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by Brian Ames
Hughie and Moira stand in freezing air outside the driver’s door of Hughie’s Eldorado. Their breath
makes twin plumes in the night, and ice crystals are already forming on the windshield. Its frozen skin
crawls imperceptibly up the window from the dash to the roofline, forming a skein so slowly that watching
the sweep of a clock’s hour hand would seem, in comparison, like tracking the movement of light. But
this--the propagation of ice crystals on smooth safety glass--they do not watch: instead they watch
Hughie’s keys hanging from the ignition through the driver’s window. Lisa comes up from behind and
asks what’s the matter.
“Dammit, Hughie,” she says, after his palms-up explanation. “It’s fucking cold out here.”
They’ve just eaten a post-midnight supper inside the Denny’s, Hughie a chicken-fried steak and the girls
both pot pies. They sat in an upholstered booth, Hughie between the two young women like a tended
sultan. Although they are not consorts, simply devotees. They had talked for an hour and a half after
finishing their entrees, cream spiraling into bottomless coffee mugs. Talked about being clean and
sober, in the program, the Big Book, twelve steps. The Fellowship. The Promises found on Page 84.
Hughie is older than the two of them put together, a sagacious mentor who can, somehow, get a pair of
young women to run around with him on a Friday night with ardent alacrity. He'd given them a ride to the
clean-and-sober dance. They worship him, now, because what they worshipped for so long --albeit a
short time in comparison to some others--was no longer working. Moira and Lisa know this: When
Hughie speaks at meetings, he speaks wisdom by agency of fable and parable. It’s the wisdom they
crave now, more than the drink. He’s got it--they want it.
“I know darlin’,” he says, sighing, resigned to the frigid fact of his inattentive gaffe. “I know.”
The three make an assessment, bare hands stuffed in pockets for warmth. The night is as clear as
glass, with stars visible straight overhead, although not at the horizons where their light is overcome by
neon and streetlamps. Even though it’s past 1 a.m., cars continue up and down Auburn Avenue,
headlamps sweeping the puzzling trio as drivers traverse the intersection in front of the restaurant. It’s
twenty-five, maybe twenty-six degrees.
“I’ll go see if they got a coat hanger inside,” Moira says. Hughie thinks a coat hanger won’t work--the
Eldorado has electric locks.
“We gotta find somebody with a slim-jim,” he says. “Who knows where, at this time of night.”
He thinks a slim-jim would work, despite the electrics--they can work the lock mechanism from the slot
between the window and its rubber stripping. Poke and lever around down in there with the cold metal
strap and maybe--just maybe, if they’re lucky and the Higher Power grins down on them--pop the
mechanism.
“Jesus, it’s cold,” Lisa whines again. “Kind of thing makes you want a good shot of bourbon.”
Hughie eyes her with a level stare, a look that communicates he is about to impart a zealous saying. The
kind of thing members have on their bumper stickers.
“There’s no problem, ever, that alcohol can solve,” he states. Then adds, to make clear he understands
she was only half-serious, “except, perhaps, virginity.”
The girls giggle, their laughter rising like bubbles toward a bright, fresh star overhead. Hughie has a
notion maybe they could jimmy the trunk--one of the girls might be able to wriggle through the support
struts that give form to the back seat and separate it from the trunk space, if there’s access and room to
squeeze through there. He can’t remember ever noticing. But the trunk’s lock isn’t electric. Maybe one of
the girls has a key that will fit.
“Let me see your keys,” he says. Lisa points through the back window to a dark mass on the seat.
“Mine are in my purse.”
But Moira has a set. From fingertips already going numb, she extends them to Hughie. Their jingle
overfills the Denny’s lot like a tardy echo of the young women’s laughter. It occludes the sounds--
momentarily--of passing autos as it whorls and eddies into a bottleglass-spun heaven. He examines
each key for one that might fit the trunk’s lock, finds a likely candidate, shoves it in the hole. But it won’t
turn.
“Maybe they got a paperclip inside, or a stiff wire,” Moira suggests, accepting Hughie’s return of the
keys, stowing them in her jacket’s pocket. “You could pick it.”
Hughie grins--it’s been years and years since... but he could do it, has done it in the past. Picked a lock,
that is. He nods, his affirmation indicating one of the women should go in and inquire. Lisa says she’ll
go, shuffles across the frosty asphalt, leaving Hughie and Moira to assess, further, the gamut of possible
solutions.
“Maybe we should go in and warm up for a second,” Moira says.
“Naw, she’ll be back in a minute. We’ll have this open in no time.”
A police cruiser rolls by on the Avenue. Hughie and Moira watch the officer watch them--Moira suffers a
small bit of paranoia that is habitual. For her, so green, so recently on the deficient side of right and
wrong, the feeling that she is iniquitous--guilty--is inherent in even the most innocent encounter with any
sort of authority. She has only, just in the past few months, migrated toward that fulcrum where most of
humanity breathes in the golden oxygen of ethics. She has only understood, recently, the mishap of her
past six years as the manifestation of disease, an allergy with anguishing consequences. Hughie,
though, has defeated this concept--that alcoholics possess some unique measure of original sin. He has
grappled with it as Jacob wrestled the angel and overcame it, receiving unto himself a New Name:
Israel. Even so, Hughie knows that guilt snarls at the heels of the freshly sober even into the initial stages
of recovery. Possibly years into it, if the guilt has set down deep hooks. He spent decades hard-plowing
the fields of booze, piled up his own tottering list of transgressions. But that’s all over now. And this is his
car; the title’s in there to prove it, clamped to the sun visor. His registration, proof of insurance and
drivers’ license are in order. He is a productive citizen needing protection and service. He wants the cop
to stop.
But the cruiser continues down the Avenue in spite of Hughie’s raised, beckoning arm.
“Shit,” he tells the night. “He didn’t even slow down.”
Moira is glad the policeman continued his patrol rather than stopping to help. She offers Hughie no
rebuttal, and Lisa is halfway across the lot anyway, grasping a bobby pin one of the waitresses had dug
from her purse. Lisa hands the pin to Hughie, who smiles at its latent utility. Hughie takes the pin.
“The light,” he says, and gestures so Moira can see how her shadow falls across the lock. He nudges
her to one side with firmness but gentleness, and streetlight flashes from the chrome hasp. Hughie
kneels, knees on the cold blacktop, holds his mouth in a frown of concentration and will, inserts the pin.
By minute probings and explorations, he charts the lock’s topography. Its architecture is revealed to him
through subtle pressures on his fingerpads. Numbness has not yet colonized them, but it will soon, so he
must survey the lockscape briskly. It reveals its guts to him and his bobby pin. He records the positions
and ridges of tumblers and pins. Now that he has mapped his mission, he turns the pin twice,
depressing one, then two, then three tumblers. Moves the pin horizontally and down at fifteen- or twenty-
degrees approach. The lock clicks, gives, the trunklid raises on its springs.
“Ain’t lost my touch,” he says, trunk yawning as a wishing well. He stands over a balding spare tire, the
jack and lug wrench, a couple of boxes of literature, remnants of carpet that used to go quarter-panel to
quarter-panel. The odor of mildew emanates. He explains there may be access through the backseat, in
doing so indicates his round body is no candidate for the squeeze that may be required. Which one of
them--Moira or Lisa --will climb into his trunk and see whether there’s a way in? Lisa says no way in hell
is she getting in that trunk, climbing through all that crap, feeling around in the dark. All that musty carpet
and rusty bare steel...
Before Lisa can conclude her list of excuses Moira is over the trunk’s lip, hands down in the clutter, ass
in the air. “Don’t you dare shut it on me,” she orders as she disappears into the cavern. Her head and
upper torso vanish, the onset of a spelunking that may produce discovery or disappointment. Hughie,
who thinks of himself as past, or nearly past, the age where he is much influenced by carnal matters, is
surprised in a pleasant way that he cannot remove his eyes from the curve of her bottom, her tight jeans,
the way they hug and caress the valley between those well-proportioned half-globes. The way she moves
back and forth as she probes, up there where he can’t see, as if she is midway through the act of female-
dominant sex with an invisible partner trapped in pleasure underneath.
Hughie, as a young man in his twenties, used to watch a neighbor in her window. He’d step onto the
veranda of his apartment with a tumbler of whiskey and a cigarette, sit in a folding chair, ever hopeful.
Sometimes she would shower with her bathroom window open wide, step from the hot steam into view.
She would apply her towel and deodorant, raising her arms to reveal the soft curve of breasts. Hughie
would gulp his bourbon, draw at the smoke like a hog attacking a rasher of bacon. She’d step through
her wall into the bedroom--curtains never drawn--take a station at a settee to leisurely apply makeup, still
nude.
One morning Hughie stepped onto his veranda, disappointed to discover her curtains drawn. But as he
waited, she swept them aside and stood in the window full on, breasts high and round, pressed almost
into the glass. The view ended just below her navel. The woman’s gaze was as vacant as the alley
between them, forty feet between Hughie and her nakedness. There was no acknowledgement, no
seduction, no exhibitionistic motive, no approbation nor reproach apparent in her stare. Slowly, she
redrew the curtains and, as far as Hughie knew, never opened them again.
“What am I looking for?” he hears, muffled, from deep in the metallic cave of his Eldorado.
“See if you can feel for any of the seat fabric,” Hughie answers, bends down into the trunk as if closing
the distance will make his instructions all the clearer. “I’m trying to figure out whether there’s a solid wall
of metal between the trunk and the seat, or if the seat just kind of rests there and makes the wall itself--
do you get it?” Where Hughie has placed his head, he can just discern where Moira’s leather jacket
hangs open and her blouse has come untucked from her waistband. When she moves at a certain
angle, one cup of her brassiere is discernible--even if just mostly imagined in the small, stingy light. Even
so, Hughie finds the imagining delicious and prodigal.
“Yeah, I get it,” Moira is saying. Her fingers wander across hard nubbins of metal that are bolts cranked
around nuts, sealed, and painted over. Little flanges where steel has been spot-welded together, the
nipples of rivets. There are no cavities where she can thrust her wrist and feel for the inside springs or
fabric of a seat. It’s all solid. A barrier that cannot be breached. “There’s nothing here,” she declares.
“All right,” Hughie says, and Lisa utters an impatient oath in the chill behind them. Moira hoists herself
backward from the cave, Hughie arrested with the shape and arcs of her, the movements of her
pistoning legs and lunging hips as she extracts herself from the fruitless attempt.
“Watch your head,” he adds, as he monitors her thighs. But he recovers himself, reaching in to protect
her head from the sharp flange where the trunk’s hinges wait like jackal teeth. He’d hate for her to bark
that creamy skin on one of those nasty hinges. The open trunk births her back into bitter pre-dawn, an
outcome in which even the best, most honest and willing attempts to render problems powerless,
instead, leaves their solutions unrealized. Hughie tenders the bobby pin, which he has been grasping, to
his trousers pocket.
There is a moment of bewilderment as the trio contemplate a next course of action. This is not at all what
The Promises on Page 84 say: We will intuitively understand situations that used to baffle us, or
somesuch guarantee. The solution is fleeing them rather than coming home. They circle the car like
worried tugboats, crystals having sheeted, now, both the windshield and rear window. But now Moira
has an idea:
“What about a locksmith?”
“At this time of night?” Hughie asks. “I bet that’ll run a hundred, hundred and fifty bucks.”
“Oh,” Moira says, disappointed. She would like to be the one who solves Hughie’s--their--problem. And
stops Lisa’s looks of accusal and impatience. She’s starting to see, again, Lisa’s bitchy side, with
which she is well-acquainted. Moira and Lisa have grown up together, but Moira has evolved toward the
demure, assuming everyone else is always right, while Lisa makes a point of how stupid and ridiculous
everyone else is, how her will and her plans must take precedence. She is having a rough go at
acceptance, and always will. Her recovery, therefore, will be anguishing, if it holds. Moira looks at Lisa
now, who is shivering, glaring at Hughie with impatience.
“Well maybe you better do something!” Lisa nags.
“You got a hundred and fifty bones?” Hughie asks, still calm, but pointing at the fuming Lisa. “Either of
you? ‘Cause I don’t.”
A silent fuming descends on them.
“Why don’t you just go inside?” Moira suggests to Lisa. But Lisa only offers a pout. After a moment,
Hughie suggests they do, all three, go inside and warm up for a few minutes. The two women are about
to agree when the three of them hear a strange, whirring sound and the popping of rubber tires on
sidewalk. A man in a motorized wheelchair trundles toward them, humming and singing snatches of a
song. His progress is slow and zig-zaggy, not a straight line as a wheelchair might more efficiently draw
on pavement. He has, they suppose, emerged from The Dot, the tavern four businesses up the Avenue.
The man looks up and sees them gathered around Hughie’s Eldorado, takes their measure--friends or
foes?--motors his chair through a gap in the curb and pulls up. He surveys them, wonders through grain
alcohol about their situation. Maybe they’d give him some money, if he asks.
“What up?” the wheelchair man stammers.
It looks as if his legs have suffered some withering catastrophe. They are too small for his body, even
dangling, as they are, from a down parka that hides most of his frame. Hughie can tell just because of
the size of his head. He scrutinizes the chair-bound man, wonders whether this drunk-on-wheels can
possibly represent a contribution. In Hughie’s experience, the Higher Power has sent his agents in more
baffling disguises, that’s for sure. But a bird-legged booze-hound mumbling What up? in the icy night--it
seems unlikely.
“Locked my keys in,” Hughie says.
“We tried everything,” Lisa adds, “for about an hour.”
The wheelchair man accepts this information as if it is a passing comment about the frigidness of the
air. “Hmm,” he observes. He engages the chair motor with a flick of his gloved hand, the chair lurches to
a slow orbit around the Eldorado. “Tried a hanger?”
“Electric locks,” Hughie answers.
“Slim jim?”
“Nobody has one,” Moira explains.
The drunk man pulls up beside the driver’s window. Tries peering in but can’t see over the lip. Frost has
begun to assemble there as well, so even if he could get the angle he’d be unable to verify Hughie’s
keys suspended there.
“You checked your pockets?”
“Oh, they’re there,” Hughie says. “We seen ‘em.”
The man seems to gather thoughts like yarn into a ball, from tangled, wooly strings saturated in
dipsomania. His assembly of options, parsing through them like a slow, stumbling megahertz hierarchy,
resolves in one simple action.
"At your service,” the man announces, reaches behind him to a tube affixed to the back of the chair,
withdraws an umbrella and wields it like a ball-bat. Before anyone can react, he has wound up, and
powers--with biceps and forearms toned from years of self-propulsion before he got the electric-
motored conveyance--the umbrella through a resolving arc. The curled handle strikes the driver’s-side
window, its contact like a gunshot. A system of cracks webs the safety glass. Before Hughie can protest,
the man swings again, opening a small, baseball-sized hole at the web’s nexus, shards like a failed
pearl strand or falling teeth showering inward.
“Jesus God!” Hughie shouts, and Moira and Lisa step away. But it's too late--the wheelchair man winds
up once more and cavitates the window with a third sweep. Little pieces of safety glass lie everywhere,
inside and outside the Eldorado, some even gathered in the wheelchair man’s parka’d lap. He offers
Hughie the umbrella.
“Do you mind?” he asks. “It’s easier to get out than it is to put back.”
Hughie accepts the annihilator of his Eldorado’s driver’s-side window--the agent of its destruction, but
the solution to their immediate problem as well. He wonders for a moment whether he should knight the
man with it. Hughie has a foreign urge to bring it down on this besotted idiot’s skull, to crown him king of
vandals. Smash his fucking pumpkin-head to a pulp. He is convinced such a blow would uncover wet
brain-mush like a booze pudding.
Instead, shaking his head, he returns the umbrella to its plastic sleeve.
“Jesus, man,” he starts, and wonders what in the hell he can possibly say. “Uh, oh shit.” He looks from
the man back to his window, or rather, its absence. “I didn’t exactly want that. I mean, well, I could have
done that.”
“But you didn’t,” their deliverer states, gesturing at the shivering women, offering an assessment of
accusal. They’re freezing, his look seems to indict, close to hypothermia. Have the courage to change
the things you can.
Truly, in that moment, Hughie forgets the destruction of his window and what it will cost to replace. He
stands corrected and humbled in a night that seems arctic outside, but has grown tropical in his guts.
There is a certain wisdom in this rolling drunk. It is a certainty, the Higher Power can utilize anything or
anyone It wishes. And has done so, here, now. It is an odd acceptance, borne of years of practice, one
that Moira and Lisa would not understand. While they are amazed Hughie doesn’t retaliate, they--Lisa
particularly--are grateful they will soon be home under warm blankets. In fact Lisa, absurdly, now offers
the man a ride home. No thanks, he says, vodka-hot and stumbling over an explanation that he lives only
three blocks away on Third. He’ll just roll on home.
And so he engages the lever again, lurches forward mumbling as if mildly perturbed by the new power of
a good deed executed with great risk, but yet missing a proper compensation. “You’re welcome,” he
calls back over the chair, and the whirring of its motor fades in the more urgent passing of auto exhaust
from passersby.
Hughie reaches through the wreckage of his former window and retrieves the keys. Holds them up for
the women to see, displays them to Lisa’s lame clapping and silly exclamation: “Yay!” He unlocks the
door, it opens wide in his grasp, glass spilling onto his loafers. Bits cover the benchseat in front, and
have sprayed into the backseat as well, on the floormats, on the dash like a hoard of diamonds. He
removes his jacket to sweep them off the seats, hands Moira an ice-scraper he keeps under the front
seat. She starts scraping the windshield as he cleans the shards from inside the car. Lisa stands
hugging herself, immobile, useless and watching. When Moira has cleared the front window, she hands
the scraper pointedly to Lisa.
“You can do the back,” she orders, her demand as frost-coated as the window itself.
Cleanup finished, Hughie clicks the lock lever, the buttons leap up like sailors at attention on a scrubbed
deck. Moira slides into the front passenger seat, careful to ensure there is no more glass she might sit
on. Lisa joins her purse and keys in the back. Hughie sits behind the wheel, hauls his door closed and
fires the ignition. They all engage their safety belts. Hughie toggles the thermostat on full, engages drive
and pulls from the lot, wind picking up in the space that used to comprise the window. Lisa squeaks in
the back seat, the airstream’s edge growing increasingly arctic with each mile per hour Hughie
accelerates. She slides across the back seat, buckles in behind Moira. They are all silent and freezing
as Hughie crosses town to Lisa’s apartment. They drop her there, waiting at the curb to ensure she
arrives safety at her doorstoop and is inside. She barely uttered a goodnight as she left the car.
She will drink yet tonight, for the first time in more than seven months. Lisa, as she hunkers up the walk,
knows a bottle of whiskey waits for her inside, a decanter she refused to purge from her apartment in
those early weeks. Knowing, somehow, it would come in handy for post-trauma such as this.
Hughie and Moira drive toward Moira’s place, an apartment nine blocks from Lisa’s. They are quiet--
although there might be much to discuss, and they have consumed enough coffee for a small battalion.
The thermostat strains, blowing heat across them and out past Hughie and the empty frame. It cannot
keep pace with the icy air blowing in. Finally, Moira asks, “You got a seat belt in the middle?”
“Yep.”
“Mind if I move over?”
“No--but watch it, there might be glass I missed.”
Moira unbuckles her belt, slides over next to Hughie. Clicks the harness across her midriff. Despite the
cold, despite the fact Hughie is at the confluence of two independent, pressurized streams of air, one hot
from the blower, one freezing from the windowframe, her scent is discernible, and pleasant. He is at the
locus of a weather front, where hot meets cold, and could form a storm.
“I’m sorry about the window,” she says. “And about Lisa.”
“You need to keep clear on what you are responsible for,” he says. In his confusion he reverts to
proffering advice. “You aren’t responsible for any of that.”
“I’m still sorry.”
He thinks of another window, another time. The nude neighbor and his habitual voyeurism. That is
something he is not proud of, but which he has--he believes--dealt with and made, in his own way,
amends for. Now, next to him, is a pleasing surprise. She is like a visitor whom he hasn’t received for
two, no three, decades. He’s fifty-four, she may be twenty-three, twenty-four--something like that--and
clean but a few months. He is sober nineteen years. This is absurd. Still...
They are outside Moira’s apartment. She asks whether he will come in and get warm.
Can this be? A sudden, surprising offer for her to make, even as the words escape her teeth. Does the
inquiry in her soft, gray eyes belie confusion or state clarity?
Her question may envelop an entire cosmos. Considering this, Hughie and Moira stand in freezing air.
ABOUT BRIAN AMES:
"I write from St. Charles County, Missouri. My work appears in several
magazines, including The North American Review, Glimmer Train Stories,
The Massachusetts Review, Weber Studies, South Dakota Review, Night Train
and Wisconsin Review. I am the author of story collections “Smoke Follows
Beauty” (Pocol Press, 2002), “Head Full of Traffic” (Pocol Press, 2004)
and “Eighty-Sixed” (forthcoming from Word Riot Press, October 2004). I am
a fiction editor at Word Riot, and a former editor of Wind Row,
Washington State University’s literary journal."
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