Locking the Fury’s doors was a very natural thing to do, all right. Except that, when I walked around the car the first time, I thought I had noticed the door-lock buttons had all been up.
I stepped slowly backward again, looking at the car. It sat there, still little more than a rusting hulk. I was not thinking any one thing specific—I am quite sure of that—except maybe it was as if it knew that I wanted to get inside and pull the release.
And because it didn’t want me to do that, it had locked its own doors?
That was really a very humorous idea. So humorous that I had another laugh (several people were glancing at me now, the way that folks always glance at people who laugh for no apparent reason when they are by themselves).
A big hand fell on my shoulder and turned me around. It was Darnell, with a dead stub of cigar stuck in the side of his mouth. The end of it was wet and pretty gross-looking. He was wearing small half-specs, and the eyes behind them were coldly speculative.
“What are you doing, kiddo?” he asked. “This ain’t your property.”
The guys with the camper cap were watching us avidly. One of them nudged the other and whispered something.
“It belongs to a friend of mine,” I said. “I brought it in with him. Maybe you remember me. I was the one with the large skin-tumour on the end of my nose and the—”
“I don’t give a shit if you wheeled it in on a skateboard,” he said. “It ain’t your property. Take your bad jokes and get lost, kid. Blow.”
My father was right—he was a wretch. And I would have been more than happy to blow; I could think of at least six thousand places I’d rather be on this second-to-last day of my summer vacation. Even the Black Hole of Calcutta would have been an improvement. Not a big one, maybe, yet an improvement, all the same. But the car bothered me. A lot of little things, all adding up to a big itch that needed to be scratched. Be his eyes, my father had said, and that sounded good. The problem was I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
“My name is Dennis Guilder,” I said “My dad used to do your books, didn’t he?”
He looked at me for a long time with no expression at all in his cold little pig eyes, and I was suddenly sure he was going to tell me he didn’t give a fuck who my father was, that I’d better blow and let these working men go about the business of fixing their cars so they could go on putting bread on their tables. Et cetera.
Then he smiled—but the smile didn’t touch his eyes at all. “You’re Kenny Guilder’s boy?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
He patted the hood of Arnie’s car with one pale, fat hand—there were two rings on it, and one of them looked like a real diamond. Still, what does a kid like me know?
“I guess you’re straight enough, then. If you’re Kenny’s kid.” There was a second when I thought he was going to ask for some identification.
The two guys next to us had gone back to work on their camper, apparently having decided nothing interesting was going to transpire.
“Come on into the office and let’s have a talk,” he said, then turned away and moved across the floor without even a glance backward. That I would comply was taken for granted. He moved like a ship under full sail, his white shirt billowing, the girth of his hips and backside amazing, improbable. Very fat people always affect me that way, with a feeling of distinct improbability, as if I were looking at a very good optical illusion—but then, I come from a long line of skinny people. For my family I’m a heavyweight.
He paused here and there on his way back to his office, which had a glass wall looking out onto the garage. Darnell reminded me a little bit of Moloch, the god we read about in my Origins of Literature class—he was the one who was supposed to be able to see everywhere with his one red eye. Darnell bawled at one guy to get the hose on his exhaust before he threw him out; yelled something to another guy about how “Nicky’s back was acting up on him again” (this inspired a fuming, ferocious burst of laughter from both of them); hollered at another guy to pick up those fucking Pepsi-Cola cans, was he born in a dump? Apparently Will Darnell didn’t know anything about what my mother always called “a normal tone of voice”.
After a moment’s hesitation, I followed him. Curiosity killed the cat, I suppose.
His office was done in Early American Carburettor—it was every scuzzy garage office from coast to coast in a country that runs on rubber and amber gold. There was a greasy calendar with a pin-up of a blond goddess in short-shorts and an open blouse climbing over a fence in the country. There were unreadable plaques from half a dozen companies which sold auto parts. Stacks of ledgers. An ancient adding machine. There was a photograph, God save us, of Will Darnell wearing a Shriner’s fez and mounted on a miniature motorcycle that looked about to collapse under his bulk. And there was the smell of long-departed cigars and sweat.
Darnell sat down in a swivel chair with wooden arms. The cushion wheezed beneath him. It sounded tired but resigned. He leaned back. He took a match from the hollow head of a ceramic Negro jockey. He struck it on a strip of sandpaper that ran along one edge of his desk and fired up the wet stub of cigar. He coughed long and hard, his big, loose chest heaving up and down. Directly behind him, tacked to the wall, was a picture of Garfield the Cat. “Want a trip to Loose-Tooth City?” Garfield was enquiring over one cocked paw. It seemed to sum up Will Darnell, Wretch in Residence, perfectly.
“Want a Pepsi, kid?”
“No, thank you,” I said, and sat down in the straight chair opposite him.
He looked at me—that cold look of appraisal again and then nodded. “How’s your dad, Dennis? His ticker still okay?”
“He’s fine. When I told him Arnie had his car here, he remembered you right off. He says Bill Upshaw’s doing your figures now.”
“Yeah. Good man. Good man. Not as good as your dad, but good.”
I nodded. A silence fell between us, and I began to feel uneasy. Will Darnell didn’t look uneasy; he didn’t look anything at all. That cold look of appraisal never changed.
“Did your buddy send you to find out if Repperton was really gone?” he asked me, so suddenly that I jumped.
“No,” I said. “Not at all.”
“Well, you tell him he is,” Darnell went on, ignoring what I’d just said. “Little wiseass. I tell em when they run their junk in here: get along or get out. He was working for me, doing a little of this and a little of that, and I guess he thought he had the gold key to the crapper or something. Little wiseass punk.”
He started coughing again and it was a long time before he stopped. It was a sick sound, I was beginning to feel claustrophobic in the office, even with the window looking out on the garage.
“Arnie’s a good boy,” Darnell said presently, still measuring me with his eyes, Even while he was coughing, that expression hadn’t changed. “He’s picked up the slack real good.”
Doing what? I wanted to ask, and just didn’t dare.
Darnell told me anyway. Cold glance aside, he was apparently feeling expansive. “Sweeps the floor, takes the crap out of the garage bays at the end of the day, keeps the tools inventoried, along with Jimmy Sykes. Have to be careful with tools around here, Dennis. They got a way of walkin away when your back’s turned.” He laughed, and the laugh turned into a wheeze. “Got him started strippin parts out back, as well. He’s got good hands. Good hands and bad taste in cars. I ain’t seen such a dog as that ’58 in years.”