“Maybe I should take it on the road,” Wu told me after several weeks of trying. “I could be a shopping-center attraction: ‘Half a Chinaman exhibits half a Lunar Roving Vehicle. Kids and adults half price.’”
Wu’s humor masked bitter disappointment. But he kept trying. The JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) wouldn’t accept his calls. General Motors wouldn’t return them. Finally, the Huntsville Parks Department, which was considering putting together an Apollo Memorial, agreed to send their Assistant Administrator for Adult Recreation to have a look.
She arrived on the day my divorce became final. Wu and I met her in the garage, where I had been living while Diane and I were waiting to sell the house. Her eyes were big and blue-green, like Frankie’s. She measured the LRV and shook her head. “It’s like a dollar bill,” she said.
“How’s that?” Wu asked. He looked depressed. Or maybe skeptical. It was getting hard to tell the difference.
“If you have over half, it’s worth a whole dollar. If you have less than half, it’s worth nothing. You have slightly less than half of the LRV here, which means that it is worthless. What’ll you take for that old P1800, though? Isn’t that the one that was assembled in England?”
Which is how I met Candy. But that’s another story.
We closed on the house two days later. Since the garage went with it, I helped Wu move the half-LRV to his back yard, where it sits to this day. It was lighter than any motorcycle. We moved the P1800 (which had plates) onto the street, and on Saturday morning, I went to get the interior for it. Just as Wu had predicted, the Hole was easy to find now that it was no longer linked with the adjacency. I didn’t even have to stop at Boulevard Imports. I just turned off Conduit onto a likely looking street, and there it was.
The old man would hardly speak to me, but Frankie was understanding. “Your partner came out and gave me this,” he said. He showed me a yellow legal pad, on which was scrawled:
“He told me this explains it all, I guess.”
Frankie had stacked the boards of the shed against the garage. There was a cindery bare spot where the shed door had been; the cinders had that sour moon smell. “I was sick and tired of the tire disposal business, anyway,” Frankie confided in a whisper.
The old man came around the corner of the garage. “What happened to your buddy?” he asked.
“He’s going to school on Saturday mornings,” I said. Wu was studying to be a meteorologist. I was never sure if that was weather or shooting stars. Anyway, he had quit the law.
“Good riddance,” said the old man.
The old man charged me sixty-five dollars for the interior panels, knobs, handles, and trim. I had no choice but to pay up. I had the money, since I had sold Diane my half of the furniture. I was ready to start my new life. I didn’t want to own anything that wouldn’t fit into the tiny, heart-shaped trunk of the P1800.
That night, Wu helped me put in the seats, then the panels, knobs, and handles. We finished at midnight and it didn’t look bad, even though I knew the colors would look weird in the daylight—blue and white in a red car. Wu was grinning that mad grin again; it was the first time I had seen it since the Moon. He pointed over the rooftops to the east (towards Howard Beach, as a matter of fact). The Moon was rising. I was glad to see it looking so—far away.
Wu’s wife brought us some leftover wedding cake. I gave him the keys to the 145 and he gave me the keys to the P1800. “Guess we’re about even,” I said. I put out my hand, but Wu slapped it aside and gave me a hug instead, lifting me off the ground. Everybody should have a friend like Wilson Wu.
I followed the full Moon all the way to Alabama.