A Permanent Member of the Family

by Russell Banks

  The Sunshine Cars USA showroom is a peach-colored concrete bunker, windowless on three sides with a large plate glass window facing the street. The exterior walls of the building and the window are decorated with signs that shout, We Work With Any Credit Type! and promise $1,000 Down—You Ride! The spiked fence runs behind the showroom from one corner of the building to the other like a corral for a hundred or more used cars, closing off half the block between Ninety-seventh and Ninety-eighth Streets. Every ten feet droops an American flag the size of a bedsheet waiting for an early evening offshore breeze.

  Ventana stops in front of the big plate glass window and looks into the dimly lit showroom beyond. A very fat black man in a short-sleeved white guayabera shirt sits behind a desk reading a newspaper. A red-faced white man with a shaved head, wearing a black T-shirt and skinny jeans, talks into his cell phone. Multicolored tattoos swarm up and down his pink arms. Ventana has seen both men many times hanging around the showroom and sometimes strolling through the lot with potential buyers, and though she has never actually spoken with either man, she feels she knows them personally.

  She likes the black man. She believes he’s more honest than the white man, who is probably the boss, and decides that she will buy her car from the black salesman, give him the commission, when suddenly a woman is standing beside her on the sidewalk. She’s a fawn-colored Hispanic girl half Ventana’s size and age. Her lips are puffed up from the injections that skinny white and Latina ladies think make them look sexy, but instead make them look like they got popped in the mouth by their bad boyfriend.

  The girl smiles broadly as if she’s known Ventana since their school days together, although Ventana has never seen her before. She says, “Hi, there, missus. You want to drive away with a nice new car today? Or you still just window-shopping? I see you walk by almost every day, you know. Time you took a car out on a test drive, don’t you think?”

  “You see me going past?”

  “Sure. Ever since I started here I been seeing you. Time to stop lookin’, girl, time to start drivin’ your new car.”

  “Not a new car. Used car. Pre-owned car.”

  “Okay! That’s what we got at Sunshine Cars USA, guaranteed pre-owned cars! Certified and warranteed. Not new, okay, but like new! What you got in mind, missus? My name’s Tatiana, by the way.” The girl sticks out her hand.

  Ventana shakes the hand gently—it’s small and cold. “I’m Ventana. Ventana Robertson. I only live two blocks off Seventh on Ninety-fifth, that’s why you been seeing me here before. On account of the bus stop at a hundred and third.” She doesn’t want the girl to think she’s already decided to buy herself a car today and is carrying the cash to do it. She doesn’t want to look like an easy sale. And she is hoping the fat black man will come out.

  “Okay, Ventana! That’s great. Do you own your place on Ninety-fifth, or rent?”

  “Own.”

  “Okay. That’s perfect. Married? Live alone?”

  “Divorced. Alone.”

  “Okay, that’s wonderful, Ventana. And I know you have a steady job that you go to every morning and come home from every night, because I see you coming and going, and that’s very good, the steady job. So what’s your price range, Ventana? What can I fit you into today?”

  “I’m thinking something like under thirty-five hundred dollars. But I’ll look around on my own for a while, thanks. The price tags, they on the cars?”

  “Yes, they sure are! You just go ahead and kick the tires, Ventana. Check over on the far side of the lot, way in the back two rows. We’ve got a bunch of terrific vehicles right there in your price range. Will you be bringing us a trade?”

  “Trade?”

  “A car to trade up for the new one.”

  “No.”

  “Okay, that’s good too. We close at six, Ventana, but I’ll be inside if you have any questions or decide you want to take a test drive in one of our excellent vehicles. It’s still too hot out here for me. Don’t forget, we can work with any kind of credit type. There’s all kinds of arrangements for credit readily available through our own financing company. You have a Florida driver’s license, right?”

  Ventana nods and walks calmly through the open gate into the lot as if she’s already bought and paid for her car, although her legs feel wobbly and she’s pretty sure she is trembling, but doesn’t want to look at her hands to find out. She knows she’s scared, but can’t name what she is scared of.

  Tatiana watches her for a few seconds, wondering if she should follow her, the hell with the heat, then decides the woman isn’t really serious yet. She strolls back inside the showroom and reports that the woman is a long-term tire kicker, probably a month or more from signing away her firstborn, which makes the black man chuckle and the white man snort.

  The black man checks his watch. “Yeah, well, she only got thirty minutes till we outa here.”

  Tatiana says, “She’ll be back tomorrow. Early, I bet. The girl’s decided where she’s going to buy, now she just got to figure out what to buy.”

  “How much she got to spend?” the black man asks.

  “She’s sayin’ three-five. I’ll start her at five and work up from there.”

  “Too low. The ’02 DeVille, start her with that. The bronze one. It’s listed at nine. Tell her she can drive it home for six. Fifty-nine ninety-nine. Sisters like her, they too old for the Grand Ams but still hot enough to want a Caddy. She got the three-five?”

  “Prob’ly.”

  “Gonna need financing. Forget the fucking Caddy. Go higher.”

  “For sure.”

  “Get her into the blue Beemer,” the white man says.

  VENTANA MAKES HER WAY toward the cars in the far corner of the lot, as instructed. She walks quickly past and deliberately avoids looking at the nearly new cars that she knows she can’t afford. She doesn’t want her car, when she finds it, to appear shabby and old by comparison, not pre-owned but used. Used up.

  When she gets to the far corner of the lot and walks past the cars that are supposed to be in her price range, most of them look used up. Rusted, scraped, dinged and dented, they seem ready for the junk heap, just this side of the cars sitting on cinder blocks or sinking into the weeds in the front yards of half the houses in her neighborhood, unsolvable mechanical problems waiting to be solved by the miraculous arrival of a pocketful of cash money from a lottery ticket payout, which will never come, and the vehicle will be finally sold for junk.

  There is a black 2002 Honda Civic fastback that at first looks good to her, no dents or dings, no rust. The doors are locked, but when she squints against the glare and peers through the driver’s side window she can make out the numbers on the odometer—278,519. End of the line, for sure. The sign in the window says, Retail Price $4950, Special Offer $2950.

  There is a blue 1999 Mercury Grand Marquis with half the teeth in its grille missing, bald tires, torn upholstery, trunk lid dented at the latch so she’ll have to tie it closed with wire to keep it from yawning open when she drives it to work. A sign taped to the driver’s-side window says, Retail Price $5950, Special Offer $2950.

  Maybe she should go up a notch in price, she thinks. After all, even though they call it a “special offer,” it’s actually just an asking price, a number where negotiations can begin. That’s when she spots a light blue 2002 Dodge Neon with a big yellow sign on the windshield that cheerfully yells, Low Mileage!!! The retail price is $6,950, and the asking price is $3,950. If she offers $3,000, they might settle on $3,500.

  Okay, that’s a car to test-drive. But instead of driving just one car, she’ll try to find two more, so she can compare three. In very little time she has added a 2002 Hyundai with 87,947 miles, clean body, no dents or rust, good tires, and has found a metallic gray 2002 Ford Taurus that she really prefers over both the Hyundai and the Neon. It’s a large four-door sedan with a tan cloth interior, and this car too has a Low Mileage!!! sign, including the actual number of miles, 55,549. It’s stodgy and
boring, the kind of four-door sedan a high school math teacher or a social worker might own, nowhere near as sleek and borderline glamorous as the Neon and the Hyundai. It’ll burn more gas than either, for sure. But the respectability and conventionality of the Taurus suit her. And unlike the Neon and the Hyundai, maybe because of its size, it does not feel used to Ventana; it feels pre-owned. Well cared for. By someone like her.

  She takes another slow walk around the vehicle looking for scratches or dents she might have missed on her first pass, but there aren’t any to be seen. When she steps away from the Taurus, intending to take another last look at the Neon and the Hyundai before heading for the showroom, she hears from behind her the low rattling growl of a large animal and, turning, sees a gray dog coming toward her at full speed. It’s a thick-bodied pit bull running low to the ground five or more car lengths away and closing fast, eyes yellow with rage, teeth bared, growling, not barking, a dog not interested in merely scaring her and driving her away. It’s a guard dog, not a watchdog, and it wants to attack her, attack and kill her.

  Ventana doesn’t like dogs to start with, but this one terrifies her. She scrambles around to the front of the Taurus and climbs up on the hood and on her hands and knees gets up onto the roof of the car. The dog skids to a stop beside the car and circles the vehicle as if looking for a ramp or stairs. Finding none, it tries climbing onto the hood of the Taurus as she has done and falls off, which only increases its rage and determination to get at the woman on the roof of the car, a terrified and confused woman trying desperately not to panic and slip and fall off the car to the ground. “Help!” she cries out. “Somebody help me! Somebody, come get this dog away from me!”

  She remembers that you aren’t supposed to show fear to a dog, that it will only embolden the animal, so she carefully, unsteadily, stands up and folds her arms over her chest and tries to look unafraid of the beast as it circles the car. She wishes she had a gun in her purse. A person is legally entitled to carry a concealed firearm in Florida but she has always said no way she’ll own and carry a gun, a mugger will only turn it against her or use it afterward in the commission of some other crime in which a person gets killed. But now, forget all that liberal crap. Now she truly wishes she had a gun to shoot this dog dead.

  She is a long ways from the gate where she came in, but the cars are parked side by side tightly all the way out to the gate so that, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, she might be able to get over to where the Hispanic girl or the black man can hear her cries and call off their vicious dog. She’s wearing sneakers, thank the Lord, and has good balance for a woman her age, and it hasn’t rained all day and none of the cars appears to have been recently washed, so the metal roofs are not slippery. She slings the strap of her purse over her shoulder and across her chest, tries to calm her pounding heart, counts to ten and jumps from the roof of the Taurus to the roof of the Mercury Grand Marquis next to it.

  The dog sees her land safely on the Mercury and snaps at the air in that direction, forgets about climbing onto the Taurus and races to the front of the Grand Marquis, where he leaps scratching and clawing onto the hood. But once again in his frenzy he fails to gain traction and falls off. She decides to keep moving as fast as she can, before she thinks too much about what will happen if she slips and falls or if somehow the dog manages to get onto the hood of one of the cars and then to the roof so that he too can leap from roof to roof in pursuit of her, surely catching her and ripping into her flesh, pulling her to the ground, where he will kill her.

  She leaps from the Mercury up and across to a white, high-topped 1999 Jeep Cherokee, from there to a 1997 Ford Expedition, the tallest and widest vehicle in the lot, the safest rooftop, impossible for the dog to get at her up there. She probably should stay there, but she decides to keep moving, to get to the fence and the gate and somehow attract the attention of one of the people who works for Sunshine Cars USA or somebody walking past on the street who will go inside the showroom and get one of the car people to come out and call off this animal.

  She leaves the safety of the big Ford Expedition and jumps to the slightly lower roof of a dark blue, sporty 2002 Mazda 626 LX, then onto a red 2005 Kia Sportage. Growling and drooling, the dog follows at ground level, not taking his eyes off her for a second. There is no way she can escape him, except by staying up on top of the cars, moving gradually closer to the high fence via the roofs of the fancier, pricier cars, genuinely pre-owned now, not used, Mercedes Benzes, Cadillacs, Lincolns, and cars from more recent years, 2010, 2011, 2012, with lower mileage advertised in the window signs, 22,000 miles, 19,000, 18,000. As the mileage numbers drop, the price tags rise: Retail Price $15999, Special Offer $12999; Retail Price $18950, Special Offer $15950.

  Eventually she arrives at the last row before the fence, and from the roof of a metallic silver 2012 Ford Escape spots the gate three car lengths in front of her, chained shut and padlocked. She looks at her watch; it’s six twenty, and she remembers that the Hispanic girl said they close at six. She is trapped in here, caged, imprisoned by a vicious, ugly dog that has nothing in its brain but a burning need to kill her solely because she accidentally entered its territory.

  It occurs to her that she can call Sunshine Cars USA with her cell phone. She can explain her situation to whoever answers and get him to come back to the salesroom and unlock the chain, swing open the gate, put the dog on a leash and lead him away to wherever his cage is located so she can escape hers. From her perch atop the Ford SUV she can make out the Web site, www.sunshinecarsusa.com, and the phone number for Sunshine Cars USA painted on the big glittering sign atop the cinder block salesroom. She punches in the number and after a half-dozen rings hears the lightly accented voice of the Hispanic girl. “Thank you for calling Sunshine Cars USA. Our hours are nine A.M. till six P.M. Please call back during business hours. Or at the sound of the beep you can leave a message with your number, and we’ll call you back as soon as we can. Have a nice day!”

  Ventana hears the beep and says to the phone, “You locked me in with the cars by accident, and now your dog has me trapped, and I can’t get out on account of the gate is locked. Please, I need someone to come unlock the gate and get this dog away from me. Please come right away! I’m very scared of this dog. Goodbye,” she says and clicks off.

  In less than two hours it will be dark. Maybe by then the dog will have gotten bored and wandered off or fallen asleep somewhere, and Ventana can climb over the fence and set herself free. She checks out the fence. It’s nearly three feet taller than she. The spiked bars are too close together for her to squeeze through. She’ll have to climb over the fence, which she is not sure she can do even if she has time to spare. She will first have to get from the rooftop of the Ford Escape down to the ground, run across the six- or eight-foot-wide lane between the Escape and the fence and somehow in a matter of seconds pull herself up and over the fence. It looks impossible. There is no way she can do it without the dog hearing her and racing back from his doghouse or wherever the beast hangs out when he isn’t terrorizing humans.

  She decides to call 911, but then stops herself. A rescue vehicle from the fire department will have a police escort attached. Things always get complicated when you involve the police. They’ll want to know what she’s doing inside a locked car lot anyhow. Maybe she hid there after closing time, intending to pop car doors and trunks and steal parts, hubcaps, radios and CD players, planning to throw them over the fence to an accomplice on the street. Didn’t expect a guard dog to mess up her plans, did she? Maybe she hid in the lot after closing, intending to break through the back door into the showroom and steal the computers and office machines and any cash they stashed there. Before the police call off the dog and release her from her cage, she’ll have to prove her innocence. Which for a black person is never easy in this city. Never easy anywhere. She decides not to call 911.

  That leaves her daughter, Gloria, and a small number of other people she knows and trusts—her pastor, a few of her nei
ghbors, even her ex-husband, Gordon, whom she sort of trusts. Her son, Gordon Junior, who is more competent than anyone else she is close to, is stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. Not much he can do to help her. Gordon Senior will probably laugh at her for having put herself in this situation, and Gloria will simply panic and, looking for an excuse, start drinking again. She is too embarrassed to call on Reverend Knight or any of her women friends from the church or from the neighborhood, and she will never call on anyone from work. Although, if she can’t get free till nine tomorrow when Sunshine Cars USA opens again, she’ll be hours late for work and will have to call American Eagle Outfitters anyhow and explain why she’s late.

  She thinks of hiding overnight inside one of the cars, sleeping on the backseat, but surely all the cars are locked, and in any case she is not going to climb down there and start checking doors to find out if one has been accidentally left unlocked. The dog will have her by the throat in thirty seconds. Her best option is to stay where she is until morning. It won’t be painful or cause her serious suffering to curl up and lie here overnight on the roof of the Ford Escape and try to doze a little, as long as she doesn’t fall asleep and accidentally roll over and tumble off the car onto the ground.

  It’s almost dark now and the heat of the day has mostly dissipated. She hopes it won’t rain. Usually at this time of day clouds come in off the ocean bringing a shower that sometimes turns into a heavy rain that lasts for hours until the clouds get thoroughly wrung out. If that happens she will hate it, but she can endure it.

  It’s quieter than usual out there in the world beyond the fence. Traffic is light, and no one is on the street—she can see Seventh Avenue all the way north to the bus stop at 103rd and in the opposite direction down to Ninety-fifth Street, where her pink shotgun bungalow is located three doors off Seventh, the windows dark, no one home. The narrow wooden garage she emptied out a week ago and where she planned to shelter her car tonight is shut and still emptied out, unused, waiting. Along Seventh the streetlights suddenly flare to life. The number 33 bus, nearly empty, rumbles past. A police cruiser speeds by in the opposite direction, lights flashing like the Fourth of July.