Chapter 5: The Creeper

On Monday morning a man in a Co-op jacket backed a fuel truck up to the shop tanks and read a clipboard out loud.

"Levi, the account's two months past due," he said. "Home office is calling me every day about it."

Levi was on a creeper with his legs sticking out from under the old wrecker.

"Friday," he said from underneath.

"You said that last time."

"I said it and it's true. Friday."

The man looked at the clipboard and then at me, sitting on an overturned bucket by the parts shelf with a mug of Orlin's coffee.

I gave him the polite face I used on patients.

He cranked the hose out of the truck and left.

Orlin had gone to Wichita for his hip, and the lot was empty.

The bay door was half up with the sun lying across the concrete.

I had $212 and a borrowed jacket, I had slept two nights in a bunk room.

I had been wet since I woke up.

I stood up.

I walked across the floor to where his boots stuck out, and I knelt down beside the creeper on the cold concrete.

"Driver," I said.

I'd started calling him that.

He rolled out on the creeper and looked up at me, a smear of black on his cheek, a socket wrench in his fist.

"You're in my light," he said.

"Good."

I put my hand flat on his belt buckle.

He went still.

His eyes went to the bay door, wide open to the road, and to the lot, and the empty highway beyond it.

"Carla."

"The door's up," I said. "Anyone can walk in."

"That's not an answer."

"I'm not answering." I undid the buckle. "I'm telling you."

He put the wrench down on his chest.

I opened his jeans and he was already hard.

I took him out and held him in my hand and looked at him in the daylight, for the first time.

He was thick and flushed and ridged with veins, and a drop had already gathered at the tip.

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