stiff; that may have loosened it up.” Delicately as a safecracker, his black silhouette picked at the dashboard as his foot probed the gas pedal. It had to be on the first try and it was. He found the spark again and nursed it into roaring life. I closed my eyes in thanks and relaxed into the coming motion of the car.
It did not come. Instead, a faint disjointed purr arose from the rear of the chassis, where I imagined the corpses had been carried when the undertaker owned the car. My father’s shadow hurriedly tried all the gears; to each the same faint and unmoving purr answered. He tried each gear twice in disbelief. The motor roared but the car did not move. The factory wall echoed back the frantic sustained crescendo of the cylinders and I was afraid men would be called toward us out of the distant bar.
My father put his arms up on the wheel and lowered his head into them. It was a thing I had only ever seen my mother do. At the height of some quarrel or sadness she would crook her arms on the table and lower her head into them; it frightened me more than any rage, for in the rage you could watch her face.
“Daddy?”
My father did not answer. The streetlight touched with a row of steady flecks the curve of his knit cap: the way Vermeer outlined a loaf of bread.
“What do you think’s wrong?”
Now it occurred to me he had had an “attack” and the in explicable behavior of the car was in fact an illusionistic reflection of some breakage in himself. I was about to touch him-I never touched my father-when he looked up with a smile of sorts on his bumpy and battered urchin’s face. “This is the kind of thing,” he said, “that’s been happening to me all my life. I’m sorry you got involved in it. I don’t know why the damn car doesn’t move. Same reason the swimming team doesn’t win, I suppose.”
He raced the motor again and peered down past his knees at the clutch pedal as he worked it in and out with his foot.
“Do you hear that little rattling behind?” I asked.
He looked up and laughed. “You poor devil,” he said.
“You deserved a winner and you got a loser. Let’s go. If I never see this heap of junk again it’ll be too soon.”
He got out and slammed the door on his side so hard I thought the window might shatter. The black body swayed fastidiously on its obstinate wheels and then sat casting its paper-thin shadow as if it had won some inscrutable point. We walked away. “That’s why I never wanted to move to that farm,” my father said. “As soon as you do you become dependent upon automobiles. All I’ve ever wanted is to be able to walk to where I had to go. My ideal is to walk to my own funeral. Once you’ve sold out your legs, you’ve sold out your life.”
We walked across the railroad station parking lot and then turned left to the Esso station on Boone Street. The pumps were dark but a dim golden light burned in the little office; my father looked in and tapped on the glass. The interior was crowded with raw new tires and spare parts in numbered boxes more or less arranged in a green metal frame. A great upright Coca-Cola dispenser vibrated audibly and trembled and shut off, as if a body trapped inside had made its last effort. The electric Quaker State Oil clock on the wall said 9:06; its second hand swept the full circle as we waited. My father tapped again, and there was still no answer. The only motion within was the second hand sweeping.
I asked, “Isn’t the one on Seventh Street an all-night place?”
He asked me, “How are you bearing up, kid? This is a helluva thing, isn’t it? I ought to call your mother.”
We walked up Boone and across the tracks and past the little porches of the brick row houses and thence up Seventh, across Weiser, which wasn’t so gaudy this high up, to where indeed the great garage was open. Its white mouth seemed to be drinking the night. Within, two men in gray coveralls, wearing gloves from which the fingers had been cut, were washing an automobile with pails of sudsy hot water. They worked quickly, for the water tended to freeze in a film of ice on the metal. The garage was open to the street at one end and at the other end faded into indeterminate caverns of parked cars. Along one wall a little booth, like a broader telephone booth or like one of those enclosed sheds in which people used to wait for trolley cars-there still was one in the town of Ely-, seemed to function as the heart of the place. Outside its door, on a little cement curb stenciled with the words step up, a man in a tuxedo and white muffler waited, periodically consulting the black-dialed platinum watch strapped to the inside of his wrist. His motions were so jerky and chronic that when I first spotted him in the corner of my eye I thought he was a life-size mechanical ad. The car being washed, a pearl-gray Lincoln, was presumably his. My father stood in front of him for an instant and I saw from the quality of the man’s pearl-gray gaze that my father was literally invisible to him.
My father went to the door of the booth and opened it. I had to follow him in. Here a thickset man was busily scrambling a table of papers. He was standing; there was a desk chair to sit in but it was heaped to the arms with papers and pamphlets and catalogues. The man held a clipboard and a smoking cigarette in the same hand and was sucking his teeth as he searched through his papers.
My father said, “I beg your pardon, my friend.”
The manager said, “Just a minute please, give me a break, will ya?” and, angrily wadding a piece of blue paper in his fist, plunged past us out the door. It was much more than a minute before he returned.
To consume the time and conceal my embarrassment I fed a penny into the chewing-gum-ball machine installed by the Alton Kiwanis. I received, the rarest, the prize, a black ball. I loved licorice. So did my father. The time we went to New York my Aunt Alma had told me that in their childhood the other kids in their block of Passaic had called my father Sticks because he was always eating licorice sticks. “Do you want this?” I asked him.
“Oh God,” he said, as if in my palm I was holding out a pill of poison to him. “No thanks, Peter. That would just about finish my teeth on the spot.” And he began, in a way I can hardly describe, to rear and toss in the confined space of our cabin, turning to confront now a rack of road maps, now a detailed chart of spare part code numbers, now a calendar displaying a girl posed only in a snow bunny cap with pink pointed ears, mittens and booties of white fur, and a fluffy round tailpiece. Her bottom was pertly pointed outward at us. My father groaned and pressed his forehead against the restraining glass; the man in the tuxedo turned around, startled at the bump. The men in the fingerless gloves had climbed inside the Lincoln and were wiping the windows with busy swipes like the blur of bees. My father’s freckled fists rummaged blindly among the papers on the table as he strained to see where the manager had disappeared to. Afraid he would disturb a mysterious order, I said sharply, “Daddy. Control yourself.”
“I’ve got the heebie-jeebies, kid,” he answered loudly. “Biff. Bang. I’m ready to smash something. Time and tide for no man wait. This reminds me of death.”
“Relax” I said. “Take off your cap. He probably thinks you’re a panhandler.”
He gave no sign of hearing me; his communion was all with himself. His eyes had turned yellowish; my mother sometimes screamed when that amber gleam began to appear in his eyes. He looked at me with lifesaver irises lit by a ghost’s radiant gaze. His parched lips moved. “I can take anything by myself,” he told me. “But I’ve got you on my hands.”
“I’m all right” I snapped back, though in truth the cement floor of this place felt remarkably cold through the soles of my pinching loafers.
I could hardly believe it, but in time the manager did return, and he listened politely to my father’s tale. He was a short thickset man with three or four parallel creases furrowing each cheek. He had the air-something about the set of his neck in his shoulders expressed it-of having once been an athlete. Now he was wearied and harassed by administration. His hair in thinning backwards had stranded a fore lock, half-gray, which as he talked he kept brushing back brutally, as if to scrub a new sense of focus into his head. His name, Mr. Rhodes, was stitched in a fat script of orange thread on the pocket of his olive coverall. He told us, speaking in hurried puffs between pronounced intakes of breath, “It doesn’t sound good. From what you say, the motor running and the car not moving, it’s in the transmission somewheres, or the driveshaft. If it was just the engine”-he said “enchine” and the way he said it it seemed to mean something different, something pulsing and living and lovable-”I’d send the Jeep down, but this way, I don’t know what we can do. My tow truck’s off after a wreck down on Route 9. Do you have a garage of your own?” He accented “garage” on the first syllable:
“We use Al Hummel over in Olinger,” my father said.
“If you want me to get after your car in the morning,” Mr. Rhodes said, “I will. But I can’t do anything before then; these two”-he indicated the workmen in front of us; they were flicking chamois pads across the Lincoln’s serene gray skin while the man in the tuxedo rhythmically slapped his palm with an alligator billfold-”go off at ten and that leaves just me and the two off in the wrecker down Route 9. So it’d be just as soon for you probably to
