Car Sinister

by Robert Silverberg

  About a mile past the reservation, Harry turned into a narrow road that wound among oaks and maples into a park-like clearing. Diffidently, she accompanied him, and when he parked beneath a big oak, she parked beside him. She regretted it instantly when she felt his hand touch her chassis and begin its relentless journey toward her headlights again. This time her voice was anguished: “Don’t!”

  “What do you mean, don’t!” Harry said, and she felt the hard pressure of his chassis against hers, and the fumbling of his fingers around her headlights. She managed, somehow, to wheel out of his grasp, and find the road that led out of the clearing, but a moment later he was abreast of her, edging her toward the ditch. “Please!” she cried, but he paid no attention and moved in even closer. She felt his fender touch hers, and instinctively she shied away. Her right front wheel lost purchase, and she felt her whole chassis toppling. Her hardtop hat fell off, caromed off a rock and into a thicket. Her right front fender crumpled against a tree. Harry’s wheels spun furiously and a moment later the darkness devoured the red dots of his taillights.

  There was the sound of tree-toad and katydid and cricket, and far away, the traffic sound of Blacktop Boulevard. There was another sound too—the sound her sobs made as they wrenched free from her throat. Gradually, though, the sound subsided as the pain dulled, and the wound began to knit.

  It would never knit wholly, though. Arabella knew that. Any more than the Mr. Upswept wound had. She recovered her hardtop hat and eased back onto the road. The hat was dented on top, and a ragged scratch marred its turquoise sheen. A little tear ran down her cheek as she put it on and patted it into place.

  But the hat represented only half her problem. There was the crumpled right fender to contend with too. What in the world was she going to do? She didn’t dare show up at the office in the morning in such a disheveled state. Someone would be sure to turn her in to Big Jim if she did, and he’d find out how she’d been secretly defying him all these years by owning only one car outfit when he’d made it perfectly clear that he expected everybody to own at least two. Suppose he took her license away and relegated her to the nudist reservation? She didn’t think he would for such a minor deviation, but it was a possibility that she had to take into consideration. The mere thought of such a fate surfeited her with shame.

  In addition to Big Jim, there were her parents to be considered too. What was she going to tell them? She could just see them when she came down to breakfast in the morning. She could hear them too. “So you wrecked it already!” her father said. “I’ve had hundreds of car-dresses in my life,” said her mother, “and I never wrecked a single one, and here you go out and get one one minute and smash it up the next!”

  Arabella winced. She couldn’t possibly go through with it. Some way, somehow, she had to get the dress repaired tonight. But where? Suddenly she remembered a sign she’d noticed in the display window that afternoon—a sign which her preoccupation with the car-dress had crowded out of her awareness: 24-hour service.

  She drove back to town as fast as she dared and made a bee-line for the Big Jim building. Its windows were square wells of darkness and its street door was closed tight. Her disappointment became a sick emptiness in her stomach. Had she read the sign wrong? She could have sworn that it said 24-hour service.

  She drove up to the display window and read it again. She was right: it did say 24-hour service; but it also said, in smaller, qualifying letters, AFTER 6 P.M., APPLY AT USED-CAR LOT NEXT DOOR.

  The same young man who had taken the dress out of the window drove up to meet her when she turned into the entrance. Howard, his name was, she remembered. He was still wearing the same denim-blue pickup, and the old look she had noticed in his eyes before came back when he recognized her. She had suspected it was pity; now she knew it was. “My dress,” she blurted, when he braked beside her. “It’s ruined! Can you fix it, please?”

  He nodded. “Sure, I can fix it.” He pointed to a garagette at the back of the lot. “You can take it off in there,” he said.

  She drove hurriedly across the lot. Used car-dresses and g-suits lay all about her in the darkness. She glimpsed her old model, and the sight of it made her want to cry. If only she’d held on to it! If only she hadn’t let her better judgment be swayed by so tawdry an accouterment as a hardtop hat!

  It was cold in the garagette, cold and damp. She slipped out of her dress and hat and shoved them through the doorway to Howard, being careful not to reveal herself. But she needn’t have bothered, because he looked the other way when he took them. Probably he was used to dealing with modest females.

  She noticed the cold much more now, without her dress, and she huddled in a comer trying to keep warm. Presently she heard someone pounding outside and she went to the single window and peeked out into the lot. Howard was working on her right front fender. She could tell from the way he was going about it that he must have straightened hundreds of them. Except for the sound of his rubber mallet, the night was silent. The street beyond the Cape

  Cod fence was empty, and save for a lighted window or two, the office buildings across the way were in darkness. Above the building tops, the huge Big Jim sign that preempted the public square in the center of town was visible. It was an alternating sign:

  WHAT’S GOOD ENOUGH FOR BIG JIM IS GOOD ENOUGH FOR EVERYBODY,

  it said on the first circuit.

  IF IT WASN’T FOR BIG JIM, WHERE WOULD EVERYBODY BE?

  it asked on the second.

  Hammer hammer hammer . . . Suddenly she thought of a TV musical—one of a series entitled Opera Can Be Fun When Brought Up to Date—she’d listened to once, called Siegfried Roads, and she remembered the opening act in which Siegfried had kept importuning a sawed-off mechanic—supposedly his father—named Mime to build him a hot-rod superior to the Fafner model owned by the villain so that he could beat the latter in a forthcoming race at Valhalla. The hammer motif kept sounding forth on the bongo drums while Mime worked desperately on the new hot-rod, and Siegfried kept asking over and over who his real father was. Hammer hammer hammer . . .

  Howard had finished straightening her fender, and now he was working on her hardtop hat. Someone wearing a citron Providence passed in the street with a swish of tires, and a quality about the sound made her think of the time. She looked at her watch: 11:25. Her mother and father would be delighted when they asked her at breakfast what time she got in and she said, “Oh, around midnight.” They were always complaining about her early hours.

  Her thoughts came back to Howard. He had finished pounding out the dent in the hardtop hat and now he was touching up the scratch. Next, he touched up the scratches on the fender, and presently he brought both hat and dress back to the garagette and shoved them through the doorway. She slipped into them quickly and drove outside.

  His eyes regarded her from behind his windshield. A gentle light seemed to emanate from their blue depths. “How beautiful with wheels,” he said.

  She stared at him. “What did you say?”

  “Nothing, really. I was thinking of a story I read once.”

  “Oh.” She was surprised. Mechanics didn’t usually go in for reading—mechanics or anyone else. She was tempted to tell him that she liked to read too, but she thought better of it. “How much do I owe you?” she asked.

  “The dealer will send you a bill. I only work for him.”

  “All night?”

  “Till twelve. I just came on when you saw me this afternoon.”

  “I—I appreciate your fixing my dress. I—I don’t know what I would have done—” She left the sentence unfinished.

  The gentle light in his eyes went out. Bleakness took its place. “Which one was it? Harry Fourwheels?”

  She fought back her humiliation, forced herself to return his gaze. “Yes. Do—do you know him?”

  “Slightly,” Howard said, and she got the impression that slightly was enough. His face, in the tinselly radiance of the Big Jim sign, seemed suddenly older, and littl
e lines she hadn’t noticed before showed at the comers of his eyes. “What’s your name?” he asked abruptly.

  She told him. “Arabella,” he repeated, “Arabella Grille.” And then: “I’m Howard Highways.”

  They nodded to each other. Arabella looked at her watch. “I have to go now,” she said. “Thank you very much, Howard.”

  “You’re welcome,” Howard said. “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  She drove home through the quiet streets in the April darkness. Spring tiptoed up behind her and whispered in her ear: How beautiful with wheels. How beautiful with wheels! . . .

  “Well,” her father said over his eggs the following morning, “how was the double feature?”

  “Double feature?” Arabella asked, buttering a slice of toast.

  “Hah!” her father said. “So it wasn’t a double feature!”

  “In a way it probably was,” said her mother. “Two drive-ins—one with movie and one without.”

  Arabella suppressed a shudder. Her mother’s mind functioned with the directness of a TV commercial. In a way it matched the gaudy stationwagons she wore. She had on a red one now, with a bulbous grille and swept-back fins and dark heavy wipers. Again Arabella suppressed a shudder. “I—I had a nice time,” she said, “and I didn’t do a thing wrong.”

  “That’s news?” said her father.

  “Our chaste little twenty-seven—almost twenty-eight—year-old daughter,” said her mother. “Pure as the driven snow! I suppose you’ll do penance now for having stayed out so late by staying in nights and reading books.”

  “I told you,” Arabella said, “I don’t read books anymore.”

  “You might as well read them,” her father said.

  “I’ll bet you told him you never wanted to see him again just because he tried to kiss you,” said her mother. “The way you did with all the others.”

  “I did not!” Arabella was trembling now. “As a matter of fact I’m going out with him again tonight!”

  “Well!” said her father.

  “Three cheers!” said her mother. “Maybe now you’ll start doing right by Big Jim and get married and raise your quota of consumers and share the burden of the economy with the rest of your generation.”

  “Maybe I will!”

  She backed away from the table. She had never lied before and she was angry with herself. But it wasn’t until she was driving to work that she remembered that a lie once made, either had to be lived up to or admitted. And since admitting this one was unthinkable, she would have to live up to it . . . or at least give the impression that she was living up to it. That night she would have to go someplace and remain there till at least midnight or her parents would suspect the truth.

  The only place she could think of was a drive-in.

  She chose a different one from the one Harry Fourwheels had taken her to. The sun had set by the time she got there and the main feature was just beginning. It was a full-length animated fairy tale and concerned the adventures of a cute little teen-ager named Carbonella who lived with her stepmother and her two ugly stepsisters. She spent most of her time in a comer of the garage, washing and simonizing her stepmother’s and stepsisters’ car-dresses. They had all sorts of beautiful gowns—Washingtons and Lansings and Flints—while she, little Carbonella, had nothing but clunkers and old junk-heaps to wear. Finally, one day, the Big Jim dealer’s son announced that he was going to throw a big whingding at his father’s palatial garage. Immediately, the two stepsisters and the stepmother got out their best gowns for Carbonella to wash and simonize. Well, she washed and simonized them, and cried and cried because she didn’t have a decent dress to her name and couldn’t go to the whingding, and finally the night of the big event arrived and her two stepsisters and her stepmother got all chromed up in their car-gowns and took off gaily for the dealer’s garage. Left behind, Carbonella sank to her knees in the car-wash corner and burst into tears. Then, just as it was beginning to look as though Big Jim had deserted her, who should appear but the Fairy Car Mother, resplendent as a shining white Lansing de mille! Quick as scat, she waved her wand, and all of a sudden there was Carbonella, radiant as a new day, garbed in a carnation-pink Grandrapids with hubcaps so bright they almost knocked your eyes out. So Carbonella got to the whingding after all, and wheeled every dance with the dealer’s son while her ugly stepsisters and her stepmother did a slow burn along the wall. She was so happy she forgot that the Fairy Car Mother’s spell was scheduled to expire at midnight, and if the clock on the dealer’s Big Jim sign hadn’t begun to dong the magic hour she might have turned back into a car-wash girl right there in the middle of the showroom floor. She zoomed out the door then, and down the ramp, but in her haste to hide herself before the spell ended, she lost one of her wheels. The dealer’s son found it, and next day he made the rounds of all the garages in the Franchise, asking all the women who had attended his whingding to try it on. However, it was so small and dainty that it wouldn’t even begin to fit any of their axles no matter how much grease they used. After trying it on the axles of the two ugly stepsisters, the dealer’s son was about to give up when he happened to espy Carbonella sitting in the car-wash corner, simonizing a car-dress. Well, he wouldn’t have it any other way than for Carbonella to come out of the comer and try the wheel on, and what do you know, there before the horrified stares of the stepsisters and the stepmother, the wheel slid smoothly into place without even a smidgin of grease being necessary! Off Carbonella went with the dealer’s son, and they drove happily ever after.

  Arabella glanced at her watch: 10:30. Too early to go home yet, unless she wanted to leave herself wide open to another cynical cross-examination. Grimly she settled down in her parking place to watch Carbonella again. She wished now that she’d checked to see what picture was playing before driving in. Carbonella was classified as adult entertainment, but just the same, there were more kids in the drive-in than there were grownups, and she couldn’t help feeling self-conscious, parking there in her big car-dress in the midst of so many kiddy-car outfits.

  She stuck it out till eleven, then she left. It was her intention to drive around till midnight, and she probably would have done just that if she hadn’t decided to drive through town—and hadn’t, as a consequence, found herself on the street where the used-car lot was. The sight of the Cape Cod fence evoked pleasant associations, and she instinctively slowed down when she came opposite it. By the time she reached the entrance she was virtually crawling, so when she noticed the pickup-clad figure parked in front of it, it was only natural that she should stop.

  “Hi,” she said, “What are you doing?”

  He drove out to the curb, and when she saw his smile she was glad she had stopped. “I’m drinking a glass of April,” he said.

  “How does it taste?”

  “Delicious. I’ve always been partial to April. May comes close, but it’s slightly on the tepid side. As for June, July and August, they only whet my thirst for the golden wine of fall.”

  “Do you always talk in metaphors?”

  “Only to very special people,” he said. He was quiet for a moment then: “Why don’t you come in and park with me till twelve? Afterwards we’ll go some place for a hamburger and a beer.”

  “. . . All right.”

  Used car-dresses and g-suits still littered the lot, but her old car-dress was gone. She was glad, because the sight of it would only have depressed her, and she wanted the effervescence that was beginning in her breast to continue unchecked. Continue it did. The night was quite warm for

  April, and it was even possible now and then to see a star or two between the massive winks of the Big Jim sign. Howard talked about himself for a while, telling her how he was going to school days and working nights, but when she asked him what school, he said he’d talked about himself long enough and now it was her turn. So she told him about her job, and about the movies she went to, and the TV programs she watched, and finally she got around to the b
ooks she used to read.

  They both started talking then, first one and then the other, and the time went by like a robin flying south, and almost before she knew what had happened, there was the twelve-to-eight man driving into the lot, and she and Howard were heading for the Gravel Grille.

  “Maybe,” he said afterwards, when they drove down Macadam Place and paused in front of her garage, “you could stop by tomorrow night and we could drink another glass of April together. That is,” he added, “if you have no other plans.”

  “No,” she said. “I have no other plans”

  “I’ll be waiting for you then,” he said, and drove away.

  She watched his taillights diminish in the distance, and disappear. From somewhere came the sound of singing, and she looked around in the shadows of the street to find its source. But the street was empty except for herself and she realized finally that the singing was the singing of her heart.

  She thought the next day would never end, and then, when it finally did end, rain was falling out of an uninspiring sky. She wondered how April would taste in the rain, and presently she discovered—after another stint in a drive-in—that rain had little to do with the taste if the other ingredients were present, and she spent another winged night talking with Howard in the used-car lot, watching the stars between the winks of the Big Jim sign, afterwards driving with him to the Gravel Grille for hamburgers and beer, and finally saying good night to him in front of her garage.

  The other ingredients were present the next night, too, and the next and the next. Sunday she packed a lunch and they drove up into the hills for a picnic. Howard chose the highest one, and they climbed a winding road and parked on the crest under a wind-gaunt elm tree and ate the potato salad she had made, and the sandwiches, passing the coffee-thermos back and forth. Afterwards they smoked cigarettes in the afternoon wind and talked in lazy sentences.