by Earl Swift
The path takes him past a wayworn horse trailer that shields prying eyes from the weeds Painter Paul favors for taking a leak—the body shop and a neighboring paint shed lacking a functional toilet—then through a break in a six-foot chain-link fence that separates the shop area from the sales floor, as it were, and around and among several dozen cars that block the way to the Quonset.
Paul is forty-one, but comes across as younger. His face, nearly as wide as it is tall, is predisposed to crinkly smiles that reveal several chipped or broken incisors, creating the aura of a kid waiting for his permanent teeth to come in—an impression reinforced by his hair, cut to a quarter-inch burr, and his voice, which is high-pitched and becomes more so when he’s excited or angry. Shirtless, encased in a paste of sweat and silicone dust, he has almost reached the Quonset—and air-conditioning—when he’s intercepted by a couple of clean-cut college boys from Virginia Beach, asking about the price of an old Buick a ways across the lot.
Painter Paul asks whether they saw a price on the windshield. Well, maybe, one says—they saw the number “4,000,” but weren’t sure whether that was the price. Yes, Paul tells him, that’s the price, and if you want a different one, you’ll have to talk to the boss. He steps into the building.
Arney trudges in a minute later, crusted with some of the dirt he’s kicked up while crushing cars with an excavator. “Couple fellows out there interested in buying that ’70 Buick,” Paul tells him. The two fellows in question enter the Quonset as he speaks.
“They can do that,” Arney replies quietly. “They can do it if they give me four thousand dollars.” He falls into his chair and stares, whipped, at his bagged lunch, which Slick delivered minutes ago from the kitchen at Bootleggers. The prospective buyers loiter among the showroom’s Corvettes, then venture a few feet closer. “So,” he says, not looking their way, “you want to buy a car?”
They approach the counter. Yes, says the taller of the two, an olive-skinned kid, early twenties. The Buick out there. “I’ll sell it to you for four thousand dollars,” Arney says. He unfolds the top of his lunch bag, reaches inside, extracts a Styrofoam to-go box.
“Four thousand?” the kid says.
“Yeah,” Arney says. “I bought it from an old man’s son. He said it was running when we parked it. That’s about all I can tell you about it.”
“Oh,” the kid says, nodding. “What’s wrong with it—does it run rough, or something?”
Arney opens the box, digs in the bag for a plastic fork. “I have no idea,” he replies. “I don’t know anything but what I just told you.”
The kid nods again. “Can we test-drive it?” he asks. “It runs, right?”
Arney stabs his fork into a catfish fillet. “Are you listening?” he says. “Pay attention. I bought it from this old man. I parked it over there. I haven’t done anything with it.”
The kid visibly gulps. “When did you park it—like, two days ago?”
Arney snorts. “No,” he murmurs, “I parked it a long time ago.” He looks up from his meal. “Why? Did you come by here two days ago and it wasn’t here?”
“Well, no,” the kid says.
“Because I was going to say, you must have been asleep.”
“No,” says the kid. “I was just wondering.” He glances at his companion, scans the showroom, stares down at his feet, and works up the fortitude to return his eyes to Arney. “So you haven’t looked at it?”
Arney has just taken a bite, and chews for a while before answering. “What I do is, I buy cars from people,” he says. “I park ’em on the lot, and if somebody happens by and wants to buy ’em, I sell ’em to them, as a project car. You follow me?” If he kept every car on the lot in running shape, “I wouldn’t sleep,” he says. “I only get four hours of sleep a night as it is.” He shoots a glance at Painter Paul, who affirms the statement with a quiet “That’s right.”
“Now,” Arney says, turning toward the kid, “what I could do is, if you pay me four thousand dollars for that car, I’ll get it running for you.”
“You could do that?” The kid sounds surprised and pleased.
“I’d be happy to do that,” Arney says.
“How much would it cost?”
Arney gazes at the ceiling. “Oh, two or three hundred dollars,” he guesses.
The kid looks at his wingman, says: “That’d be cool.” The second kid nods.
“Bring me some money,” Arney suggests. “You bring me four thousand dollars, and I will drop everything and get that car ready for you.”
They leave. Arney watches them go. “Think they’ll be back?” I ask him.
“I doubt it.” He turns his attention back to his catfish. “I think we’ve probably seen the last of those motherfuckers.”
It’s the answer I expect. The two aren’t ready for an old car—you could hear in their questions that they don’t have the first clue how to buy, let alone operate, a piece of machinery close to twice their age. They need reliable daily transportation, not a project.
“But what the fuck,” Arney adds. “I could be wrong.” He peers at me, shrugs. “Maybe they fucking will come back.”
Here’s the thing: They might come back because a lot of people, probably most people, don’t use their heads when they buy a car. Not, at least, to the degree that they should—the degree that would save them money, produce a purchase that answers their needs, and block the psychological static that accompanies buying a car but contributes nothing to an intelligent choice.
More often than not, we pick our cars with our hearts—not for their utility, or their economy, or their reliability, or their safety, but for the way they look and how good we’ll look behind the wheel, and the effect this visual combination of driver and car will have on others, especially of the opposite sex. For what they say about the size of our wallets, our position in the social hierarchy, or our manliness. For how they smell and how they sound. For how they make us feel: for the way a stomp on the accelerator throws us back against our seats, for the rush that comes when they lunge forward from a stop, for the exhilaration that climbs, along with g’s, on taking a curve at high speed. All of which is germane to what makes driving fun but doesn’t have a thing to do with what makes a car good for us.
Still, those are the things that sell. Those are the measures we use to judge automotive worth. We go into thousands of dollars of debt to make purchases that, in a great many cases, are rationally indefensible. We buy the cars we want, not the cars we need.
This is central not only to Arney’s enterprise, but that of every auto dealership in the country, not to mention the corporations that build the cars they sell; if we didn’t buy with our hearts, there’d be no reason to consider a ’70 Buick, or any other vehicle that didn’t move us without fuss from one place to another. We’d seek no more horsepower than was absolutely necessary. We wouldn’t require monster stereos, built-in DVD players, or heated seats. We’d all be driving Honda Fits.
Not just Fits—used Fits, because everyone knows there’s no good reason to buy a new car, as 14.5 million Americans did in 2012. It loses value faster than virtually any other investment.
My own purchasing history illustrates our collective car-buying folly. My first car was a 1973 Mazda RX-2, a sedan of Japanese quality, practical size, reasonable safety, none of which moved me. What did? Under the hood lurked an early and imperfect version of Mazda’s powerful rotary engine, which shot the car like a rocket. Alas, it proved an unwisely exotic choice for a flat-broke college student—I blew the engine’s seals three times in a year. I replaced it with a new 1978 Fiat sedan. Not only did it drop in value as I left the showroom, but being a 1978 Fiat, it was poised to drop its drivetrain as well. I knew it was reputed to be a dog, but saw only its clean lines, its lovely metallic paint, and its modernist dashboard, and I delighted in its seats, which were big and cushy and well bolstered. After three years, those seats were about the only parts that worked.
Next up was a used MG Midg
et, a microscopic British two-seat roadster—again, a car of legendary unreliability, which I knew, and knew full well. It didn’t matter. I loved its looks. I loved its mock-leather cockpit. I loved the idea of driving, and being seen driving, such a car. As it happened, I got lucky: Its engine didn’t seize until two weeks after I sold it to a friend, who didn’t talk to me much after that.
My instincts for self-preservation were slow to mature. I now bought an aging Triumph TR4, another English sports car. Crazed with lust for its tailfins and knockoff wire wheels and sonic growl—for every little thing about it—I gave its innards just a cursory once-over before stroking a check for what soon proved a grand mal automotive and financial disaster.
Lust. Lust was my undoing in these early transactions. When in time I wised up, and chose cars better suited to my means and needs, I found that I no longer felt the same brand of all-consuming hunger that my sexier, ill-fated purchases had inspired. Perhaps my Hondas and Toyotas have lacked the whiff of danger, the long-shot gamble, necessary for such heady emotion. But I can’t claim to have felt none at all, because every car I’ve bought has inspired some level of lust in me.
The same is true of just about every American, for car ownership passes through several predictable stages, not unlike those of a doomed marriage. You buy a new car after a showroom courtship and tantalizing foreplay, consumed with an all-be-damned yearning for its curves, its smooth and supple surfaces, that sweet, responsive ride. Its eagerness to perform. Its smell. This lust yields, over time, to a love that blends the romantic and parental: You show off your car, luxuriate in its company, treat it with care and respect, protect it from harm. Eventually, love fades to a companionable reliance; your car becomes a trusted friend, and your relationship, almost self-sustaining—gone is any expectation that it’ll turn heads or grace you with a particular prestige, as well as any that you’ll indulge it with your past fervor.
Years may pass before this contented dependence is shaken, but in time it’ll happen. The car’s mechanical heart will falter, its metal will fatigue, and your old friend will surprise and inconvenience you—in little ways at first, with tiny gaffes that multiply in number and bound in cost until you feel doubt with every turn of the key, a pang of anxiety whenever you punch the gas to pass a truck, a wave of despair as your mechanic swipes your credit card.
For the vast majority of cars, this fourth stage is terminal: From here, they’re bound for the crusher. A statistically insignificant few, however, are rescued from oblivion by their stature as classics, curiosities, or heirlooms. They enter a fifth stage, as objects of a renewed desire—a more scholarly yearning, this time around, its heat tempered by the responsibility and expense of antique ownership. And a scant few will, over time, transcend appreciation to become objects of worship—such an obsessive love one finds among the most devoted collectors of vintage wines, antiquarian books, and the ephemera of fame and infamy.
If you buy a used car, you’ll experience the early stages, though they’re going to be somewhat compressed. Lust may be fleeting. Love may last a day or two, rather than months or years. You may be cursing your new purchase before you’ve exhausted its first tank of gas. A safe general rule, I think, is that the older and more traveled the car you buy, the faster you’ll pass through the first three stages and reach the fourth, heartache, and its substages—those being doubt, disappointment, and disgust.
IT’S A SAFE bet that Nicholas Thornhill had experienced the first three stages of ownership when he decided to replace his decade-old Chevy sedan. Chances are, he had not moved far into the fourth, if he reached it at all, for he opted to keep his old car, rather than trade it in—and he was a man who knew his way around machinery, and would have known when to junk a beater.
Likewise, it’s probably safe to assume that he felt some measure of lust for the ’57 wagon. Granted, it would have been a quiet sort of lust—very, very quiet—because this was a man of few needs, simple pleasures, and a humble past. Thornhill was the last of thirteen children born to George Duke Thornhill and Katherine Teresa Cassidy, who married in Xenia, Ohio, in 1877. George’s people had owned a sawmill, and were counted among Xenia’s better Protestant families. Katy May, as his wife was known, was a Catholic; on the union, the Thornhill elders arranged for the couple to relocate, willingly or otherwise, to a farm near Athens, in northern Alabama. They sent along two train cars of housewares and furniture to soften the newlyweds’ landing.
The pair farmed for several years, their labors augmented by their growing brood of children. By the time Nicholas came along, twenty years into the marriage, the Thornhills had entrusted care of the crops to tenants whose shacks were sprinkled around their spread, and George had gone to work for the Louisville & Nashville Railroad—the L&N, or “Old Reliable,” which maintained a huge shop complex and switching yard a few miles to the south in Decatur. In time, Nicholas joined his father there, as did most of his seven brothers. They were part of an industry that snaked its way into American life to a much greater degree than railroading does today, for in Thornhill’s youth, any long-distance travel in the United States was by train. Few rural roads were “improved” in any manner, and next to none were paved in the modern sense. At best, a lane in the open country might have a macadam surface—several layers of broken stone, in rare cases bound with a sprinkling of asphalt; at worst, it was a rough, rutted path of ungraded dirt that with the first hint of a shower turned into a bog that would suck the shoes off a horse. Early motorists—the smart ones, anyway—left home prepared for breakdowns and flat tires, but their foremost challenge wasn’t mechanical. It was mud.
By his late teens, Thornhill was a welder and a boilermaker for the L&N, skilled enough at metalwork that the railroad sent him far afield to tend to company projects. He had grown into a compact, handsome young man, with thick dark hair and full lips, a ready smile, and a droll sense of humor, and when, on an assignment to Springfield, Missouri, he met an athletic beauty named Alma Violet Arnold, sparks flew.
They married in Springfield, moved to Alabama, and before long Alma was pregnant. Their first child, Polly, was born in 1918, while Nicholas was away in the navy. After the Armistice they settled into a white frame house, a two-story place with a wraparound porch and a few gingerbread touches, shaded by pines and maples, and had another couple of kids—Jack, who arrived in 1923, and Bruce, two years later. Nicholas discovered a passion for gardening, and planted a vegetable patch beside the house that he tended with the children’s help between shifts at the rail yard. They kept a cow and Alma raised chickens, hatching their eggs in an incubator. So in 1928, when the L&N announced it was shuttering its Decatur shops and Nicholas found himself without a job, the family was largely self-sufficient, at least in terms of food. And when the Depression settled on northern Alabama and many went hungry, the Thornhills shared eggs with their neighbors and enjoyed homegrown luxuries: On hot summer days, Alma would rinse out the cotton bags in which the chicken feed was packaged, slip them over watermelons that Nicholas had grown, and lower them into the well out back to cool.
Eventually, searching for work, Thornhill drove his Model T north to Tidewater, Virginia, a knot of cities at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay that he’d come to know during his brief stint in uniform. The region’s economy was dominated by the business of waging war: The naval station in Norfolk, home to an armada of ships and the first naval airplanes, was the most obvious component of the biggest concentration of military might in the world. Huge coastal guns jutted from the dunes of Virginia Beach. Army bombers flew overhead from Langley Field, among the country’s earliest air bases. The Norfolk Naval Shipyard, actually in Portsmouth, across the Elizabeth River from its namesake city, had built and repaired warships since before the American Revolution. Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock, across the harbor, turned out America’s heaviest battleships and cruisers, and was preparing to build the world’s first purpose-built aircraft carrier.
The naval shipyard was
hiring. Thornhill claimed a job as a boilermaker, started work at once, and Alma and the children moved north the following year. They settled in Newtown, a dense neighborhood of blue-collar shipwrights just outside the yard’s gates.
Bruce, the youngest, was the first of the kids to marry and move out, before he’d even turned seventeen. He didn’t go far: He took a job at the shipyard, too, and he and his new wife, a high school classmate, set up house just around the corner. Within days, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and work at the yard exploded. An army of laborers was imported to meet the demand for men-of-war. Uniformed sailors descended on Portsmouth by the thousands.
Across the water, Norfolk underwent an even more dramatic transformation, from sleepy southern port to command post for the fight against Nazi Germany. Long convoys of Liberty ships steamed from its harbor, decks packed with men and arms. The city’s population more than tripled. Cheap housing, thrown up seemingly overnight, crowded the land around the naval station and shouldered aside summer rentals lining the Chesapeake Bay beachfront. And there was no avoiding sailors, not in the world’s biggest navy port. They spilled into town in hordes to hunt down relief from the boredom and fear of life under way, and the good times they sought, and often found, put them at odds with the locals: They picked fights with civilians and each other, passed out drunk in front yards, cussed and threw up on the streetcars, wolf-whistled at high school girls. One downtown row of old storefronts got so rowdy with beer, strippers, and fistfights that it was billed as the wickedest street in the country. A wartime yarn held that a disgusted homeowner posted a sign on his lawn reading: “Dogs and Sailors Keep Off the Grass.” Whether the sign really existed is sketchy, but the story was treated as fact by navy men, and encouraged a nickname sailors knew Norfolk by for the rest of the century: Shit City.
When the fighting ended and the fleet returned, Tidewater, like the rest of the United States, was squeezed by a desperate housing shortage. In answer, new homes sprang up in both Norfolk and Portsmouth in dense clots of cheap “two-and-ones”—two-bedroom, one-bath, look-alike frame cottages on tiny lots. They were Spartan and dark by today’s standards, but they were just the ticket for returning GIs. War had crammed a generation of American men into foxholes and barracks and steel hulls, had stripped them of privacy and any say in their own fates, had forced them to wallow in their own blood and filth and stink for days, weeks, sometimes months at a time. Now the nation’s veterans craved a lifestyle that refuted the hardships they’d endured, those long years of noise and chaos, death and fear, and, not least, of living practically on top of each other. They sought order, quiet, and control over their surroundings. More than anything, they wanted elbow room.