Vintage Ford

by Richard Ford

  “We’re waiting for you, Daddy,” Cheryl said when I crossed the road. “The taxicab’s already here.”

  “I see, hon,” I said, and gave Cheryl a big hug. The cabdriver was sitting in the driver’s seat having a smoke with the lights on inside. Edna was leaning against the back of the cab between the taillights, wearing her Bailey hat. “What’d you tell him?” I said when I got close.

  “Nothing,” she said. “What’s there to tell?”

  “Did he see the car?”

  She glanced over in the direction of the trees where we had hid the Mercedes. Nothing was visible in the darkness, though I could hear Little Duke combing around in the underbrush tracking something, his little collar tinkling. “Where’re we going?” she said. “I’m so hungry I could pass out.”

  “Edna’s in a terrible mood,” Cheryl said. “She already snapped at me.”

  “We’re tired, honey,” I said. “So try to be nicer.”

  “She’s never nice,” Cheryl said.

  “Run go get Little Duke,” I said. “And hurry back.”

  “I guess my questions come last here, right?” Edna said.

  I put my arm around her. “That’s not true.”

  “Did you find somebody over there in the trailers you’d rather stay with? You were gone long enough.”

  “That’s not a thing to say,” I said. “I was just trying to make things look right, so we don’t get put in jail.”

  “So you don’t, you mean.” Edna laughed a little laugh I didn’t like hearing.

  “That’s right. So I don’t,” I said. “I’d be the one in Dutch.” I stared out at the big, lighted assemblage of white buildings and white lights beyond the trailer community, plumes of white smoke escaping up into the heartless Wyoming sky, the whole company of buildings looking like some unbelievable castle, humming away in a distorted dream. “You know what all those buildings are there?” I said to Edna, who hadn’t moved and who didn’t really seem to care if she ever moved anymore ever.

  “No. But I can’t say it matters, because it isn’t a motel and it isn’t a restaurant.”

  “It’s a gold mine,” I said, staring at the gold mine, which, I knew now, was a greater distance from us than it seemed, though it seemed huge and near, up against the cold sky. I thought there should’ve been a wall around it with guards instead of just lights and no fence. It seemed as if anyone could go in and take what they wanted, just the way I had gone up to that woman’s trailer and used the telephone, though that obviously wasn’t true.

  Edna began to laugh then. Not the mean laugh I didn’t like, but a laugh that had something caring behind it, a full laugh that enjoyed a joke, a laugh she was laughing the first time I laid eyes on her, in Missoula in the East Gate Bar in 1979, a laugh we used to laugh together when Cheryl was still with her mother and I was working steady at the track and not stealing cars or passing bogus checks to merchants. A better time all around. And for some reason it made me laugh just hearing her, and we both stood there behind the cab in the dark, laughing at the gold mine in the desert, me with my arm around her and Cheryl out rustling up Little Duke and the cabdriver smoking in the cab and our stolen Mercedes-Benz, which I’d had such hopes for in Florida, stuck up to its axle in sand, where I’d never get to see it again.

  “I always wondered what a gold mine would look like when I saw it,” Edna said, still laughing, wiping a tear from her eye.

  “Me too,” I said. “I was always curious about it.”

  “We’re a couple of fools, aren’t we, Earl?” she said, unable to quit laughing completely. “We’re two of a kind.”

  “It might be a good sign, though,” I said.

  “How could it be? It’s not our gold mine. There aren’t any drive-up windows.” She was still laughing.

  “We’ve seen it,” I said, pointing. “That’s it right there. It may mean we’re getting closer. Some people never see it at all.”

  “In a pig’s eye, Earl,” she said. “You and me see it in a pig’s eye.”

  And she turned and got in the cab to go.

  The cabdriver didn’t ask anything about our car or where it was, to mean he’d noticed something queer. All of which made me feel like we had made a clean break from the car and couldn’t be connected with it until it was too late, if ever. The driver told us a lot about Rock Springs while he drove, that because of the gold mine a lot of people had moved there in just six months, people from all over, including New York, and that most of them lived out in the trailers. Prostitutes from New York City, who he called “B-girls,” had come into town, he said, on the prosperity tide, and Cadillacs with New York plates cruised the little streets every night, full of Negroes with big hats who ran the women. He told us that everybody who got in his cab now wanted to know where the women were, and when he got our call he almost didn’t come because some of the trailers were brothels operated by the mine for engineers and computer people away from home. He said he got tired of running back and forth out there just for vile business. He said that 60 Minutes had even done a program about Rock Springs and that a blowup had resulted in Cheyenne, though nothing could be done unless the boom left town. “It’s prosperity’s fruit,” the driver said. “I’d rather be poor, which is lucky for me.”

  He said all the motels were sky-high, but since we were a family he could show us a nice one that was affordable. But I told him we wanted a first-rate place where they took animals, and the money didn’t matter because we had had a hard day and wanted to finish on a high note. I also knew that it was in the little nowhere places that the police look for you and find you. People I’d known were always being arrested in cheap hotels and tourist courts with names you’d never heard of before. Never in Holiday Inns or TraveLodges.

  I asked him to drive us to the middle of town and back out again so Cheryl could see the train station, and while we were there I saw a pink Cadillac with New York plates and a TV aerial being driven slowly by a Negro in a big hat down a narrow street where there were just bars and a Chinese restaurant. It was an odd sight, nothing you could ever expect.

  “There’s your pure criminal element,” the cabdriver said and seemed sad. “I’m sorry for people like you to see a thing like that. We’ve got a nice town here, but there’re some that want to ruin it for everybody. There used to be a way to deal with trash and criminals, but those days are gone forever.”

  “You said it,” Edna said.

  “You shouldn’t let it get you down,” I said to him. “There’s more of you than them. And there always will be. You’re the best advertisement this town has. I know Cheryl will remember you and not that man, won’t you, honey?” But Cheryl was asleep by then, holding Little Duke in her arms on the taxi seat.

  The driver took us to the Ramada Inn on the interstate, not far from where we’d broken down. I had a small pain of regret as we drove under the Ramada awning that we hadn’t driven up in a cranberry-colored Mercedes but instead in a beat-up old Chrysler taxi driven by an old man full of complaints. Though I knew it was for the best. We were better off without that car; better, really, in any other car but that one, where the signs had turned bad.

  I registered under another name and paid for the room in cash so there wouldn’t be any questions. On the line where it said “Representing” I wrote “Ophthalmologist” and put “M.D.” after the name. It had a nice look to it, even though it wasn’t my name.

  When we got to the room, which was in the back where I’d asked for it, I put Cheryl on one of the beds and Little Duke beside her so they’d sleep. She’d missed dinner, but it only meant she’d be hungry in the morning, when she could have anything she wanted. A few missed meals don’t make a kid bad. I’d missed a lot of them myself and haven’t turned out completely bad.

  “Let’s have some fried chicken,” I said to Edna when she came out of the bathroom. “They have good fried chicken at Ramadas, and I noticed the buffet was still up. Cheryl can stay right here, where it’s safe, till we’re
back.”

  “I guess I’m not hungry anymore,” Edna said. She stood at the window staring out into the dark. I could see out the window past her some yellowish foggy glow in the sky. For a moment I thought it was the gold mine out in the distance lighting the night, though it was only the interstate.

  “We could order up,” I said. “Whatever you want. There’s a menu on the phone book. You could just have a salad.”

  “You go ahead,” she said. “I’ve lost my hungry spirit.” She sat on the bed beside Cheryl and Little Duke and looked at them in a sweet way and put her hand on Cheryl’s cheek just as if she’d had a fever. “Sweet little girl,” she said. “Everybody loves you.”

  “What do you want to do?” I said. “I’d like to eat. Maybe I’ll order up some chicken.”

  “Why don’t you do that?” she said. “It’s your favorite.” And she smiled at me from the bed.

  I sat on the other bed and dialed room service. I asked for chicken, garden salad, potato and a roll, plus a piece of hot apple pie and iced tea. I realized I hadn’t eaten all day. When I put down the phone I saw that Edna was watching me, not in a hateful way or a loving way, just in a way that seemed to say she didn’t understand something and was going to ask me about it.

  “When did watching me get so entertaining?” I said and smiled at her. I was trying to be friendly. I knew how tired she must be. It was after nine o’clock.

  “I was just thinking how much I hated being in a motel without a car that was mine to drive. Isn’t that funny? I started feeling like that last night when the purple car wasn’t mine. That purple car just gave me the willies, I guess, Earl.”

  “One of those cars outside is yours,” I said. “Just stand right there and pick it out.”

  “I know,” she said. “But that’s different, isn’t it?” She reached and got her blue Bailey hat, put it on her head, and set it way back like Dale Evans. She looked sweet. “I used to like to go to motels, you know,” she said. “There’s something secret about them and free—I was never paying, of course. But you felt safe from everything and free to do what you wanted because you’d made the decision to be there and paid that price, and all the rest was the good part. Fucking and everything, you know.” She smiled at me in a good-natured way.

  “Isn’t that the way this is?” I was sitting on the bed, watching her, not knowing what to expect her to say next.

  “I don’t guess it is, Earl,” she said and stared out the window. “I’m thirty-two and I’m going to have to give up on motels. I can’t keep that fantasy going anymore.”

  “Don’t you like this place?” I said and looked around at the room. I appreciated the modern paintings and the lowboy bureau and the big TV. It seemed like a plenty nice enough place to me, considering where we’d been.

  “No, I don’t,” Edna said with real conviction. “There’s no use in my getting mad at you about it. It isn’t your fault. You do the best you can for everybody. But every trip teaches you something. And I’ve learned I need to give up on motels before some bad thing happens to me. I’m sorry.”

  “What does that mean?” I said, because I really didn’t know what she had in mind to do, though I should’ve guessed.

  “I guess I’ll take that ticket you mentioned,” she said, and got up and faced the window. “Tomorrow’s soon enough. We haven’t got a car to take me anyhow.”

  “Well, that’s a fine thing,” I said, sitting on the bed, feeling like I was in shock. I wanted to say something to her, to argue with her, but I couldn’t think what to say that seemed right. I didn’t want to be mad at her, but it made me mad.

  “You’ve got a right to be mad at me, Earl,” she said, “but I don’t think you can really blame me.” She turned around and faced me and sat on the windowsill, her hands on her knees. Someone knocked on the door, and I just yelled for them to set the tray down and put it on the bill.

  “I guess I do blame you,” I said, and I was angry. I thought about how I could’ve disappeared into that trailer community and hadn’t, had come back to keep things going, had tried to take control of things for everybody when they looked bad.

  “Don’t. I wish you wouldn’t,” Edna said and smiled at me like she wanted me to hug her. “Anybody ought to have their choice in things if they can. Don’t you believe that, Earl? Here I am out here in the desert where I don’t know anything, in a stolen car, in a motel room under an assumed name, with no money of my own, a kid that’s not mine, and the law after me. And I have a choice to get out of all of it by getting on a bus. What would you do? I know exactly what you’d do.”

  “You think you do,” I said. But I didn’t want to get into an argument about it and tell her all I could’ve done and didn’t do. Because it wouldn’t have done any good. When you get to the point of arguing, you’re past the point of changing anybody’s mind, even though it’s supposed to be the other way, and maybe for some classes of people it is, just never mine.

  Edna smiled at me and came across the room and put her arms around me where I was sitting on the bed. Cheryl rolled over and looked at us and smiled, then closed her eyes, and the room was quiet. I was beginning to think of Rock Springs in a way I knew I would always think of it, a lowdown city full of crimes and whores and disappointments, a place where a woman left me, instead of a place where I got things on the straight track once and for all, a place I saw a gold mine.

  “Eat your chicken, Earl,” Edna said. “Then we can go to bed. I’m tired, but I’d like to make love to you anyway. None of this is a matter of not loving you, you know that.”

  Sometime late in the night, after Edna was asleep, I got up and walked outside into the parking lot. It could’ve been anytime because there was still the light from the interstate frosting the low sky and the big red Ramada sign humming motionlessly in the night and no light at all in the east to indicate it might be morning. The lot was full of cars all nosed in, a couple of them with suitcases strapped to their roofs and their trunks weighed down with belongings the people were taking someplace, to a new home or a vacation resort in the mountains. I had laid in bed a long time after Edna was asleep, watching the Atlanta Braves on television, trying to get my mind off how I’d feel when I saw that bus pull away the next day, and how I’d feel when I turned around and there stood Cheryl and Little Duke and no one to see about them but me alone, and that the first thing I had to do was get hold of some automobile and get the plates switched, then get them some breakfast and get us all on the road to Florida, all in the space of probably two hours, since that Mercedes would certainly look less hid in the daytime than the night, and word travels fast. I’ve always taken care of Cheryl myself as long as I’ve had her with me. None of the women ever did. Most of them didn’t even seem to like her, though they took care of me in a way so that I could take care of her. And I knew that once Edna left, all that was going to get harder. Though what I wanted most to do was not think about it just for a little while, try to let my mind go limp so it could be strong for the rest of what there was. I thought that the difference between a successful life and an unsuccessful one, between me at that moment and all the people who owned the cars that were nosed into their proper places in the lot, maybe between me and that woman out in the trailers by the gold mine, was how well you were able to put things like this out of your mind and not be bothered by them, and maybe, too, by how many troubles like this one you had to face in a lifetime. Through luck or design they had all faced fewer troubles, and by their own characters, they forgot them faster. And that’s what I wanted for me. Fewer troubles, fewer memories of trouble.

  I walked over to a car, a Pontiac with Ohio tags, one of the ones with bundles and suitcases strapped to the top and a lot more in the trunk, by the way it was riding. I looked inside the driver’s window. There were maps and paperback books and sunglasses and the little plastic holders for cans that hang on the window wells. And in the back there were kids’ toys and some pillows and a cat box with a cat sitting in it stari
ng up at me like I was the face of the moon. It all looked familiar to me, the very same things I would have in my car if I had a car. Nothing seemed surprising, nothing different. Though I had a funny sensation at that moment and turned and looked up at the windows along the back of the motel. All were dark except two. Mine and another one. And I wondered, because it seemed funny, what would you think a man was doing if you saw him in the middle of the night looking in the windows of cars in the parking lot of the Ramada Inn? Would you think he was trying to get his head cleared? Would you think he was trying to get ready for a day when trouble would come down on him? Would you think his girlfriend was leaving him? Would you think he had a daughter? Would you think he was anybody like you?

  MY MOTHER, IN MEMORY

  My mother’s name was Edna Akin, and she was born in 1910, in the far northwest corner of the state of Arkansas—Benton County—in a place whose actual location I am not sure of and never have been. Near Decatur or Centerton, or a town no longer a town. Just a rural place. That is near the Oklahoma line there, and in 1910 it was a rough country, with a frontier feel. It had only been ten years since robbers and outlaws were in the landscape. Bat Masterson was still alive and not long gone from Galina.

  I remark about this not because of its possible romance, or because I think it qualifies my mother’s life in any way I can relate now, but because it seems like such a long time ago and such a far-off and unknowable place. And yet my mother, whom I loved and knew quite well, links me to that foreignness, that other thing that was her life and that I really don’t know so much about and never did. This is one quality of our lives with our parents that is often overlooked and so, devalued. Parents link us—closeted as we are in our lives—to a thing we’re not but they are; a separate-ness, perhaps a mystery—so that even together we are alone.