He was my father’s business partner. They were stock brokers together in their own little firm in San Francisco, where we lived. And they were both of them the same kinds of damn fools as the rest of the country through the twenties, playing a high-stakes game and thinking you never had to fold your hand and walk away. Though listen to me. I love to gamble. Maybe not love it. I get something I need out of gambling and I keep doing it. But at least I know how much I’m ready to lose, and when I lose it, I know how to find my way to the door.
But none of this about the situation is new to me. I had plenty of time growing up and being an adult to think out the issues and all of how things went in my family, how my mama divorced my papa and she went on to a life of, more or less, chaos after that. I’m getting off what it is that just came to me. What’s new in my recollection is the drive to Reno, and that Buick. He had a Buick and I was wrapped in a bedspread and my mama and her boyfriend were in front of me, the backs of their heads, in the roadster’s main seat and I was in the rumble seat and they paid me no attention at all. She snuggled up to him and he put his arm around her and it was like I wasn’t there at all. It was just me and the Buick.
And that was fine. It was a wonderful car. I can see that. My mama’s boyfriend had paid maybe fifteen hundred dollars for it, which was enough to support two families for a whole year back then. And I think the seat was leather and it was more comfortable than our couch at home. And I could hear the Buick’s motor. Most of the cars in the street made a terrible racket, sputtering and burbling and coughing away. But this Buick purred. Even idling at a corner while my mama and her boyfriend waited too long having a kiss and somebody behind us would honk his horn and yell. Even then, the Buick was making this low, smooth sound, right underneath me, it felt like, and all the other stuff didn’t concern me. The Buick was holding me tight and talking to me low and sweet and then it carried me away, fast, making the wind blow in my hair.
My word. I loved that Buick, didn’t I. This doesn’t explain a thing. The Buick carried me into a quiet, green world, meadows and folds of land and fields filled with low growing things, vegetables I knew, but I could name nothing, no vegetable, no tree, no fold or lift of land, I had no words at that age to name anything. Except the jagged edge of mountains before me — I knew those were the High Sierras — my mother’s boyfriend had told me this name before we began — and we rose to them and the Buick whispered to me, reassured me, carried me up and into a forest and we rose gradually, for miles and miles, and the road began to twist and turn and I was okay with all of this. I saw, once, among the trunks of the trees, the dappled flank of a deer and, briefly, its dark eyes. I was something like happy.
But it was getting cold. The sun was there, free and clear in the sky, and yet, even as it seemed to get brighter as we climbed, it gave off less and less heat. I wondered at this. I began to tremble with the cold. I hunched into the seat, pulled the bedspread tighter around me, but it was a thin thing, I realized, there was so much of it wrapped around me that you’d think it would make anyone warm, but it was very thin and as pitiful as the sun. I looked at my mother and her boyfriend and they were snuggled close and they did not seem to notice the cold at all. And the Buick was carrying me and whispering still and I wanted it to warm me, as well, but it could not.
Then we were over the top and we began to descend and suddenly the world changed. It was all rock and dust and scrawny things growing and patches of grass that hunkered low and looked like the scum between the tiles in our bathroom. And I was trembling and the road was sharply angled and I could look down for what seemed like miles, down these long folds of barren rock, and I felt like there was something gripping me by the shoulders and wanting to pluck me from the seat and throw me down this mountain and I pressed myself down, tried to make myself as heavy as a boulder, and I asked the Buick to please not let me go. And it didn’t. The Buick held me and it held to the road and it wound us down the mountain and the air was growing warmer and I was listening carefully again to the Buick’s voice and I was okay.
And then there was a catch in the voice. The engine coughed and stammered and coughed again and my mama’s boyfriend cursed and I suddenly was aware of the road and it was angled sharply down and there was a great dome of rock off one way and a sharp drop the other way and the road was narrow and the Buick shuddered a little and I said to it, softly, No. Please. But the engine fell quiet and the brakes whined and the boyfriend cursed some more and my mama was making little gasping sounds and I didn’t care about those two at all, not at all, I spread my hands out from under the bedspread and I laid them flat on the Buick’s leather seat and I prayed for the car to come back to life, to carry me on to a place where I’d be safe and everything would be okay forever.
But we rolled through a curve and then another and my mama was saying her boyfriend’s name over and over and he was telling her to shut up and then there was a little bit of a gravelly shoulder to the road at a curve coming up and it was very narrow and there was a sharp edge beyond it and then a big break in things, a leap, the next thing out that you could see was about a mile away, and you could feel the boyfriend stomp on the brakes, put everything he could into them, and we swerved onto the shoulder and there was a great spitting of gravel beneath us and my mama screamed and then we stopped.
They didn’t say a thing for a while in the front, though you could hear them breathing hard. They were sitting apart, my mama and her boyfriend, and looking opposite ways. Me, I sat listening to the Buick. It was making a little ticking sound. Then it stopped even that. I was sitting in the center of the rumble seat and I pulled the bedspread from around me and crept to the right, keeping my face low at first, smelling the leather of the Buick’s upholstery, thinking, What a phony you are, what a phony, what good is it that you smell nice. And then I was ready and I lifted my head up and I looked out, and there was only a great and wide chasm before me, gray and rocky and deep, and this was what all the holding and the carrying and the sweet low whispering was about. Just to bring me to the edge of the rest of my life and fall silent.
Funny. I don’t remember much of anything else from that trip. Things sort of stop there on the mountain. Obviously somebody came along and we made it to Reno. I do know the divorce didn’t happen that fall. That much I’ve been told. We were supposed to live in a hotel there for three months to establish residency, but it got cut short. Somewhere in the first week or two the stock market crashed and my father and his partner, my mama’s boyfriend, were both ruined. So were Mama and me, in a certain way. So was pretty much everybody.
Now that explains it, I guess, about Buicks. To me at least. To a sympathetic googly-eyed alien, I guess. But it would never do for Arthur. He’d never understand. I’m just happy he knows when to fold a losing hand and find his way to the door. We both do. That makes for an okay marriage, it seems to me.
I have ceased being Viola Stackhouse. Before me, her eyes close for a moment as she decompresses from her memory. Then she looks at me and says, “Did I offend you?”