“She looks up at me, cold green eyes, eyes like the water under the Bay Bridge when you go fishing. ’What?’ she says in this tiny little voice.
“ ’Christ, I don’t know: this is crazy. But tell me, do you … I mean, you wouldn’t happen to have a penis by any chance?’
“Suddenly her eyes look like they’re sinking into her head, her pupils shriveling up, and she looks like she’s about to cry. And then she holds her hand up in front of my face, two fingers an inch apart. ’Yes,’ she whispers, and I jerk back as if my shirt’s on fire, ’but it’s only a little one.’ “
It must have been around seven when we hit the outskirts of Willits. The sun was dropping in the west and igniting the yellow grass of the hills, trees began to leap up along the road, and we passed a succession of neat little houses, as alike as pennies. Gesh was asleep, his head propped up on one arm and playing to and fro like a toy on a spring. I was thinking of the summer camp, of the plants flourishing in the stark sun, of the candy man who was going to buy the whole crop — cash up front — and of what I could do with a hundred and sixty-six thousand dollars, when I noticed that the car in front of me, a VW Bug of uncertain vintage, was behaving erratically. The car had slowed to a crawl and seemed to be listing to the right, as if the road had given way beneath it. As I drew closer and swung out to pass, I saw that the car was mottled with primer paint, bumper-blasted and rusted, and that the right front tire was flat to the rim.
I was already accelerating, humping up alongside to roar past and reduce the crippled Bug to a dot in the rearview mirror, when I turned to glance at the driver. What I saw was arresting: eyes you could fall into, a nimbus of black ringlets, the long, sculpted fingers and the open palm waving frantically for help. There was a desperation in that face, a needfulness that made my heart turn over. What she saw in return could hardly have inspired confidence — i.e., the battered Toyota, Gesh’s big lolling shaggy head, my intrusive eyes and sweat-plastered hair — but she waved all the harder. My foot fell back from the accelerator.
Having been raised in New York, I was accustomed to turning my back on all such appeals for aid from strangers. I routinely gave the stiff arm to panhandlers, slammed the door in the faces of Bible salesmen, Avon ladies and Girl Scouts, ground the receiver into its cradle at the hint of a solicitation and strenuously avoided all scenes of human misery and extremity. Ignore him, my mother would say of a man twisted like a burned root, the stubs of three crudely sharpened pencils clenched in his trembling fist. Don’t get involved, she’d hiss as a couple slugged it out over a carton of smashed eggs in the supermarket parking lot. But this was different. This was no half-crazed wino, wife-beater or terminal syphilitic — this was a flower, a beauty, a girl with a face that belonged to Amigoni’s Venus. She pulled over to the shoulder, her damaged wheel rim clanking like a cowbell, and I swung up just ahead of her.
She was agile, urgent, pouring from the car in a spill of flesh. Nike sneakers, satiny blue jogger’s shorts, a halter that left her shoulders and navel bare. Gesh had momentarily jolted awake as I rumbled up onto the shoulder, but now he drifted off again, snores ratchetting mechanically through his dried-up nostrils. I stepped out of the car.
“Oh, listen, thanks a lot,” she gasped, snatching for breath like a miler. “I’m really glad somebody stopped — have you got a jack?”
She was standing directly in front of me now, too close in her urgency, shoulders shrugged and palms spread in entreaty. Her mouth was wide, nose cut like an L, skin dark. Italian, I thought. Or Greek.
“Because I don’t know what happened to mine. I must’ve loaned it to somebody or something. Anyway, I’ve got a spare, and if you could just let me borrow your jack for a minute …”
I realized I’d been staring at her like a deaf-mute under sedation, and wrenched my face into a broad grin. “Sure, of course, no problem,” I barked, swinging round to work open the trunk.
“I hit something about three miles back,” she explained, peering into the trunk full of fast-food wrappers, rags, laundry, tools, cans of spray paint, torn tennis sneakers, and lurid paperbacks. “I figured I could limp into town, but then the rim started to go on me and all of a sudden the car was shaking like a roller coaster or something. Well, that was it. I started to get afraid for my pieces …”
I glanced up inquisitively, jack in hand.
“My pottery. I’m a potter. In Willits?” She took the jack from me as casually as if I were handing her a canapéeA at a cocktail party. “I’m right on Oak Street — it’s just a little place, Petra’s Pots. Between the real-estate office and the barbershop.”
A mobile home the size of a DC-7 rumbled by as she bent to maneuver the jack under the frame of the VW and give the jack handle two quick twists. I stood above her, watching the coils of hair play across her bare shoulders, and then peered through the window of her car and saw that the back seat was stacked with flats of ceramic mugs and matching cream-and-sugar sets. Larger pieces — they could have been bongs or samovars for all I knew — were wrapped in newspaper and wedged into the floor space on the passenger’s side. “Need any help?” I asked.
She was squatting beside the wheel now, fitting the cruciform wrench to the first of the wheel lugs, and she paused to glance up at me with a wide white smile: “No, thanks,” she said, “I’m not the helpless type.” Then she turned back to her work, and I watched her arms harden as she fought the lug. It wouldn’t give. She strained until her shoulders began to tremble, then rose to her feet for better purchase.
“You’re supposed to spit on your hands,” I said, and she laughed.
Then she attacked the recalcitrant lug once more, throwing her entire body into it, teeth gritted, eyes clenched, halter bursting. Nothing. I watched her smugly, greedily — it was my right and privilege to study this beautiful woman, this stranger, because my stopping to help had forced us into an intimacy of purpose, and I knew it would be only a matter of moments before she would turn to me for the muscle she lacked. “Wow,” she said finally, “that’s a bitch,” and she stood to wipe her hands on her shorts.
“Mind if I give it a try?” I said, arms folded across my chest.
“It must be frozen on,” she said. “You know, rusted,” but she was smiling softly, capitulating, and we both recognized that she was yielding ground, casting off the mantle of the woman warrior, if only for a moment.
As I bent to the wheel, I asked her if she was from Buffalo or Rochester, having detected a trace of vowel strangulation in her accent. “I was just curious,” I added. “I’ve got a lot of friends from up around there.”
“Chicago,” she said, flattening the a. “My name’s Petra, but I guess I already told you that.”
I smiled up at her, gripping the prongs of the lugwrench like Samson fastening on the jawbone of an ass, introduced myself in a gasp and gave the wrench a mighty jerk. Nothing happened. “Tight,” I grunted, flexing the muscles in my back.
“You from around here?” she said.
I jerked at the lug. It was immovable. With exaggerated care, as though the tool must be defective, I slipped the wrench from the lug and studied it.
“I mean,” she prompted, “you look familiar to me.”
“Oh,” I said, judiciously fitting the wrench to another lug and preparing to slip every disc, rupture every muscle, and herniate myself into the bargain with one murderous herculean thrust, “not really. We live in Palo Alto, actually. But we just”—I broke off to jerk savagely at the wrench—“but we just like come up on weekends to go, to go”—I was running sweat, furious, distracted, and I nearly shouted the final word—“fishing.”