Car Read online

  CAR

  A novel

  Harry Crews

  1972

  One

  Mister sat at the top of the car-crusher as close to joy as he’d been in a long time. The afternoon had come up Cadillacs. It seemed a good sign, a great sign. He needed one. They all needed one. The enormous machine that he used to smash cars into suitcases throbbed and pulsed under him. In the small yellow cab thirty feet off the ground, Mister took the controls in his hands and revved the engine. The leather seat that held him rocked and swayed. He waited patiently for the next car to slide into the cradle below.

  No pattern had developed during the morning, and that was all right because he did not expect it to. He never expected a pattern, but he was ready if one came. For a while, the middle of the day—just before lunch—had been interesting when two Hudson Hornets had appeared like magic one after another in quick succession. But it was a fluke. Nothing you could really take hold of. So Mister just quickly crushed them, smashed the Hudson Hornets into solid metal suitcases, and sent them sliding down the chute where the barge would pick them up.

  Then in late afternoon, the Cadillacs had started. The first one had been a forty-seven two-door hardtop. It sat in the cradle, finless, but full of chrome. Pow! He smashed it shut. A fifty-seven slid into the cradle. It sat creaking gently in its own momentum, full of fantastic fins. A drunk’s dreamfish. Pow! With great untender satisfaction, Mister returned it to an earlier time, back to raw unmolded metal. Then a third Cadillac appeared. And a fourth. Mister’s heart pounded. A small wave of heat washed through him. A fifth! He’d had five in a row now. He sat hunched and waiting over the rubber controls.

  A brand-new 1970 Cadillac slid into the cradle. Mister whipped a red bandana out of the bib of his overalls and signaled Paul, who was working the crane, that this was the last one for today. Mister sat gazing fondly down upon the Cadillac. The sixth in succession. A record.

  Cadillac: the poor man’s car (Once you git youself one of them babies, you got youself something. Your regular Cadillac is a pree-cision-made machine. Low upkeep. No depreciation to speak of hardly).

  Cadillac: the rich man’s car (I didn’t work eighteen hours a day and get three ulcers at the age of thirty-six to drive a Volkswagen. You show me a man who can trade in for a new Cadillac in October of every year and I’ll show you a man in the mainstream of America).

  The voices pumped quietly in Mister’s head. Quietly he participated in the car’s evolution. He saw the first Cadillacs—solid and square as Sherman tanks. But gradually they were attenuated by the wind, stretched and smoothed like teardrops. Then the first evidence of a fin began to appear. A small bump at the small end of the teardrop. And from that small bump there grew a giant fin of such proportions as to take the breath away. It swam through all the garages from ocean to ocean, from Canada to Mexico. It went upstream, savage and unrelenting, to the headwaters of the American heart. And there it remained. There it would always remain. Who could doubt it?

  Mister took out his bandana again and wiped his face. There below him in the cradle was what the Cadillac had become. The fins were still there, but no longer fluid or functional. They were massive, straight and unmoving. Mister revved the engine of the car-crusher. Its noise was the only noise anywhere.

  He was sitting on the edge of forty-three acres of wrecked cars. Below him to his left was the roiling excremental flow of the Saint John’s River. Ten feet of gasoline on top of fifty feet of shit was the way his daddy described it. But his daddy didn’t seem to like anything much anymore. And across the river in a pulpmill haze cast red by the setting sun was Jacksonville, Florida. It was time to quit for the day, time to crush the last car suitcase size and let it slide down the chute where it would eventually be loaded onto one of several barges anchored at the concrete dock. Twenty-five tons of machinery waited, poised on rails at either end of the car-crusher, to shorten the Cadillac, to reduce it to a manageable unlovely square lump.

  The Cadillac had already been shortened by about a third when they got it. It was a pale-green four-door sedan with a paisley vinyl roof. But now it wore its chromeshining breast-bumper around its doors. The entire hood had been shoved back into the stomach of the car where the front seats once had been.

  Ten miles north on U.S. 1, between Jacksonville and Saint Augustine, the driver had apparently fallen asleep and run the Cadillac head-on into a concrete bridge abutment. The state troopers had taken the driver out with an acetylene torch and a putty knife. And put him in a rubber sheet. That’s what Junell said when she towed the Cadillac into Auto-Town.

  She had brought the Cadillac in on the back of Big Mama, her red ten-wheeled tow truck. Then she had the boys strip it. The Cadillac had a wooden hand-carved walnut steering wheel, and strangely, because the steering column had been driven all the way through the left side of the back seat, the walnut wheel was undamaged. It was hanging in Salvage House right now. She had removed it, along with the hubcaps off the back. Then she had taken the rear window glass out, the door handles off, the glass tailights out, robbed the trunk of jack and spare tire. Finally, there was nothing left but the stripped-bare skeleton of metal that lay in the cradle below him now.

  Mister touched the red-rubber lever in front of him and a colossal vise clammed shut on the Cadillac. A solid piece of metal the size of a suitcase slid down the chute. Mister sighed and turned off the engine of the car-crusher. He climbed down the iron steps and walked toward the concrete dock. On three sides his horizon was mountains of wrecked cars. Every possible kind of car in every possible kind of attitude: upside-down, sideways, on end, pitching, yawing, tilted. The ground under his feet was not ground at all but an unknowably thick layer of glass shards, glass of all colors, rose, yellow, clear, tinted blue and pink, and even black. Mixed with the glass were ragged slivers of aluminum, scarred lumps of cast iron, and other pieces of metal worn down fine as sand. From long practice he walked evenly over the uneven pieces of metal and glass.

  He stood on the dock and regarded the day’s work with satisfaction. Hudson Hornets vanished, Oldsmobile’s Youngmobile gone, Pontiac reduced, Chevrolet canceled, Buick Believers undone. Just suitcases now. Enormously heavy suitcases. Tomorrow they would go up the river. Mister squinted and looked in the direction they would go. His eyes burned and his vision blurred from the palpable breath rising out of the water of the river. Being this close to the Saint John’s River was like being too close to the open door of a furnace. An airy blast of gas and chemicals and stopped-up toilets rushed about his head. Mister turned up the collar of his denim shirt, hunched his shoulders against the hot blast of the river and walked back into Auto-Town.

  It was nearly a half-mile to Salvage House, half a mile on a trail that led through a valley that wound between abrupt cliffs of automobiles.

  A hundred and fifty yards before he got to Salvage House, he broke out onto a plain of wrecked and mangled cars laid out neatly in rows, one after the other, more than ten acres of them spreading out to his left and ending where the expressway arched over Auto-Town toward Jacksonville.

  Mister refused to look at the rows of cars but walked doggedly on. Now that he had the mountain of cars between himself and the river, there was no wind. It was very late. They’d probably have to pay Paul an hour or more overtime.

  Salvage House gate was shut and locked. Through the wire-mesh front, hubcaps and rearview mirrors and steering wheels glowed dully where they hung on display from the walls. Big Mama stood out by the high yellow fence that hid Auto-Town from the superhighway. Or at least the fence hid Salvage House and the three-foot-high sign that said that this was Auto-Town, but it did not hide the mountains of wrecked cars.

  There was a taxi parked at the iron-grilled gate, closed and padlocked now. It was near enough da
rk that the taxi had its headlights on. A woman in a wide black hat and a black veil stood at the grilled gate with her hands on the bars. Mister sighed. God knows who she was. He was prepared to have anybody arrive at their gates. If it had been a woman come to take him away and butcher him and sell him as meat in the local supermarket, it would not have surprised him. But of course it was nothing so interesting and unusual as that, and he had known it wouldn’t be.

  “Where is Fred’s car?” she asked through the gate.

  Mister was close enough that he could see right through her veil even through the light was bad. He saw that her eyes were black and hollow and her nose was blunt and spoon-shaped. Without answering, he turned from her and looked back toward forty-three acres of wrecked cars, dark and jagged and indistinguishable one from the other now. He looked back at her. Why couldn’t any of them see it was impossible?

  “I don’t know,” said Mister.

  She weaved gently on her black-shod, delicate feet. Then she turned loose the iron gate and opened a black purse, took out a piece of paper, and squinted at it in the bad light.

  “Is this Auto-Town?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Mister said.

  “Is this your place of business? Do you own it?” Her voice was light and, in its grief, lilting.

  “My daddy owns it.”

  “His car was brought here,” she said.

  “Whose?”

  “Fred’s. My husband. The one he was …The one he had the accident in. They told me it was brought here. Please. If I could just see it? For a minute. Please help me.”

  “When was it brought here, lady?”

  “Six days ago.” Through the veil, he could see the little place between her eyes tighten. “In the afternoon.”

  “Make?”

  “A Cadillac. A vinyl top. A paisley vinyl top.”

  “A new one?”

  “This year’s, yes, a new one.”

  It would have been that one naturally. Which other one could it have possibly been? And now it was a very solid suitcase, lumped in with two hundred and sixteen other suitcases on the dock waiting for the barge. Mister took a key ring out of his pocket. The ring was fastened to a leather strap attached to his belt. He unlocked the gate.

  “This way, lady.”

  She looked at the taxi. “I’ll be a little while. You can turn off your lights.”

  It was getting dark now, but she followed him all right, making only a little sound like rats scurrying over dried grain. Mister knew exactly where to take her. Less than fifty yards from Salvage House, laid out in one of the first rows, they came upon it, a foreshortened Cadillac car in perfect condition except that the front seat was filled with the engine and the windshield on the driver’s side had a star-shaped shatter where, unmistakably, a head had stopped.

  They stood in the darkness watching it. It was a sixty-nine and not a seventy, but Mister knew that even if the light had been good she probably would not have known. Women were emotional and full of gestures.

  She walked closer to the Cadillac. She stopped by the back door. She looked at him. He knew exactly what to do. He took the handle of the door and pulled. The hinge was jammed. He pulled harder. It groaned and scraped, but it opened. She wedged into the back seat. He closed the door.

  “I’ll just sit here a while,” she said.

  “Right,” he said. He left her there and went back to Salvage House and climbed the outside stairs to the second floor where he lived with his father, his sister Junell, and his twin brother Herman.

  Herman was not there. But Mister had not expected him to be. The light was dim in the single vast room they used for kitchen, dining place, and living room. The wall was a solid bank of windows on the side next to the wrecked mountains and the river. His father, Easton Mack, whom everyone called Easy, stood at the windows looking down. Junell stood beside him. She was dressed in black motorcycle racing leathers. The long hair spilling down her back was red and burned like a light against the black jacket. Mister’s father turned his head and glanced at him as he came through the door. His eyes were thin as knifeblades. Mister went over to where they were standing. They were looking down at the sixty-nine Cadillac where Fred’s new widow sat. The three of them stood there a long time. The windows were open to the wind from the river. From this distance the wind was pleasantly warm and thick with an odor like ripe cheese.

  A sound came to them from below. Metal on metal, a groaning. Easy Mack turned and walked quickly across the room and came back. He stared down into the gathering darkness where the sound had become more urgent, insistent. Fred’s widow was trying to get out of what she thought was Fred’s Cadillac.

  “She won’t be able to get out of there,” Junell said.

  “She’ll get out,” said Mister.

  “Who died in it?” asked Easy.

  “Husband,” said Mister. “Name of Fred.”

  “Fred?” Easy said.

  “Fred.”

  They could hear her voice now, faint, lilting, full of grief.

  “Go down and get her out,” said Easy Mack.

  “She’ll make it,” Mister said.

  “Go on down,” Junell said. “Daddy caint stand it.”

  “I guess it’s about time he stood something,” said Mister.

  Easy Mack’s knife-thin eyes touched Mister briefly about the face, but Easy said nothing. Mister was sorry for what he’d said. He knew that his father felt bad enough about what had happened without being made to feel worse. It had been Easy Mack who had finally made Mister’s twin brother Herman give up his last venture, which had been called CAR DISPLAY: YOUR HISTORY ON PARADE. Fred’s widow was sitting in part of the parade right now. And because Easy Mack hadn’t been able to stand it, hadn’t been able to stand the crowds, the arc lights at night, the laughter, the tears and angry accusations, his brother Herman was lost now for good.

  The thing about Herman was that he couldn’t take hold. He never had been able to. The others took hold and found their places, but not Herman. Junell drove Big Mama and ran Salvage House. Mister ran the disposal end of the business, operating the car-crusher, directing the hired man Paul on the crane, and overseeing the loading at the dock. Their father, who had founded Auto-Town, kept the books and tried to see into the future. But Herman was a dreamer. That was what his daddy, who loved him, said. But Herman’s dreams never seemed to amount to much, or when they did amount to something, there was always somebody to stop him, somebody to say no.

  Take CAR DISPLAY: YOUR HISTORY ON PARADE. They were turning money with both hands when their father said they had to stop.

  “You got to stop,” he said one morning. “I caint stand it anymore.”

  It had all started one day when a well-dressed man had come into Auto-Town and asked if they had a 1949 De Soto. Of course they had one. Could he see it? Mister and Herman took him back to look at it. The man climbed up the slope of wrecked cars to the place where the 1949 De Soto stuck out. Mister and Herman climbed up with him and sat on the crushed fender of a Plymouth, watching. The De Soto was in bad shape, not wrecked or mangled, but covered with a heavy skin of rust. The man looked in through the back window. He stared for a long time. When he finally straightened, he had tears in his eyes.

  “I just lost my son in Vietnam,” he said.

  They got off the Plymouth fender. They didn’t know what to say. Mister thought he might be crazy.

  “In 1950, I had one of these,” said the man, gently touching the rusty car. “A year old and ran like a dream. Had twenty-three coats of paint on her. Put them on myself. And every coat buffed—hand-buffed—before the next coat was put on.” He looked at them, but not at them either, through them rather, on into something else. “You could comb your hair in the lid of the trunk.” He looked toward the back seat again. His face was now away from them, his voice distant, muted. “And that’s the only reason she ever married me. I’ve always known that. Right in the back seat of this very car on the first date. And she
caught.” He looked suddenly at Mister. “She caught. You believe that? She caught. You believe that?”

  Mister didn’t know what to say.

  “The first time on the first date, she caught. Pregnant. And now the boy’s dead.” He looked back at the car. “Thanks. I wanted to see it again.”

  Walking back to Salvage House after the man was gone, Mister was about to cry. It was the saddest goddam thing he’d ever heard. But not Herman. That Herman was a dreamer.

  “How many of the American people do you think fucked for their children in the back seat of a car?” asked Herman. “What percent?”

  “Goddam, Herman,” Mister said.

  “I’d say ten percent,” Herman said. Herman smiled at his brother. “Hell, the old man may have got us in a back seat.”

  That was his brother Herman, a dreamer of mad dreams. But Herman was never willing to let mad dreams remain just dreams. He insisted upon acting on them. And so when he thought about YOUR HISTORY ON PARADE, he mined the mountains for individual cars.

  “Everything that’s happened in this goddam country in the last fifty years,” said Herman, “has happened in, on, around, with, or near a car.” He smiled his dreamy smile. “And everybody wants to return to the scene of the crime.”

  And so he mined the mountains for cars, individual cars for each of the last fifty years, cleared off ten of his father’s acres, and laid the cars in rows. From 1920 to 1970, the cars sat there rusted, broken, and mutilated with parts missing, but all still recognizable. And they did want to return to the scene of the crime. Thousands of people.

  Herman put up a billboard: SEE THE CAR IT HAPPENED IN—THE EVENT THAT CHANGED YOUR LIFE. And they came: to relive the love affair, the accident, that first car, that last car, the time the tire went flat, the time he ran out of gas, the time he said he ran out of gas, the place where Junior was conceived (“You had your foot braced against the dash light and the other foot against the door handle, honey. Remember?”).