Read Online Interference & Other Stories by Richard Hoffman - Free Book Online

who was making this picture.
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    â€œHappens sometimes. Can’t tell until you go to start the bugger up again. Sometimes the ignition wires get brittle so when you hook them up again you find out they’re shot.” The mechanic lowered the hood, then dropped it. Bang. He walked toward Russell, wiping his hands on a rag. “Take about an hour. You can wait inside or come back. Up to you.”
    Having to wait was irritating and returned Russell to the argument with his wife. The grimy tubular steel chair in the office was uncomfortable. It occurred to him that this was almost a religious difference, if there could be such a thing between non-believers. He had married a fellow atheist and found himself in a mixed marriage. The irony didn’t wake his sense of humor, though; on the contrary, he felt a wave of panic pass through him, the perception of how complicated and beyond governing was this thing called marriage.
    He had no patience for what seemed to him to be her facile, hippie wisdom. He’d seen this delusion before, the first time during a rocket attack in the Central Highlands. Ordnance flying everywhere: screaming shells, screaming soldiers. And one of them, a kid named Scott, sitting on the tarmac on the edge of the compound babbling about transcending fear. Raving. Laughing at death. Making life thus inconsequential. Bullshit. It was a dodge, that’s what it was. Despair with a happy face stuck on it. He lived, the kid, rotated out. He should have been busted, the little prick.
    So if she needed to make believe she’d grasped something fucking ineffable, fine; but he had no intention of being drawn in or letting her warp the boy for that matter.
    He looked out the window across the station at the traffic going by. A lot of trucks this time of day. He remembered Roger in his arms just moments after he was born, and how he had hummed “Old Man River” to him in his deepest voice, surprising himself, not knowing he was going to do it, with his chin against the infant’s skull. Pouring into this act all his sorrow, joy, grief, anger: aggregates of that same ghost he had given up in drunken song, from the bottom of illness, in the moan of the love bed, so many times before, but now at last his own to give, this ghost that could only be known in transmission, that did not depend on the words of the song, but only on the love with which he shaped each vowel in his deepest belly-voice.
    The mechanic was there in the doorway. “She’s ready. What’s the trouble with the other one?” He nodded toward the Taurus Russell had arrived in.
    â€œThat one? Nothing. Company car.”
    The mechanic frowned. “I thought you come to pick her up.”
    â€œI did. I did. I’m wondering if you have an old tire and a length of chain. Or a good strong rope would probably do the trick.”
    â€œYou’re shittin’ me, right? You want to tow it home with a piece of rope?”
    â€œWhy not? It’s not far.”
    â€œNot out of here you’re not.”
    Challenged, Russell felt a surge of anger. It was his car, after all. Even the company car was his, really, since he owned the company. He looked the mechanic up and down. Banty rooster on his own turf. “Give me one good reason.”
    â€œâ€™Cause I won’t let you. You’ll bang up both these cars but good. And that’s if you don’t kill yourself and take somebody else down with you. What’s the matter with you? You got some kind of death wish?”
    He turned and opened the door to a storage closet next to the shelves of motor oil and antifreeze. In the time it took the mechanic to open the lid on a can of hand cleanser and scoop two fingers of it into his palm, Russell got a good look at a large photograph on the inside of the door. Above the picture of a large group of men in combat fatigues was a sign, in stenciled letter, reading:
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    2 nd Battalion, 4 th