* * * *
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?