The Centaur

by John Updike

  “Practice this Wednesday as usual,” my father had called to them in parting. “Don’t drink any milkshakes or eat more than four hamburgers before you show up.” Everyone laughed, and even I smiled, though my father was a heaviness upon me. In all the events of the night that followed there was this weight and inertia about him that blocked and snagged at every turn my simple plan, which was to get him home, where he would pass out of my care.

  As we were walking up the hall from the concrete steps the West Alton coach Foley caught up with us, and the two men talked for what seemed an hour. The damp air around the pool had put their suits out of press, and they seemed in the dimness of the green hall two shepherds soaked in dew. “You’ve done a superhuman job with those boys,” my father told Foley. “If I was one-tenth the coach you are we would have given you a run for your money. I have a few naturals this year.”

  “George now, no crap,” Foley replied, a thick sandy man all courtesy and ginger. “You know as well as me there’s no coaching to it; let the tadpoles swim is all you can do. There’s a fish in every one of us, but you have to soak to get him out.”

  “That’s good,” my father said. “I never heard that before. Bud, how did you like my big man in the breast stroke?”

  “He should have had the two-twenty, too; I hope you burned his ass for letting up like that.”

  “He’s dumb, Bud. D-U-M-B. The poor devil has no more brains than I do and I hate to bawl him out.”

  My throat rasped in sheer pressure of impatience.

  “You’ve met my son, haven’t you, Bud? Peter, come over here and shake this man’s hand. This is the kind of man you should have had for a daddy.”

  “Why hell I know Peter,” Mr. Foley said, and there was something deeply agreeable about his handshake, gritty and warm and easy. “The whole county knows Caldwell’s boy.”

  In their twilit world of Y. M. C. A.s and recreational programs and athletic banquets, this sort of wildly congratulatory blarney passed for conversation; I minded it less in Mr. Foley than in my father, whose affectation of it always seemed to me embarrassed.

  My father was for all his talk at heart a man of silence. He walked through the events of that night in a mood that has become in my memory silence. Once outside, his mouth made a firm line and his heels gathered in the pavement with a kind of aloof greed. I wonder if any man ever enjoyed walking in the small ugly cities of the East as much as my father. Trenton, Bridgeport, Binghamton, Johnstown, Elmira, Altoona: these were the cities where his work as cable splicer for the telephone company had taken him in the years before and the years just after he married my mother, the years before my birth and Hoover’s Depression stalled him in the sticks. He feared Firetown and felt uneasy in Olinger but adored Alton; its asphalt and streetlights and tangent façades spoke to him of the great Middle Atlantic civilization, bounded by New Haven in the north and Hagerstown in the south and Wheeling in the west, which was his home in eternal space. To walk beside my father down Sixth Street was to hear the asphalt sing.

  I asked him how his X-ray had gone and in answer he asked me if I were hungry. It occurred to me that indeed I was; the popcorn and the Jordan Almonds had settled into a sour aftertaste. We stopped at the trolley-shaped diner beside the Acme’s parking lot. My father conducted himself in the city with a simplicity that was soothing. My mother made too much of a decision of everything, as if she were trying to express herself in a foreign language. Just so, in the country my father was confused in action and circuitous in thought. But here, in Alton at quarter after eight o’clock, he handled himself with the deftness, the expertness that is, after all, most of what we hope for from fathers: the door pushed open, the glare and stares calmly blinked down, the two stools located side by side, the menu knowingly plucked from its place between the napkin dispenser and the catsup bottle, the counterman addressed without stridence or equivocating, the sandwiches—his a Western egg, mine a toasted ham—consumed in manful silence. My father quietly sucked the three central fingers of his right hand and pinched his lower lip with a paper napkin. “First time I’ve felt like eating in weeks,” he said to me. In conclusion we ordered apple pie for me and coffee for him; the check was a stiff green tab cryptically nipped by a triangular punch. He paid it with one of two dollar bills left in the worn hip wallet that had curved through the years to fit his haunch. As we rose my father noncommitally slipped, with a practiced flick of his wart-freckled hand, two dimes beneath his empty cup. And as an afterthought he bought for 65¢ one of the diner’s ready-made Italian sandwiches. It was to be a present for my mother. There was a vulgar side to my mother which apparently enjoyed smelly slippery Italian sandwiches and to which my father had, I saw jealously, more access than I. He paid for the sandwich with his last dollar and said, “That cleans me out, kid. You and I are penniless orphans.” Swinging the little brown paper bag, he walked us to the car.

  The Buick was still alone, brooding on its shadow. Its nose was tipped up the slope, toward the unseen tracks. Menthol like a vaporized moon suffused the icy air. The factory wall was a sheer cliff mixed of brick and black glass. The panes of glass were now and then mysteriously relieved by a pane of cardboard or tin. The brick did not yield its true color to the streetlamp that lit the area but instead showed as a diminution of black, a withdrawn and deadly gray. This same light made the strange gravel here glitter. Compounded of coal chips and cinders, it made a loud and restless earth that never settled, crackling and shifting underfoot as if its destiny were to be perpetually raked. Silence encircled us. Not a window looking at us was lit, though deep in the factory a blue glint kept watch. My father and I could have been murdered in this place and until dawn no one would have known. Our bodies would lie in the puddles near the factory wall and our hands and hair would freeze solid into the ice.

  The car was slow to start in the cold. Unh-uh, unh-uh, the engine grunted, at first briskly and then more and more slowly, self-discouraged. “Jesus, don’t quit on me now,” my father breathed in a dancing stream of vapor. “Start one more time and tomorrow I’ll get your battery charged.”

  Unnh-uh, unnnnh-ah.

  My father switched off the ignition and we sat in the dark. He made a loose fist and blew into it. “See,” I said, “if you’d worn your gloves you’d have ’em now.”

  “You must be frozen to death,” was his answer. “One more time,” he said, and switched the ignition back on and depressed the starter button with his thumb. In the pause, the battery had gathered a little juice. It commenced hopefully.

  Ih-huh, Ih-huh, uh-uh, unnh-uh, unnhn-ah, uhhhh. We scraped the bottom of the battery.

  My father pulled the emergency brake a notch tighter, and said to me, “We’re in the soup. We’ll have to try a desperation measure. You get in behind the wheel, Peter, and I’ll get out and push. We have a little slope here but we’re pointed the wrong way. Put the car into reverse. When I shout, let the clutch out. Don’t ease it out, pop it out.”

  “Maybe we should get a garageman now, before they close,” I said. I was frightened of failing him.

  “Let’s give this a whirl,” he said. “You can do it.”

  He got out of the car and I slid over, accidentally sitting on my books and the paper bag containing the Italian sandwich for my mother. My father went to the front of the car and as he stooped to put his weight into it his grinning face burned yellow like a gnome’s. The light of the headlights cut across his face so sharply his forehead seemed all knobs and it was plain how often his nose had been broken when he played football at college thirty years ago. My stomach clenched coldly as I checked the position of the gear shift and ignition switch and choke. At a nod from my father I released the emergency brake. Only the ovoid of his imbecile blue cap showed above the hood as he pitched his weight into the car. It did move backwards. The crunching of the tires on the gravel lifted in pitch; grinding backwards we struck a little declivity that added a precious bit of momentum; the Buick’s inertia for a moment tug
ged to be free of itself. In a piercing sob my father shouted, “Now!” I popped out the clutch as I had been told to do. The car snapped to a stop jaggedly; but its motion was transferred through crusty knobs and clogged pivots to the engine, which, like a slapped baby, coughed. The motor gasped and shook the frame as its cylinders erratically exploded; I pushed in the choke halfway, trying not to smother it, and jiggled my foot on the accelerator: this was the mistake. Twitched out of tune, the motor missed one, two beats, and died.

  We were on the flat. Far away beyond the factory wall the door of a bar opened and a slat of light collapsed into the street.

  My father flashed to my door and I lurched over, sickly ashamed. My body burned all over; I needed to urinate. “Son of a bitch,” I said, to distract with my manliness my father from my failure.

  “You did O. K., kid,” he said, panting with excitement as he resumed his place behind the wheel. “This engine’s 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 inexplicable 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 stencilled with the words STEP UP, a man in a tuxedo and white muffler waited, periodically consulting the black-dialled 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 lifesize 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 snowbunny 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 forelock, 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: garritch.

  “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 call your own garage out in Olinger and have them look after it first thing in the morning.”