The Gold Coast

4

Dennis McPherson leaves LSR some time after Lemon and tracks home. Up Muddy Canyon Parkway past Signal Hill, through the Irvine condos to Jeffrey, turn left on Irvine, right on Eveningside, left on Morningside, up to the last house on the left, now a duplex; the McPhersons own the street half of the house, along with the carport and garage. As he tracks into the driveway and under the carport Dennis sees Jim’s shabby little Volvo out on the street. Here for another free meal. Dennis isn’t in the mood for any more irritants at the end of this long day, and he sighs.

He enters the house to find Jim and Lucy arguing over something, as usual. “But Mom, the World Bank only lends them money if they grow cash crops that the bank approves of, and so then they don’t do subsistence farming and they can’t feed themselves, and then the cash crops market disappears, and so they have to buy their food from the World Bank, or beg for it, and they end up owned by the bank!” “Well, I don’t know,” Lucy says, “don’t you think they’re just trying to help? It’s a generous thing to give.” “But Mom, don’t you see the principle of the thing?” “Well, I don’t know. The bank lends that money with hardly any interest at all—it really is almost like giving, don’t you think?” “Of course not!”

Dennis goes back to the bedroom to change clothes. He doesn’t even want to have the day’s debate clarified. Jim and Lucy argue like that constantly, Lucy from the Christian viewpoint and Jim from the pseudo-socialist, both mixing large matters of philosophy with questions of daily life, and making a mash of everything. Lord. It’s just theoretical for the two of them, like debaters going at it to keep in practice; just one more part of their constant talk. But Dennis hates arguments, to him they’re no more than verbal fights that can make you furious and upset you for days after. He gets his fill of that kind of thing at work.

They’re still at it when Dennis comes back out to read the daily news on the video wall. WAR IN BURMA SPILLS INTO BANGLADESH. “Stop that,” he says to them.

They eye each other, Jim amused, Lucy frustrated. “Dennis,” she complains, “we’re just talking.”

“Talk, then. No bickering.”

“But we weren’t!” Still, Lucy gives up on it and goes to prepare dinner, telling Jim about members of her church, with Jim asking highly informed questions about people he hasn’t seen in ten years. Dennis scans the news and turns the wall off; tomorrow the headlines’ll say the same thing, artfully altered to appear original. WAR SPILLS INTO (pick country)—

They sit down to dinner, Lucy says grace, they eat. Afterward Jim says, “Dad, um, sorry to mention it, but the old car is tending to shift lanes to the right whether I want it to or not. I’ve done what I could to check the program, but… I didn’t find anything.”

“The problem won’t be in the program.”

“Oh. Ah. Well, um… could you take a look at it?”

The visit is explained. Irritated, Dennis gets up and goes outside without a word. The thing is, he’s over a barrel; the freeways are in fact dangerous, and if he refuses to fix Jim’s car and tries to make him learn to do a little work of his own, then next thing he knows he’ll get a call from the CHP to tell him the fool’s car has failed and he’s dead inside, and then Dennis will have to wish that he’d done the damn repair. So he drives the thing into the garage and goes at it, unscrewing the box over the switcher mechanism by the light of a big lamp set next to him on the floor.

Jim follows him into the garage and sits on the floor to watch. Dennis slides back and forth on the floor-sled, putting all the screws in one spot, testing the magnetic function of all the points in the switcher… ah. Two are dead, two more barely functional, and commands are being transferred right on through to the right-turn points, which explains the problem. Small moment of satisfaction as he solves the little mystery, which wasn’t, after all, so mysterious. Anyone could have found it. Which returns him to his irritation with Jim. There he sits, spaced out in his own thoughts, not learning a thing about the machine he relies on utterly to be able to lead his life. Dennis sighs heavily. As he replaces the points with spares of his own (and they’re expensive) he says, “Are you doing anything about getting a full-time job?”

“Yeah, I’ve been looking.”

Sure. Besides, what kind of job is he fit to apply for? Here he’s been going to college for years, and so far as Dennis can tell, he isn’t qualified to do anything. Clerk work, a little marginal night school teaching… can that really be it? Dennis gives a screw a hard twist. What can Jim do? Well… he can read books. Yes, he can read books like nobody’s business. But Dennis can read a book too, and he didn’t go to college for six years to learn how. And meanwhile, here he is out on his back after an eleven-hour day, fixing the kid’s car!

Time to make him help. “Look here, take that point and reach down from above and insert it into this slot here,” pointing up with the screwdriver.

“Sure, Dad.” And Jim moves around the motor compartment, blocking the floor lamp’s light, and leans down into it, the point between his fingers. “There we go—oops!”

“What’d you do?”

“Dropped it. But I can see where it went—down between the motor and the distributor—just a sec—” And he’s leaning down, stretched out over the motor, blocking Dennis’s light.

“What’re you doing?”

“Just about—uh-oh—”

Jim falls into the motor compartment. His weight sinks the front end of the car abruptly and Dennis, flat on his back underneath it, is almost crushed by the underbody.

“Hey! For God’s sake!”

It’s a good thing the car has decent shocks—put in by Dennis himself last year—otherwise he would have been pancaked. Very carefully he tries to roll from beneath the car, but the edge of the body hits his ribs and… well, he can’t scrape under it. “Get your feet back on the ground and take your weight off the car!”

“I, um, I can’t. Seem to have my hand—stuck under this thing here.”

“What thing here.”

“I guess it’s the distributor. I’ve got the point, but—”

“If you drop the point, can you get your hand free?”

“Um… no. Won’t go either way.”

Dennis sighs, shifts sideways until he tilts off the floor-sled, it bangs up against the car bottom and he slides down onto the garage floor, smacking the back of his head. A slow, awkward shimmy past the track pickups, which are pressed against the ground, and he’s out from under the car.

He stands, rubs the back of his head, looks at the waving legs emerging from under the hood of the car. It looks like the kid just up and dived headfirst into the thing. In fact that’s probably pretty close to what he did. Dennis takes a flashlight and directs its beam into the motor compartment; Jim’s head is twisted down and sideways against his chest.

“Hi,” Jim says.

Dennis points the flashlight at the end of Jim’s arm, where it disappears under the distributor. “You say you’ve let go of the point?”

“Yeah.”

Sounds like he’s had a clamp put on his throat. Dennis leans in, reaches down to the distributor, pulls the clips away and lifts the distributor cap. “Try now.”

Jim gives a sudden jerk up, his hand comes free and his head snaps back up into the hood of the car, knocking it off its cheap metal stand so that the hood comes down with a clang, just missing Dennis’s fingers and Jim’s neck. “Ow! Oops.”

Dennis looks over the frames of his garage glasses at Jim. He reopens the hood. He replaces the distributor cap. “Where did you say that point was?”

“I’ve got it,” Jim says, rubbing his head with one hand. With the other he holds the point out proudly.

Dennis finishes the job himself. As he screws the box back on he gives all the screws a really hard final twist; if Jim ever tries to get them loose (fat chance) he’ll know who screwed them in last.

“So how’s your work going?” Jim asks brightly, to fill the silence.

“Okay.”

Dennis finishes, closes up. “I’m going to have to be in Washington most of next week,” he tells his son. “Might be good if you came up an evening or two and had dinner here.”

“Okay, I’ll do that.”

Dennis puts the tools back in the tool chest.

“Well, I’m off now, I guess.”

“Say good-bye to your mom, first.”

“Oh yeah.”

Dennis follows him back in the house, shaking his head a little. Legs waving about in the air… kind of like a bug turned on its back.

Inside Jim says his farewells to Lucy.

“How come we haven’t seen Sheila lately?” Lucy asks him.

“Oh, I don’t know. We haven’t been going out that much, these last weeks.”

“That’s too bad. I like her.”

“Me too. We’ve just both been busy.”

“Well, you should call her.”

“Yeah, I will.”

“And you should give your uncle Tom a call too. Have you done that lately?”

“No, but I will, I promise. Okay, I’m off. Thanks for the help, Dad.”

Dennis can see him forgetting the promises to call even as he walks out of the door. “See you. Be careful,” he says. Try not to get stuck in your car’s motor compartment. As the door slams shut Dennis laughs, very shortly.