The Jack Finney Reader
Page 73
He moved a chrome-plated catch on the side of the machine, then, and opened a small, brown-crackle-finished door, exposing a chrome-plated tray inside the machine. Into this tray he slipped half a dozen sheets of the rectangular white paper, and they fitted the tray exactly. Carefully he placed a hinged, rubbertipped rod on the top sheet of paper, then closed the little door. From the opened suitcase he brought out two small bottles of ink, one green, one black. He unscrewed their caps, placed a finger of each hand over the mouths of the bottles, inverted them, and pushed their necks into two small openings on top of the machine, until they clicked into place.
Turning swiftly to the suitcase, he brought out a Manila folder and from it took a new, unwrinkled, ten-dollar bill. The serial numbers on its face were glued over with narrow strips of white paper, and Mr. Henkle, grinning delightedly, indicated this to the staring young man who was watching him. Now Mr. Henkle pushed back a sliding panel at the back of the little machine, the tall young man leaning over his shoulder to watch. He slipped one white edge of the bill into a chrome-plated clip within the machine. The opposite edge he fitted into a similar clip, and now the bill was stretched tautly between them. He flicked the bill with a finger tip, and it made a half revolution, stopping with a click, the green reverse side upward. Again Mr. Henkle flicked the bill, it turned, and with a click, stopped, its black face up. Mr. Henkle slid the little panel closed.
Now he stooped to look quickly over the exposed rods and disks on the machine's exterior, apparently checking their position. Satisfied, he glanced at Mr. Lucca, eyes flashing triumphantly, and pressed a stud in the base of the machine. Inside a motor whirred almost soundlessly, the little rods and disks moving rapidly. Several seconds passed, then a series of rapid clicks sounded from within the machine; a moment more passed, then an intense lavender-blue light flashed inside the machine, visible through various tiny openings. A moment later the little rods and disks paused, and with a tiny gurgle a little bubble moved upward through the bottle of black ink and soundlessly broke the surface. Again the rods and disks flashed with movement, again the clicks sounded, the brilliant light flashed — then a tiny bubble rose through the green ink.
Mr. Henkle, leaning over the desk, one hand gripping its edge, pressed a thumb against one of the tiny rubber pads taped to its undersurface; then he pressed his forefinger on the other. A second passed, the machine clicked once, and then, astonishingly, it ejected a crisp, new, shiny-wet, ten-dollar bill into a chrome-plated projection at its front. A horizontal bar, touching the bill only at its white, unprinted, upper edge, prevented the bill from falling flat. Instantly, excitedly, Mr. Henkle's hand reached out for the bill and picked it up by a corner between thumb and forefinger — then he made an exclamation of annoyance, Smudged it, he said, taking the bill carefully in his other hand; then he exhibited his thumb, wet with black ink, and his forefinger, damp with green. The bill, where he'd seized it, was similarly smeared, and before Mr. Lucca could realize what he intended, Mr. Henkle had dropped the bill into a metal ash tray and touched a corner with the flame of a lighter; and the bill, crackling moistly, burned quickly into a coil of fragile black ash. Mr. Henkle pressed the little stud again, then wiped his fingers on a handkerchief as the shiny parts flashed in the light and the rapid clicking sound began again.
Once more the lavender light flared, and then again; the bubbles moved up through their bottles; and the machine spit forth a new, wet, ten-dollar bill. Handling it very carefully this time, by a corner of the unprinted white edging, Mr. Henkle flapped it rapidly through the air till the shiny-wet mist of water and alcohol dried. He quickly pressed it with the iron on his dresser, then handed the fresh warm note to Mr. Lucca. With my compliments, he said, beaming with pleasure. Take it to a bank teller! Tell him you think it's counterfeit; then listen to what he tells you. It's perfect! Flawless! he exclaimed truthfully, then pressed the little stud once again.
Three more times the beautiful little machine on Mr. Henkle's desk produced what seemed to be, and were indeed, new, fresh, and absolutely flawless ten-dollar bills; and after drying and neatly pressing each, Mr. Henkle presented them to Mr. Lucca. Go ahead! he urged. Take them to any bank, and see what they tell you!
But Mr. Lucca, the last bill stretched taut between his hands and close to the desk lamp, finally shook his head. I don't have to, he said. I know what they'd say. He nodded at the machine. The machine numbers them serially; no two alike? Mr. Henkle nodded, and Mr. Lucca tossed the new bills onto the desk. Walking to the easy chair, he sat down and looked up at Mr. Henkle. All right, he said quietly, you have to sell the machine to me. You've got to. Or I'll walk to a phone, and turn you in for counterfeiting. He waited until Mr. Henkle, biting his lip through several seconds of obviously anguished frustration, finally nodded. On the other hand — the young man smiled pleasantly — I've got to pay you; and a decent price too. Or you can throw the machine into two miles of ocean and tell me to go after it. Again visibly controlling himself, Mr. Henkle nodded. Obviously, though, the young man added softly, I can't pay you what it's worth; there is no such price. But you can always build another for yourself. Again, and this time with a sigh of final defeat, Mr. Henkle nodded. All right, the young man said then, now let's talk business — and Mr. Henkle's heart leaped with the ancient exultation of the hunter as the missile strikes and the prey staggers and falls.
Much later that night, well after one o'clock in the morning, a young man with predatorily grooved cheeks sat alone in a locked compartment of a fast-moving train 19 miles out of Miami Beach. For a few moments, his fingers worked at the fasteners of an airplane-luggage carrying case on the seat beside him; then he had it open. For a dozen seconds, then, he stared at the little machine it contained, a beautiful thing gleaming softly under the swaying light overhead. Then the young man grinned balefully and reached out to caress the machine with his hands.
At very nearly the same moment in the semidarkened interior of a DC-7 11,000 feet above the coast of northern Florida, a small man in an exquisitely tailored blue gabardine suit unlocked a small suitcase on his lap. He paused, glanced at the young man with the yellow crew cut sleeping beside him, glanced at the other sleeping passengers around him, then opened the suitcase. Pushing aside a protective wadding of clothes, he exposed a flat, rough, metal surface, which gleamed a dull yellow in the subdued light. Then he slipped a hand under it and hefted it on his palm; a block of metal 6 inches thick, over 2 feet long, and nearly 10 inches wide. But his hand sunk quickly under the weight, for it was very heavy; heavy as only two metals, gold — and lead — can be. Then the man who had registered as Alfred G. Henkle (inventer) carefully closed the lid on the gold brick he had been given by the man who had registered as Frank O. Lucca (mining engineer from the West).
Good Housekeeping, August 1955, 141(2):50-51, 103-104, 106, 109-110, 112, 114-115
Second Chance
I can't tell you, I know, how I got to a time and place no one else in the world even remembers. But maybe I can tell you how I felt the morning I stood in an old barn off the county road, staring down at what was to take me there.
I paid out $75 I'd worked hard for after classes last semester — I'm a senior at Poynt College an Hylesburg, Illinois, my home town — and the middle-aged farmer took it silently, watching me shrewdly, knowing I must be out of my mind. Then I stood looking down at the smashed, rusty, rat-gnawed, dust-covered, old wreck of an automobile lying on the wood floor where it had been hauled and dumped 33 years before — and that now belonged to me. And if you can remember the moment, whenever it was, when you finally got something you wanted so badly you dreamed about it, then maybe I've told you how I felt staring at the dusty mass of junk that was a genuine Jordan Playboy.
You've never heard of a Jordan Playboy, if you're younger than forty, unless you're like I am: one of those people who'd rather own a '26 Mercer convertible sedan, or a '31 Packard touring car, or a '24 Wills Sainte Claire, or a '31 air-cooled Franklin converti
ble — or a Jordan Playboy — than the newest, two-toned, '56 model made; I was actually half-sick with excitement.
And the excitement lasted; it took me four months to restore that car, and that's fast. I went to classes till school ended for the summer; then I worked, clerking at J. C. Penny's. I had dates, saw an occasional movie, ate, and slept. But all I really did — all that counted — was work on that car — from six to eight every morning, for half an hour at lunchtime, and from the moment I got home, most nights, till I stumbled to bed, worn out.
My folks live in the big old house my dad was born in. There's a barn off at the back of the lot, and I've got a chain hoist in there, a workbench, and a full set of mechanic's tools. I built hot rods there for three years, one after another — those charcoal-black mongrels with the rear ends up an the air. But I'm through with hot rods — I'll leave those to the high-school set; I'm twenty years old now. I'd been living for the day when I could soak loose the body bolts with liniment, hoist the body aside, and start restoring my own classic. That's what they're called, those certain models of certain cars of certain years that have something that's lasted, something today's cars don't have for us, and something worth bringing back.
But you don't restore a classic by throwing in a new motor, hammering out the dents, replacing missing parts with anything handy, and painting it chartreuse. “Restore” means what it says, or ought to. My Jordan had been struck by a train, the man who sold it to me said — just grazed, but that was enough to flip it over, tumbling at across a field — and the thing was a wreck; the people in it had been killed. So the right rear wheel and the spare were hopeless wads of wire spokes and twisted rims, and the body was caved in, with the metal actually split in places. The motor was a mess, though the block was sound. The upholstery was rat-gnawed and almost gone. All the nickel plating was flaking off, and exterior parts were gone, nothing but screw holes to show they'd been there. But three of the wheels were intact, or almost, and none of the body was actually missing.
What you do is write letters; advertise in the magazines people like me read; ask around; prowl garages, junk heaps, and barns; and you trade, and you bargain, and one way or another you get together the parts you need. I traded a Winton name plate and hubcaps, plus a Saxon hood, to a man an Wichita, Kansas, for two Playboy wheels — rusty, and some of the spokes bent and loose, but I could fix that. I bought my Jordan runningboard mats and spare-wheel mount from a man in New Jersey. I bought two valve pushrods and had the rest precision-made precisely like the others. And — well, I restored that car, that's all.
The body shell — every dent and bump gone, every tear welded and burnished down — I painted a deep green, precisely matching what was left of the old paint before I sanded it off, Door handles, windshield rim, and every other nickel-plated part were restored, renickeled, and replaced. I wrote 11 letters to leather-supply houses all over the country, enclosing sample swatches of the cracked old upholstery, before I found a place that could match it. Then I paid $112 to have my Playboy re-upholstered, supplying old photographs to show just how it should be done. And at 8:10 one Saturday evening in July I finally finished; my last missing part, a Jordan radiator cap, for which I'd traded a Duesenberg floor mat, had come from the nickel plater's that afternoon. Just for the fun of it, I put the old plates back on — Illinois license 11,206 for 1923. And even the original ignition key, in its old leather case — oiled and worked supple again — was back where I'd found it, and now I switched it on, advanced the throttle and spark, got out with the crank, and started it up. And 33 years after it had bounced, rolled, and crashed off a grade crossing, that Jordan Playboy was alive again.
I had a date and knew I ought to get dressed; I was wearing stained dungarees and my dad's navy-blue, high-necked old sweater. I didn't have any money with me; you lose it out of your pockets, working on a car. I was even out of cigarettes. But I couldn't wait — I had to drive that car — and I just washed up at the old sink in the barn, then started down the cinder driveway in that beautiful car, feeling wonderful. It wouldn't matter how I was dressed anyway, driving around in the Playboy tonight.
My mother waved at me tolerantly from a living-room window, and called out to be careful, and I nodded; then I was out in the street, cruising along, and I wish you could have seen me — seen it, I mean. I don't care whether you've ever given a thought to the wonderful old cars or not, you'd have seen why it was worth all I'd done. Draw yourself a mental picture of a simple, straightlined, two-seater, open automobile with four big wire wheels fully exposed and its spare on the back in plain sight; don't put in a line that doesn't belong there and have a purpose. Make the two doors absolutely square — what other shape should a door be? Make the hood perfectly rounded, louvered at the sides because the motor needs ventilation. But don't add a single unnecessary curve, jiggle, squiggle, or porthole to that car — and picture the radiator facing the windstream squarely upright and looking like a radiator, nothing concealing it and pretending it doesn't exist. And now see that Playboy as I did cruising along, the late sun slanting down through the big old trees along the street, glancing off the bright nickel so that it hurt your eyes, the green of the body glowing like a jewel. It was beautiful, I tell you it was beautiful, and you'd think everyone would see that.
But they didn't. On Main Street I stopped at a light, and a guy slid up beside me in a great big, shining, new '56 car half as long as a football field. He sat there, the top of the door up to his shoulders, his eyes almost level with the bottom of his windshield, looking as much in proportion to his car as a two-year-old in his father's overcoat; he sat there in a car with a pattern of chrome copied directly from an Oriental rug and with a trunk sticking out past his back wheels you could have landed a helicopter on; he sat there for a moment, then turned, looked out, and smiled at my car!
And when I turned to look at him, eyes cold, he had the nerve to smile at me, as though I were supposed to nod and grin and agree that any car not made day before yesterday was an automatic side-splitting riot. I just looked away, and when the light changed he thought he'd show me just how sick his big $4,000 job could make my pitiful old antique look. The light clicked, and his foot was on the gas, his automatic transmission taking hold, and he'd already started to grin. But I started when he did, feeding the gas in firm and gentle, and we held even till I shot it into second, faster than any automatic transmission yet invented can, and drew right past him; and when I looked back, it was me who was grinning. But still, at the next light, every pedestrian crossing in front of my car treated me to a tolerant, understanding smile; and when the light changed, I swung off Main.
That was one thing that happened; the second was that my date wouldn't go out with me. I guess I shouldn't blame her. First she saw how I was dressed, which didn't help me with her. Then I showed her the Jordan at the curb, and she nodded, not even slightly interested, and said it was very nice, which didn't help her with me. And then — well, she's a good-looking girl, Naomi Weygand, and while she didn't exactly put it in those words, she let me know she meant to be seen, preferably on a dance floor, and not waste her youth and beauty riding around in some old antique. And when I told her I was going out in the Jordan and if she wanted to come along, fine, and if she didn't — well, she didn't. Eight seconds later she was opening her front door again, while I scorched rubber pulling away from the curb.
I felt the way you would have by then, and I wanted to get out of town and alone somewhere, and I shoved it into second, gunning the car, heading for the old Cressville road. It used to be the only road to Cressville, a two-lane paved highway just barely wide enough for cars to pass. But there's been a new highway for 15 years — four lanes, and straight as a ruler except for two long curves you can do 90 on, and you can make the 7 miles to Cressville in 5 minutes or less.
But it's a dozen winding miles on the old road, and half a mile of it, near Cressville, was flooded out once, and the concrete is broken and full of gaps; you have to dr
ive it in low. So nobody uses the old road nowadays except four or five farm families who live along it.
When I swung onto the old road — there are a lot of big old trees all along it — I began to feel better. I just ambled along, no faster than 30, maybe, clear up to the broken stretch before I turned back toward Hylesburg, and it was wonderful. I'm not a sports-car man myself, but they've got something when they talk about getting close to the road and into the outdoors again, the way driving used to be before people shut themselves behind great sheets of glass and metal and began rushing along superhighways, their eyes on the white line. I had the windshield folded down flat against the hood, and the summer air streamed over my face and through my hair, and I could see the road just beside and under me flowing past so close I could have touched it. The air was alive with the heavy fragrances of summer darkness and the rich nostalgic sounds of summer insects, and I wasn't even thinking, but just living and enjoying it.
One of the old Playboy advertisements, famous in their day, calls the Jordan this brawny graceful thing, and says, It revels along with the wandering wind and roars like a Caproni biplane. It's a car for a man's man — that's certain. Or for a girl who loves the out-of-doors. Rich prose for these days, I guess; we're afraid of rich prose now and laugh in self-defense. But I'll take it over a stern sales talk on safety belts.
Anyway, I liked just drifting along the old road, a part of the summer outdoors and evening, with the living country around me; and I was no more thinking than a collie dog with his nose thrust out of a car, his eyes half closed against the air stream, enjoying the feeling human beings so often forget of simply being a living creature. “I left my love in Avalon,” I was bawling out at the top of my lungs, hardly knowing when I'd started, and saaailed awaaay! Then I was singing “Alice Blue Gown” very softly and gently. I sang, “Just a Japanese Saaandman!”, and “Whispering,” and Barney Google, with the goo-goo-googly eyes, the fields and trees and cattle, and sometimes an occasional car, flowing past in the darkness, and I was having a wonderful time.