B. is confused. “It … it’s my car,” he says.
“Ohhh,” running her tongue round her lips. “You’re the Audi.”
“Right.”
“Just wait a sec and I’ll ring Diagnosis,” she says, high-stepping across the room to an intercom panel set in the wall. At that moment a buzzer sounds in the office and a car pulls up to the farthest set of gas pumps. The redhead jerks to a halt, peers out the window, curses, shrugs into a fringed suede jacket and hurries out into the storm. B. locks fingers behind his back and waits. He rocks on his feet, whistles sotto voce, casts furtive glances at the knee-down of the eight majorettes. The droopy greatcoat, soaked through, feels like an American black bear (Ursus americanus) hanging round his neck.
Then the door heaves back on its hinges and the redhead reappears, stamping round the doormat, shaking out the jacket, knocking the Stetson against her thigh. “Brrrr,” she says. In her hand, a clutch of bills. She marches over to the cash register and deposits them, then takes her seat at the far end of the line of majorettes. B. continues to rock on his feet. He clears his throat. Finally he ambles across the room and stops in front of her chair. “Ahh …”
She looks up. “Yes? Can I help you?”
“You were gong to call Diagnosis about my car?”
“Oh,” grimacing. “No need to bother. Why, at this hour they’re long closed up. You’ll have to wait till morning.”
“But a minute ago—”
“No, no sense at all. The Head Diagnostician leaves at five, and here it’s nearly ten. And his staff gets off at five-thirty. The best we could hope for is a shop steward—and what would he know? Ha. If I rang up now I’d be lucky to get hold of a janitor.” She settles back in her chair and leafs through a magazine. Then she looks up again. “Listen. If you want some advice, there’s a pay phone in the anteroom. Better call somebody to come get you.”
The girl has a point there. It’s late already and arrangements will have to be made about getting to work in the morning. The dog needs walking, the cat feeding. And all these hassles have sapped him to the point where all he wants from life is sleep and forgetfulness. But there’s no one to call, really. Except possibly Dora—Dora Ouzel, the gay divorcee he’s been dating since his wife’s accident.
One of the majorettes yawns. Another blows a puff of detritus from her nail file. “Ho hum,” says the redhead.
B. steps into the anteroom, searches through his pockets for change, and forgets Dora’s number. He paws through the phone book, but the names of the towns seem unfamiliar and he can’t seem to find Dora’s listing. He makes an effort of memory and dials.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Dora?—B. Listen, I hate to disturb you at this hour but—”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine.”
“That’s nice, I’m fine too. But no matter how you slice it my name ain’t Dora.”
“You’re not Dora?”
“No, but you’re B., aren’t you?”
“Yes … but how did you know?”
“You told me. You said: ‘Hello, Dora?—B.’ … and then you tried to come on with some phony excuse for forgetting our date tonight or is it that you’re out hooching it up and you want me—if I was Dora and I bless my stars I’m not—to come out in this hellish weather that isn’t fit for a damn dog for christsake and risk my bones and bladder to drive you home because only one person inhabits your solipsistic universe—You with a capital Y—and You have drunk yourself into a blithering stupor. You know what I got to say to you, buster? Take a flyer. Ha, ha, ha.”
There is a click at the other end of the line. In the movies heroes say “Hello, hello, hello,” in situations like this, but B., dispirited, the greatcoat beginning to reek a bit in the confines of the antechamber, only reaches out to replace the receiver in its cradle.
Back in the office B. is confronted with eight empty chairs. The redhead occupies the ninth, legs crossed, hat in lap, curls flaring round the cover of her magazine like a solar phenomenon. Where five minutes earlier there were enough majorettes to front a battle of the bands, there is now only one. She glances up as the door slams behind him. “Any luck?”
B. is suddenly overwhelmed with exhaustion. He’s just gone fifteen rounds, scaled Everest, staggered out of the Channel at Calais. “No,” he whispers.
“Well that really is too bad. All the other girls go home at ten and I’m sure any one of them would have been happy to give you a lift…. You know it really is a pity the way some of you men handle your affairs. Why if I had as little common sense as you I wouldn’t last ten minutes on this job.”
B. heaves himself down on one of the plastic chairs. Somehow, somewhere along the line, his sense of proportion has begun to erode. He blows his nose lugubriously. Then hides behind his hands and massages his eyes.
“Come on now.” The girl’s voice is soft, conciliatory. She is standing over him, her hand stretched out to his. “I’ll fix you up a place to sleep in the back of the shop.”
The redhead (her name is Rita—B. thought to ask as a sort of quid pro quo for her offer of a place to sleep) leads him through a narrow passageway which gives on to an immense darkened hangar. B. hunches in the greatcoat, flips up his collar and follows her into the echo-haunted reaches. Their footsteps clap up to the rafters, blind birds beating at the roof, echoing and reechoing in the darkness. There is a chill as of open spaces, a stink of raw metal, oil, sludge. Rita is up ahead, her white boots ghostly in the dark. “Watch your step,” she cautions, but B. has already encountered some impenetrable, rock-hard hazard, barked his shin and pitched forward into what seems to be an open grease pit.
“Hurt yourself?”
B. lies there silent—frustrated, childish, perverse.
“B.? Answer me—are you all right?”
He will lie here, dumb as a block, till the Andes are nubs and the moon melts from the sky. But then suddenly the cavern blooms with light (a brown crepuscular light, it’s true, but light just the same) and the game’s up.
“So there you are!” Arms akimbo, a grin on her face. “Now get yourself up out of there and stop your sulking. I can’t play games all night, you know. There’s eleven sets of pumps out there I’m responsible for.”
B. finds himself sprawled all over an engine block, grease-slicked and massive, that must have come out of a Sherman tank. But it’s the hangar, lit like the grainy daguerreotype of a Civil War battlefield, that really interests him. The sheer expanse of the place! And the cars, thousands of them, stretching all the way down to the dark V at the far end of the building. Bugattis, Morrises, La Salles, Daimlers, the back end of a Pierce-Arrow, a Stutz Bearcat. The rounded humps of tops and fenders, tarnished bumpers, hoods thrown open like gaping mouths. Engines swing on cables, blackened grilles and punctured cloth tops gather in the corners, a Duesenberg, its interior gutted, squats over a trench in the concrete.
“Pretty amazing, huh?” Rita says, reaching out a hand to help him up. “This is Geriatrics. Mainly foreign. You should see the Contemp wings.”
“But what do you do with all these—?”
“Oh, we fix them. At least the technicians and mechanics do.”
There is something wrong here, something amiss. B. can feel it nagging at the edges of his consciousness … but then he really is dog-tired. Rita has him by the hand. They amble past a couple hundred cars, dust-embossed, ribs and bones showing, windshields black as ground-out eyes. Now he has it: “But if you fix them, what are they doing here?”
Rita stops dead to look him in the eye, frowning, schoolmarmish. “These things take time, you know.” She sighs. “What do you think: they do it overnight?”
The back room is the size of a storage closet. In fact, it is a storage closet, fitted out with cots. When Rita flicks the light switch B. is shocked to discover three other people occupying the makeshift dormitory: two men in rumpled suits and a middle-aged woman in a rumpled print dress. One of the men sits
up and rubs his eyes. His tie is loose, shirt filthy, a patchy beard maculating his cheeks. He mumbles something—B. catches the words “drive shaft”—and then turns his face back to the cot, already sucking in breath for the first stertorous blast: hkk-hkk-hkkkkkkgg.
“What the hell is this?” B. is astonished, scandalized, cranky and tired. Tools and blackened rags lie scattered over the concrete floor, dulled jars of bolts and screws and wing nuts line the shelves. A number of unfolded cots, their fabric stained and grease-spotted, stand in the corner.
“This is where you sleep, silly.”
“But—who?”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? They’re customers, like yourself, waiting for their cars. The man in brown is the Gremlin, the one with the beard is the Cougar—no, I’m sorry, the woman is the Cougar—he’s the Citroen.”
B. is appalled. “And I’m the Audi, is that it?”
Suddenly Rita is in his arms, the smooth satiny feel of her uniform, the sticky warmth of her breath. “You’re more to me than a machine, B. Do you know that I like you? A lot.” And then he finds himself nuzzling her ear, the downy ridge of her jawbone. She presses against him, he fumbles under the cheerleader’s tutu for the slippery underthings. One of the sleepers groans, but B. is lost, oblivious, tugging and massaging like a horny teenager. Rita reaches behind to unzip her uniform, the long smooth arch of her back, shoulders and arms shedding the opalescent rayon like a holiday on ice when suddenly a buzzer sounds—loud and brash—end of the round, change classes, dive for shelter.
Rita freezes, then bursts into motion. “A customer!” she pants, and then she’s gone. B. watches her callipygian form recede into the gloom of the Geriatrics Section, the sharp projection in his trousers receding with her, until she touches the light switch and vanishes in darkness. B. trundles back into the closet, selects a cot, and falls into an exploratory darkness of his own.
B.’s. breath is a puff of cotton as he wakes to the chill gloom of the storage closet and the sound of tools grating, whining and ratcheting somewhere off in the distance. At first he can’t locate himself—What the? Where?—but the odors of gas and kerosene and motor oil bring him back. He is stranded at Tegeler’s Big Garage, it is a workday, he has been sleeping with strangers, his car is nonfunctional. B. lurches up from the cot with a gasp—only to find that he’s being watched. It is the man with the patchy beard and rancid shirt. He is sitting on the edge of a cot, stirring coffee in a cardboard container, his eyes fixed on B. My checkbook, my wallet, my wristwatch, thinks B.
“Mornin’,” the man says. “My name’s Rusty,” holding out his hand. The others—the man in brown (or was it gray?) and the Cougar woman—are gone.
B. shakes the man’s hand. “Name’s B.,” he says, somewhere between wary and paranoid. “How do I get out of here?”
“Your first day, huh?”
“What do you mean?” B. detects an edge of hysteria slicing through his voice, as if it belonged to someone else in some other situation. A pistol-whipped actress in a TV melodrama, for instance.
“No need to get excited,” Rusty says. “I know how disquieting that first day can be. Why Cougar here—that woman in the print dress slept with us last night?—she sniveled and whimpered the whole time her first night here. Shit. It was like being in a bomb shelter or some frigging thing. Sure, I know how it is. You got a routine—job, wife at home, kids maybe, dog, cat, goldfish—and naturally you’re anxious to get back to it. Well let me give you some advice. I been here six days already and I still haven’t even got an appointment lined up with the Appointments Secretary so’s I can get in to see the Assistant to the Head Diagnostician, Imports Division, and find out what’s wrong with my car. So look: don’t work up no ulcer over the thing. Just make your application and sit tight.”
The man is an escapee, that’s it, an escapee from an institution for the terminally, unconditionally and abysmally insane. B. hangs tough. “You expect me to believe that cock-and-bull story? If you’re so desperate why don’t you call a cab?”
“Taxis don’t run this far out.”
“Bus?”
“No buses in this district.”
“Surely you’ve got friends to call—”
“Tried it, couldn’t get through. Busy signals, recordings, wrong numbers. Finally got through to Theotis Stover two nights ago. Said he’d come out but his car’s broke down.”
“You could hitchhike.”
“Spent six hours out there my first day. Twelve degrees F. Nobody even slowed down. Besides, even if I could get home, what then? Can’t get to work, can’t buy food. No sir. I’m staying right here till I get that car back.”
B. cannot accept it. The whole thing is absurd. He’s on him like F. Lee Bailey grilling a shaky witness. “What about the girls in the main office? They’ll take you—one of them told me so.”
“They take you?”
“No, but—”
“Look: they say that to be accommodating, don’t you see? I mean, we are customers, after all. But they can’t give you a lift—it’s their job if they do.”
“You mean—?”
“That’s right. And wait’ll you see the bill when you finally do get out of here. Word is that cot you’re sitting on goes for twelve bucks a night.”
The bastards. It could be weeks here. He’ll lose his job, the animals’ll tear up the rugs, piss in the bed and finally, starved, the dog will turn on the cat…. B. looks up, a new worry on his lips: “But what do you eat here?”
Rusty rises. “C’mon, I’ll show you the ropes.” B. follows him out into the half-lit and silent hangar, past the ranks of ruined automobiles, the mounds of tires and tools. “Breakfast is out of the machines. They got coffee, hot chocolate, candy bars, cross-ants and cigarettes. Lunch and late-afternoon snack you get down at the Mechanics’ Cafeteria.” Rusty’s voice booms and echoes through the wide open spaces till B. begins to feel surrounded. Overhead, the morning cowers against the grimed skylights. “And eat your fill,” Rusty adds, “—it all goes on the tab.”
The office is bright as a cathedral with a miracle in progress. B. squints into the sunlight and recognizes the swaying ankles of a squad of majorettes. He asks for Rita, finds she’s off till six at night. Outside, the sound of scraping, the putt-putt of snowplow jeeps. B. glances up. Oh, shit. There must be a foot and a half of snow on the ground.
The girls are chewing gum and sipping coffee from personalized mugs: Mary-Alice, Valerie, Beatrice, Lulu. B. hunches in the greatcoat, confused, until Rusty bums a dollar and hands him a cup of coffee. Slurping and blowing, B. stands at the window and watches an old man stoop over an aluminum snow shovel. Jets of fog stream from the old man’s nostrils, ice cakes his mustache.
“Criminal, ain’t it?” says Rusty.
“What?”
“The old man out there. That’s Tegeler’s father, seventy-some-odd years old. Tegeler makes him earn his keep, sweeping up, clearing snow, polishing the pumps.”
“No!” B. is stupefied.
“Yeah, he’s some hardnose, Tegeler. And I’ll tell you something else too—he’s set up better than Onassis and Rockefeller put together. See that lot across the street?”
B. looks. TEGELER’S BIG LOT. How’d he miss that?
“They sell new Tegelers there.”
“Tegelers?”
“Yeah—he’s got his own company: the Tegeler Motor Works. Real lemons from what I hear … But will you look what time it is!” Rusty slaps his forehead. “We got to get down to Appointments or we’ll both grow old in this place.”
The Appointments Office, like the reward chamber in a rat maze, is located at the far end of a complicated network of passageways, crossways and counter-ways. It is a large carpeted room with desks, potted plants and tellers’ windows, not at all unlike a branch bank. The Cougar woman and the man in the brown suit are there, waiting along with a number of others, all of them looking bedraggled and harassed. Rusty enters deferentially and takes a seat bes
ide Brown Suit, but B. strides across the room to where a hopelessly walleyed woman sits at a desk, riffling through a bundle of papers. “Excuse me,” he says.
The woman looks up, her left iris drowning in white.
“I’m here—” B. breaks off, confused as to which eye to address: alternately one and then the other seems to be scrutinizing him. Finally he zeroes in on her nose and continues:”—about my car. I—”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No, I don’t. But you see I’m a busy man, and I depend entirely on the car for transportation and—”
“Don’t we all?”
“—and I’ve already missed a day of work.” B. gives her a doleful look, a look charged with chagrin for so thwarting the work ethic and weakening the national fiber. “I’ve got to have it seen to as soon as possible. If not sooner.” Ending with a broad grin, the bon mot just the thing to break the ice.
“Yes,” she says, heaving a great wet sigh. “I understand your anxiety and I sympathize with you, I really do. But,” the left pupil working round to glare at him now, “I can’t say I think much of the way you conduct yourself—barging in here and exalting your own selfish concerns above those of the others here. Do you think that there’s no one else in the world but you? No other ailing auto but yours? Does Tegeler’s Big Garage operate for fifty-nine years, employing hundreds of people, constantly expanding, improving, streamlining its operations, only to prepare itself for the eventuality of your breakdown? Tsssss! I’m afraid, my friend, that your arrogant egotism knows no bounds.”
B. hangs his head, shuffles his feet, the greatcoat impossibly warm.
“Now. You’ll have to fill out the application for an appointment and wait your turn with the others. Though you really haven’t shown anything to deserve it, I think you may have a bit of luck today after all. The Secretary left word that he’d be in at three this afternoon.”