The Poor Are Always With Us

The trouble with owning a Porsche is that there's always some little thing wrong with it. This time it was a sticky brake pedal. Russell had planned a trip for Easter weekend, so he left work early on Friday afternoon and drove up to Menlo Park to have Bruno, his mechanic, take a look at the car. Bruno was an Austrian. The wall behind his desk was covered with diplomas, most written in German, congratulating him on his completion of different courses in Porsche technology. Bruno's office overlooked the bay where he and his a.s.sistant worked on the cars, both of them wearing starched white smocks and wielding tools that glittered like surgical instruments.

When Russell pulled into the garage, Bruno was alone. He looked up, waved, and bent back down under the hood of a vintage green Speedster. Russell walked around the Speedster a couple of times, then watched over Bruno's shoulder as Bruno traced the wiring with a flashlight whose thin silver beam looked as solid as a knitting needle.

"So?" Bruno asked. After Russell described the trouble he was having, Bruno grunted and said, "Sure, sure. No sweat, old bean." He said that he would get to it as soon as he was done with the Speedster-forty-five minutes, maybe an hour. Russell could wait or pick it up on Monday.

Russell told him he would wait.

There were two men in Bruno's office. They glanced at Russell when he came in, then went on talking above the noise of a radio on Bruno's desk that was playing music from the 1950s. Russell couldn't help listening to them. They were friends; he could tell that by the way they kept insulting each other. They never let up, especially the bigger of the two, a black guy who wore sungla.s.ses and a safari jacket and popped his knuckles steadily. Whenever the white guy got off a good line the black guy would grin and shake his head and get off a better one. Twice Russell laughed out loud, and after the second time the white guy turned and stared at him. He had red-rimmed eyes that bulged as if some pressure inside him were forcing them out. His skin was tight-looking, drawn so severely over the bones of his face that even now, unsmiling as he was, his teeth showed. He stared at Russell and said, "Little pitchers have big ears."

Russell looked down at the rug. He tried to mind his own business after that, until the two men began to talk about someone from Russell's company who had recently been arrested for selling information on a new computer to the j.a.panese. Russell had met the man once, and from what these two fellows were saying he gathered that they had both worked with him at Hewlett-Packard a few years back. Russell knew he should keep his mouth shut, but he decided to say something. He had followed the case and had strong opinions about it. Mostly, though, he just wanted to join in the conversation.

"We all got our price," the black guy was saying. "s.h.i.t, they'd put every one of us in stir if they could read our minds for an hour. Any hour," he added.

"As if everybody else in this town isn't doing something just as bad," the white guy said. "As bad or worse. Bunch of piglets. They're just burned up because he got the trough before they did."

"I see it differently," Russell said. "I think they should lock him up and throw away the key. He sold out the people who worked with him and trusted him. He sold out his team. As far as I'm concerned he's a complete write-off."

The white guy fixed his eyes on Russell and said, "Groves, who is this weenie?"

"Now, now," Groves said.

"I swear to G.o.d," the white guy said. He pushed himself out of his chair and went to the window overlooking the garage, coming down hard on the heels of his boots as he walked. He stood there, and when he turned away Russell saw that his upper teeth were almost entirely exposed. He squinted at Russell. "A complete write-off," he said. "How old are you, anyway?"

Groves popped a knuckle. "Easy does it," he said. "Lighten up there, Dave."

Russell didn't know any Daves, but this one had something against him. "Twenty-two," he said, adding a year.

"Well then, I guess you know it all. From the lofty perspective of your twenty-two years."

"I don't know it all," Russell said. "I know the difference between right and wrong, though." I hardly ever talk like this I hardly ever talk like this, Russell wanted to add. You should hear me with my friends back home You should hear me with my friends back home.

The pants Dave wore looked too small for him and now he made them look even smaller by jamming his hands into the back pockets. "Go away," he said to Russell. "Go away and come back later, okay?"

"Easy does it," Groves said again. He put a small silver bong on Bruno's desk and began to stuff it with brown marijuana from a sandwich bag. "Peace pipe," he said. He lit up and pa.s.sed the bong to Russell. Russell took a hit and held it out to Dave, but Dave kept his hands in his pockets. Russell put the bong back down on Bruno's desk. He wished that he had refused it too.

"While we're on the subject," Dave said, "is there anybody else you want to write off?"

"Unbelievable," Groves said, turning up the volume on the radio. "'Runaround Sue.' Man, I haven't heard 'Runaround Sue' in about eighty years."

Dave looked gloomily out the window. "Is that your Targa?" he asked. Without waiting for Russell to answer, he said, "How do you rate a Targa? Graduation present from Pop?"

"I bought it myself," Russell said.

Dave asked Russell where he worked and when Russell told him, he said, "That outfit. Nothing but j.a.p spies and boy wonders. I swear to G.o.d they'll be hiring them out of first grade next."

"I do dearly love a Porsche," Groves said. "There isn't anything I wouldn't do to get me a Porsche."

Dave said, "Why don't you buy one?"

"Ask my wife."

"Which wife?"

"You see my problem," Groves said. He fired up the bong again and offered it to Russell. "Go on, child, go on," he insisted when Russell shook his head, and kept pushing it at him until Russell took another hit. Russell held the smoke in his mouth, then blew it out and said, "Gracias. That's righteous weed."

"Righteous!" Dave said. He grinned at Groves, who bent over and made a sound like air escaping from a balloon. Groves began to drum his feet on the floor. "Gracias!" Dave said, and Groves threw his head back and howled.

Bruno came into the office carrying a clipboard. "You chaps," he said. "Always laughing." He sat down at the desk and started punching away at a calculator.

Groves said, "Oh Lord. Lord Lord Lord." He pushed up his sungla.s.ses and rubbed his eyes.

Bruno tore a sheet off the clipboard. "Seventy-two fifty," he said to Dave.

"Catch you tomorrow," Dave said.

"Better now," Bruno told him. "Tomorrow something bad might happen."

Dave slowly counted out the money. He was putting his wallet in his pocket when Groves pointed at him and said, "Name that tune!"

"'Turn Me Loose,'" Dave said. "Kookie Byrnes. Nineteen fifty-eight."

"Fabian," Russell said.

"What do you you know?" Dave said. "You weren't even born when this song came out." know?" Dave said. "You weren't even born when this song came out."

Russell said, "It's Fabian. I'll bet you anything. I'll bet you my car."

Dave studied Russell for a moment. "Boy, you do bad things to me, you know that? Okay," he said. "My Speedster against your Targa."

Russell turned to Bruno. "You heard that."

"Get your papers," Bruno said.

Russell had his in his wallet. Dave's were in the glove compartment of the Speedster. While he was down in the garage getting them, Groves stood up and began to walk around the office. "I don't f.u.c.king believe this," he said. Dave came back and handed the papers to Bruno, and they all waited for the song to end. But when it ended, two more songs played back to back: "My Prayer" and "Duke of Earl." Then the deejay came on and gave the names of the recording artists.

"Nuts," Dave said. Then, to Russell, "You little weenie."

The whole thing caught Bruno on his funnybone. He laughed until tears came to his eyes. "You crazy chaps," he said. "You crazy, crazy chaps."

Russell agreed to let Dave bring the car over to his apartment later that afternoon. He had legal t.i.tle now; if Dave didn't show up, Russell could have him arrested for grand theft auto. Bruno was the one who made this point. Still laughing, Bruno got his camera out of the desk and took several pictures of the Speedster to keep as souvenirs of the event.

Russell waited alone in the office while Bruno put the Targa right; then he drove home and ate a sandwich beside the pool in the courtyard of his apartment building. He had the place to himself. All the other tenants were still at work, and none of them had children. Some owned dogs, but they'd been trained not to bark, so the courtyard was quiet except for the sigh of traffic from Page Mill Road and the tick of palm fronds above the chair where Russell sat.

He hated to think of giving the Speedster back. He wanted to keep it, and he could give himself reasons for keeping it, reasons that made sense. But all of them sounded like lies to Russell-the kind of lies you tell yourself when you already know the truth. The truth was that he'd been certain Fabian was the singer, and certain that Dave would take his bet. He had smoked marijuana in the middle of the afternoon like some kind of junior-high dropout, and lied about his age, and generally made a fool of himself. Then, because his feelings were hurt, he had goaded a man into gambling away his car.

That was how the truth looked to Russell, and it had nothing to do with his dream of being a magnanimous person, open-hearted and fair. Of course, not everyone would see it this way. Russell knew that most people would think he was being fussy.

Russell lived alone now, but when he first arrived in town he had roomed with a fellow from his company, an MIT graduate whose ambition was to make a bundle in a hurry, invest it, and then become a composer. He wrote moody violin pieces, which he sometimes played for Russell. Russell thought that they sounded great and that his roommate was a genius. But his roommate was also a swinger. He had girls in the apartment every weekend and sometimes even during the week, different girls, and one night he and Russell got into an argument about it. Russell hadn't said anything up to then but his roommate knew that he disapproved. He wanted to know why. Russell told him that it seemed cheap. His roommate said, "You're completely uptight, that's your problem," and walked away, but he ran back a moment later yelling that n.o.body, but n.o.body, called him cheap and got away with it. Russell apologized, and apologized again the next morning, and after that the two of them lived together on exquisitely polite terms.

Russell moved out at the end of the month. For a long time afterwards, until he got used to living alone, he made up conversations with his old roommate in which he laid bare his soul, and was understood and forgiven. "Listen," Russell would say, "I know you think I'm uptight because I don't sleep around or do many drugs or party a lot. But I'm not uptight, I'm really not. I just don't want to end up like Teddy Wells. I don't want to end up fifty years old and getting my sixth divorce and wearing gold chains and putting half my salary up my nose and collecting erotic art and cruising El Camino for teen-agers."

And Russell's roommate would answer, "I never looked at it that way before, but I see what you mean and you're absolutely right."

Russell just wanted to keep his bearings, that was all. It was easy to lose your bearings when you were three thousand miles from home and making more money than you needed, almost twice as much as your own father made after thirty years of teaching high school math. "I'm just getting started," Russell would say. "I'm doing the best I can!"

And his roommate would answer, "Of course. Of course."

Dave brought the Speedster by at five-thirty, half an hour later than he'd promised. Russell was waiting outside the apartment building when Dave drove up. A dark-haired woman in an old station wagon pulled in behind the Speedster and sat there with the engine running. Dave rolled his window down. "Did you call the heat yet?" he asked.

"I knew you'd come," Russell said. He smiled, but Dave did not smile back.

"That's funny," Dave said. "A throw-away-the-key guy like you, I figured you'd have my picture in the post office by now." He got out and closed the door gently. "Here," he said, and tossed Russell the keys. "What are you going to do with it? Sell it?" He looked at the car, then back at Russell.

"No," Russell said. "Listen-"

Dave said, "You listen." He crossed the strip of gra.s.s to the sidewalk where Russell stood. Russell felt the man's hatred and took a step backwards. The woman in the station wagon revved the engine. Dave stopped and looked back at her, then put his hands in his pockets as he had done earlier that day. Russell understood the gesture now: it was what Dave did with his hands to keep them from doing something else.

"I wish this hadn't happened," Russell said.

Though Dave was a couple of inches shorter than Russell, he seemed to be examining him from a height. "You're nothing special," he said. "You want to know how I got the Speedster?" When Russell didn't answer, he said: "I'll tell you. They gave it to me for an idea I had. They just handed me the keys and told me where it was parked and that was that. No speeches or anything. No plaque. Everything was understood."

The woman in the station wagon revved the engine again. Dave ignored her. He said, "You little snots think you're on the cutting edge but all you're doing is just sweeping up, collecting our stuff. The work's been done. You're just a bunch of janitors."

"That's not true," Russell said.

"You're a janitor," Dave repeated. "No way in h.e.l.l do you rate a car like that. A car like that is completely out of your cla.s.s." He took a quarter from his pocket and said, "Flip me for it."

"Flip you? Flip you for what?"

Dave looked down the street where the woman sat watching them. "The wagon," he said.

"Come on," Russell said. "What kind of deal is that?"

Dave flipped the quarter. "Call it."

"This is baloney," Russell said. Then, because he was afraid of Dave and wanted to be done with him, he said, "What the h.e.l.l. All right. Tails."

"Tails it is," Dave said, and threw the coin into Russell's face. It struck him below the eye and fell to the sidewalk. Dave walked back to the station wagon. He knocked on the window, and when the woman rolled it down he reached past her, turned off the engine, and dropped the keys into the gutter.

"Hey," she said.

"Get out," Dave told her, and held the door open until she obeyed him. She was thin and pale. She had liquid brown eyes like a deer's eyes, and like a deer she looked restlessly around her as if unsure of everything.

"I'll send Groves over with the papers," Dave said. He turned and started down the street toward Page Mill Road. The woman watched him walk away, then looked at Russell.

"I'm sorry," he said. "It wasn't my idea."

"Oh no," she said. "Wait a minute. Dave!" she called, but Dave kept walking and didn't look back. "Don't go anywhere," she told Russell. "Just wait here, okay?" She took a couple of steps and gave a loud scream. Then she broke into a run, stopping once to scream again-no words, only the pure sound rising between the tiled rooftops into the cloudless blue sky.

Russell ate dinner at a Chinese place near the freeway. When he got home, he found Groves leaning back in one of the chairs by the side of the pool. The woman who managed the building was sitting beside him. She was a widow from Michigan. The other tenants complained about her because she was snoopy and enforced all the rules. In the eight months since Russell moved in he had never seen her smile, but when he stepped into the courtyard she was laughing.

"That's gospel," Groves said. "I swear."

She laughed again.

It was dark but Groves still had his sungla.s.ses on. His hands were folded behind his head. When he saw Russell, he pointed one foot at him and said, "Here come de champ."

"Sorry I made you wait," Russell said. "I didn't know you'd be coming tonight."

"See?" Groves said. "I'm no perpetrator." He pushed himself up from the chair and said to Russell, "Emma here thought I was a perpetrator."

"No I didn't!" she said.

Groves laughed. "That's cool. Everybody gets one mistake." He clapped his hand on Russell's shoulder. "Champ, we got to talk."

Russell led Groves up the stairs and along the walkway to his apartment. Groves followed him inside and looked around. "What's this number?" he asked. "You in training to be a monk or something?"

"I just moved in a while ago," Russell said.

"No pictures, no sounds, no box," Groves went on. "No nothing. You sure you live here?" He took an envelope from his pocket and dropped it on the counter that divided the living room from the kitchen. "Candygram from Dave," he said. "Crazy Dave. Champ, we got a problem." Groves began to pace the small room, deliberately at first, then faster and faster, wheeling like a cat in a cage, the unbuckled straps of his safari jacket swinging at his sides. "We got a priority situation here," he said, "because you just got yourself all tied up in something you don't understand, and what you don't understand is my man Dave isn't in no no condition to go laying off his automobiles at this point in time. He isn't what we say condition to go laying off his automobiles at this point in time. He isn't what we say competent competent, you dig? What we're talking about here is some serious post-Vietnam s.h.i.t. I mean serious head problems."

Without slowing down, Groves lit a cigarette. "What we've got here is a disturbed veteran. We've got a man who's been on the big march through the valley of the shadow of death, you follow me? I'm talking about Khe Sanh, champ. The Pit. Here's how it went down. Dave's company is sitting out on the perimeter or whatever and the Cong come pouring over, you with me? There's mortars going off and all that s.h.i.t and rifles and whatever, and a whole bunch of Dave's friends, I mean his special dudes, get shot up. I mean they're hanging out there on the wire and so on. Now my man Dave, he's been hit too but what he does, he crawls out there anyway and drags his buddies in. All of them. Even the dead ones. And all the time old Charlie Cong is just raining raining on him. I mean he's got holes in places you never even on him. I mean he's got holes in places you never even heard heard of." of."

Groves shook his head. "Two years in the hospital, champ. Two years all wrapped up like some kind of horror movie, and then what do they do? They give him the Congressional Medal of Honor and say, Sayonara, sucker. He don't think straight anymore that's not their problem, right?"

Groves walked around the counter. He ran water on the b.u.t.t of his cigarette and dropped it in the sink. "What I'm saying is, you got any self-respect and don't go ripping no automobiles off of no disturbed veterans with the Congressional f.u.c.king Medal of Honor. That's what I'm saying here tonight."

Groves leaned forward against the counter and smiled at Russell. "Child," he said, "why don't you just give the man his cars back?"

"My name is Russell. And I don't believe that story. I don't believe that Dave was even in Vietnam."

"d.a.m.n!" Groves said. "Where's your imagination?" He took his sungla.s.ses off, laid them on the counter, and began to rub his eyes, slowly, with his fingertips. "I don't know," he said. "All right. Let's take it again. We're talking about Dave."

Russell nodded.

"Dave's a good head," Groves went on. "I admit he's not that great with the general public, but he's okay. Lots of smarts, too. I mean, I'm smart, but Dave is smart smart. Dave was centerfold material for a while there, but nowadays things just keep messing up on him. It's like the well went dry. Happens to plenty of people. It could happen to you. I mean you might be coming up with sweet stuff today but there's no law says it's got to be there tomorrow, and just maybe it won't be. You ought to think about that."

"I do," Russell said.

"Now his wife's gone and left him. No concern of yours, but Lord, what a business."

"I tried to give the car back to him," Russell said. "He didn't give me a chance. He wouldn't even let me talk."