The flat LeBay had taken off rested against the wall. I got down on my hands and knees and peered under the car. A fresh oil-stain was starting to form there, black against the brownish ghost of an older, wider stain that had sunk into the concrete over a period of years. It did nothing to alleviate my depression. The block was cracked for sure.
I walked around to the driver’s side and as I grasped the handle, I saw a wastecan at the far corner of the garage. A large plastic bottle was poking out of the top. The letters SAPPH were visible over the rim.
I groaned. Oh, he had changed the oil, all right. Big of him. He had run out the old—whatever was left of it—and had run in a few quarts of Sapphire Motor Oil. This is the stuff you can get for $3.50 per recycled five- gallon jug at the Mammoth Mart. Roland D. LeBay was a real prince, all right. Roland D. LeBay was all heart.
I opened the car door and slid in behind the wheel. Now the smell in the garage didn’t seem quite so heavy, or so freighted with feelings of disuse and defeat. The car’s wheel was wide and red—a confident wheel. I looked at that amazing speedometer again, that speedometer which was calibrated not to 70 or 80 but all the way up to 120 miles an hour. No kilometres in little red numbers underneath; when this babe had rolled off the assembly line, the idea of going metric had yet to occur to anyone in Washington. No big red 55 on the speedometer, either. Back then, gas went for 29.9 a gallon, maybe less if a price-war happened to be going on in your town. The Arab oil-embargoes and the double-nickel speed limit had still been fifteen years away.
The good old days, I thought, and had to smile a little. I fumbled down to the left side of the seat and found the little button console that would move the seat back and forth and up and down (if it still worked, that was). More power to you, to coin a crappy little pun. There was air conditioning (that certainly wouldn’t work), and cruise control, and a big pushbutton radio with lots of chrome—AM only, of course. In 1958, FM was mostly a blank wasteland.
I put my hands on the wheel and something happened.
Even now, after much thought, I’m not sure exactly what it was. A vision, maybe—but if it was, it sure wasn’t any big deal. It was just that for a moment the torn upholstery seemed to be gone. The seat covers were whole and smelling pleasantly of vinyl… or maybe that smell was real leather. The worn places were gone from the steering wheel; the chrome winked pleasantly in the summer evening light falling through the garage door.
Let’s go for a ride, big guy, Christine seemed to whisper in the hot summer silence of LeBay’s garage. Let’s cruise.
And for just a moment it seemed that everything changed. That ugly snarl of cracks in the windscreen was gone—or seemed to be. The little swatch of LeBay’s lawn that I could see was not yellowed, balding, and crabgrassy but a dark, rich, newly cut green. The sidewalk beyond it was freshly cemented, not a crack in sight. I saw (or thought I did, or dreamed I did) a ’57 Cadillac motor by out front. That GM high-stepper was a dark minty green, not a speck of rust on her, big gangster whitewall tyres, and hubcaps as deeply reflective as mirrors. A Cadillac the size of a boat, and why not? Gas was almost as cheap as tap-water.
Let’s go for a ride, big guy… let’s cruise.
Sure, why not? I could pull out and turn toward downtown, toward the old high school that was still standing—it wouldn’t burn down for another six years, not until 1964 and I could turn on the radio and catch Chuck Berry singing “Maybeliene” or the Everlys doing “Wake Up Little Susie” or maybe Robin Luke wailing “Susie Darling.” And then I’d…
And then I got out of that car just about as fast as I could. The door opened with a rusty, hellish screech, and I cracked my elbow good on one of the garage walls. I pushed the door shut (I didn’t really even want to touch it, to tell you the truth) and then just stood there looking at the Plymouth which, barring a miracle, would soon be my friend Arnie’s. I rubbed my bruised crazybone. My heart was beating too fast.
Nothing. No new chrome, no new upholstery. On the other hand, plenty of dents and rust, one headlamp missing (I hadn’t noticed that the day before), the radio aerial crazily askew. And that dusty, dirty smell of age.
I decided right then that I didn’t like my friend Arnie’s car.
I walked out of the garage, glancing back constantly over my shoulder—I don’t know why, but I didn’t like it behind my back. I know how stupid that must sound, but it was how I felt. And there it sat with its dented, rusty grille, nothing sinister or even strange, just a very old Plymouth automobile with an inspection sticker that had gone invalid on June 1, 1976—a long time ago.
Arnie and LeBay were coming out of the house. Arnie had a white slip of paper in his hand—his bill of sale, I assumed. LeBay’s hands were empty; he had already made the money disappear.
“Hope you enjoy her,” LeBay was saying, and for some reason I thought of a very old pimp huckstering a very young boy. I felt a surge of real disgust for him—him with his psoriasis of the skull and his sweaty back brace. “I think you will. In time.”
His slightly rheumy eyes found mine, held there for a second, and then slipped back to Arnie.
“In time,” he repeated.
“Yessir, I’m sure I will,” Arnie said absently He moved toward the garage like a sleepwalker and stood looking at his car.
“Keys are in her,” LeBay said. “I’ll have to have you take her along. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Will she start?”
“Started for me yesterday evenin,” LeBay said, but his eyes shifted away toward the horizon. And then, in the tone of one who has washed his hands of the whole thing: “Your friend here will have a set of jumpers in his boot, I reckon.”
Well, as a matter of fact I did have a set of jumper cables in my boot, but I didn’t much like LeBay guessing it. I like him guessing it because… I sighed a little. Because I didn’t want to be involved in Arnie’s future relationship with the old clunker he had bought, but I could see myself getting dragged in, step by step.
Arnie had dropped out of the conversation completely. He walked into the garage and got into the car. The evening sun was slanting strongly in now, and I saw the little puff of dust that went up when Arnie sat down and automatically brushed at the seat of my own pants. For a moment he just sat there behind the wheel, hands gripping it loosely, and I felt a return of my unease. It was, in a way, as if the car had swallowed him. I told myself to stop it, that there was no damn reason for me to be acting like a goosey seventh-grade schoolgirl.
Then Arnie bent forward a little. The engine began to turn over. I turned and shot LeBay an angry, accusatory glance, but he was studying the sky again, as if for rain.
It wasn’t going to start; no way it was going to start. My Duster was in pretty good shape, but the two I’d owned before it were clunkers (modified clunkers; neither was in the same class as Christine); and I’d become very familiar with that sound on cold winter mornings, that slow and tired cranking that meant the battery was scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Rurr-rurr-rurr… rurr… rurrr… rurrr… rurr—
“Don’t bother, Arnie,” I said. “It’s not going to fire up.”
He didn’t even raise his head. He turned the key off and then turned it on again. The motor cranked with painful, dragging slowness.
I walked over to LeBay. “You couldn’t even leave it running long enough to build up a charge, could you?” I asked.
LeBay glanced at me from his yellowing, rheumy eyes, said nothing, and then began checking the sky for rain again.
“Or maybe it never started at all. Maybe you just got a couple of friends to come over and help you push it into the garage. If an old shit like you has any friends.”
He looked down at me. “Son,” he said. “You don’t know everything. You ain’t even dry behind the ears yet. When you’ve slogged your way through a couple of wars, like I have—”
I said deliberately, Fuck your couple of wars,” and walked toward the garage where Arnie was still trying to start his car, Might as well try to drink the Atlantic dry with a straw or ride a hot-air balloon to Mars, I thought.
Rurr… rurr… rurr.
Pretty soon the last ohm and erg would be sucked out of that old corroded Sears battery, and then there would be nothing but that most dismal of all automotive sounds, most commonly heard on rainy back roads and deserted highways: the dull, sterile click of the solenoid, followed by an awful sound like a death-rattle.
