Reinhart in Love (58 page)

“Well,” he said at last in answer, “I think that while what you say has a superficial justification, it is basically unfair. I have had occasion more than once in the past to sense in myself a certain creative talent. True, I don't draw or sing or write verse, but I do manage to get involved in situations that seem to have artistic form and I do frequently feel an exaltation for which no other explanation would suffice than that I am something of a poet. That is, while suffering the most grievous disappointments I am inclined to rise above them and actually enjoy the spectacle.

“Now, as to your comments about fakery. My position on that is Platonic: every earthly condition or entity is but the pale shadow of the perfect fake that stands for it in heaven, or America, which are for all practical purposes synonymous. Therefore to be is human; to seem, divine.”

His other self made no immediate rejoinder, because he had reached a stretch of highway flanked by used-car lots whose owners in collusion with the police had put a traffic signal every hundred yards to arrest the flight of prospective buyers; and when he stopped at each of these, the other motorists who pulled alongside might have seen him talking to himself, a practice which though widespread on the streets of New York is frowned upon in the Middle West.

Thus inhibited in his dialogue—it was perhaps evidence of advancing age that he could not continue it without moving his lips—Reinhart turned as a person will to practicalities: he needed money on the one hand and on the other he had the car, the title to which had been transferred to Cosmopolitan Sewers, Ltd., of which he was legal president. Morally his case was weaker, for the Gigantic was essentially the property of Claude, and Claude had actually dealt squarely with him on the personal level ever since the organization of Cosmo, paid him generously and on time, given him the use of the house and car, and so on: in civilian life there was always this discrepancy between public and private.

But if he were to commit suicide, he needed a few dollars for necessary expenses, but didn't want to be seen around home or bank. Ergo, he whipped the Gigantic off the highway and into one of the lots, driving between parallel lines of prewar chariots until he reached a hut that evidently constituted the office, for it wore a sign:
PSYCHO
SAM
:
TAKE
ADVANTAGE OF
MY
LUNACY AND
BUY
QUICK
BEFORE
I
AM
HAULED
OFF TO
THE
HATCH!

The poor old Gigantic, cowed by these exhortations, mumbled to a stop. Reinhart had pretty well licked it anyway by his highhanded driving since leaving the West Side, so naturally he felt guilty about what he was ready to do now. “You weren't the worst car in the world,” he said graciously to the heater-grille, which might be taken as its ear, and climbed out. Two men were pawing the gravel several cars down, and several others at the back of the lot, but no one appeared for him. He opened the office door and poked inside.

“Never,” said a sweat-shiny, catchup-faced man who continued to wear a felt hat though he sat behind a desk. “I'll put your name on a list, brother, but don't look for it to come up before you're old and bald. So long.”

But Reinhart had already steeled himself for the unpleasant encounter that any kind of commerce seemed to turn out to be for him.

“How do you do,” he said. “If you are Psycho Sam, I want—”

The man developed an interesting combination of snarl and grin. “No sirree, brother, you don't want
nothing
, not one iota. It's what I want all the way. Me, Myself, and I are the only three fellas I pay any attention to nowadays. You know what ‘sellers' market' means? It means I got the merchandise what you want and you're going to have to crawl to get it.”

The same kind of situation they had had in real estate, except that not even Claude had exploited it in this fashion. There must be something abominable inherent in the idea of cars, which are also used as lethal weapons on the great national holidays and have made more casualties than all the wars since the dawn of man—or however it is phrased by the newspaper hacks on July 5th.

“All right, then,” Reinhart said pleasantly. “Sorry to have bothered you. I'll sell my 1941 Gigantic to Max the Maniac, next door.”

The red-faced guy rose from his chair and swept towards Reinhart in one fluid motion, as if he were being swung aboard ship by breeches buoy.

“Friend, whyn't you say so?” He made as if to kiss Reinhart, but dodged at the last moment, pinched the slats in the little door-blind, glanced perfunctorily through the window, and cried: “Beautiful vehicle! You get our top price.”

Anticipating some difficulty with the registration, Reinhart started to explain: “You see, it's a company car, and—”

“Uh-huh,” said Psycho Sam (if indeed it was he), “never you mind, big fellow, that automobile will be in Flaarida before they know it's gone, and in South America next week, where we peddle that class-type car to rich Spiks for an arm and a leg, and they don't complain, getting nothing from Detroit for the whole war and they got the wherewithal, raising coffee and such, nothing a greaser woont do for a Gigantic Flameburst Straight Eight, he would sell his old lady on the street. … I can take all you get. Forget about Maniac Max. He will hump you on the price and if you holler, blow the whistle to the cops.”

Reinhart got out his driver's license and the registration. “I can prove this isn't a hot car—”

Psycho unlocked a desk drawer, took from it a metal cashbox, unlocked that, and counted off eight 100-dollar bills. Stretching forward to poke them at Reinhart, he let go a long, low, half-muted fart, and said to himself, aloud: “I hear you talkin'.”

Reinhart suddenly understood he was getting a good deal only because Psycho believed him to be an auto thief (strange when you considered that Negroes usually figured him for a policeman), so he took the cash and insolently flipped the ignition key onto the desk, the way underworld figures do in the movies.

This however offended Psycho, who gave him a pissy look and rasped: “You could use some etiquette, brother.”

“Sorry, Psycho.”

“Let me set you straight about that, too: I'm Harry. There ain't no Psycho. Just a name, get it? Kind of a come-on.”

“Yeah,” answered Reinhart, who with the cash in his pocket found his mood changed: essentially he hated this type of person. “Yeah, a come-on, but when a guy takes you up on it and wants to buy a car, you give him a bad time because it's a seller's market. What's the idea, or are you in this line of work just because you're sadistic?”

Harry pushed back his hat. “Who?” he asked. “I happen to be Lithuanian, but that ain't neither here nor there. No, after all, get it, you want to get a guy in here inna first place, no? If you already give him the works on the signs—'Frig You, Jack, Keep Going'—that's what he'll do. No, first you pull him off the street with his balls in a uproar,
then
tell him go jerk hisself off. Get it? Nobody can hold up under that kinda tension. He'll buy anything and kiss your dilly for it. Course it won't work for the rest of your life now they got rolling in Detroit again. Couple of years and lots of cars, we go back to patting
their
rosy rumps. I don't know what's so hard to grab about that. You just stick to the merchandising, brother, and leave the thinking to us.”

The phone rang at that moment and he stuck his face into it. Reinhart left the lot on shank's mare, first time he had walked in ages. He seemed already to have a blister when he passed Maniac Max's, so in front of the next establishment, a wholesale house for tires, he sat on the pile of discarded whitewalls that made a fence around the place and put up his thumb at the traffic—though his billfold held eight hundred dollars and he could well have afforded a cab. But it was rather pansyfied, he thought, to run away in a taxi like an eloping debutante. Also he didn't want so precise a record of his trip as a taxi driver would be likely to make.

His fellow men showed their usual disinclination to be serviceable, passing by with accelerators to the floor and noses towards heaven. And who could blame them? Reinhart himself would not have stopped for Reinhart—you could get held up, beaten to a pulp, and flung into a culvert that way. He tried to look like something smaller than he was, scrooching down against the tire, but then of course his arms seemed longer, apish.

He had put on his reading glasses and was surveying the immediate area for a piece of cardboard on which he could letter
MINISTERIAL
STUDENT
RETURNING TO
SEMINARY
, when a squeal of brakes lifted his heart.

It was a late, prewar Buick four-door, with one whole fender covered in red lead as a preparation for repainting: the front bumper had been taken off no doubt for the same reason, and the hubcaps as well; newspaper, held by draftsman's tape, masked the back windows. The radio aerial flew an enormous hairy tail, the size a fox might grow if he were big as a pony.

The driver stuck his head out the right-hand window—to do which he did not have to slide as far as another might: his neck seemed unusually long.

“Come on, boy!”—actually he said, “‘mon, bwa!”

He wore sideburns that fell to his jawbone, a mustache thin as a sprinkling of cigarette ashes, and a sort of blue cowboy shirt with white two-headed-arrow piping over the breast pockets.

Reinhart caught the door as it was flung open, got in and—

“Watch yass,” warned his host, but too late, and he fell through empty space onto the floorboards: no right-hand seat. “I bought this machine off a nigger,” his friend went on, “and you know what he did to it—used it right up, lived, eat, sleeped, shit in it, never got out the door from the time he bought it to when he sold it to me. I'm cleaning it up, boy, and putting in a new rear end. You never seen a machine like I'm going to have. I'm going to cut her down like a racer and run her at Indianapolis. I'm going to rebore her block, and I'm going to drive two hundred miles an ar, and run them p'lice off the road. One of ‘em old boys stopped me yesserday, come up and put his hand right here on the winda, and I said: ‘You bear pull it back, boy, or I'll break it off rat at the wrist.' You bear believe he pulled it right back too, boy, or I would of done it. You goddam right I would of done it.” He clawed some hair out of his eyes and drove a quarter mile in low gear. Neither did the car have a muffler. With his behind on the floor, and the dashboard above his eyes, Reinhart felt as though he were being shot out of a cannon.

“I would of put my knife in him,” continued his host, a specimen of what was called locally a “Briarhopper,” a person with Kentuckian antecedents. “I saw my daddy do that onetime. Put a double-bit ax right in some old boy's head for getting smart with him. FBI ran him to China and we never saw him since. Over there still with them Chinks, probly. I had a Chink girl once. Her gash run crossways, like they say, and that's no lie. I can go eight times a night, and then I get tared and it hangs down like a old sock. Where you from, Cum-minsville?”

“No,” answered Reinhart from the floor. He had an under-chin view of his benefactor and consequently a perspective on several boils. From the rear-vision mirror dangled a naked kewpie doll in a nimbus of red and blue feathers. The back seat seemed to be filled with old tires and extra auto parts, because Reinhart looked it over, thinking he might retire there, but no.

The Briarhopper had one of those little swivel-knobs on the steering wheel, and drove with a hand on it, freeing the other to finger his crotch, pick his nose, and hail—girls, Reinhart assumed though of course he couldn't see, and what he heard was the frequent repetition of “Got damn! What I need is a piece of cock.” Such are the variations in American idiom that certain terms reverse their meaning from one to the next: Reinhart had served in the Army and hence knew this fellow was anything but a queer: on the other hand, it was not impossible that he might have been waving at chickens.

“No,” Reinhart answered. “My name is Lorenz Goodykuntz of Pocatello, Idaho, and I am just passing through.”

The next moment he was hurled into the back of the automobile and saved from serious damage only by the cushion of an old tire. The Briarhopper had suddenly climbed on the brakes. When the skid finally petered out, he pulled off the road, then turned and thrust his wiry hand at Reinhart.

“Doc Goodykuntz, I be a sonbitch! Recall me, Doc? Homer A. Blesserhart of 119 Snell Avenue and before that I uz in the Army: PFC Homer A. Blesserhart, Twenty-Seventh Messkit Repair Battalion, APO 93, care uh Postmaster S. F. My God, I must of tuck every course you sell, and I got four of your degrees, though them genuine sheepskin parchments must of got lost in the mail.”

Reinhart sighed and crawled forward, dragging with him a wooden carton of wire and such, which he emptied, upended, and sat on. He was now at a higher level than a normal seat and feared that when they got the show on the road again, Homer's cowboy driving might send him through the roof.

“You realize, Blesserhart,” he said severely, “that from my thousands of students it is difficult to remember any single one….” He saw Homer's slack mouth begin to tighten in a pout. “… Wait a minute—nonchemical medicine, wasn't it?”

“Nuh,” said Homer, going sullen again. “Nucklar Science and Industral Mechanics, Radiotellagrafy, Psychic Energy, and Advanced Seminar in Martal Relations.”

“Oh sure, the marriage course. I remember you very well. How's the wife?”

Homer put his head out the driver's window. They sat on the shoulder of the road, between a wholesale tile house and a gravel pit, and a little farther along was a giant plaster cone from a window in the base of which a red-haired guy in a white overseas cap sold frozen custard, and one of those gaspipe-rack establishments that offered two-pants suits for 19.95, alterations included. However, Homer had averted his head from embarrassment and not to enjoy the view: a blush ran over his pimples.