The Gap of Time Read online

  “Sure is—so, it’s my dad’s place, but I’m his son.”

  Autolycus swabbed his hands on a medicated rag, locked up the DeLorean and hopped into the Chevy. “Stitched leather—and so clean. I like this.”

  “Dad always said, no matter how old or beaten-up your car, you keep it smart. I learned that lesson when we was poor and now we’re rich.”

  “And I thought the American dream was done, and only the rich got richer—or politicians.”

  “Don’t get me wrong—we’re just a family business, but yeah, it’s a good business.”

  “So where you heading, big guy?”

  “Downtown. It’s Dad’s seventieth birthday today. We’re having a party. My little sister sent me out to get a few things and maybe a special gift for him, like a son would get his dad. I said, what the Holy Lion of Judah am I supposed to get him?”

  “You religious? He religious?”

  “I was raised on the Good Book. We don’t do church so much these days but I still believe that God has his ways.”

  “You believe that God sends us what we need?”

  “Sure do—Dad always says my little sister was sent by God, even if she’s a pain in the ass.”

  Autolycus nodded. “I guess this is one of those God-sent days too. God sent me to you.”

  “I’m the one that’s helping you out!”

  Autolycus nodded again—he cocked his head sideways and took a flask from one of his pockets. He swigged. “You want bourbon?”

  “I want to keep my licence.”

  “My doctor says I have to drink every day for my liver.”

  “Go right ahead.”

  “So what’s your name?”

  “Clo.”

  “Good to meet you, Clo. A good day and that’s a fact.”

  —

  Saturday morning. Spring day.

  —

  Perdita saw her father on a ladder, hammer in his hand, nails in his mouth. She had thought he was still sleeping. She put on fresh coffee and went into the garden to wish him happy birthday.

  Over the years Shep had worked hard to build up the bar. The Fleece served food: the best fish soups, crabs in their shells, rice and peas, black beans. If it was a way out to drive, along the levee where the cormorants prophesied the weather, well, the drive was worth it.

  In the beginning Shep had done most of the work himself; restoring the long shutters, finding lengths of iron balustrade to rebuild the balcony that ran all the way round the building.

  He had worked with Perdita strapped to his back. She had been put down once and he was never going to let her be put down again. At night she slept in his room and he told her old stories of love and loss. She was too young to know that’s what they were. What she knew was the sound of his voice.

  As she grew, Shep taught Perdita piano and harmony and they listened to the music Shep had grown up on himself—girl groups like the Marvelettes, protest songs, Dylan and Baez, and Shep’s favourite, Marvin Gaye.

  —

  Perdita went out into the garden. Her father was watching the buzzards wing-level with the wind.

  “Happy birthday, Dad.”

  He put his arm round her. “I have something for you.”

  “For me? It’s your birthday—not mine.”

  Out of his pocket Shep pulled a soft, worn leather pouch.

  “This came from your mother. I was waiting till you turned eighteen, but instead I turned seventy. Didn’t want to drop dead and not give this to you myself.”

  “You’re not dropping dead.”

  “Here.” Shep emptied the contents of the pouch in her hands.

  Perdita sat silently, looking at the shining cold-fire beauty—the making of the world. A layer of time. That’s what diamonds are.

  “Are they real?”

  “Sure. Diamonds all the way.”

  “She wasn’t poor, then.”

  “I don’t reckon she was a poor woman, no.”

  Perdita was holding the diamonds that her mother had held as her mother must once have held her, in both hands.

  She started to cry.

  “Don’t cry,” said Shep. “You were loved then and you are loved now. Isn’t that enough?”

  Perdita nodded and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She was at that age when sometimes she was a grown woman and sometimes she was still a kid.

  “I’ll put it on this afternoon,” she said, “for your party.”

  “I don’t know why we’re having a party. It’s a lot of fuss.”

  “What’s the point of being old if you can’t party?”

  “Am I old?”

  “Yeah, you’re old.” She kissed him. “But you’re not dying.”

  “Maybe I’m old, but I’m still a better dancer than you.”

  She reached up and swatted him—Shep was tall like Clo, and a foot taller than Perdita. Then she took his hand and they sang and danced together for a minute—Shep on melody and clicking his fingers, Perdita singing over the top in harmony. Fly me to the moon, let me play among the stars…

  “Was my mother a good dancer?”

  “She was a good singer. She wrote you that song. The first one I ever taught you.”

  “Did she really write it?”

  “That’s her music notation in her handwriting. That’s her piano part. She was a cool musician. That song was her letter to you. You want to sing it later?”

  Perdita stopped dancing and shook her head. “I’ll sing all your favourites.”

  “Let’s go inside and run through a few on the piano. Are the girls here yet?”

  “Not yet, Dad. It’s early.”

  Shep nodded. “I guess it is. I didn’t sleep last night. Mortality was visiting me.”

  “You’re fine!”

  “High blood pressure.”

  “So why not leave the work to me and Clo?”

  “Surest way to die is to stop working.”

  “What did she die of? My mother?”

  Shep put his arms round Perdita. “You know I don’t know.”

  “You kept these diamonds all these years and you never told me. Maybe there’s other things you never told me.”

  Shep laughed. “Sweetheart, if I knew the who and the where and the why and how—why wouldn’t I tell you?”

  “Would you?”

  Perdita didn’t know anything about the BabyHatch. All she knew was that her mother had died and that Shep had adopted her. From a church a long way away. The past was a long way away. Nearly eighteen years’ drive.

  Whenever she asked about her mother Shep said, “She was a damn fine woman.”

  When she asked about her father, he said, “I don’t know about him at all.”

  When she asked her brother, Clo, he said, “Ask Dad.”

  So she had stopped asking questions because there weren’t any answers.

  Overhead the buzzards circled round their cold, high cry, circling as if they were looking for something they had lost. A long time ago.

  —

  Saturday morning. Spring day.

  —

  Out on the highway Clo had the radio up full-blast like he was trying to blow up the car from the inside with a double-barrelled bass. As they pulled up towards the stop lights, the Chevy booming, its metal flanks pulsing, Autolycus put his hands to his mouth and yelled—

  “OK, big guy! Exit here towards the roundabout!”

  Clo pulled into the exit lane. “I hate roundabouts! They were just coming in when I was a kid. I like a road straight ahead of me. Stop sign now and again to take a drink. Cruise control. No stress, no steering.”

  Clo didn’t look like a man who did much steering, leaning his forearms on the wheel, his big hands drumming to the beat.

  Autolycus took another swig from his flask and put on his shades against the reflecting sun.

  “Let me tell you something for nothing that no highwayman ever will tell you, ever will know. You listenin’?”

  Clo turned the
sound down and the car stopped reverberating.

  “Here’s the truth…if roundabouts had been invented sooner the whole of western civilisation would be different.”

  “The whole thing?”

  “Whole damn thing.”

  “How’d y’work that out?”

  “Remember the story of Oedipus?”

  “Eddy who?”

  “Guy who murdered his father and married his mother.”

  “Was that on Fox News?”

  “It happened a while back. Oedipus is racing up some narrow road when he meets an old guy in a chariot.”

  “A Chevy Chariot?”

  “No, just a chariot. So the old guy, Laius, is a King and he won’t give way to some kid, and Oedipus is a moody type, proto-democrat, not impressed with age or chariots, and he won’t give way either. The two of ’em fight—and Eddy ends up killing the old guy.”

  “Did he have a concealed-weapons licence?”

  “He just hit him over the head.”

  “That’s not respectful.”

  “Just listen! The whole mess happened at a crossroads, right? Three roads running into one. If we had invented the roundabout in time, the calamity could never’ve happened. First it’s you, then it’s me, y’know?”

  “Yeah, OK, so what?”

  “So what? Freud so what? Biggest theory in psychoanalysis and the western world and you say so what?”

  “Well, I never heard of it.”

  “Oedipus complex! Men are always killing their fathers and marrying their mothers.”

  “No, that ain’t so! I don’t know not a soul who’s done that even once.”

  “You can’t do it more’n once. How many sets of parents you got?”

  “I mean I never even heard of it—yeah, somebody sleeps with their sister maybe…yeah, that can happen, but…”

  “Listen! It’s a metaphor—rivalry and forbidden desire and the failure to leave behind the family romance.”

  “You didn’t say the King guy was his dad, and where was the mom—right up there in the Chevy?”

  “It wasn’t a Chevy! The mom was at home being Queen. Oedipus didn’t know the old guy was his father. He was adopted. He had this curse on him that he would kill his parents, and as he liked his parents—they played with him when he was little and bought him a dog, y’know?”

  “Sure, sure—my dad’s like that.”

  “So Eddy ran away from home. He didn’t know he was adopted.”

  “They never told him? My sister’s adopted. You gotta tell kids the truth.”

  “That’s right! So poor Eddy ran away to escape the curse and walked right into it—killing his own father.”

  “That is some shit.”

  “Yeah—so after he had murdered Laius he carried on to the city, fancy place called Thebes—bars, clubs, no two-bit shit—and he found that Thebes was being terrorISed, TErrorised, terrORised—like having the Mafia come to stay—by this creature called the Sphinx.”

  “Sphinx? Isn’t that underwear?”

  “Spanx is underwear. The Sphinx was a woman—you know the type: part monster, part Marilyn Monroe. The Sphinx had her own kind of female logic—made plenty of sense to her but sounds pretty crazy to the rest of us. This was her deal: sit down, have a drink, do a quiz, and if you get the right answer she’ll hand over control of Thebes—she had other business interests elsewhere. But because she was a tricky badass, if you got her question wrong she bit your head off.”

  “I know that type! Do I know that type!”

  “But Oedipus got the question right and part of his reward was to marry the Queen—which he could do as her husband was now dead. But the Queen was his own mother!”

  “I feel sorry for the guy. Then what happened?”

  “Oedipus and Jocasta, the mom, had four kids together, two boys and two girls. Nice family. Some mental instability but that’s incest for you. On the whole they were OK. Then a plague plagued the city and some meddling oracle announced that the plague would never, ever end unless the killer of the dead old King was found. They had no idea about viruses in those days. Plagues were sent from the gods.”

  “They said that about AIDS. Even I knew it was a stupid thing to say and I’m no doctor.”

  “One thing you notice about progress, kid, is that it doesn’t happen to everyone.”

  “You are right there, brother—look at that piece of junk driving in front of us.”

  “Probably made in Thebes, boy. So Oedipus starts the hunt for the killer and the hunt led to…himself! Imagine how he felt.”

  “Like shit.”

  “Like shit. His wife, or his mother, or his wife/mother, Jocasta, she went into the bedroom—the bedroom! A lot of resonance there. She hangs herself. Oedipus cuts her down, unpins her brooch and stabs out his own eyes.”

  “For real?”

  “For real. And this entire event—crucial to western thought, a billion neurotics, a million shrinks and motherfuckers, literary theory, all that anxiety of influence…”

  “You can get a jab for that now.”

  “Influence is not the same as influenza.”

  “I said I wasn’t medical.”

  “And specialist porn.”

  “You mean MILF?”

  “Spell it out, boy—Mothers I’d Like to Fuck.”

  “Uh-huh…” (and they both laughed) “UH-HUH!”

  “This entire event could not have happened if the world had invented the roundabout.”

  “That is some shit.”

  “But there’s nothing deep or poetic about a roundabout, is there? I mean, nobody ever looks solemn and says, I’ve reached a roundabout in my life. No, it’s crossroads all the way.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Next exit, kid, next exit. This is home.”

  —

  And Clo saw the sign “AUTOS LIKE US.”

  “Hey! Holy Ghost! I heard about you! You’re Autolycus! You’re famous! You got the Motormobile Museum. We were moving out of the city soon after you showed up—from Detroit, right?”

  “Right! You want to see the museum?”

  “I don’t have time.”

  “What’s the point of time if you don’t have any?”

  —

  Clo parked the Silverado. A slip of a boy, prettier than he was handsome, came back-firing out of the garage in an open-topped Jeep.

  “She’s running too high!” yelled Autolycus.

  “That’s because the engine is shit!” shouted the boy. He was wearing oil-stained overalls. A pair of heavy goggles hung round his neck. He killed the engine and got out.

  “I need you to take the tow-truck for the DeLorean.”

  “Again?”

  “Clo…this is Zel. My assistant,” said Autolycus. “Kids these days are either built like bulldozers with brains like Tarmac or they got a college degree and want to polish fenders. He’s one of those. Reads all the time.”

  “My sister reads all the time too,” said Clo. “Hey, haven’t I seen you out at the Fleece?”

  Zel was looking down at the floor as though it had something to tell him.

  “Well, I like reading in a youth,” said Autolycus, “makes the stories easier to tell. This Jeep here belonged to Ernest Hemingway.”

  “The fuel can strapped on the side did,” said Zel.

  Autolycus ignored him. “A 1940 khaki beauty. Ernest Hemingway. Writer. Hemingway served as a major in the American Army, Second World War. He was in the Liberation of Paris. Drove right down the rue de l’Odéon looking for that bookstore, Shakespeare and Company.”

  “I’ve heard of Shakespeare but I never knew he ran a bookstore.”

  “I guess you don’t read much, huh? Here—a keepsake.”

  Autolycus pulled a battered paperback out of his hunter’s jacket that seemed to be a series of pockets held together by his own body. “The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.”

  “Thanks. I’ll give it to my little sister.”

&
nbsp; “No. I have the gift of second sight—one day you’ll thank me for this book. Now go ahead, take a look around—that’s Marilyn Monroe’s Pontiac over there; put your nose down real close and you can still smell Chanel No5.”

  As Clo ambled away, Autolycus grabbed Zel by his greasy overalls.

  “You want to ruin me? He’s buying the DeLorean.”

  “Him?”

  “I can sell anything to anybody—so long as they got the money. We need to ditch the DeLorean.”

  “You are a crook.”

  “I always wanted to be a crook. It’s my vocation.”

  “I can’t pick up the DeLorean. I have to leave early today—I told you.”

  “Because your dad’s coming in? To pick up the Mercury?”

  “It’s a kit car with phony paperwork.”

  “When you can tell me what’s real, in a world of avatars and clones, mass production, reproduction, and 3D printing, then tell me what’s a fake, smart-ass.”

  “I don’t care anyway. He deserves to waste his money. That’s not why I’m leaving early.”

  Zel was twenty-something, not much of the something. Slight frame, strong shoulders, mass of hair on his head tied back like a girl’s. Hands he turned over to the palms when he was upset, frowning as if he could read the lines there and find a way out. He had been living at the garage for over a year. Turned up one day riding a British Royal Enfield saddle-seat motorcycle he had rebuilt himself.

  Autolycus, who was no saint, had given the kid a job, and later, when he found him sleeping on the discarded foam of the repair cars, he’d given him a home of a kind too. Zel worked hard, read books, didn’t go out much.

  “You should make it up with him. He asks about you.”

  “He’s the parent. He can make it up with me.”

  “I got five kids. I never see ’em.”

  “You never told me you had kids.”

  “What, we’re in a relationship all of a sudden? I have to tell you about my kids? I’ll tell you something else, more important: regrets come soon enough in life. Don’t go hunting for them.”

  “Enough about my dad, OK? You said I could use the MGB Roadster today.”

  “I did? What for?”

  Zel blushed. “I have a date.”

  “Who is she?”

  “No one you will ever know.”

  “Haven’t I been a friend to you and this is how you treat me?”

  Zel was silent. Then he said, “I’m sorry. I…I think I’m nervous.”