Tire

by Michael Cocchiarale

The tire the old man had gone to fill was flat. Sighing, he thumped to the curb, punched the hazards, and pushed himself into vicious wind. In the trunk was a jack but no spare. There hadn’t been, come to think of it, in some number of years.

The garage was down the hill—maybe a hundred yards past the light. A half mile? Although the thaw before this current cold snap had left sidewalks mostly clear, considerable ice remained, as he’d found out earlier when he slipped while scraping the windshield in the drive. Now, even standing still, his left knee throbbed. He ran a thumb over the lump above his eye.

What to do? Vehicles cruised by, drivers squeezing wheels. Across the street, a bus coughed away from the curb, having rescued a couple from a bare-bones shelter. No one gave him as much as a glance. This morning, it appeared he was on his own.

He jabbed his cane at the asphalt until an island of ice split in two. Stepped, winced, and aimed the cane again. Teeteringly, he made his way, despite unpredictable gusts. Twice, he nearly lost his balance. Head down, he kept going, plunge and shuffle, grimace and slip, until he found respite in a drugstore alcove. He turned up his collar. Palmed his nose like a little boy.

“My God, my God!”

He turned to see a stout woman working around the hood of her stopped sedan. As she paused to bring one side of her coat across the other, he wanted to tell her to take care. However, his lips refused to move.

“Are you—?” She finally reached him, her hair a squid in the wind. “Are you crazy?”

He said, “no,” only because his mouth could not form a “yes.”

The woman led him from the alcove to her open door. “Look, I work with the elderly. I know what one simple fall can do.”

From the back of the vehicle, a child rolled huge eyes over him, rattle wagging like a finger. The old man fell into the front seat. At first, he thought the bone-like clunk had been the closing door. But strangely, the sound continued. It took a few moments for him to figure out the sound was coming from inside his mouth. His teeth—tops colliding against bottoms. He closed his eyes, felt the forward jerk of the vehicle. And the heat. The glorious heat.

“There. Whew.” The woman checked the child in the rearview mirror. “Now, where do you need to go?”

He looked ahead, mind blank as snow until a single word appeared amid the white. “Tire,” he said.

“Tell me about it.”

He pressed a hand against his jaw to stop the chattering. “Tire. Sh-shop.”

“Oh. You mean D’Ambrosio’s? I went to school with one of the younger brothers.”

Was that really the name of the place? Seemed like more syllables than he remembered.

“Good people. Honest. Won’t charge you an arm and a leg.”

At the light, he glanced her way. She tapped the wheel, adjusted her behind. Her eyes remained on the road, but he knew she was watching him out of the corner of her eye.

“You could have died,” she said.

Death. Yes, of course. Most days, he felt he was almost ready for it. Years ago, when the idea of death first struck him with full force, he felt quite differently. While zipping up in the bathroom of the house of a couple they knew from church, he found himself staring at the clutter of creams, deodorants, shampoos, and pastes resting on a cockeyed shelf above the toilet. So much upkeep—how desperate, how hopeless, how entirely animal it all suddenly seemed. He’d been how old then? Mid thirties? Whatever the age, he had in an instant gone from thinking of himself as a figure of some consequence to feeling like a sad, doomed beast, slouching toward bushes to take its last breaths in peace.

But then he opened the bathroom door and smelled freshly brewed coffee. In the play room to his left, the children were giggling at cartoons on the TV. The wife—what was her name?—was in the living room, setting down a plate of lemon bars on the table before the fireplace. From the couch, Gloria smiled up at him. With coffee and dessert, conversation and laughter, his anxiety melted away. In fact, by the end of the night, he had convinced himself that time would always be on his side.

There was babbling in the car. Not from the woman. Nor the baby. It was the radio, the voice of a reporter going on about a bombing overseas. Many lives had been lost. The casualty count was certain to rise.

“I read he’s ill,” the woman said. “By that I mean dying. So, you know, he doesn’t care now if he blows the whole darn world to bits.”

The old man couldn’t place the name of the leader she was talking about. The face pressed upon him, though, not unlike a wall of wind. There was that nearly lipless smirk. The infant chin. The tiny peevish evil of those eyes.

“POO Toom.” The child banged the rattle against the car seat. “POO Toom!”

“Watch your mouth,” the woman said, grinning despite herself.

Yes—that was the name, more or less. POO Toom: a vault for excrement. The child had nailed it. But, of course, the war he’d begun was no laughing matter. In fact, it seemed to the old man yet another indication that the world was at the brink. Maybe tomorrow, this despot would wake up and just start pushing buttons. Or some other madman would. These days, there were so many to choose from.

“Well, well—here we are!”

The old man opened his eyes. D’Ambrosio’s. Beneath a sun-bleached American flag stood the cherubic cartoon tire, wink and smile, triumphant forefinger in the air. For years the mascot had been there, letting customers know the shop would “Fill Your Every Need!”

. . .

The old man had been sitting in the waiting room for a long, hazy time. Golf magazines, sub shop menus, the noxious odor of oil and exhaust. Heat pouring over his ankles. Chatter about the game last night. The sudden whine of a drill from the garage. On the flat screen squeezed between stacks of antifreeze, a politician-turned-pundit predicted how support for Ukraine would fall apart as soon as world leaders realized how much they needed Russian goods to make their countries’ engines go.

Just last week, in a rare burst of irritation, the old man had told his first-born: “I’m done with presidents, congress, reps. Crooks and liars—every single one of them.”

“Dad,” Mark said, switching to his prep school teacher voice, “You shouldn’t paint with such a broad brush.”

“The broader the brush, the quicker the job.”

His son laughed. “Point taken. But maybe not bring it up at Easter?”

To think that, years ago, Mark had been the angry one. After their youngest died, the old man, in a state of shock, shied away from relatives and co-workers, from anyone who thought they had something useful to say about grief and loss. Gloria had withdrawn too—even, for the most part, from him. Mark, on the other hand, blew up at the world. He smashed his TV. Jabbed caustic signs in the sky at the state capitol. Hung a flag upside down in his front yard. As a result, he was called “traitor” and “commie” and worse. Once, while wearing an “F America” shirt, he was roughed up so badly he ended up in the emergency room. When the old man asked if he’d learned his lesson, Mark said, “Jawohl.”

Later, his son stitched up, the old man tried to reason him, listing sacrifices that had been made to preserve democracy.

“I see. You want me to go around saying ‘I love my country!’ ‘Thank you for your service!’ I happen to believe that the best way to honor these men and women is to NOT SEND THEM TO DIE IN ANY GODDAMN MADE-UP WARS!”

Mark escaped abroad for a time. On the rare occasions he called, he always started by reiterating the threat to give up his citizenship. He railed about governmental corruption, about the evil indifference of ordinary Americans. Swallowing grief, the old man tried yet a different tack: “Think of your mother,” he said. But in those days, everything he tried exploded in his face.

In time, Mark met someone over there (In Amsterdam was it? Antwerp?). He returned home, got married, and had three kids—one after the other. Overnight, it seemed, his values became suburban: lawn care and cookouts, soccer camps and Disney movies. And now—the reversal long-since complete—all Mark was worried about was his father making waves at a holiday dinner. The thing was, the old man didn’t need to be told. He had neither the desire nor the energy to puncture the joy of a holiday gathering. Call it wisdom. Or resignation. These days, he couldn’t tell the difference.

There was a Styrofoam cup in his hands. Lukewarm coffee, black as oil long overdue for a change. Moistening his lips, the old man tried to connect the dots between this waiting room and where he’d been beforehand. Much earlier, the sun hardly up, he’d put on shoes, locked the house. In the drive, he’d slipped, banging knee and head. Then there was the flat tire. They must have towed his car in. Yes, that was right—he recalled conversation, arrangements. The woman with frantic hair, toddler in arms, had done the explaining while he stood dumb next to her at the counter, too cold to grasp more than the gist. She’d stayed with him until the truck returned and his car was up in the air, gently chastising him while her child raced crayons through the pages of a coloring book.

This room made him think now of another, a hospital room, snow-white sheet, tubes sprouting from his arm. Bypass surgery. Gloria had been there, legs crossed on the bed, slurping pear halves in juice. On the lunch tray stood a meatball that for the life of him he couldn’t slice. The boys had been adolescents then, a perfect study in contrast: Mark, a drowsy sulk in ravaged jeans, and his second-born, a natural comedian, performing an on-the-spot bit about doctors who had the gall to wear white after Labor Day. From the hallway poured loud voices, which made the unit sound like a lively restaurant rather than a place of sickness and disease. For the duration of the visit, the old man found it hard to believe that anyone had ever really died in all the history of the world.

Laughter on TV brought the old man back to this waiting room, long enough for the sound to make him remember he was missing his favorite cooking show right now, the one with that giggly brunette. In the last several months, the program, along with a cup of decaf and a sweet roll, had become an important part of his morning ritual.

Before his marriage, Mark viewed rituals in general with the deepest scorn. “Routines, traditions,” he’d say, voice booming, as if trying to shout across the ocean between them. “I can’t keep track of all the opiates for the people.” Christmas dinner drew his special ire. “Who the hell can tell one from the other?” One year, desperate to defend himself, the old man told Mark that his mother was going to roast Cornish hens instead of the usual turkey. His son laughed out loud. “How bold! You’re such trailblazers!” The memory left a bad taste in the old man’s mouth. Could there have been some truth to what his son had said? Is it possible that these celebrations had been just a long series of missed opportunities?

No, no—nothing could be further from the truth. Gloria had been a mastermind, quietly confident about what she was doing. Each holiday, she had given her family nothing less than the irreplaceable gift of tradition, of sheer timelessness for a time. He pictured her now as she was after those magnificent meals, elbows on the table, hands cradling a cup of decaf, listening to family talk, eyes shining with contented fatigue. For a moment, that image flared so brightly in his mind he wanted to reach out and move hair from her face.

“Alright, partner, you’re all finished.”

The old man looked up, blinking, trying to recall where he’d seen this goateed man before.

“You’re good to go!”

“Oh.” He stood. The man—of course, the tire shop’s manager—handed him his cane. At the counter, he felt himself for something important he could not name.

“What’s wrong?”

His back pocket. The lump. Yes—his wallet. “My brain, sorry . . . it comes and goes.”

“You me both.”

“Don’t ever get old if you can help it.”

“Oh, come on now.” The manager took the credit card. “You don’t look a day over—”

“You’re guess is as good as mine.”

“Ha. Well, look on the bright side: You’re still not old enough to know better than to take a stroll when it’s thirteen degrees!”

The old man stuffed the receipt into his pocket. For a harrowing moment, he had no clue what came next. Then a key was resting in his palm. His key. He nearly wept as this young man helped him to his vehicle.

. . .

Home sweet home, the old man thought, even though the feel if not the fragrance of the place had always been more savory to him. As he stood in the foyer, he could almost taste Gloria’s Saturday-morning specialty: Western omelet, home fries with onions and fresh rosemary, a split-open biscuit, steam rising from butter-glazed fluff. Another powerful current of loss surged through him. When it passed, he clicked the heat and caned into the TV room.

Back in his chair, he experienced a whole new level of fatigue. At the diner by the interstate, there’d been a fellow oldster who would greet fellow patrons with the line, “I’m beat, let’s eat!” And he had the face to prove it. Deep creases, drooping eyes. But once the guy had a few slurps of coffee, he began rambling with great energy about his wimpy son-in-law, about celebrity scandals, about what he’d do with old girlfriends if he had to do it all over again. For months after Gloria’s death, the old man had gone to that restaurant, staving off despair for an hour or two with a bottomless cup of coffee and two slices of whole wheat toast. For months he nodded and sometimes smiled as the guy held forth. And now here he was drawing a blank with his name. The old man checked his brain by listing others: Gloria, always and forever. Mark, his once-surly first-born. His second born? Goodness—how could he fail to remember the name of his only dead son? In his head, another vast field of snow appeared. Despite his best efforts, he could not fill that space with a name.

And yet the odd things he remembered: the scratch of gnarled brown leaves on his bare feet, an orange he peeled on the way to work—the juice and scent and thin, white strings. Nothing, however, compared to all that he’d forgotten. Plots of films, playoff games, early milestones, names of colleagues and acquaintances. Sometimes, a fragment of a memory would begin glinting in his brain. There was the vacation that one summer to the place with the overly-friendly racoon. Was that in Southern Ohio? The Lake Michigan shore? Maybe it had been a skunk. There was no denying it: his brain was an old appliance on the fritz. Things that glowed with unreal specificity one moment became inaccessible to him the next. On and off, on and off. Sometimes, he’d smack his head like the side of an ancient TV set.

He stood and limped to the living room mantel for a look at the back of the boy’s graduation picture. There was a date but no name. He labored upstairs, opened the cedar chest, and found his pre-deployment photo. James. James. Of course. How terrible to have forgotten—a tragedy upon tragedy. He brought the frame to his chest. Let his heart move for a time against the glass.

Downstairs in his chair again, the old man felt even worse than before. He closed his eyes and began to immediately fall away, down, down through something cool and smooth and head over heels into the black and toward a light that grows and grows and he is through, onto a street where firecrackers go off—Pop p-p-pop pop. Grins slice through the smoke, which drifts across the street. After a time, the bodies of boys begin to emerge from the haze. Is that Les Demko? And Harry, Harry . . . Sackett? The shapes are running now, as if seeking cover. From what? He wants to say something. A greeting? A warning? But then: the harsh wrong-answer buzz of a streetlight. Time to go in. Is it a school night? It must be, because he’s in the old house now, but how did the bathtub get down in the basement? He climbs in, naked as the day he was born. Sinks into the water, deeper and deeper. No air, no air! He tries to rise but finds himself slipping further down . . .

. . .

“Aaaand we’re back!”

The old man snorted, sat up, hands seizing the arms of his chair. On TV, a breezy woman in a sundress had just finished introducing a bespectacled man who was going to tell everyone how to travel to Europe on less than eighty dollars a day.

He touched his face. Tapped his shirt pocket for the tube of nitro pills. Took deep breaths, feeling and hearing the air course through his nose. Yes, yes, all the signs were there: Through some strange accident, he had not died after all.

The travel expert listed safety tips. The camera cut away to a clip of him, pack over shoulder, ambling up a cobblestone path toward a gorgeous seaside view.

An accident. That was what Gloria had called their second born—“The Accident.” A silly joke, of course. Playing along, the boy would walk blithely into the living room and trip over the ottoman, ending up on the floor, arms splayed, a goofball Christ upon a shag rug cross. Pratfalls, physical comedy—from an early age, he was in love with all the body could do. The old man remembered the boy’s many rock-climbing adventures and weeks-long off-the-grid camping trips, Gloria quiet with worry until he appeared again, always sunny faced and unscathed.

But then The Accident had a real accident. Because, to put it plainly, the president at the time lied to the American people so there would be a war, and while many who went came back home, the boy (his youngest—his name was James), just three days from returning, stepped on a bomb and disappeared. The old man had opened the door to get the mail when he saw the chaplain and officer on the walkway before the stairs. And behind them, Gloria pulling to the curb in their hatchback, stepping out slowly, plastic bag hanging like a ghost from her wrist. Over the years, the old man had so thoroughly remembered this moment that he’d usually been spared from reliving the specifics of what came next: the cries, the phone calls, those first hours of pure pain. The next day too, the CAO showing up with more consolations and pages of paperwork to sign. On occasion—like now—these hazy images spun around and around into something solid, which bore down and ran over him, leaving tread marks on his head.

Months after the boy’s death, Gloria sat next to him on the porch swing and said, “I decided not to do it.”

He waited a moment. “Do what?”

When she dropped the pill bottle into his lap, he went cold. Could not move his mouth to make a sound. At the same time, the noises of the neighborhood began to roar: birds and kids and ice cream truck. At some point, he had been able to lift a hand and reach out into the air between them. He cleared his throat and said, “Please.” He said, “Never.”

She took his hand and squeezed it hard. Then, slapping her knees, she stood and said, “I feel like Chinese.”

He thumbed the remote now, mindlessly, watching numbers go up and up until there was a picture of that former president, who had taken time out from painting heroes to offer his perspective on current events. From what the old man could gather, he’d been talking somewhere about POO TOMB’s invasion. The former president had wanted to name Ukraine, the country that had been attacked; however, despite the teleprompter, he’d slipped and said Iraq. To make matters worse, he tried to joke away the error by blaming it on his age. The old man felt anger, but only in an abstract way. He closed his eyes, saw the word floating there, thin and colorless. Bland.

The phone was ringing. For how long? The old man stared at it like someone who’d grabbed him for laughs from behind. Then there was the beep, followed by a familiar voice. It was Mark, his first born, the one who once had anger enough for everyone. The last thing he had done before leaving the country was to quit his job and go to Texas, to the former president’s ranch, joining a group of grieving family members who were inspired by a woman who’d set up camp there. A week before the presidential election, Mark phoned from an airport to say, “Dad, if you vote for that stupid fucker again, don’t tell me. I’d . . . I’d disown you.” The old man hung up and put hands over his face. Gloria, who’d been sitting at his side, melted into the kitchen. There was silence for the rest of the night.

“Anyway,” his son said now, “you can’t say no because I already have tickets!”

Tickets? He thought. For what? What was there left in the world to see?

After the beep, the old man pushed himself up from the chair. Lord, his knee! Wincing forward, asininely without his cane, he made it to the kitchen, where he used the table as a railing. On his placemat, a business card leaned against his keys. That’s right—the woman had given it to him before she left the garage. “Call anytime,” she’d written. “There are programs that can help!”

He opened the back door to wind and brilliant sun. Wood chimes chocked on the porch next door. Droplets of moisture plinked from the eaves. After all that had happened, it was still miraculously before noon. For better or worse, there was plenty of time to do something else with this day. Despite the morning’s misfortune, his thoughts turned to travel. Maybe a drive to the store. A visit to the cemetery. How about a cruise—a tour of the islands of Greece? Years ago, it had been Gloria’s idea—a scratch toward sunlight after all those dark years pinned beneath the wreckage of crushing loss. Dog-eared guidebooks, triple starred sites, vibrant pictures of pristine villages scattered alongside the sea. For months, she had left an open suitcase in their bedroom, saying, “If it doesn’t look like we’re going, we probably never will.” Even Mark encouraged them—“What’re you saving your money for?” Then, out of nowhere, Gloria’s pains began. The X-rays and procedures came next. Specialists. Treatments and setbacks. Hospital stays. Intensive care. Hospice. Near the end, she squeezed his hand and whispered, “We’ll be waiting . . .”

The old man leaned against the back-door jamb, the air leaving him for a time. So much of the life he had built was gone. His wife. His second son. School friends, camp chums, teammates, colleagues, the widowers who’d gathered at that diner. Most of it—even those moments, those faces that still burned brightly in his mind—had disappeared so long ago it was difficult now to say that his life had been anything at all.

What remained, he supposed, was today. The right here and now. Now, as the cold air filled his lungs. Now, as he reached his hand into the bag and drew it out. Again, as the seeds spilled from his fist to land in the cracks of the patio. As he flung what was left toward small birds on green blades that made him think of sea amid a glistening archipelago of snow.