Henry looked down at the paper again, first through his glasses, then over them, and Willard got out a cigarette and lit it.
Henry said, “It’s a fine-looking car all right.” Then: “There is one thing, maybe. It doesn’t look—” He couldn’t find the way to say it. He tried to shrug it off, back down and merely praise the car, but Willard pressed him and, finally, feeling like a fool, he let it come out: “It doesn’t look like you.”
“It what?” Willard said, half-standing up.
“I told you I—”
“Well what in hell is it supposed to mean?” He couldn’t decide whether to be mad or puzzled. “Look, maybe it’s really crap or something, and maybe I didn’t draw it so pretty, but it is supposed to be a car, I wasn’t trying to make a picture of my goddamn face.”
Henry pulled hard at his lip, trying to think, and his seriousness, if nothing else, made Willard calm himself and wait. “Put it this way,” Henry said. “It doesn’t look like anybody, it just looks like a picture of a car. Take old Kuzitski’s truck. It looked like Kuzitski, you know what I mean?”
He shook his head, cross.
“Well, take Burk’s secondhand Cadillac, then. Would you have a car like that?”
It was useless, of course. The more he argued the less Willard saw it. Henry flipped through the magazine, pointing to cars and their drivers — and the truth was, the more he pointed the less Henry Soames saw it himself. He sat with his chair close to Willard’s now, his arm around Willard Freund’s shoulders, and though smoking was sure to kill him, Doc Cathey said, he smoked his pipe, for Willard smoked cigarettes like a trucker, one after another.
He quit at last. “Maybe it’s nonsense,” he said. “I guess it is.” And he tried to talk merely about how the air would flow, where the weight would sit — things he knew for sure he knew nothing about.
When they talked about Willard’s father and farming and old Kuzitski’s accident — all this later that night — Willard smoked less and Henry quit. The boy crossed his knees and leaned back in his chair across the room from Henry just as Willard’s father always had, or had when Henry had known him. They seldom met now. And yet even at moments like this Willard Freund did not quite seem at ease.
“Sorry, Willard,” Henry said as Willard left, a little after one-thirty.
Willard smiled, cocking his head, looking off over Henry’s shoulder. “Don’t matter,” he said. “I guess the whole thing’s a pretty dumb idea.”
“I never said that,” Henry said seriously.
“No. Well, we’ll see.” He winked, pulled down his sweatshirt a little, and went out.
Afterward Henry lay in his bed going over and over it in his mind. He was sure he was right, even if sometimes looking at pictures in magazines he couldn’t seem to see it. The only real question was whether or not it was important, whether or not it had anything to do, really, with designing a car. As he lay thinking, or brooding rather, his mind all at once called up the image of George Loomis’s house, and for some reason Henry was shocked. A gaunt old brick house among tamaracks, the round-topped windows always dark except for the eerie flicker thrown by the television he kept in the kitchen. There were maybe fifteen, sixteen rooms, and George Loomis hardly set foot in more than three or four. But maybe that was different, he thought. A hand-me-down might be something else again. Give George a choice of the kind of house he’d live in, and sure as day. … But then he knew it wasn’t true. A man did things to the world but also the world did things to him, and that was the house all right. If something or somebody didn’t interfere, that would be George Loomis.
He lay looking up at the ceiling for a long time, thinking.
10
Two nights later Willard came again. He came in around ten, while Callie and Henry were cleaning up.
“How’s it going, boy?” Henry said, serving him coffee and the blueberry pie he always ordered when there was some.
Willard sipped the coffee, looking over the rim at Callie, and then he said, “Bad. But there’s a reason now. I figured out what you meant.”
Henry frowned, not getting it at first.
“Cars and people,” Willard explained. “What you said. It’s the craziest goddamn thing!”
In a flash the old excitement was pounding inside him, and nothing he could do to stop it. He held back, struggled hard against himself like a lion converted to Christianity, but, even as his mind held back, his body pushed toward Willard. In his clumsy excitement he bumped Willard’s coffee and spilled it, and he didn’t take time to wipe it up, he was telling the boy — in sentences labored and slow at first, then faster and faster — about the fire he, Willard, had inside him, how somehow he had to get hold of it — the fire of the artist. The words were making no real sense, Henry knew as he said them, but the pitch at least — the pitch, by now, of a Pentecostal sermon — that and the big hands slapping the counter might partly make sense crash through. Willard Freund was leaning toward him, squinting as if to see better into Henry’s thoughts, but leaning wrong somehow — or so it seemed to Henry — maybe faking, or maybe partly faking, conscious of himself leaning forward. Callie was coming closer too, looking troubled. The muscles beside her mouth were tight. But Henry concentrated on the boy.
“Anything you make,” he was saying, gripping Willard’s arm, “anything you make at all has got to be finding out what you want to make. I mean, finding out what you are. Maybe you’ll draw cars or maybe you’ll drive them, either way it’s the same thing, you do what you do because of everything you ever did, or in spite of all you ever did — I don’t know. I mean, it’s love, it’s like every kind of love you ever felt and the sum total of every love you ever felt. It’s what poor old Kuzitski used to say: It’s finding something to be crucified for. That’s what a man has to have. I mean it. Crucifixion.” His voice cracked — stupid, sentimental, Soames voice — and Willard Freund jerked back and laughed. Callie too seemed repelled by it, but she reached out to touch their arms, Henry Soames’ and Willard’s. Then she drew her hands back, for Henry was blundering on.
But was he saying anything at all? he wondered. All so hopelessly confused. And yet he knew. He couldn’t do it and maybe never could have, but he knew. He was a fat, blubbering Holy Jesus, or anyway one half of him was, loving hell out of truckers and drunks and Willards and Callies — ready to be nailed for them. Eager. More heart than he knew how to spend.
It came to him that he had to tell of the bitch in Utica.
Mess.
He’d met her in the hallway of that cracking brown-papered hotel. He’d gone to Utica for a funeral, a trucker had killed himself — Ron, or Don — he’d forgotten the name — a trucker anyway; truckers were truckers. His semi had slid off 98, down in the hills, and had somersaulted to the shale banks of the river, then into the water. Henry had liked the man and had been afraid there’d be no one at the funeral. He’d been wrong, of course. The pews of the tiny white church were packed — old men, old women, children — and below the altar with its glinting, gold-embroidered cloth and fourteen candles and thin-necked statues the closed casket was buried under flowers and wide ribbons. Henry had sat in the last pew and had sobbed. And then in the hall of the Irishman’s hotel where he was staying he had met this idiot woman — though that wasn’t true, quite; in spite of the eyelashes and the lipstick that lied about the shape of her lips, she hadn’t laughed when he’d told her why he was in town. They’d walked along down the hall without speaking, earlier in the evening that was, going in the same direction, and they’d ended up at the same little tavern for supper. He’d been off his head, probably, with the funeral, and she’d been drunk as a fish when they went to her room, or she’d pretended to be. And there, with only a candle burning, throwing huge shadows on the heat-buckled brown-paper wall, they had talked about loneliness and devotion and God knew what, and he had held her in his fat arms trying to tell her of the bursting piece of sentimental stupidity inside him that had longed for something or other all his life. Her hands playing on his back had been warm, vaguely like the big drops of rain that came in August. He’d told her by God he would marry her — he didn’t even know her name — and she’d laughed her head off, not even drawing back, still rubbing against him, working him up. And at last in a kind of terror he had struck out at the damn drunken idiot, the stupid animal love in her raw hands and lips. What he had done, exactly, was hard to remember, or how she’d taken it. He’d hit her in the face when the climax came, that much he would never forget. That and the dry summer heat and the fact that now sometimes sitting in just his trousers, waiting, he could hear her moaning on his bed. The sound was distinct: so clear that he sometimes thought, in a moment of panic, that he’d lost his mind.