by John Crowley
"She couldn't take it."
"That wasn't it. She fell in love. A guy lots younger. And she left. In a day. The one thing he wanted most and was gladdest he had. She never came back; she never looked back."
"And when was this?"
"I was ten. So it was me and my younger brother and him. I loved the guy too, but I couldn't stand him. I was fairly messed up by him, about a lot of things. By her too. You can imagine."
He wondered if he could. He didn't know that much about the world, this one, and knew he ought to keep his eyes and ears open.
"Then."
"When I was eighteen I left. Didn't say why or where. One day they woke up and no me."
"Where'd you go?"
"West. It was 1967. It was easy to get lost. People were nice. Even I could get along. I was never coming back."
"You live there with him now."
"Yeah. Well. He's pretty sick. He drank a lot there, after his women went. Still does. I don't know if that did it, but anyway. He'd fought with my brother by then and he left—I never see him, which hurts. I don't know, maybe he's still mad at me too. So, big empty house. The deal was I'd get my own room, my own entrance, no questions.” She seemed to sense this left a lot unexplained. “I work when I want, not when I don't want. I cook, he cleans. Sometimes. It's a good deal."
She said the last sentence as though it were a different one, and maybe because she knew it showed, she rubbed her forefinger rapidly under her nose, throw off pursuit. Pierce thought he already knew more of her than he did of most his acquaintanceship, and wondered at it.
"So you,” she said. “How about you?"
He opened his mouth to say Well, but just then she saw the tower made of zigzag girders, surmounted by a ‘56 Impala, that marked the auto auction grounds; she turned in, and business began.
The cars were lined up in groups large and small, in categories probably, though none Pierce perceived, by seller maybe or the cars’ provenance. In the center of the field was a sort of shed with wide doors at either end, through which the cars were driven, to be bid upon. Roo saw people she knew loitering there, and walked away, leaving Pierce with an injunction to look around, see what he liked.
He looked around, though taking no steps, at the day and the earth. The plants that flourish in waste places, like slum children, have their spring too and their springing. The little one that smells, astonishingly, like pineapple when it's stepped on. American earth. It seemed to him that he had actually not been away: not that he hadn't traveled, but as though he had undertaken and undergone a long journey without moving very far, or at all. Like an old melodrama where the fleeing heroine crosses terrible terrains by running a treadmill, staying center stage while the scenery unrolls beside her.
So let's see. He began to review the cars he stood beside, which were not American as it happened, small Foxes and Beetles. He opened their doors, sat in them and smelled their insides, looked out their windows. He happened upon the hood release of a brown Rabbit, and with a dim memory of disaster he pulled it, and then went to look at the engine, which sat mum in its well.
"There's a nice ‘71 Python over there,” she said, suddenly beside him. “Nice clean car."
"I was thinking of something smaller. I like this."
"A Rabbit? You do stick shift?"
"I've had instruction.” In Rose Ryder's Asp convertible. Don't worry, she'd said. After a while it becomes automatic. Where was it now, the red Asp, shed probably like the resurrecting snake's skin, left by the side of the road. Kelley Corvino had been speaking for a moment before he heard. “What?"
"I said I don't know a lot about foreign cars, to tell you the truth."
"Front wheel drive,” said Pierce. “Good for winter driving.” Where had he heard that?
"Like a Cadillac,” she said. “You do a lot of winter driving?"
He was about to let the hood fall when she stopped him. “Something you should know,” she said. “This car's probably been in an accident."
"How do you know?"
"It's been repainted."
"You can tell that?"
"It's kind of obvious. And see?” She pointed down to a place on the frame where the warm brown color (what had initially drawn his eye, in fact) feathered away on the body. “Spray,” she said. “Factory color doesn't look like that."
"Oh."
"Might be nothing. But it might have been rolled. You don't want a car that's been rolled."
"Huh."
"Never know what got shook up. Hey, Frank."
A passing male in a NABCO cap and windbreaker turned her way.
"You think this car's been rolled?” she asked.
Frank shrugged noncommittally, put his meaty hands on the fender, and gazed within, as Pierce and Roo did; he eyed the roof, and averred that it didn't look creased; shrugged again, and moved off.
"You want it?” Roo said.
At some time in this day he apparently would have to say yes. There was no test driving, she'd said; most people came here knowing what they wanted, and the cars were all certified as driveable. For a moment he wondered where he was, how he had come to be here; then he said: “What do you think it'll go for?"
"Well, I wouldn't go over, say, a thousand. If you want it."
"Okay,” he said. “Stop at a thousand.” He thought about his money, not his at all, and how little there would be now for anything else, and for the only time that day his heart contracted in anxiety. He followed Roo back to the shed, to sit in the bleachers while she bid. One by one the cars proceeded through the space and were bought or rejected; some were greeted with murmurs of appreciation or a scattering of mocking laughter, but Pierce couldn't see why; not because of their ludicrous excess of color or tail fin. At length the little Rabbit was brought in, and in moments she'd approached his limit, and he felt his heartbeat. Eight hundred and fifty, and silence; the light stroke of the hammer.
"Good deal,” she said, filling out the papers. “Lucky."
She got the keys, and he held out his hand for them.
"No you got to drive the Firebird,” she said. “This one's unregistered. You can't drive an unregistered car, no plates, no sticker, but I can.” She bent close to him, eyebrows lifted, the way a schoolmarm listens for the small voice of a kindergartner. “Okay?"
"Yes,” he said. “Sure, of course. Makes sense."
He saw to it that she left the parking lot first, sure that he would never find his way back the way they'd come, and embarrassed to ask. It hadn't been more than a couple of turns, left or maybe right.
Evening, and the chartreuse sky darkening; the gray road striped with yellow. Following her, going where she in the little brown car went. Only long after did she confess to him that that was in fact the first time she'd ever bought a car for anybody in that way at that auction, though indeed she did have a license and had gone once, twice, with her father in former years.
Why did you then, that day?
Well? Why'd you trust me to?
Why had he? He would claim it to be a part of what he regarded as his natural optimism, a reliance that things would work out okay, probably, the odds anyway well in your favor; his sunny disposition, or trustfulness. And she said—because she knew by then—that it wasn't so, that when he walked off the end of the dock that way it was his own kind of nihilism, daring the world to get him, almost willing it to: she'd been clocking instances for years, she said.
But anyway the Rabbit had hummed along for years too by then, skipping amid all the Foxes and Bobcats and Lynxes and Rams, with him and then with him and her safe within, until the day the front seat fell down right through the rusted floor when he got in to drive, the engine still willing even then, strong lapine heart unstilled.
2
Barney Corvino's dealership was not far down 6A from the Morpheus Arms, and Pierce sitting in his overcoat at a mossy picnic table that stood behind his wing could watch the traffic come and go, the old cars drive in there and the new
ones out. Too far for his sight to resolve a person, Roo say, at work giving test drives, if she did that. The sheltering sycamores over his head had been saplings when the place opened not long after Pierce was born, it was long-lived for a Tourist Cabins and now showing its age; when summer came the gold-green shadows that the old trees cast on his bed, and the leaves’ susurration through his open window, would keep him paying the rent there. That, and his continuing paralysis, or stasis, which had seemed so dreadful to him and now seemed not so dreadful: healing, maybe, he thought, or at least now not unfamiliar; just his own old self, a trait rather than a disease, a trait he could have inherited. My get up and go got up and went, Winnie used to say about herself.
Winnie had always taken his side in this, and of course he had always taken Winnie's side too, her role of chaste inaction and apartness. No surprise; it was she and Pierce alone, and then the rest of them all together. That she was only a sort of half mother to her brother Sam's kids, unwilling to take power fully among them, might account for the ironized way she would make gestures toward raising them, offering antique rules of behavior or morality in a voice that withdrew them at the same moment: Children never let your angry passions rise / Those little nails were never meant to tear each other's eyes. You didn't know whether she was siding with you or taking you to task. She had had no official power to act there or anywhere, and couldn't teach her son how to take that power either, or to accept it for himself, there or anywhere; she only taught him the wry jokes to make—the kind she made, apparently at herself and her ineffectuality but really at all who had been fooled into acting in the world. She applauded all his meager accomplishments, without questioning why they were so meager; when periodically he returned from that world of strife and action to her room upstairs beside her brother's, having failed in one attempt or another—predictably, comically, lovably, failed again—she'd say Oh well, resigning all other possibilities, at once sad and gay. Oh well.
That appeared to be a tallish blondish woman slamming with a great heave-to the door of a huge sedan in the dealership's parking lot. If he had a pair of binoculars he might be able to resolve the figure. Did she have a little dog on a leash? Why would that be? He bent forward, as though to bring himself a little closer to the scene, and at that moment felt a touch on his back, so that he leapt, startled.
"Hey,” said Roo. “How you doing?"
"Um. Good. Quite well. You guv me a start, as they say down where I come from."
She sat beside him, hands in the pockets of a sheepskin coat. “Yeah? Where's that?"
"Kentucky."
"You don't sound like a southerner. Or a hillbilly."
"Good. Are you not working today?"
She shrugged. “You?"
"Well, you know. I loaf for a living,” Pierce said.
She laughed. Her teeth were astonishingly crooked, a great gap in the middle, and others crowding the row like spectators at a streefight. They sat there in the last of the spring sun for a time, and talked on general topics, each ready at any moment to back away if an impasse was reached and politely take leave. But that didn't quite happen, and evening came, and they still sat. She learned that Pierce had taught college once upon a time, and did no more; that he'd set out to write a book, and had given it up; that he was in a dispute with his former landlord about a lease and that his belongings languished in the old place; that he was living at the Morpheus Arms on a grant from the Rasmussen Foundation that he hadn't quite earned, and was without a further plan. She passed no judgment on this career, even while making it plain that it seemed to her a waste of some uncommon resources.
"So? You've kicked around,” he retorted. “Never anything long. Right?"
"I worked as a lineman for a whole year,” she said. “In Idaho. I'll never forget the procedures. I could recite them now."
"You mean a telephone person? Shimmying up those poles?"
"Well, a cherry picker, actually, mostly. But yes. The hard hat. The tool belt. You know."
"So did that alter your social life? Being a hard hat?"
"Well. You know there's men—I don't think a big number—that have a thing about a woman in a tool belt. Don't ask me why."
"Really."
"When I say, ‘Don't ask me why,’ that doesn't mean I've got no idea."
"Aha. Yes.” He could see her, in fact, and didn't need an explanation: her narrow wide-set hips in creased jeans, brown arms, wristwatch, the heavy belt.
When it was too dark and too cold to sit at the table, they rose together, and almost as though they'd had a date to do so, they went (in the little chartreuse Bobcat she was driving that day) to the Sandbox, a cousin establishment to the Morpheus Arms, where she chose a dark corner far from the bar and the pool table. A hangout for the guys from the dealership just down the road, it appeared, and maybe others she might not want to run into, but still the place she chose to be; where Pierce (this was what he remembered on entering the dim sweet-sour-smelling place) had heard or seen Rose Ryder speak in tongues as a country western band played and brayed. Or he'd thought she had. It seemed certain to him now that she had not, which made less difference than he felt it ought to.
"I fell in with bad magicians,” he told Roo, when she wanted to know the story.
"Oh really."
"They claimed to have power over death. That if you believed in them you wouldn't die. You might look dead and rot in the grave but somehow you'd get up again alive and well when the time came."
"In Heaven."
"No. Not somewhere else. Here. Right here. In the Faraways, say; only the Faraways made better just for you. And then never die again."
"Sounds good."
"It was terrifying."
She studied him. “Are you afraid of death?"
"I don't know that I am. I mean it doesn't frighten me to think about it. Or name it anyway."
"But these people frightened you by talking about it."
"Yes.” He felt the dread or danger again; it was a beast that accompanied him, rousing now and then at a soul-noise it heard. And as it roused he knew also and certainly what he had not known before this iteration—that he would not ever understand the reasons for it, his dread, not if he lived to a hundred, and that in this unknowing lay the way he would at last be done with it: he would forget it, as the worst dream is forgotten, the awful force of its logic in dreamland finally canceled by its illogic in this land. Only the story of it left. “And you?” he said. “Are you?"
"I'm sort of afraid. More like tense, sometimes. It seems like it'll be a kind of test—you know, a big final. Everything points to it. You want to get it right."
"How would you do that?"
"Probably not a lot you can do then. At that moment. Especially if you like get hit by a truck. It would be the things you'd done all along."
"Like a final grade."
"But one you give yourself. I mean nobody's taking attendance. I don't think."
"And then?” Pierce asked.
"Then?"
"Afterward."
She turned her bottle's end against the napkin on which it rested, which caused the paper to fold neatly around the bottle in a rose shape: it was a habit he himself had. “Here's what I think. Well, think's too much to say. I feel like if there is some part of you—of me—that goes on after, then it has to somehow in life get up enough velocity to get off, right then. At that moment. To get away."
"Escape velocity,” Pierce said.
"And you get that by what you do in life. You build it up.” She drank. “That's all."
* * * *
Later she brought him back to the motel and stayed at the wheel, motor running, while he got out, which seemed to be a clear enough signal, but just as he gestured goodbye—So hey, okay—she offered to borrow a truck to carry away from the house in Littleville his belongings. Next day or whenever. He accepted. The larger furniture he thought could take its chances with the Winterhalters for a while; he wanted only to take away the life
he had led, in case they grew vindictive, held it all hostage, put new locks on the doors, forbade it to him. When she called on the appointed day to get directions, he asked her please not to actually come into the house if that was okay; he made sure to drive over first, and when the little panel truck appeared, rolling like a bear down the rutted driveway, he had already put into boxes and bags all the books, the papers, the clothes and household goods, unavailing regrets, mysteries, bonds, tools, greatcoats, galoshes, grammarye, medicines, shames, hooks and eyes. It had all shrunk or shriveled into a list of nouns, inanimate, abstract, but he was still knee-deep in it. So much, so much.
"I asked you to just wait."
She stood leaning in the jamb looking in. “Smells in here,” she said.
"I'll be ready in a second. I'll just toss this last stuff in. You don't need to help or."
She had picked an old Polaroid camera out of a box, chuckled over it. “Man,” she said, but he didn't respond. It went back in its box, with other less patent things, a fancy carved black picture frame, empty, an open bottle of green liqueur. Who keeps such stuff—?
"What in holy hell is that?” she said mildly, ready to be amused by the collapsing scenery of his past, as squalid and as interesting as anybody's, and at Pierce's discomfiture amid it.
"It's a mask."
"It's a horsie. No, a donkey."
"Yes."
"You're leaving it?"
"Not only that."
"It looks like some kid made it."
"Yes."
"Is that the book?” She meant the masses of paper he was stuffing in a padded bag, one in which Winnie in Florida had mailed him a birthday sweater. “So called?"
"Some of it."
When it was all out, he shut the little house's door, and then went back to shut it again when it opened behind him, tempting him to re-enter. The deathless daffodils were now almost out in the yard, braving the cold. On the crest of the pale lawns, up on the big house's verandah above, there appeared the two Winterhalters, the erect and the stooped, one's hand lifted as though to say Hello, or Halt.
