The Highway Kind(78)

A week scraping on ladders passed. When he could, Eddie looked over the two streets to the Le Mans. He wasn’t sure why exactly, but he began to want it. Each day after work he looked to see his note still there and untouched. When there was a night rain in the middle of the week and his note became illegible, he left another. But no one called. When Friday came and they’d finished for the day, he went to the houses around the car. He knocked on doors and asked if anyone knew who owned it, but no one did.

He and Houston worked a half day on Saturday and when they were done, they spread out and knocked on doors farther down the neighborhood and finally Houston met the person who owned the car. It was a man who lived on a busier street a block away. Houston told Eddie which house and left.

The man was in his early twenties and let Eddie inside. The front room had dozens of drawings taped to the walls. They were pen-and-ink and all of them had women in bondage outfits and positions. The women were beautiful but always bound. They didn’t appear to be either happy or upset by it; they were just there.

The man was skinny with shaved-short dark hair. He looked anemic and pale and he stood stooped over.

“The guy I work with said you own the Le Mans.”

The man nodded.

“You interested in selling it?”

“I might be,” he said. “But I ain’t broke enough to sell it right now.”

“Does it run?”

“It did at one time but I don’t know if it still does. A friend of mine said it’s not good to start a car with flat tires so I haven’t tried in a while.”

Eddie glanced around the room. “You drew these?”

The man nodded.

“That’s a lot of work.”

“Yeah,” he replied.

Eddie looked at the man. “You have the title for the car?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Well, I’d like to buy if you ever want to sell it.”

“Let me think about it.”

“You mind if we swap numbers?”

“Sure,” the man said and Eddie began writing his number in the small spiral notebook he kept in his back pocket.

He and Houston had primed the house and were finishing two days of filling and caulking when Eddie’s phone rang and the man with the Le Mans told him his rent was due and he didn’t have the cash to cover it. He would sell the car to Eddie right then if he had the money.

“Well, how much do you want for it?” Eddie asked while caulking a window.

“How about four hundred?” the man said.

“I gotta go to the bank. I’ll be over in an hour,” he said and hung up. He got down from the ladder and told Houston the news.

“Don’t do it,” warned Houston. “You don’t even know if it has an engine, do you?”

“No,” Eddie replied.

“Then you’re nuts.” Houston put his caulk gun in a water bucket and wiped his hands with a wet rag.

“It’s just one of those things,” Eddie said and lit a cigarette. “I’m at the point where I’d pay two grand even if the tranny was shot, the engine was gone, and it didn’t have a title. I don’t know why exactly, but I just have to have it now.”

Houston bummed a cigarette from Eddie. “Even if it does run you’ll spend more than two grand fixing it up,” he said.

“I know.”

“Paint jobs are a lot of money.”

“I know that too.”

“Old cars are like bad women,” said Houston. “They’re fun at first but they break down a lot and take your money little by little. For me it’s all right when it’s little by little, but then always, eventually, they hit you with the big bill. But by then you’ve already put so much time and money into them it’s hard to quit. So you pay up and then it starts all over again.”

“I know all that,” Eddie said and laughed. “But it’ll give me something to do at night.”

Houston nodded. “The last car I gave a shit about ruined me. A 1965 Mercury Cougar.”

“I like those,” said Eddie.

“I did too, but I was downtown, on Broadway, going up the hill when she cut out on me. The car was so damn heavy I couldn’t push it and I couldn’t back up ’cause there was too much traffic. It was rush hour. And then the cops came.” He threw the wet rag in the bucket of water and combed his hair back with a small black comb he kept in his pocket. “They helped me, all right. They saw I was drunk and took me to jail and impounded the car.”

“What happened to the Cougar?”

“I didn’t give a fuck then and I don’t give a fuck now. It was dead to me after that day. The way I look at it, any car that breaks down on me when I’m drunk or in a traffic jam is no longer my car. I give no second chances. I hoped they crushed the shit out of it and melted it into bedpans.” Houston stopped and took a long drag off the cigarette. “It was a great-looking car, though. I spent three grand on the paint job alone. White with silver sparkles. Man, it was something else.”


Eddie parked the work van in front of the Le Mans. Houston sat in the passenger seat and listened to the radio while Eddie walked to the owner’s house.

“I only have a couple minutes,” the man said when he answered. He was dressed in an Applebee’s work shirt.