Gravity’s Volkswagen

Twenty-Six

God knows what time it was when I heard the sound of Leezza’s Beetle. My perceptions were a little muddy, but there was no mistaking that glorious noise. I heard it getting nearer then it stopped, just outside the trailer park, by the front gate. The engine maintained its deep, guttural rumble, and I was inevitably drawn towards it. The security guard on duty was asleep, and he wasn’t disturbed by the engine sounds, which said a lot for his sleeping abilities, and there was Leezza behind the wheel of her Beetle, bright-eyed, alert and wearing a roughed-up black-leather jacket. She looked the business. I realised how much I’d missed her in such a short time. A few days without seeing her had left me wanting a whole lot more. I ran out through the trailer-park gate to talk to her.

“You haven’t been coming to see me,” she said.

“No, I…”

“Are you bored with me?”

“No, not bored. I just thought I’d wait till Sunday.”

“You disapprove of me, don’t you, Ian?”

“Not of what you are.”

“But of what I’m doing?”

“Of what you’re about to do, yes,” I said. I thought there was no point denying it.

“I’m just helping a guy out.”

“Which guy? Phil or Barry?”

“OK, I’m helping two guys out. I’m putting Barry out of his misery. I’m helping Motorhead Phil make a buck.”

Those didn’t seem good enough reasons to me, but I knew it didn’t matter.

“It’s OK,” I said. “I don’t expect my disapproval to make any difference to anything.”

“It makes a difference to me.”

“Really? So what if I asked you not to go through with it on Sunday?”

“Then I’d pretend not to hear you. I’d say let’s go for a late-night drive.”

We did. I got into the Beetle. There was a cushion on the floor where the front passenger’s seat should have been. It was for me: a nice gesture, a great concession to comfort. Leezza drove us into Fontinella. The town was in a deep sleep by now. We went up and down the empty main drag, and at last I saw the much lauded main street of classic Americana, complete with a couple of diners, a streamlined cinema, a white civic building with stuccoed Greek columns and portico, and then we drove to the outskirts of town, past the closed stores and the open petrol stations.

It might have been described as cruising, one version of one of the dreams, not an original one, regarded as stale and outdated by many people no doubt, and environmentally dubious too, and in the end I wouldn’t have argued much with the naysayers and spoilsports. Nevertheless this simple motion, this lived fantasy of being in control while burning up no-longer-cheap fossil fuels, oblivious to the real costs, convincing yourself that you’re free — well that still had its attractions.

We stopped at last in front of a barred and gated government-surplus store. It was painted red, white and blue, and there was a small, plump missile mounted on the roof. Leezza killed the engine of the car. The silence was golden.

“So you’re really a big fan of the Volkswagen Beetle?” Leezza asked.

“Of course,” I said. “I wrote the book, didn’t I?”

“Is that what you drive back in England?”

I thought of telling the truth, but the truth hadn’t gone down so well when I told Cadence I was a Ford Focus driver. Besides, there was some fun to be had in lying. It required me to make something up, to invent a Beetle for myself, but that was all right; inventing things was what I did.

“It’s a 1974,” I said. “It started out as a 1300. Then I messed with it. Put in a Big Boys’ Toys 1641, a hot street cam, twin carbs, polished Scat manifolds, sports exhaust.”

“What colour?”

“White. Just plain white.”

“Body mods?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “None to speak of. It looks absolutely standard, like a perfectly ordinary Beetle.”

“So, it’s like a street sleeper?”

“I believe that’s what they call them,” I said.

“Sounds so cool,” she said. “And it’s right-hand drive, yeah? Cause it’s English. That must be weird.”

“You’d soon get used to it.”

“I guess you can get used to anything.”

“Maybe you’ll see it some time. Maybe you’ll come to England.”

“Sounds unlikely,” she said; then, “You ever had sex in it?”

“Yes,” I said cautiously, “but I don’t want you to think I’m a slut.”

“Why would I think that?” she said.

“But you know, my car has doors and windows and a roof, not like this thing.”

“You’re saying my car doesn’t provide much privacy?”

“You might as well be doing it in the road,” I said.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

Nevertheless she seemed to take my up-tight, inhibited, finer feelings into account. She leaned over a long way and kissed me on the mouth, then restarted the car, slipped it into gear and we were moving again, heading back where we’d come from, towards the trailer park and the speedway. She took some strange back way, along service roads that I didn’t even know existed, and she drove us in among fences and piles of scrap metal to a place where she stopped, killed the engine and where we then had a bout of very wild sex.

Sex in an ordinary Beetle is, there’s no doubt about it, a tricky, cramped, restrained, inelegant, unsatisfactory business, but in a Beetle that’s been stripped down so much that it’s ready to fly, well it’s a very different matter. I say ‘in’ a Beetle but that gives a very limited idea of what we got up to. We had sex in it, on it, inside and out, on every surface, lying against it, using it for support, in the driver’s seat, on the floorpan, on the boot, on the bonnet, our flesh pressed up against the windscreen, against the wheels, against the non-standard aluminium petrol tank. The car became a fun house, a climbing-frame, an apparatus, a sex aid. The Smut Bug. The Fuck Bug.

And when it was over, and I was wallowing in a sump of warm post-coital pleasure, I became gradually aware of my surroundings. We weren’t in such an unfamiliar place after all. We were in the grounds of the speedway, and around us were Beetles in various states of decay. It wasn’t romantic, it wasn’t secluded, and as I now saw, it wasn’t even uninhabited. There, just a car battery’s throw away, was Barry’s Beetle. And there, in the car as ever, was Barry. He’d been watching us and now he was weeping.

My first thought was that somebody, some joker or pervert or sadist, had pushed his car precisely here so that Barry was in a position where he was forced to watch the dirty (in the best sense of the word) deed. But then I saw it another way. Maybe nobody had pushed Barry anywhere. Maybe he’d remained right where he was, where he just happened to be, and Leezza had parked her car right in front of him. What the hell was that all about? Had she done it by accident or design? It was a very unlikely accident. It was an absolutely incomprehensible and disgusting design.

“This isn’t right,” I said, and I got up, pulled on my clothes and stormed away.

“Hey, don’t go,” Leezza said.

I ignored her, walked on and she came trotting after me. That was something but not much, and it explained nothing.

“What’s going on here?” I said. “What are you up to?”

“Nothing,” she said. “At least nothing bad.”

“You once accused me of being cruel,” I said. “How does it compare with this?”

“I’m not being cruel.”

“I think you are.”

“Then I’m being cruel to be kind.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about. I kept walking. She kept coming after me.

“That makes no sense,” I said.

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“That’s because you haven’t told me the other half.”

By now we had gone some distance from the car, from the scene of the crime. We stood there in the dark arguing for a while longer, and then, from behind us, we heard the sound of the engine starting in Leezza’s Beetle. You couldn’t mistake it. My first absurd thought was that it must be Barry. Some miracle must have occurred. He’d transformed himself. He’d got out of his car. He was free, he could walk, he could drive, and his first action was to steal Leezza’s car.

Once I’d dismissed that notion, the reality became all too obvious. The car thief was Josh Martin. He’d been hiding like a predator, lurking amid the cars and scrap metal, waiting for his chance. We’d given it to him. And now he drove right by us, not all that quickly, headlights ablaze, smiling, waving, naked at the wheel of the unfamiliar car, still covered in oil, still conspicuously drunk. The car disappeared loudly into the darkness.

“Oh Jesus,” I said.

Leezza took it very calmly.

“That poor sad fuck,” she said. “He really doesn’t know what he’s let himself in for.”