He crawls into the cave of the car with his father and slips off his soaked loafers and tucks his damp stockinged feet under him. Hurriedly his father backs out of the lot and heads up the alley toward Buchanan Road. At first he over-accelerates, so that on the slightest rise the back tires spin. “Boy,” Caldwell says, “this is duck soup.”
Revelations have skinned Peter’s nerves and left him highly irritable. “Well why didn’t we start for home two hours ago?” he asks. “We’ll never get up Coughdrop Hill.
What were you doing at the game so long after the tickets were taken?”
“I talked to Zimmerman tonight,” Caldwell tells his son slowly, wondering how not to seem to scold the boy. “He said he’d had a talk with you.”
Guilt makes Peter’s voice shrill. “I had to, he grabbed me in the hall.”
“You told him about the missing tickets.”
“I just mentioned it. I didn’t tell him anything.”
“Jesus kid, I don’t want to cramp your freedom, but I wish you hadn’t told him.”
“What harm did it do?-it’s the truth. Don’t you want me to tell the truth? Do you want me to lie all my life?”
“Did you-now it doesn’t matter, but did you tell him about my seeing Mrs. Herzog come out of his office?”
“Of course not. I’ve forgotten all about it. Everybody’s forgotten about it except you. You seem to think the whole world’s some sort of conspiracy.”
“I’ve never gotten to the bottom of Zimmerman, is I guess my trouble.”
“There’s no bottom to get to! He’s just a befuddled old lech who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Everybody sees that except you. Daddy, why are you so-” He was going to say “stupid” but a vestige of the fourth commandment checks his tongue. “-superstitious? You make everything mean something it isn’t. Why? Why can’t you relax? It’s so exhaustingl” In his fury the boy kicks one foot against the dashboard, making the glove compartment tingle. His father’s head is a considering shadow pinched into the pinheaded cap that is for Peter the essence of everything obsequious and absurd, careless and stubborn about his father.
The man sighs and says, “I don’t know, Peter. I guess it’s part heredity, part environment.” From the weariness of his voice, it seems his final effort of explanation.
I’m killing my father, Peter thinks, amazed.
The snow thickens around them. As it dashes into their headlights it flares like a spatter of sparks, swoops upward, vanishes, and is replaced by another spatter of sparks. The onrush is continuously abundant. They meet few other cars on the road now. The lights of homes, thinning beyond the poorhouse, are blurred in the blizzard. The heater comes on and its warmth serves to emphasize their isolation. The arc of the windshield wipers narrows with every swipe, until they stare into the storm through two mottled slits of cleared glass. The purr of the motor is drawing them forward into a closing trap.
Going down the hill beside the Jewish Cemetery, where Abe Cohn, Alton’s famous Prohibition gangster, lies buried, they skid. Caldwell fights the wheel as the chassis slithers. They slip safely to the bottom, where Buchanan Road ends at Route 122. On their right, Coughdrop Hill dissolves up wards. A trailer truck like a fleeing house pours down past them and on into Alton, the rapidfire clunk of its chains panicked. When its taillights wink out of sight they are alone on the highway.
The gradient of the hill increases toward the top. Caldwell pulls out in first and remains in this gear until the wheels begin to spin, and then shifts into second. The car plows upward some more dozens of yards; when the wheels start spinning again he shifts desperately into third. The motor stalls. Caldwell yanks out the emergency brake to hold them here on the hill. They are more than half-way up. The storm sinks sighing into the silence of the motor. The motor restarts but the rear tires cannot grip the snow; rather, the weighty old Buick tends to slip backwards toward the low cable fence that guards the edge of the highway embankment. In the end there is nothing for Caldwell to do but to open his door and, leaning out, using the pink glow of his taillights as his only guide, to back all the way down. He backs beyond the Olinger turnoff onto the flat straightaway between Coughdrop Hill and the next little rise on the road to Alton. Yet, though the momentum gathered here carries them more briskly into the lower part of the hill, they spin to a halt a little short of where they were stopped the first time. Their previous tracks are dark ruts in their headlights.
Suddenly their heads cast shadows forward. A car behind them is coming up the hill. Its lights dilate, blaze like a shout, and sway outward around them; it is a green Dodge, a ‘47. Its chains slogging, it continues past them, takes the steepest part of the hill, and, gathering speed, vanishes over the crest. Their own stalled headlights pick out the stamp of the cross links in its tracks. The sparkle of the falling snow is steady.
“We’ll have to put on chains like that guy,” Peter tells his father. “If we can just get up the next twenty yards we can make it to our road. Fire Hill isn’t so steep.”
“Did you notice the way that bastard didn’t offer to give us a push?”
“How could you expect him to? He just about made it himself.”
“I would have, in his shoes.”
“But there’s nobody else like you, Daddy. There’s nobody else like you in the world.” He is shouting because his father has clenched his fists on the steering wheel and is resting his forehead on their backs. It frightens Peter to see his father’s silhouette go out of shape this way. He wishes to call him to himself but the syllable sticks in his throat, unknown. At last he asks shyly, “Do we have chains?”
His father straightens up and says, “One thing, we can’t put ‘em on here, the car’s likely to slip off the jack. We gotta get down on the level again.”
A second time, then, he opens his door and leans out and guides the car backwards down the hill, the snow dyed rose by his taillights. A few flakes swirl in through the open door and prick Peter on the face and hands. He thrusts his hands into the pockets of his pea jacket.
Back at the bottom of the hill, they both get out. They open the trunk and try to jack up the rear of the car. They have no flashlight and nothing is easy. The snow at the side of the road is six inches deep and in trying to lift their tires clear of it they jack the rear too high and the car topples sideways and throws the jack upright, with shocking velocity, into the center of the road. “Jesus,” Caldwell says, “this is a way to get killed.” He makes no motion to retrieve the upright so Peter goes and gets it. Holding the notched bar in one hand, he looks along the side of the road for a rock to block the front tires but the snow conceals all such details of earth. His father stands staring at the tops of pines that hover like dark angels high above them in the storm. Caldwell’s thought seems to his son to be describing wide circles, like a scouting buzzard, in the opaque mauve of the heaven above them. Now his thought returns to the problem underfoot and together the father and son prop the jack under the bumper and this time it holds. They discover then that they are unable to fasten the chains. In the dark and cold it is too late for their blind eyes and numb fingers to learn how. For many minutes Peter watches his father squat and grovel in the snow around the tire. In this time no car passes. Route 122 has ceased to bear traffic. His father seems on the verge of clip ping the chain fast when it all slips forward into his hands. With a sob or curse blurred by the sound of the storm Caldwell stands erect and with both hands hurls the tangled web of iron links into the soft snow. The hole it makes suggests a fallen bird.
“You should fasten the catch on the inside of the wheel first,” Peter says. He digs up the chains and goes onto his knees and crawls underneath the car. He imagines his father telling his mother, “I was at my wits’ end and the kid just takes the chains and gets under the car and fastens ‘em neat as a pin. I don’t know where the kid gets his mechanical ability from.” The wheel slips. Several times as he drapes the cumbersome jacket of links around the tire, the tire lazily turns and shucks its coat of mail like a girl undressing. His father holds the wheel still and Peter tries once more. In the underworld beneath the car the muted stink of rubber and the parched smells of rust and gas and grease seem breathed syllables of menace. Peter remembers how the car toppled from the jack, imagines how the springs and axle would crush his skull. One comfort, there is no wind or snowfall here.