Shirl said, “Aaah? Pay attention to me, Tash. I’m supposed to go to Generoso and say aaah? Like he’s some kind of goddamn dentist?”
Tashmo said, “Not aaah, aaa-guh. From the gut, Shirl. Try it for me once.”
Generoso was their family mechanic. He ran Generoso’s Citgo on the Balt-Wash in New Carrollton. The truck had an appointment in the morning. Tashmo had planned to drive the truck to Generoso’s with Shirl on his tail, describe the aaagh, the distinctly leftward drag, the sawing of the starter, then drive home in Shirl’s car and let the old mechanic work his magic. But Movements had ruined a good nap, putting Tashmo on deployment until Tuesday, which meant that Shirl would have to get the truck to Generoso’s on her own.
She sipped her sweet iced tea. “Goddamn stupid toy.”
So it was officiaclass="underline" she was really pissed, and he, for one, knew why. She thought that he was going north to chase other women, as he once did, but didn’t anymore. He wanted to tell her that he didn’t anymore, but this would have required admitting that he did, once, or more than once, more than once a week in fact. So he was trapped again, ketchuping his fries, a lacy, spiral pattern, as Shirl made that nervous clucking noise.
Age had mugged them both, but Tashmo was defiant. His hair was gray, though still his own and thick enough to pompadour. He refused to trim his sideburns to the fashion or stop dressing as he dressed, in yoked suits with slash pockets, a style called contemporary westernwear. Gretchen Williams wouldn’t let him wear the bolo ties, even though a suit with yoking and no bolo tie looked ridiculous. Why couldn’t Gretchen see this? Never mind, fuck her — he loved his dudeish suits. They made him look, with the ’burns and the pomp and the zippered boots, like the carny-barking stock car impresarios he had worshiped as a kid. This was what he had planned to be when he was old, when he was young and planned for being old.
He chewed a fry and thought about a town called Falling Rock, the place where he was young, the grassland flats of eastern North Dakota. They used to hang out by the highway, Tashmo and his high school friends, drinking beer, pooling their pornography, and watching motorists mistake the city limits sign for a Highway Department warning. The motorists would brake behind their windshields, peering out for any sign of falling rock, or any height it might fall from. Tashmo and his buddies hunted through the grass, gathering stones, which they threw at passing cars. They gathered stones and talked about the future endlessly. One kid was going into radio, another to pro baseball, probably the Cubs, a third to the pipelines like his paw, and a fourth to glamorous stock car/funny car impresariodom, and this was the young-ass Tashmo. The kid who was going into radio already had a half-hour show on a twenty-watter in Fort Scott, beaming surfer hits — you could hear him all the way to Minnesota. The kid who planned to be a Cub could hit the city limits sign, a blue-sky peg and a satisfying ding. Tashmo loved the action of boys throwing rocks — the windup, the sliding sneaker-scrape, the click of elbow-wrist, the unt of shoulder muscle. Stay motionless until it hits, only a punk would turn his back and not watch it fall. Funny — when they talked about the future, no one even mentioned Southeast Asia.
Of the four boys throwing rocks, three went to Vietnam. Two came home, one with medals, one with legs, and this again — the boy with no medals and two legs — was Tashmo. He was in the Air Cav, ’68 and ’69. He saw true courage in Chu Lap and Ha Bong and decided that it wasn’t up his alley. He scammed his way through the rest of his tour as a chaplain’s aide, Spec 4. The chaplain was a brimstone Presbyterian from Texas. They toured the wounded tents together, passing out peppermints and reading from the Good Book. When the chaplain wasn’t looking, Tashmo charged the GIs two condoms for a dramatic reading. The soldiers loved his Fats Domino rendition of the Song of Solomon, Your breasts are like great goblets, your eyes are like great jewels, your arms are like great boughs, and your momma ain’t around. This was how he saved his legs in Vietnam.
He went to North Dakota State on the GI Bill, a twenty-two-year-old freshman, majoring in Business, English, Ag, Engineering, Ag again — he had more majors than the Army and they were about as relevant. He went to a football game in Grand Forks that November, State v. U, the homecoming. He sat next to a girl named Shirley Skurdahl, a one-in-fifty-thousand shot. They did the Wave and started chatting, and quickly realized that they had a lot in common. Shirl came from Blankenship, near Hebron, near Fort Scott, near Vercingetorix, which was only two exits from Falling Rock, which made them neighbors, nearly. They had grown up ninety miles and eighteen months apart, loving and believing the same things. They both thought the sideburned, ankle-booted racetrack impresarios were cool, the coolest, deliveries of cool from Californeeay, and even now, a lifetime and two daughters later, Tashmo was a version of these dudes, admittedly a pension-fully-vested, upper P.G. County, married-filing-jointly, no-thank-you-we’re-quite-happy-with-our-present-phone-provider version of these dudes, but still, he loved his suits and boots, his pool hall El Ranchero look, and he always would. Shirl loved it too and always would, but she didn’t understand that no one else loved the look, east of Forks, south of fifty. He had tried many times in the last few years to say or imply or insinuate that she didn’t need to worry when he went away, that he was finally faithful, finally settled, finally hers, but she wouldn’t let it go, this image of her husband as a stud. No woman wants a man no woman wants. She couldn’t see him as a relic of past futures, because what would that make her? Jealousy is vanity eventually, he thought.
Shirl ran the disposall. “Well I won’t say ugh.”
“Aaa-guh. And don’t forget: leftward. Generoso needs to know.”
Generoso had fixed every car they had ever owned since the microbus with the little sink and faucets which connected to nothing and the manual in German, making the car care tips seem all the more achtungful. Tashmo didn’t like taking orders from the Krauts, and was never big on car care, which was probably why that piece of shit was always on the fritz. They drove it up to Philly for the Bicentennial and had to get it towed by this real witty black guy in an afro. Mandy was a baby, Ford was president, and Tashmo was a trainee agent, buried in Baltimore, the Crim Division, working for a special agent in charge who liked to cut out early and watch the Orioles take batting practice.