"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.
2
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 dreadfuclass="underline" 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.
That appeared to be a tallish blondish woman slamming with a great heave-to the door of a huge sedan in the dealership's parking lot. If he had a pair of binoculars he might be able to resolve the figure. Did she have a little dog on a leash? Why would that be? He bent forward, as though to bring himself a little closer to the scene, and at that moment felt a touch on his back, so that he leapt, startled.
"Hey,” said Roo. “How you doing?"
"Um. Good. Quite well. You guv me a start, as they say down where I come from."
She sat beside him, hands in the pockets of a sheepskin coat. “Yeah? Where's that?"
"Kentucky."
"You don't sound like a southerner. Or a hillbilly."
"Good. Are you not working today?"
She shrugged. “You?"
"Well, you know. I loaf for a living,” Pierce said.
She laughed. Her teeth were astonishingly crooked, a great gap in the middle, and others crowding the row like spectators at a streefight. They sat there in the last of the spring sun for a time, and talked on general topics, each ready at any moment to back away if an impasse was reached and politely take leave. But that didn't quite happen, and evening came, and they still sat. She learned that Pierce had taught college once upon a time, and did no more; that he'd set out to write a book, and had given it up; that he was in a dispute with his former landlord about a lease and that his belongings languished in the old place; that he was living at the Morpheus Arms on a grant from the Rasmussen Foundation that he hadn't quite earned, and was without a further plan. She passed no judgment on this career, even while making it plain that it seemed to her a waste of some uncommon resources.