job restored to its factory-original sheen, her faded vinyl top replaced with a textured black lid that smelled of shoe polish and great expectations. A white vertical stripe ran up both sides of the car just behind her front wheel wells, the number “442” bisecting the stripe like a watch on a watchband as if to say, “Time to get some pussy and kick some ass.” If only Dad had not installed an obnoxious air horn that played the chorus to “In My Merry Oldsmobile,” each note fractionally diminishing your pussy-getting, ass-kicking potential until you were just another lonely teenage boy with a cool car and a cramped hand.
Dad took the Beast away from me before the summer was even over. A doctor had run a stop sign in front of me. The police report and the insurance companies said he was at fault. No argument from me. But I could have been going a little slower than sixty-five down a residential street, and I could have let off the gas in lieu of cutting the good doctor’s Honda Accord in half. Although it didn’t look it, the Beast was almost as unlucky with a cracked engine block and a buckled frame.
The Subie is a fire-engine red ’77 Subaru DL Station Wagon; her distinctive feature a massive white steel brush guard running the full width of her front bumper. I’ve had her almost a year. When we got our first real snow in December, some friends and I tested out the four-wheel drive by sneaking onto the airfield at the Empire Ridge Municipal Airport. We hit the iced-over runway at about sixty miles an hour, at which time I jerked the wheel hard to my left. The Subie stayed on her feet, but she slid off the runway a good hundred yards into a cornfield. I found random pieces of cornhusks under my car for weeks.
I have to hand it to the Subie. Up until a lovesick dumbshit tried to punch a hole in her ass last month, she’s survived me fairly unscathed. Four of us are piled into her at the moment. There’s a party tonight at Martin Neff’s house. Neff is our age, but he lives with his older brother. Translation? Booze, and lots of it. There’s even rumor of a keg.
“How’s your hand?” Beth asks.
Hatch and I started hanging out with Beth Burke and Claire Sullivan a couple weeks ago. We’ve known them since we were freshmen together but, like all high school boys, endured our customary two-year waiting period during which freshmen and sophomore girls hang out exclusively with upperclassmen. The irony, of course, is that Hatch and I are now those upperclassmen making time for them and the freshmen and sophomore girls.
Our first night out together started after Claire flagged us down at McDonald’s. Beth was trying to break up with her boyfriend in the parking lot of the First Baptist Church, and he was being, according to Claire, “uncooperative.” Hatch and I swooped in to the rescue. Beth’s boyfriend was berating her, refusing to get out of her face. Tyler was his name, yet another Prepster. After a couple veiled threats, spoken while I held a not-so-veiled baseball bat, Beth was soon very much single.
Hatch sits in the front passenger seat of the Subie. Beth and Claire sit in back. Beth sits behind me.
“How’s my hand?” I echo.
Beth leans forward and points at my hand. “Yeah. How’s it feel?”
I flex my fingers, but I know Beth’s question is not exclusive to my hand. “I feel good.”
The doggedness of youth. A plunger, a half bottle of peroxide, and a couple cute girls can repair your car, your hand, and your self-esteem.
We’ve been at the party maybe ten minutes, and Claire is already flirting with somebody from Prep, a hockey player I don’t recognize. This annoys Hatch, because Claire is the great love of his life even though she’ll never think of him as anything more than an annoying, overprotective brother.
I can see the attraction, not just to Claire but to her whole family. From top to bottom, Claire has inherited everything from her mother—smallish breasts, a tight ass, some slight curves below the waist, slender legs, long but delicate feet. Claire’s sister is a year behind her in school and almost as hot. I’ve had several fantasies involving the three Sullivan women, the mother in a supporting role as her daughters’ wise, and always naked, teacher.
Beth hasn’t left my side. The music is turned low, as one would expect from a party of underage drinkers in the middle of town. Too bad. The song playing right now is Scorpions’s “Rock You Like a Hurricane.”
“Turn this shit up!” Martin Neff says. He’s drunk and loud, but hey, it’s his party. He cranks the volume, following it up with some air guitar. He sees me and toasts his beer to the ceiling.
I toast Neff back. “You fucking know it!” He rocks like a hurricane down the hallway.
Beth hooks my arm with her hand. “What was that all about?”
“Monsters of Rock.”
“You got tickets?”
“Yeah, Neff and I, couple other guys.”
“Who’s playing?”
“Kingdom Come…” I pause for a sip of beer, halfway into my third drink already. “Dokken, Metallica, Scorpions, and Van Halen. Noon to midnight, baby.”
“Kingdom Come?”
“Zeppelin cover band. Decent.”
“Sounds exhausting.”
“Exhaustingly kick ass.” My bravado impresses no one, least of all Beth. “He’s a genius, you know.”
“Who, Neff?”
“No, Klaus Meine, Scorpions’s lead singer.”
“How so?”
“It’s his vocals. The guy is a miraculous wordsmith.” I lift a single finger in the air, turning my ear toward the stereo. “Hear that?”
“The chorus?”
“Not just any chorus. If you or I spoke the words, ‘Here I am, rock you like you a hurricane,’ it would sound clunky. And yet Klaus magically rhymes ‘here I am’ with ‘hurricane.’ A lot of Scorpions’ songs are like this.”
Beth indulges me. “Name another.”
“How about ‘Bad Boys Running Wild’?”
“Not familiar with the song.”
“Bad boys running wild—bump bummmp—if you don’t play along with their geeeems.” I sing the Rudolph Schenker guitar to great effect. “Bad boys running wild—bump bummmp—and you better get out of their weeee.”
“Is that even English?”
“That’s Klaus Meine. Except in this example, the actual words games and way do kind of rhyme, and Klaus still molds them into completely new words—geeeems and weeee—not found in any language.”
“And that makes him a lyrical genius?”
“A genius with a fucking killer skullet!”
“A skullet?”
“That’s when someone with a receding hairline grows a mullet.” I point to the balding thirty something standing by the stereo. “Like Big Neff over there.”
Big Neff is Martin’s
