Six days later, an oak appeared in the driveway in the form of a full-sized car, a mammoth replica of the acorn that now sat on Ferguson’s desk as an all-purpose paperweight, or almost a replica, since the white Chevy Impala parked in the driveway had been built in 1960, not 1958, with two doors instead of the four doors in the model, and both of Ferguson’s parents were sitting in the car and honking the horn together, honking and honking until their son came down from his room to see what the commotion was about.
His mother explained that they had been planning to give it to him on the third, but the car had needed some work, and the repairs had taken a little longer than expected. She hoped he liked it, she said. They had thought about letting him choose one on his own, but then it wouldn’t have been a surprise, and the fun of giving a present like this was the surprise.
Ferguson said nothing.
His father frowned at him and asked: Well, Archie, what do you think? Do you like it or not?
Yes, he liked it. Of course he liked it. How could he not like it? He liked the car so much he wanted to get down on his knees and kiss it.
But how did you come up with the money? he finally asked. It must have cost a lot.
Less than you’d think, his father said. Only six-fifty.
Before or after the repairs?
Before. An even eight hundred after.
That’s a lot, Ferguson said. Way too much. You shouldn’t have done it.
Don’t be ridiculous, his mother said. I’ve taken a hundred portraits in the past six months, and now that the book is finished, what do you think is hanging on the walls of my famous men and women?
Ah, I see, Ferguson said. Not just the grant, but bonus money, too. How much did you charge them for the pleasure of looking at themselves?
A hundred and fifty a pop, his mother said.
Ferguson made a little whistling sound, nodding his head in appreciation.
A cool fifteen grand, his father added, just in case Ferguson was having trouble with the arithmetic.
You see? his mother said. We’re not going to the poorhouse, Archie, at least not today, and probably not tomorrow either. So shut up, get into your car, and take us somewhere, all right?
Thus began the Season of the Car. For the first time in his life, Ferguson was the master of his own comings and goings, the sovereign ruler of the spaces that surrounded him, with no god before him now but a six-cylinder internal combustion engine, which asked nothing more of him than a full tank of gas and an oil change every three thousand miles. Throughout the spring and into the early days of summer, he drove the car to school every morning, most often with Bobby George next to him up front and sometimes with a third person in back, and when school let out at a quarter past three, he no longer went straight home to sequester himself in his small bedroom but climbed back into the car and drove, drove for an hour or two without purpose or destination, drove for the pure satisfaction of driving, and after not knowing where he wanted to go for the first minutes or quarter hours of those drives, he often found himself meandering up to the South Mountain Reservation, the only patch of wilderness in all of Essex County, acres and acres of forests and hiking trails, a sanctuary that harbored owls and hummingbirds and hawks, a place of a million butterflies, and when he reached the top of the mountain he would get out of the car and look down at the immense valley below, town after town filled with houses and factories and schools and churches and parks, a view that encompassed more than twenty million people, one-tenth of the population of the United States, for it went all the way to the Hudson River and across into the city, and at the farthest limit of what Ferguson could see from the top ledge of the mountain, there were the tall buildings of New York, the Manhattan skyscrapers jutting out from the horizon like tiny stalks of grass, and once, as he looked at Amy’s city, he got it into his head that he should go see Amy herself, and suddenly he was in the car again, impulsively driving to New York through the mounting rush-hour traffic, and when he arrived at the Schneidermans’ apartment an hour and twenty minutes later, Amy, who was in the middle of doing her homework, was so surprised to see him when she opened the door that she let out a shriek.
Archie! she said. What are you doing here?
I’m here to kiss you, Ferguson said. Just one kiss, and then I have to be off.
Just one? she said.
Just one.
So Amy opened her arms and let him kiss her, and just as they were in the middle of their one kiss, Amy’s mother walked into the entranceway and said: Good God, Amy, what are you doing?
What does it look like, Ma? Amy said, as she jerked away her lips from Ferguson’s mouth and looked at her mother. I’m kissing the coolest guy on two legs.
It was Ferguson’s finest moment, the very pinnacle of his adolescent aspirations, the grand and foolish gesture he had dreamed of so often but had never found the courage to try, and because he didn’t want to spoil it by going back on his word, he bowed to Amy and her mother and then headed for the stairs. Out on the street, he said to himself: Without the car, it never would have happened. A car had nearly killed him in January, and now, just two months later, a car was giving his life back to him.
On Monday, March twenty-third, he decided not to wear the hat to school, and since his hair had grown back by then and his head looked more or less as it had always looked before the Vermont scalping, no one mentioned the absence of the hat except for three or four girls in his French class, among them Margaret O’Mara, who had once sent him a secret love note when they were in the sixth grade. On Thursday morning, the weather was so warm for that time of year that he decided to dispense with the glove as well. Again, no one said much of anything, and of all the people in his dwindling circle of friends, only Bobby George asked to take a close look at it, which Ferguson reluctantly allowed him to do — sticking out his left arm and letting Bobby take hold of the hand, which he then brought up to within six inches of his face and examined with the rapt scrutiny of a veteran surgeon, or perhaps a young, brainless child — it was hard to tell with Bobby — turning the hand back and forth and gently rubbing his fingers against the injured areas, and when he finally let go of it and Ferguson dropped his arm back down to his side, Bobby said: It’s looking real good, Archie. All healed up now and back to its old color.
Ever since the accident, people had been telling him stories about famous men who had also lost fingers and then had gone on to flourish in life, among them the baseball pitcher Mordecai Brown, better known as Three Finger Brown, who had won 239 games in a fourteen-year career and was elected to the Hall of Fame, and the silent film comedian Harold Lloyd, who had lost the thumb and forefinger of his right hand in a property bomb explosion, and still he managed to hang from the hands of that gigantic clock and perform a thousand other impossible stunts. Ferguson tried to take heart from those inspirational narratives, to see himself as a proud member of the fraternity of eight-fingered men, but rah-rah stuff of that ilk tended to leave him cold, or embarrass him, or repulse him with its treacly optimism, and yet still and all, with or without the examples of those other men to guide him, he was slowly coming to terms with the altered shape of his hand, beginning to get used to it, and when he finally took off the glove on March twenty-sixth, he figured the worst was behind him. What he failed to consider, however, was how comforting the glove had been to him, how much he had depended on it as a shield against the squirming horrors of self-consciousness, and now that the hand was naked again, now that he was trying to act as if everything had returned to normal, he fell into the habit of sticking his left hand into his pocket whenever he was with other people, which at school meant nearly all the time, and the demoralizing thing about this new habit was that he wasn’t aware of what he was doing, the gesture was made out of pure reflex, entirely independent of his will, and it was only when he had to take the hand out of the pocket for one reason or another that he understood the hand had been in the pocket in the first place. No one outside the school was aware of this tic, not Amy, not his mother and father, not his grandparents, since it wasn’t difficult to be brave around the people who cared about him, but Ferguson had turned into a coward at school and was beginning to despise himself for it. And yet how could he stop himself from doing something he didn’t even know he was doing? There seemed to be no answer to the problem, which was yet another instance of the old and intractable mind-body problem, in this case a mindless body part acting as if it had a mind of its own, but then, after a month of fruitless searching, an answer finally came to him, an altogether practical answer, and one by one he gathered up the four pairs of pants he wore to school, gave them to his mother, and asked her to sew up the front and back left pockets on each pair.