he had little to say, he did not remember much, just the road and the dials and the feelings that made him turn the wheel in a certain way and the intuition that led his foot on the brakes and on the gas.

"I think I can do this," she thought, sitting beside him, but the advertisements could sell no ordinary story, no one point, two point three point and point. These ads that she dreamed had to be something else, like her own trembling beside him, the arrow of his velocity, in the quiet eyes that saw the road and barely ever turned to her, and that face, so soft like a road newly pressed, and those hands, helping her to pick up her dropped notebook, and how they were as soft as a seatcushion, and how they moved as rapidly as a transmission.

The strange machinery was bubbling and brewing, the peculiar mechanism she remembered from her childhood days years ago. And when the car stopped and they had to sit, she had specific questions for him, and he could barely answer.

"Tell me about your mother?"

"They say my mother was the old grandstand. They're planning to tear her down some day when they build the new one."

A single tear that catches all the light of the sun.

"Tell me about what you want to do with your life?"

"I want to keep moving forward."

Sometimes a gull in the sky thinks the asphalt is water.

"What does it feel like to be driving in a race?"

"It feels like nothing. It feels like sitting beside you right now."

The wind in their hair as if it was driving fastest.

"What do you want people to know about you?"

"I want them to be safe. I want them to watch out."

A distant rumble like thunder, but there is no thunder in the sky, no storm, but only the ones that are made by carelessness.

When they leave the grandstands they have to push aside a blanket but it isn't a blanket it's just the poor thick air of dust. It's a grey buzz in their eyes that keeps them from seeing things clearly, it's a smudge on their screens, it's a haziness in their true beliefs and ideals. Later they will kiss, she will be the one to be so forward, to lean so forward. He will allow her, as if she were just something passing him by on his way to the finish line, something that he had to pass to get there on time, to get there ahead of time.

She leans forward and there are her lips and her eyes she leaves open and he moves his lips the last quarter of an inch and they meet and here is her tongue with crumbs of popcorn still and suddenly it is searching thru his mouth for his tongue and he moves his tongue the last centimeter and their tongues meet like the last stretch of road completed on a very rainy day and he closes his eyes and the white stripe just passes and passes.

He will ask her to marry him after more weeks of dating and driving and the first two drafts of the commercial series scripts. She just asks that they wait until all the scripts are finished and approved.

She works on the drafts with his breath still upon her. She types out descriptions racing straight from her heart. The love of the road, the speed of two together. The hush of the victory lap, as if everyone agreed that there were suddenly no sound. The fingers feeling the steeringwheel, and the old wood of the ancient grandstand. A man and woman side by side in the vehicle, and how the road and tires shake their bodies into an awakening, and how the journey to the drive-thru restaurant makes them so alive and jumps them to a realization.

When she hits her writer's block she gives him a call. He stops what he is doing to take her on a drive. At first she doesn't know what to say, and he certainly never does. But with the road moving, and the subtle bumps said by the machinery, and the quiet after the door closes, her mind can wander and take her down new roads and freeways.

If you remember

The car

You remember the times

It was opening day for the new Minneapolis Million Mile Motorway and the flags taught the air just how fast to blow. Tosk, Gearhart and Walker were moving their hands so fast they couldn't keep track of which one was left and which one was right, but the racecars would be humming for the opening race of all races.

A pride of infantrymen and women just back on leave from the War for Cars made the crowd all remember why with their firm lock step as all the dots of color in the grandstand rippled like the ocean flowing with paper cups and programs and absurd hats to keep the sun away on those cloudy times.

Tosk was even weeping as he made the last few adjustments with his monkey wrench. Walker saw Tosk's tears drip down in to the engine where they could only help the lubrication system.

The crowd was up on its feet - the color dots had just blown up and over, and paper cups and programs were saluted high to the flag of the nation and the flag of the speedway. Around and around the color guard of battle-wearied fighters was the big oval loop, the raceway like all their lives, around and around and keep track of the laps and there will be a winner some time today.

The drums rolled and the music played and some sang along and some just sneezed. The flags showed the other flags their favorite dance steps in the wind and then it was just the loud car roars and rips and the announcer man's voice trying to strike a blow above all the other sounds.

Walker just kept his eyes on a particular fanbelt on a particular car. He kept his stool heated just by sitting so hard and each time that car came around his eyes narrowed to a point to settle on that belt and detect the slightest movement of it. He forgotten whether he had given it the appropriate three twists or only a hurried two. Each time around the belt came back and each time around his eyes flew straight to it.

Gearhart startled him with a slap on the back, "Hmm, it's a nice day for a race, yes?"

And Walker nodded, here was the belt around again and his glance still felt it out.

"Hmm, I bet you wish you were still racing today, on such a fine new smooth track," Gearhart said to him. Gearhart's chin was up so high that his eyes almost must have been looking behind his back.

The belt was in its place. Walker said, "I don't really think about those things any more."

Gearhart believed him, but still his hands felt for some excuse. Gearhart wished like nothing in the world that he was speeding around some bend, that the mighty car shivered his body in a race day, that he had to hurry to squeeze in his seat on time, that the helmet was secure, that the crowd was cheering at him, or at least at his kind, and that he could keep up the pace and not blow a tire and come around the corner and overtake the leader. When he was younger he had seen Walker do all that so many times, and he respected the man on the stool with his eyes so intent on the tiniest detail, but he also hoped deep within that he, Gearhart, wouldn't be someone to die in his hopes and dreams so fast.

The clock spins

The car sticks

The alleys are even more dangerous

The deadline ticks like a sack of sand and her fingers tremble but they won't shake the keys. The screen pulses white and beats her own heartbeat back at her but she can't see the pictures to write the script to sell the new model of faster and better. She's got a stone in her eyes, she can see everything but the single thing and she needs a way to concentrate, she needs a way to know it and down to her finger which can then tap out the proper combination. She can try a few of the usual parts of speech, beginning with the articles, "an" and "the" and "they" but these fragments will not connect together, or they do connect, in a fashion, but they connect in a train and not a car and you don't want a commercial about something that's extinct.

The ancient rails

Grey in the rain

Awake the bumping tires

"Hi, drivers and drivettes on the beautiful roads of our beautiful nation. This is Super Livius saying why don't you salute the stars and stripes when you next see them at a Car Showlot you may pass. And salute when the next flag comes up on the next pole five feet further. And again and again. You're going slow enough for that because the traffic's pretty thick these days. I know because I'm caught in it too. There are other drive time driving deejays, but I was the first, remember that, my fans of friends. And I am playing the hits from my car radio to yours. Here's the latest chock-a-block singing sensation, ten year old Wonder Ricky, and his latest hit that's up to number one on the Traffic Jam hits scoreboard. Here's his Super Livius hit, 'Don't drive me to school, let me do it with the keys.'"

Is it sun

Or is it headlight

That guides me forward

He observed her body thickening over her years of driving. She was a balloon slowly blown up until her features and her face and her torso and all were just a series of circles, a circle containing a circle within a circle on top of a circle containing more circles. Her bottom spread out to greet with softness the soft seat of her car when she sat down for a drive. Her fingers grew pudgy to grip the steering wheel like marshmallows. Her smile and twinkling eyes slowly disappeared under the layers of extra stuffing in her face.

But in her immensity she was like most people - it was Walker who stood out for his skinniness. Penny wondered what kind of sweat he made turning the steering wheel and pushing the pedals to keep in such shape. Or maybe he was secretly working out somewhere, as if he had the time to do it, at some gym. With her job and her commute she simply didn't have the time to work out. All the hours of the day were already taken, they and her sleep.

Walker got to the war bar long before the others. He sat at a corner table with plenty of empty room for all four of them and nursed his small beer. The big screen TV flashed with an ongoing explosion and then tall men in shorts were racing across a yellow court, a wood floor shining. Someone was flipping between two channels, and in both situations one team was blowing the other away, according to the basketball score and the war reporting.

As he sat there, for some reason he wished that time didn't race by as fast as he usually wanted it to race by. He wished that it would slow down and take its time, as if it were being extra careful, as if it wanted to wait just a bit before completing its circle.

Tracia was the first of the others to arrive. She said, "Man, Walker, you are such a good driver." Walker said, "Hi." Neither said any more until the others arrived, as if it had been decided beforehand that Walker and Tracia were to bring the stares and Penny and Livius the conversation.

So that's where the music is coming from

He now sees

The bison have sousaphones

Part Ten

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