by Tobias Wolff
Davis’s tea was empty but he pulled on the straw, making a commotion so the adjuster would know he was ready to leave.
“What happened in the office today,” the adjuster said, “I was doing my job, I was trying to help.”
“I understand that,” Davis said, standing up. Together they walked outside.
“It wasn’t lies,” the adjuster said, “not the way you thought. That is how we make out an accident report—for protection. But I know you don’t see it like that. You are a Southern gentleman.”
“I was brought up in the South.”
“Down there you have all that tradition. Honor. Up here—” he swept his hand around—“all they know is grab. I tell you, it is hard to be a good man. Well,” the adjuster stepped back, “I won’t detain you.” He said this in a formal way and gave a slight bow which he evidently thought to be courtly. Davis attributed the gesture to some movie the adjuster had seen with belles and gallants and pillared houses.
A man who worked with Davis recommended Leo the Lion so he took the car there for an estimate. Leo the Lion was a perfectly made, very small man. His mechanic’s overalls were tailored to nip in at the waist and flare at the legs. His top two buttons were undone. He paid no attention to Davis when Davis told him that all he wanted was the dents pounded out and the headlight replaced. Instead he made Davis get down and look at the underside of the fender. It was crusted and black. There were wires everywhere. Davis tugged at his trousers, trying to keep the cuffs off the floor.
“See?” Leo the Lion said. “The metal’s just about rusted through. We start banging on that and it’ll fall apart.” He turned and walked toward his office. Davis got to his feet and followed. There was a lion painted in velvet over the desk. A large stuffed lion was seated on one of the chairs and another peered out from behind the dusty leaves of a philodendron.
Leo the Lion took several manuals down from the shelves and made calculations. He showed them to Davis.
“Nine hundred dollars,” Davis said. “That seems very high. Why do you have to repaint the whole car?”
“Because when we find another fender it’s going to be a different color. We can’t match the color you’ve got, they don’t make it any more. That’s why.” He put the manuals away. Then he explained to Davis that he might not be able to do the job at all. Cars like that were rare and it wouldn’t be easy to locate a fender for it. But he had access to a computer which was plugged in to salvage yards all over the country, so if anybody could do it he could.
“Nine hundred dollars,” Davis said.
“You can probably get it done cheaper if you look around,” Leo the Lion said. “I wouldn’t vouch for the work, though. That car’s cherry except for the fender. It’s a classic. People are investing in classics these days. They put them on blocks and run the engine once a week, then take them to rallies.”
Davis folded the estimate sheet and said that he would be in touch, thinking that no way was he going to spend nine hundred dollars getting a fender fixed. As he drove away he saw another shop up the street and took the car in there. The mechanic told him it wasn’t worth the trouble and offered to take it off his hands for three hundred dollars.
“It’s worth more than that,” Davis said. “How much to fix it?”
“Twelve hundred dollars.”
“That’s a lot of money.”
The mechanic laughed. He monkeyed around with the figures and brought the total down to a thousand. He explained the difficulties he would have repairing the car. “Oh, all right,” he said suddenly, as though Davis had been trying to beat him down, and made up another estimate for seven hundred dollars. “That’s my absolute bottom price,” he said. “I can’t do it for less and come out ahead.”
As Davis was leaving the shop the mechanic ran toward the car, waving a piece of paper. Davis assumed that he had come up with another set of figures. “You forgot this,” the mechanic said, and pushed the first estimate through the window. Seeing that Davis did not understand, he explained how Davis could make himself an easy five hundred. He spoke with an angry kind of patience, the way people back home spoke to Negroes who couldn’t follow simple instructions. Davis was furious. He crumpled the paper and threw it out the window. For a time he considered reporting the man to an appropriate agency but decided against it. He would look like a whiner, and anyway he had no real proof.
A few days later the adjuster called Davis at work. “I trust this is not a busy time for you,” he said.
Actually this was the busiest part of the day, but Davis did not wish to seem rude so he said nothing.
“Hello?” the adjuster said.
“I’m here,” Davis said. “Did you get the estimates?”
“I did indeed receive your estimates only yesterday by the mail.”
“They seemed high to me. If you like I’ll get some more. I’m sure I can do better.”
The adjuster was not calling about the estimates. A more important matter had come up which he thought he should not discuss over the telephone. Davis agreed to drop in later. When he hung up his mouth was dry and his pulse racing. He knew that guilty people felt like this and decided to have the adjuster withdraw his claim that very day.
“That will not be possible at this time,” the adjuster said when Davis advised him of his intentions. “This woman has filed a claim against you which if she wins is going to cost a lot.” He slid a form across the desk and when Davis had read it he asked, “Do you understand?”
“No.”
“What she is saying is you ran into her because you were not watching where you were going and also you were driving at an illegal rate of speed.”
“But that’s not true!”
“She is claiming three thousand dollars in damages.”
Davis thought that was absurd, but the adjuster did not find it so. “She is not saying anything about personal injury, thank God. It would be a mess. I could tell you stories.”
Davis closed his eyes.
“She is saying you told her, quote unquote: ‘Don’t worry, it wasn’t your fault, I wasn’t paying attention.’” The adjuster looked over the top of the paper. “Which is a complete falsehood of course.”
“Not exactly.”
The adjuster lowered the paper. “You told her this?”
“Not those exact words,” Davis said. “It meant nothing, I was just being polite.” He looked down at the desk, at a cartoon of a man standing in front of a jury and displaying an empty sleeve where his right arm should have been. From behind, the outline of his missing arm was clear beneath the jacket, and his hand poked out below. “That’s the truth,” Davis said.
“Polite! Oh boy!” The adjuster laughed, then stopped and peered closely at Davis. “Forgive me,” he said, “but you don’t look so hot. You feel okay? You want some water?”
“I’m all right,” Davis said.
“Come on, I’ll buy you an iced tea. The other day I talked, now it’s your turn.”
“I have to get back to work,” Davis said. “What are we going to do?”
“What I told you before. You say she backed up without looking and hit you and left the scene of the accident. None of this stuff about you told her she could go. No more polite. This is time for impolite.”
“That would contradict the first report I gave you.”
“What report?” The adjuster took a form out of his desk and began tearing it into long shreds. “What report?” he repeated.
“You didn’t turn it in?”
“You want a miracle? You want me to turn in what does not exist? So—you have a sense of humor, you’re smiling.”
Richie, the boy from across the street, came over with a friend. “I can fix that light for you,” he said. “Fifty dollars. It won’t look like much but you’ll be legal.” His friend stood behind him staring at the car. Rust was gathering in the folds of the metal. “Thirty for the light,” said Richie, “twenty for labor.” The boy with him suddenly flipped over on
his back and crawled under the car.
“I don’t know,” Davis said. “I’m considering having it done right.”
“That’ll cost you. It’s not going to be easy, finding parts for this, but I guess you won’t have to sweat the bucks, you can put the screws to your insurance company. It’d be worth it, fixing this car up. I can do it if you want. I’ll give you a good price.”
Davis could see nothing of the boy under the car except the soles of his shoes. One was brown and the other was black. His feet made a V, reminding Davis of pictures he had seen of dead soldiers. He had no idea what the boy could be doing under there. “I’ll take it into consideration,” Davis said.
Richie kicked his friend’s shoes and the boy rolled out from underneath the car. “I can give you an estimate,” Richie said importantly. “Just let me know.”
“Where are you going to find the parts?”
Richie and his friend looked at each other and grinned.
Davis tried to read after dinner that night but the story made no sense to him. He could not understand why the people did what they did or said what they said. Finally he decided to visit his friends from home.
They were doing the dishes when Davis arrived. He watched TV in the living room and when they joined him he told them all about the accident, about Clara and the adjuster and the crooked mechanic. What should he do?
The wife yawned. “Search me,” she said. “I’ve never been in an accident.”
She went to bed and her husband got up and began tidying the room. “I’m not impressed with this display of virtue,” he said. “If you really want to do something worthwhile why didn’t you help us with the dishes? In the five months you stayed here with us you never once offered to wash the dishes.”
He followed Davis to the door. “Nothing is good enough for you,” he said. “When you were looking at apartments they were always too big or small, too far from work or too close to the traffic. It doesn’t take anybody five months to find an apartment. And when we took you to parties you acted bored and left early. Oh, what the hell. I’m sorry!” He shouted down the stairs: “Call me tomorrow!”
The thing to do, Davis thought, was to sit down and reason with Clara. She had seemed ridiculous to him but not dishonest. Probably her adjuster had gotten to her, or her husband. He could imagine how someone like her might get confused trying to do both the right thing and the pleasing thing.
He considered calling Clara, but her husband might answer and hang up, a strange man asking for his wife. Davis knew that somewhere there was someone capable of jealousy over Clara, and it was just possible that she had married him. Finally he copied down the address from the brochure and drove there.
Davis parked across the street. The houses in this neighborhood were very expensive, which irritated him. What could people like that, who could afford to live in such a house, possibly want with another three thousand dollars?
A long shadow passed across the drapes in the front window. It might have been Clara or it might have been her husband. To marry someone as tall as Clara, and beat her, you would have to be big—really big. But it was not this consideration that kept Davis in his car. He was thinking that he shouldn’t go around like a child, without keeping his eyes open, without thinking twice about everything. He ought to have learned that by now. If he got out of his car and went up to Clara’s door, they would find a way of using his honesty against him as they had used his good manners against him. He pitied her and he pitied himself.
Oh Clara, he thought, why can’t we tell the truth?
After Davis got the check he took the car down to Leo the Lion. The other man was cheaper but Davis thought he would cut corners. Richie was too young and inexperienced and probably wouldn’t have the right tools. Davis did not care for the way Leo the Lion swaggered but he took it as a sign of pride, and in his experience proud people did good work. And the computer thing impressed him. When a mechanic got involved with computers, my God, that showed he was serious about fixing cars.
When Davis went down to pick it up he was surprised at how beautiful the car was. People on the shop floor whistled when Leo the Lion drove it up from the basement parking lot. The color was brighter than Davis had thought from the sample book, brighter than he would have wished, but everyone else seemed to like it.
“The lock on the passenger side is broken,” Leo the Lion said. “The brakes aren’t good for more than another five thousand miles. She runs fine, though.” He sent Davis off with a small stuffed lion and a bumper sticker—“Treat Yourself to a Leo Today.”
The motor had been cleaned and fine-tuned, and Davis noticed the difference immediately. The car was faster, more responsive. The engine made a throaty, bubbling sound and banged like a pistol whenever he down-shifted. On his way home a bunch of boys pulled up next to Davis at a red light. Their car had wide tires and was raised in back. The driver gunned his engine several times. Davis fed his own engine a little gas to keep it turning over and it popped loudly. The boys started yelling things at him, not mean but playful. Davis stared straight ahead. When the light changed the other car laid rubber, and the boys in the back seat grinned over their shoulders at him.
The adjuster called one last time. He called Davis at home, and Davis resented it. “Listen,” the adjuster said, “I am very intuitive and I have this picture of you brooding all the time. You have to remember that up here is different from down there. Down there you can do things right. You have honor, what you call the gentleman code.”
“It’s the same there as here,” Davis said. “It’s no different anywhere.”
“You got scrunched,” the adjuster said, “and you got paid for getting scrunched, which seems to me fair.”
“I agree,” Davis said.
“Which also calls for a celebration,” the adjuster said, who then astonished Davis by inviting him to dinner on the following Wednesday. “You will like my wife,” said the adjuster. “She is very interesting with a degree in music. Do you enjoy music?”
“Not especially,” Davis said, though he did.
“No matter. With my wife you can talk about anything and she can talk right back. She cooks the old way. In twenty years cooking like this will be a memory, only a memory.”
Davis thought that he could very well imagine the kinds of things he would be expected to put in his mouth. He told the adjuster that he was busy on Wednesday and when the adjuster suggested Thursday, he said that he was busy that night as well. “You will find that my wife and me are flexible,” the adjuster said. “Whatever day will be fine with us. You name it. You say when.”
Davis could not speak. The silence gathered and he could not think of anything to say to break it with.
“Correct me,” the adjuster said, “but maybe you would rather not come.”
Davis switched the receiver to his left hand.
“I hope,” the adjuster went on, “this is not because you hold against me anything I have done.”
“No, it’s nothing you’ve done,” Davis said, and thought: it’s what you are.
“What I did, I was trying to help.”
“I know.”
“I am inviting you to break bread, I am inviting you to a banquet, and all the time you are thinking: ‘He made me lie, he made me go against my honor.’ That is the way it has always been with you people. There you have the whole story. Listen, such pure people like you should not get into accidents.” The adjuster went on and on; the complaint seemed old, a song, a chant, the truth of it not in the words but in the tone itself. Finally he stopped, and apologized, and Davis said that there was no need. He thanked the adjuster for his help and hung up.
On Sunday morning he went to the corner for a newspaper and when he came back he saw that the hood of his car was open. One boy was leaning over the engine and another was sitting in the front seat with the door open. The radio was on. “Hey, you kids,” Davis yelled, and they looked up. The one under the hood was Richie. “I didn’t know it w
as you,” Davis said, coming up to them.
“I see you had it fixed,” Richie said. “How much it put you back?”
Davis named a price three hundred dollars less than what he had paid, not wanting to look like a sucker. Apparently even this figure was not low enough. “Jeez,” said the boy in the front seat, and rolled his eyes.
“What the hell.” Richie closed the hood harder than was necessary. “As long as it wasn’t your money.”
Davis had the lock fixed but still he worried. There were quite a few souped-up cars in the neighborhood and he had to stop himself from going to the window when one of them started up outside or passed in the street. He heard them in his sleep. Often they entered his dreams. This went on for weeks after the car was stolen.
One night, in a prankish and suicidal mood, the thieves drove Davis’s car up and down the street at a terrific speed. Davis stirred in recognition; his dream changed, delivered him to a flat and lonely stretch of road outside Shreveport. He was in the old car with his friend. A half-empty bottle rolled on the seat between them. His friend had the pedal pushed to the floor: the white line trembled like a blown thread between the lights, and the tall roadside pines ticked by like fenceposts. They were singing, heads thrown back and teeth bared.
The thieves were singing too. They turned at the end of the block and made another pass down the street. Outside Davis’s window they shifted down, and the engine detonated. Davis bolted up from sleep, hand over breast, as if his own heart had misfired.
Wingfield
When we arrived at the camp they pulled us off the buses and made us do push-ups in the parking lot. The asphalt was hot and tar stuck to our noses. They made fun of our clothes and took them away from us. They shaved our heads until little white scars showed through, then filled our arms with boots and belts and helmets and punctured them with needles.