Auto-De-Fe

by Paul Hawkins

the shadow. We chose our cues and played.

  We played, and I actually got the better of him. I began to feel good. I was good at pool. The moment he suggested we play I'd commenced a cautious reverie that crescendoed as the game went on, and I observed his weaknesses and catalogued his mistakes. I didn't offer to help him out, of course. And as we played he began to talk - where he was from, what he liked and what he'd like to do. But I just nodded and mumbled for my part, lubricating the conversation just enough to keep it going and maybe keep him distracted, but wholly inattentive, concentrating instead on the game, figuring the angles and the shots and the strategies two and three shots in advance, making sure to win, and tuning him out increasingly as I did so. Finally his voice was just like the buzz of the lights, but after I made my final shot of our final game, and the balls had clicked one final solid time before dropping the eightball, it seemed too quiet, and I noticed that he'd stopped talking for the last few shots and had simply watched, leaning wearily on the cue stick.

  "It's getting late," he said, "I'd better go."

  "Well, all right," I replied, as reluctantly as I could, moved by my triumph to try and bleed a little penitence from him. But as I did so I realized it was the wrong thing, and some snatches of what he'd been saying during our games began to seep into my conscious mind.

  We walked out of the poolroom back into the bright red and white diner. "Man, you're good at pool," Bill said.

  I apologized hastily. "Naw, I was just lucky. I'm usually awful."

  He cast a keen glance at me, cutting through the sentiment. "You're supposed to say that before you play. That way you can sucker bets." I admitted that I still needed to master the subtleties.

  The diner was lonely. Eddie and Rick and Carlene were gone. An old guy sat at the bar, sipping coffee while the cook and the waitress let him alone. We saw Mark sitting in that furthest booth, looking ditched and pitiful.

  "You guys leaving?" he asked sheepishly.

  We nodded.

  "Women!" he muttered as we three headed out into the night.

  I sympathized but didn't waste my breath, and we exhibited our due respect for his condition, and commenced the appropriate ceremony, but I called off our observance after two beers and suggested that we all head home. Sympathy? It was just another facet of their game. I knew and Mark knew and Bill doubtlessly suspected that their quarrel was just an action of endearment, and that the two of them would be within grabbing distance of each other by noon tomorrow. No need to waste beer money on that.

  Mark left first, then Bill departed, dashing across the wide but scarcely trafficked street down a close dark south-bound lane retreating toward the shady prominence of crowded cheap apartment houses. I kept on walking down the mainstreet for several blocks, alone.

  The darkness deepened as I headed north among the smaller houses and the taller trees, preceding toward my house wading through the popular alarm of residential dogs up to our slightly sloping toy-strewn lawn, and on the porch trying to be quiet I stood working the key, then edging open the door the soft yellow light of one vigilant lamp welcomed me and I stepped comfortably inside. My dinner waited in the stove and moving to the kitchen table I opened the paper and gazed at it while eating, not absorbing a word. I finished my dinner and turned out the light and looked out the windows but nothing was happening so I went to bed, walking cat-like past my parents' room glad to see they were asleep. I climbed into bed but my head was full of frustrated energy, and it kept me dully awake, parading past me the images of all those things I'd tried not to think about all day, like a faithful but persistent hunting dog displaying its game.

  My dad had tough times for a while. He had to get a new job when the factory closed down. It used to be when I was a kid he'd be yelling at me for things - for anything - and after he was fired he was down for a long time. But now his job was new and things were better, and he and mom all of a sudden had two new kids with me already out of highschool and things were different now, and he was actually nice to me like he'd like to help me some way because when I got mad I told him how I wished I could be gone. He seemed to know as much already, and I didn't want to work at the warehouse forever, and I planned "if nothing else came up" to join the Navy in the fall. I kept that clause in there because good things can happen, and not as an escape hatch, because I knew that disappointment wasn't just a way to get back at parents anymore. They'd been good enough to me and come this fall if nothing else turned up I knew I'd do it. My only real idea of the ocean was the dark tides and the pale bodies and the littered shores near the amusement park, but lying in bed and starting to dream it became the brighter, cleaner place I knew it had to be in places, and I knew those were the places that I'd like to be.

  ii

  Bill was born in Memphis, he'd told me that night playing pool, but living with his mother they'd moved to Raleigh, then Charlotte, then Baltimore, then Pittsburg, then Rochester, then Scranton before moving here. His mother popped gum when she talked and was currently employed as a foundations lady at Bingle's Department Store. And Bill worked where I did. They'd probably be moving again soon - the odds were in favor of it. But Bill wouldn't move again with her. The next move he made, he said, would be his own, and he was confident it would be a good move just because it was his.

  The sun was bright at eight o'clock the next morning. Working the late shift had encouraged me to forget little facts like that, until the occasions arose that forced me to rudely rediscover their validity.

  My mother poked me at eight in the morning and told me my friend was here. The word 'friend' did not jive with the idea of eight o'clock but I mumbled 'okay' and pulled on a shirt and mashed down my hair and wandered into the living room. And there was Bill.

  "You don't look too good," Bill said.

  There he was totally at ease in our living room, sitting on our couch watching cartoons over the shoulders of my four-year old sister and three-year-old brother, who were squatting in front of the tube holding bowls of cold cereal in their laps, acting like Bill was nothing new, the way dogs will take to certain people automatically.

  "I'm gonna get something to eat," I said.

  Bill agreed that this was a good idea and followed me into the kitchen. I didn't know Bill well back then so I had to ask if he liked cold cereal and he said he liked it fine. We ate and watched cartoons and afterwards he said he wanted to show me something, and I was relieved that was all there was to it so we put our bowls in the kitchen sink then went outside.

  It was bright. He walked fast down the street and out of our neighborhood back toward the avenues of businesses and there the sun got really bright bouncing off all the austere shopfronts and the white concrete, and I winced and followed him my stomach appraising its breakfast unsatisfactorily throughout the exertion, and when I was just about to ask where we were going Bill relinquished his determined discipline just long enough to confide, "Just wait! Just wait'll you see it!" so I thought I'd wait a little longer. We went up to Fifth past the war surplus store and the mission down to the corner and crossed the street toward a filling station. As we approached I saw it, and seeing it I looked for something else, but that had to be what he was talking about. It was long with tailfins and three generations of paint - all visible. As we neared it Bill began to radiate a motherly glow then asked, "Whaddya think?"

  What did I think? I didn't have a car, so I suppose I was impressed by the idea of it, and I walked around and around the behemoth, trying to establish some correlation between my fantasies of wheel-driven liberation and this artifact.

  "Isn't it something?"

  "Are you planning on buying it?"

  He beamed. "I already have."

  I should've known. Looking back at the garage I'd noticed a wicked little man in the shadows, counting through a grasping a wad of bills with an ‘all sales are final’ look in his eyes, seeming pleased enough to start his binge at nine o'clock.

  "You can steer," Bill said, "I'll push."

 
My fantasies dissipated with a flash, and the lead sled from another era leered at me. I kicked a tire.

  "It doesn't run?"

  "Not yet."

  "But it will?"

  "Sure it will. It just needs a little something."

  "And you can fix it?"

  He looked surprised. "In no time. Now hop in. I'm pushing."

  I didn't look forward to the awkward, conspicuous trek, but I sighed and climbed in, gripping the wheel. It felt as solid as a tank. "Hey," I called back to him, "I can push from up here, too."

  "Naw," he declined magnanimously, "your house aint that far away, and some of it's downhill."

  My house? Visions of my dad confronted me. Dad, as glaring pagan totem.

  "Bill..." I began to object.

  "I'll have it running by tonight," he said. "I'll drive us both to work in it! You got tools, don't ya?"

  "Sure," I conceded. "Bill..." I began again.

  "By tonight," he repeated.

  We rolled awesomely out of the garage's lot, the tank's suspension complaining with ill-concealed glee, like a dog going for his first walk in ages.

  I steered and Bill pushed and car after car passed us. It was embarrassing, but I resurrected my old altar-boy demeanor and just stared obliviously straight ahead. But then one car lingered beside us, and I finally looked over at it. It was Mr. Walters, driving a long black sedan, and I couldn't see as