The car was slow to start in the cold. Unh-uh, unh-uh, the engine grunted, at first briskly and then more and more slowly, self-discouraged. “Jesus, don’t quit on me now,” my father breathed in a dancing stream of vapor. “Start one more time and tomorrow I’ll get your battery charged.”
Unnh-uh, unnnnnh-ah.
My father switched off the ignition and we sat in the dark. He made a loose fist and blew into it. “See,” I said, “if you’d worn your gloves you’d have ‘em now.”
“You must be frozen to death,” was his answer. “One more time,” he said, and switched the ignition back on and de pressed the starter button with his thumb. In the pause, the battery had gathered a little juice. It commenced hopefully.
Ih-huh, Ih-huh, uh-uh, unnh-uh, unnhn-ah, uhhhh. We scraped the bottom of the battery.
My father pulled the emergency brake a notch tighter, and said to me, “We’re in the soup. We’ll have to try a desperation measure. You get in behind the wheel, Peter, and I’ll get out and push. We have a little slope here but we’re pointed the wrong way. Put the car into reverse. When I shout, let the clutch out. Don’t ease it out, pop it out.”
“Maybe we should get a garageman now, before they close,” I said. I was frightened of failing him.
“Let’s give this a whirl,” he said. “You can do it.”
He got out of the car and I slid over, accidentally sitting on my books and the paper bag containing the Italian sandwich for my mother. My father went to the front of the car and as he stooped to put his weight into it his grinning face burned yellow like a gnome’s. The light of the headlights cut across his face so sharply his forehead seemed all knobs and it was plain how often his nose had been broken when he played football at college thirty years ago. My stomach clenched coldly as I checked the position of the gear shift and ignition switch and choke. At a nod from my father I released the emergency brake. Only the ovoid of his imbecile blue cap showed above the hood as he pitched his weight into the car. It did move backwards. The crunching of the tires on the gravel lifted in pitch; grinding backwards we struck a little declivity that added a precious bit of momentum; the Buick’s inertia for a moment tugged to be free of itself. In a piercing sob my father shouted, “Now!” I popped out the clutch as I had been told to do. The car snapped to a stop jaggedly; but its motion was transferred through crusty knobs and clogged pivots to the engine, which, like a slapped baby, coughed. The motor gasped and shook the frame as its cylinders erratically exploded; I pushed in the choke halfway, trying not to smother it, and jiggled my foot on the accelerator: this was the mistake. Twitched out of tune, the motor missed one, two beats, and died.
We were on the flat. Far away beyond the factory wall the door of a bar opened and a slat of light collapsed into the street.
My father flashed to my door and I lurched over, sickly ashamed. My body burned all over; I needed to urinate. “Son of a bitch,” I said, to distract with my manliness my father from my failure.
“You did O.K., kid,” he said, panting with excitement as he resumed his place behind the wheel. “The engine’s stiff; that may have loosened it up.” Delicately as a safecracker, his black silhouette picked at the dashboard as his foot probed the gas pedal. It had to be on the first try and it was. He found the spark again and nursed it into roaring life. I closed my eyes in thanks and relaxed into the coming motion of the car.
It did not come. Instead, a faint disjointed purr arose from the rear of the chassis, where I imagined the corpses had been carried when the undertaker owned the car. My father’s shadow hurriedly tried all the gears; to each the same faint and unmoving purr answered. He tried each gear twice in disbelief. The motor roared but the car did not move. The factory wall echoed back the frantic sustained crescendo of the cylinders and I was afraid men would be called toward us out of the distant bar.
My father put his arms up on the wheel and lowered his head into them. It was a thing I had only ever seen my mother do. At the height of some quarrel or sadness she would crook her arms on the table and lower her head into them; it frightened me more than any rage, for in the rage you could watch her face.
“Daddy?”
My father did not answer. The streetlight touched with a row of steady flecks the curve of his knit cap: the way Vermeer outlined a loaf of bread.
“What do you think’s wrong?”
Now it occurred to me he had had an “attack” and the in explicable behavior of the car was in fact an illusionistic reflection of some breakage in himself. I was about to touch him-I never touched my father-when he looked up with a smile of sorts on his bumpy and battered urchin’s face. “This is the kind of thing,” he said, “that’s been happening to me all my life. I’m sorry you got involved in it. I don’t know why the damn car doesn’t move. Same reason the swimming team doesn’t win, I suppose.”
He raced the motor again and peered down past his knees at the clutch pedal as he worked it in and out with his foot.
“Do you hear that little rattling behind?” I asked.
He looked up and laughed. “You poor devil,” he said.
“You deserved a winner and you got a loser. Let’s go. If I never see this heap of junk again it’ll be too soon.”
He got out and slammed the door on his side so hard I thought the window might shatter. The black body swayed fastidiously on its obstinate wheels and then sat casting its paper-thin shadow as if it had won some inscrutable point. We walked away. “That’s why I never wanted to move to that farm,” my father said. “As soon as you do you become dependent upon automobiles. All I’ve ever wanted is to be able to walk to where I had to go. My ideal is to walk to my own funeral. Once you’ve sold out your legs, you’ve sold out your life.”
We walked across the railroad station parking lot and then turned left to the Esso station on Boone Street. The pumps were dark but a dim golden light burned in the little office; my father looked in and tapped on the glass. The interior was crowded with raw new tires and spare parts in numbered boxes more or less arranged in a green metal frame. A great upright Coca-Cola dispenser vibrated audibly and trembled and shut off, as if a body trapped inside had made its last effort. The electric Quaker State Oil clock on the wall said 9:06; its second hand swept the full circle as we waited. My father tapped again, and there was still no answer. The only motion within was the second hand sweeping.
I asked, “Isn’t the one on Seventh Street an all-night place?”
He asked me, “How are you bearing up, kid? This is a helluva thing, isn’t it? I ought to call your mother.”
We walked up Boone and across the tracks and past the little porches of the brick row houses and thence up Seventh, across Weiser, which wasn’t so gaudy this high up, to where indeed the great garage was open. Its white mouth seemed to be drinking the night. Within, two men in gray coveralls, wearing gloves from which the fingers had been cut, were washing an automobile with pails of sudsy hot water. They worked quickly, for the water tended to freeze in a film of ice on the metal. The garage was open to the street at one end and at the other end faded into indeterminate caverns of parked cars. Along one wall a little booth, like a broader telephone booth or like one of those enclosed sheds in which people used to wait for trolley cars-there still was one in the town of Ely-, seemed to function as the heart of the place. Outside its door, on a little cement curb stenciled with the words step up, a man in a tuxedo and white muffler waited, periodically consulting the black-dialed platinum watch strapped to the inside of his wrist. His motions were so jerky and chronic that when I first spotted him in the corner of my eye I thought he was a life-size mechanical ad. The car being washed, a pearl-gray Lincoln, was presumably his. My father stood in front of him for an instant and I saw from the quality of the man’s pearl-gray gaze that my father was literally invisible to him.