Joey had visions of his car going conk in the middle of a cornfield. He drove in fear of the police and his own lack of education at the wheel. Every year he grew more apprehensive about the day — in every other way quite ordinary — in which Authority would come and take him suddenly, in shame and chains, to the clink. The cause would be an accident, an arrest, an account overdrawn, a signature faked, a vengeful pupil, a person from his past, a colleague, out of curiosity or suspicion, who had researched his file, an innocent clue … a … who knew? He had once wanted bank accounts and credit cards; to have ID was a victory; but now he saw the wisdom in cutting as many connections to the Machine of Modern Life as he could sever. Sometimes Joey dreamed, not of dismemberment (he’d let that happen in his sleep), but of jollity and a little peppy music set to a rhyme relentless as sirens—
The Machine of Modern Life
will insist you have a wife,
will demand you vote for strife—
the bomb the gun the knife—
but especially wed a wife
with whom to spend your life,
and tho with troubles rife
continue to be blithe
in the grip of modern life.
These lines should be repeated incessantly but each time accompanied by a different solo instrument. And animal illustrations of the text held up for listeners to see: a muskrat running from a potato peeler.
Joey’s plan, which had gradually matured until it received Joseph’s okay, was elegant in its simplicity and design. He would drive the car back to Lowell and to the scrap yard where he’d found it. He would seek out Miss Spiky and ceremoniously return the Bumbler to her with his thanks. Then he would pop on the bus that passed that point on its way from Urichstown to Woodbine. The car would thus, like a South American protester, disappear. This escapade, as he saw it, would be a big step back, but the step would take him even more deeply into anonymity and its protections. It would also force Boulder to fetch and carry Miriam on her grandmotherly visits. Better yet, it would lessen the need for his attendance at these deeply humiliating gaga occasions.
Once the Bumbler decided to move, the trip to Lowell went without incident. That, to Joey, was a minor miracle and the car’s last gift to him. At Lowell, however, matters began to sour. The yellow oil drum had a deep crease across its middle that made it bend as if kowtowing, and rust had eaten through its base. A wire fence had been planted along the front of the yard, but in places its stanchions danced perilously close to the ground. The Airstream still stood on its cinder blocks, but it appeared to have been idle for a long time, and ignorant of company. The side screen door hung from one hinge, while the wooden steps to the entry had sagged and seemed suspended now from the few tougher grains in its board. There was no line of cars to face the highway, only untidy patches of resilient weed and puddles so filled with oil they couldn’t evaporate. They gave the sky an iridescent leer. With a groan Joey drove Bumbler over a low point in the fence and left the car where it stalled.
One thing went to Joey’s satisfaction. Once enmeshed, Bumbler looked at home.
The scrap in the scrap yard seemed scrappier than he remembered; the large piles of metal were now small and ate slowly at one another like couples in a lengthy marriage. There were still a few gatherings of running boards, bumpers, and grilles, as well as melted cardboard boxes from which spilled wipers, hinges, and latches. What a desolate place, Joey and Joseph thought. Unlike buildings after bombing, these remains had no dynamics, inertia was their god. Rainbow-colored water was that deity’s substitute for incense. Professor Skizzen rapped on some tinny-looking pieces, but there was no spring in their response, no music in this mess of messes. All things have their demise, even stone its catacomb.
Of Miss Spiky there was no evidence. Professor Skizzen had saved up a sigh appropriate for cemeteries, and he used it now. He did not regret missing Miss Spiky in this place of her business, though his intent had been to see her, because she made him uneasy and ashamed of the feeling. Where did you stand, he wondered, to expect the bus.
While he waited, wishing he had brought a suitcase he could sit on, Joseph Skizzen suffered several sorts of reverie. Cars would rise over the nearby hill and rush down toward the spot he had chosen. Drivers must think him an odd hitchhiker, with his funny cap, his young goatee, and his black-and-white knickers. Joseph’s vacant gaze rose for no reason toward the ridge. Traffic was light and shot indifferently past Lowell, whose old church spire you could barely see beyond the trees that formed the rear of the junkyard. He felt slightly chilled and quite alone. Wasn’t this what he had feared: to be broken down, inappropriately dressed, on a country road far from any viable town? The light for that day had realized its age, and was feeling its weakness. Most bushes, trees — all feisty replacement growth — were leafless now, revealing their skeletal configurations. Joey, Joseph, and the professor stood in their own puddles of stupidity and noted the time between trucks. The still air had some heaviness though the shadows through which it passed had given it a slight bite. Wasn’t he sporting his best duds just to impress Miss Spiky and elicit her laughter? There were other hints of winter, he observed. Cars raced their reflections up and down the hill, the shadows shrinking or enlarging as they ran, and seeming faster, to Joseph’s eye, than they really were — always ahead, never behind — so that when the highway emptied, he felt he was being painted into his posture.
Professor Skizzen imagined that beneath each heap of wheels or side-view mirrors or backseat springs there lived a singing spirit and that during the earliest edge of dawn any unlikely visitor could hear them, as a chorus, making a mournful moaning punctuated by Miss Spiky’s contralto — she the secret conductor of these ritual performances — in an oratorio of the discarded, the used up, the forgotten, those standing alone at the side of an empty road always just before dawn … always before or, at twilight, always after. What would that stack of tires behind the Airstream contribute? or that pile of bruised bumpers near the collapsing shed? because these were, after all, pieces that once composed the American dream — the automobile — that freed us to leave, move, travel, get around. Should these stacks sing of the speedometer that had made us equal, the backseats that had offered us sex, the accelerator that had given us power, the wheelbases that had conferred prestige? Or should they complain of their fate, like the Bumbler who had been left pinioned in a tangle of wire, the driver’s window not quite closed, so a bird might fly in, an animal enter?
Leave them to their fate, the professor said, and tried to mean it, because, were all the pieces in these piles reassembled, what you would display here would not be an advert for used cars but a quite ordinary murderers’ row.