The mean-looking old guy kind of shifted position and looked at various pieces of gravel, but he didn’t have anything else to say. So the others all turned back to Ken with their big smiles on again.
Smiles that Ken mistrusted; none of this behavior was traditional. Lowering his window another fraction of an inch, he said, “Ngyou dough wanna argnue?”
Kelp grinned amiably at him. “Argue with a fluent guy like you? I wouldn’t dare. Have a happy. Drive it in good health.” Then he leaned closer, more confidentially, to say, “Listen; the brake’s a little soft.”
The other vehicles were all out of the way now, but people kept milling around back there. The van driver returned from moving his van to lean down by Ken’s window and say, “You heading back to the city? What you do, take the Palisades. Forget the Tappan Zee.”
Ken couldn’t stand it. Trying hopelessly to regain some sense of control over his own destiny, he stared around, grabbed the tambourine, shoved it into the van driver’s hand: “Here. This ain’t the bank’s,” he said, the clearest sentence of his life.
The blond guy stood down by the sidewalk and gestured for Ken to back it up; he was going to guide him out to the street. Ken put the Cadillac in reverse again, and the woman from the porch came over to say, “You want a glass of water before you go?”
“Gno!” Ken screamed. “Gno! Just lemme outta here!”
They did, too. Three or four of them gave him useful hand signals while he backed out to the street, and then all nine of them stood in the street to wave good-bye; a thing that has never happened to a car hawk before.
Ken Warren had his Cadillac but, as he drove away, he just didn’t look very happy about it. Much of the fun seemed to have gone out of the transaction for him.
FIFTY-EIGHT
Two solid weeks of beautiful weather. Clear sunny days, low humidity, temperature in the seventies, air so brisk and clean you could read E PLURIBUS UNUM on a dime across the street. Clear cloudless nights, temperature in the fifties, the sky a great soft raven’s breast, an immense bowl of octopus ink salted with a million hard white crystalline stars and garnished with a huge moon pulsing with white light. It was disgusting.
The problem was, to take the boat out on the reservoir, they needed darkness, clouds, no moon. They didn’t need nights so bright you could read a newspaper in the back yard (Kelp did, which Dortmunder hated). They didn’t need nights so bright that the local drive-in movie shut down because people couldn’t see the screen. “In darkness deep the darkest deeds are done,/And villains all retreat before the sun,” as the poet put it. Dortmunder didn’t know that particular verse, but he would have agreed with it.
It was a big house, 46 Oak Street, but it had never expected to house nine people and a computer. Dortmunder and May occupied the master bedroom, upstairs front over the living room. Stan and Tiny shared the other front bedroom, Stan sleeping on the box spring and Tiny tossing uncomfortably on the mattress on the floor. Kelp and Wally and the computer filled the large bedroom at the rear, Wally being the one on this mattress on the floor (he didn’t seem to mind), while Doug had been shoehorned into the last bedroom, with Tom. Since Tom would not divide his bed, Doug had brought up a sleeping bag; when it was open and occupied, the room was so full the door couldn’t be opened. And, finally, the small utility room off the kitchen downstairs contained a cot which was Murch’s Mom’s portion. The three bathrooms—two up, one down—were fought over constantly.
Idle days in Dudson Center aren’t exactly the same as idle days in Metropolis. Wally still had his computer, still could spend his days and nights battling unambiguous enemies in far-flung galaxies, but for the rest of them certain adjustments had to be made. Doug had a local girlfriend, whom he kept scrupulously away from the others (not even telling her he had a place to stay here in town), and with whom he spent as much of his free time as he could, and other than that he commuted four days a week to his Dive Shop, three hours each way, driving doggedly back to Dudson Center every night just in case the weather should break. Tiny traveled with him as far as New York about half the time, not liking to be for very long away from his own lady friend, J. C. Taylor.
Other than that, though, time hung heavy.
The regulars in the Shamrock Family Tavern on South Main Street were talking about the railroad. “I worked for the railroad,” one unshaved retiree announced, “when it was the railroad. You know what I mean?”
“I know exactly what you mean,” said the guy to his right. “New York Central. D&H. Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western. Those were railroads.”
Down at the end of the bar, Dortmunder and Kelp drank beer.
“Union Station up in Albany,” the first regular said, with a little catch in his voice, holding up his bourbon and Diet Pepsi. “Now, that was a beautiful station. That station was like a church.”
“Grand Central Station,” intoned his pal. “Crossroads of a million private lives.”
“You know,” said a third regular, joining the conversation, “some people confuse that line with the Naked City motto.”
A fourth chimed in: “There are eight million stories in the naked city.”
“Exactly,” said the third.
“Let’s get outta here,” Dortmunder said.
Stan had brought home a dark blue Lincoln Atlantis, a huge old steamboat of a car, which he was “fixing up” in the driveway beside the house. Along about the third day, May came out onto the porch with her hands in a dish towel—she’d never done that before, was doing it unconsciously now—and looked with disapproval at what Stan, with help from Tiny, was wroughting. On newspapers spread on the lawn squatted any number of automobile parts, all of them caked with black oily grime. The Lincoln’s huge hood had been removed from the car and now leaned against the chain-link fence like a Titan’s shield. The moth-eaten old backseat was out and lying on the gravel between the car and the street in plain sight of the entire neighborhood.
“Stan,” May said, “I’ve got two phone calls already today.”
Stan and Tiny lifted their heads out of the hoodless engine compartment. They were as grimy and oil-streaked as the auto parts. Stan asked, “Yeah?”
“About this car,” May told him.
“Not for sale,” Stan said.
“One, there’s no papers,” Tiny added.
Stan was about to dive back into his disassembled engine when May said, “Complaints about the car.”
They looked at her in surprise. Stan said, “Complaints?”
“It’s an eyesore. The neighbors think it detracts from the tone.”
Tiny scratched his oily head with an oily hand. “Tone? Whadaya mean, tone?”
“The quality of the neighborhood,” May told him.
“That’s some quality,” Stan said, getting a little miffed. “Down where I live in Brooklyn, I got two, three cars I’m working on at a time, I never get a complaint. All over the neighborhood, guys are working on their cars. And it’s a terrific neighborhood. So what’s the big deal?”
“Well, look around this neighborhood,” May advised him, taking one hand out from under the dish towel to wave it generally about. “These people are neat, Stan, they’re clean. That’s the way they like it.”
Gazing up and down the street, Stan said, “How do they fix their cars?”
“I think,” May said carefully, “they take them to the garage for the mechanic to fix, when something goes wrong.”