by Craig Nova
She said to me in the bar, “See, there’s this moment. Everything is hanging in the balance. You have to know what the buyer wants and how to give it to them. They’ve got to feel that you will do anything for them. It is an intimate moment. They want something. You give it to them. For instance, if they want bucket seats, by god, you’ve got to move heaven and earth. You can’t ever let them feel that they are just a convenience of some kind. You’ve got to give them a fucking hard-on.”
She came home at the end of the week and flipped open the book she kept to keep track of the cars she had sold, and as she did, she had a glass of wine, then straight vodka, which she took out of the freezer, poured a slug into a glass and then slammed the door so hard the refrigerator rocked back and forth on its little legs. With a kind of fury, she wrote, “I sold three cars, and a truck. Tinted glass, radio, CD player, leather seats. Two jackasses invited me out and one made an indecent proposition. Bank approved them all.”
Her boss called her and asked if she would meet him in a bar after work, on a Saturday. Usually he wanted to talk to her about new models and what lines he should order from the manufacturer, what she thought the inventory should be, what extras, CD players, air, tinted glass, leather seats were going to fly and what about the TVs that could be in the backseat of the wagons. Would parents go for that? He used to bitch about how he couldn’t keep a body man or a good mechanic, since they were always taking off for someplace like Alaska or Hawaii, and these days even China.
His name was Barry Hammelman. He had wanted to be a doctor, but he hadn’t gotten into medical school, even after he had tried a lot of times, and he had taught biology in a high school, although he got tired of the rules and regulations there and kids carrying guns, but most of all he got tired of being broke. So he had opened a dealership. He wore his hair short and he had big glasses so he looked like a kid, just as he wore bowties to suggest a kind of innocence. The most dangerous thing anyone could do would be to believe that what he looked like and what he was were the same thing.
In Danville, beyond the black hole of downtown where the Dunkin’ Donuts was, next to a burned-out dress store (where someone was just hoping to collect the insurance after Wal-Mart came, like an economic dinosaur), a strip had still grown up, and while it was mostly car dealerships, like Sara’s, and AutoZones, and some stinky junk stores, a Chinese restaurant had opened, too. Barry and Sara met there.
Car dealerships on either side of it and one across the street. Barry had on one of his bowties and a white shirt. When Sara came in he had been looking out through the glass doors of the restaurant at the promotion in the Ford dealership across the street: balloons and a guy with a hot-roasted-peanut cart in the parking lot giving away bags of peanuts.
“I’m not kidding this time, Sara,” he said. “Now, you know how I feel about selling cars. No one likes to move iron more than I do. But what you’re doing is going to cause trouble. I don’t mind a call or two from the Better Business Bureau. How can you make any money and avoid that? But this is different. You are going at people in a way that is going to get us in trouble. You’re getting too . . . ” He looked at her. “Personal. I know it is hard for you to believe, but even in the car business there are matters of propriety. At least if you get caught. So what’s wrong? What are you trying to prove?”
“That’s between me and me,” she said. “You want me to move to some other dealership? Will you give me a good recommendation?”
“No, I don’t want that. I’m just saying back off a little. You don’t have to go after these people like an alligator after a dog.”
She rolled a shoulder.
“This is what I’ve got,” she said.
“Sure, sure,” he said. “Sure.” He took a drink. Then another. Finished the glass and held it up for another.
He said that he was going by her office one afternoon that week, and she was getting ready to close with a guy, a big guy, about forty-five with a big gut, and Hammelman stood by the door, just back from it so he could see her face and hear what she was saying. The guy, the buyer, had the pen in his hand and he was thinking it over. Not signing, but thinking about it. Wavering. Thinking one thing and then another, and she was looking at him. You know you are an attractive woman, the buyer said to her. You send a kind of atmosphere, sexy but yet kind of considerate.
So the buyer was looking at the brochures and then at you, Hammelman said to her. What she wanted, of course, was for the buyer to sign the damn form. She leaned forward, smiled, looking right at him. She tried to figure out what he wanted, better air, more speakers, what the hell could it be? The closer. The thing that would wrap this up. The guy looked over his shoulder, at the bathroom, and it was obvious, of course, that the buyer thought it would it be nice to get Sara in there for a couple of minutes with the door locked, since he seemed to be able to tell that she would do just about anything to sell the damn car. Actually, a van. Good fabric on the seats. Automatic. All-wheel drive. Sara looked right back, and Hammelman saw it, not that he would object if they could get away with things like that, but he knew they couldn’t, not for long. Sara looked right back at the buyer, not angry so much as insistent, and she stood up and reached for the key to the bathroom, and the buyer said, “Well, I guess I will just sign this,” kind of scared. “But,” Hammelman said. “You would have done it, wouldn’t you?”
She shrugged.
“I wanted to sell the car,” she said.
Hammelman told her to back off, because soon the Better Business people and god knows who else are going to be on them like stink on a dog, and Hammelman had his own family to worry about and his wife—what would she say? And he had a license to protect, a line of credit to look after, and while he knew it was hard to believe, he was a member of a church, and that was a great source for people who bought cars. So if Hammelman thought she could do it and get away with it, fine. But he didn’t think that was it. So knock it off, he said. Sell the cars. Flirt. But stop right there.
He drew a line with water at the tip of his finger across the plastic tabletop where they were talking. Like drawing a line in the sand.
“So,” I said then, in the bar where Sara and I went after almost getting shot. “Is that the trouble? You got somehow sideways selling cars with, err, incentives?”
“Oh, Jake,” she said. “I don’t think I would have really done it. But no, that’s so far away from it, from trouble.”
I lay there, next to the stream and in that sound, that humble hiss, splash that has such a secret, and in the stars overhead a meteor streaked across the sky, a sort of scratch of light, the color of a sparkler, and that led me to think about the Horsehead Nebula before I began to face up to the beginning of the real problem. That’s when Sara decided that she wanted more money, to sell more cars, to have more proof that she could make up for every mistake, every error in perception. She thought of me, she said, but by this time she was too much on her own, too alone to be able to make me understand. Or to take the time to find me. And what was I doing anyway, I thought, since I spent my time thinking about some star, Zeta-12. Lambda Crb. Centaurus.
THEDAWN WAS an ominous gray, as though something were stirring behind the trees, the leaves of which looked like the feelers or ears of monsters, and as the stars faded, which left me with a sense of being more alone (like a diamond cutter without his tools), I thought, Well, now is the time to face up to Sara’s real trouble, right? My father got up and took a long, slow leak, the steam of it urine-scented. Then I took my fly rod and waded into the now pink water where the fish were taking emergers. Hungry, desperate, large.
Even then I thought about some of the photographs I had seen from the Hubble, particularly those of filmy clouds of gas, glowing green or red. The difficulty was often one of precision. For instance, I confronted the endless failure of expectation, or my thinking things would be one way, but reality, if that’s what you can call it, seems to delight in being slippery, in trying to get you to believe one t
hing is true, when, in fact, this item is just another false lead. Error is at the heart of the history of science or medicine, that is, a lot of what was believed turned out not to be true, and I can’t forget this essential vulnerability. We will look back on the present, from a hundred years from now, and laugh. Or, at least, that’s a possibility. So I was left with that essential uncertainty, that essential possibility of being wrong, not only in the heavens, but in confronting Sara’s trouble, too. In my work, what I expect to get as a result of observation is often just a little skewed, but you do your best, make the best assumptions (how do you know what’s “best”?), do the calculations. The next thing you know you are off by a billion years. When you saw something unexpected was it just an error, or was it something new, and if it was new, did it change everything? Understanding could be going along just fine: All the data was safely inside the realm of statistical error and yet the next thing I knew, it didn’t add up. Nothing you could put your finger on, aside from the certainty that your explanations didn’t really make sense anymore.
And yet, beneath those stars that glittered like the sequins on a woman’s dress at an elegant dance, where a mirrored ball turned above the couples, I still was convinced of a cold romance (in its demands), just like hitting an elbow on a frozen pipe, the chilly vibration the evidence of how those stars overhead were connected to Sara. Or, maybe, with a little luck, I could be wrong about that coldness, too. Was that hope on my part or delusion? Hadn’t I thought things were one way and had them turn out another? Well, I had a little more to go on than usual. Sara was in trouble, and even reality, at its most slippery, wasn’t going to change that.
Barry Hammelman said, after a couple of weeks of uneasiness with her obvious restraint, that is, he was afraid she could resist making more money, but not for long. “Say, Sara, I want you to meet an old friend of mine. Maybe you should get to know him. A good guy.”
I am a slow learner, in many ways, but I have learned the hard way that when someone is introduced as a “good guy,” it probably refers to someone who behaves in such a way that the rest of us, that is men, end up paying for it, just by association. Hammelman’s friend was Frank McGee, or that’s what he called himself. And he even had ID that said he was Frank McGee, but Sara found out that his real name was Miguel Jose Cardoza, whose mother had been a blond beautician in San Diego who had taken up with a man, Cardoza, who had been in the navy, although he spent a lot of his time in the brig. So Sara called him McDoza, at least when she thought of him, which these days was a lot. Or, she said, when she hated him the most, she called him, to herself, MD.
McDoza had a proposition for her, although he sort of worked around to it slowly. They went to that same Chinese restaurant where Barry Hammelman had taken Sara. McDoza had blond hair, dark eyes, a scar in his eyebrow, and he wore dark, very cool clothes, Armani, said Sara, which, for reasons she couldn’t really explain, made her feel that he was someone she could do business with. “If the guy is wearing a sport coat that cost twenty-eight hundred dollars, doesn’t that mean he’s someone you should think about doing a deal with?”
“That depends,” I said, when Sara and I sat in the bar after the guy with the Hawaiian shirt had almost killed us both. “Maybe it’s a knockoff, or bought at an outlet. Maybe it means just the opposite of what you think. The jacket shows the guy is a fraud rather than being genuine.”
“You mean like a disguise?” said Sara.
“I mean it’s hard to tell what you’re dealing with.”
“Oh,” said Sara. “I found that out. Oh, yeah.”
Somehow, as we had a drink, the scent of cordite lingered on my clothes. And, of course, it was the right thing to be reminded of, when you got into the difficulties, to put it in a polite way, of just what McDoza was up to.
He started by explaining tax policy. Sara thought he was nuts, and was about to take her bag and go home to one of those microwave noodle packages when, she said, the tax policy turned into tariff policy and how, if you lived in Mexico (“Me-he-co,” as McDoza said it, as though even though he was blond and blue-eyed he wanted to prove just how authentic he really is), you could end up paying a shitload of tax. That’s another item, I think, I have learned to be wary around. The authentic. What’s that? Breast implants? Genital surgery? Cheap mortgage rates with a balloon payment? Bernard Madoff? All advertised as the real thing. Items you can trust.
So, he said, he had a car that wasn’t registered properly, since some dumb-ass in the Department of Motor Vehicles had got the wrong vehicle identification number on the forms.
Sara looked at him for a long time and said, “Yeah. I guess.”
MD figured that Sara could fix up a temporary registration and a sort of temporary plate, too, one of those cardboard things the dealers have, and maybe, you know, if she had a limited number, why she could make some copies with a high-end scanner and a good printer, see, and so who the hell would know? And then the idea was that a woman, a nice-looking, appealing, innocent sort of soccer mom like Sara (“I’m a little young for the soccer mom shtick,” said Sara), why, she could get through customs like a warm, fragrant breeze. And so just like that they were already talking about how much Sara would make if she drove the car across the border, even though it was a long way away. Two days’ drive to El Paso and then cross over to Juarez to meet the “client.” And that drug war stuff you see on TV? Well, that’s just sensationalism, although if Sara saw guys walking around with a swagger and pushing people out of the way, she might be a little careful. It would be better if she did the drive as fast as she could and when she stayed the night on the way, make it a Days Inn. One of those anonymous places with a clerk from Mumbai who probably couldn’t tell one customer from another anyway since he was working eighteen hours a day. Once she’s gotten rid of the car, she takes a cab to the border, since she sure doesn’t want to mess around with renting a car in Me-he-co (just as she doesn’t want to spend any more time than possible with the “client,” that is, doesn’t want to ask for a lift to the border), walks across with her ID, then takes a cab to the El Paso International Airport, where she gets a flight she’s booked the day before, from her laptop, by way of Expedia, to Albany. $949. One stop in Chicago. Lands in Albany ten hours later, where she’s left her car in long-term parking. And a lot richer than when she left it.
And then they started talking about the fact that MD’s “customers” or “clients” weren’t “gangsters or anything like that, but good, hardworking people, doctors, dentists, architects, you know, the salt of the earth,” and how they would pay her in cash and so all Sara had to do was to drop off the car with the temporary papers (“They can take it from there on the other side of the border, no problem”) and take the cash and bring it back to this country, in used or at least dirty hundreds and twenties. Then, of course, MD and Sara would meet and she’d take her cut, which was going to be “like 20 percent” plus “expenses,” although he didn’t want her staying, as he said, in anything more expensive than a Days Inn and not one night in Me-he-co. Food could be eaten at a Red Lobster. All the cars had great AC, some with all leather, nothing in the trunk, nothing underneath, nothing like that at all, just the car. Why, the DEA could look all day and use a vacuum cleaner and all the dogs in the world. Why, they could even use genetically enhanced dogs and machines to sniff, but that wasn’t the deal, see, because every dumb-ass along the border is thinking about drugs but this isn’t about drugs. It’s just about some poor oral surgeon in Me-he-co who doesn’t want to pay the tax on a new car from the U.S. of A. And of course, MD said, the beauty of it was that they were going to get a cut of the tariff, since they were going to sell the car at substantially below the price with tariff, but MD wasn’t such a dumb-ass as to sell it without what it would be with some tariff, say about a quarter of what it really would be. So how could you beat that? You get 20 percent of a piece of a tariff the customs dickheads don’t even know exists. And beyond that, you don’t have to pay taxes, becau
se you can either just spend it, cash, or if you want to be more legitimate you can launder it through the dealership. And be totally legitimate. Why, it would take an army of accountants to figure it out. And they’re too busy trying to figure out reverse credit swaps and what a tranche is. Do you know what a tranche is?
“One of the sections of the payment for a security,” said Sara.
More authentic items, and some of these left a lot of men, particularly those who had been in construction, standing around with signs that said WILL WORK FOR FOOD.
“I can see you’re going to go for this,” said MD. “Someone as smart as you.”
So that’s the way it started. MD didn’t say the cars were stolen, but then sometimes she met him in the parking lot of a McDonald’s where two kids, probably not seventeen, brought in a car, a new Camry, all leather, CD, extra speakers, and they passed the car over fast and got out of there, and then Sara put the temporary tags on and she already had the papers filled out, since these days MD was dealing directly, by coded email, with the doctors and dentists on the other side of the border and was providing, to order, just what they wanted, although sometimes the color was hard to get. A black Infiniti was usually pretty easy, but a new yellow Boxster was a harder item, and MD didn’t want to start playing around with painting cars, although he asked if Sara’s dealership could do it and she told him no.
And it was fine. The money came in and Sara was thinking about buying a vending machine business to get the money in the bank that way, to keep it totally separate from the dealership, but for a while she kept it on the top shelf of her apartment, wrapped in baggies, which, it seemed to me, was one of the great American contributions to crime. And of course, she had the money in baggies in case she had to bury it quickly. MD was happy. The kids who brought him cars were happy. And Sara was, if not happy, glad to see the money lined up there like new shoes in her closet, just as she made it clear to MD that she wasn’t going to meet any kids behind a McDonald’s and have them see her.