by Rod Serling
Now, normally most of Harvey’s stories can be overlooked—but not this one. The Harvey Hennicutt who buttonholed me out in front of his lot on that gray, sullen November day was a different man, and a different storyteller. Even the loud, garish sport coat that was his uniform and that screeched at you with its off-violet checks, the flamboyant hand-painted tie, the Stetson sitting on the back of his head could not disguise the grim, set, almost frightened look on Harvey’s face. And this was his story:
It was in September—a beautiful Indian summer late afternoon. A golden sun sparkled through the somewhat faded bunting that surrounded Harvey’s used-car emporium. It highlighted one particular banner that read: “Harvey Hennicutt’s Used Motors—Not a Dud in the Lot.” And there stood the cars—or rather, “lay” the cars. Because Harvey’s stock in trade was, and always had been, the antique lemon barely able to wheeze on and off his lot. Harvey was leaning against a car, cleaning his nails and watching a young couple examining a 1928 Buick at the far end of the lot. You had to see Harvey’s face to believe it on an occasion like this. He was a General of the Armies deciding the strategy of the attack. He was the psychiatrist analyzing the patient. Now he put on his most infectious smile—the one he saved up for the initial assault, and he carried it with him over to the antique Buick.
The young man looked up somewhat diffidently and nervously.
“We were just looking—”
“We want you to!” Harvey exclaimed. “We certainly want you to. Nobody rushes you around here. Nossir, young man, around here you can exhale, pause, check and re-check, think, peruse, contemplate, thumb over, wade through, and dip into.” He made an expansive gesture at the line of cars. “Be my guest, folks.”
The young man and woman blinked as the verbal wave hit them and bowled them over.
“We were...” the young man began hesitantly. “We were thinking of...you know...a nice four-door. Something under five hundred dollars and as late a model as we could go.”
Harvey closed his eyes, shook his head with a pained, desperate expression on his face. “You shock me, do you know that?” He then looked toward the girl. “Did you know that your husband shocked me just then?”
The girl’s mouth formed an O, and then plopped closed. Harvey tapped the fender of the old car.
“Do you know why you shocked me?” he asked. “Do you? I’ll tell you why you shocked me. Because you have succumbed to the propaganda of every cement-headed clod up and down this street. I said propaganda!” He pounded on the car and left a dent which he hurriedly covered-up with his elbow “They tell ya to go with the late models. Don’t they? They do, don’t they?”
Captivated, the young man and woman nodded in unison.
“You know why they tell ya to go with the late models?” Harvey continued. “Do you think they do that because they’re honest, law abiding, rigidly moral church-goers?” He shook his head and made a face like a minister suddenly observing a crap game in one of the pews. “Let me tell ya something, young man.” He waggled a finger in the young man’s face. “They push late models because that’s where the profit margin is! They’ll try to cram the post-fifty-fours down your gullet because they’d rather make a buck than a friend! They’d rather make a profit than a relationship!”
Again he pounded on the fender, forgetting himself—and this time there was the screech of metal as the fender separated from the body of the car. Harvey hid this disaster by deliberately standing in front of it.
“They would rather fill their wallets with cash, than their hearts with the fellowship of men to men,” Harvey continued.
The young man gulped and swallowed. “Well, all we’re looking for is good transportation, and we figured that the newer the car—”
Harvey threw up his hands, interrupting him. “Now, that’s where you’re wrong! That is precisely where you have gone amiss. That is the juncture where you have headed, off into a blind alley. You don’t want a new car. You don’t want one of these rink-dinks slapped together on an assembly line, covered with chintzy chrome, fin tails, idiotic names, and no more workmanship than you can stick into a thimble! I’ll tell ya what you’re lookin’ for.” Again he pointed a waggling finger into the young man’s face. “What you’re lookin’ for is the craftsmanship that comes with age! The dependability that comes with a proven performance! The dignity of traditional transportation.”
He drew back as if unveiling the Hope diamond, and pointed to the car behind him. “This is what you’re lookin’ for. This is a 1938 four-door Chevy—and this will get ya where ya want to go and get ya back.”
Harvey’s voice went on and on. The pitch took another four or five minutes. And while the whole thing sounded spontaneous it was all a practiced routine. He broke down his assault into three phases. First was the slam bang, “back-’em-up-against-a-wall” for the initial contact. The second phase was the one he entered into now—the quiet, rather beneficent, patient phase. Later came part three, the wrap-up. Right now, he smiled beatifically at the two young people, winked at the girl as if to say, “I’ve got a few little ones like you at home myself—and then, in a voice much gentler, pointed to the Chevy.
“Look. I don’t want to rush you kids. Rushing isn’t my business. Satisfaction happens to be my business. And I tell ya what ya do. Spend some time with that automobile. Look it over. Sit in it. Get the feel of it. Relish the luxury of it. Check and see how they built cars when cars were really built. Go ahead, my friend,” he continued, leading the young man over to the front door—and then hurriedly reaching out to grab the wife. “Sit in it. Climb right in there and sit to your heart’s content. What you really need is some candlelight and a good bottle of wine. Because this baby right here has dignity!”
Harvey heard the sound of a car pulling into the lot at the far end. He slammed the door on the young couple, raising a cloud of dust and an agonized groan of protesting metal, smiled at his victims through the cloudy glass, and then hurried over to the north end of ~ the lot where other commerce appeared to be waiting for him.
The “commerce” in this case was a model A Ford, driven by a silvery-haired old man with a face like Santa Claus and happy, guileless eyes. Harvey had a thing about happy, guileless eyes, because it usually meant a quick, and relatively painless, transaction. He walked up within a few feet of the model A. It chugged, whinnied, backfired twice, and finally came to an uneasy stop. The old man got out and smiled at Harvey.
“How do you do?”
Harvey ran a tongue around the inside of his mouth. “That depends, grandpa. If you’re here to park it—I’ll charge you nominal rates. If you’re here to sell it—you’ve gotta give me three and a half minutes to have my little laugh.” With this, he stepped back and surveyed the car, tilting his head in several different directions, walking around several times with an occasional look at the old man. Finally he stopped, heaved a deep sigh, put his hands behind his back, and closed his eyes for a moment.
“Well?” the old man asked quietly.
“I might give ya fifteen bucks. A junkyard’ll give ya twelve, and the Smithsonian might beat us both by a buck or two.”
The old man merely smiled a gentle smile. “It’s a wonderful old car and they made them better in the old days, I think...”
Harvey’s eyes rolled wildly, and he shook his head as if struggling for an almost superhuman patience. “Grandfather dear,” he said, holding out his hands in a gesture of resignation, “that is the old rhubarb. The saw. The turkey that everybody and his brother tries to peddle on the open market.” Then, mimicking fiercely: “‘Cars were built better in the old days.’ That, sir, is a fabrication beyond belief! Why, ten years ago they didn’t know how to build cars. It’s the new stuff that sells. It’s the new stuff that runs. It’s the new stuff that shows the genius of mind, muscle, and the assembly line!”
He very condescendingly, and with a kind of super-secretive air, leaned toward the old man. “I’ll tell ya what I’ll do—because I love
your face.” He made a motion encompassing the man’s whole figure. “Because you remind me of my own grandfather, rest his soul. A man of dignity right down through his twilight years till the day he died saving a boatload of capsized people on the East River!” His eyes went down reverently for a moment, and then up again very quickly.
“I’ll give ya twenty-five for it. I’ll probably have to dismantle it and sell it wheel by wheel, bolt by bolt, to whatever itinerant junk man comes around. But twenty-five I’ll give ya!”
“Twenty-five dollars?” The old man looked at the car with nostalgia. “I...I kind of need the money.” He turned to Harvey. “You couldn’t make it thirty?” Harvey stuck a cold cigar between his teeth and looked away. “You try me, old friend,” he said in a grim voice. “You try me right down to the bare nerve of my most inveterate patience!”
The old man kept looking at Harvey “Does that mean—” he tried to interject.
Harvey smiled down at him with the same assaulted patience. “That means that twenty-five is going, going, going... twenty-five is gone!” With a single motion, his wallet was out of his hip pocket, and from a cash-packed interior, he removed three bills and handed them to the old man. He turned him around and pointed toward the shack in the center of the lot.
“You walk into that little office there,” he ordered, ‘2nd bring your car registration papers with you.” He looked toward the model A. “Did I say ‘car’? I meant...”He wiggled his fingers as though searching for a word. “That vehicle! I’ll stretch a point as far as the next man! But there are limits, my charming old friend, there are definitely limits.” With this, he turned abruptly and walked away back to the young couple still seated in the 1938 Chevy.
He peered at them through the window, wiggled his fingers, smiled, winked, ran a tongue over his teeth, and then looked skyward with suppressed impatience. In the process, he propped a foot on the rear bumper of the car and it immediately clattered to the ground. Harvey lifted it back into place, secured it with a kick, and then turned to walk over to the shack.
When he went inside, the old man had just finished with the registration papers. He smiled at Harvey. “Signed, sealed, and delivered, Mr...” He looked out of the window toward the giant banner. “Mr. Hennicutt. Here are the keys.” He placed a set of ignition keys on the desk, and stared at them for a reflective moment. Then he looked at Harvey with a small, apologetic smile. “There is one other item that I ought to mention to you about the car.”
Harvey was examining the registration papers and barely looked up. “Oh—do, do,” he said.
“It’s haunted.”
Harvey looked up at him briefly and gave a kind of see-what-I-have-to-go-through smile. “Is that a fact?
“Oh, yes,” the old man said. “Indubitably. The car is haunted. It’s been haunted since the day it came off the assembly line, and every single one of its owners can attest to this fact.”
Harvey continued to smile as he walked around the desk and sat down in his chair. He winked, puckered up his mouth, ran his tongue around inside his cheeks. His voice was quite gentle. “I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me,” he asked, “how the car is haunted...or how I can get it unhaunted?”
“Oh, you’ll find out soon enough, “the old man said. He rose and started for the door. “And as for unhaunting it—you’ll have to sell the car. Good day to you, Mr. Hennicutt. It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.”
Harvey remained seated in his chair. “Oh, likewise. . .likewise,” he said.
The old man paused at the door and turned to him. “I think you’ll find that you may have actually gotten the best of the bargain at that.”
Harvey laced his fingers together behind his head. “My aged friend,” he announced in a hurt tone, ‘you do me the ultimate injustice. This little transaction, haunted or otherwise, is my charity case of the day. You dwell on that, will you? Just go ahead and dwell on it.”
The old man pursed his lips. “No, no, no, Mr. Hennicutt. You dwell on it—And I rather think you will.” Then he laughed, and walked out of the office.
Harvey looked down at the registration papers, then shoved them untidily into a basket on his desk, already running over in his mind how he could advertise the model A as one of the cars used on the “Untouchables”—or even, perhaps, plugging it as the actual car used by Eliot Ness in his capture of Baby Face Floyd. He’d shoot a couple of .22 holes in the rear fender and point these out as having taken place during the monumental chase. Three hundred bucks easy for a car with this history and tradition of law and order. His daydreaming was stopped by the sound of the young couple’s voices approaching from outside. He looked out the window to see them walking toward the shack. He immediately replaced his normal expression of avarice by his “third-phase, wrap-’em-up” look—a mixture of parental affection and rock-ribbed, almost painful, honesty It was this look he took outside with him.
The young man pointed to a 1934 Auburn. “How much is that one over there?” he inquired.
A pigeon, Harvey thought. An absolute, unadulterated, bonafide, A-number-one honest-to-God pigeon. That Auburn had been with Harvey for twelve years. It was the first automobile and the last one he’d ever lost money on. He cleared his throat. “You mean that collectors’ item? That’s—that’s—” Harvey’s eyes bugged. For some crazy reason, nothing more came out. He formed the words—packed them up like snowballs, and tried to throw them, but nothing came out!
After a moment something did come out. It was Harvey’s voice and they were his words, but he was not conscious of actually saying them. “It’s not for sale,” his voice said.
The young man exchanged a look with his wife and then pointed to the Chevy that they had been sitting in. “How about the Chevy?”
Again Harvey felt his mouth open and again he heard his voice. “That one’s not for sale either.”
“Not for sale? The young man looked at him strangely. “But that’s the one you were pushing.”
“That’s the one I was pushing,” Harvey’s voice said—and this time he knew he was saying it—“but I’m not pushing it any more. That’s a heap! A rum-dum. It hasn’t got any rings. It hasn’t got any plugs. It hasn’t got any points. It’s got a cracked block and it’ll eat up gasoline like it owned every oil well in the state of Texas.”
Harvey’s eyes looked glazed and he made a massive effort to close his mouth, but still the words came out of it. “The rubber’s gone and the chassis’s bent, and if I ever referred to it as a runabout, what I meant by that was that it’ll run about a mile and then stop. It’ll cost you double what you paid for it the minute you try to get it repaired—and you’ll be gettin’ it repaired every third Thursday of the month.”
The young couple stared at him incredulously and Harvey stared back. His tongue felt like a red-hot poker in his mouth. He stood there forlornly, wondering when this madness would pass from him. The young couple exchanged yet another look, and finally the young man stammered, “Well...well, what else have you got?”
Harvey’s words came out despite anything he could do to stop them. “I haven’t anything to show you that’s worth your while,” he announced. “Everything I’ve got on this lot should have been condemned years ago. I’ve got more lemons per square foot than the United Fruit Company. So, my advice to you kids would be to run along and head for a reputable place where you get what you pay for and be pleased with it, but don’t come around here, because I’ll rob you blind!”
The young man was about to retort when his wife gave him a sharp nudge with her elbow, motioned with her head, and the two of them walked away.
Harvey remained standing there, absolutely motionless. He found himself drawn to the model A that stood in plain, simple, almost exquisite, homeliness. Harvey blinked, shook himself like a big St. Bernard, and then deliberately, with conscious effort, walked back into the shack.
He sat inside for several hours, asking himself a hundred times just what the hell had happened.
It was as if some demon had entered him, fastened itself to his larynx and dictated his language. It was the screwiest odd-ball feeling he’d ever felt. But several hours later the feeling had worn off. What the hell, Harvey thought to himself, what the hell! They looked like the kind of kids who’d be back in the morning, screaming for their money.
But once again, for perhaps the twentieth time, he let his eyes rest on the model A. Haunted, the old man had said. Haunted! Goddamn you, Harvey Hennicutt, you will persist in dealing with kooks.
A few moments later, Harvey’s assistant entered the shack. This was a sallow post-teenager named Irving Proxmier. Irving was an undernourished version of his master, affecting the same sport coat, the hat tilted on the back of his head, and a hand painted tie that showed a hula dancer under a Hawaiian setting sun. But the imitation, of course, was noticeably inferior to the original. The effort showed itself, but only the effort.
“Sorry I’m late, boss,” Irving announced, putting a cigar in his teeth in exactly the same manner he’d watched Harvey do it. “I was checking the junkyard for those ‘34 Chevy wheel disks. I found two of them.” He looked behind him through the open door. “What’s the action?
Harvey blinked. “A little quiet this afternoon.” Then, shaking himself from his deep reflections, he pointed out the window. “That ‘35 Essex, IN. I want you to push that one.”
“Push it is right. It’ll never get anyplace under its own power.”
Harvey lit a cigar. “Knock it down to fifty-five bucks. Tell everybody it’s a museum piece. The last of its kind.” He rose from the chair, walked over to the open door and peered outside. He noticed then that the hood of the Essex was partially open. “Booby,” he announced grievously, you gotta close the hood, booby.” He turned to Irving. “How many times I gotta tell ya that? When ya can’t see the engine for the rust—you’ve gotta play a little hide-and-seek. You don’t go advertisin’ the fact that you’re tryin’ to job off a car that carried French soldiers to the first Battle of the Marne.”
