“Maybe,” Al said.
“You just a humpty dumpty,” Tootie said. “You just stand there, stand around, while it all happen to you. You just perch and watch. So now you don’t even have a wife. A nice wife like that.”
“Why don’t you go and look for her?” Mary Ellen said.
Tootie said, “I bawled Mary Ellen out because she asked you to leave. Now I think she right. You ought to leave. You ought to go out and make it. And then come back and sit here. Okay?”
Putting on his jacket, Al left their apartment. They were both watching him as he shut the door after him.
He stood by the ruins of the Marmon, kicking at a cylinder that had been part of the ignition system. Most of the lot lay in darkness, but the neon sign of the coffee shop across the street gave him enough light to see again what he had already seen before; there was no hope of restoring the Marmon. Whoever had wrecked it knew what he was doing. The idea that had come grotesquely into his mind: it couldn’t be done, at least not without several weeks of work, and by then it wouldn’t matter. He had seen himself driving the ruined Marmon down the freeway, late, in the part of the night when there was the least traffic. All the way to the Richmond Bridge, and then at seventy-five miles an hour, into the steel and concrete side of the bridge and through and down into the water. But it was out of the question, and anyhow it was only a vision, a dream of his own death.
A hearse, he thought. All this time, all these months; was that what I was restoring it to be? A black, big, heavy, silent hearse wheeling along the deserted streets with me in it, on my back with my hands folded, my eyes open wide. My tongue, possibly, sticking out a half-inch, stiff, swollen; unless the undertaker pushed it back in or snipped it off. Me sticking out my tongue as they dragged me up the street, my tongue out at them even in death. The sons of bitches.
And then he had another dream, another vision; this one was so clear that he at once began to work on it. He did not hesitate. He hurried to the little basalt blockhouse, unlocked the door, and began searching around until he had found a paper bag left over from a lunch. He carried the paper bag outside, and, stooping down, began to sweep up sand from the lot. The sand had been put there to collect grease dripping from his cars. He swept it with his hands, pushing it into a pile, and then he dumped the sand into the paper bag.
Maybe I can get both of them, he said to himself. The Mercedes-Benz and the Cadillac. Unless, he thought, they have locks on the gas tanks. He could not remember.
While he stood there at the edge of the lot, holding the paper bag of sand and trying to remember, a car horn honked. He turned and saw an old but polished Cadillac at the curb. It had stopped, and the driver was watching him; he saw, in the reflected streetlight, the driver’s eyes.
Rolling the car window down, the driver leaned over and called out to him, “Hi!” It was a woman. For an instant he had it that she was his wife; he leaped all over and started toward her. But it was not Julie, and he knew that. It was Mrs. Lane. He went on toward her anyhow, more slowly, taking his bag of sand with him.
He stood on the sidewalk, saying nothing.
“Hello there, Mr. Miller,” Mrs. Lane said, her lips drawing back to show her carved golden teeth; the club and diamond sparkled. “What you doing down here in the dark? You appear to be having to pick up something you drop.”
He said nothing.
“You want me to drive up on the lot so my headlights make it show up better?” she said.
“No,” he said. “Thanks.”
“Guess what I doing,” she said, still leaning toward him. Now he could smell her perfume: it was so intense that it came out of the car and around him where he stood. “Here, I show you.” She shut off the motor of the Cadillac, squirmed over, opened the door on his side, and stepped out. She had on a knit dress and high heels and a hat; she was dressed up, obviously going out somewhere. “Don’t you think I look good?” she said.
“Yes,” he agreed. He had never seen her so spruced up, so sleek. Her hair, her skin, her eyes, everything about her shone. She had one single piece of jewelry on: a brooch near her collar.
“I been on a diet,” she said. “I don’t even have a, if you don’t mind my saying it, a panty girdle.” She patted her stomach. “I flat,” she said. “Flat as a griddle pan. After all these years. I flatter than a lot of those high-school girls that go by eating those Popsicles and sticking out and hunching.” She laughed. Turning in the streetlight, she showed him, with no need of comment, that she had on no bra, either. “Fact is,” she said, “I need nothing under this, and that exactly what I got on.” She raised her arms and skipped a step or two.
“Nothing at all,” he agreed.
“Whee,” she said, her eyes glowing.
“Where’s your husband?” he said.
“Oh him,” she said. “He gone. He a contractor. Up in Shasta County seeing about a important public building. He be back in another week. I going to a party.” Her voice lilted and rose. “Goodbye,” she said, reopening the car door. “I got to scoot. I just see you working away and I stop to show off. Don’t get a chance every day.”
“You look fine,” he said.
She said, “Mr. Miller, you sound so bad. Where all your usual jokes and ironic style of humor?”
He shrugged.
“No more,” Mrs. Lane said, regarding him. “Is that it? I hear about Mr. Fergesson. Now where you go? What you do?”
“I’m looking for my wife,” he said.
“She gone, too? Everybody gone? Nobody want you, it seem. No wife, no friend, no job. You in a bad way. How did you get that way, Mr. Miller? Life perplexing in certain regards. One day you have all those things, the next day not. And what you done in between? Far as I can see, you not done nothing at all. Sometime it make you ponder if those church people not right. But I, myself. I never go to church and believe nothing. I already had that and it just the same as all the rest. I think you and I both be crazy to go back to that, as much as we wish we could, like other folk.”
He nodded.
“What in the package?” she said.
He did not know what she meant. He looked around.
“In your hand,” she said.
He showed her.
“Sand,” she said, looking into it as he held it open. “You picking up sand like a little boy.” She took the sack of sand away from him and set it down by one of the parked cars. “That all you get out of this? At your age, thirty-something years? No wonder you got nothing joking to say. And here I going out to my party. I going to get in and drive off leaving you. And I even take your sack of sand away from you. I a bad woman if I do that. I really bad; I see myself in my jangly skin laughing out. My mean jangly skin.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “I wasn’t getting anywhere. Forget it.”
“You not begrudge me my party,” she said. “I know that, Mr. Miller.” After a moment she reached out and took hold of his wrist. “I think I take you with me,” she said.
“Where to?” he said.
“Not to no old party. I take you home with me.” She pulled him, and he went along, across the sidewalk to the car. Opening the car door, she sat him down on the seat and then she went around to the other side and got in behind the wheel. “I drive,” she said to him, “because I know the way.” She started the motor.
He reached out and put his arms around her.
“Yes,” she said, “I really look good tonight. I don’t think I look this good ever in fifteen years.” She drew him against her, holding him against her shoulder and patting him. Then she put the car in gear and drove, holding the wheel with her left hand. “It a good thing I got automatic transmission on this,” she said, “or long before now I run into somebody while changing gear.”
Soon they were traveling through streets he had never seen before. Streets that he did not know.
“I never hit anybody yet,” Mrs. Lane said.
Philip K. Dick, Humpty Dumpty in
Oakland
(Series: # )
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