I asked him how his X-ray had gone and in answer he asked me if I were hungry. It occurred to me that indeed I was; the popcorn and the Jordan Almonds had settled into a sour aftertaste. We stopped at the trolley-shaped diner beside the Acme’s parking lot. My father conducted himself in the city with a simplicity that was soothing. My mother made too much of a decision of everything, as if she were trying to ex press herself in a foreign language. Just so, in the country my father was confused in action and circuitous in thought. But here, in Alton at quarter after eight o’clock, he handled himself with the deftness, the expertness that is, after all, most of what we hope for from fathers: the door pushed open, the glare and stares calmly blinked down, the two stools located side by side, the menu knowingly plucked from its place between the/ napkin dispenser and the catsup bottle, the counterman addressed without stridence or equivocating, the sandwiches-his a Western egg, mine a toasted ham-consumed in manful silence. My father quietly sucked the three central fingers of his right hand and pinched his lower lip with a paper napkin. “First time I’ve felt like eating in weeks,” he said to me. In conclusion we ordered apple pie for me and coffee for him; the check was a stiff green tab cryptically nipped by a triangular punch. He paid it with one of two dollar bills left in the worn hip wallet that had curved through the years to fit his haunch. As we rose my father noncommittally slipped, with a practiced flick of his wart-freckled hand, two dimes beneath his empty cup. And as an afterthought he bought for 65¢ one of the diner’s ready-made Italian sandwiches. It was to be a present for my mother. There was a vulgar side to my mother which apparently enjoyed smelly slippery Italian sandwiches and to which my father had, I saw jealously, more access than I. He paid for the sandwich with his last dollar and said, “That cleans me out, kid. You and I are penniless orphans.” Swinging the little brown paper bag, he walked us to the car.
The Buick was still alone, brooding on its shadow. Its nose was tipped up the slope, toward the unseen tracks. Menthol like a vaporized moon suffused the icy air. The factory wall was a sheer cliff mixed of brick and black glass. The panes of glass were now and then mysteriously relieved by a pane of cardboard or tin. The brick did not yield its true color to the streetlamp that lit the area but instead showed as a diminution of black, a withdrawn and deadly gray. This same light made the strange gravel here glitter. Compounded of coal chips and cinders, it made a loud and restless earth that never settled, crackling and shifting under foot as if its destiny were to be perpetually raked. Silence encircled us. Not a window looking at us was lit, though deep in the factory a blue glint kept watch. My father and I could have been murdered in this place and until dawn no one would have known. Our bodies would lie in the puddles near the factory wall and our hands and hair would freeze solid into the ice.
The car was slow to start in the cold. Unh-uh, unh-uh, the engine grunted, at first briskly and then more and more slowly, self-discouraged. “Jesus, don’t quit on me now,” my father breathed in a dancing stream of vapor. “Start one more time and tomorrow I’ll get your battery charged.”
Unnh-uh, unnnnnh-ah.
My father switched off the ignition and we sat in the dark. He made a loose fist and blew into it. “See,” I said, “if you’d worn your gloves you’d have ‘em now.”
“You must be frozen to death,” was his answer. “One more time,” he said, and switched the ignition back on and de pressed the starter button with his thumb. In the pause, the battery had gathered a little juice. It commenced hopefully.
Ih-huh, Ih-huh, uh-uh, unnh-uh, unnhn-ah, uhhhh. We scraped the bottom of the battery.
My father pulled the emergency brake a notch tighter, and said to me, “We’re in the soup. We’ll have to try a desperation measure. You get in behind the wheel, Peter, and I’ll get out and push. We have a little slope here but we’re pointed the wrong way. Put the car into reverse. When I shout, let the clutch out. Don’t ease it out, pop it out.”
“Maybe we should get a garageman now, before they close,” I said. I was frightened of failing him.
“Let’s give this a whirl,” he said. “You can do it.”
He got out of the car and I slid over, accidentally sitting on my books and the paper bag containing the Italian sandwich for my mother. My father went to the front of the car and as he stooped to put his weight into it his grinning face burned yellow like a gnome’s. The light of the headlights cut across his face so sharply his forehead seemed all knobs and it was plain how often his nose had been broken when he played football at college thirty years ago. My stomach clenched coldly as I checked the position of the gear shift and ignition switch and choke. At a nod from my father I released the emergency brake. Only the ovoid of his imbecile blue cap showed above the hood as he pitched his weight into the car. It did move backwards. The crunching of the tires on the gravel lifted in pitch; grinding backwards we struck a little declivity that added a precious bit of momentum; the Buick’s inertia for a moment tugged to be free of itself. In a piercing sob my father shouted, “Now!” I popped out the clutch as I had been told to do. The car snapped to a stop jaggedly; but its motion was transferred through crusty knobs and clogged pivots to the engine, which, like a slapped baby, coughed. The motor gasped and shook the frame as its cylinders erratically exploded; I pushed in the choke halfway, trying not to smother it, and jiggled my foot on the accelerator: this was the mistake. Twitched out of tune, the motor missed one, two beats, and died.
We were on the flat. Far away beyond the factory wall the door of a bar opened and a slat of light collapsed into the street.
My father flashed to my door and I lurched over, sickly ashamed. My body burned all over; I needed to urinate. “Son of a bitch,” I said, to distract with my manliness my father from my failure.
“You did O.K., kid,” he said, panting with excitement as he resumed his place behind the wheel. “The engine’s stiff; that may have loosened it up.” Delicately as a safecracker, his black silhouette picked at the dashboard as his foot probed the gas pedal. It had to be on the first try and it was. He found the spark again and nursed it into roaring life. I closed my eyes in thanks and relaxed into the coming motion of the car.
It did not come. Instead, a faint disjointed purr arose from the rear of the chassis, where I imagined the corpses had been carried when the undertaker owned the car. My father’s shadow hurriedly tried all the gears; to each the same faint and unmoving purr answered. He tried each gear twice in disbelief. The motor roared but the car did not move. The factory wall echoed back the frantic sustained crescendo of the cylinders and I was afraid men would be called toward us out of the distant bar.
My father put his arms up on the wheel and lowered his head into them. It was a thing I had only ever seen my mother do. At the height of some quarrel or sadness she would crook her arms on the table and lower her head into them; it frightened me more than any rage, for in the rage you could watch her face.
“Daddy?”
My father did not answer. The streetlight touched with a row of steady flecks the curve of his knit cap: the way Vermeer outlined a loaf of bread.
“What do you think’s wrong?”
Now it occurred to me he had had an “attack” and the in explicable behavior of the car was in fact an illusionistic reflection of some breakage in himself. I was about to touch him-I never touched my father-when he looked up with a smile of sorts on his bumpy and battered urchin’s face. “This is the kind of thing,” he said, “that’s been happening to me all my life. I’m sorry you got involved in it. I don’t know why the damn car doesn’t move. Same reason the swimming team doesn’t win, I suppose.”