“I intend to,” he said.
A number of people seemed to be leaving their workplaces at three o’clock, and a significant number of those wanted hot dogs. I got a few tips. Only one, a teen with an anachronistic flattop, ran off without paying, and it seemed to me that all the planning — get-away-car and so forth was hardly justified by the savings. Generally, the hot dogs aroused enthusiasm, and finally they aroused mine. I hadn’t eaten a real meat by-product junk hot dog in a decade, but this time I had two of them, oozing with sweet relish and mustard, some of which ended up on my clothes. My dentist, Ted Conroy, parked his Audi right in front of the stand, stuck his red head out the window, shut off the engine, and as he came to the stand I thought fast.
“What’s this?”
“I’m helping out a friend.”
“I didn’t know you had such friends.”
“You want a hot dog?”
“And tear up my Swiss electric toothbrush?”
“It was just a thought.”
“You stay away from them too. They’re nothing but lips, hoofs, and noses.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“I don’t know who your friends are, but this is not in the best interest of our community.”
“Ted, give it a rest. They’re hot dogs. They predate our community by a century.” I was defensive about my little afternoon rebellion. As Conroy got back into the low-anthracite Audi, he said, “Distal erosion number twenty-seven crown. You’re a year late.”
After Ted, no one came and I was alone. I held absurdity at bay as I stood behind the open-air counter, a colonnade of old ash and burr oak trees ending at a distant Stop sign. A dog slept in the street. A yellow fish-and-wildlife-service helicopter passed overhead carrying fingerlings to high country lakes. The westerly breeze that had stirred leaves all day long was visible now only in the highest treetops.
I was still there at dark. I had eleven dollars and fifty-four cents in small change, which I’d put in my pants pocket for safekeeping, and then had trouble keeping my pants up from the weight of all that metal. And I had no car. An indeterminate countdown ensued while I held off facing the music. I began to tell the story to myself as I would have to tell it to the authorities. The raw facts — I cancel medical appointments to run a hot dog stand in hopes of being compensated by a dissolute young woman — were unpromising. Very often when one is out of line entirely, invoking the Good Samaritan is advantageous. Good Samaritans are associated with failed foresight, and it seems to belong to most people’s embedded memory that anything beginning with “I was just trying to help” with its undertones of grievance is liable to lead to unintended consequences, of which ours is the golden age.
A streetlamp came on and shortly after the moths, the bats arrived. She needed a ride, then remembered missing an appointment and if I would just step temporarily out of my role as a misguided town physician and be a Good Samaritan I would understand she had no resources to offer save her humble thanks. “You want to spend time with me? Sell some hot dogs.” I suppose I thought I’d heard what appeared to be an opportunity.
I started to walk, the leaden cluster of coins pressing against my leg.
To this day, I don’t know why my car seemed, when I first found it, like a death ship. It was moving slowly with the lights out under a canopy of trees. In good light it was green, but in the late dusk it was black. It was an ordinary car, but watching its quiet passage aroused all my sorrows at once — the death of my mother, my father’s amiable despair and vigil of mortality, and the suspicion that I was losing faith in my own work. I say “my work,” but perhaps I mean myself. I understood it was only a car, but there was something unnatural to my impulse to just let it go that frightened me. I knew I couldn’t do so without consequences, and they were more than was explained by the inappropriate desire the present driver had occasioned. Even this lacked candor as the scene flashed before me: my recriminations, the car reclaimed, remorse, the payoff as the minor fault was made flesh. Such inner conflict caused the hesitation during which the darkened vehicle drifted from view several blocks ahead. I began to stalk it. I began to stalk my own car!
There were times when I felt a sourceless smile forming on my lips, and these times could last for weeks. I mention this only because it is this faint, amiable smile that has always involuntarily formed when I was about to say or do something with a high element of risk. Why the fleeting glimpses of my own automobile in the dark should produce this rictus is no clearer to me than the elation I felt years ago during the tango fiasco. I suppose going over Niagara Falls in a barrel had some of this mysterious glory — the slap of river on the staves, the magnificent silence as the barrel falls through air, the prospect of catastrophe with its great plunging sound, the final gurgle inaudible to the many spectators, the honeyed ease beyond.
It crossed a few hundred yards away, and then crossed again. I waited several minutes, my eyes riveted on the empty intersection. Here it came: she was driving in circles or around a block, a block of interest, an air of waiting. The next time it went through, I hurried to the corner where she had passed and leaned against the trunk of a splendid amur maple, an ancient thing from the day of the horse; indeed, I rather formed my body to it until I felt myself becoming part of its deep shadow. I opened my mouth to soften the sound of my breathing and felt a zephyr in the branches scatter dark camouflage overhead. Just then I spotted a garbage can, still on the sidewalk from the last collection. I rushed out and rolled it into the intersection, then retreated to my maple.
As I waited, I thought of tomorrow’s patients. What had happened to me today? I desperately wanted to see my patients. Harelipped Eleanor with repetitive stress injuries from her three decades of washing dishes at an interstate truck stop: I may have given her too many cortisone shots, but what relief they provided! Onetime jockey Dan Devlin, a near midget, had a tiny nursery that produced nice perennials — emphysema. A couple of pre-football physicals and then lunch. Couldn’t remember the p.m. sched.
Here came my car. Proximity had not dispelled its lightless mystery, its frictionless deathship glide. I watched it slow down as if it were driving itself, approach the garbage can, and stop. I waited until I heard the creak of the driver’s door, then moved quickly to the passenger’s side and let myself in. The noise of rolling the can out of the way must have muffled my entrance because Clarice climbed behind the wheel and shut her door. It was a moment before she saw me in the shadows and screamed. Seeing who it was, she calmed down and told me I could keep all the hot dog money and wouldn’t have to pay for any I’d eaten. I think that when I heard the indignation while turgidly explaining that I was capable of paying for my own hot dogs, I realized who I was for the first time — a feckless professional drawn from absurdity to absurdity by bad impulses. I thought of the small red tugboats that towed the great liners into port, the solitary tugboat skipper, the ship filled with a thousand voices.
Nevertheless — I love this — all had been set in motion. Clarice said, “I just needed a ride. I didn’t know the other girl would quit. I was enjoying my freedom while you sold the hot dogs. You went for it! Do you think I’m a grifter? What do you do for a living?”
“I’m a private detective.”
“Really! Well, I hope you don’t charge people. You’re not a private detective, are you? What are you? You look like a lawyer. Maybe you are. Or a senator.”
I had a burst of near candor: “I’m a house painter.” This reply swept me with happiness. The once dreaded color wheel appeared before me like a galaxy of cheerful stars.