In God We Trust (22 page)

“I said no Jawbreakers unless you buy Red
and
Black.”

There wasn’t a Red Jawbreaker man in the crowd.

“Make up your mind. D’ya want ’em or not?”

We looked in through the curving glass case and saw that beautiful tray of magnificent Jawbreakers, almost all Red, the few remaining Blacks spotted here and there like diamonds in a bank of blue South African clay. Flick said:

“
Red
Jawbreakers!”

Schwartz said:

“I’d rather have some rotten Tootsie Rolls!”

I thought it over. For as long as I had remembered, Jawbreakers were two for a penny.
Black
Jawbreakers. Two for a penny, and now, in effect, the price had doubled. I thought about it. Finally Pulaski’s face loomed over the counter, looking down at all of us. I don’t think he ever saw an individual kid. They were always just that jostling little mob in front of the case, with the hot, sweaty pennies.

“Awright, you guys. I don’t have any more time to mess around. You want Black Jawbreakers or not?”

The only other Jawbreaker salesman in town was a good twelve blocks away, and still I couldn’t say it.

“Gimme a penny’s worth of Jawbreakers.”

Pulaski reached into the case, carefully taking one Red Jawbreaker and one Black Jawbreaker, and handed them over to me, picking up my penny from the glass top of the case. One after the other we gave in, until finally there was only Flick.

“Awright, what do
you
want?”

“Four Root Beer Barrels and a Mary Jane.”

“Fer Chrissake, all right!”

Pulaski grabbed a handful of Root Beer Barrels and a Mary Jane and shoved them in Flick’s fist. Mrs. Rutkowski seemed to be asking for spareribs, or something, in broken Croatian. More steelworkers surged through the door. The screen door slammed. Pulaski clanked the sliding panels of his candy counter shut, turned his back on us, and hurried back behind the meat counter.

It was the first Jawbreaker Tie-in Sale. To get the gold you must also take the dross. The Jawbreaker remained true to its spirit, a pure distillation of Life itself; give and take.

Out on the street I stuck my black beauty far back on the right side, right where my wisdom teeth would be eventually impacted. I shoved the red monster into the pocket of my Levis. I’ll give it to my kid brother, I figured. The great Jawbreaker pushed my cheek walls out until the proper tension
was reached and the first soul-satisfying taste of that dark, rich, ebony masterpiece began to sink into my veins. It was worth the exorbitant price.

    I stood at the window, looking out over the vast, crowded metropolitan traffic-jammed street, the burning coals of my aching tooth subsiding somewhat in the tepid bath of recollection and nostalgia. Only a steady, dull, thumping, subterranean pulse remained. I was still paying Pulaski.

A high thin whine of the steel burr as it bit into the marrow of another victim’s left upper canine wound its way into my consciousness. It stopped. There was a moment of silence and then that white Archangel of Pain, the blonde, crisp, Shirley Temple-ish dentist’s assistant, touched me on the elbow.

“The doctor’s ready.”

I turned.

“So am I, Miss.”

Together we moved forward toward the Rack.

XXI
ENTER FRIENDLY FRED

Flick sucked noisily at a hollow tooth as I stood up stiffly to get the kinks out of my legs. Bar stools are not good for the knees. Not only that, but my conscience was beginning to bother me. Here I was, frittering away an afternoon chewing the fat with Flick, when I should have been out filling up my blue-lined notebook with acute observations on the evolving life of the Industrial Midwest, not to mention the impact of Automation on the day-to-day life of the solitary citizen. Also, I was on an expense account, and there wasn’t much to squander it on in Flick’s. I enjoy living to the full.

I stalked to the end of the bar, flexing my shoulder muscles and jiggling my feet. This is known in Indiana tavern circles as “Shaking Down The Suds.” Flick moodily changed his apron. It was getting late in the afternoon now, and the big rush of steelworkers was due shortly after four when the shift at the mill changed.

Again the entranceway swung open with a puff of frigid air. This time a tall, thin, natty customer displaying a formidable set of store teeth and a dour piercing gaze strode resolutely to the bar. Flick glanced up and, without a word passing between the two, took a bottle of bourbon down off the mirrored shelf behind the bar and poured a double. Neat. The man quickly
tossed it off, threw a dollar down on the bar, said: “Be seein’ you,” and was gone. Flick rang up the buck as I returned to my stool.

“Well?” I asked.

“Oh, him? That’s Fted. Friendly Fred. He runs the Used-Car lot across the street.”

I looked over at the lot. A touch of twilight gloom was beginning to dull the surfaces of the shiny fenders and grinning grilles. The banners fluttered jauntily, snapping and cracking in the breeze.

“He sure has some great-looking junkers over there,” I remarked, dredging an expression out of my misty past.

“Yep. Sure has.”

Next to bowling, automobiles are probably the single most important fact of a Midwesterner’s life, after his job, of course. The family heap, the weekly paycheck, and a decent bowling average are all they ask of Life.

“What are y’ driving these days, Flick?”

“Olds 88.”

“How’s she do on gas?”

“Oh, seventeen, around town. Maybe nineteen, twenty on the road,” Flick lied.

“Can’t ask for more than that.”

I found myself sinking into the laconic conversation that I had almost forgotten existed. I had become completely acclimated to the martini-drenched, impassioned, self-pitying monologues of the French restaurants and expensive bars of New York. Here, the Ego—if it existed at all—was barely discernible. They had never even heard of the word “Career.” Job, yes. Career, no.

“Olds 88. Hydromatic?”

“Yep.”

“Four-door?”

“Nope. Hardtop.”

“What color is it?”

“Dark blue. ’Bout the same color as that old Graham-Paige your Old Man used to have.”

“The what?”

“The four-door Graham. With the V-grille.”

Now I remembered. Of course! The Graham-Paige. In Hohman, cars were never forgotten, any more than old love affairs are ever really erased in other cultures. Family histories are measured in terms of cars, such as: “Clarence got the whooping cough when we had the Willys-Knight,” or, “Alex ran away with the Ledbetter girl right after we got the Hupmobile.”

“You know, Flick, there’s something I never told you about that Graham-Paige,” I said.

“Well, if you’re gonna tell me about the bad clutch it had, forget it. I know about that.”

Flick was showing off again.

“No, Flick, there’s something that’s been on my conscience for a long time. It has to do with that Graham-Paige.”

XXII
THE PERFECT CRIME

My father loved used cars even more than he loved the White Sox, if possible. A Used-Car Nut is even more dedicated than the ordinary car worshiper. A true zealot never thinks in terms of a
new
model. His entire frame of reference and system of values is based on acquiring someone else’s troubles. It is a dangerous game, and the uncertainty of it appeals to the true Used-Car
aficionado
the same way that Three Card Faro draws on the profligate.

My father, in company with other Used-Car fanatics, loved to spend long Saturday afternoons roaming the Used-Car lots on the South Side of Chicago, beating the bushes for hypothetical great buys and spectacular deals in Willys-Knights, Essexes, and Hudson Terraplanes. And when the Used-Car type actually tracked his car down and made the buy, it was a total commitment. All the way. And if the car turned out to be actually functional, his love for it far transcended the love and involvement of the lesser men who simply went to a dealer and bought a new car.

Anybody
can buy a new car and expect to get a fairly operative machine, but it takes guts, knowledge, and a reckless sense of deadly abandon to come home with, say, a Lafayette Six previously owned by other shadowy drivers that had gone
through God knows what hells, and to feel confident of victory. A used car, therefore, is a far more powerful love object than a new one. And my father played this deadly game to the hilt. Each succeeding used car was loved and babied, petted and honored in its turn.

Some of the great emotional scenes of his life occurred on Used-Car lots when he was deserting the Pontiac Eight for the “new” DeSoto. He would even go back day after day to see if they were treating the Pontiac well, and then would get moody and morose when it finally disappeared forever off the lot.

The new DeSoto—he always referred to each used car as “new”—at first would seem strange and formal to us, vaguely unfriendly, like living in someone else’s apartment. On Saturdays, when we cleaned the car, we’d find foreign hairpins and other people’s lost papers under the seats. But gradually the DeSoto or the Pontiac or the Hupmobile would become Ours.

Of course, at that time cars had distinctive personalities and characteristics in themselves and did not all come stamped out of the same mold, painted with the same paint, and advertised by the same agency. A Terraplane man was a completely different breed than, say, a Buick type. John Dillinger drove a Terraplane, which said a lot for the Terraplane type—an angry, rakish, wild machine. It was not a matter of Status then, but of attitude and personality, and the Used-Car man had the fiercest loyalties of all. He was usually not only dedicated to certain makes of cars but to specific years within the breeds. I remember spending long afternoons with my father, hunting for a particular Graham-Paige that reputedly was of the finest of vintage years.

The day we found that beautiful midnight blue four-door Graham, with its stark Gothic radiator grille, was one of the true Festival days of that epoch. She sat bracketed between an elderly Plymouth and a stodgy LaSalle, glowing darkly with a sort of prim, contained politeness—a true aristocrat unaccountably cast in with the rabble. She had more than a few years on her, but was spotless and ageless.

The old man lit up like a Christmas tree and immediately went into his cagey Used-Car Buyer’s cool, calculating bargaining character. It was exciting, in several ways. The contest between Father and
his
Friendly Fred, the imminent loss of the trusty old Pontiac—did the Graham have a sponge-rubber transmission? The lurking reefs of disaster were always there.

Later, the first time he wheeled the midnight blue Graham up the driveway and around the back, was just the beginning of it—the week-long Festival of Love for the new Graham.

At the time I was just below the legal minimum age limit for driving. And I used to sit in the back seat and watch my father shift gear, casually make left turns, back into parking spots, and wheel the Graham around like a second skin.

In the Midwest driving is like breathing. Kids living on the Maine coast learn to sail at a certain age. They all do. In the Midwest, driving is simply part of life, and they are serious about it. Afternoons, when the car was parked in back, I would sit in the front seat and practice shifting gears, working the clutch, and mentally whistling down US 41 in the center lane. And once in a very great while, when we would be out for a drive on a Sunday, my father would maybe let me back the car out of the driveway, or on the
really
great days he’d say:

“You want to take over?”

Do I want to take over! What a question!

He’d sit next to me:

“Easy on the clutch now.”

I’d ease the clutch out.

“Wait now, don’t shift to Second yet. There, get it moving. All right, into Second now. Well, for crying out loud, push the clutch all the way
IN
before you shift!
YOU’RE GONNA STRIP THE GEARS
! Here, lemme do it!”

Next thing I know I’m sitting in the back with my kid brother. Flubbed it again!

I was always trying to curry favor with both the Graham and my father by surprising him, especially on Sundays. The surprise consisted of washing the Graham or polishing the chrome with some pink stuff that my father used.