Endless Things (32 page)

"I'll take a chance,” she said. “Where do I meet you?"

"I'm, right now I'm at the Morpheus Arms Motel, on the Cascadia road."

"Oh jeez,” she said.

"Yeah,” he said. “I need a home too."

"I'll be there,” she said.

She was his own age, he thought; actually she'd turn out to be some years younger, but the lines of her face were deep cut, and her throat incised too with finer lines. The hand she held out to him was knuckly and strong.

"Roo,” she said.

"
Rue?
” he said. “You're called Rue?” He seemed to remember a different name, but not what it had been.

"What's the matter? You know some other girl with that name?"

"Oh yes,” he said. “More than one. Many more. Almost all, in fact."

She seemed to decide he was making a joke not worth investigating. “It's a nickname,” she said. “I've had a lot of names.” She looked into the room, took in the unmade bed, the still-packed bags. “You're ready?"

"Yes."

"Got your money?"

"Yes."

She turned away to where the cars stood, each before its owner's door. She didn't seem to fill her faded workpants, but you couldn't tell, they weren't designed to reveal, or conceal either. He found himself fixed by her face, trying to place her. She seemed to belong to none of the three sexes he lived among, these being men, women who drew him, and women who didn't.

"The Firebird yours?"

"Yes. I mean I'm driving it. It's a rental."

She nodded, regarding it with a certain caustic knowingness, a face he would come to learn she wore when looking at all old cars and certain other classes of things, but he didn't know that yet, and supposed that he'd made an obvious wrong choice at Gene's, and should have known better. “Okay. We gotta go. You want to take the short way? I can show you. Save half an hour."

"I tell you what,” Pierce said. “Why don't you drive."

He held out to her the Firebird's key on its ring. How attuned we are to the faces of our kind. Something happened in Roo Corvino's mobile features, something slight, too slight to interpret but not too slight to catch, a kind of relenting or unlocking, he would have had no word for it even if he'd been wholly conscious of perceiving it; distant cousin of a smile, the troubling or calming of some deep water.

"Okay,” she said.

And they set out.

Nickel Lake is in the north of the county, a round deep pool like the mirror taken from a compact that you might set into papier-mâché hills for your HO locomotive to pass and repass, or into the wintry Bethlehem beneath your Christmas tree for miniature skaters to pose on. That's what Pierce had imagined on first hearing the name. In fact it was a dun waste of water glimpsed now and then through the burgeoning sumac and other roadside trees, and around its marge a spread of roadhouses, low motels, auto graveyards, and bike shops. On the far side were summer places and a beach, where last July he (and Rose Ryder) had watched fireworks. He told her this, though no more.

"We had a place over there once,” Roo said to him. “Burned down."

She told him her history, and it was patent and severe. Her father, handsome devil, hot-rodder, soldier, then car salesman; her mother some years older, divorcée, their romance a scandal, burning hotly. Years go by, a couple of kids, the dealership, a big new house in Labrador, that development east of the Jambs? Pierce knew of it. Her father was one of those guys who are sure that everything they have is the best there is, and everything they know can't be beat: my fishing rod, my power saw, my gas mileage, my wife, my club sandwich, enjoying himself daylong with a profound and seemingly unalloyed enjoyment, and always ready to tell you with a smile how you too can get the best of everything.

She said that women like guys like that. Pierce thought he'd never heard the type described before, and wasn't certain he recognized it. Oh yeah: women love it when men know exactly what they want. Especially if what they want is you.

"Lucky man."

"Well. He always had a lot of affairs. Long ones, short ones. It was sort of well known. My mother kept finding out, and kicking him out, and taking him back. Because she knew that underneath he always wanted her most. Then one year no more."

"She couldn't take it."

"That wasn't it. She fell in love. A guy lots younger. And she left. In a day. The one thing he wanted most and was gladdest he had. She never came back; she never looked back."

"And when was this?"

"I was ten. So it was me and my younger brother and him. I loved the guy too, but I couldn't stand him. I was fairly messed up by him, about a lot of things. By her too. You can imagine."

He wondered if he could. He didn't know that much about the world, this one, and knew he ought to keep his eyes and ears open.

"Then."

"When I was eighteen I left. Didn't say why or where. One day they woke up and no me."

"Where'd you go?"

"West. It was 1967. It was easy to get lost. People were nice. Even I could get along. I was never coming back."

"You live there with him now."

"Yeah. Well. He's pretty sick. He drank a lot there, after his women went. Still does. I don't know if that did it, but anyway. He'd fought with my brother by then and he left—I never see him, which hurts. I don't know, maybe he's still mad at me too. So, big empty house. The deal was I'd get my own room, my own entrance, no questions.” She seemed to sense this left a lot unexplained. “I work when I want, not when I don't want. I cook, he cleans. Sometimes. It's a good deal."

She said the last sentence as though it were a different one, and maybe because she knew it showed, she rubbed her forefinger rapidly under her nose, throw off pursuit. Pierce thought he already knew more of her than he did of most his acquaintanceship, and wondered at it.

"So you,” she said. “How about you?"

He opened his mouth to say Well, but just then she saw the tower made of zigzag girders, surmounted by a ‘56 Impala, that marked the auto auction grounds; she turned in, and business began.

The cars were lined up in groups large and small, in categories probably, though none Pierce perceived, by seller maybe or the cars’ provenance. In the center of the field was a sort of shed with wide doors at either end, through which the cars were driven, to be bid upon. Roo saw people she knew loitering there, and walked away, leaving Pierce with an injunction to look around, see what he liked.

He looked around, though taking no steps, at the day and the earth. The plants that flourish in waste places, like slum children, have their spring too and their springing. The little one that smells, astonishingly, like pineapple when it's stepped on. American earth. It seemed to him that he had actually not been away: not that he hadn't traveled, but as though he had undertaken and undergone a long journey without moving very far, or at all. Like an old melodrama where the fleeing heroine crosses terrible terrains by running a treadmill, staying center stage while the scenery unrolls beside her.

So let's see. He began to review the cars he stood beside, which were not American as it happened, small Foxes and Beetles. He opened their doors, sat in them and smelled their insides, looked out their windows. He happened upon the hood release of a brown Rabbit, and with a dim memory of disaster he pulled it, and then went to look at the engine, which sat mum in its well.

"There's a nice ‘71 Python over there,” she said, suddenly beside him. “Nice clean car."

"I was thinking of something smaller. I like this."

"A Rabbit? You do stick shift?"

"I've had instruction.” In Rose Ryder's Asp convertible.
Don't worry
, she'd said.
After a while it becomes automatic
. Where was it now, the red Asp, shed probably like the resurrecting snake's skin, left by the side of the road. Kelley Corvino had been speaking for a moment before he heard. “What?"

"I said I don't know a lot about foreign cars, to tell you the truth."

"Front wheel drive,” said Pierce. “Good for winter driving.” Where had he heard that?

"Like a Cadillac,” she said. “You do a lot of winter driving?"

He was about to let the hood fall when she stopped him. “Something you should know,” she said. “This car's probably been in an accident."

"How do you know?"

"It's been repainted."

"You can tell that?"

"It's kind of obvious. And see?” She pointed down to a place on the frame where the warm brown color (what had initially drawn his eye, in fact) feathered away on the body. “Spray,” she said. “Factory color doesn't look like that."

"Oh."

"Might be nothing. But it might have been rolled. You don't want a car that's been rolled."

"Huh."

"Never know what got shook up. Hey, Frank."

A passing male in a NABCO cap and windbreaker turned her way.

"You think this car's been rolled?” she asked.

Frank shrugged noncommittally, put his meaty hands on the fender, and gazed within, as Pierce and Roo did; he eyed the roof, and averred that it didn't look creased; shrugged again, and moved off.

"You want it?” Roo said.

At some time in this day he apparently would have to say yes. There was no test driving, she'd said; most people came here knowing what they wanted, and the cars were all certified as driveable. For a moment he wondered where he was, how he had come to be here; then he said: “What do you think it'll go for?"

"Well, I wouldn't go over, say, a thousand. If you want it."

"Okay,” he said. “Stop at a thousand.” He thought about his money, not his at all, and how little there would be now for anything else, and for the only time that day his heart contracted in anxiety. He followed Roo back to the shed, to sit in the bleachers while she bid. One by one the cars proceeded through the space and were bought or rejected; some were greeted with murmurs of appreciation or a scattering of mocking laughter, but Pierce couldn't see why; not because of their ludicrous excess of color or tail fin. At length the little Rabbit was brought in, and in moments she'd approached his limit, and he felt his heartbeat. Eight hundred and fifty, and silence; the light stroke of the hammer.

"Good deal,” she said, filling out the papers. “Lucky."

She got the keys, and he held out his hand for them.

"No you got to drive the Firebird,” she said. “This one's unregistered. You can't drive an unregistered car, no plates, no sticker, but I can.” She bent close to him, eyebrows lifted, the way a schoolmarm listens for the small voice of a kindergartner. “Okay?"

"Yes,” he said. “Sure, of course. Makes sense."

He saw to it that she left the parking lot first, sure that he would never find his way back the way they'd come, and embarrassed to ask. It hadn't been more than a couple of turns, left or maybe right.

Evening, and the chartreuse sky darkening; the gray road striped with yellow. Following her, going where she in the little brown car went. Only long after did she confess to him that that was in fact the first time she'd ever bought a car for anybody in that way at that auction, though indeed she did have a license and had gone once, twice, with her father in former years.

Why did you then, that day?

Well? Why'd you trust me to?

Why had he? He would claim it to be a part of what he regarded as his natural optimism, a reliance that things would work out okay, probably, the odds anyway well in your favor; his sunny disposition, or trustfulness. And she said—because she knew by then—that it wasn't so, that when he walked off the end of the dock that way it was his own kind of nihilism, daring the world to get him, almost willing it to: she'd been clocking instances for years, she said.

But anyway the Rabbit had hummed along for years too by then, skipping amid all the Foxes and Bobcats and Lynxes and Rams, with him and then with him and her safe within, until the day the front seat fell down right through the rusted floor when he got in to drive, the engine still willing even then, strong lapine heart unstilled.

Barney Corvino's dealership was not far down 6A from the Morpheus Arms, and Pierce sitting in his overcoat at a mossy picnic table that stood behind his wing could watch the traffic come and go, the old cars drive in there and the new ones out. Too far for his sight to resolve a person, Roo say, at work giving test drives, if she did that. The sheltering sycamores over his head had been saplings when the place opened not long after Pierce was born, it was long-lived for a Tourist Cabins and now showing its age; when summer came the gold-green shadows that the old trees cast on his bed, and the leaves’ susurration through his open window, would keep him paying the rent there. That, and his continuing paralysis, or stasis, which had seemed so dreadful to him and now seemed not so dreadful: healing, maybe, he thought, or at least now not unfamiliar; just his own old self, a trait rather than a disease, a trait he could have inherited.
My get up and go got up and went
, Winnie used to say about herself.

Winnie had always taken his side in this, and of course he had always taken Winnie's side too, her role of chaste inaction and apartness. No surprise; it was she and Pierce alone, and then the rest of them all together. That she was only a sort of half mother to her brother Sam's kids, unwilling to take power fully among them, might account for the ironized way she would make gestures toward raising them, offering antique rules of behavior or morality in a voice that withdrew them at the same moment:
Children never let your angry passions rise / Those little nails were never meant to tear each other's eyes
. You didn't know whether she was siding with you or taking you to task. She had had no official power to act there or anywhere, and couldn't teach her son how to take that power either, or to accept it for himself, there or anywhere; she only taught him the wry jokes to make—the kind she made, apparently at herself and her ineffectuality but really at all who had been fooled into acting in the world. She applauded all his meager accomplishments, without questioning why they were so meager; when periodically he returned from that world of strife and action to her room upstairs beside her brother's, having failed in one attempt or another—predictably, comically, lovably, failed again—she'd say
Oh well,
resigning all other possibilities, at once sad and gay.
Oh well.