Burial of the Dead

CY PRES - Billy the Driver

BILLY THE DRIVER

Billy, the Driver, sits in the ‘64 Bonneville he’s been working on forever, a huge thing from GM’s glory days, sitting on blocks in the backyard of his house. His face is streaked with sweat and oil and he rubs his hands with a rag made black, blue, purple with the residue of oil, petrol, dirt and time. He’s one of those quiet men who look like they’ve no need to talk, who consider conversation a kind of womanly weakness. But that’s not the way it is. Billy talks all the time, mostly in his head, usually to himself. But the chatter’s on-going and if anybody had told Billy he was a quiet man, he would have disagreed – at least to himself.

Iron Brian Wyman, the Big Dog, stops by Billy’s place and hovers under the hood like a surgeon resecting a clogged artery while Billy grabs another can of club soda from the cooler on the front seat. He pops it, drinks half and offers the can to the Iron Man. Brian declines, pulling back from the engine, ducking then standing straight again, grabbing a chair off the untended lawn and dropping it next to the Bonneville’s open door. He tells Billy his old man had one of these ‘Queen-Marys’ back when Jimmy Carter was President and that he could barely drive it, the car being so wide it was hard to gauge where the passenger side of the hood ended. He asks Billy if he ever tried to parallel one of these bad-boys and Billy says driving’s his life work, his calling, his vocation, as in passion, the word all the movie stars have been using lately.

“So what in hell happened?” Brian asks, the question coming from nowhere, catching Billy out of step so that he almost coughs on the tickle of cold carbonated water.

“What are you saying, Boss?”

“You know what I’m saying, Bill. There’s what happened and what really happened and I want to know what really happened.”

“I told you, Brian. I told you what really happened – at least what I saw of it, and to be honest I don’t like thinking about it all that much.”

Brian Wyman makes a church and steeple with his fat fingers, looks at the dirty ground and shakes his head with empathy, compassion, a tinge of sadness shared between men.

“I know you did, Billy. I know, but the old lady’s calling me everyday and I’ve told her all I know, and she’s got a rat-trap mind when it comes to ferreting out whatever she thinks she needs to protect herself and the old man.”

“I don’t know what to say, Brian.”

“What happened when the cops took you downtown?”

“Not much.”

“They interview you?”

“Sure did.”

“How’d that go?”

“Went fine,” Billy says. “I told you.”

“How’d it go for my brother?”

“I don’t know,” Billy says. “I guess it went okay. They didn’t keep him or nothing.”

“Yeah.”

“He’s gone to ground, huh?”

“I don’t know where he is,” Brian says.

“Well, the Professor’s as smart as he is crazy and she’ll make up for the part of him that’s got no common sense at all.”

“You mean that Manny girl?”

“I do.”

Billy and Brian work on the car for another hour, not talking, the silence of busy men. After that Brian wipes his hands on a rag and says he’s got to get home. “Carol’s got tickets for the Bushnell.”