Car by Harry Crews

Author:Harry Crews [Crews, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction - General
ISBN: 9780688021450
Google: 84paAAAAMAAJ
Amazon: 068802145X
Publisher: Morrow
Published: 1972-03-15T07:00:00+00:00

Eight

”Well, I didn’t mean to,” said Easy Mack irritably.

“Mr. Edge was upset anyway,” Mister said. “His wife was in the audience. His daughter had her fiance out there and everything. And what do you do? You throw up on his shoes. How would you feel?”

“I said I didn’t mean to. I couldn’t help it.”

“I know that, daddy. The doc said it was sympathy.”

“Bullshit. Sympathy? What does that mean?”

“Sympathy is what he said,” said Mister. “Your stomach for his stomach. It was just like you were going to eat it yourself.”

“Godamighty,” said Easy Mack. His gorge rose in his throat. He gagged.

“You all right?”

“I’m not all right. No. And I’m not going to ever be all right again.” They were talking in the suite of rooms Mister had made Mr. Edge give them on the same floor with Herman’s. The rooms fronted on the street so they could watch the traffic and the crowds below and judge the business they were doing at the box office. The first month’s performances were sold out solid. Scalpers were doing a tremendous business on tickets for the nine-thirty passing. Once news raced through Jacksonville that the Mack boy had actually eaten the Maverick, orders for tickets had poured in. In two hours, they’d sold out the first month’s show, and Mister—from the room where he was talking with his daddy—watched the people lined up, filling the sidewalk as far away as he could see.

“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that,” said Mister. “Look at that down there.” He pointed to the street below.

“I’ve already looked,” said Easy. His voice was the voice of a man who has been told his disease is terminal.

“It’s our chance,” said Mister. “You always said our chance would come and that the car would bring it. It’s here and I’m going to ride it as far as it goes.”

Easy Mack wished he had something to say, but he didn’t. He had said the car would save them all. Back when Junell and Herman and Mister were just little things and their mother was alive, he had said that America was a V-8 country, gas-driven and water-cooled, and that it belonged to men who belonged to cars. He believed it all those years as a shade-tree mechanic, and he believed it when he got the job as shop foreman in the new-car dealership in Waycross, Georgia, and he still believed it when he got his chance and bought the forty-three acres and started Auto-Town, even though nowadays a junked car put through the crusher, packaged and delivered to the barge, only brought fifty cents a hundred pounds.

That Maverick Ford downstairs was worth about two thousand dollars at the dealership; junked (Easy paused and the figures clicked in his head), junked it was worth a little over eleven dollars. He sighed and took what consolation was left him. There were over twelve million cars junked a year in America. A man could still make a living. More cars than people were made in this country every year, and those damn cars had to go somewhere.

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