To consume the time and conceal my embarrassment I fed a penny into the chewing-gum-ball machine installed by the Alton Kiwanis. I received, the rarest, the prize, a black ball. I loved licorice. So did my father. The time we went to New York my Aunt Alma had told me that in their childhood the other kids in their block of Passaic had called my father Sticks because he was always eating licorice sticks. “Do you want this?” I asked him.
“Oh God,” he said, as if in my palm I was holding out a pill of poison to him. “No thanks, Peter. That would just about finish my teeth on the spot.” And he began, in a way I can hardly describe, to rear and toss in the confined space of our cabin, turning to confront now a rack of road maps, now a detailed chart of spare part code numbers, now a calendar displaying a girl posed only in a snow bunny cap with pink pointed ears, mittens and booties of white fur, and a fluffy round tailpiece. Her bottom was pertly pointed outward at us. My father groaned and pressed his forehead against the restraining glass; the man in the tuxedo turned around, startled at the bump. The men in the fingerless gloves had climbed inside the Lincoln and were wiping the windows with busy swipes like the blur of bees. My father’s freckled fists rummaged blindly among the papers on the table as he strained to see where the manager had disappeared to. Afraid he would disturb a mysterious order, I said sharply, “Daddy. Control yourself.”
“I’ve got the heebie-jeebies, kid,” he answered loudly. “Biff. Bang. I’m ready to smash something. Time and tide for no man wait. This reminds me of death.”
“Relax” I said. “Take off your cap. He probably thinks you’re a panhandler.”
He gave no sign of hearing me; his communion was all with himself. His eyes had turned yellowish; my mother sometimes screamed when that amber gleam began to appear in his eyes. He looked at me with lifesaver irises lit by a ghost’s radiant gaze. His parched lips moved. “I can take anything by myself,” he told me. “But I’ve got you on my hands.”
“I’m all right” I snapped back, though in truth the cement floor of this place felt remarkably cold through the soles of my pinching loafers.
I could hardly believe it, but in time the manager did return, and he listened politely to my father’s tale. He was a short thickset man with three or four parallel creases furrowing each cheek. He had the air-something about the set of his neck in his shoulders expressed it-of having once been an athlete. Now he was wearied and harassed by administration. His hair in thinning backwards had stranded a fore lock, half-gray, which as he talked he kept brushing back brutally, as if to scrub a new sense of focus into his head. His name, Mr. Rhodes, was stitched in a fat script of orange thread on the pocket of his olive coverall. He told us, speaking in hurried puffs between pronounced intakes of breath, “It doesn’t sound good. From what you say, the motor running and the car not moving, it’s in the transmission somewheres, or the driveshaft. If it was just the engine”-he said “enchine” and the way he said it it seemed to mean something different, something pulsing and living and lovable-”I’d send the Jeep down, but this way, I don’t know what we can do. My tow truck’s off after a wreck down on Route 9. Do you have a garage of your own?” He accented “garage” on the first syllable: garritch.
“We use Al Hummel over in Olinger,” my father said.
“If you want me to get after your car in the morning,” Mr. Rhodes said, “I will. But I can’t do anything before then; these two”-he indicated the workmen in front of us; they were flicking chamois pads across the Lincoln’s serene gray skin while the man in the tuxedo rhythmically slapped his palm with an alligator billfold-”go off at ten and that leaves just me and the two off in the wrecker down Route 9. So it’d be just as soon for you probably to call your own garage out in Olinger and have them look after it first thing in the morning.”
My father said, “In your considered opinion, then, as far as tonight goes, my goose is cooked?” Mr. Rhodes confessed, “It don’t sound good, from how you describe it.”
“There’s a little rattle in the back,” I said, “like two cog wheels spinning and just brushing against each other.”
Mr. Rhodes blinked at me and brushed back his forelock. “It might be something in the axle. I’d have to get it up on the rack and take apart the whole rear assembly. Do you live far?”
“Way the hell down in Firetown,” my father said.
Mr. Rhodes sighed. “Well, yes. I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help.” A long scarlet Buick, its paint a swirling cosmos of reflections, nosed in from the street and honked its horn: the blast totally possessed the low concrete cavern and Mr. Rhodes’ attention was deflected from us.
My father said hurriedly, “Don’t apologize, mister. You’ve told me what you think is the truth and that’s the greatest favor one man can do for another.” But outside the garage, again walking in the night, he said to me, “That poor devil didn’t know what he was talking about, Peter. I’ve been a bluffer all my life so I can spot another. He was what they call talking through your hat. I wonder how he got to be manager of an important place like that; I bet he doesn’t know himself. He acted just the way I feel half the time.”
“Where are we going now?”
“Back to the car.”
“But it doesn’t go! You know that.”
“I know it and yet I don’t. I have the feeling it’ll go now. It just needed a rest.”
“It isn’t just the motor being cold, it’s something in the body!”
“That’s what that man was trying to tell me but I can’t get it through my thick head.”
“But it’s nearly ten o’clock. Shouldn’t you call Mother?”
“What can she do? We’re on our own, kid. The devil take the hindmost.”
“Well I know perfectly well if the car didn’t move an hour ago it won’t move now. And I’m freezing.”
As we walked down Seventh, I hurrying and continually failing to close that gap of a step which was always between us, a drunk slipped out of a dark doorway and capered along beside us. For an instant I thought he was the hitchhiker, but this man was smaller and further gone in degeneracy. His hair was wild like the mane of a muddy lion and it stood straight out from his head like the rays of the sun. His clothes were preposterously tattered and he wore a frazzled old over coat around his shoulders in the manner of a cape, so that its empty arms waved and bobbled about him as he pirouetted. He asked my father, “Where are you going with this boy?”
My father obligingly slowed his walk so that the drunk, who had stumbled in skipping sideways, could keep pace with us.
“I beg your pardon, mister,” he said. “I didn’t hear your question.”
The drunk exercised an elaborate, pleased control over his intonation, like an actor marvelling at his own performance. “Oh ho ho,” he rumbled softly but distinctly. “You dirty, dirty man.” He waved his finger back and forth in front of his nose and peered at us roguishly through this wind shield-wiper action. For all his raggedness on this bitter night there was much that was merry about him; his face was flat and hard and bright and his teeth were set in his grin like a row of small seeds.
To me he said, “You go home, boy, home to your mother.” We had to stop or else bump into him. “This is my son,” my father said.
The drunk turned from me to him So quickly all his clothes fluffed up like feathers. He seemed to be not so much dressed as shingled in rags, layer on layer of torn multi-textured scraps. His voice was like that, too, hoarse and broken and indefinitely soft. “How can you lie?” he said sadly to my father. “How can you lie about a thing so serious? Now let this boy go home to his mother.”