She picked up the handset on the other side of the glass, her ruby-red nails clacking gently on the Bakelite handle. I had already started reflexively flinching so that by the time the full weight of invective had left her mouth I would not be completely destroyed.
“Is this about the two stroke V8?” was all she was curious about.
My two stroke V8. How did she know about it? Of course - I must have spoken of my white rabbit in the middle of the night, when the strange mist of unconsciousness clouds men’s minds and brings their true desires to light. I begin to hyperventilate and sweat, a reaction that does not go unnoticed. My visitor clicks the phone back onto its carrier, and gets up to leave. A futile attempt to rap on the glass, get her attention, get her to post bail, is unnoticed. I’m in here for the duration.
When I was a small child, I fell out of a fishing boat on a trip with the least alcoholic of my uncles. It wasn’t my fault; my uncle ripped the throttle a little hard and the torque buck knocked my uncoordinated eight-year-old ass plain out of the boat. I guess you could say that torque made me what I was today. Either way, by the time my head broke water again, I would never be the same.
I tried my best to keep the urges within me at bay. I moved to a landlocked state, stayed away from lakes, rivers, docks, even that booth at the annual carnival where there are little remote-controlled boats that you can drive around for five minutes in exchange for a dollar. Such a lust can never be kept at bay for long, and almost monthly I would find myself gazing at a passing boat on the highway, or be feeding an impulse-bought yachting magazine to my office shredder lest it consume me.
One night, I went to take out the trash. In front of my neighbour’s house, an Evinrude two-stroke V8 laid on the pavement, its passenger head gasket irretrievably blown. I knew him to be a man of means but little ability, and reckoned it could be fixed. It needed me, after all, and it would be rude to ignore the plight of this little motor just because I had a problem with nautical products.
I don’t remember exactly when I got fired from my job for not showing up anymore, but it was probably during the time when I was hand-welding long-runnered expansion chambers to get the crunchiest, nastiest sound and the most bone-crushing power out of my white whale. But an engine alone can’t take you somewhere, and as I contemplated my malaise further my roving eye settled, as if guided by my unconscious, on a nearby Dodge Diplomat, sinking on flat tires into the very macadam that I had retrieved the Evinrude from. It was provenance, and nobody would miss it.
My wife had suspicions, sure. The five o’ clock shadow on my face slowly became more of a lumberjack beard, and the garage evolved from a leftover-house-parts junk pile to its more lethal form of what looked at first glance like a Stacey David car show set on fire in slow motion. She didn’t say anything, not until that morning in county jail.
On the day I fired it up, the sky was the colour of a baby-boomer metaphor about analogue television, clouds hanging low over the not-colour of the sky. I had been tracking a persistent headache that refused to leave me for weeks on end, infecting my comprehension of all but the Diplomat. When I sat in it, or laid hands upon it, the haze would clear. Some part of me hoped that with this final turn of the key I would at last have a sharp, perfect view of my destiny.
It was not to be. Lured by my crackling wail, law enforcement could not help but be summoned. They found me outside the Cabela’s, the evidence of my two-dozen tire shredding donuts as plain on the parking lot as my trunk filled to the brim with specialty high-zinc Evinrude two-stroke oil. I was separated from the Diplomat, torn from the machine that allowed me to expose my most closeted boat impulses in broad daylight for all to see.
From my cell window as I awaited trial, I could see it sitting in the impound lot, its sagging sealed-beam headlight trim performing an anthropomorphized sad-puppy routine that I know would pull in another unsuspecting victim. Perhaps at the seized-property auction this saga would come full circle, an uncle and his favourite nephew, ready to scar another indelibly in the cruelly dwindling days of the two-stroke.
My cellmate liked boats, too. He wanted to tell me about the Carnival cruises he took, where he had killed his previous victims. Diesel, I thought to myself. It figured.
