Vintage Ford

by Richard Ford

  Edna seemed badly affected by that story and slid low in the seat so she couldn’t see out over the dash. “Isn’t that a shameful story, Earl, what happened to that poor little monkey?”

  “I see a town! I see a town!” Cheryl started yelling from the backseat, and right up Little Duke started yapping and the whole car fell into a racket. And sure enough she had seen something I hadn’t, which was Rock Springs, Wyoming, at the bottom of a long hill, a little glowing jewel in the desert with I-80 running on the north side and the black desert spread out behind.

  “That’s it, honey,” I said. “That’s where we’re going. You saw it first.”

  “We’re hungry,” Cheryl said. “Little Duke wants some fish, and I want spaghetti.” She put her arms around my neck and hugged me.

  “Then you’ll just get it,” I said. “You can have anything you want. And so can Edna and so can Little Duke.” I looked over at Edna, smiling, but she was staring at me with eyes that were fierce with anger. “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Don’t you care anything about that awful thing that happened to me?” Her mouth was drawn tight, and her eyes kept cutting back at Cheryl and Little Duke, as if they had been tormenting her.

  “Of course I do,” I said. “I thought that was an awful thing.” I didn’t want her to be unhappy. We were almost there, and pretty soon we could sit down and have a real meal without thinking somebody might be hurting us.

  “You want to know what I did with that monkey?” Edna said.

  “Sure I do,” I said.

  “I put her in a green garbage bag, put it in the trunk of my car, drove to the dump, and threw her in the trash.” She was staring at me darkly, as if the story meant something to her that was real important but that only she could see and that the rest of the world was a fool for.

  “Well, that’s horrible,” I said. “But I don’t see what else you could do. You didn’t mean to kill it. You’d have done it differently if you had. And then you had to get rid of it, and I don’t know what else you could have done. Throwing it away might seem unsympathetic to somebody, probably, but not to me. Sometimes that’s all you can do, and you can’t worry about what somebody else thinks.” I tried to smile at her, but the red light was staying on if I pushed the accelerator at all, and I was trying to gauge if we could coast to Rock Springs before the car gave out completely. I looked at Edna again. “What else can I say?” I said.

  “Nothing,” she said, and stared back at the dark highway. “I should’ve known that’s what you’d think. You’ve got a character that leaves something out, Earl. I’ve known that a long time.”

  “And yet here you are,” I said. “And you’re not doing so bad. Things could be a lot worse. At least we’re all together here.”

  “Things could always be worse,” Edna said. “You could go to the electric chair tomorrow.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “And somewhere somebody probably will. Only it won’t be you.”

  “I’m hungry,” said Cheryl. “When’re we gonna eat? Let’s find a motel. I’m tired of this. Little Duke’s tired of it too.”

  Where the car stopped rolling was some distance from the town, though you could see the clear outline of the interstate in the dark with Rock Springs lighting up the sky behind. You could hear the big tractors hitting the spacers in the overpass, revving up for the climb to the mountains.

  I shut off the lights.

  “What’re we going to do now?” Edna said irritably, giving me a bitter look.

  “I’m figuring it,” I said. “It won’t be hard, whatever it is. You won’t have to do anything.”

  “I’d hope not,” she said and looked the other way.

  Across the road and across a dry wash a hundred yards was what looked like a huge mobile-home town, with a factory or a refinery of some kind lit up behind it and in full swing. There were lights on in a lot of the mobile homes, and there were cars moving along an access road that ended near the freeway overpass a mile the other way. The lights in the mobile homes seemed friendly to me, and I knew right then what I should do.

  “Get out,” I said, opening my door.

  “Are we walking?” Edna said.

  “We’re pushing.”

  “I’m not pushing.” Edna reached up and locked her door.

  “All right,” I said. “Then you just steer.”

  “You’re pushing us to Rock Springs, are you, Earl? It doesn’t look like it’s more than about three miles.”

  “I’ll push,” Cheryl said from the back.

  “No, hon. Daddy’ll push. You just get out with Little Duke and move out of the way.”

  Edna gave me a threatening look, just as if I’d tried to hit her. But when I got out she slid into my seat and took the wheel, staring angrily ahead straight into the cottonwood scrub.

  “Edna can’t drive that car,” Cheryl said from out in the dark. “She’ll run it in the ditch.”

  “Yes, she can, hon. Edna can drive it as good as I can. Probably better.”

  “No she can’t,” Cheryl said. “No she can’t either.” And I thought she was about to cry, but she didn’t.

  I told Edna to keep the ignition on so it wouldn’t lock up and to steer into the cottonwoods with the parking lights on so she could see. And when I started, she steered it straight off into the trees, and I kept pushing until we were twenty yards into the cover and the tires sank in the soft sand and nothing at all could be seen from the road.

  “Now where are we?” she said, sitting at the wheel. Her voice was tired and hard, and I knew she could have put a good meal to use. She had a sweet nature, and I recognized that this wasn’t her fault but mine. Only I wished she could be more hopeful.

  “You stay right here, and I’ll go over to that trailer park and call us a cab,” I said.

  “What cab?” Edna said, her mouth wrinkled as if she’d never heard anything like that in her life.

  “There’ll be cabs,” I said, and tried to smile at her. “There’s cabs everywhere.”

  “What’re you going to tell him when he gets here? Our stolen car broke down and we need a ride to where we can steal another one? That’ll be a big hit, Earl.”

  “I’ll talk,” I said. “You just listen to the radio for ten minutes and then walk on out to the shoulder like nothing was suspicious. And you and Cheryl act nice. She doesn’t need to know about this car.”

  “Like we’re not suspicious enough already, right?” Edna looked up at me out of the lighted car. “You don’t think right, did you know that, Earl? You think the world’s stupid and you’re smart. But that’s not how it is. I feel sorry for you. You might’ve been something, but things just went crazy someplace.”

  I had a thought about poor Danny. He was a vet and crazy as a shit-house mouse, and I was glad he wasn’t in for all this. “Just get the baby in the car,” I said, trying to be patient. “I’m hungry like you are.”

  “I’m tired of this,” Edna said. “I wish I’d stayed in Montana.”

  “Then you can go back in the morning,” I said. “I’ll buy the ticket and put you on the bus. But not till then.”

  “Just get on with it, Earl.” She slumped down in the seat, turning off the parking lights with one foot and the radio on with the other.

  The mobile-home community was as big as any I’d ever seen. It was attached in some way to the plant that was lighted up behind it, because I could see a car once in a while leave one of the trailer streets, turn in the direction of the plant, then go slowly into it. Everything in the plant was white, and you could see that all the trailers were painted white and looked exactly alike. A deep hum came out of the plant, and I thought as I got closer that it wouldn’t be a location I’d ever want to work in.

  I went right to the first trailer where there was a light, and knocked on the metal door. Kids’ toys were lying in the gravel around the little wood steps, and I could hear talking on TV that suddenly went off. I heard a woman’s voice talking, and then the door o
pened wide.

  A large Negro woman with a wide, friendly face stood in the doorway. She smiled at me and moved forward as if she was going to come out, but she stopped at the top step. There was a little Negro boy behind her peeping out from behind her legs, watching me with his eyes half closed. The trailer had that feeling that no one else was inside, which was a feeling I knew something about.

  “I’m sorry to intrude,” I said. “But I’ve run up on a little bad luck tonight. My name’s Earl Middleton.”

  The woman looked at me, then out into the night toward the freeway as if what I had said was something she was going to be able to see. “What kind of bad luck?” she said, looking down at me again.

  “My car broke down out on the highway,” I said. “I can’t fix it myself, and I wondered if I could use your phone to call for help.”

  The woman smiled down at me knowingly. “We can’t live without cars, can we?”

  “That’s the honest truth,” I said.

  “They’re like our hearts,” she said, her face shining in the little bulb light that burned beside the door. “Where’s your car situated?”

  I turned and looked over into the dark, but I couldn’t see anything because of where we’d put it. “It’s over there,” I said. “You can’t see it in the dark.”

  “Who all’s with you now?” the woman said. “Have you got your wife with you?”

  “She’s with my little girl and our dog in the car,” I said. “My daughter’s asleep or I would have brought them.”

  “They shouldn’t be left in the dark by themselves,” the woman said and frowned. “There’s too much unsavoriness out there.”

  “The best I can do is hurry back.” I tried to look sincere, since everything except Cheryl being asleep and Edna being my wife was the truth. The truth is meant to serve you if you’ll let it, and I wanted it to serve me. “I’ll pay for the phone call,” I said. “If you’ll bring the phone to the door I’ll call from right here.”

  The woman looked at me again as if she was searching for a truth of her own, then back out into the night. She was maybe in her sixties, but I couldn’t say for sure. “You’re not going to rob me, are you, Mr. Middleton?” She smiled like it was a joke between us.

  “Not tonight,” I said, and smiled a genuine smile. “I’m not up to it tonight. Maybe another time.”

  “Then I guess Terrel and I can let you use our phone with Daddy not here, can’t we, Terrel? This is my grandson, Terrel Junior, Mr. Middleton.” She put her hand on the boy’s head and looked down at him. “Terrel won’t talk. Though if he did he’d tell you to use our phone. He’s a sweet boy.” She opened the screen for me to come in.

  The trailer was a big one with a new rug and a new couch and a living room that expanded to give the space of a real house. Something good and sweet was cooking in the kitchen, and the trailer felt like it was somebody’s comfortable new home instead of just temporary. I’ve lived in trailers, but they were just snail-backs with one room and no toilet, and they always felt cramped and unhappy—though I’ve thought maybe it might’ve been me that was unhappy in them.

  There was a big Sony TV and a lot of kids’ toys scattered on the floor. I recognized a Greyhound bus I’d gotten for Cheryl. The phone was beside a new leather recliner, and the Negro woman pointed for me to sit down and call and gave me the phone book. Terrel began fingering his toys and the woman sat on the couch while I called, watching me and smiling.

  There were three listings for cab companies, all with one number different. I called the numbers in order and didn’t get an answer until the last one, which answered with the name of the second company. I said I was on the highway beyond the interstate and that my wife and family needed to be taken to town and I would arrange for a tow later. While I was giving the location, I looked up the name of a tow service to tell the driver in case he asked.

  When I hung up, the Negro woman was sitting looking at me with the same look she had been staring with into the dark, a looked that seemed to want truth. She was smiling, though. Something pleased her and I reminded her of it.

  “This is a very nice home,” I said, resting in the recliner, which felt like the driver’s seat of the Mercedes, and where I’d have been happy to stay.

  “This isn’t our house, Mr. Middleton,” the Negro woman said. “The company owns these. They give them to us for nothing. We have our own home in Rockford, Illinois.”

  “That’s wonderful,” I said.

  “It’s never wonderful when you have to be away from home, Mr. Middleton, though we’re only here three months, and it’ll be easier when Terrel Junior begins his special school. You see, our son was killed in the war, and his wife ran off without Terrel Junior. Though you shouldn’t worry. He can’t understand us. His little feelings can’t be hurt.” The woman folded her hands in her lap and smiled in a satisfied way. She was an attractive woman, and had on a blue-and-pink floral dress that made her seem bigger than she could’ve been, just the right woman to sit on the couch she was sitting on. She was good nature’s picture, and I was glad she could be, with her little brain-damaged boy, living in a place where no one in his right mind would want to live a minute. “Where do you live, Mr. Middleton?” she said politely, smiling in the same sympathetic way.

  “My family and I are in transit,” I said. “I’m an ophthalmologist, and we’re moving back to Florida, where I’m from. I’m setting up practice in some little town where it’s warm year-round. I haven’t decided where.”

  “Florida’s a wonderful place,” the woman said. “I think Terrel would like it there.”

  “Could I ask you something?” I said.

  “You certainly may,” the woman said. Terrel had begun pushing his Greyhound across the front of the TV screen, making a scratch that no one watching the set could miss. “Stop that, Terrel Junior,” the woman said quietly. But Terrel kept pushing his bus on the glass, and she smiled at me again as if we both understood something sad. Except I knew Cheryl would never damage a television set. She had respect for nice things, and I was sorry for the lady that Terrel didn’t. “What did you want to ask?” the woman said.

  “What goes on in that plant or whatever it is back there beyond these trailers, where all the lights are on?”

  “Gold,” the woman said and smiled.

  “It’s what?” I said.

  “Gold,” the Negro woman said, smiling as she had for almost all the time I’d been there. “It’s a gold mine.”

  “They’re mining gold back there?” I said, pointing.

  “Every night and every day.” She smiled in a pleased way.

  “Does your husband work there?” I said.

  “He’s the assayer,” she said. “He controls the quality. He works three months a year, and we live the rest of the time at home in Rockford. We’ve waited a long time for this. We’ve been happy to have our grandson, but I won’t say I’ll be sorry to have him go. We’re ready to start our lives over.” She smiled broadly at me and then at Terrel, who was giving her a spiteful look from the floor. “You said you had a daughter,” the Negro woman said. “And what’s her name?”

  “Irma Cheryl,” I said. “She’s named for my mother.”

  “That’s nice. And she’s healthy, too. I can see it in your face.” She looked at Terrel Junior with pity.

  “I guess I’m lucky,” I said.

  “So far you are. But children bring you grief, the same way they bring you joy. We were unhappy for a long time before my husband got his job in the gold mine. Now, when Terrel starts to school, we’ll be kids again.” She stood up. “You might miss your cab, Mr. Middleton,” she said, walking toward the door, though not to be forcing me out. She was too polite. “If we can’t see your car, the cab surely won’t be able to.”

  “That’s true.” I got up off the recliner, where I’d been so comfortable. “None of us have eaten yet, and your food makes me know how hungry we probably all are.”

  “There are fine restauran
ts in town, and you’ll find them,” the Negro woman said. “I’m sorry you didn’t meet my husband. He’s a wonderful man. He’s everything to me.”

  “Tell him I appreciate the phone,” I said. “You saved me.”

  “You weren’t hard to save,” the woman said. “Saving people is what we were all put on earth to do. I just passed you on to whatever’s coming to you.”

  “Let’s hope it’s good,” I said, stepping back into the dark.

  “I’ll be hoping, Mr. Middleton. Terrel and I will both be hoping.”

  I waved to her as I walked out into the darkness toward the car where it was hidden in the night.

  The cab had already arrived when I got there. I could see its little red-and-green roof lights all the way across the dry wash, and it made me worry that Edna was already saying something to get us in trouble, something about the car or where we’d come from, something that would cast suspicion on us. I thought, then, how I never planned things well enough. There was always a gap between my plan and what happened, and I only responded to things as they came along and hoped I wouldn’t get in trouble. I was an offender in the law’s eyes. But I always thought differently, as if I weren’t an offender and had no intention of being one, which was the truth. But as I read on a napkin once, between the idea and the act a whole kingdom lies. And I had a hard time with my acts, which were oftentimes offender’s acts, and my ideas, which were as good as the gold they mined there where the bright lights were blazing.