The Third Level

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by Jack Finney


  I didn't tell anyone my Jordan was gone; there was no way to explain it. Ed Smiley and a couple of other guys asked me about it, and I said I was working on it in my garage. My folks didn't ask; they were long since used to my working on a car for weeks, then discovering I'd sold or traded it for something else.

  But I wanted — I simply had to have — another Playboy, and it took a long time to find one. I heard of one in Davenport and borrowed Jim Clark's Hudson and drove over, but it wasn't a Playboy, just a Jordan, and in miserable shape.

  It was a girl who found me a Playboy, after school started up in September. She was in my Economics II class, a sophomore, I learned, though I didn't remember seeing her around before. She wasn't actually a girl you'd turn and look at again and remember, I suppose; she wasn't actually pretty, I guess you'd have to say. But after I'd talked to her a few times and had a Coke date once when I ran into her downtown — then she was pretty. And I got to liking her, quite a lot. It's like this; I'm a guy who's going to want to get married pretty early. I've been dating girls since I was sixteen, and it's fun, and exciting, and I like it fine. But I've just about had my share of that, and I'd been looking at girls in a different way lately, a lot more interested in what they were like than in just how good-looking they were. And I knew pretty soon that this was a girl I could fall in love with, and marry, and be happy with. I won't be fooling around with old cars all my life; it's just a hobby, and I know it, and I wouldn't expect a girl to get all interested in exactly how the motor of an old Marmon works. But I would expect her to take some interest in how I feel about old cars. And she did — Helen McCauley, her name is. She really did; she understood what I was talking about, and it wasn't faked either, I could tell.

  So one night — we were going to the dance at the Roof Garden, and I'd called for her a little early, and we were sitting out on her lawn in deck chairs, killing time — I told her how I wanted one certain kind of old car and why it had to be just that car. And when I mentioned its name, she sat up, and said, Why, good heavens, I've heard about the Playboy from Dad all my life; we've got one out in the barn; it's a beat-up old mess, though. Dad! she called, turning to look up at the porch where her folks were sitting. Here's a man you've been looking for!

  Well, I'll cut it short. Her dad came down, and when he heard what it was all about, Helen and I never did get to the dance. We were out in that barn, the old tarpaulin pulled off his Jordan, and we were looking at it, touching it, sitting in it, talking about it, and quoting Playboy ads to each other, for the next three hours.

  It wasn't in bad shape at all. The upholstery was gone; only wads of horsehair and strips of brittle old leather left. The body was dented but not torn. A few parts, including one headlight and part of the windshield mounting, were gone, and the motor was a long way from running, but nothing serious. And all the wheels were there and in good shape, though they needed renickeling.

  Mr. McCauley gave me the car, and he wouldn't take a nickel for it. He'd owned that Jordan when he was young, had had it ever since, and loved it; he'd always meant, he said, to get it in running order again sometime but knew he never would now. And once he understood what I meant about restoring a classic, he said that to see it and drive it again as it once was was all the payment he wanted.

  I don't know just when I guessed, or why; but the feeling had been growing on me. Partly, I suppose, it was the color — the faded-out remains of the deep-green this old car had once been. And partly it was something else, I don't know just what. But suddenly — standing in that old barn with Helen and her mother and dad — suddenly I knew, and I glanced around the barn and found them: the old plates nailed up on a wall, 1923 through 1931. And when I walked over to look at them, I found what I knew I would find — 1923 Illinois tag 11,206.

  Your old Jordan plates? I said, and when he nodded, I said as casually as I could, What's your first name, Mr. McCauley?

  I suppose he thought I was crazy, but he said, Vincent. Why?

  Just wondered. I was picturing you driving around when the Jordan was new; it's a fast car, and it must have been a temptation to open it up.

  Oh, yeah. He laughed. I did that, all right; those were wild times.

  Racing trains, all that sort of thing, I suppose?

  That's right, he said, and Helen's mother glanced at me curiously. That was one of the things to do in those days. We almost got it one night too; scared me to death. Remember? he said to his wife.

  I certainly do.

  What happened? I said.

  Oh — he shrugged — I was racing a train, out west of town one night, where the road parallels the Q tracks. I passed it, heading for the crossroad — you know where it is — that cuts over the tracks. We got there, my arms started to move, to swing the wheel and shoot over the tracks in front of that engine — when I knew I couldn't make it. He shook his head. Two, three, seconds more — if we'd got there just two seconds earlier, I'd have risked it, I'm certain, and we'd have been killed, I know. But we were just those couple of seconds too late, and I swung that wheel straight again and shot on down the road beside that train, and when I took my foot off the gas pedal and the engine rushed past us, the fireman was leaning out of the cab, shaking his fist and shouting something, I couldn't hear what, but it wasn't complimentary. He grinned.

  Did anything delay you that night, I said softly, just long enough to keep you from getting killed? I was actually holding my breath, waiting for his answer.

  But he only shook his head. I don't know, he said without interest. I can't remember. And his wife said, I don't even remember where we'd been.

  I don't believe — I really don't — that my Jordan Playboy is anything more than metal, glass, rubber, and paint formed into a machine. It isn't alive; it can't think or feel; it's only a car. But I think it's an especial tragedy when a young couple's lives are cut off for no other reason than the sheer exuberance nature put into them. And I can't stop myself from feeling, true or not true, that when that old Jordan was restored — returned to precisely the way it had been just before young Vince McCauley and his girl had raced a train in it back in 1923 — when it was given a second chance, it went back to the time and place, back to the same evening in 1923, that would give them a second chance too. And so again, there on that warm July evening, actually there in the year 1923, they got into that Jordan, standing just where they'd parked it, to drive on and race that train. But trivial events can affect important ones following them — how often we've all said that if only this or that had happened everything would have turned out so differently. And this time it did, for now something was changed. This time on that 1923 July evening someone dashed in front of their car, delaying them only two or three seconds. But Vince McCauley, then, driving on to race along beside those tracks, changed his mind about trying to cross them and lived to marry the girl beside him. And to have a daughter.

  I haven't asked Helen to marry me, but she knows I shall; after I've graduated and got a job, I expect. And she knows that I know she'll say yes. We'll be married and have children, and I'm sure we'll be driving a modern hardtop car like everyone else, with safety catches on the doors so the kids won't fall out. But one thing for sure — just as her folks did 32 years before, we'll leave on our honeymoon in the Jordan Playboy.

  Contents of the Dead Man's Pocket

  At the little living-room desk Tom Benecke rolled two sheets of flimsy and a heavier top sheet, carbon paper sandwiched between them, into his portable. Interoffice Memo, the top sheet was headed, and he typed tomorrow's date just below this; then he glanced at a creased yellow sheet, covered with his own handwriting, beside the typewriter. Hot in here, he muttered to himself. Then, from the short hallway at his back, he heard the muffled clang of wire coat hangers in the bedroom closet, and at this reminder of what his wife was doing he thought: Hot, hell—guilty conscience.

  He got up, shoving his hands into the back pockets of his gray wash slacks, stepped to the living-room window beside the
desk, and stood breathing on the glass, watching the expanding circlet of mist, staring down through the autumn night at Lexington Avenue, eleven stories below. He was a tall, lean, dark-haired young man in a pullover sweater, who looked as though he had played not football, probably, but basketball in college. Now he placed the heels of his hands against the top edge of the lower window frame and shoved upward. But as usual the window didn't budge, and he had to lower his hands and then shoot them hard upward to jolt the window open a few inches. He dusted his hands, muttering.

  But still he didn't begin his work. He crossed the room to the hallway entrance and, leaning against the doorjamb, hands shoved into his back pockets again, he called, Clare? When his wife answered, he said, Sure you don't mind going alone?

  No. Her voice was muffled, and he knew her head and shoulders were in the bedroom closet. Then the tap of her high heels sounded on the wood floor and she appeared at the end of the little hallway, wearing a slip, both hands raised to one ear, clipping on an earring. She smiled at him—a slender, very pretty girl with light brown, almost blonde, hair—her prettiness emphasized by the pleasant nature that showed in her face. It's just that I hate you to miss this movie; you wanted to see it too.

  Yeah, I know. He ran his fingers through his hair. Got to get this done though.

  She nodded, accepting this. Then, glancing at the desk across the living room, she said, You work too much, though, Tom—and too hard.

  He smiled. You won't mind though, will you, when the money comes rolling in and I'm known as the Boy Wizard of Wholesale Groceries?

  I guess not. She smiled and turned back toward the bedroom.

  At his desk again, Tom lighted a cigarette; then a few moments later as Clare appeared, dressed and ready to leave, he set it on the rim of the ash tray. Just after seven, she said. I can make the beginning of the first feature.

  He walked to the front-door closet to help her on with her coat. He kissed her then and, for an instant, holding her close, smelling the perfume she had used, he was tempted to go with her; it was not actually true that he had to work tonight, though he very much wanted to. This was his own project, unannounced as yet in his office, and it could be postponed. But then they won't see it till Monday, he thought once again, and if I give it to the boss tomorrow he might read it over the weekend … Have a good time, he said aloud. He gave his wife a little swat and opened the door for her, feeling the air from the building hallway, smelling faintly of floor wax, stream past his face.

  He watched her walk down the hall, flicked a hand in response as she waved, and then he started to close the door, but it resisted for a moment. As the door opening narrowed, the current of warm air from the hallway, channeled through this smaller opening now, suddenly rushed past him with accelerated force. Behind him he heard the slap of the window curtains against the wall and the sound of paper fluttering from his desk, and he had to push to close the door.

  Turning, he saw a sheet of white paper drifting to the floor in a series of arcs, and another sheet, yellow, moving toward the window, caught in the dying current flowing through the narrow opening. As he watched, the paper struck the bottom edge of the window and hung there for an instant, plastered against the glass and wood. Then as the moving air stilled completely, the curtains swinging back from the wall to hang free again, he saw the yellow sheet drop to the window ledge and slide over out of sight.

  He ran across the room, grasped the bottom edge of the window, and tugged, staring through the glass. He saw the yellow sheet, dimly now in the darkness outside, lying on the ornamental ledge a yard below the window. Even as he watched, it was moving, scraping slowly along the ledge, pushed by the breeze that pressed steadily against the building wall. He heaved on the window with all his strength and it shot open with a bang, the window weight rattling in the casing. But the paper was past his reach and, leaning out into the night, he watched it scud steadily along the ledge to the south, half-plastered against the building wall. Above the muffled sound of the street traffic far below, he could hear the dry scrape of its movement, like a leaf on the pavement.

  The living room of the next apartment to the south projected a yard or more farther out toward the street than this one; because of this the Beneckes paid seven and a half dollars less rent than their neighbors. And now the yellow sheet, sliding along the stone ledge, nearly invisible in the night, was stopped by the projecting blank wall of the next apartment. It lay motionless, then, in the corner formed by the two walls—a good five yards away, pressed firmly against the ornate corner ornament of the ledge, by the breeze that moved past Tom Benecke's face.

  He knelt at the window and stared at the yellow paper for a full minute or more, waiting for it to move, to slide off the ledge and fall, hoping he could follow its course to the street, and then hurry down in the elevator and retrieve it. But it didn't move, and then he saw that the paper was caught firmly between a projection of the convoluted corner ornament and the ledge. He thought about the poker from the fireplace, then the broom, then the mop—discarding each thought as it occurred to him. There was nothing in the apartment long enough to reach that paper.

  It was hard for him to understand that he actually had to abandon it—it was ridiculous—and he began to curse. Of all the papers on his desk, why did it have to be this one in particular! On four long Saturday afternoons he had stood in supermarkets counting the people who passed certain displays, and the results were scribbled on that yellow sheet. From stacks of trade publications, gone over page by page in snatched half-hours at work and during evenings at home, he had copied facts, quotations, and figures onto that sheet. And he had carried it with him to the Public Library on Fifth Avenue, where he'd spent a dozen lunch hours and early evenings adding more. All were needed to support and lend authority to his idea for a new grocery-store display method; without them his idea was a mere opinion. And there they all lay in his own improvised shorthand—countless hours of work—out there on the ledge.

  For many seconds he believed he was going to abandon the yellow sheet, that there was nothing else to do. The work could be duplicated. But it would take two months, and the time to present this idea was now, for use in the spring displays. He struck his fist on the window ledge. Then he shrugged. Even though his plan were adopted, he told himself, it wouldn't bring him a raise in pay—not immediately, anyway, or as a direct result. It won't bring me a promotion either, he argued—not of itself.

  But just the same, and he couldn't escape the thought, this and other independent projects, some already done and others planned for the future, would gradually mark him out from the score of other young men in his company. They were the way to change from a name on the payroll to a name in the minds of the company officials. They were the beginning of the long, long climb to where he was determined to be, at the very top. And he knew he was going out there in the darkness, after the yellow sheet fifteen feet beyond his reach.

  By a kind of instinct, he instantly began making his intention acceptable to himself by laughing at it. The mental picture of himself sidling along the ledge outside was absurd—it was actually comical—and he smiled. He imagined himself describing it; it would make a good story at the office and, it occurred to him, would add a special interest and importance to his memorandum, which would do it no harm at all.

  To simply go out and get his paper was an easy task—he could be back here with it in less than two minutes—and he knew he wasn't deceiving himself. The ledge, he saw, measuring it with his eye, was about as wide as the length of his shoe, and perfectly flat. And every fifth row of brick in the face of the building, he remembered—leaning out, he verified this—was indented half an inch, enough for the tips of his fingers, enough to maintain balance easily. It occurred to him that if this ledge and wall were only a yard above ground—as he knelt at the window staring out, this thought was the final confirmation of his intention—he could move along the ledge indefinitely.

  On a sudden impulse, he got to
his feet, walked to the front closet, and took out an old tweed jacket; it would be cold outside. He put it on and buttoned it as he crossed the room rapidly toward the open window. In the back of his mind he knew he'd better hurry and get this over with before he thought too much, and at the window he didn't allow himself to hesitate.

  He swung a leg over the sill, then felt for and found the ledge a yard below the window with his foot. Gripping the bottom of the window frame very tightly and carefully, he slowly ducked his head under it, feeling on his face the sudden change from the warm air of the room to the chill outside. With infinite care he brought out his other leg, his mind concentrating on what he was doing. Then he slowly stood erect. Most of the putty, dried out and brittle, had dropped off the bottom edging of the window frame, he found, and the flat wooden edging provided a good gripping surface, a half-inch or more deep, for the tips of his fingers.

  Now, balanced easily and firmly, he stood on the ledge outside in the slight, chill breeze, eleven stories above the street, staring into his own lighted apartment, odd and different-seeming now.

  First his right hand, then his left, he carefully shifted his finger-tip grip from the puttyless window edging to an indented row of bricks directly to his right. It was hard to take the first shuffling sideways step then—to make himself move—and the fear stirred in his stomach, but he did it, again by not allowing himself time to think. And now—with his chest, stomach, and the left side of his face pressed against the rough cold brick—his lighted apartment was suddenly gone, and it was much darker out here than he had thought.

 

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