In my high school days I always tried to have a date on Saturday nights. Tried, but usually failed. So I cruised the streets with some buddies who were every bit as hard up as I was. The bowling alley; the pizza joint; the Y, where they had mixers; all the usual places where guys went to find the girls who didn’t want to have anything to do with them.
The last resort was the Dx station, which the custom cars and street rods used as their home base. They only came out at night, like vampires, shined, chromed, sculpted masterpieces that even the drunkest biker-who always made clear that he thought that street rod owners were femmy-pd awe and respect. You could tell this because they didn’t stove-in the street rod doors or smash in the windshield.
The custom car crowd didn’t like us any more than they liked the bikers. We were just pimply kids who couldn’t even get chicks on Saturday nights-the custom boys always had plenty of good-looking chicks-and so when we asked them our dopey questions, their answers were short on information and long on contempt.
But there they’d be on the drive, six or seven of the finest mechanical animals rubes like us had ever seen. Andfora while it was enough in the accompanying blare of Chuck Berry and Little Richard to walk around and around these beasts and take in as much of their beauty as we could handle without fainting dead away.
The lone car on the drive tonight was David Egan’s chopped and channeled black Merc.
David leaned against it, cigarette hanging at an angle from the corner of his mouth, his James Dean uniform natty as always. I don’t mean to imply he never changed his clothes. I was pretty sure he did. He didn’t smell, anyway. But his wardrobe seemed to consist of interchangeable James Dean duds, so that even when he changed red nylon jackets, snowy white Tshirts, and jeans, his clothes looked exactly the same.
The smells of gasoline, cigarettes, and oil were pleasant on the Saturday night air as I pulled in.
Dean had taken him over completely tonight, giving me that little two-finger salute while he watched me walk toward him with squinched-up eyes. I always wondered if old folks secretly wanted to imitate Lawrence Welk.
I said, “No girl on Saturday night?”
“I could ask you the same question.”
“Yeah. But I have an excuse. I’m short and stupid.”
He smiled. “I don’t know why you’re always putting yourself down.”
“I do,” I said. Then, “It’d be nice if you’d write a condolence note to the Griffins.”
“For what?”
In the first hours following the murder, David had been frightened enough to show only his nicest side.
David the lost boy. But there was the other side, a cold and arrogant side. And I felt I was just about to hear it.
“Because she was a nice, decent, troubled kid and because some sonofabitch murdered her.”
“You think I did it, don’t you?”
“David, she’s dead, all right? Her folks will never get over it, no matter how long they live.”
“Sure they will. They’re always flying off to Europe and soaking up the gin and name-dropping so much it’s embarrassing. Sara couldn’t stand them.”
He smirked. “And neither could I. But they had a nice house.”
I shouldn’t have done it but I did. I grabbed him by the collar of his James Dean jacket and flung him the length of his car.
“Hey, you little prick,” he said.
“She’s dead, David. You could at least be decent to her folks.”
He straightened his jacket and T-shirt and gave me the squinted-eyes routine again.
“Just get out of here, McCain.”
“She’s dead, David. Her parents deserve a note of condolence.”
“They’ll just throw it away.”
“Even if they do, it needs to be written.”
The sullen face was all his own. “All the shit I’ve had to go through.”
“That doesn’t give you any right to treat women the way you do.”
“They know what they’re getting into.”
It was a bad movie line. The desperado.
The rebel no woman could tame. You could hear it coming through a tinny drive-in speaker now.
“You’re taking your life out on them, David, and they deserve better. Sara and Rita and Molly are good young women.”
“They hire you to say that?”
I said, “I don’t want to represent you anymore, David.”
He came off the car and said, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“There are other lawyers in town. I’ll arrange for one of them to help you. But I’m done.”
“That’ll make it look like I’m guilty.”
Then, “You can’t do this, McCain. You really can’t.”
“You going to write that note to the Griffins?”
“All right, God, if that’s what you want me to do.”
“That’s a start. And knock off the heartbreaker bullshit. Everybody knows you love ‘em and leave ‘em, David. But you may have to face a jury here pretty soon. And you’re gonna need all the friends you can get.”
He smirked again. “Maybe I should wear a cassock and a Roman collar.”
“It wouldn’t hurt, David.” I got sick of him from time to time-his childhood hadn’t corrupted him but his reaction to his childhood, his self-pity, certainly had-but I hadn’t ever been as sick of him as I was at this moment.
I walked away to my ragtop.
“I knew you were bluffing, McCain. I knew you wouldn’t really drop me.”
I said nothing. Just drove away. Leaving a bad imitation of James Dean standing alone in the muzzy yellow light of the gas station drive.
In the rearview mirror, I watched as he slipped his hands in his back pockets, pure James Dean. And now, unfortunately, pure David Egan.