They call me Hellhound : My name is Jake Carter

Regular Guy Problems

The thing nobody tells you about a 2011 Malibu is that whoever owned it before did something unforgivable to it, and you will be the one who finds out what.

I was on my back under this one with a drop light hooked to the subframe, looking up at a control arm bushing that had been replaced by a man who I can only assume hated his family. Somebody had shimmed it. With a washer. Not a spacer, not a proper sleeve. A washer, and then a second washer, and then what I’m pretty sure was a third washer that had given up on life and welded itself into the assembly through the sheer power of Michigan road salt.

“Yo.” Darius kicked my boot. “Jake.”

“Busy.”

“You been under there forty minutes.”

“That’s because a wizard built this car.”

Above me, the shop radio was losing an argument with the TV. Ray kept a flatscreen bolted up in the corner by the parts counter, angled so customers in the waiting area could watch it and so nobody working could avoid it. The volume was always three notches too loud. That morning it was tuned to whatever channel runs hero coverage on a loop, which is most of them now, which is one of the many reasons I don’t own a television.

Darius kicked my boot again.

I slid out.

He was standing there with a buffer in one hand and a Faygo in the other, wearing coveralls unzipped to the waist like he was on a magazine cover instead of in a garage on Yale Street with a hole in the roof we’d patched twice. Darius Hill has never once in his life let a job make him look bad. The man details cars for a living and dresses like he’s about to be photographed doing it.

“What,” I said.

“Ray’s asking about the Malibu.”

“Ray can come ask me himself.”

“Ray did come ask you himself. Twice. You said, and I’m quoting, ‘mm.’”

“That’s an answer.”

“It’s a sound.”

I sat up, wiped my hands on the rag hanging out of my back pocket, and looked at the underside of the car with the specific hatred you develop for an object that has personally wronged you. “It’s got three washers in the front left bushing.”

Darius whistled low. “Three?”

“Three.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah.”

“Who does that?”

“A man with a washer and a dream.”

Darius laughed, which is one of the reasons he’s my best friend. Most people, you say something stupid, they wait a beat to decide whether it was worth laughing at. Darius just goes.

The TV picked that moment to get louder. They do that on purpose, I’m convinced — the segment music swells so you look up, and once you look up they’ve got you.

I looked up. Everybody looks up.

It was the ranking show. It’s always the ranking show. Two people at a curved desk in a studio the color of a hospital, sitting in front of a graphic that said AMERICA’S TOP 10 — Q3 UPDATE, and behind them, ten photos in a grid, lit like a boy band poster.

Number one was Aegis. Number one is always Aegis. Nathaniel Grant, forty-two years old, gray coming in at the temples in a way that focus groups apparently love, standing on a collapsed overpass somewhere in Ohio with one hand raised and about nine hundred tons of concrete hanging in the air above him like it was waiting for permission. Gravity manipulation. Fifth Class. The kind of man who looks like he’s already been carved into a monument and is just waiting for everyone else to catch up.

“—and of course the big story this quarter is Tempest holding at number three,” one of the anchors was saying, “which some analysts are calling a soft finish for someone with her raw capability—”

“Soft finish,” Darius repeated. “She dropped a storm on a wildfire in June. On purpose. That’s soft?”

“Collateral numbers were up,” I said.

“You watch this?”

“I hear it. Constantly. Against my will. Like tinnitus.”

They cut to footage of her anyway. They always cut to footage of her, because she’s got platinum hair and cheekbones you could open mail with and when she’s actually working, her eyes go this pale color like the inside of a cloud and her hair lifts straight off her shoulders and every camera in a two-mile radius points at her whether the operator meant to or not. Alexandra Monroe. Tempest. Number three in America. In the clip she was maybe four hundred feet up over a burn line in Northern California with the whole sky going green-black behind her, and then the rain came down in a sheet so hard and so sudden that the drone footage juddered.

“Okay,” Darius said. “See, that’s tight. You can’t tell me that’s not tight.”

“It’s tight,” I admitted.

“There he is.” Ray’s voice, from the parts counter. “The mechanic. Ladies and gentlemen.”

Ray Foster is fifty-two years old, built like a fire hydrant that lifts, and has exactly one facial expression, which he deploys at different volumes. He was standing there in his glasses with a work order in his hand and his reading glasses pushed up on his head, which meant he had two pairs of glasses on his person and was using neither.

“Ray.”

“Malibu.”

“Somebody put three washers in the front bushing.”

Ray’s eyebrows moved about a millimeter. In Ray, that’s a gasp. “Three.”

“Three.”

“Show me.”

“You want to get on the ground?”

“I want you to tell me you’re gonna have it out by four, because Mrs. Aldridge is coming at four, and Mrs. Aldridge is a woman who has never in her life been late to anything, and I’m not standing at that counter explaining washers to her.”

“It’ll be out by four.”

“Say it like you mean it.”

“It’ll be out by four, Raymond.”

“Don’t call me Raymond.”

“Sorry, Ray.”

He pointed the work order at me the way other men point a finger, and went back to the counter, and that was the whole conversation. That’s Ray. He’ll ride you about a deadline and then, if you ever needed a place to sleep, he’d hand you a key without making you ask, and then never mention it again, and if you brought it up he’d tell you you were blocking the bay.

I’ve worked at Foster Auto & Body for four years. Ray gave me the job three weeks after my life fell apart, and he never once asked me why a kid straight out of high school needed steady work that badly, and I have never once told him.

* * *

Around one, the front bell went off and the day got better.

She came in wearing a denim jacket over a summer dress, sunglasses pushed up in her hair, holding her keys in that way people do when they’re annoyed at a machine and don’t know how to be annoyed at it correctly. Dark hair. Real smile, not the customer-service one. She looked around the shop like she’d never been in one, which she probably hadn’t, and then she looked at me, and then she looked at me again, which is a different thing.

I set the wrench down.

“You in charge?” she said.

“Depends what’s wrong.”

“That’s not a no.”

“It’s not a yes either.”

Behind me I heard Darius make a noise into his soda can.

Her car was an eight-year-old Civic making a noise she described, generously, as “a kind of screamy thing when I turn left.” I walked out with her, popped the hood, listened to her start it, told her it was a belt and the tensioner behind it, quoted her a number, and watched her decide whether to believe me. People always decide whether to believe you. It’s the whole job. The wrenching is easy.

“That seems low,” she said.

“It’s a belt.”

“My last guy quoted me four hundred.”

“Your last guy saw the dress.”

She laughed. She had a good laugh, big for her, the kind that surprises you and then surprises her. “And you’re not seeing the dress?”

“Ma’am, I’m a professional.”

"Ma’am."

“Ninety percent professional.”

She wrote her number on the bottom of the estimate slip before she handed it back, which is a thing that happens to me more than it probably should and less than I’d like, and she said, “For when it’s done,” in a tone that made it real clear the car wasn’t the point, and she left, and I stood there in the sun for a second holding a piece of carbon paper like an idiot.

Darius was in the bay door before I turned around.

“Nope,” I said.

“I didn’t say nothing.”

“You were loud about it.”

“You didn’t even get her name.”

“It’s on the work order, D. That’s how work orders function.”

“Unbelievable.” He shook his head slowly, with real reverence, like a man watching a home run leave the park. “You know what your problem is?”

“I’m about to.”

“You don’t even try. That’s what kills me. I gotta go out there with a personality. You just stand there covered in grease looking like you fell off a motorcycle, and women hand you paperwork with their phone number on it.”

“I’m gonna go put a belt on a Civic.”

“That’s what I’m saying! You don’t even celebrate!”

* * *

The rest of the shift was the rest of a shift. I got the Malibu’s bushing out at ten to four, which counts as by four in any court in this country, and Mrs. Aldridge arrived at 3:59 and paid in cash and asked Ray whether we’d washed it, and Ray said we had, and Darius had, because Darius washes everything.

Around five I was pulling a manifold off a Silverado that had come in overheating, and I got careless.

That’s the honest word for it. Careless. The truck had been running an hour before it came in and I had the fan on it, and I reached in for the bolt at the back and my forearm went flat against the manifold — the actual manifold, not the shield, bare metal that had been carrying exhaust gas at four hundred degrees plus.

And I felt it. That’s important. I want to be clear that I felt it, because people always think it doesn’t hurt, and it does. It just doesn’t do anything else.

It was like leaning on a warm radiator. Uncomfortable. Not urgent.

I pulled my arm back at a normal speed and said “shit” at a normal volume, because a man whose arm touches a hot manifold says shit, and if he doesn’t, somebody notices.

Nobody noticed. Darius had a buffer going on a Tahoe. Ray was on the phone with a parts distributor, doing the thing where he says “mm-hm” nine times and then says a number.

I looked down at my forearm. The skin was pink where it had touched, a little raw, like a mild sunburn. It’d be gone by morning.

I put my sleeve down.

Twenty-two years old and I still do the math on everything. Every day. How fast did I move, how loud was I, did anybody see, was that a normal amount of strength for a guy my size, is this the thing that finally makes somebody go huh. You’d think it gets easier. It gets automatic, which is different. It’s like walking with a limp for so long you forget you’re doing it, and then some morning you catch yourself in a window and go, oh, right. That’s me. That’s what I look like from outside.

My mother taught me that math when I was eight years old. She sat me down at the kitchen table and she didn’t tell me I was special. She told me I was going to be careful, and she said the word careful the way other parents say the word hot when a kid reaches for a stove.

* * *

We closed up at six-thirty. Ray killed the compressor and the shop got that big empty sound it gets when the air stops, and Darius pulled the bay door down, and the TV was still going because the TV is always still going.

They’d looped back around to the ranking show. Aegis again. Then a chyron: VANGUARD RESPONDS TO WAREHOUSE FIRE, EAST SIDE — NO CASUALTIES, and footage of a guy in navy tactical armor standing on a loading dock with his hand out, and a falling section of burning roof simply... turning. Going sideways instead of down, into open air, into the lot, away from the four firefighters underneath it.

“Sentinel,” Darius said, respectfully. He knows all their names. He knows their classes. “Ethan Cole. That’s vector manipulation, that’s not even strength, he just tells it where to go.”

“Mm.”

“Vanguard’s underrated, man. They ain’t flashy but they show up. That’s a Detroit thing. Nobody gives us credit for nothing.”

Behind him on the screen, a woman in black and silver dropped down off the dock with electricity crawling blue-white along the channels in her sleeves, hair up, saying something to a firefighter that made him laugh in the middle of a burning lot. The chyron said VOLTAGE.

Darius was quiet for a second, watching, and then he said it. The thing people say. The thing people have said to me approximately nine thousand times in my life without ever once knowing what they were doing.

“You ever wish you had powers?”

I picked my jacket up off the tool chest and put it on.

Somewhere in that building on the screen was a woman who can pull a storm out of a clear sky and a man who can take the weight of a collapsing roof and hand it to the wind. Somewhere in a file in Washington there’s a list of everybody in this country who can do anything at all, and next to every name is a number, and the number decides what your life is.

I have two. Two powers. Not one. Two, and they don’t have anything to do with each other, and I’ve known since I was fourteen years old that if the wrong person ever finds that out, I don’t get to have a life like this — a shop, a busted Malibu, a girl’s number on a carbon slip, a best friend who talks too much.

Fourteen years of doing the math.

“Fuck no,” I said.

Darius laughed and hit the lights.