He took the crowbar and rubber hose back around to the plate covering the tank.
"Joe, can you come here for a minute and help me?"
The boy looked up from the cheese and crackers he was eating and gazed distrustfully at Larry.
"Go on, now, that's all right," Nadine said quietly.
Joe came over, his feet dragging a little.
Larry slipped the crowbar into the plate's slot. "Throw your weight on that and let's see if we can get it up," he said.
For a moment he thought the boy either didn't understand him or didn't want to do it. Then he grasped the far end of the crowbar and pushed on it. His arms were thin but belted with a scrawny sort of muscle, the kind of muscle that working men from poor families always seem to have. The plate tilted a little but didn't come up enough for Larry to get his fingers under.
"Lay over it," he said.
Those half-savage, uptilted eyes studied him coolly for a moment and then Joe balanced on the crowbar, his feet coming off the ground as his whole weight was thrown onto the lever.
The plate came up a little farther than before, enough so that Larry could squirm his fingers under it. While he was struggling for purchase he happened to think that if the boy still didn't like him, this was the best chance he could have to show it. If Joe took his weight off the crowbar the plate would come down with a crash and he'd lose everything on his hands but the thumbs. Nadine had realized this, Larry saw. She had been peering at one of the bikes but now had turned to watch, her body angled into a posture of tension. Her dark eyes went from Larry, down on one knee, to Joe, who was watching Larry as he leaned his weight on the bar. Those seawater eyes were inscrutable. And still Larry couldn't find purchase.
"Need help?" Nadine asked, her normally calm voice now just a little highpitched.
Sweat ran into one eye and he blinked it away. Still no joy. He could smell gasoline.
"I think we can handle it," Larry said, looking directly at her.
A moment later his fingers slipped into a short groove on the underside of the plate. He threw his shoulders into it and the plate came up and crashed over on the tarmac with a dull clang. He heard Nadine sigh, and the crowbar fall to the pavement. He wiped his perspiring brow and looked back at the boy.
"That's good work, Joe," he said. "If you'd let that thing slip, I would've spent the rest of my life zipping my fly with my teeth. Thank you."
He expected no response (except perhaps an uninterpretable hoot as Joe walked back to inspect the motorcycles again), but Joe said in a rusty, struggling voice: "Weck-come."
Larry flashed a glance at Nadine, who stared back at him and then at Joe. Her face was surprised and pleased, yet somehow she looked - he couldn't have said just how - as if she had expected this. It was an expression he had seen before, but not one he could put his finger on right away. "Joe," he said, "did you say 'welcome'?"
Joe nodded vigorously. "Weck-come. You weck-come."
Nadine was holding her arms out, smiling. "That's good, Joe. Very, very good." Joe trotted to her and allowed himself to be hugged for a moment or two. Then he began to peer at the bikes again, hooting and chuckling to himself.
"He can talk," Larry said.
"I knew he wasn't mute," Nadine answered. "But it's wonderful to know he can recover. I think he needed two of us. Two halves. He... oh, I don't know."
He saw that she was blushing and thought he knew why. He began to slip the length of rubber hose into the hole in the cement, and suddenly realized that what he was doing could easily be interpreted as a symbolic (and rather crude) bit of dumbshow. He looked up at her, sharply. She turned away quickly, but not before he had seen how intently she was watching what he was doing, and the high color in her cheeks.
The nasty fear rose in his chest and he called: "For Chrissake, Nadine, look out! " She was concentrating on the hand controls, not looking where she was going, and she was going to drive the Honda directly into a pine tree at a wobbling five miles an hour.
She looked up and he heard her say "Oh! " in a startled voice. Then she swerved, much too sharply, and fell off the bike. The Honda stalled.
He ran to her, his heart in his throat. "Are you all right? Nadine! Are you - "
Then she was picking herself up shakily, looking at her scraped hands. "Yes, I'm fine. Stupid me, not looking where I was going. Did I hurt the motorcycle?"
"Never mind the goddamn motorcycle, let me take a look at your hands."
She held them out and he took a plastic bottle of Bactine from his pants pocket and sprayed them.
"You're shaking," she said.
"Never mind that either," Larry answered, more roughly than he had intended. "Listen, maybe we had better just stick to the bicycles. This is dangerous - "
"So is breathing," she answered calmly. "And I think Joe should ride with you, at least at first."
"He won't - "
"I think he will," Nadine said, looking into his face. "And so do you."