by the shaky, teary quality of my own voice. That sour taste was back in my mouth. 'What a crazy fucking day.'
Darnell's Garage on Hampton Street was a long building with rusty corrugated-tin sides and a rusty corrugated-tin roof. Out front was a grease-caked sign which read: SAVE MONEY! YOUR KNOW-HOW, OUR TOOLS! Below that was another sign in smaller type, reading Garage Space Rented by the Week, Month, or Year.
The automobile junkyard was behind Darnell's. It was a block-long space enclosed in five-foot-high strips of the same corrugated tin, Will Darnell's apathetic nod toward the Town Zoning Board. Not that there was any way the Board was going to bring Wilt Darnell to heel, and not just because two of the three Zoning Board members were his friends. In Libertyville, Will Darnell knew just about everyone who counted. He was one of those fellows you find in almost any large town or small city, moving quietly behind any number of scenes.
I had heard that he was mixed up in the lively drug traffic at Libertyville High and Darby Junior High, and I had also heard that he was on a nodding acquaintance with the big-time crooks in Pittsburgh and Philly. I didn't believe that stuff - at least, I didn't think I did - but I knew that if you wanted firecrackers or cherry-bombs or bottle-rockets for the Fourth of July, Will Darnell would sell them to you. I had also heard, from my father, that Will had been indicted twelve years before, when I was but a lad of five, as one of the kingpins in a stolen-car ring that stretched from our part of the world east to New York City and all the way up to Bangor, Maine. Eventually the charges were dropped. But my dad also said he was pretty sure that Will Darnell might be up to his ears in other shenanigans; anything from truck hijackings to fake antiques.
A good place to stay away from, Dennis, my father had said. This had been a year ago, not long after I got my first clunker and had invested twenty dollars in renting one of Darnell's Do-It-Yourself Garage bays to try and replace the carburettor, an experiment that had ended in dismal failure.
A good place to stay away from - and here I was, pulling in through the main gates behind my friend Arnie after dark, nothing left of the day but a tinge of furnace red on the horizon. My headlights picked out enough discarded auto-parts, wreckage, and general all-around dreck to make me feel more depressed and tired than ever. I realized I hadn't called home, and that my mother and father would probably be wondering just where the hell I was.
Arnie drove up to a big garage door with a sign beside it reading HONK FOR ENTRY. There was a feeble light spilling out through a grime-coated window beside the door somebody was at home - and I barely restrained an impulse to lean out of my window and tell Arnie to drive his car over to my house for the night. I had a vision of us stumbling onto Will Darnell and his cronies inventorying hijacked colour TVs or repainting stolen Cadillacs. The Hardy Boys come to Libertyville.
Arnie just sat there, not honking, not doing anything and I was about to get out and ask him what was what when he came back to where I was parked. Even in the last of the failing light, he looked deeply embarrassed.
'Would you mind honking your horn for me, Dennis?' he said humbly. 'Christine's doesn't seem to work.'
'Sure.'
'Thanks.'
I beeped my horn twice, and after a pause the big garage door went rattling up. Will Darnell himself was standing there, his belly pushing out over his belt. He waved Arnie inside impatiently.
I turned my car around, parked it facing out, and went inside myself.
The interior was huge, vaultlike, and terribly sil2nt at the end of the day. There were as many as five dozen slant-parking stalls, each equipped with its own bolted-down toolbox for do-it-yourselfers who had ailing cars but no tools. The ceiling overhead was high, and crossed with naked, gantrvlike beams.
Signs were plastered everywhere: ALL TOOLS MUST BE INSPECTED BEFORE YOU LEAVE and MAKE APPOINTMENT FOR LIFT-TIME IN ADVANCE and MOTOR MANUALS ON FIRST-COME FIRST-SERVE BASIS and NO PROFANITY OR SWEARING WILL BE TOLERATED. Dozens of others; everywhere you turned, one seemed to jump right out at you. A big sign-man was Will