The explanation for the latter lies way beyond anyone presently inside DeHaven Steelritter's frightening car, unless you want to buy Tom Sternberg's post-Murphy axiom that life sucks, then spits you out into a Dixie cup, then you pay the tab, gratuity, and Massachusetts sales tax.
The explanation for the former is as obvious as the nose we look beyond: it lies in what happens to the well-aimed arrow when it's released; what happens while it's traveling to the waiting target.
Things roadside keep mangling and reconstructing the car's shadow. C.I. Airport recedes behind them, Southeast, still clearly visible, should anyone care to look back. Its control tower's light rondelles, shining with the pale weak quality the sun lends manufactured lights. They pass road-kill, a Corrections Facility sign interdicting any stops for hitchhikers, unmarked gravel roads, the odd mailbox, and the odder fallow field, cropless but boiling with pests in a frenzy Mark can't figure.
They do not pass so much as are entunneled by corn, two walls of green that loom right up flush against what Sternberg hopes is a straight quick blacktop shot to Collision and Reunion. DeHaven drives with just one wrist, his white glove tapping something brisk and martial on the top of the dash. He occasionally and for no clear reason exclaims "Varoom!" D.L. humps it between the clown and J.D. Steelritter, who's on shotgun. Magda has the hump in back and is flanked by Sternberg and Mark Nechtr, who's now so impatient with D.L. over the whole Datsun thing that he's afraid someone might lose his temper, here.
They were just past the pay lot's attendant's booth, J.D. flashing a voucher that raises any gate, when they got passed screamingly on the right by two young men and a blur of beard in something low to the ground and exquisitely foreign that treated the lot's speed bumps like moguls.
Mark comes to the sudden realization that he doesn't have his Dexter Aluminum target arrow. The one that's been under his surgeon's shirt, stabbing. Sternberg has left it back in the lounge, in that sad-looking guy's compote.
"What about the van?" D.L. is shouting into DeHaven's too-white ear.
"Whut?"
"Mr. Steelritter's money-and-fear man said he called for a van for us!"
"Huh?"
"He lied!" yells J.D.
"What?"
"He lied! Close that fucking window, kid!"
DeHaven complies. Sternberg whimpers softly as they're sealed in.
"He lied," J.D. says. "Also doing fieldwork in false reassurance. Strategems and effects."
"That guy who looked just like Christ lied?" Sternberg asks.
"He looked like a Mormon," says Mark.
D.L. turns. "Mormons don't wear beards, darling."
Mark doesn't even bother to mention Donny Osmond's new beard. He's close to feeling upset as hell. His best wedding present, erect in heavy syrup. His prized inexpensive possession.
"No vans left," J.D.'s explaining, crunching a Rothschild's tip with gusto. "No limos left. Everything's worn down, all down at Goodyear, with Mr. Wrench." J.D.'s head is fine and utterly round, his hair rigid, thick, fitted snugly over forehead and some very red ears, trailing close-clipped sideburns. His hair suggests the squat immovability of the best Romanesque facades. No telling, of course, about DeHaven's real hair, though his yarn has been window-blown the wrong way, slightly over its bright slight central part.
J.D.: "My own car, down with Mr. Wrench and company. We've been shuttling and shuttling. Everything's in the shop."
"Three straight days Varoom," says DeHaven.
"Three virtually nonstop days of supervising and shuttling, thousands of people, most of them personally," J.D. says. In enclosed spaces his voice is much smaller than he, utterly without resonance, and seems to issue from a smaller person in his pharynx somewhere, a square root of Steelritter.
"You were late as hell, you two," he adds, producing a lighter with a tall flame.
"Problems with LordAloft." D.L. sniffs.
"Hey, man, three miles," the clown says, squinting past the furry steering wheel's axis. "Three more miles, then the odometer rolls over. To all zeroes. That's two hundred thousand on this baby. That's a big varoom, when the odom—"
"Shut up, shitspeck."
"Shit, Pop." Voice of a whiny sullen hood, Mark thinks.
". . hate this car," growls J.D. He turns to those in back, his face a red planet impaled by a cigar, his eyes bloodshot. He's looking at Sternberg's bad eye. "On behalf of McDonald's I apologize for this car. This was our last car. Collision is not big on transportation."
"Plus try to get an alum to part with his car," DeHaven says.
"It's not that bad a car," D.L. says, smiling at DeHaven, whose lipstick dooms him ever to appear to be smiling back. He lights a cigarette with a complex nonchalance that confirms what Mark's suspected.
The car sat idling in a Forbidden Zone as the six approached. Sternberg pulled Magda's luggage for her. D.L, still groggy, was almost epileptically out of step with the other five, half hanging on her husband as he looked curiously at Magda and her stained skirt.
The car itself looked like a car for neither adults nor children. It was a huge, ageless, jacked-up, malevolent sports car — practically a car with fangs. Its crude paint job was the kind of gold-with-silverish-glitter-in-it one associates with postwar Formica. The interior was red. The car was a pastiche, home-assembled from scrounged parts, complex, rimed — much like the kind of cars assembled, maintained, and cruised in by Maryland hoods who roll cigarette packs into their sleeves and beat up sensitive heirs to detergent fortunes just on general principles. Mark narrowed his eyes at DeHaven: there may've been a pack up there in the polka-dot sleeve of that Ronald costume. One tough clown.
The deposit of a trunkful of heavy luggage didn't change the car's jacked-up posture one bit, either.
"This isn't a Datsun," D.L. had stated flatly, crossing her arms and advancing a foot to tap. Mark's now being in the back seat, and she in front, is directly traceable to this remark. Sternberg, whose tongue tasted metal at even the thought of riding six in a car, had rolled his eye. This girl was too damn much. On the plus side, his slacks had dried in the white sun almost instantly. Brandy being a tougher nut than automatic water, Magda's brown flight-attendant skirt was still stained. Also tight and slit, and sexy. J.D. Steelritter's walk resembled the noiseless glide of her pulled luggage.
"I'm seen only in Datsuns," D.L. said.
"This car's built from parts." Ronald McDonald slammed the loaded trunk hard, so that the dice suspended from the rearview did a jagged dance. "I built this baby from scratch. It's not technically an anything. It's a me, if it's anything."
"Shut up, shitspeck."
"I'm under instructions to avoid cars that aren't Datsuns," D.L. said firmly.
"Jesus fucking Christ," Sternberg moaned.
Mark now had his hands out before him, apart, palms opposed, his eyes cast upward.
Magda looked over at him. "Prayer?"
"Mosquito." He clapped, looked at his red palms. "Full, too."
J.D. Steelritter was looking D.L. over speculatively. They were all perspiring in the humidity by now, though Sternberg led the field in gabardine slacks and a forehead full of tributaries. His sumac throbbed in the sun.
"Let me guess," Steelritter said, looking D.L. over speculatively, supporting a big lower lip with a finger and that finger's elbow with his other arm's crook. "Artist," he speculated. "Free-form sculptor."
"Writer. Poet. Postmodernist. Regionally published."
"I'll take the hump," Magda Ambrose-Gatz volunteered. She got prettily in the back of the growling car and slid over.
"Tell you what, Eberhardt." J.D. Steelritter knows you have to know when to concede the easy concession. She'll get hers. "We write DATSUN in the shameful no-pride dust on the kid's rear window, here," scrawling a big NISSAN next to the WARSH me! that was already there. He made a voilà with his hands, one finger dark. "Now it's a Datsun."