"Well, the first thing I learned," he said, and she didn't have to see a face or body language or anything like that to know he was stalling, so that bad news must be on the way here, sooner or later, "the first thing I learned, if they do talk to me, they're gonna lie to me. They said they were, they told those other guys that."
"Who were all those people?"
"I dunno, some kind of house party. I got the feeling it was like Dracula's house, you wouldn't want to go there after dark."
"You don't want to go there in the daytime. What was the other thing you learned, Freddie?"
Long silence. Very long silence. How bad could this bad news be? And then at last he said it: "Well, Peg, what they told those other guys, this situation is permanent."
She stared at the road, appalled. Out there, five drunken teenage boys, flopping around beside the road, made some hopeless attempt at hitchhiking; she didn't give them a second's thought. "Permanent?"
"What they say now," came his deeply gloomy voice, "was that the thing they told me was an antidote wasn't an antidote, so they lied to me from the very beginning, it was their other experiment, and they never figured to put those two experiments together, so they're trying to put it around it's my fault."
"Your fault! Doctors!" Peg cried, curling her upper lip, a thing she rarely did because it didn't look good on her. "Blame the patient!"
"That's it. They lied to me before about it being the antidote, and they told their pals they were gonna lie to me about it being permanent. So the only way I can trust those guys is when they don't know I'm around."
"That's probably true of all doctors," Peg said. "But what about it, Freddie? Why not get a second opinion?"
"I wouldn't trust anything they said to me."
"From a different doctor, Freddie. Have a different doctor examine you, as best he can."
"Peg, those are the guys made up those experiments, they're gonna know better than anybody else what's what with them."
Peg scrinched up her face, as though at a bad taste. "So you really think they're right, huh?"
"Well, Peg, I've had this thing a month now, with no booster shots or nothing like that. If it was gonna wear off, wouldn't it start by now?"
"I guess. Probably."
Another silence, each of them alone with troubled thoughts, and then Freddie said, "I know what you got to do, Peg, and I don't blame you. I'd do the same. I mean, with men, a woman's looks are more important than a man's looks to a woman. Imagine if I couldn't see that nice face anymore." Then, perhaps realizing the other implication of what he'd said, he added, "I mean, if you were invisible."
"I know, Freddie."
"Here, but I couldn't see you."
"I know, Freddie."
Something touched her right forearm; she couldn't help it, she flinched, but then immediately pretended she hadn't. Freddie said, "This doesn't change anything, Peg, not between you and me. You still got to go away, see how you feel, get away from this situation for a while."
She sighed, long and sincere. "Yeah, I do, I really do."
"We can still talk on the phone, you can still come up and see me — Jeez, Peg, the language is full of land mines — you can come up and visit me when you want, we won't have to worry about what happens long-term, just take it one day at a time."
"Okay, Freddie," she said, grateful to him and loving him and sorry for him and absolutely unable to go on living with him — not right this minute, anyway.
Some of their silences together were comfortable, but not this one. It was with a real grinding of gears being shifted that Freddie suddenly said, in a bright new artificial voice, "Well, anyway, did you get me a car?"
"I got you wheels," she said.
"What do you mean? It isn't a car?"
"No no no, it's a car."
"It's not a truck, or a hearse, or a school bus."
"Come on, Freddie, I'm not going to get you anything stupid. It's a car, okay?"
Did you ever have that feeling, even though you can't see anybody, you know eyes are watching you?
"What is it?"
"It's called a Hornet. An American Motors Hornet. It's eighteen years old, and in perfect mechanical condition, except the right window doesn't roll down."
"It's green, Peg."
"So?"
"The green Hornet, Peg?"
"You worry too much, Freddie," she told him.
This was Saturday morning, around eleven o'clock. Yesterday, when they'd gotten home, Freddie had taken a long hot tub, he'd had two big cheeseburgers and two ears of corn on the cob and two bottles of beer from Pennsylvania, and then he had slept until eight that evening, and woke up just in time to eat his way through a complete dinner, after which he'd announced he was beginning to feel a little better.
This morning, Peg had called the dealer over in Putkin to be sure the car was ready, which it was. Freddie, in Dick Tracy mode, then rode in the van with Peg to Putkin, left her there outside the used-car lot, and drove on back to the house. Half an hour later — even when the dealer says it's ready, it isn't ready — Peg showed up in this thing.
The green Hornet was very low, about elbow height, and small, with two doors and a backseat just big enough for two bags of groceries and one — not two — six-pack. The front and rear windows were both so steeply slanted they almost looked straight up. The rear and side windows were covered with smoky film, and even the windshield had a faint coppery gray tinge to it. The interior was very hard to see. Freddie said, "What's with the windshield?"
"It's bulletproof. All the windows are."
"Who owned this thing? Al Capone?"
"It's not that old, Freddie. I've got the car's whole history, and it only ever had one owner, and she was a little old lady—"
"Who only drove the car once a week."
"Well, yes," Peg agreed.
"To go to church on Sunday."
"Well, no," Peg said. "Actually, to go visit her son the ax murderer in the state penitentiary."
"That's what the dealer told you."
"He showed me the newspaper clippings," Peg said. "There's a law, there's a lemon law, if a car has anything unusual in its history that you oughta know about, like a bad accident or a dead body stuffed in the trunk for a couple months, anything like that, the dealer has to tell you."
"I've heard of a lot of laws," Freddie said, "and none of them have ever made a hell of a lot of sense, if you want my personal opinion, but that one there is just about the dumbest yet. You're makin a law that mice can fly."
"Nevertheless," Peg said, "he had to tell me the history, and that's why the car was so cheap. Three hundred bucks. With a one-year guarantee on everything except tires."
"Peg," Freddie said, "there's bumps all over this car, dents and bumps."
"Well, according to the news clippings," Peg said, "the ones the dealer showed me, the people in the neighborhood hated the family, especially because the mother always kept saying her son was a good boy—"
"They always do."
"So people would throw rocks at the car every time she went by. That's why the bulletproof glass, too. And that isn't the original paint."
"No, I could see that," Freddie said. "You don't usually get brush marks on a factory job. Peg, when I drive this thing around, people are gonna throw rocks at me?"
"No, no, this all happened in Maryland. They had to move the car far away to a different state so they could sell it at all. When they auctioned it."
"Who auctioned it?"
"It was a consignment from the state of Maryland. Apparently, this dealer in Putkin is the only one even put in a bid."
"How come it was up for auction? What happened?"