by Rod Serling
Harvey’s face suddenly looked very white. His lower lip sagged. That strange haunted look appeared in his eyes. He whirled around and retraced his steps over to the desk. “Irv,” he said in a strained voice. “Irv...”
“What’s the matter?” Irving asked. “You sick, boss?”
Harvey felt the words bubble inside and then heard them come out. He pointed out the window. “Put a sign on the Essex. Say it’s for sale as is. No guarantees. And open up the hood wider. Let ‘em take a look at that engine.”
Irving gaped at him. “Ya wanna sell it—or ya wanna keep it around for an heirloom? Why, nobody in his right mind would buy that car if they could see what’s under the hood.”
Harvey sat down heavily in his chair. He felt the perspiration rolling down his face. He opened up the left bottom drawer of the desk and took out a small bottle of whisky, unscrewed the cap, and took a deep gulp. He looked up into Irving’s worried face. “What’s goin’ on?” he asked in a strange, thin voice. “What’s the matter with me, IN? Irv, booby...do I look all right to you?”
Irving’s voice was guarded. “What did ya have for dinner?”
Harvey thought for a moment, then made a gesture with his hands, denying any possible gastronomic connection. He set his face, jutted his jaw, let out a laugh dripping with bravado, and reached for the telephone.
“This is nuts,” he announced definitely, as he dialed a number. “This is...this is power of suggestion or something. That old gleep with the model A! Lemme tell ya, Irv—a real nutsy! Comes in here with this song and dance about a haunted car—”
He heard the receiver lifted at the other end. “Honey,” he said into the phone, “it’s your ever-lovin’! Listen’ baby...about tonight... yeah, I’m gonna be late. Well, I told ya it was inventory time, didn’t I?” He doodled with his free hand, drawing a picture of an old man and a model A Ford. “Of course it’s inventory time!” he continued, “And what I’m gonna be doin’—” He stopped abruptly. Again his face turned white and again the beads of perspiration came on his forehead and traveled in little rivulets down his face. ‘‘& a matter of fact, honey,” he heard himself saying, “I’m playin’ a little poker with the boys after I close up tonight. And when I told ya last month I was doin’ inventory—I was playin’ poker then, too!”
At this moment, Harvey thrust the phone away from him as if it were some kind of animal lunging for his throat. He gulped, swallowed, and it to him again.
“Honey,” he said in a sick voice, “honey, baby, think I’m sick or somethin’. What I just told ya...well, honey...it was a gag...what I mean to say is—”
Out came the words again. “I’m gonna play poker with the boys again tonight!” With this, Harvey slammed the phone down and pushed it away. He whirled around to stare at Irving, wild-eyed.
“What’s goin’ on, IN? What the hell’s the matter with me? I got no control over what I say. I got absolutely no control over—”
Again he stopped, took out his handkerchief and wiped his face. He rose from the chair, went across the room over to the open door, and stared out. There was the model A, sitting all by itself, several feet away from the other cars. Harvey kept staring at it, and finally turned to face Irving.
“Irv,” he said, his voice strained, “I’m in the middle of a calamity! That old geezer...that gleep l was tellin’ ya about...he said that car was haunted—and he was right! Ya know what, Irv? Whoever owns that car—he’s got to tell the truth!”
Harvey clutched at his thick hair, yanking it this way and that. He shook his head back and forth, and his voice was agonized. “Irv, booby...do ya dig it? Can ya think of anything more ghastly?”
He released his hair and pounded himself on the chest. “Me! Harvey Hennicutt! From now on—as long as I own that car—I gotta keep tellin’ the truth!”
Three days went by. The three longest days that Harvey Hennicutt could ever remember spending. Patsies came and patsies went and Harvey watched them go, quietly wringing his hands or pulling on his hair or just sitting inside his dinky shack, constitutionally unable even to whisper an adjective—let alone make one of his traditional vaunted pitches. Irving, he set to work making signs, and it was a few of these that the assistant brought into the shack and rather forlornly placed around the room. He pointed at them and looked up at Harvey, who sat there, head in hands.
“I finished the signs, boss,” he said.
Harvey separated two fingers to let an eyeball free. He nodded perfunctorily, then covered up his face again.
Irving cleared his throat. “You want I should put ‘em on the cars... or ya wanna read ‘em?”
Once again, Harvey peeked through his fingers at the signs. “Not Guaranteed,” “In Poor Condition,” “Not Recommended,” they announced in turn.
Irv shook his head. His voice was disconsolate. “I’ve heard of low pressure before, boss...but I mean, let’s face it—this is no pressure.”
Harvey nodded and let out a small groan. “Irv, booby,” he said in a hospital-ward voice, “do you know that my wife isn’t speaking to me? She hasn’t spoken to me in three days.”
“That ain’t your only wow, boss. Do you know that in three days you haven’t moved a car off this lot. He took a step closer to Harvey. “That old lady,” he continued, “who came in yesterday afternoon and wanted to buy the old Auburn? Boss—I mean, let’s level now! How do ya start a sales pitch by tellin’ a customer that if this car was one year older, Moses could’ve driven it across the Red Sea?” He shook his head. “I mean...there’s a limit to honesty, boss!”
Harvey nodded his complete approval. “I used to think that, too,” he said.
Irv smiled, changed his weight to the other foot, bit slowly into the end of a cheap cigar, and girded himself for another kind of combat.
“Boss,” he said, in a slightly different tone, “I didn’t wanna bother ya about this. But...well, you know—it’s that thing about my raise.”
Harvey closed his eyes. “Raise?”
Irv nodded. ‘It’s six months today. I mean. ..I didn’t wanna bug ya—but ya promised. You said in six months if I sold three cars—”
Harvey turned in the swivel chair and stared out of the window dreamily, but then his eyes grew wider as he felt another voice rising up within him, just as it had been doing the past three days. He tried to clamp his lips shut and throttle off the oncoming words, but they simply wouldn’t be throttled.
“Irving,” he heard his voice say, “the day I give you a raise, it’ll be below zero on the Fijis!”
The words didn’t stop there, though Harvey made a massive, almost inhuman effort to stop them by hurriedly reaching into the bottom desk drawer and pulling out the bottle. But even as he was uncorking it, the rest of the speech spewed out of him like lava out of a volcano.
“Every yokel who’s ever worked here starts and stops at the same salary! I just keep dangling a raise in front of ‘em for as long as it takes ‘em to wise up.”
Harvey wanted to say how sorry he was—that he didn’t mean it—that he loved Irving like a son—that he certainly would get a raise as soon as things got back to normal; but all that came out was a simple sentence.
“For you to get any more dough outta me,” Harvey heard himself saying, %odd be about as easy as poking hot butter in a wildcat’s ear.”
Harvey lifted the bottle to his mouth as if it weighed a ton, drank, fought down the nausea, and said—in a strained, quiet voice, “Irving, booby...that hurt me a lot more than it hurt you.”
Irving squared his thin bony shoulders, took a few steps around the desk, stuck a fist into his former master’s face.
“Correction,” he said firmly, in his high, piping squeal. “This is gonna hurt me a lot worse than it’s gonna hurt you.”
With that, he swung from the floor, and Harvey watched it coming until it cracked on the point of his jaw. In a portion of his tired, bedraggled mind, he felt surprise that thin little Irving packed such a wallop. He was
still carrying this thought as he fell over backward and landed on the floor.
Irving picked up a sign that read, “In Poor Condition-Not Recommended,” laid it on Harvey’s chest like a funeral wreath, and then stalked righteously out of the room.
Late that night, as Harvey tells it, he sat on the stoop of the shack looking out sadly at his car lot—and particularly at the model A, which stood like some metal pariah staring balefully back at him through its ancient headlights. The banner and bunting flapped noisily in the breeze, mocking him with their sound and with their meaninglessness.
A paunchy gentleman walked briskly into the nod end of the lot, stopped, and looked down the line of automobiles. In old and better days, Harvey would’ve been on his feet and shaking hands and beginning phase one of the attack before the prospective buyer had drawn three breaths. But on this night, Harvey just rose slowly, waved halfheartedly, and leaned against the shack while the man eyed him and walked toward him.
The man in this case was a gentleman named Luther Grimbley He wore a variation of a frock coat and had small beady eyes. He also wore a cigar in his mouth, which was obviously an accouterment, and he looked as if he had been born with it. He grimly nodded back at Harvey and then looked sideways at the model A. Clearly, this was one of those “thinker” type buyers who was as anxious to engage in a battle of wills and wiles as Harvey himself. This was quite evident in the rather nonchalant way Mr. Grimily studied the model A, but kept his eye on Harvey’s expression.
Harvey himself, seeing that the man was traditionally an opponent, forced himself to walk over to him. He dredged up some of his old charm, lit his own cigar, tilted his hat an inch farther back on his head, and looked, at this moment, like the Harvey Hennicutt of old.
“What’ll be your pleasure tonight?” he asked.
Grimbley kept the cigar in his teeth. “Luther Grimbley, here,” he announced, and handed Harvey a card. “Honest Luther Grimbley, thirty years in politics, currently up for reelection—alderman, thirteenth ward. You’ve probably heard of me.”
All of this came out as if it were a single sentence. Harvey took the card and read it.
“Delighted,” he said. “Something in a—” He gulped. “A nice model A? It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
Then Harvey mentally sat back, waiting for the perverse honesty inside of him to come out with the denial of what he’d just said, but no words came—and for the first time in several days Harvey felt hope rising up inside.
Grimbley removed the cigar, picked off a few errant fragments of tobacco, and daintily freed them from his fingertips.
‘‘That depends,” he said, his eyes half closed. “If you take twelve aspirin and shut your eyes tight—you might call that car beautiful. But in the cold light of neon, son—” He shook his head and pointed to the car. “It’s a wreck! What about its condition?”
Harvey chuckled a deep chuckle and started to retort with a biblical quote that he usually used in answer to that question, and one that he had made up himself not six months before, but he heard himself saying, “The block’s cracked!” He shuddered, clamped tight on the cigar, and half turned away, damning himself, honesty, the haunted car, and everything else.
Grimbley’s eyebrow rose a little. “Block cracked, you say, son?”
Harvey nodded tiredly and gave up fighting. “Block cracked.”
“What else?”
Harvey looked down at the tires. “Rubber’s almost gone.” He kicked at the tire.
Grimbley went over to the car and also kicked the tire. “It sure is,” he said. Then he made a face and scratched his jaw.
“Might be a few good years left in it.” Then, hurriedly, looking keenly over at Harvey, “Not many, though.”
Harvey felt the misery welling up, and also the words. “Many? This car’s living on borrowed time!”
Grimbley ran his tongue inside one cheek and drummed softly on the fender of the model A. He looked at Harvey squinty-eyed.
“What’s she worth?” he asked, and then hurriedly changed his tone. “I mean, assuming some clod wanted a real bum car to use for a gag or something.”
He chewed off a little piece of the cigar and spit it out, then walked around the car again. He whistled a continuous low whistle, sucked in his cheeks, again tapped gently on the car’s fender.
“Maybe fifty bucks?”
Harvey’s eyes looked glazed. “Fifty bucks?” !
“All right,” Grimbley said, “maybe sixty.”
“Why not thirty?” Harvey said. “You don’t understand, do you?” He pointed to the car. “It’s a bad car. It’s a lemon.”
Harvey wished fervently at this moment that his tongue would rot at the roots and he could keep his mouth shut. He was cursed, damned, and preordained, so he half turned as if ready to walk away and give it up as a bad thing. He was quite unprepared for Grimbley’s reaction, for the far little man stared at him and began to laugh. The laugh turned into a full-throated roar, until it was uncontrollable. Grimbley just stood there and laughed until the tears came out of his eyes.
‘Why, you dirty dog, you! Why, you clever son of a—!”
Harvey began to laugh now, too. He didn’t know exactly why. Maybe it was release or relief or something—but he joined Grimbley’s laughter until his own was a shriek.
“Isn’t it the truth?” he screamed. “Isn’t it the honest-to-God truth!”
Grimbley wiped his eyes and gradually the laughter died away, though he still shook his head in respectful amazement.
“I’ve seen all kinds of routines, honest-to-God...all kinds of routines.” He winked at Harvey and poked him in the chest. “But you clever little cookie, you—this is the old reverse English, isn’t it? The old twist-a-roo! Why, you sharp shootin’ sharpie!”
He laughed again and clamped the cigar back in his mouth. “You knew I wanted it, didn’t you—you little devil, you!” He poked Harvey again. “You knew I wanted it. I’ll tell you what,” he announced, taking the cigar out, “I’ll give you twenty-five bucks for it—mainly on account of it’s good politics to drive an old car. Makes people realize you’re not getting rich off them!”
He turned to look at the car again. “Make it twenty-two and a half. I didn’t notice the dent in the fender.” He put the cigar back, squinted his eyes, and looked at Harvey. “Deal?” he asked. “I mean twenty-two fifty, the car—and no strings.”
The ecstatic look on Harvey’s face slowly dissolved and he felt cold all over. “No strings,” he repeated weakly.
Harvey’s tone was quite sufficient for Grimbley. Once again his tongue explored the inside of his mouth and he squinted from Harvey to the car and back again.
“You better trot out the strings, buddy boy. Trot out the strings. I want to know what I’m getting!’’
Harvey looked off in another direction and closed his eyes. “Twenty-two-fifty—the car as is, and. . . and. . .”
“And what?”
Harvey turned to him, his voice ghostlike. “It’s haunted,” he said weakly.
Grimbley took the cigar out of his mouth again and stared at Harvey, and then the laughter came again, uncontrollable, shrieking. “It’s haunted!” he shouted. “The Goddamn car is haunted!” He could barely control himself and just stood there, hands around his vast girth, rolling, wheezing, and half doubled over with hysteria, repeating it over and over again. “It’s haunted. The Goddamn thing is haunted.”
Finally he stopped and wiped his eyes, and the cigar was back between his teeth. “So it’s haunted! I swear to God, you’re the cleverest cookie in fifty states! You ought to be in politics.” He laughed again. “It’s haunted.” He wiped his eyes again, and the chuckle was still in his voice when he asked, “How’s it haunted?”
Harvey’s eyeballs rolled up in his head. “Whoever owns it,” he heard himself say, “has to tell the truth!” There, Goddamnit, Harvey thought, at least it’s out in the air. He could stop worrying about it. The honest Satan inside him had per
formed the ultimate treachery and forced the admission out.
The word “truth” had a telling effect on Mr. Grimbley. It was as if Harvey had said “smallpox” or “Venereal disease” or “the black plague.” He let out a long, low breath and took the cigar out of his mouth.
“Has to tell the truth?” he asked, pronouncing the word as if it were a profanity.
Harvey nodded. “The whole truth. And the only way you can stop telling the truth is to sell the car.”
Again Grimbley gave Harvey his squinty-eyed look and then stared at the model A. He walked a few feet away and pointed to a 1935 Dodge with a rumble seat.
“How about this baby?” he inquired, loading the question with the grape shot of the experienced price-knocker-down.
Harvey heaved a huge sigh. “That’s no baby! It’s a great grandfather. It’s got no transmission, no rear end, no axle. That one’s shot.”
Immediately after saying this, his shoulders slumped and his normally ruddy face took on the color of an off-white sheet.
Grimbley’s eyes sparkled. He was on the precipice of a vast and strange knowledge and he perceived it readily. He took a few steps over to Harvey and spoke in a hushed voice.
“That’s the goods, isn’t it? he asked. “You have to tell the truth, don’t you? He shook his head from side to side. “That’s it! That’s the reason for the song and dance. You have to tell the truth.”
Harvey smiled the kind of smile that on babies is considered gas. He made a halfhearted gesture toward the car.
“What about the model A? he said. “Outside of the fact that it’s haunted, it’s a. . .it’s a nice conversation piece.”
Grimbley held up a beefy hand. “For some people, maybe,” he said positively, “but not for old honest Luther Grimbley! Buddy boy, I’m in politics and when you tell me I gotta start tellin’ the truth all the time—” He pulled at his jowls and looked horrified. “Holy God!” He looked back over at the car. “Well, do you know something? I couldn’t make a single political speech! I couldn’t run for office again. Why, old honest Luther Grimbley . . . old honest Luther Grimbley would die on the vine!”