Why Not You and I?

SHRAPNEL

It looked like the wreckage of a hundred stained glass windows, strewn across a desolate tangle of wasteland in a schizophrenic kaleidoscope.

The hood of the ’78 Marquis buckled in protest as Harmon shifted his not inconsiderable weight. He smeared sweat from his face with a sweatier arm and squinted against the piercing sunlight. Even from his vantage point atop the rusting Mercury, it was impossible to achieve any sense of direction amidst these thousands of wrecked cars.

At some point this had been farmland, although such was difficult to envision now. Whatever crops had once grown here had long ago leeched the red clay of scant nutrients. Fallow acres had lapsed into wild pasture where enough soil remained; elsewhere erosion scourged the slopes with red gashes, and a scrub-growth of pine, sumac, honeysuckle and briar grudgingly reclaimed the dead land. Grey knobs of limestone and outcroppings could almost be mistaken for the shapeless hulls of someone’s tragedy.

Harmon wished for a beer — a tall, dripping can of cold, cold beer. Six of them. He promised himself a stop at the first convenience store on the highway, once he finished his business here. But first he needed a fender.

“Left front fender. 1970 or ’71 Montego.”

“I think it will interchange with a ’70-’71 Torino,” Harmon had offered — too tired to explain that the fender was actually needed for a 197 °Cyclone Spoiler, but that this was Mercury’s muscle car version of the Montego, which shared sheet metal with Ford’s Torino, and anyway the woman who ran Pearson’s Auto Yard probably knew all that sort of stuff already She had just a dusting of freckles, and wheat-colored hair that would have looked striking in almost anything other than the regulation dyke haircut she had chosen. The name embroidered across the pocket of her freshly washed but forever grease-stained workshirt read Shiloh. Shiloh had just finished off a pair of redneck truckers in quest of certain axle parts incomprehensible to Harmon, and she was more than capable of dealing with him.

“Most of the older Fords are off along the gully along the woods there.” Shiloh had pointed. “If they haven’t been hauled to the crusher. There’s a row of fenders and quarter panels just beyond that. You wait a minute and Dillon or somebody’ll be here to look for you.”

The thundering air conditioner in the window of the cramped office might have been able to hold the room temperature at 80 if the door weren’t constantly being opened. Harmon felt dizzy, and he further felt that fresh air, however searing, was a better bet than waiting on an office stool for Dillon or somebody.

“You watch out for the dogs,” Shiloh had warned him. “If one of them comes after you, you just jump on top of something where they can’t get at you until Dillon or somebody comes along.”

Hardly comforting, but Harmon knew his way around junkyards. This was an acquaintance that had begun when Harmon had decided to keep the 1965 Mustang of his college days in running order. It had become part hobby, part rebellion against the lookalike econoboxes or the Volvos and BMWs that his fellow young suburban professionals drove each day from their energy-efficient homes in Brookwood or Brookcrest or Crestwood or whatever. Harmon happened to be an up-and-coming lawyer in his own right, thank you, and just now his pet project was restoring a vintage muscle car whose string of former owners had not been overly concerned with trees, ditches, and other obstacles, moving or stationary.

It was a better way to spend Saturday morning than on the tennis court or golf course. Besides, and he wiped his face again, it was good exercise. Harmon, over the past four years and at his wife’s insistence, had enrolled in three different exercise programs and had managed to attend a total of two classes altogether. He kept telling himself to get in shape, once his schedule permitted.

Just now he wished he could find Dillon or somebody. The day was too hot, the sun too unrelenting, for a comfortable stroll through this labyrinth of crumbled steel and shattered glass. He rocked back and forth on the hood of the Marquis, squinting against the glare.

“Yoo hoo! Mister Dillion! There’s trouble brewin’ on Front Street!”

Christ, enough of that! He was getting light-headed. That late-night pizza had been a mistake.

Harmon thought he saw movement farther down along the ravine. He started to call out in earnest, but decided that the general clatter and crash of the junkyard would smother his words. There was the intermittent mutter of the machine shop, and somewhere in the distance a tractor or towtruck, innocent of muffler, was dragging stripped hulks to their doom in the jaws of the yard’s crusher. Grunting, Harmon climbed down from the wreck and plodded toward where he thought he’d glimpsed someone.

The heat seemed worse as he trudged along the rutted pathway. The rows of twisted sheet metal effectively stifled whatever breeze there might have been, at the same time acting as grotesque radiators of the sun’s absorbed heat. Harmon wished he had worn a hat. He had always heard that a hat was a good thing to wear when out in the sun. He touched the spot on the top of his head where his sandy hair was inclining to thin. Unpleasant images of frying eggs came to him.

It smelled hot. The acres of rusted metal smelled like an unclean oven. There was the bitter smell of roasting vinyl, underscored by the musty stench of mildewed upholstery basted in stagnant rainwater. The palpable smell of hot metal vied with the noxious fumes of gasoline and oil and grease — the dried blood of uncounted steel corpses. Underlying it all was a sickly sweet odor that Harmon didn’t like to think about, because it reminded him of his smalltown childhood and walking home on summer days through the alley behind the butcher shop. He supposed they hosed these wrecks down or something, before putting them on the yard, but nonetheless…

Harmon’s gaze caught upon the sagging spiderweb of a windshield above a crumpled steering wheel. He shivered. Strange, to shiver when it was so hot. He seemed to feel his intestines wriggle like a nest of cold eels.

Harmon supposed he had better sit down for a moment.

He did.

“Morris?”

Harmon blinked. He must have dropped off.

“Hey, Morris — you OK?”

Where was he?

“Morris?” The voice was concerned and a hand was gently shaking him.

Harmon blinked again. He was sitting on a ruined front seat in the shade of an eviscerated Falcon van. He jerked upright with a guilty start, like a junior exec caught snoring during a senior staff meeting. Someone was standing over him, someone who knew his name.

“Morris?”

The voice became a face, and the face a person. Arnie Cranshaw. A client. Former client. Harmon decided to stop blinking and stand up. On the second try, he made it to his feet.

Cranshaw stared reproachfully. “Jesus! I thought maybe you were dead.”

“A little too much sun,” he explained. “Thought I’d better sit down in the shade for a minute or two. I’m OK. Just dozed off is all.”

“You sure?” Cranshaw wasn’t so certain. “Maybe you ought to sit back down.”

Harmon shook his head, feeling like a fool. ‘Til be fine once I get out of this heat. Christ, I’d kill for a cold beer right now!”

Not a well-chosen remark, he suddenly reflected. Cranshaw had been his client not quite a year ago in a nasty sort of thing: head-on collision that had left a teenaged girl dead and her date hopelessly crippled. Cranshaw, the other driver involved, had been quite drunk at the time and escaped injury; he also escaped punishment, thanks to Harmon’s legal talents. The other car had crossed the yellow line, no matter that its driver swore that he had lost control in trying to avoid Cranshaw, who had been swerving all over the road — and a technicality resulted in the DUI charges being thrown out as well. It was a victory that raised Harmon’s stock in the estimation of his colleagues, but it was no’t a victory of which Harmon was overly proud.

“Anyway, Morris, what are you doing here? ” Cranshaw asked. He was ten years younger than Harmon, had a jogger’s legs, and worked out at his health club twice a week. Nonetheless, the prospect of lugging a semiconscious lawyer out of this metal wasteland was not to Cranshaw’s liking.

“Looking for a fender for my car.”

“Fender-bender?” Cranshaw was ready to show sympathy.

“Someone else’s, and in days gone by. I’m trying to restore an old muscle car I bought back in the spring. Only way to find parts is to dig through junkyards. How about you?”

“Need a fender for the BMW.”

Harmon declined to press for details, which spared Cranshaw any need to lie about his recent hit-and-run encounter. He knew a country body shop that would make repairs without asking questions, if he located some of the parts. A chop shop wasn’t likely to respond to requests for information about cars with bloodstained fenders and such grisly trivia. They’d done business before.

Cranshaw felt quite remorseful over such incidents, but he certainly wasn’t one to permit his life to be ruined over some momentary lapse.

“Do you know where we are?” asked Harmon. He wasn’t feeling at all well, and just now he was thinking only of getting back into his little Japanese pick-up and turning the air conditioner up to stun.

“Well. Pearson’s Auto Yard, of course.” Cranshaw eyed him suspiciously.

“No. I mean, do you know how to get out of here?”

“Why, back the way we came.” Cranshaw decided the man was maybe drunk. “Just backtrack is all.”

Cranshaw followed Harmon’s bewildered gaze, then said, less confidently: “I see what you mean. Sort of like one of those maze things, isn’t it. They ought to give you a set of directions or something — like, ‘Turn left at the ’57 Chevy and keep straight on till you pass the burned-out VW bug.’”

“I was looking for one of the workers,” Harmon explained.

“So am I,” Cranshaw said. “Guy named Milton or something. He’ll know where to find our fenders, if they got any. Sort of like a Chinese librarian, these guys got to be.”

He walked on ahead, tanned legs pumping assertively beneath jogging shorts. Harmon felt encouraged and fell in behind him. “I thought I saw somebody working on down the ravine a ways,” he suggested to Cranshaw’s back.

They seemed to be getting closer to the crusher, to judge by the sound. At intervals someone’s discarded dream machine gave up its last vestiges of identity in great screams of rending, crumpling steel. Harmon winced each time he heard those deathcries. The last remaining left front fender for a ’7 °Cyclone might be passing into recycled oblivion even as he marched to its rescue.

“I don’t think this is where I want to be going,” Cranshaw said, pausing to look around. “These are pretty much stripped and ready for the crusher. And they’re mostly Ford makes.”

“Yes. Well, that’s what I’m trying to find.” Harmon brightened. “Do you see a ’70 or ’71 Montego or Torino in any of these?”

“Christ, Morris! I wouldn’t know one of those from a Model T. I need to find where they keep their late-model imports. You going to be all right if I go on and leave you here to poke around?”

“Sure,” Harmon told him. The heat was worse, if anything, but he was damned if he’d ask Cranshaw to nursemaid him.

Cranshaw was shading his eyes with his hand. “Hey, you were right. There is somebody working down there. I’m going to ask directions.”

“Wait up,” Harmon protested. He’d seen the workman first.

Cranshaw was walking briskly toward an intersection in the rows of twisted hulks. “Hey, you!” Harmon heard him call above the din of the crusher. “Hey, Milton!”

Cranshaw turned the corner and disappeared from view for a moment. Harmon made his legs plod faster, and he almost collided with Cranshaw when he came around the corner of stacked cars.

Cranshaw was standing in the middle of the rutted pathway, staring at the mangled remains of a Pinto station wagon. His face looked unhealthy beneath its tan.

“Shit, Morris! That’s the car that I…”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Arnie. All burned-out wrecks look alike.”

“No. It’s the same one. See that porthole window in back? They didn’t make very many of that model. Shit!”

Harmon had studied photos of the wreck in preparing his defense. “Well, so what if it is the car. It had to end up in a junkyard somewhere. Anyway, I don’t think this is the same car.”

“Shit!” Cranshaw repeated, starting to back away.

“Hey, wait!” Harmon insisted.

A workman had materialized from the rusting labyrinth. His greasy common-placeness was initially reassuring — faded work clothes, filthy with unguessable stains, and a billed cap too dirty for its insignia patch to be deciphered. He was tall and thin, and his face and hands were so smeared and stained that Harmon wasn’t at first certain as to his race. The workman carried a battered tool box in one hand, while in the other he dragged a shapeless bag of filthy canvas. The eyes that stared back at Harmon were curiously intent above an expressionless face.

“Are you Dillon?” Harmon hoped they weren’t trespassing. He could hear a dog barking furiously not far away.

The workman looked past Harmon and fixed his eyes on Cranshaw. His examination of the other man seemed frankly rude.

“Are you Milton?” Cranshaw demanded. The workman’s name across his breast pocket was obscured by grease and dirt. “Where do you keep your late-model imports?”

The workman set down his tool box and dug a limp notebook from a greasy shirt pocket. Licking his fingers, he paged through it in silence. After a moment, he found the desired entry. His eyes flicked from the page to Cranshaw and back again.

“Yep,” he concluded, speaking for the first time, and he made a checkmark with a well-chewed pencil stub. Returning notebook and pencil to shirt pocket, the workman knelt down and began to unlatch his tool box.

Harmon wanted to say something, but his mouth was too dry to speak, and he knew he was very much afraid, and he wished with all his heart that his legs were not rooted to the ground.

Ahead of him, Cranshaw appeared to be similarly incapable of movement, although from the expression on his face he clearly seemed to wish he were anyplace else but here.

The tool chest was open now, and the workman expertly made his selection from within. The tool chest appeared to contain mainly an assortment of knives and scalpels, all very dirty and showing evidence of considerable use. If the large knife that the workman had selected was a fair sample, their blades were all very sharp and serviceable.

The canvas bag had fallen open, enough so that Harmon could get a glimpse of its contents. A glimpse was enough. The arm seemed to be a woman’s, but there was no way of telling if the heart with its dangling assortment of vessels had come from the same body.

Curiously, once Harmon recognized that many of the stains were blood, it seemed quite evident that much of the dirt was not grease, but soot.

The sound of an approaching motor was only a moment’s cause for hope. A decrepit Cadillac hearse wallowed down the rutted trail toward them, as the workman tested the edge of his knife. The hearse, converted into a work truck, was rusted out and so battered that only its vintage tailfins gave it identity. Red dust would have completely masked the chipped black paint, if there hadn’t been an overlay of soot as well. The loud exhaust belched blue smoke that smelled less of oil than of sulfur.

Another grimy workman was at the wheel. Except for the greasy straw cowboy hat, he might have been a double for the other workman. The doors were off the hearse, so it was easy to see what was piled inside.

The hearse rolled to a stop, and the driver stuck out his head. “Another pick-up?”

“Yeah. Better get out and give me a hand here. They want both right and left leg assemblies, and then we need to strip the face. You got a three-inch flaying knife in there? I left mine somewhere.” Then they lifted Cranshaw, grunting a little at the effort, and laid him out across the hood.

“Anything we need off the other?” the driver wondered.

“I don’t know. I’ll check my list.”

It was very, very hot, and Harmon heard nothing Someone was tugging at his head, and Harmon started to scream. He choked on a mouthful of cold R.C. and sputtered foam on the chest of the man who was holding the can to his lips. Harmon’s eyes popped open, and he started to scream again when he saw the greasy workclothes. But this black face was naturally so, the workman’s eyes showed kindly concern, and the name on his pocket plainly read Dillon.

“Just sip on this and take it easy, mister,” Dillon said reassuringly. “You had a touch of the sun, but you’re going to be just fine now.” Harmon stared about him. He was back in the office, and Shiloh was speaking with considerable agitation into the phone. Several other people stood about, offering conflicting suggestions for treating heat stroke or sun stroke or both.

“Found you passed out on the road out there in the yard,” Dillon told him. “Carried you back inside here where we got the air conditioner running.”

Harmon became aware of the stuttering howl of an approaching siren. “I won’t need an ambulance,” he protested. “I just had a dizzy spell is all.”

“That ambulance ain’t coming for you,” Dillon explained. “We had a bad accident at the crusher. Some customer got himself caught.”

Shiloh slammed down the phone. “There’ll be hell to pay!” she snapped.

“There always is,” Harmon agreed.