Splat, a novel

Damn, I missed.

Out of the corner of her eye Suzie caught a flash of international safety orange disappearing over the barrier, making a clear path for a fraction of a second, arching over the hood of a red pickup in the passing lane. She steered with her left hand and pumped off two more shots, aiming at the windshield.

Another miss. Damn. And another. Shit.

She was weaving in and out of the lane, swearing at the guy, her car jerking with every shot. She was seething with frustration. The driver of the other vehicle noticed nothing, even as a slow barrage of orange paintballs crossed his windshield. He was on the phone, and could only see things right in front of him, and only if they didn’t move. Like the road stretching on ahead, which was clear and unchanging because he was single handedly blocking all the traffic on the road behind him. And there she was, trying to kill him. And he never noticed.

Suzie turned her attention to the traffic for a moment as they went around a bend, and then matched speed with him again and aimed a shot at his passenger side window. She decided that trying to hit his windshield presented too many physics problems at the moment, and went for the cheap hit. If I can’t kill him, at least I can put the fear of God in him, she thought. She squeezed the trigger, and heard a click, but no pop.

Empty. Feh. With a bleat of frustration Suzie threw the gun down onto the floor of the passenger side. It was a cheapo starter paintgun that only held ten rounds, passed down to her when one of her roommates got tired of it. But she had been practicing. And she was in hot pursuit. And she was out of paintballs.

Sniping 101: It’s not easy to hit a moving target head on sideways through sixty-mile-an-hour winds. She was going to have to figure in the air resistance of a marble-sized plastic ball. She was going to have to figure out crosswinds and parabolic trajectories. She knew she’d get a headache trying to figure it out.

She was disappointed in herself, and was glad her dad couldn’t see her. She promised herself that the first chance she got, she was going to get away to the hideout and practice with moving targets, something on a rope swung from a big branch.

She was also going to have to figure out a way to load more paintballs. Hoppers that sat on top of the barrel of the gun were just too visible in a car where just anybody could look inside and see what you were doing. If she was going to be Vigilante Of The Year then she was going to have to remain below all sorts of radar. Waving her starter paintgun around was bad enough, but at least she could keep it mostly below the level of the door, and maybe work on disguising it somehow.

Suzie was still riding next to her intended target. He was still driving in the passing lane, and had no idea that this was his lucky day because she was out of ammo. So she shoved her middle finger out the window at him, also unnoticed, and then worked her way over into the right lane and took the next exit.

She thought about logistics. She was way out I-20 west of town, almost to Douglasville. She could get back on the highway going east and take 285 around to 75 south. There wasn’t much traffic right now, it was two in the afternoon. It shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes to get down to see her boyfriend Nelson, and she had plenty of time before work. Unless there was an accident. She looked out the window at the passing scenery. It was a nice day. She decided to take the back roads anyway, see some countryside on the way to Riverdale. Suzie reached into her heart and pulled out all her rage and flung it out the window like a girl with a Care Bear in her bag.

The guy in the red pickup had been bothering her for miles, driving in the passing lane. A lane meant for passing, she had thought furiously at him. You goddamned redneck. Something about the way he drove pressed a button, and she’d been indulging in road rage again. She had this thing about drivers with less than courteous manners and less than average driving skills.

Suzie had noticed him ten minutes earlier when she was getting onto the Connector downtown. She’d been on the Freedom Parkway overpass, merging southbound on I-75/85 just before the east-west I-20 interchange. She’d noticed him driving erratically below. He stuck out as the problem vehicle in six lanes of slowing, crowded highway.

His was a large red pickup in the passing lane going first faster, then suddenly slower than everyone else as he realized he had to cross six lanes of traffic to make his exit onto I-20. What an idiot, she thought. Right where traffic gets sticky and he’s in the left lane being macho.

It was the Grady Curve, mentioned in every rush-hour traffic report. A wide bend in a congested area right in the middle of Atlanta, where two major north-south interstate highways cross a major east-west interstate highway. the bends were the designer’s little joke on everybody. Hours of disruption every day; hundreds of thousands of drivers tailgating through crowded downtown exit and entrance ramps. It was always a bottleneck. Right in the dead center of town, a city in the middle of the forest, with five million people and eight million cars.

Suzie had just come out for her patrol and had been scouting for her first offender when she spotted the red F-350. He nearly rammed her trying to cross over to his exit to I-20, and from that point on, he was her suspect.

They both pulled into a lane at the same time from opposite directions, she with her signal flashing, he swerving unannounced into the hole she was edging into. Suzie first thought he must be drunk. He was a crew-cut white guy in a white t-shirt, kind of beefy-looking. He had Douglas County plates, a plastic trash bag flapping in the bed of his truck, and a Heritage Not Hate license tag frame.

He’d gone from the passing lane through three lanes to almost hit Suzie, and was pulling over another lane to the right. Traffic was slowing and car distances were only slightly larger than a car length as cars backed up around the Grady Curve.

He shouldered into the next lane, causing the guy he cut in front of to swerve and brake suddenly, and then he pulled into the next right lane with barely a glance to see who he was displacing. I’m right, Suzie could almost hear him exuding. I’m important. Fuck y’all.

Suzie saw him thrusting into her lane and had to hit the brakes to avoid his rear bumper. This in turn frightened the guy behind her who was too close to begin with, and he put his brakes on, and the guy behind him had to put his brakes on when he saw it, and if it had been any closer to rush hour, it would have turned into a slowdown all the way back to Tenth Street.

When she saw him horning in front of her, Suzie’s first thought was to creep up behind the car in front of her and squeeze him out, but he barged in anyway. She gave way only because he was so much bigger and so much more determined, and he grinned as he pulled in front of her and then proceeded to barrel his way into the exit lane just as the white line changed from dotted to solid, and the I-20 traffic split off from the I-75/85 traffic.

On impulse she followed him, hurrying to the right across the solid line and taking a graceful merge between two cars, waving thanks to the car behind her. She briefly noticed a gaggle of homeless guys sitting under the bridge watching traffic. They looked happy in the warm spring sunlight; amused.

She brought her attention back to the asshole in the truck. Did I see a nice big victorious grin on your face? she wondered. Just ram your big old truck in front of me and everybody else with barely a glance? Didn’t even look. Wouldn’t care if you sideswiped me. Probly don’t even have insurance, and you for sure wouldn’t stop even if you did. Would it be the end of the world to miss the exit and go around? No, but you’ve got to come all the way over no matter what kind of trouble you cause. You’ve just got to ride in the passing lane. You probly cut across all those lanes of traffic every day.

She merged with I-20 traffic westbound, and drove down the road with him for a few miles, hanging back, watching. Just as he did on the Connector, he got into the left lane and stayed there. It was early afternoon and there wasn’t much traffic. The road was moving at 75 miles an hour right through the middle of downtown Atlanta. The guy and his red pickup were four or five cars ahead of her, and thin as the traffic was, it was still starting to back up behind him waiting for him to get over so they could pass on his right. Like they’re supposed to, she thought approvingly. Using the passing lane. The lane designated for passing slower traffic. Asshole. She looked viciously at his car.

Suzie inched up through traffic to get closer to him. She was driving a ‘94 Dodge Doohickey two-door automatic six-cylinder POS that got twenty-eight miles to the gallon, catching up to a Ford 350 truck with wheels the size of her door. Normally a truck like that would leave her in the dust. But she had a mission. And she was determined. And he was driving erratically. And he was on the phone.

She saw this with intense disapproval. He was looking straight ahead. Driving at the same speed as the guy on his right, probably subconsciously. He was blocking, she counted, six cars who wanted to be on their way. Talking on the cellphone, his brain the size of a pea, his vision narrowed to a cone, his eyes glazed over. He’d stopped making sense of what was going on around him. All his attention was on his conversation. And what could be so important? His job, his girlfriend, his buddy, a bill collector? She started screaming at him. ‘Look at what you’re doing to the road!’

She was even with him and two lanes over to the right, gripping the steering wheel with superhuman strength. Her costume itched as she began to sweat. She scratched with the tips of her driving gloves; the fishnet weave made a great scratcher, and besides, she bit her nails. Her windows were down halfway and there was a nice cool breeze, but the sun was out and she could feel the sizzle right through the windshield. The road was going 58 because of the red Ford.

Four lanes; people in the slow lanes driving 55; people in the next left lane doing 60, the leftmost two lanes should be doing 65 and up to 75 except for this redneck just sitting at the head of a clump of traffic, in the passing lane, forcing anyone who wanted to pass to go around to the right. Which in case he didn’t know, she pointed out to herself, is illegal. She shook her first at him violently. The cars in back of him were flashing their lights and tailgating trying to give him the message, but he was on the phone, and probably unaware that he was in the passing lane at all.

So one car after another jerked into the next lane, whipped around him to the right, and then came back into the lane in front of him to continue on their journey. Suzie saw at least one finger and heard several honks. But he never noticed. His windows were up, loud country music was on the radio, he was shouting into his phone, his brainstem maybe the only part of him paying attention to the road. And maybe not.

As a fifth car finally swerved past him, she saw him finish his call. He put his phone down, put both hands on the wheel, looked around for the first time in minutes, and sped up to 70.

Suzie became aware of other things as she relaxed her obsession with the guy’s bad driving habits. I-20 had was now cruising through the treed, genteel area called West End, a turn of the last century area of old Queen Anne houses with twelve-foot porches under ancient trees. A great, old, upper middle class black neighborhood. Now and then the gable of a house could be seen through the greenery. Traffic was thinning out as the pickup stopped blocking the flow. Cars settled into their preferred lanes and relaxed into a constant speed and generous spacing as the road gentled its way through the trees toward I-285 and the Chattahoochee River. The red truck was still in the left lane, but he was passing the slower cars like he was supposed to, and generally behaving himself.

Suzie backed off her stalking and let him get further ahead of her. If he was being reasonable, there was no point getting all upset about him. There were plenty of bad drivers to choose from in Atlanta. She looked through a gap as she passed the exit to MLK Drive, the road peering over the tops of trees for a moment as it rounded a bend, looking out over a sea of green.

The pod of traffic she was riding in crossed over the I-285 interchange, everyone driving at a safe distance from each other, letting merging cars and trucks integrate without any crowding. And this was how it was supposed to work. There were both left and right exits onto the Perimeter, and huge big heavy trucks were allowed, for one mile only, to use all six lanes of traffic to get into position for their exits. An asshole driving in the left lane at the wrong time could screw the process right up.

Suzie loved to drive: it brought her such peace. Except for the idiot drivers. She had a real problem with bad drivers. Her dad had a real problem with bad drivers. All her dad’s trucker buddies had a real problem with bad drivers, especially around Atlanta, where there were bad drivers from all over the country who moved here just so they could screw up traffic on a daily basis.

Then Suzie saw the driver of the red F350 weave and jerk as he picked up the phone again, flipped it open and started pushing buttons. His foot let up on the gas pedal and he began to slow down the moment he put the phone to his ear. While the first cars behind him cruised up and passed easily, the others were prevented from swinging out by a VW minding its own business in the next lane. So the cars started piling up again, waiting for the bug to get past the truck so they could get by, flicking their headlights hoping to make him notice.

As they approached a double-lane exit for Six Flags, several cars cut over to take the exit at the last minute. She could see the guy shouting into the phone two lanes over and two cars ahead of her. He was oblivious of the traffic ripples in the other lanes; his fingers twitched on the wheel, and he slowed even further as the conversation developed into an argument. Suzie watched as the drivers behind him got impatient and started swerving around him. She braked sharply as the car in front of her braked sharply to avoid a Mercedes cutting out to pass the guy. Asshole, she thought. You’re a danger to decent drivers. You really shouldn’t be allowed to live.

She rolled her window all the way down. The wind blew in on her face, and the sound of engines and spinning wheels on concrete rose up to a loud, dull roar. She gripped the wheel with both hands and spat hair out of her mouth so she could see, edging forward and working her way left to approach the red truck. Like a cat stalking a bird, she crept up on him, watching him continuing to disrupt traffic. She was fully in her mission now.

In her head she accused him, argued the case, and justified his sentence. It’s his fault, your honor, she argued in her head. Causing a traffic jam in the middle of the day, when everyone can expect an easy, pleasant ride down the fucking highway. He’s too stupid to drive and talk at the same time. She nodded over at him. There he is, driving in the passing lane. Going below road speed. Nobody can pass him. People are taking chances to get around him. He’s an accident just waiting to happen. And he’s on the phone. Not paying any attention at all to the road. Or the traffic around him. And now he’s fighting on the phone. Getting all emotional and driving on automatic. And where are the cops? Would they even stop him? He’s barely going the speed limit. They would only notice him if they were driving in traffic with him. Like me.

Suzie sat up straight. She felt like a real crusader for justice, and at that moment was prepared to take her mission very seriously. She had gone to the trouble of wearing a superhero costume, even though it chafed, just to prove her commitment. And she’d worked up an elaborate crime fighting ritual to enhance her focus. She was doing her bit to keep Atlanta free of dangerous should-be traffic criminals and hazards to public safety. There were lives at stake, and it was her duty to do something about what any idiot could see was a very real and present danger. If the cops were too busy, then it fell to her as a citizen to step in and do what was right.

Another car swept to the right of the redneck in the truck and angrily cut back into the left lane in front of him, narrowly missing his front bumper. Suzie could see the driver shaking his fist at the guy. But he never noticed. The next car did the same, but put on his brakes as he pulled in front of the guy, whose dull satisfied gaze withered and grew into an ugly look as he noticed, then braked, then watched the guy flip him off and stand on the hammer of his Mustang. But his worry was momentary. He went back to his argument, his face settled back to bovine, and he thought no more about it.

He’s slowed back down! she thought in fury. I can’t stand this. He’s the worst driver I’ve seen all day. He truly deserves to die. She bent over to scratch a sudden itch at the back of her knee where the sparkly tights of her superhero costume rolled and pinched. Then she reached under the seat on the passenger’s side, swerving slightly as she ducked down to grab her paintgun. Carefully checking that nobody was observing her from neighboring cars, she brought the gun up into her lap and cradled the barrel in her left elbow, waiting for her chance.

She was mad enough to kill someone, and that someone was still on the phone and driving like an idiot. Sitting bolt upright with one hand on the wheel, short red hair whipping around her head, she was concentrating so hard on her subject that she was forgetting to check her mirrors or monitor her instruments.

Her attention was divided between staring hard at the target and glancing at the road in front of her. With every look she grew more angry, and she could only have vaguely described her feelings or the reasons for them. He’s a bad driver and deserves to die, was how she would put it, but that wouldn’t begin to describe the feelings that made her vengeance feel so right.

She felt rage, anger, fear, and sadness, in that order. The sadness was buried; the fear was physically and emotionally thrilling; the anger gave her the energy she needed to execute the sentence; and the rage was against negligent drivers everywhere, focused tightly on this one crew-cut pudgy redneck son of a bitch driving down the left lane in a gas-guzzling pickup with penis-extender monster truck tires.

Although Suzie had experienced road rage for years, and though she’d played through revenge fantasies a hundred times, she’d never actually tried to kill someone before. This was, in fact, Suzie’s debut as a modern crime fighter, and as she shadowed him down the highway, she had to admit to herself that so far she wasn’t doing very well. She’d missed, again and again, and now she was out of ammunition and never thought to bring a spare 10-round tube. The rage boiled up, and she just barely choked off the impulse to ram his truck. I’ll push him off the road into the median where he’ll flip over and catch fire, she thought. But a quick look at the size of his wheels brought her back to reality. And so she gave up her pursuit, just like that, thrust a finger at him, and started moving through the right lanes to exit and turn around.

The good ol’ boy in the red pickup cruised ahead down the road, trying to calm his wife down. She’d been going thru his drawers again. He was going home to a night of hell. If he’d known he had a choice, he might have let Suzie hit him.

Three cars back, in the right lane, a blond woman in a red SUV was driving back to Douglasville from dropping her husband at the airport. The kids were watching a DVD in the back seat, and her mind was somewhere else. It was over before she knew it, but her eyes happened to be focused on Suzie’s blue car, and so she saw the whole thing. She dialed 911.

‘Hello…What’s my emergency? I want to report someone shooting at a car…Yes, I just saw a driver in a car. Shooting at another driver…In another car…A truck…A blue car…I don’t know what kind…I don’t know what year…I didn’t see the driver.’ Holding her phone to her ear and trying to think, she started drifting to the left, and swerved to correct it. ‘Well, yes I did see the actual gun. I’m pretty sure of that…Or movements like firing a gun…The driver pointed it at him from the driver’s seat…I saw the bullet…Yes, I did. It flashed real bright, like a tracer, like on those shows on the War Channel…Yes, really.’

Brake lights came on in front of the woman as traffic continued to adjust for the red pickup controlling the road from the left lane, now ten cars in front. She didn’t see the brake lights because she was so busy trying to recall details about the assailant’s car. Traffic slowed to 35 miles an hour on the road in front of her, but she didn’t notice.

Somewhere in her brain as she cruised down the road, whole cell colonies cringed and tried to avoid an impact as the traffic slowed to twenty-five, then fifteen. Finally she made sense of the panorama and put on her brakes. She screeched to a halt only inches from the next car’s rear bumper, as it came to a halt only inches from the next car in front of it. The kids set up a wail of complaints, and her bag on the front seat flipped over and ejected its contents onto the floor. She dropped the phone; it flipped shut and cut off the call.

The dispatcher scratched her head and did what she always did with calls like that. She notated it on the log as incomplete and went back to filing her nails.

In her ancient blue Dodge Doohickey, Suzie Q Public, Queen of the Road, slipped the car into neutral and coasted up the exit ramp.

* * *

next, suzie’s boyfriend

Suzie was sitting in the passenger seat of a 1964 GTO convertible, her legs up on the dashboard, bare feet wiggling, sipping sweet tea and reading the paper that rustled slightly in the breeze. The Goat was baby blue, one of only 6,644 convertibles made the first year John DeLorean produced the very first muscle car for GM.

It had shown up in the shop over a year before, needing something to do with the carburetor, but Nelson was always vague about which exact part, and how long it was going to take to order, and nobody but him knew whose car it was anyway. And the guy never showed up, and the part never came, and Nelson had it parked in the middle of the shop, in the north bay, and opened the door behind it every day to get the breeze, and locked the garage around it every night; and it stayed there and grew legs, like a big comfy couch.

Sometimes when Suzie was hanging around the shop, she got tired of standing around, sitting up on the stool, leaning against the worktable, or pacing around outside watching the sky. And she’d grab the paper and go sit in the Goat and read. But she didn’t like to sit and read the paper. Because it annoyed her. Reading the paper.

Nelson was her boyfriend, and he was the manager at Stone’s Auto Repair, a stand-alone cement-block building along a strip of services heading down Tara Boulevard on the way to Jonesboro, Griffin, and the Atlanta Motor Speedway.

Both sides of the road for miles were gas stations, fast food places, used car lots, strip malls, failing suburban ventures, storage places, and other assorted nondescript businesses. Here at the very beginning of the middle of Nowhere, Georgia, they catered to the needs of the motorists, and they were serious about snagging them. If zoning permitted, they would have had massage parlors, spas and topless bars.

The sign out front actually said Stoners Ato Repar, because of the peeling paint, and because Suzie had brought in a paint pen and written an R right where the apostrophe was. She thought it looked good. Nobody else noticed. It was starting to fade in the sun, though, and she might think about touching it up when she had nothing to do.

Which was a joke. There was never anything to do when she was hanging out at Nelson’s. She couldn’t work on cars, even though she could if she had to, because the boys wouldn’t let her pick up a tool.

Today they were moderately busy. It was getting on for three o’clock. The lot was full of cars, but that meant nothing. Some of these cars stood around for weeks before the boys were finished with them. Others were in and out the same day, and the owners of those were sitting in the tiny, gray, cramped, cold, tile-floored waiting room with three-year old magazines and a pot of free coffee nobody ever fell for.

She sat around on the only stool, or leaned on a clean part of the worktable, or paced, or sprawled in the Goat with her feet up. She cleaned out her car and checked all the fluids and pressure readings. She watched the boys do emissions tests, oil changes, tune ups, minor engine repairs. She saw customers wander back to ask questions and get escorted right back out by a greasy mechanic waving a greasy rag in front of their face so they wouldn’t get a good look at what the boys were doing to their car. And though she might be there for half the afternoon, she only spent about seven minutes in any kind of conversation with her boyfriend; most of that during test drives in customer’s cars.

And until Nelson got a few moments and they could go drive around the mall, she was stuck reading a newspaper, or watching clouds go by. And of the two she preferred the clouds. The news was always stupid and trivial, or important and fabricated, and it just made her mad. It was just one version of the truth, and it served interests that were very different from her own.

Suzie was a socialist anarchist, or that’s as near as she could get to politics. The State should pay for everybody, and everybody should be able to go off in search of their exalted destiny even if it wasn’t all that economically viable. The poor should be lifted up and the rich reined in so that everybody got to the trough.

And it was a reasonable position for her to hold. Because there she was, with not much of a job, and not enough money to go into debt and rise to the next level. Maybe by the time she was middle aged she’d look around and notice that she’d become middle class, and she’d have a mortgage and vote Republican and be paying on an SUV. But right now she didn’t have any obligations, no hooks, nothing to strive for. So she was pretty solidly anti-class, anti-money, anti-power and influence, anti-establishment, anti-the-way-things-were.

So this newspaper article she was reading was driving her nuts. ‘New Law A Solution To Homeless Problem.’ It was about a brand new law banning homelessness in Atlanta. It drove her nuts because the homeless guys just sat in the shade talking and minding their own business, and there on the front page of the Journal-Constitution they were being accused of being depraved criminals, lying in wait to rob honest people. The paper was absolutely certain about it, no doubt at all that they were right, no room to look at it any other way.

Suzie found herself growling. Her dad had taught her to see the world from all sides, and she was offended, and scared. She could see a whole newspaper-reading population going right along with the Journal’s attitude without spending a single moment thinking about the issues.

Suzie put the paper down and climbed out of the car over the closed door, sliding her legs over the side and standing up next to a fifty-gallon barrel of oil. She had to be careful about getting her pants dirty. Everything in the place would leave greasy shiny streaks if she came close to it in her white work pants.

Stupidly, she’d changed clothes first thing, dashing into the customer bathroom to get out of her costume. It chafed something horrible, and Suzie already knew she was going to have to do a serious rework right away. Summer was coming.

The garage’s metal roof pinged and snapped in the sun. The loblolly pines waved feebly in the breeze; sixty-foot tall weeds. Even in May it got really hot in the garage when the wind died down; even with north and south bay doors open practically all the time.

Stoner’s Auto Repair was a typical concrete standalone with a flat metal roof, fifty feet square. Concrete blocks were painted two tones of gray with a stripe of yellow. It was maybe thirty feet high, with a suspended ceiling stuck full of pens flung up there by the boys.

Allen, a buddy of Nelson’s fresh out of jail, was over in the southwest bay, down in the pit doing an oil change. Nubby was working on a white minivan in the southeast bay. Nathan was out in the parking lot bringing a customer’s car to the northeast bay for emissions.

Nelson was standing at the south bay door looking out at the traffic, silhouetted, motionless. He looked like a preying mantis, one arm raised up and leaning on the wall, one foot crossed over the other, knees and elbows akimbo. He looked like Danny Kaye, only tall and skinny, stretched out to somewhere around seven feet and dangerously underfed, with a massive Viking head, sunken eyes, a hooked nose, a huge chin, and curly used-to-be red hair thinning on top.

Suzie could see his thoughts floating out around his head, his concerns, his responsibilities, his plans and schemes. But though she could see his thoughts, she still couldn’t read them. Nelson was deep, and nobody really knew what was going on inside him. Sometimes it seemed like he was trying to confuse things on purpose. Sometimes she thought maybe he was a psychopathic liar, but she could never be sure.

Nathan pulled the car into the emissions bay and ran it up onto the ramp, braking sharply when it got to the rollers at the top, the frame of the car teetering at the very edge. He got out of the car with a big sheepish grin on his face, and nodded at the edge of the car. ‘Almost went for a trip, eh?’

Nathan was over six feet and was pretty thick around the middle. He was somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties, though he had lots of lines on his face so he could have been in his forties, except that he didn’t act old enough to actually be grown up. Little things made Suzie think he was younger. Like that grin. And the fact that his crew-cut hair was bleached blond like some surfer dude with a beer gut. Compared to the other mechanics in the shop, he had perfect teeth, broad and white and filling his mouth. Maybe that’s why he grinned so often.

The car he was going to test was old, from sometime in the early ’90s, and it was painted a curious shade of dark blue. The paint had been put on with a paint roller, and featured visible brushstrokes and waves and dips where it covered patches of bondo. Although not designed to draw attention, the paint job was notable for its raw energy and expressionistic flair.

Nathan was very attracted to it. He stood up from the stool in front of the console where he was entering the car’s data into the computer, and studied the car for a long moment. ‘You know, I think if I were going to paint a car like this, I’d take paint and splatter it on the car.’ He made flinging motions at the car, white there, green there. Very artistic. It would have looked good, especially glazed over with a thick coat of clear varnish.

Nubby passed by with a greasy rag in his hand and had a quick look at the car. ‘This is house paint, not car paint,’ he said, straightening up. ‘See, you can scratch it with a fingernail. And when winter comes and it gets cold and damp out, it’ll pull off in sheets.’ Nubby was short and skinny and didn’t say much. He wore his hair in a mullet, thinning on top with a long ratty braid running down his back. He was about thirty, short and skinny with bad teeth; quiet, a hard worker with a wife and a baby at home.

‘How would you know about that, Nubby?’ said Nelson, coming over to see why his people were clustering together at one end of the shop.

Nubby came back and they all stood around the car. ‘Cuz I did some house painting once, and this other guy on the crew just came back from robbing a liquor store and used it to disguise his car, is how come. It worked for a couple of days, but then it started cracking, and it didn’t last more’n two months. He never got caught for the robbery, though, so maybe it worked after all.’ Nubby stood wiping the greasy rag over his wrench, thoughtful. ‘He died. Robbed another liquor store, and the cops chased him. Ended up in a ditch.’ He shook his head. ‘Gas tank blew up. Not much left to bury.’

‘Serves him right,’ Nathan snorted. ‘He’d have been better off robbing a diner. There’re fewer guns under the counter than they used to be, and the cops are bent on eating in peace.’

‘Let me tell you something,’ Nelson spoke up. ‘Best thing would be to rob a bank. Nobody expects that these days, not since the ’80s. You just get you a good disguise and be all nice and polite about it, and have you a good exit plan, and you’ll be fine, because the tellers have strict orders to just hand the money over.’

Allen the new guy spoke up, stepping into the middle of the circle and shaking his head. ‘No,’ he said, the voice of experience. ‘You can’t do that anymore. They’ve got all sorts of ways of monitoring banks, and restaurants, too.” He looked sad. He acted like he was throwing cold water on a pack of dogs.

Then he smiled kind of wistfully, his big bushy moustache snarling up at one end. ‘No, drugstores is what you want to rob these days. There’s lots of boys want to buy anything you can carry away from there. Times you don’t get no money from the registers, you’ve got all these class A drugs sitting behind the counter. And cough syrup. I knew this guy’

Allen was getting ready to tell them about someone he was in jail with who masterminded the biggest heist in the South, and they could see it coming, so the boys edged away. Nubby abruptly turned and walked back to the car he was messing with, as if trouble was an infectious disease Allen carried.

‘Aight.’ Nelson spun around on the balls of his feet to look them all in the eye. ‘Everybody get back to work. We don’t need to stand around jawing about the best way to make us some money. That’s what we got jobs for. We do the work we’ve got in front of us, and I for one go home with plenty.’ He grinned like a showman, and grabbed the clipboard for the hand-painted car. ‘Who’s doing this?’

Nathan raised his hand, grinning. He grinned whenever he was the center of attention. Mainly because he spent so much time getting yelled at. But maybe he was trying to make a friendly moment of it as a way of feeling better about himself. Whatever, it tended to set Nelson off. Maybe he didn’t like seeing that many healthy teeth. His were stained and jumbled up together near the front of his mouth, but he had most of them, and that was better than Nubby or Allen.

Nelson looked at the clipboard again. ‘This says retest?’

Nathan leaned over and looked at the paperwork. He nodded. ‘Yep.’

Nelson did a double take for the audience. ‘Nathan, tell me something. Did you ever see this car in here before?’

Nathan started to say that he could have seen it before its paint job and just not recognize it in its current state.

Nelson could tell what he was going to say and jumped in, his arm flailing at the test results. ‘No, Nathan, we’ve never seen this car before. And that’s the God’s honest truth. So why are you giving them a retest if they haven’t paid their twenty-five dollars for the first one?’

Nathan shrugged. ‘They said they were bringing it in for a retest, so I’m retesting it.’

Nelson ran his stained fingers through his hair. ‘You didn’t check. Nathan, you’ve always got to check.’ Nelson blinked and started off toward the office with a lurch, and then dashed back. ‘I’d like to get the guy out of here, so I’m gonna let you go ahead and do the work to make it pass.’ He paused and jerked his head. ‘Nathan, you listening to me? I don’t want you running the test on the computer. Let me fix it first. Can you remember that?’

Nathan nodded distractedly, his eyes darting around and beyond Nelson’s face. He’d decided to check the glove box for proof (or not) that the car’d been tested somewhere else. Maybe it would mollify Nelson a little to know that Nathan was at least half right. So he climbed back in the car and ransacked the glove compartment, taking a sheaf of loose papers and receipts out of it and sorting through them, letting papers slip through his fingers and fall to the grimy floor of the shop. He singled out a couple of sheets of crumpled paper and spread them out, tossing the rest on the passenger seat. ‘Looks like this guy failed at two other places.’

Nelson walked back over from another part of the shop and took the papers from Nathan, shaking his head. ‘So yeah he might have a retest coming, but not from here, because you only get the retest A,’ he ticked it off on his fingers, ‘if you get some work done to make it pass, and B, if you’ve already paid that particular shop. And you can see right here,’ he said, waving the papers at Nathan, ‘that he didn’t. So go ahead and finish entering him into the system,’ he repeated patiently, ‘ and go ahead and make him pass, but I don’t want you finishing it, because we’ve got to make sure to make him a new bill and get him to pay us.’

Nelson walked off again and left Nathan to finish entering the VIN and other input and run the test, confident that Nelson would know how to get around the rules. Suzie hung out watching Nathan. She’d appropriated the barstool while the boys were admiring the van gogh car, dragged it over to the edge of the wooden worktable that separated the GTO from the emissions bay, and perched on the unfinished wooden seat. Nathan had to enter the seventeen-digit VIN twice, and then twice again when the numbers didn’t match.

She had her shoes off beneath her stool, and kept sliding her bare feet over the rungs gingerly trying to find a spot worn bare of grease. Her butt was beginning to ache and she was going to have to get up and walk around soon. She always felt kind of lethargic when she was hanging out at Nelson’s.

Nathan was muttering to himself. ‘Make it pass. He wants to make it pass. I’ll show him passing.’ He ran tests. He pressed the hydraulic lift button and the front end of the car rose up six inches or so. Then he got in the car and ran it up to sixty for awhile, watching the monitor that he’d turned so he’d be able to see it from the car. Then he got out and punched up some other test, and got back into the car and ran it at half speed for awhile, his face going blank, his mouth hanging open, hunched over inside the little toy car. Maybe he was a football player in high school. He was very jock-like, being not too swift and always inclined to just stand in the way and let everyone go around him. Maybe he was a fullback.

Nathan was a relative of Nelson’s, and Suzie was not really sure how close a relative, maybe his sister’s kid, maybe his aunt’s. He wasn’t the brightest bulb God ever screwed into a lamp, but he tried, and he was enthusiastic about his job, and he loved working on cars. Well, not really. In fact, when Suzie asked him, he insisted that he hated working on cars. But when she asked him what he’d rather be doing, he never said; he just muttered for a few minutes about how much he hated it, using vague unfinished sentences and waves of his hand. So maybe he didn’t love working in a garage. But he certainly tackled his work with vigor.

Suzie sat there watching Nathan. Nathan sat there watching the monitor. Time passed. Nelson came up to the window of the car to check on what Nathan was doing, and for awhile she watched them both watching the monitor, the same mesmerized look coming over their faces.

After a few minutes of this, a black dude in a white t-shirt and long red shorts came cruising in through the back of the shop and strolled up to Nelson. A customer perhaps. Nelson conferred with him, stepping away from Nathan’s window, and then they drifted off and walked through the south bays and disappeared around the corner to the side of the front parking lot.

She was thinking of the boys as the three musketeers, or stooges, or Marx brothers. Nelson, Nathan, and Nubby. Three J’s Garage. They made that name up themselves one day after pulling off some audacious fraud against the owner and rolling up cigar sized joints to celebrate. They’d puffed ceremoniously until they were coughing, and did complex handshakes using mostly their fists. With some sort of rebel yell once they got their breaths back.

Suzie sat there watching them and suddenly saw them all lit up, as if surrounded by an aura. They were a team of total country misfits doing their best against the odds, being their own loser selves and getting away with it. She felt proud of them, like their teamwork meant something, and wanted to applaud them in public.

She spent some time fantacizing the logistics of coming around one night to tag the building with their caricatures and Three J’s Garage. There was only one place to paint it: around back, away from the road. People would only notice it when they drove around, so it would be a private tribute. The boys were proud of the work they did on the side and the scams they worked. They deserved a tribute.

Suzie’s butt hurt, but it didn’t help to shift on the stool. She considered getting off it and going outside to look at the sky. But she stayed and watched as Nathan did another test with a tailpipe monitor, and then a test with the gas cap. He looked around for the barstool, saw Suzie sitting on it, shrugged and grinned, and went over to stand at the console to punch up the results.

He bent over his work, bobbing with the silent rhythm of some song he wasn’t quite humming, his bleach-blond crew cut waving slightly with each nod. He peered at the printout as it came out. ‘It didn’t pass, Nelson,’ he called cheerily. ‘Duh.’

Suzie could see that he’d been thinking about how to fix it so it would pass. He’d taken a bunch of readings, and stood there and thought about it for a few minutes. During which time Nubby changed spark plugs in the minivan; Allen did another oil change; Nelson and the black guy came sauntering back through the shop, said a few happy things to each other, and did the fist handshake thing, and the guy went back to his car and left. Suzie sat there the whole time, perched on the barstool, leaning forward to take the pressure off her butt, with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands.

Nathan jumped into the car and took a close look under the dash, his feet kicking outside the door as he came up with a radical, exciting idea. He jumped out and went to the shelf that ran the length of the west wall and rummaged around for a fuse. ‘A big fucking fuse. This’ll fix it.’ He ducked back into the car and replaced some smaller fuse with one lots more powerful. And then he ran the reading again, and was all smiles. ‘Make it pass, he said. Hey Nelson, I’m making it pass!’

Nelson didn’t hear him because he was in the office making a phone call. Nathan took the opportunity to run the retest so that he’d have something printed out to show Nelson when he came to check on it. Nelson would think he was finally getting the point of doing emissions tests, and would be really proud of him for figuring out how to make it pass.

‘It passed, Nelson,’ he said when Nelson emerged from the office and closed the door behind him. Nathan was bursting to tell him what he’d done. Because making cars pass an emission tests was a very complicated science. Nelson might know most of the tricks, but Nathan was sure he’d come up with a new innovation himself, and Nelson would finally see that he wasn’t as dumb as everyone thought he was. He handed him the certificate as it came off the printer.

Nelson frowned. ‘What’s this?’ Nathan pointed to the part where it said Passed, smiling broadly. ‘No, what is this?’ Nelson asked again, pointing to the part where it said Retest. ‘Nathan, didn’t I tell you to let me do it? I swear you never listen to a thing I say.’ He looked pained.

Suzie made a sympathetic noise as he walked past her to check on Allen. As he passed, he brushed her shoulders with the back of his hand, which was almost clean. It was the only notice he’d given her for half an hour. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with that boy,’ he said loud enough for Nathan to hear him. Suzie made a questioning noise. ‘He loses me a little bit of money every time he touches anything, is all.’

Nathan grinned, looking like a big Garfield. ‘But I got it out of here, it passed and now it’s leaving.’ That’s what Nelson had told him to do. Suzie could see how proud he was, and that he was totally oblivious to Nelson’s displeasure.

She wandered over to the front of the shop to stand in the shade of the overhang and look off south into the sky. There were great views to the south and the north, and you could stand anywhere in the shop and see weather coming in. But there was no weather coming in.

The sky was bright blue behind puffy little clouds that had no rain in them. There was a tease of a breeze wicking through the shop, and the air was cool, but it was hot out there in the sun. It was hot out in the sun even in the winter, something Nubby complained of every time he went and stood outside for a cigarette, like he was doing at that moment.

Suzie went to join him. ‘So smoke inside,’ she said as he swore between puffs. He shook his head. ‘It’s not like you couldn’t smoke in the shop. I mean, there’s nothing flammable in there. Just the aerosol cans, really.” Suzie turned to survey all the oil and grease, the tires stacked against the far corner, the filthy floor and the wads of paper trash everywhere, the big bottles of pressurized gasses, the fifty-gallon drums of oil and transmission fluid.

Nubby took another drag and nodded his head toward the inside of the shop. ‘I just need a break from all the aggravation.’ They stood and watched the sky while he smoked. Nubby’s dad had some land when he was a kid, and he’d spent lots of time wandering the fields and woods. He was saving up to buy a few acres to put the trailer on, further away from Atlanta, and for a guy who didn’t speak much, he loved talking about the country, and would it rain, and how hot it was getting.

He ground out the butt under his boots and went back to the minivan. Suzie went back to her post near the worktable, past a sign on the wall that said Only Legal Emissions Tests Are Done Here, Any Requests To The Contrary Will Be Reported To The EPA. She’d drawn a winking eye on it when they’d first put it up, and Cindy, the owner, had replaced it and yelled at Nelson about it. But she drew a wink on that one, too, and after a few replacements, Cindy stopped noticing it and the sign stayed tagged.

Nathan had reclaimed the barstool and was getting ready to test another car, a white pickup. ‘So, Nathan, what did you do to make it pass?’

‘I put in this big fucking fuse, and now it’s fixed.’

‘But, isn’t that just hiding the problem?’

‘Who cares?’

‘And doesn’t putting in too big a fuse cause a fire hazard?’

He shrugged. ‘So what? It passed, and that’s what counts.’

Nathan wasn’t concerned with the twenty-five bucks the customer didn’t have to pay for the test, either, because that was office stuff, and he didn’t want to know. Cindy, Glenda who worked in the office when Cindy wasn’t there, Nubby, and Nelson all worked the register and wrote up jobs. Nathan just did the little stuff that Nelson told him to do.

He didn’t even have to go to the bank to cash his paycheck. He could get paid right out of the till. It would just be more to think about if he had to know prices or deal with the customers. And it was a whole nother computer system in the office. Out in the shop there was just the emissions machine and the dashboard computer thing they could plug in to download shit from the car. That was more than enough. They couldn’t pay him to learn any more than he already had to.

Suzie was tired of hanging around with nothing to do. The soles of her feet hurt, and she had to be at work in an hour and a half. Her butt still hurt from sitting on the stool. She had actually come by to see if Nelson could do something about her air conditioner. He’d filled it with freon the last time she’d been here, but it had already escaped into the upper atmosphere, so she needed some more.

It was just too hot driving around in the sun with the windows down. It was really sweaty in all those costume layers, sitting in Atlanta traffic with no breeze, and now that she had a good job she had to make sure not to come in dripping wet. At sixty miles an hour, eighty-degree air might be slightly cooling, but when she was in stop-and-go traffic there wasn’t enough breeze to keep her from breaking out into runnels of salt water down both sides of everything.

Nelson must have read her mind. He came over and stood behind her, rubbing her shoulders for a moment with the backs of his wrists, then leaned over and said conspiratorially, ‘Let’s go for a spin. These boys about to drive me crazy.’ So Suzie straightened up from her position against the worktable and stretched, then went off to use the bathroom in the office. Because Nelson might say right now, but he still had things to do before slipping away, and she knew she had maybe ten minutes before he’d dash to the car and fuss at her for not waiting there the whole time.

All mechanics have pictures of naked women somewhere. This place had porn mags strewn all over the shop floor bathroom which were perfectly safe from discovery because nobody has ever seen a filthier bathroom.

The outside of the door had years of greasy handprints on it, and the doorknob was so slick that the boys had to use their shirt tails to twist it open. Every surface was grimed; there was a scuffed-clean path to the toilet from the door. There was no toilet paper, just old newspapers dashed into the corner. You wouldn’t want to wash your hands or even rest anything on the lip of the sink, and don’t even think about looking at the underside of the seat.

Should a customer open the door by mistake, they’d never notice the porn mags. The horror would show on their face and in the way they backed off, and you’d be able to see them thinking that they’d better get their car away from the shop as soon as possible.

Suzie used the customer bathroom instead. She pulled open the door to the office and was hit by a blast of air conditioning, cooling the waiting room to a frigid fifty-eight degrees even though it was only spring. She made her way past the front counter, past Cindy, and past the sullen, angry stares of customers waiting for their cars, and slipped into the bathroom, which was spotless compared to the shop floor bathroom. This bathroom’s only flaws were a hastily patched wall where someone had gotten angry and put their fist through it, a constantly dripping sink, and a pile of paper towels spilling out of the waste basket which she scooped up and stuffed back in - her contribution to tidiness.

Suzie didn’t like to be in the shop when Cindy was around. She’d give him hell for having his friends there during business hours. So she only ever nodded when she had to deal with Cindy, who scowled back in that Southern, cold-eyed smiley way. Cindy was a nervous little woman who was always afraid of being made a fool of or ripped off. She’d thought she’d get rich owning a franchise, but she was in way over her head. She was too nice, too middle class, too clueless. She should have just let Nelson run things his way and take what profit he could generate without prompting.

But she was adamant about doing the right thing, and so she came in twice a week to oversee everything, and that meant she’d be looking at the books and asking questions and wanting the boys to work more and faster. Cindy might have done well being an office manager in a small place, or working in a parts store, because she micromanaged. But the boys were allergic to scrutiny and didn’t respond well to management techniques, so when she came in they hustled around and added a little more energy to their movements so they’d look busier and more effective and she’d stay off their backs. It drove everyone nuts.

Even Nelson looked more efficient and seemed to get more done when she was there. But he was the star of the shop, so Cindy never said much. Maybe she was a little intimidated by him. A little charmed. The more she looked up to his genius, the more his methods slid. In fact, as long as they made money and the books were straight, she didn’t have much to complain about. Nelson was always there on time, came in on his day off whenever they could get hold of him, handled customers with charm, and had the benevolent air of a master at work. He was the perfect employee. Except he was ripping her off at every opportunity.

Nelson was a mechanic’s mechanic. Not in the sense that other mechanics looked up to him and studied his skillful way with an engine, but in the sense that anything he touched had to be gone over later by another mechanic, making more work for everyone. He fixed anything that came into the shop, anything the customer wanted done, whether it was necessary or not, and whether the repair was actually done or just approximated, and whether or not he’d done that kind of repair before.

To Nelson, nothing mechanical was a mystery, just a big pain in the ass. He always figured he was a born inventor, not a technician, and this led to some creative repairs that it was best the customers didn’t know about.

Suzie came back out and found him yelling at Nathan for something new. She waited around until he was through, and then he washed up at the back sink, and they got into some customer’s red Camry that was sitting out back.

It had been sitting in the sun, and its black interior felt like the inside of a toaster oven. There was a fine covering of dust on everything. The inside of the windshield was filthy, with streaks and splotches from imperfectly wiped condensation and spilled coffee. The car had a CD hanging on the mirror by a thread, a full ashtray, and paper trash all over the floor - newspapers, McDonald’s bags, discarded mail, drink cups, water bottles, cigarette packs.

She had to move a bunch of papers from the passenger seat, and glanced in the back as she got in. There were clothes scrunched in the corner of the back seat, and car parts and cans of car fluids taking up the foot room. Nelson was already revving the car and was impatient to get away before Cindy noticed him gone.

Nelson started the car up and they headed down Tara Boulevard to the first subdivision and snaked around the streets. It was a maze built in the ’60s, called Camelot. It had a Tudor look, sort of. She looked at him fondly and relaxed into the seat, gently sweeping her hand over to his side of the car, hoping he wanted to hold hers and be close. But he had something else in mind, and turned his hand over to reveal a joint he’d palmed back in the shop.

Nelson smoked a lot of weed. He smoked it all day long, and always had a huge big joint ready to smoke when they’d take a break. Suzie couldn’t stand getting high all day long, but there was no refusing Nelson, and he never asked her if she wanted to smoke, just handed her the joint.

It was the size of her thumb, and she held on to it while he fished around in his pockets for the lighter. Then she handed it back, after duly admiring the tightness of the roll and the enormous amount of weed it contained. He pulled a half-smoked cigar out of his pocket and put it in the ashtray, so he’d have some camouflage in the unlikely event a cop stopped them. Then he lit the joint, bellowing smoke as he took the first drag and rolled the window down a crack so he could see where he was going. He started to cough, his 7′4” frame convulsing tightly as he let out great hacking sounds that reminded Suzie of an end-stage lung cancer patient. She looked at him with concern as he passed her the joint, but he had turned his attention back to the road and didn’t see her face.

‘Great stuff,’ he said, once he caught his breath. ‘Taste that. That’s the measure of good pot, you know, how hard it makes you cough.’

Suzie was dubious. ‘I’m not sure there’s a connection between the amount of THC and how resinous it is.’ Because she rather thought it wasn’t.

‘Nah, it’s a well known fact.’ He took another hit, and the coughing continued. ‘Seriously, did you know that the pot we smoke today has twenty-three times more THC in it than what you could get in the ’60s? Even the field-grown strains are stronger. That’s why it costs so much more.’

‘That and maybe the general rate of inflation?’ Suzie was not easily satisfied with Nelson’s explanations. They were so absolute. So she usually tried to bring out other facts that might influence the subject so they could have a discussion. Suzie had trouble talking to Nelson because he knew so much about everything, and though she could see flaws in his logic and holes in his evidence, she always understood that it was because he’d already factored in their relative influence on the matter, and was expecting her to see that.

‘I’ll tell you something else. The CIA, who - believe it - have been genetically engineering pot all this time for maximum effect, have also been setting the price to the dealers. And that’s really why the price is so high.’

She blew out her lungful of smoke a fraction of a second early. ‘Now don’t tell me that the CIA is entirely behind the drug trade.’ Everything Nelson said sounded plausible when he said it. But when you got away from the shop and thought back on it, parts of the vast conspiracy it always ended up being didn’t quite hold together. So she was always a bit skeptical. Or tried to be, to balance the thrill of emotion she got whenever she thought about a huge vast conspiracy to control the world.

‘It’s the God’s truth. The CIA took it over from the mob in the early ’60s.’ He waved the joint with energy, pointing to the windshield, indicating an imaginary Southeast Asia spot on the lower right, then sweeping over to Europe and South America and Mexico on the left.

‘Yep, they got into heroin and then they got into coke, and they only recently took over pot because turns out it’s the most profitable.’ He looked wise, glancing at her, driving the car with his left hand, his elbow draped all the way out of the window, his head within millimeters of the roof, his knees right up beside the steering wheel, poised to take over the driving should he happen to drop the joint and have to fish for it.

Nelson was of Scandinavian heritage, one of the few spots in the world where humans still intermarry with giants. His every move was a dart and a jab as he wheeled and pivoted on stilts for legs and mop handles for arms. And yet, for all his 8′3 ”, he weighed 92 pounds. You could see his spine through his belly, swear to God. He always spoke with a great animated rush, completely enthused by the thoughts he needed to communicate, possessed by the immediacy of his truth.

‘Yeah. And let me tell you something else.’ He said quickly. She looked at him as he paused with dramatic emphasis to take a deep drag and commence coughing again. He was so noble looking, so intelligent. Beautiful in a really ugly way, with his big sunken eyes, his big toucan nose, his massive jaw, those enormous Buddha ear lobes and batwing ears, and almost-red wiry hair looking like the grass in an Easter basket.

He loomed in her direction. ‘The reason it’s still not legal is because the CIA can fund its entire black operations budget with the price of pot today. It’s the highest return on the dollar of any option, legal or not. The drug companies are killing themselves trying to come up with patentable uses for pot, that’s how profitable it is. And the government doesn’t want the competition, and doesn’t want to license it, because the only revenue they’ll get is tax, which is a fraction of what they’re getting now.’

He sat back and passed her the joint, proud of his razor-sharp insight, pleased at having revealed the damning truth.

Suzie was trying to become a skeptic by nature. But get her high and she had no problem believing in secret societies, hidden organizations, master plans. The thought frightened her, because if they were running things, then things were being run into the ground.

‘See, my dad was a Mason,’ Nelson said as he reclaimed the joint, which was getting small and sticky. He held it with the tips of his fingers so it wouldn’t burn him when he took the next hit. ‘My dad told me some shit. All sorts of secret societies are running things you would not believe. The CIA can control the weather. They’ve got big machines. I’m not shitting you. But the Masons don’t need machines. The highest Masons get together and use these magic powers they spend all their time developing, and they can make it rain or snow anywhere they want to.’

Suzie thought of Glinda, Good Witch of the North, making snow fall to wake Dorothy and the Lion. She’d heard stories about her mom’s crowd, conjuring thunderstorms in a drought. But what Nelson was saying sounded a little far-fetched. If they can’t even predict the weather, how can anyone control it?

She burned her fingers on her last turn with the joint, so she waved it away when Nelson handed it back to her. He happily kept it and took several short drags, but choked it all out immediately in another long fit of coughing.

‘Let me tell you something else about the weather,’ Nelson said. ‘I been reading about this. Back in the ’70s the CIA built a Tesla machine to control the weather. They like studied Russian weather patterns and found some sort of pressure point, a spot up in the North Atlantic where all the big storms came from. And they turned this machine on and made the whole earth, like, tingle, and focused it on that one spot and made a wave of turbulence. It instantly affected the weather, and Russia was hit with storm after storm for months. Ruined all the crops.’ He stopped for another coughing fit. Suzie watched with concern as he grew red in the face and didn’t seem able to stop coughing even to draw a breath.

Gradually the hacking diminished, and he eagerly put the butt end of the roach up to his mouth for a last hit. ‘Thing about that is, it fucked up America’s weather, too, and they had to stop.’ He turned to her earnestly. ‘But don’t think they’ve stopped trying to control weather. They’ve just moved on to other methods. Like electrifying the atmosphere to power airplanes and monitor the earth and control the clouds and shit.’

Suzie wanted to hear more about this latest claim, but Nelson turned into the parking lot of the garage and handed her the smoldering roach. ‘Here, put that out and let me get back to work.’ He pulled to a stop and lunged over for a kiss, then was out the door and bouncing off into the back of the shop while she was still trying to find her shoes among the debris on the floor of the Camry.

She turned her mind to work. The thought of going off to work and leaving the breezy garage reminded her that she wanted him to fix her air conditioning.

Cindy wandered out from the office, carrying a clipboard and calling, ‘Awl change,’ like she was selling newspapers on the street. Nelson was back at work, and she knew it was going to be another hour and a half before he’d be willing to pay attention to her again. She’d just spent all her available time with him talking about conspiracy theories instead of asking him when he was going to get around to looking at her car. She didn’t bother approaching him to ask about it. She knew what his answer would be: ‘Come see me tomorrow and we’ll fix it first thing.’

So, fine, she thought. Whatever. Let’s just go and maybe get to work on the early side.

* * *

next, the emerald city

Never tempt God by saying ‘Early’ with reference to Atlanta traffic.

She drove off with a wave nobody saw. They were all bent over a car and Nelson was fussing at Nathan and never looked up. Somehow relieved, Suzie made for 75 North back into town. Suzie Q, Queen of the Road, happiest when she had a steering wheel in her hand.. She didn’t really like staying still. Didn’t like touching the ground. Loved the wind in her hair. Seeing the trees flash by. Watching the sky reinvent itself every day, all day long. She headed straight up to the entrance ramp, and joined the traffic heading to Atlanta.

Traffic was moderate, an average of 75 cars per mile in each lane, an average spacing of 70 feet. The road speed averaged 72 miles per hour. It was the usual mix of pickups, SUVs and cars, with commercial vans and trucks here and there; everybody behaving themselves. Big rigs were kind of thick on this stretch, most of them preparing to go around the Perimeter and leave the Connector to the lesser vehicles. God bless them. Professional drivers, who know how to drive, keeping out of the way of the idiots.

Then she hit her brakes suddenly because of someone crossing in front of the semi next to her and into her lane. It’s a wonder truckers don’t lose their shit and mete out some punishment, she thought, take out the real menaces, smite theyself some ass, like Uncle Daddy says. Like that one in the white Explorer just almost creamed her. Fucking looked like a storm trooper. Just sauntering across the road. Not only dangerous, he was damn rude.

It’s a real art, driving, Suzie was thinking, and in a town like The Big 404 you got to be sharp. It’s all life in the fast lane round here. Assholes these days don’t learn shit when they’re coming up, just how to work the pedals and steer. Now, truckers are trained right. And because they’re sitting on all that momentum, they’re damn careful about the way they handle their rigs. They don’t do sudden anything less there’s a real reason, the way it slings them around. Not like these fucking four-wheelers. It’s all a trucker can do sometimes to maintain speed and stay in their lane with all the batshit drivers cutting in and out around them, and slamming on their brakes twenty feet in front of them. If they only knew the danger they put themselves in.

Suzie fumed. The rant was a combination of all the nasty things her dad and Uncle Daddy said over the years, and was embroidered to suit traffic conditions. She continued on up Seventy-Fifth Street, as her dad’s trucker buddies used to call it, passed the exit to the Perimeter, and was just at the Henry Ford II exit. A stream of thick traffic merged on the right, doing seventy-five, slowing down to 68 as the flow got heavier.

She passed a billboard: ‘Now Y’all Play Nice - God.’ And another one: ‘$69 to Myrtle Beach - Fly Hooter’s Air‘ with a blond thing in a wet t-shirt and bikini shorts with an owl flying out of her bra. Suzie hated the Hooters billboards. Choice of peanuts or a quick feel, she thought, airline extras being what they are these days. She was starting to get ansty about being at work. It was getting close to Four-thirty, her shift started at Five. They had a big banquet tonight and she need to be there on time. Good thing the traffic doesn’t suck, the mused.

Ahah, a second challenge thrown out to God. Who could resist?

The thought that traffic didn’t suck lasted until she approached the Connector. I-75 North became a sea of waving heat-distorted parked cars as it merged with I-85 North. Bumpercars and leapfrog. A loose average of five miles an hour and the electronic sign, for once accurate, reading 8 Miles To I-20, Travel Time 18-25 Minutes.

She got her first partial peek of Atlanta’s skyline at seven miles per hour as traffic moved over a ridge, hanging on the steering wheel, steering with her chin with her chest draped over the airbag. She made it one mile to the next ridge nine and a half minutes later. And there, the first whole view of Atlanta, five miles up the road.

The city poked up out of the trees like one of those alligator yard ornaments, one wavy segment of spikes along a ridge Downtown, another one a ways over on the ridge in Midtown with several dozen cranes jutting into the sky from the back of its spine. Then another expanse of trees, and then the ridge at Buckhead and Lenox, with its several miles of distinctive skyscrapers topped by half-circles and cock heads and sails fading off into the haze. if you could see far enough, which you couldn’t because of the pollution, you could see Perimeter on a ridge way off to the northeast, featuring the King and Queen buildings.

Atlanta was the Emerald City. In the middle of a forest, every direction revealed a sea of rolling greens that met the sky in a sort of purple gunge of hydrocarbons, but never mind. Green as far as the eye could see. Built on one of the last ridges of the Appalachians, which headed roughly northeast to Canada from there, the city had grown into a narrow line of sharp buildings rising above endless trees, like a giant-sized stretch of split rail fencing covered with razor wire and glinting in the sun.

The city receded behind the next ridge as the traffic moved down the hill from Lakewood. Suzie was proud of the landscaping along the roads. It’s what sets Atlanta apart from other cities. Wildflowers on the verges, bushes and trees at every exit and bank, green everywhere you look. Not like northern cities, which are all gray; nothing growing, nothing planted and taken care of; only gardens of tossed-out trash stirring in the wakes of passing vehicles. Atlanta’s like the forest moon of Endor.

The cars were beginning to move again, past no apparent obstacles. It was all for nothing, Traffic eased up for no reason because it had stopped for no reason. A brake check is all, that’s what her dad would call it. NFR, Uncle Daddy would say, No Fucking Reason. The traffic went back up to fifty-five, but it was thick, ten feet between cars, everybody speeding up together. Past University Avenue, past Turner Field, then past the exit to I-20.

Suzie saw the gold dome of the Capital on the left, and then Grady Hospital, the Auburn Curb Market, a sign reading Jesus Saves on top of a green church steeple, and then the whole of Downtown spread out as thin as a line of coke, one distinctive tall building after another parading by.

But traffic had gotten slow and pokey again going through the Grady Curve, and Suzie got to turn her attention back to the skyline, which made her heart thrill every time she saw it. The black Equitable building with its turned-down white collar top, the 191 Building with its twin towers and cascading back side, the Westin like a pokey-up penis, its glass elevator running up the outside just like a vein. Great view from the top, they’ve got a rotating floor, but it’s got to be a clear day. The food is worthless and expensive, so just look at the scenery and ignore the menu.

She passed the Peachtree Center complex with its Rockefeller-modern prison windows. It held tens of thousands of corporate droids in a dozen blocks of interconnected beige towers linked by hamster tubes lined with shops and food courts. People went in there on Monday and never came out until Friday night, swear to God. Downtown ended with the proud blue Portman building, with skyhooks and handles and crenellations and a spike the size of the Eiffel Tower that lit up at night so you could see Atlanta from the moon.

Traffic slowed even more as the road started through the Marta curve where the subway line ran over the highway. Suzie stopped in traffic and looked up, her foot on the brake. She had always thought the Marta overpass would be a perfect spot for some good poignant graffiti having to do with the traffic. Something like, ‘If you can read this you should have stayed at work until traffic died down.’ No, something better.

She could have got out and walked past Crawford Long Hospital, but the cars started to move slightly as the road straightened out to cruise past Georgia Tech and the Varsity Restaurant. She drove on thru Midtown, where traffic resumed its fifteen mile-an-hour crawl as the road paralleled the west side of town, and then slowed again as millions of drivers got into position for jockeying into position to get into the correct lane before the Connector split back into two major interstates at Brookwood. All at a snail’s pace, a slow motion dance of death.

Whoever designed the Connector through Atlanta had a criminal mind. How else do you explain why they joined two interstates and thrust them right through the middle of town, weaving back and forth around Peachtree Street, the main drag, cutting right through neighborhoods and making a hash out of the already convoluted surface streets? And how do you explain the split? I-85 goes northeast, and I-75 goes northwest, but at the split 75 they’re on opposite sides from each other and have to cross over. If you’re coming north thru Atlanta for the first time, you’re going to be driving on the wrong side of eight lanes, expecting the split to veer off in a logical direction. More accidents happen at the Brookwood split because of last minute lane changes, and it’s all the fault of some highway engineer on speed fifty years ago.

Suzie sped up at last as she started up the exit ramp for Tenth and Fourteenth Streets. She took the access road to Seventeenth, avoiding bottlenecks further on. Then she turned right and drove up the hill to cross over Peachtree Street.

As far as she could see down Peachtree, it was all tall buildings of glass, brick or stucco. Massive construction was going on all up and down the length of the street, cranes and boarded-up sidewalks, pedestrians everywhere, all in business clothes.

Here’s where you’ll see the most uncomfortable looking people in Atlanta, with ID badges around their necks, and clothes wrinkled at the hips from sitting: black, brown and gray, hot and sweaty clothes designed to keep you warm in air conditioning, released from the caves and now steaming in the sun. Suzie noticed the shoes, so tight it hurt to look at them. Those poor people all look stunned, she though. Blinded. It probably takes them all the way home to come out of that stupor. Maybe that’s why rush hour traffic is so horrible, maybe they all still think they’re staring at their computers instead of driving home.

Atlanta’s urban segmentation is drastic. Go one block east of skyscrapers on Peachtree, and there are multi-million dollar homes built a century ago. From the mid-level balconies of the tall buildings of Peachtree, you can look down into the placid back yards of rich people and their pets. Sit on the porch of one of these palatial residences, and you can time the movement of the shadow of some skyscraper through the back yard. Suzie always found it shocking to cross from Metropolis into Pleasantville like that. She couldn’t feel comfortable in either place, and it tended to make her very edgy to be hit with both worlds in the space of a block.

So she always slowed down and cruised slowly down Peachtree Circle and onto The Prado. The lawns and landscaping were mature and well-tended, the houses were set way back and up the hill away from the streets, which were as wide as Peachtree and lined with sidewalks full of pram-toting nannies and maids in uniforms, and buff, shirtless guys jogging with walk-zombies and earphones. She passed them all, vaguely ashamed of her beat up blue Doohickey with all the Mercedes and BMWs and Volvos parked along the curbs, and finally turned into the entrance of the White Magnolia Club.

* * *

next, private clubs

A word about Atlanta’s exclusive private club scene. And we’re not talking about Atlanta’s exclusive adult private club scene, either. That’s too sordid and corrupt. It might make a great Atlanta-based crime fiction novel, except that it would all be true, and I’d be in real trouble then. No, I want to talk about the private clubs that cost the earth to join just as a way of discouraging the riff-raff. There’s not really much to choose between them unless you like to measure degrees of superiority. Here are a few of their mission statements, right off their websites:

• The Capital City Club has been located on Harris Street Downtown since 1883 and is one of the oldest private clubs in the country. Their motto is ‘To promote the pleasure, kind feeling and general culture of its members.’
• The Piedmont Driving Club, on Piedmont Road since 1887, stands for ‘The promotion of recreation and enjoyment for its members and their families.’
• The Cherokee Country Club, a newcomer, on West Paces Ferry around the corner from the new Governors mansion, wants to be known for its ‘Commitment to the highest standards in dining and member services.’
• The Atlanta Athletic Club, chartered in 1898, has moved steadily away from the hoi polloi (read: blacks) in East Point and now is located in Duluth, way outside the Perimeter in what they hoped would remain white people country. It was motivated by ‘A group of young men seeking a place where they could enjoy indoor and outdoor athletics with their business associates and friends.’
• The Ku Klux Klan, which was created at the end of the Civil War by six bored middle-class Confederate veterans who decided to form ‘A social club - one purely for amusement, centered on practical jokes and hazing rituals.’
• The St. Ives Country Club is new, and insists a little crassly upon its goal, ‘To operate the most successful and highly regarded member-owned club in Metro Atlanta.’
• The White Magnolia Club (a fictitious member of the Rich White Guys Clubs of Atlanta, virtually established in 1896 around the corner from the Capital City Club) puts the same sentiment slightly differently: ‘Its all about us.’

A word about the White Magnolia Club, where Suzie worked. Those readers who know Atlanta might notice that you can navigate using these pages, and not get any more lost than if you used a map - this is modern Atlanta, after all, and everyone gets lost here, even natives from eight generations back. In the interests of accuracy, I’ve gone to great pains to describe the Atlanta I know and love.

But because of the threat of dismemberment, I’m going to have to fudge a few details about certain aspects of this story, despite my scruples about accuracy. So, though you can otherwise navigate by this book, you’re not going to be able to find this particular clubby bastion of white male privilege, though there are lots of others to choose from. And you won’t exactly recognize the garage full of loveable dopesmoking mechanics, though there are plenty of them in Atlanta, too. And if you did recognize these places, I’d have to insist that you’d be wrong. And in case anybody official were to object to my portraits, skewed though they may be and twisted around to serve my own wicked purposes, then I would have to rest on the fact that this is a work of fiction, and I’ve exercised my right to make shit up.

Instead of laying myself open lawsuits and drive-by sprays of bullets, I’m just going ahead and telling you that the White Magnolia Club, as well as Stones Auto Repair, is fictional. Completely. Any resemblance to any other private club or garage has been made to look like a coincidence.

To begin with, the White Magnolia was a private club that only rich southern white men could belong to, and only after membership fees that would buy a house in the suburbs. The Club bowed to the pressure of progressive members back in the ’90s, and now had a couple of Jews, and three blacks, two of them from Africa. The Board of Directors was considering admitting an Indian Indian. But no Hispanics, no Asians, no Native Americans, no women except as wives. Though a son could inherit his daddy’s membership, Mom was out in the cold when her husband died or if they divorced, even if she’d been attending functions for thirty years and was head of the Ladies Auxiliary.

The main qualification was how much money a man had, but plenty of consideration was given to such arcanities as racial and ethnic purity, religious righteousness, college affiliation, voting record, and family connections. It was a good ol’ boy’s club, pure and simple, established for the comfort and pleasure of people who liked to think they ran things.

And it didn’t matter a lick what someone did for a living, as long as his bona fides and checks were good. Members owned garbage companies, peanut farms, cement factories, pulp mills, car dealerships, construction companies, bail bond offices. There were no drug dealers, because most of those were black or Hispanic, but they did have a particularly successful pharmaceutical representative, the head of an HMO and several plastic surgeons. They didn’t have any prostitutes or madams, because most of those were women, but they did have the owner of an employment agency and half a dozen politicians.

The original home of the White Magnolia Club was downtown on Peachtree Street. It was built as a big Victorian house after Sherman came through with the wreckers, and sold cheap by a northerner fleeing back home during the panic of 1873. A bunch of good ol’ boys bought it, and, still rankling from the superior attitudes of those damned Yankees, declared right off the bat that nobody who wasn’t from the South could join their Club.

Progress being what it is, the area got pretty gritty (read: black) in the ’50s and ’60s, and Club members voted to flee up Peachtree to Ansley Park, three miles north, an expensive suburban enclave built at the turn of the last century in the grandest post-Reconstruction style. Typical of development in Atlanta, the lovely old mansion on Peachtree was eventually razed to the ground, and John Portman put up an enormous bronze statue of two naked dancing girls on top of what used to be stately columns and well-tended gardens.

So when they built the current governor’s mansion in 1968, that awful, blocky Greek Revival thing on West Paces Ferry, the Club bought the old governor’s mansion for a song, and completely restored and refashioned it into the grandest private club in the South.

It was built in the Italian Renaissance Revival style, up on the top of a hill, at 205 The Prado, Ansley Park, in the early years of the last century. It was the very finest address in Atlanta at the time, the residence of hot developer Edwin Ansley. It had thirteen rooms, five baths, and the house was dressed with granite excavated right there on the property. After 1925 it was the home of eleven successive governors of Georgia.

Two stories and a full basement, built on top of a rise, acres of land beside and behind it, servants’ quarters and other outbuildings; the place reminded the visitor of an old plantation, including life-size statues of black boys holding lanterns at the end of the driveway. Suzie drove her beat up old car very slowly past them for someone who was already twenty minutes late to work.

The place has seen some renovations, seeing as how the Club has owned the ex governor’s mansion for awhile. They knocked out the various parlors and dens downstairs, made two huge ballrooms out of the space, and commissioned two enormous rugs emblazoned with the club’s logo. They kept the original heart-of-Georgia-pine floors, which could still be seen around the edges of the room, but lowered the ceiling with practical suspended-tile ceilings that were now going gray and getting ugly, but were still a good idea because they hid the pipes and ducts that were installed at the same time. There were now double-paned windows, central heating and air conditioning, hidden speakers, programmed lighting, discrete security cameras, and a courtesy elevator for the more fragile members.

The newest renovation, done at a cost of several millions dollars, converted what used to be spacious living quarters upstairs, and then mostly storage, into a whole bunch of casual dining rooms. They also, while they were at it, converted the ground beneath their prize-winning ornamental gardens into a brand new parking deck; and converted the entire basement into a huge commercial kitchen. This was all several years back, but they still pointed it out with pride.

A set of semi-circular granite steps led up to a set of ancient carved oak double doors, which swung open to reveal a long wide breezeway going through the middle of the building to a covered verandah out back, overlooking the prize-winning gardens. The breezeway was recently renovated into a two story atrium, with white marble floors and a fountain in the middle under a glass roof. You could stand in the hall and catch glimpses of the second floor with all the private dining rooms and lounges. A sign at the foot of the stairs insisted: Coat And Tie For The Men And Evening Dress For The Ladies Are Required At All Times. There Is No Smoking In The Casual Dining Rooms.

At the head of the house were the two massive ballrooms on either side of the breezeway that held up to 250 each, with a luxurious rug, sconces and chandeliers and fireplaces shining with brass. Expensive watered-silk wallpaper patterned with yellow orchids covered the walls of the Ladies Slipper Ballroom to the left, and green ducks and brown hunting dogs decorated the Southern Sportsman Ballroom to the right.

Behind the Sportsman Room was the large dining room: paneled in mahogany, seating just under a hundred, a long formal dining table running down the middle of the room flanked by high backed chairs, with mirrors and crystal glinting everywhere. Behind the Ladies Slipper Room was the pantry, a library, a game room, and a lounge where the wives adjourned after dinner so that the men could stay in the dining room to drink and smoke and have strippers in.

Up on the second floor were a variety of dressing rooms for men and ladies, lounges where the same could sleep off too many cocktails, and private dining and function rooms all named after southern flowers, where from a pair to several dozen could have intimate gatherings.

The basement was where Suzie worked. In the kitchen. Except for orientation, she’d never seen upstairs. And she’d never gone up the front steps. Or seen the gardens. Suzie’s Doohickey never sullied the grandeur because it disappeared from view down an access road alongside the iron-railed fence, and sat in the depths of the underground garage until her shift was over.

The kitchen of the White Magnolia Club took up the entire basement, a massive kitchen in the middle, ringed all around with store rooms and coolers. The ceilings were low, criss-crossed with ducts and pipes and fans. The walls were beige, darkened by steam and cooking fumes, brown streaks running down the walls from daily condensation. The floor was checkerboard tile. The kitchen equipment was all stainless steel: tables, stations, sinks.

As in every large kitchen, a shiny steel table ran right down the middle of the room, with sinks and dishwashing equipment over against the far wall, next to a row of commercial stoves, ovens, grills, deep fat fryers and serving stations with warming lights. The cold prep area was against the other wall, near the walk-in coolers. The corner nearest the door was the butcher shop, and the corner closest to the kitchen stairs was the pastry shop. In back, beyond the coolers, squeezed into a corner behind the trash room, was the employee break room, a plastic, utilitarian place with folding tables and chairs.

The head chef’s office was next to the door, the first thing you passed going in and the last going out, where Chef could sit and scrutinize everyone suspiciously as they hung up their jackets and punched the time clock, took out the trash or slipped a case of food out to their car.

There are several ways to run a kitchen. The General Manager, the Executive Chef, and the Sous-chefs operated under the brigade system, a quasi-military hierarchy devised by the head chef of the French army over a hundred years ago. It’s a rigid organization, where everybody has a boss who reports to a boss who reports to THE boss; where every aspect of the work has someone assigned to perform it the right way. And there is only one right way.

Chef had a recipe book everyone was expected to follow every time. There were pictures of the finished dishes showing exactly how each one was supposed to be produced and plated. There was even a timing sequence, where a particular dish was supposed to take this much time to cook, this much time to cool, and this much time to stand before being served.

You’ve probably seen the brigade system at work if you watch the Food Channel. You might have thought it was a logical, smooth way to run things. Most restaurateurs agree. Any fancy establishment of any size will usually insist upon it as the perfect way to run a restaurant.

But go ahead and take a poll of people who’ve spent time in an army brigade and see if they agree with ‘perfect’. Organized - yes sir. Covering all the contingencies - affirmative. Giving everyone a sense of their place in the system - sir yes sir.

Jail is like that, too. The brigade system is perfect if you want a bunch of droids doing exactly what they’re told to, acting more like cogs in a machine than human beings. But there’s one problem. Cooks tend to be on the independent side of droids, cogs or army types.

The executive chef of the White Magnolia Club was an Italian guy from New York. He’d been hired away from a big-name restaurant several years ago in order to lend a cosmopolitan air to the club, and because the chef before him enjoyed making such dishes as shrimp and grits with hushpuppies and collard greens, rather to the embarrassment of members who liked to entertain northern business acquaintances.

Chef Ricardo was how the staff addressed him. He was 6′4” and weighed close to 300 pounds. Dressed out in his chef uniform with an extra large twelve inch toque hat on his head, he looked just like the Pillsbury Dough Boy. Except for his rather long greasy black hair, which kept escaping from his hat and getting into the food.

He was a very strict brigade man, and just as in the army, where the responsibility for everything lay with the chief, the blame for anything that went wrong always fell on the lowest ranking recruit.

So a hair would be found in a member’s food, and would be brought to Chef’s office by a waiter, and he would look at it with extreme distaste and then blame the black cooks who’d worked on that particular dish. He’d come slamming out of his office, yelling commands at the entire kitchen to put down their work and listen, and they’d all stop and crowd around while he came screeching back to the cooking station, his white workshoes squealing, his face red, waving the offending follicle in his fat fist, and getting right up into the faces of some poor group of cooks, shouting at them from six inches away just like a drill sergeant, blaming them all for sloppiness, for health code violations, for being lazy and shiftless.

And they’d stand there with their heads bowed, nodding at everything he said, saying yessir and sorry sir and never again sir, looking steadily at the hair: straight, greasy, and an entirely different kind of black from what grew on their nappy heads.

Nobody dared to point this out, of course, so they just stood and listened and agreed until he got tired of yelling at them, and turned on his squeaky heels to march back into his office, slam the door, and sit steaming while the staff got back to making dinner.

While the Executive Chef and his team of Sous-chefs, all white guys, thought they were running the kitchen in brigade style, in reality this was a particular type of Southern kitchen, operating under an entirely different system. In a Southern kitchen, the real power is wielded by the two oldest black ladies who work there. One of them was Miss Mabel, and the other was Miss Charlene, and they’d been there since the Club moved uptown. They didn’t decide what the members were going to eat, or what raw materials were going to be ordered, or who was going to be hired or fired, but they assigned and oversaw all the preparation and cleanup, and most of the cooking. Not officially, of course.

Miss Charlene was a pastry cook, and while there was a pastry chef above her, she made all the most popular desserts. Likewise Miss Mabel, who made all the sauces. Together they operated the whole kitchen, and let the highly paid, titled white guys think they were doing things their way. I’ve heard this system called the Black Mafia, but it was much more like a Black Matriarchy, where Grandma can still whip your ass at 83 and absolutely everyone bows to her will.

The fact that a pair of black women actually ran the kitchen was the cause of great anguish to Chef Ricardo, who’d been taught that the Commander in Chief ran things. It was like the way a dysfunctional marriage heads for divorce. Daddy hung out with his buddies and loafed while Mamma and the kids did the work, and he only came out of his office to scream and yell, waving recipes and photographs, prepared to first lecture and then spank the children, who would scatter and hide, beg and plead, and do anything to avoid punishment. And then he’d go back into his office after showing just how big an ass he could be, and they’d come out from hiding and go right back to doing everything the way Mamma wanted it done.

This particular evening was no better than normal for Chef, who was getting to the end of his rope. Suzie easily avoided being noticed for her lateness because Chef was piled off in the corner with his Sous-chef entourage around him, busily taking out his rage on the Latino dishwashers.

‘These glasses are full of spots!’ he screamed, waving a wine goblet by its stem, holding it above his head and turning it so everyone could see spots glowing dully under the florescent lights. ‘I swear to God. Nobody else anywhere in the world has it as bad as I do. How many times do I gotta teach you how to polish? And what happens? The members get a dirty glass, and they complain, and it makes me look bad. I Will Not Have It!’ and he slammed the glass down on the floor, where it shattered with a loud, satisfying kliiing.

Suzie waited until the sudden silence was broken before punching her time card, lest the loud clunk of the machine draw his ire. A Latino porter scurried over to grab a broom and dustpan, but everyone else’s attention was riveted on Chef Ricardo. ‘That glass is coming out of your pay,’ he said to Manuel, the dishwasher he’d picked to blame for the problem. ‘I’ll show you again, one more time, and don’t you ever forget it.’

Chef’s face was red. He grabbed another glass, plucked a moderately clean napkin off his shoulder, held the stem with a corner of the cloth and violently twisted the goblet into the napkin. Then he held it up for display. Suzie thought it looked a little streaky, but didn’t think anyone would point it out.

Chef thrust the glass at Manuel to take, and let go a fraction of a second before he had it. It crashed to the floor. ‘Idiot!’ cried Chef. ‘You did that on purpose!’ Manuel said nothing, but leaned down and began to pick up the larger fragments. Everyone backed away from them. Chef looked like he wanted to take a third glass and break it over Manny’s head. But he controlled himself, and gestured angrily. Manuel gently took a goblet out of the tray and rubbed it dry with his napkin, his bare hands never touching the glass, the goblet coming out of the napkin gleaming like crystal.

Chef leaned close and snarled, ‘You better watch it. I have my eye on you, and you are this close to being fired, my friend. Today.’ And then he spun around with a squeak, and crunched through the glass back to his office, where he slammed the door and sat heavily in his chair, glowering out at the people in the kitchen who immediately turned away and went back to work.

Suzie had edged away from the office as soon as she punched in, and slunk off toward the coldboxes as Chef had stalked back to his office. She’d briefly noticed the schedule posted above the time clock. A banquet for 125 at Seven in the Ladies Slipper Room. Cocktails for seventy-five in the large dining room at Seven-thirty, thirteen in the Camellia Room at Eight, four in the Honeysuckle Room at Eight, six in the Petunia Room at Eight-thirty.

Suzie looked around. Everyone was back to work. There was a knot of cooks over at the stoves making lots of clatter and commotion, with porters scurrying around the fringes carrying trays to the stove or pans to the sink. It probably clearly going to be a busy dinner rush in the Casual Dining room; waiters were already coming in with orders and going out with platters, adding to the air of constant panic.

She went back and said hello to Miss Charlene, who was looking rather displeased. ‘Just find something to do and stay out of the way for now, child,’ she said, stirring a huge bowl of chocolate pudding with her wooden spoon. ‘Go ask Manuel if you can help polish up, how bout.’

Suzie chuckled and Miss Charlene winked, and Suzie walked over and stood next to Manny and grabbed a napkin. Talking and joking as much as they could in Suzie’s limited Spanish and Manuel’s kitchen-functional English, they made short work of several stacked-up trays of goblets, and then started on the silverware while more glasses went through the big Hobart dishwasher.

It’s amazing how peaceful you can be when you’re doing a mindless task. There’s nothing as serene as working at some utterly repetitive, seemingly boring job. Look down. Select a fork. Lift a fork. Place the fork in a napkin between your fingers. Rub back and forth using a little pressure, examine for remaining spots. Chuck the fork into a tub with the rest of the polished forks. Repeat. It was a calming exercise, and Suzie loved it because it gave her a chance to think. The way they polished things was a bit different than Chef taught them. They routinely breathed on the glasses that had already dried in order to soften up the spots, and if they were really on there, a little spit did the trick every time.

When they were finished, Manuel began loading a bunch of pots into the Hobart. Suzie wrestled the tubs of silverware onto a cart and dragged it back to the china closet, and came back for the glasses, and with a nod to Miss Charlene, fixed herself a cup of coffee and stepped outside for a breath of fresh air. She had to walk through the garage to get to the air, and was slightly out of breath when she got to the entrance where the employees went to smoke.

It was getting on in the evening, the air was cooling off, and through the trees, which were still just filling out, she could see the skyscrapers and apartment buildings lining Peachtree, and past those she could see the sky - orange gold and pale yellow, fading to baby blue in the west, with that green at the horizon that says pollution. She wasn’t sure; was that another crane on the skyline? A blue glass building that split at the top into two broad, flat pincers. Like an opening silo.

There was a dual-purpose trash container sitting at the edge of the drive, the top brimming with cigarette butts, their white ends poking up like a big city seen from 30,000 feet. Styrofoam coffee cups filled the can beneath it. The area smelled like a bar the morning after, and the way the wind was blowing, she got whiffs of it all the way back to the kitchen, where she could hear vague drum beats and cymbal crashes.

The noises of a kitchen are distinct, and at a distance they sound like music. All the surfaces were metal, so everything clanked. The floors were wet nubby tile or rubber mats, so shoes tended to squeak as people walked around. Plates clinked, plastic bags rustled, trays scraped over the counters, knives went click click click click scrape clunk. There were the sounds of gas fueling the burners and dripping faucets pinging and fans howling and dishwashers running and refrigerators whining and water spraying. The kitchen made noise even when there was nobody there. Sometimes it was just the dripping faucets. And the click of the time clock.

It was a fast-paced environment; kitchens always are. Aside from unpredictable rushes in the Casual Dining rooms, it took hours to prepare everything for a half-hour’s panic serving a banquet, and then nonstop in and out until the members and guests were fed and they could clean and close. It got so hectic forty-five minutes before plate-up that the cooks got into fights with each other and lashed out at the servers and porters when they got too close.

Suzie was new at the White Magnolia Club, so she was everybody’s gopher while she learned her way around the kitchen. As an apprentice cook, she was learning everything from the bottom up. Because she was white, it was understood that she was training to become a chef. Because she was female, it was understood that she would never rise to Executive Chef, but might make a good Sous-chef down the line. Because she was Suzie, she was accepted by the black and Latino lower-level kitchen staff, and because she was Suzie, she was looked at skeptically by the executive staff. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she liked restauran