by T. C. Boyle
He pulled over at a Citgo just off the highway.
“Doesn’t look too clean,” he said. “You want me to find something better?”
“Well, aren’t you the gentleman,” she said. She bounced up and down on the seat and grimaced. “I gotta pee. I don’t care what it looks like.”
She left her handbag on the seat and ran inside. He started to reach for his phone to check messages, then remembered. A shadow fell across the interior of the van and he glanced up to see the beginnings of a thunderhead building in the distant sky. His gaze drifted around the car and fell on the handbag on the seat next to him, where a thick envelope protruded from the open zipper. He glanced up at the Citgo and then slipped the envelope out of the purse and opened it. Inside were several fat bricks of cash, stacks of hundreds in rubber-banded piles two inches thick. He stared at the money, tried a quick calculation. Thousands? At least thousands. Tens of thousands?
The passenger door of the Caravan was yanked open, and Stacey plopped down in the seat and snatched her handbag out of his hands.
“Mind your own,” she said. A note of fear had crept into her voice.
“How much money is that?” he said.
She hesitated a moment, then turned and looked at him. “Seventy thousand,” she said. “It took me eight years.”
She held his gaze for a long moment, then pulled at the rearview mirror and leaned forward to apply her orange lipstick. Her hand shook.
“We going?” she said.
“You’re scaring the shit out of me, Stacey,” he said. He started the van.
“I’m scaring the shit out of myself too,” she said.
As he merged back onto the highway she told him how she did it.
“When the patients pay cash, that’s easy,” she said. “But other times you can record it as a no-charge, or you can give them a discount and pocket the difference. You have to be creative. Not every case is the same.”
“And Wainwright had no idea?” he said.
“Pfftt,” she said. “He doesn’t know his asshole from his elbow.” She paused, squinted at the road. “Although now that I’m gone,” she said thoughtfully, “he’ll probably catch on.”
Theo felt a coolness run through his veins, and he processed the implications of the current situation. So far today, he’d initiated (though admittedly had not yet executed) an unapproved expenditure of five thousand dollars from the joint checking account he shared with Sherrill; he’d very likely lost his biggest commission of the month, if not his entire job, by blowing off the sales call with Kelso; and he’d committed tawdry and outrageously athletic adultery with a woman half his age. And now, it seemed, he’d also aided and abetted a confessed embezzler. He watched the road. He felt in his pocket again for his phone. He gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white.
“You’re wanted,” he said.
She rolled her eyes. “Well, how nice of you to say, Theo,” she said. “I guess there’s a first time for everything.”
He adjusted the rearview mirror and drove on.
It was nearly four-thirty. The heat had been dialed back a smidge and Theo watched the thunderheads build in earnest now to the west, the lightning lacing like fingers through the distant clouds. It was hard to tell if they’d drive into the storm or not, but he appreciated the gray cast the sky had taken on and the damp air, merely tepid now, rushing into the Caravan.
He wondered about Sherrill’s voicemails, unchecked on the ruined phone, which was probably still sitting on the bottom of the waste pail at the Ramada Inn, steeped in urine. It wasn’t like Sherrill to leave voicemails. She was more of a texter. A vague feeling of nausea crept into his abdomen, and he felt the first twinge of regret for the appletinis, for the affair, for the entire afternoon. A fat lovebug hit the windshield and burst, leaving a creamy blob of entrails just at eye level. He turned on the windshield washer, but it was out of fluid, so the wipers simply smeared the bug into an opaque rainbow of whites and yellows, and he had to slouch in his seat in order to see below it. The movement strained his back, and he straightened out and then hunched over the steering wheel. He glanced sidelong at Stacey and tried to muster a bit of the arousal that had so consumed him just a couple of hours ago, but got nothing. Ah, God! Had he ruined everything? He had a vision of himself behaving this way for the rest of his days: a bent, beaten old man, neutered by remorse, driving toward disaster, unable to see.
“No,” Stacey said. He looked over at her. “No, no, no, no, no.” Her eyes were wide and her gaze was fixed, frightened, on the wing mirror outside her window. He looked in the rearview and saw the blue flashing lights, and his stomach clenched. He glanced at the speedometer and saw he’d inched above eighty.
“Shit,” he said. “Holy hell.”
“Don’t stop, Theo,” she said.
He took his foot off the accelerator and scanned the road’s shoulder for a place to pull over.
“Don’t stop,” she said again. Her voice was panicked, desperate.
“I have to stop,” he said.
“No, you don’t,” she said. “Keep going.” She reached over and put her hand on the steering wheel, trying to keep the Caravan straight in the lane.
“I have to stop. Are you crazy? It’s a cop! I have to stop.”
She was wiggling over the center console now, trying to put her own foot on the accelerator, trying to keep the steering wheel straight. Her weight tipped over the console and she fell into him; the Caravan swerved crazily into the next lane. He shoved her roughly back into her own seat and started to pull to the side of the road. A quarter-mile ahead, an exit ramp yawned down a narrow slope. Stacey clutched at his arm and started to cry, and when he looked at her, her eyes wide and terrified, her lips pulled back in a grimace so fraught it was almost beautiful, something shifted. He’d never seen anyone so alive.
“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Oh, Jesus, help me now.”
He pulled the Caravan back into the lane, steadied the wheel, and stomped on the accelerator. He pushed it up to ninety, then bulleted down the exit ramp. The cop evidently had a delayed reaction to the pursuit, and Theo imagined him startled, fumbling with the radio, calling for help. But then he obviously floored it and Theo watched in the rearview as the gap dwindled and the police car followed them down the ramp. The light was red at the bottom, and a solid line of traffic rushed across the road perpendicular to the exit. He glanced at the speedometer. They were approaching the intersection and still doing fifty. In the rearview, the reflection of the cop’s blue lights ricocheted against the black wall of thunderheads.
“Do it,” Stacey said.
At the crossroads, he took his foot off the accelerator for only the barest instant, tapping the brakes just long enough to dodge a semi, and then another. The two trucks closed behind the Caravan like curtains and the truck drivers immediately slowed from the shock of the near miss, effectively blocking both the cop’s trajectory and his vision for a good ten seconds, at least. And then—my God! They were still alive, and Theo was piloting the shaking, rattling Caravan straight back up the next ramp to reenter the interstate. He was Burt stinking Reynolds now, and he let out a yelp when he realized they were going to make it. In a Caravan! He pounded the accelerator and pulled straight up the ramp, reentering the same stretch of highway they’d just exited and leaving the dumb cop in the distance sniffing around the exit ramp like a geriatric bloodhound.
He accelerated to a sensible sixty and then hung there, panting. He edged into a clump of traffic, alongside a silver Toyota minivan, and they hawked the rearview, silent and sober, but the cop was gone.
Stacey clapped her hands, gleeful.
“You did it!” she said. “You lost him!”
The adrenaline drained as quickly as it had arrived. Theo felt like he was going to be sick. The first fat drops of rain spattered the windshield.
“He’s going to have every cop in Lakeland looking for my tag,” he said.
She laughed and
reached down for her handbag, and then she pulled out the Caravan’s license tag. “You mean this old thing?” she said.
They pulled off at the next exit, and she sat in the van in the pouring rain while he stole a license tag off a Honda Odyssey parked at a Waffle House. They moved to park behind a BP, where he bolted the stolen tag onto the Caravan. For once, he was glad it was a Caravan, a million others just like it between here and Lakeland. Then he climbed into the van, wiped the water off his face with an old paper towel he found in the back seat, and got back on the road. With the windows up in the rain, the inside of the van was steamy and dank. He put the vents on full blast. They gasped hot air into the front seat. Stacey clutched her handbag to her chest and held his hand while he drove. Theo felt her trembling slow, then stop.
In Lakeland, they exited the interstate and headed north on a county road slick with rain, the steam rising like ghosts in the distance.
The Corvair wasn’t at the auction. It was parked in a chain-link yard behind a garage two blocks away. THE KAR KORRAL, the sign over the garage said, and the man inside explained: “This here is direct sales. These cars won’t sell at auction,” he said. He was terribly thin, cancer-thin, with sunken eyes and yellowed fingers. He sucked on a cigarette. His name, Rick, was stitched above his pocket. “They’re not competitive enough,” he said. “Auction is for the cars everybody wants. Not like these here.”
He gestured to the lot, and Theo approached the fence. The rain had stopped and the sun was back, brutal, heating the puddles into vapor. Stacey followed him to the yard, where not one but two Corvairs sat sweltering among a crowd of decrepit, rust-eaten Mustangs and Camaros. Rick unlocked the gate and they walked into the yard. Theo pulled the crumpled ad out of his pocket and showed it to Rick.
“Right here,” Rick said. He led them to one of the cars. It was a 1963 Corvair, blue, and it was one of the most depressing things Theo had ever seen. It was a convertible, and the ragtop was tattered beyond repair. The interior was a catastrophe—a cheap velour redo now dirty and damp-looking, with burnt orange foam bulging out from between ripped seams. The dashboard was cracked, the floorboards were rusted, and a hefty dent across two quarter panels kept the passenger door from even opening. The whole car smelled like cat.
“Oh, gawd,” Stacey said. “I don’t know, Theo. This is it?”
“No,” Theo said. “That’s not the one.” He turned to the white Corvair behind him. “This one here.”
“That’s a good ’un,” Rick said. “Better car, all around. After the redesign, you know. This here ’66 is a sweet little car.” Theo nodded. Indeed it was. Neat as a pin, a clean dry hardtop with a beautiful creamy finish and a red interior. It was the car from the photo. It was even better in person. Stacey opened the passenger door and climbed in, smiled up at him.
Theo stared at the ad in his hand, which was written, he now saw, as ambiguously as possible. “Corvair!” it said. “Two models. $5,000. Call for details.”
“So which one is five thousand dollars?” he asked, feeling his heart sink, already knowing the answer.
Rick laughed, a wet jagged chuckle. “The ragtop I can let you have for five,” he said. “This little coupe here is almost fully restored. She goes for nine.”
“Christ,” Theo said. He showed Rick the ad again. “This here is bait and switch.”
Rick gazed at him levelly. “You saying I don’t have a Corvair here for five thousand dollars?”
Stacey got out of the car.
“It’s for your daughter here?” Rick said. “Maybe we can negotiate a little bit. She looks pretty as a picture in that coupe.”
This was a lie, of course. Stacey was wet, bedraggled, and road-worn, and she looked worse than she had when she’d slid open the frosted glass window at Wainwright’s earlier this morning. All of it was a lie, and Theo was sick and disgusted, suddenly, with everything. He didn’t have nine thousand dollars to spend on the white Corvair. He didn’t even have five thousand for the blue one, come to think of it; he’d debited ninety-five dollars for the room at the Ramada and seventy-nine dollars for chicken fingers and appletinis at TGI Friday. He’d have to do some negotiating just to win the ’63, which was a wanked-out proposition to begin with, the damn thing not even drivable, no way to get it home without a tow. A lemon. A ’63—the year before the redesign. The idiot year. What a bust. What a goddamn bust.
He turned and strode back to the Caravan.
“You want to take my card, think it over?” Rick said, but Theo didn’t turn around. “I’m staying open late. I’m here till six, you change your mind,” Rick called. Theo barely waited for Stacey to get back into the van before he lurched into reverse and turned around in the gravel parking lot. He pulled out onto the highway again, drove north into downtown Lakeland, with no particular destination in mind.
“I’m sorry, Theo,” she said, after a minute. She bit her lip. “You want me to help you make up the difference?”
He shook his head.
“I’m not buying a car with stolen money,” he said. He stopped at a red light and looked at her hard. “Now where the hell do I let you out?”
She turned away, blinking. He’d stung her. He didn’t care. Between the appletinis and the heat and the leftover adrenaline, he was beginning to think he might really be sick, so when he saw a Books-a-Million hulking on the corner of a busy intersection, he pulled in.
“We gotta cool off,” he said.
They walked into the bookstore, but the café area was too crowded, so they moved to the back of the store and sat on low benches in the children’s department. A young father was parked on one of the benches across from them, supervising three tiny kids, all outfitted in some sort of denim camouflage. He was reading the little girl a book, and his voice had the reading monotone of a second grader. He stopped when the two little boys started wrestling over an oversized book shaped like a truck.
“Put that book back,” the man said. “And don’t get you no more.” He looked at Theo and Stacey and grinned. Theo took Stacey’s elbow and scooted her further down the bench.
“Listen, I’ve got to go home,” he said. “I’ve got a three-hour drive.”
Stacey clutched her handbag to her chest and watched the little boys, who had turned their attention to a wooden train set spread out on a low table.
“How am I going to get to Tampa?” she said.
He snorted. “You’re filthy rich,” he said. “I think you’ll figure it out.”
She started to cry, a silent ugly weeping that made him feel small and embarrassed. The camouflaged family looked at them. The young father raised his eyebrows at Theo.
“I’m scared, Theo,” Stacey said. “What’s going to happen to me?”
He patted her damp shoulder and smiled grimly at the young father. Then he took a deep breath.
“I’ll get you a coffee, OK?” he said. “Just sit tight.”
He left her hunched over her purse on the little wooden bench. He walked toward the café, and his pace quickened as he moved, until he walked out the front door of the bookstore and over to the Caravan. He started the engine, rolled down the windows, and headed for I-4. Northbound.
The traffic on the interstate was heavy, but he’d driven through worse. He glanced at his watch. Five-thirty. The afternoon’s thunderstorm was just a lingering dampness now, and he knew that by the time he approached Orlando the usual rush hour should have dissipated. He’d probably be home before nine.
He hunkered down behind a U.S. Mail semi, steadied his speed at fifty-five, and tried to relax. He pushed the play button of the CD player. And before Susan Boyle had even reached the chorus of “Wild Horses,” he was back down the exit ramp, retracing his route and pulling into the still-damp parking lot of the Books-a-Million, where she stood like a statue on a parking island, clutching the handbag.
“I’m sorry,” he said to her. He leaned over the seat and opened the passenger door. “I panicked.”
“It’s OK
,” she said. “I’m panicking all the time.”
They struck a deal. A thirty-five-mile ride to Tampa for $3,174.00. They left Books-a-Million and made it back to the Kar Korral just as Rick was locking up the chain-link fence. He gave them a salute and ushered them into his sales office. They signed over the Caravan for a thousand bucks and Stacey fished the tag out of her purse. Rick raised an eyebrow but offered no comment. When they pulled out of the parking lot in the white Corvair, Theo felt as though he’d been reborn. The afternoon sky was a deeper blue. The trees were a crisper green. In the seat next to him, Stacey was radiant, and he felt blood rushing everywhere in his body. Everywhere.
“You are so sexy in this car,” he said.
She smiled. “You’re full of shit,” she said. “Doesn’t this thing go any faster?”
He drove her south to Tampa, and the sun drifted slowly lower until the road was dim, and then dusk. She was quiet, and he rested his hand on her thigh for a little while and then returned it to the steering wheel. In Tampa, he followed her directions and pulled up in front of a neat little cinderblock motel on the south side of the city.
“My mother is staying here,” she said. “But we’re leaving tonight. She’s got a car. We’re going back to Texas, where we’re from.” She sighed, then smiled. “Some girls run away with Prince Charming,” she said. “I’m running away with my momma.”
“You going to be OK?” Theo said. He touched her face.
“Hell, yes,” she said. “Peachy.”
She got out of the Corvair and leaned in to look at him through the passenger window.
“The car is beautiful,” she said. “And you’re a good man, Theo.”
He stared at her and had no idea what to say. She laughed.
“Now what?” he said.
“Here’s where you go home, Theo. And here’s where I just walk away,” she said.
“Walk away?”
“Yes,” she said. “Walk. Away.” And she did. He watched her funny gait, short-stepping on the high heels, the way her backside protruded and her skirt stretched tighter than could possibly be comfortable as she walked up to one of the motel rooms and knocked on the door. A tiny woman answered the door and Stacey turned around, waved to him, and then disappeared into the room.
