“Yeah, but you never killed anybody.”
“Could’ve,” he said. “I was pissed as a newt.”
“What’s a newt?”
He ignored the question. “I blew three times the limit. Weaving all over the road. Thank God I got pulled over before I did kill somebody. They took away my license forever.”
“But you stopped drinking.”
“That I did.”
“So can’t you appeal or something? Get your license back?”
“Don’t deserve it,” he said. “And what if I fall off the wagon one day?” He shook his head. “No, I shouldn’t be on the road. You have to pay a price for that kind of thing. I’m willing to accept that.”
“But you kept your car. Even though you can’t drive.”
“I kept that car. But my regular car, that was a five-year-old Dodge. I gave that one up. But Finny, a beauty like that, well, that’s a whole different story. Car like that is pretty hard to part with.” His smile returned. “Best thing that’s happened to me in years is you peeking through the window that night.”
“What do you mean?”
“Means I got to ride in Finny again. Sitting in the passenger seat’s almost as good as sitting behind the wheel. For years there, all I did was run the engine with it sittin’ in the garage. Once or twice, thought about running a hose from the tailpipe in through the window, but I put that thought out of my head. So I’d put it in drive, go ahead a foot, put it in reverse and go a foot back. Almost as bad as when I was fifteen and I used to run my dad’s old Ford back and forth in the driveway.”
“You shouldn’t joke about killing yourself,” Katie said.
“Wasn’t a joke,” he said.
“Why would you want to do that?”
Bruce appeared pensive. “Before Barbara passed — this would have been ten years, no, eleven years ago — I was hitting the bottle pretty hard, and then after, I guess I was into it even harder, until I got that ticket, and, well, that smartened me up as far as the booze was concerned. But then, once I got sober, and realized there wasn’t much left to live for... the drinking kind of helped me forget that.”
“So,” Katie said, “what made you not do it?”
He smiled. “I was worried about who’d look after Finny.”
“You’re not serious,” she said.
“I know. It sounds crazy.”
Katie took a quick slurp of her coffee. “Look, I should go. Maybe Archie’ll realize the trouble he’s going to be in and come home. He might not get into trouble while he’s in the Arrival, but once he gets out, who knows what he’ll do.”
Bruce pursed his lips, slowly exhaled, then ran his tongue over his teeth.
“What?” Katie asked.
“Thinkin’.”
“Oh.” She nodded. “I thought I smelled something burning.”
“Why don’t we go look for him?”
Katie paused. “What do you mean? You mean, in the car?”
Bruce smiled slyly. “Yeah. In the car.”
“But regular cars — cars that people actually drive — aren’t supposed to be on the road right now. They’re not even supposed to be on the island. Everybody put them on the ferry and left them on the mainland. That’s why we’ve been doing my driving lessons at night. Remember?”
Bruce shrugged. “Maybe I don’t give a damn anymore.”
“Yeah, well, who are you planning on putting behind the wheel?”
“You,” he said. “You’re a good driver.”
“Yeah, but I don’t have a license. Did you forget about that, too?”
Bruce mulled that one over. “If we get stopped, we’ll say it was an emergency.” He thought about that. “I was out of eggs. Wanted to make an omelette, went to the fridge, didn’t have any goddamn eggs.”
“That is not an emergency,” Katie said.
“Oh yes, it is,” he said confidently. “You ever had one of my omelettes?”
“You’re losing it, Bruce.”
“Come on,” he said. “There’s never been a better time to take a spin. There’s no cops on the roads. There’s nothing for them to do except hang out at Dunkin’ Donuts all day.”
Katie gave the proposal some thought. “If we did get stopped, I’d just say I was trying to find my brother. That I was worried he might be in trouble.”
“There you go,” Bruce said. “Come on.”
He reached into a decorative bowl on the kitchen counter, grabbed a set of car keys, and then tossed them to Katie. She wasn’t expecting them, and fumbled the catch. The keys hit the floor.
“You play for the Red Sox?” Bruce asked as she bent over to retrieve them.
He was already leaving the kitchen and heading down a short hallway to the door that led into the garage. Katie caught up to him as he opened it and reached around for the switch. The garage was bathed in light as they stepped inside.
And there was Finny.
“Every time I step in here,” he said, “she takes my breath away.”
It was easy to understand why. The gleaming black car, which had been backed into the garage, overwhelmed the space. The garage had probably been designed to hold one average-sized vehicle, not a land yacht like this.
“What year is it again?” Katie asked.
“This,” Bruce said, taking a breath, “is the 1959 Cadillac Coupe de Ville. It’s two hundred and twenty-five inches long, a wheelbase of one hundred and thirty inches, with a three-hundred-and-ninety-cubic-inch V-8 under that hood up there.”
“You’ve told me all this stuff before. I was just asking about the year.”
“You want to know how many of these babies they made?”
“Not really.”
“They cranked out 21,924. No idea how many of them are still around. But I’d bet you there aren’t many as nice as this one. One of the most beautiful cars ever made and the absolute peak of the tailfin craze.”
“Yeah, about these,” Katie said, taking a step toward the car and touching her index finger to the chrome-trimmed tip of one of the two massive tailfins on each of the rear fenders. “Why does the car have these? I mean, do they actually do anything?”
Bruce smiled. “They don’t have to do anything, Katie. They just are.”
She tapped her finger again on the sharp tip of the left tailfin. “I’d hate to run into this at sixty miles an hour.”
“Interesting fact,” Bruce said. “There were actual incidents of people — motorcyclists, I believe — being impaled on those beauties. It was in Ralph Nader’s book on safety deficiencies in the American auto industry, most notably where the Chevrolet Corvair was concerned, which—”
Katie rested a hand gently on Bruce’s arm. “Please,” she said. “Stop.”
He nodded slowly. “I get carried away sometimes. So, why don’t you get behind the wheel?”
Katie did a walkaround of the car, fitting into the narrow space between the massive front grille and the closed garage door. “There’s so much chrome here,” she said. “There’s enough here to make a million toasters.” She looked across the huge hood and said, “Do they mine chrome? Does chrome come from underground or something?”
Bruce said, “Get in the car.”
Katie shimmied between the driver’s side of the car and the wall, which was lined with wood shelves bearing half-empty cans of paint. She eased open the door, careful not to bump the shelves, and slithered in behind the wheel like a snake.
Bruce got in on the other side and gently closed the door. Katie glanced across the expansive bench seat and said, “You’re like a mile away.”