You Are What You Drive

One bright winter morning in February of 1969, in the Deerlake, Minnesota, Chevrolet/GMC/Ford/Chrysler/Buick Dealership where the tall windows were reduced to portholes by brilliant white frost, Mrs. Fulton G. Anderson drew one finger across the roof of the new Buick LeSabre. Its paint was black and smooth. Sunlight bloomed golden in the chromed mirror. From below, she could smell the leather of its seats, the fresh rubber of its tires.

Mrs. Anderson swallowed. Her husband, the Reverend Anderson, had died suddenly the previous year, in December; his life insurance money was sitting in the bank. The Andersons’ present car, a Ford, was on its second hundred thousand miles. In winter, ankle-biting drafts leaked through the floorboards; in summer, dust. Mrs. Anderson’s only child, Beth, a thin, studious girl with a long neck, was already a senior at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, and had good prospects for teaching high school English (though no prospects whatsoever for a husband unless she began to take more pride in her appearance; but unwashed hair, floppy hats, purple sweatshirts, and long black skirts would pass, Mrs. Anderson believed, because children went through phases). Right now Mrs. Anderson wished Beth were here. They had always included Beth in family decisions.

“Go ahead,” the auto salesman said. He was a young fellow, Beth’s age, with big teeth and tiny dried razor nicks on his Adam’s apple. “Put yourself behind the wheel,” he said with a grin.

Mrs. Anderson drew back her finger, kicked a tire.

That afternoon Mrs. Anderson wrote Beth.

Her daughter’s letter came by return post. Beth wrote that the Buick seemed like a lot of money for just a car. She said that a luxury car like the LeSabre was, considering the division of wealth in the world, one of the most repugnant of American metaphors. She wrote that, rather than buying the Buick, Mrs. Anderson ought to donate the insurance money to the Maryknoll nuns laboring in Central America, then use public transportation to get around Deerlake.

After Mrs. Anderson read Beth’s letter she looked out the kitchen window to the bird feeder. Several chickadees pecked at cracked corn. She watched the little birds without really seeing them, just their brief gray flutters, their minor comings and goings in the periphery of her mind, and waited to be visited by her true opinion of Beth’s letter. Suddenly a single fluffed-up chickadee, a big fellow, lit squarely in the yellow corn and stared straight at her through the glass. Mrs. Anderson blinked. She squinted and leaned closer to the window. How truly gray his grays, how sharply drawn his blacks and whites!

She found a pen and wrote Beth a brief note reminding her there was no public transportation in Deerlake, never had been.

The pastor at First Lutheran encouraged Mrs. Anderson to buy the Buick. First, he said, the way the Indians drove—especially during the autumn ricing season—one needed a safe car, and it was the big front-engine American cars like the LeSabre that always came out best in head-on collisions. Second, he said, she was already sixty-three. The Buick would be the last car she’d ever have to buy.

That night Mrs. Anderson sat bolt upright from a deep sleep: in her own room she had heard someone say, loudly,

“Yes!”

In nine years Mrs. Anderson drove the LeSabre 18,142 miles. During this time Beth went on to graduate school in English, first for an MA at Iowa City and then for the PhD at Purdue. Beth returned home to Deerlake regularly at Christmas and Easter, always alone, and talked endlessly about a French novelist called Alain-Fournier who had died tragically—heroically, actually—at age twenty-eight. Fournier was perhaps the first man killed in World War I. Beth had written her dissertation on Fournier, and now was enlarging the dissertation into a book because she had decided she wanted to be an essayist or a novelist; publishing the Fournier book, even with a small house, might be her big break. Summers, Beth traveled by train or Greyhound bus back and forth across the country to college writers’ conferences. There she stayed in low redbrick dormitories for two weeks at a time and got tips from famous writers during wine and cheese hours.

Each Christmas and Easter Mrs. Anderson listened to Beth talk on of Fournier and of other things one could write about. A hot topic the year before had been depression, Beth said, but she hadn’t realized it until depression had peaked and the magazines had gone on to breast cancer. After a few years of this, whenever Beth began to talk of Fournier or of writing, Mrs. Anderson’s mind automatically shifted into reverse, to Beth back in high school, Beth winning at debates and at spelling bees. However, by Easter of 1978, when Mrs. Anderson was seventy-two, she thought mainly about who it was who was to take her grocery shopping. In the previous year, the year of depression, Mrs. Anderson had begun to drive the LeSabre an inch too close to things.

To the drive-in window at the bank.

To the pumps at the gas station.

To both sides of her own garage.

People from church, especially those with small children who rode bicycles around town, now drove Mrs. Anderson about Deerlake. Any time, anywhere, they told her, just call.

Of course Mrs. Anderson didn’t need to call when Beth was home. Beth drove her mother about in the Buick. Beth drove and complained about a funny ticking noise somewhere in the car. Try as she might, Mrs. Anderson could not hear the noise.

“That fellow Sylvester Harjula,” Mrs. Anderson said. She was surprised to have remembered his full name. “The dark-haired fellow you went to high school with. He has a mustache now. Maybe I should have him look into it—they say he can fix anything.” Mrs. Anderson looked over at Beth. At her daughter’s long neck, her thin blond hair that needed a good washing and then a body perm. “He’s not a bad-looking man either,” she added.

“Really, Mother!” Beth said. Her neck colored pink.

When Mrs. Anderson turned seventy-five she happened onto a Reader’s Digest article, “The Cruel Cost of Aging.” The next day, without writing Beth, Mrs. Anderson dusted off the windshield of the LeSabre and drove it carefully back to the dealership. There she learned firsthand a lesson about depreciation—how when a person puts the key into the ignition of a new car, one thousand dollars flies out the window. (She imagined green dollar bills streaming out the window and fluttering down the road behind.) She also learned that people preferred smaller Japanese and German cars these days.

Mrs. Anderson took the check for the LeSabre and walked three blocks to the bank’s drive-in window. There she placed the check in the little tin tube and pushed the button. With a hiss her check disappeared down the pipe—which suddenly reminded her of another Reader’s Digest article: the similarities between rural banks of today and rural banks of the 1930s.

She spoke into the microphone, then waited. Her heart pounded. After a long while the pipe hissed and the little tube popped into daylight. Mrs. Anderson retrieved, in cash, one half of the LeSabre money. At home she placed the money in a one-pound coffee can which she then stored in the freezer beneath several square packages of frozen corn dated 1969.

At the dealership the LeSabre was scheduled for the body shop. It needed front and rear bumpers. New chrome door guards. Rocker panels. Quarter panels. Paint. That same morning Big Ed Hawkinson was driving his Kenworth logging truck past the car lot when from the corner of his eye he spied something different. Something black. He set the air brakes and skidded his rig to a stop. Big Ed was a logger, a Christmas tree farmer, and an auto body man during the coldest months of the winter. Every fall during ricing season he made a few bucks selling junkers to the Indians. At the moment, however, Big Ed was looking for a better-than-average unit, something a notch or two up. His oldest boy, Elvis, was getting his driver’s license this very week. Big Ed never knew exactly what he was looking for in a car until he saw it, and what Big Ed was seeing, there next in line at the body-shop door, was the old Anderson widow’s LeSabre.

Elvis Hawkinson drove the LeSabre home and straight into Big Ed’s body shop. Elvis had plans for the LeSabre. He saw it painted metal flake blue, saw it with rear leaf-spring risers and Cragar mags, saw inside red shag carpet on the dash and a Jensen stereo system that would tear your scalp off. But there was one problem. The LaSabre was a four-door. Four-door cars were for women hauling around curtain climbers and bags of diapers and Kotex.

Elvis worked thirty hours straight. He knocked off the rear door handles and fiberglassed the holes. He welded the rear doors shut, then sanded smooth the welding bead. With a toilet plunger he popped out the rear quarter panels. He stripped all the chrome, glassed the screw holes, sanded everything again, then taped the windshield and all the glass. Toward morning of the second day, he shot the whole car with rust-colored primer.

After breakfast Elvis led Big Ed and Jimmy out to the shop.

“So what do you think?” Elvis said happily. He held a screwdriver and was about to open the gallon of blue metal flake.

“Well . . .” Big Ed said. He ran his hand through his hair.

“You ask me, it looks like a sixty-nine four-door LeSabre with the back doors welded shut and then primed,” Jimmy said.

Elvis looked at the LeSabre. At Big Ed. At the can of blue metal flake.

That fall Elvis drove the LeSabre, still primed, with no Cragar mags and no Jensen stereo, back and forth to International Falls Community College where he took classes in diesel mechanics and hydraulics. The drive was 125 miles one way. At the end of two years the LeSabre had 62,879 miles on it and Elvis Hawkinson had enlisted in the air force.

Jimmy Hawkinson, Elvis’s younger brother, put chrome wheels on the rear of the LeSabre and added twelve-inch risers to the rear leaf springs. The risers caused two problems. First, the rear bumper now stood forty-two inches off the ground, and Jimmy, who was five feet five, or only sixty-five inches tall, could not jump high enough to reach into the trunk. Second, the rear risers also threw the headlight beams directly onto the highway, like two floor lamps. But these were not large problems. Jimmy built a small wooden step stool which he carried on the back seat, in case he needed to get into the trunk; and when driving at night he simply left the headlight beams on bright.

Jimmy further customized the LeSabre. He tore out the front bench-type seat and welded in its place two bucket seats he had gotten from a wrecked Datsun 280Z. To the dashboard he added an eight-track stereo. He was saving for a gallon of red metal flake, but his car payment made things tough.

Every week Jimmy sent thirty dollars to Ensign Elvis Hawkinson, Third Diesel Support Squadron, c/o Fourth Tactical Squadron, Fifth Fleet, Pensacola, Florida. He sent the thirty dollars for two weeks. He missed the third week because he had bought the chrome wheels. He made the next week’s payment, but could muster only twenty dollars the following week. Missed the next week. Missed the week after that. At the end of three months he stopped sending anything, though he did write to Elvis asking what exactly were the dates when Elvis would be home on leave.

Elvis showed up for Christmas two days earlier than planned, but Jimmy and the LeSabre had left the day before. A business trip. Jimmy left a note for Elvis and for Big Ed, saying that he was heading out to work in the gas fields in Wyoming. A week later he wrote again, a card postmarked Buffalo. He didn’t say what outfit he was working for. He did write that there was so much natural gas in Wyoming it came up in water pipes; that you could turn on a faucet, light a match, and have fire and water coming from the same tap.

In March, Jimmy wrote Big Ed that Wyoming was deader than road kill and he was heading down to Texas, to the oil fields. He said that’s where the work was.

In May, Jimmy Hawkinson hitchhiked into Deerlake from the south. He found Big Ed working on the Kenworth boom, hunkered over the bright spark of the welder. When Big Ed finally tipped back his mask and saw Jimmy, he stood up. Father and son grinned at each other. They shook hands. Jimmy didn’t remember ever shaking hands with Big Ed. In a rush of words, Jimmy told Big Ed that he was ready now to work with him in the body shop or in the woods or trimming Christmas trees, wherever he was needed. Jimmy felt dumbshit happy and more than a little like crying. He told Big Ed that he’d always wanted to work at home with his own father, but for some reason he had to get way far away before he saw it. And one more thing: Could he borrow the Kenworth to drive down to Minneapolis to pick up the LeSabre?

Sylvester Harjula, a bachelor with deeply bitten fingernails, was the sole proprietor of a one-banner used-car lot at the Deerlake city limits. He bought the old Anderson LeSabre off the Hawkinson truck for ten tens cash. He would have paid more—a lot more, for here was the car Beth Anderson herself had driven. Here was the car that finally would give Sylvester a real excuse to talk to Beth Anderson when she came home for Christmas. But a hundred bucks was a hundred bucks.

The LeSabre was cold iron stew. The engine had thrown a rod through the block and clear into the battery. The trunk lid was gone. The left rear door was punched in with the outline of a parking meter. The transmission bled red through its seals like a lung-shot deer, and the odometer was a dead clock stopped at 17,847 miles. Yet none of this necessarily bothered Sylvester. With cars, where other people saw rust, Sylvester saw Bondo. Where other people saw blue oil smoke in the exhaust and turned away, Sylvester saw piston rings and maybe sleeves. SYLVESTER HARJULA’S NO PROBLEM USED CARS, DEERLAKE, MINNESOTA, his business cards said. Within two weeks Sylvester found an engine from a junked LeMans which used a quart only every five hundred. He found a door, though no trunk lid. He gave the Buick a quick coat of black enamel, inside the trunk as well, so everything matched, and had the car on the lot stickered at $295 just in time for ricing season.

Sylvester sat in the square wooden office he had built himself. He wore a yellow shirt and a yellow tie. It was October. Sunlight slanted through the single window. Sylvester leaned back in his chair and smoked a Camel. His fingers smudged the white cigarette paper. He looked out the window at the shiny black LeSabre. He glanced at the calendar. Beth Anderson was thirty-nine this year. He wondered if she’d found a man yet. He nibbled at a thumbnail, then stopped himself. He looked at his hands, his fingernails. He glanced over at the calendar again. Briefly he lifted the cellophane sheet and looked at the tanned blonde on the beach. He looked at the untanned parts of her. Then he let her bathing suit fall back into place, and turned the pages to November and December. His fingers left little black lilypads on the corners of the pages. He examined his hands again. Another three weeks, four at most, he’d have to start work on his hands if they were to be clean in time for Christmas. He swung around to his desk, found a notepad and stub of a pencil. “Gojo” he wrote. After that he doodled a minute. He drew a tall, thin girl with a long neck.

When Sylvester looked up some time later, there were Indians in the lot. A whole covey of them, like blackbirds, had lit around the Buick. Two kids perched on top of the LeSabre, another kid jumped up and down inside the lidless trunk, longer legs poked from beneath the car and several heads were visible inside the Buick.

Sylvester stood up. In the small mirror above his desk he checked his hair, adjusted his yellow tie. Then, humming a little tune he had made up himself, Sylvester stepped outside into sunlight. The Indians’ hair gleamed like crows’ wings.

At the river John All Day steered the Buick backward to the big Norway pine. When the bumper hit wood, he killed the motor and set the brake. He always parked that way to cover up the license plate and, more important, the gas cap. Sometimes on the reservation he forgot to park that way. Then his first stop had to be a gas station, which was his own fault for not parking right. Now as the bumper rocked once more against the Norway, John All Day felt the long back of the old tree come into his own body. Felt its roots in his own legs. Old Man Pine with the long legs.

The rest of the All Days, including Bobby All Day, John’s brother, and several of their children, climbed out the rear windows of the black car. The kids ran to the shore and began to throw stones into the water. John and Bobby untied the canoe ropes and the long duckbill pole. They left the car radio on while they loaded the canoe.

In a still moment between songs, they heard, far out on the lake, the whump-whump of rice sticks on canoes.

Bobby straightened up to listen. “Dammit, we better hurry,” Bobby said, and clattered the duckbill into the canoe.

John All Day laughed at his brother and continued to load the canoe at the same pace. Lastly he went to his wife, who was watching from the soft front seat of the black car. He put his hand on her belly. Inside, the baby kicked like a little calf. “Whoa!” John said.

His wife grinned. Her face was round and smooth and shiny, like the aspen trees on the bank, only darker and smoother, like walnut.

“Stay in the car and sleep,” John said. “Honk the horn if you need me. I’ll come, hey?”

“You better, mister,” she said. They smiled at each other.

John and Bobby pushed off from shore. The canoe scraped on sand, then went silent on water. An Elvis song played from the black car’s radio. On the shore the children waved and threw rocks after the canoe. At first their stones splashed close beside the canoe—one rock clinked on tin. “Devils!” Bobby said without looking behind him. But soon the splashes fell farther and farther behind. John All Day watched his children and the black car grow smaller. He wondered if things disappeared when they went out of sight. If they really went away.

Ahead was the rice bed, a long feather of green in blue water. As they neared the rice, John took from his pocket two pieces of pink bubble gum. He tossed one to Bobby, and they chewed the sweet gum soft. Soon the bow of the canoe entered the tall grass with a soft scraping sound. The rice stalks leaned away from both sides of the canoe. John swung his long stick and brought the rice heads over the mouth of the canoe.

“Little Mahnomen men,” John said to the rice, and with his other hand brought down the flail.

Bobby poled.

John beat grain. Once a rice beard flew into the corner of his eye. Bobby stopped poling while John took the bubble gum from his mouth, held open the eyelid and pressed the gum to his eyeball. He took away the bubble gum and blinked his eye rapidly; the lake wobbled back into focus. John popped the gum back into his mouth and nodded to Bobby, who leaned into the pole. The little rice beard crunched in the bubble gum. “Mahnomen man,” John said. From across the water, out of sight, came the faint laughing cries of his children and music from the black car’s radio.

That afternoon at three o’clock Bobby poled the canoe slowly back toward the landing. The canoe rode low in the water.

When they came closer, John saw on the shore his two boys jumping up and down like young crows trying to fly from a tree. They flapped and called to him. “Hurry,” they shouted. “The baby!”

Bobby leaned into the duckbill pole.

“In the car—” the boys shouted.

John leaped from the canoe and ran through the shallow water. From the car his wife groaned. Her feet stuck out the driver’s side window. They were wide apart and her brown toes were curled like snail shells.

“It’s coming,” his wife said. She had bitten her bottom lip and there was blood on her chin.

“Dammit, you should have honked!” John said.

“The horn don’t work,” she said. She groaned again.

“It works, I tried it—” John said.

“Not for me, it don’t work,” she said.

“Forget the horn, man!” Bobby said from behind them.

John leaped in beside her and turned the key to start the engine. The battery clicked once and was silent.

“Goddammit!” John shouted. He tried again. Not even a click this time. Then he heard a noise, a faint faraway noise that was at the same time close up. He looked down at the dashboard. The radio volume knob was turned all the way up. He leaned his ear toward the speaker. A song. “Jesus, you listened to the radio all day!” John said.

“Why not?” she said, then groaned again.

“Why not? Why not? The damn battery, that’s—”

His wife’s groan rose to a shout. “It’s coming, I can’t stop it.”

“Bobby—run to the highway—flag somebody down,” John called.

Bobby’s shoes kicked up dust as he ran. John knelt between her legs to help. The children gathered around.

Twenty minutes later a dusty pickup jolted down the road toward the shore. Bobby rode standing up in the rear, hanging on like a bronco rider. He leaped from the truck before it came to a stop and raced forward. John came slowly from the front seat of the black car. He was grinning and holding, wrapped in his shirt, his new baby, Manny, whose full name was to be Mahnomen, which in Ojibwe meant wild rice. John’s wife lay in the front seat, resting. The two biggest boys stood with pine-bough fans by the open windows of the black car and made sure no flies or mosquitoes bothered their mother. The smaller kids had returned to the shore and were throwing pebbles into the water.

The pickup’s driver, an older farmer with a limp, walked forward. He looked into the front seat, then at the baby. “Well, I’ll be dipped,” he said. He spit long and cleanly to the side, then bent down for a closer look at the baby. John held the baby forward. The farmer brought up a thick finger and touched Manny’s nose. “You little bugger,” the farmer said, “you little acorn, you.”

John smiled and nodded.

Then the farmer looked at the Buick. “We better get your car started anyway,” he said. He went to his truck and dug behind the seat for a pair of dusty jumper cables.

Bobby took up one pair of the cable grips.

“Nope—I’ll do it,” the farmer said. “Don’t want my alternator burned out.”

Bobby shrugged and let go his end.

Leaning against the big Norway pine, his bare back on the bark, John All Day held his son and watched. He felt the old man pine come into him again. Grandfather Pine. John’s back was Grandfather’s back, John’s arms were Grandfather’s thick, curving limbs, and John’s baby was a pine cone, a sticky, sweet-smelling pine cone full of seeds of his own, seeds enough for a whole forest, seeds and life for anyone or anything who touched Grandfather Pine.

“Ready?” the farmer called to Bobby.

Bobby got in the driver’s seat of the black car. Its rear bumper remained pressed against the big pine; from its nose, battery cables stretched forward, drooping power lines, to the farmer’s truck. Bobby held up his hand.

“Here we go,” the farmer called; he touched metal to metal.

John All Day felt something pass through his own body, something like the flow of river water against a canoe paddle, the way moving water pushed up through the paddle handle and into your hands and arms and shoulders and finally into your back where it turned around your spine and then you pushed it back to where it lived, where it never needed recharging or batteries or wires, that weight in the river—or in the bite of axe on wood or in a full wind against your face that pushed against you but pulled you forward at the same time—John All Day felt it pass up the chain of wood and iron and men’s hands, and the black car’s engine coughed alive.

After the farmer had gone, John returned the baby to his wife. Then he drove the black car down to the shore, to the canoe. He left the engine running while Bobby shoveled the rice into the open trunk. There was only one shovel, so John watched. The rice flew, each shovelful thudding onto the last, onto the rising green mound. Bobby began to sweat. “Slow down, man,” John said, “you always in such a damned hurry. Running around like a damned crazy man.”

Bobby straightened up fast to glare at his brother, then saw that John was smiling.

The All Days drove the black car, which sagged in the rear, out to the highway. First John took the baby and his wife home to her mother; he waited outside the house until her mother came and said everything was okay. Then he and Bobby drove fast to Deerlake to have the rice weighed while it was still wet.

The rice weighed 210 pounds.

The price was ninety cents a pound.

John and Bobby took the check and cashed it at Doc’s Inn, on Main Street. The tavern was loud and warm and smelled like lake water and beer. People danced. Rice beards hung on the shirts and pants of everybody but the bartender. John bought a drink for everyone, and people clapped. Other people danced, sometimes Indians and whites together. Tiny pale green rice worms shook loose from cuffs and pockets, and left slippery spots on the dance floor. John grinned and sipped the whiskey. He watched his brother and he watched the other dancers and he watched the beer light, a circle of seasons—spring green, summer gold, fall orange, and winter white—painted on a plastic plate turning with a grinding noise around a yellow light bulb. John watched and he chewed the bubble gum that was crunchy with rice beards and now tasted like the whiskey and now like the lake. John sipped his whiskey and he watched the dancers go around and around.

On December 10, Sylvester Harjula repoed the LeSabre. All Day had paid $150 down with $145 due when the rice was sold. Sylvester knew for a fact All Day had cashed his rice check at Doc’s Inn—like any businessman Sylvester kept track of his customers—and Sylvester hadn’t seen a dime of the $145.

Which didn’t necessarily bother him. He called Ken Edevold, a high school pal who was also the deputy sheriff. He caught a lift with Ken out to the reservation. The All Day house was a white government prefab with a sagging roof and smudges all around the siding as high as children could reach. In the snowy yard sat four rusted 1966 Bonnevilles. Doors and trunk lids from three of the Bonnevilles had migrated to the blue Bonneville, which sat closest to the front door. The LeSabre sat off to the side with a drift of snow down its hood. It looked like a frozen skunk.

Sylvester knocked on the metal door. There was no storm door. Inside, a dog barked. A TV played loudly. A baby cried. Someone peeked briefly out the window, then the TV went silent. No one came to the door. Sylvester knocked again. He heard whispering. Finally he turned away and walked to the LeSabre. He had a key. He kept a key to every car he sold to the Indians and to whites as well; business was business, particularly with used cars. The LeSabre’s battery was deader than an icehouse pike but Sylvester had jumper cables and a spray can of ether. Five minutes later Sylvester was driving the LeSabre off the reservation and back toward Deerlake.

In his shop Sylvester examined the LeSabre. The seats were covered with dog hair and stank accordingly. The front seat was ruined; somebody had spilled what looked like a gallon of ruby port. The trunk was covered with snow and rice hulls and frozen green worms. But none of this was a problem. Come spring he’d steam-clean the whole unit, find another front seat and a trunk lid, touch up the black enamel, and the Buick would sticker out at $325, minimum. If it didn’t sell until fall, that was fine. The All Days might even buy the Buick again, which was fine by Sylvester. He felt nothing one way or the other about the All Days. They had the Buick car for ricing season, and now Sylvester had it back. And none too soon.

Beth Anderson rode into Deerlake on the Greyhound bus the snowy evening of December 22. Sylvester Harjula sat parked across the street in his personal car, a fully restored ’51 Merc. He ran the wipers to keep the windshield clear of snow. He saw Beth get down from the bus; his heartbeat picked up RPMs. She wore a long black coat and dark stocking cap pulled low across her forehead. Her neck was bare and for a moment caught light from the street lamps. Sylvester’s heartbeat picked up speed. A man came down the steps close behind Beth; Sylvester’s heartbeat raced. There was some accelerator in his chest and he felt short of breath. But the headlamps of a waiting car blinked on and the man waved and turned toward the light. Sylvester, slightly dizzy, let out his breath. Beth waited for her small black suitcase, then walked, leaning into the snow, the two blocks to her mother’s house.

The next morning Sylvester drove slowly by the Anderson house. He looked for tracks in the snow on the front steps, but saw none. Which was no problem. He knew her routine. He parked down the street.

At two o’clock Beth came out of the house. She swept snow from the steps, not the whole width but just enough to make a path for her own feet. She continued sweeping in this manner down the sidewalk. At the street she turned and for a long time stared at the house she had grown up in. Then she let the broom fall in the snow, and walked downtown.

Sylvester followed her in the Merc a block behind. She looked closely at each house she passed. Once she stopped to stare up at a big elm tree, its naked branches, the white knots of snow where the black limbs joined the trunk. On Main Street Beth walked slower. She paused by every store window. Eventually she turned into Kinder’s, the old soda fountain from high school days.

Beth Anderson took a stool at the long counter. Kinder’s was empty but for two high school kids in orange-and-black letter jackets who stood jolting two pinball machines with the butts of their hands. Magazine racks to the side. Booths, probably empty, to the rear. The booths were where high school couples necked. She didn’t remember ever sitting in the booth section of Kinder’s.

Old Man Kinder, bald now, his mouth caved in, turned from the television set and came her way. He paused in front of her. He waited in silence. He did not recognize her.

“Cherry Coke,” she said, which was the only reason she’d come here in the first place. Cherry Cokes at Kinder’s did not come from a can.

Old Man Kinder turned back to the TV as he filled her glass. One rattle of ice. One long squirt of cherry that raced a red spiderweb among the cubes. Then the brown flood of cola.

She sipped the Coke. Its sweet blossom filled her nose and made it tingle. She drank half, then slowed, and looked out to Main Street. The square front windowpane was shrunken by frost to a single clear oval. A porthole in a submarine. Outside, a brown jacket passed; she saw its quilted pattern as the coat drifted by only inches from the glass, like some large, unidentifiable sea mammal.

Beth thought of Sylvester Harjula. Creepy Sylvester. He was still around, she supposed. Sylvester had been a regular at Kinder’s ever since high school. Back then he had some sort of radar for her. She looked past the counter into the mirror. She took off her stocking cap and shook out her hair, except that it didn’t shake. She had forgotten, again, to wash it. She replaced the stocking cap and looked away from the mirror. Mirrors were not her friends, never had been. Mirrors in truth were no one’s friends, for they reflected appearance to the neglect of reality. Mirrors saw no inner life, and it was the inner life of people, other people, that had always interested Beth. She was a people-kind-of-person, always had been.

She thought of herself. Her own life. From Deerlake to a dissertation on Alain-Fournier, the doctorate, a comp/lit teaching position at Northwestern in Chicago. Not too shabby, as her students might say. Northwestern was not the University of Chicago, but with a book or two in print, anything was possible. And of course, had she been born, say, to a family of Georgetown diplomats who spoke three languages at dinner, she doubtless would be at Harvard. And often on the MacNeil/ Lehrer news. One of Robert MacNeil’s favorite sources, one who spoke in short but perfect paragraphs and so made his blue eyes shine; she would certainly remember to wash her hair for the “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.”

She glanced down at the pinball players. She looked at the ceiling. An oval water stain, brown-rimmed and weepy at the corners, stared back at her. She turned to look out the frosted glass to Main Street and thought again of her own life. She had come, several years ago, to believe that Deerlake was a mistake. That, somewhat like Shirley MacLaine, she should have been born in France, preferably in 1890 in the village of Epineuil-le-Fleuriel, France. Then she would have met Alain-Fournier. They would have been childhood friends, then schoolmates; then, in adolescence, the wonderful confusion of friendship and deeper passions; and much later, because of her—Beth Anderson (though her name would have been different, perhaps Beatrice)—the drums of World War I would have sounded to Alain faint and far away. He would have remained in Epineuil. Alain, dear Alain, would have loved honor less and her more, and so would not have gone off to the front—at least not so quickly—and because of Beth and her letters, a correspondence of aesthetics atremble with desire, a correspondence surpassing even the letters between Alain-Fournier and Jacques Riviere—all because of Beth, Alain would have returned to his writing desk. To the white paper. The dark ink.

Alain was commanding officer that day. There was ragged fire from a hostile wood. Alain had led the charge, pistol upraised; he had taken a ball in the hand or the arm, had fallen, but then risen and pressed on into the smoke, the dust, the noise. Into memory, history, dream. “Oh Alain,” she whispered, “dear dark burning Alain—”

Suddenly a voice beside her said, “Beth Anderson—long time no see!”

She turned. Her mouth fell open. The dark hair across the forehead, the eyebrows, the deep-set burning eyes, the mustache. It was Sylvester Harjula.

“Welcome home,” Sylvester said. He extended a chapped hand.

Beth caught her breath. Her cheeks warmed. She took the hand—there was no choice. It felt like a coconut. Like Sylvester soaked his hands in pickling brine.

“Mind if I?” Sylvester said, sitting down, leaving one stool between them.

“No—I mean, go ahead,” she said. She looked back at her Coke.

They sat in silence for a while. Sylvester ordered a chocolate Coke. Creepy Sylvester.

“So when did you get in?” he asked.

“Last night.”

“All by your lonesome?”

“I enjoy traveling alone,” she said.

Sylvester was silent for a moment. “It’s a good time to think about things, I suppose,” he said.

She looked up at Sylvester. She never imagined he thought about anything except cars.

“I was thinking about you recently,” Sylvester said.

Beth looked down and swirled her cubes.

“I’ve got the LeSabre now,” Sylvester said.

In the mirror Beth saw him smile at her as if he expected to be congratulated for something. “The LeSabre?” Beth said.

“Your mother’s old car,” Sylvester said.

“Oh—I’d quite forgotten,” Beth said.

Sylvester’s smile faded. He turned back to his chocolate Coke. “Of course it’s pretty well beat,” Sylvester said. “Mainly an Indian car now.”

Beth turned. She had forgotten about the Indians.

“Why are they so hard on cars?” she said.

Sylvester shrugged. “They don’t see cars like we do. They don’t care what they drive, long as it goes,” Sylvester said.

Beth was silent.

“They’re kind of beat down, themselves, I guess,” Sylvester said. “As a race, I mean. Maybe it’s like that old saying, ‘You are what you drive.’”

Beth swirled her ice cubes once around her glass. “I don’t have a car, so what does that make me?”

“Well,” Sylvester began, “I . . .” But there was no more. His neck reddened.

For an instant Beth felt sorry for him and ashamed of herself. She shouldn’t have been so quick, so sharp. All her life she’d been that way. It was not an admirable trait.

“Maybe not having a car could be good,” Sylvester said. “You wouldn’t have payments, upkeep, insurance.”

She turned to look at Sylvester.

“You’d be more free,” he said, staring straight at her.

Then her eyes fell to his lobster hands. She turned back to her watery ice cubes.

After a long silence, Sylvester said, “So how’s your mother?”

“Not good,” Beth said. She told him about the diabetes. The heart trouble. The forgetfulness.

That night, after fixing hot milk for her mother, who was, strangely, not at all sleepy by eleven o’clock, Beth finally went to bed. She was slipping toward sleep when something Sylvester had said came into her mind. Indians and cars. “You are what you drive,” Sylvester had said.

Beth opened her eyes. For the Indians, a car was not a car at all, but a metaphor. A cultural metaphor. More than that: it was a Weltanschauung. And the fact that Indians cared not a whit for cars was not necessarily a sign of cultural decay; in fact, it was the opposite. Indians who drove junked cars and left them along the road when the motors burned out were the real, that is, the nonassimilated, the true Indians.

Beth switched on the lamp, got up and began to pace the bedroom. Of course Sylvester was right—you are what you drive. But she was right, too. She was righter. She was a writer, that is. For wrapped up in her mother’s disgusting old LeSabre—Sylvester had told her all the details—was the whole Indian Problem.

Rapidly she dug in her suitcase for a yellow notepad and a pen. At the top of the page she wrote in bold letters “The Indian Problem, by Beth Anderson.” As she waited to be visited by the next sentence, downstairs her mother gave out a groan and died.

After the funeral there was the matter of the house and her mother’s belongings. For want of acquaintances her own age—Beth realized how few friends she had had in high school (not any, really)—she called Sylvester Harjula.

Sylvester appeared at her door twenty minutes later. He carried a long tool box. He said he imagined there were things of her mother’s that Beth would want shipped, and he had brought along lumber, saw, hammer, nails, and strapping tape.

“Well, there is the china cabinet,” Beth said.

Sylvester sawed and hammered. He made a marvelous crate; Beth found old blankets to drape the cabinet. Mid-morning, Beth made a pot of coffee. At noon they drove downtown for lunch in Sylvester’s Mercury. The Mercury was scented sharply with a Pine-Tree air freshener; its seats were deeply soft and upholstered in burgundy velours, a combination Beth imagined that one might find in the waiting room of a bordello. She also realized, as they turned downtown, this was the first time she had ever ridden alone with a man her own age, in his car, down Main Street in Deerlake.

At the cafe she ordered a broasted half-chicken in a basket.

Sylvester ordered the same, though with potato skins rather than fries. They waited for the food in silence.

“I have a house now,” Beth said to herself. She looked out the window for a long time.

Their chicken came. As they ate, Sylvester intermittently spoke, but Beth often missed what he said and didn’t remember to reply. She stared out the window. Whenever she stopped eating, Sylvester paused as well. Finally she turned to Sylvester. “Would you watch the house for me? This winter?” she asked.

“Well,” Sylvester began.

“For remuneration, of course,” Beth said. “Then when spring comes I’ll organize some sort of estate auction. However, for the short term I need someone to watch the house.”

“It’d be an honor and a privilege,” Sylvester said.

Beth stared at Sylvester. Then she laughed.

Sylvester’s eyes widened; he looked down, into his chicken basket.

“I’m sorry,” Beth said. “It’s just that you sounded so . . . formal.” She laughed again, and tried to cover her mouth with her hand.

“I really am very sorry,” she said. She giggled.

“It’s okay,” Sylvester said. “I know how tough it must be.”

She laughed again, louder this time, because she had entirely forgotten about her mother. She was thinking, rather, of herself. Herself, at thirty-nine years of age, sitting in Deerlake, Minnesota, picking at cold broasted chicken and fries with Sylvester Harjula of Harjula’s No Problem Used Cars. She continued to laugh. She couldn’t stop. She upset her water glass and laughed louder at that. Sylvester helped her up from the table and out the door into the cold air. On the way home she tipped over on the seat and kept laughing harder and harder until Sylvester realized she was crying.

The next day Beth prepared to leave. Sylvester had a key. Everything was in order with the electricity and water departments, the heating oil truck driver. She took a last look around the house. In the basement a faint humming noise caught her attention. She touched the furnace. The water heater. The white side of the chest-type freezer, which vibrated beneath her fingers. She had forgotten about the freezer. Ice squeaked as she lifted the lid. The freezer overflowed with large cauliflowers of frost, and beneath the frost, years’ worth of food. Frozen vegetables. Meat. Berries. Packages of arm roasts, round steak, hamburger; containers of crystalline raspberries, purple chokecherries; layers and layers of hard bags of yellow corn. Among the corn was a single red coffee can which rang emptily to her touch. She lifted the can and shook it; something rustled inside with a sound like dried leaves. She pried off the plastic lid and found inside the can fifty green twenty-dollar bills. One thousand dollars in cash.

In January, back at Northwestern, Beth happened to glance through the travel section of the Sunday Tribune. She began reading about sun vacations to Mexico and the Caribbean. She noticed how some of the advertisements slipped the word singles into their sentences; how really quite inexpensive they were.

The next day Beth booked a single’s package to Club Papagallos, which meant Club Parrot, on Grand Cayman Island, which was seventy nautical miles south of Cuba. There Beth was walking along the beach with her head down to avoid stepping in the crude oil that had washed ashore and rolled itself into little black sandy balls that resembled Russian tea cakes when she bumped full-length against a tall, thin man with a Lincoln beard.

“One thousand dollars for a vacation and the damned beach is no better than a goose yard,” the man said. “Look at my feet!”

Beth did.

The man was a full professor at the University of Chicago, was recently divorced, and had written two books and eighteen critical papers about Gustave Flaubert. At dinner that night he told Beth things about Flaubert that few people knew, for example, that Flaubert’s saliva was perpetually blackened by mercury treatments for venereal disease. He also told Beth his former wife read nothing but James Michener, which was the straw that finally broke the back of their marriage. “Not that I didn’t bring home good literature for her to read,” he said twice that night.

Beth and Henry Ridgecraft were married in February in the office of a judge in a civic building overlooking Lake Michigan. As they left the office, Henry made a joke about the number of Chicago judges caught in recent police stings.

Beth moved into Henry’s town house. And to that address, every other week, came a letter from Sylvester Harjula. Sylvester wrote on his small, brown “No Problem” stationery. His writing, always in blue ink, was cramped both in penmanship and in style, yet contained no sentence fragments or comma splices. Henry, for a good laugh, always read the letters aloud. He pointed out faint oil smudges on the pages. After a month of this Beth kept Sylvester’s letters to herself.

In his letters, Sylvester wrote about the house. He said now that winter was here he worried about the furnace going out. About the pipes freezing. Since he had a key, he wrote, he sometimes slept overnight in the house. He said it was a warm house and a quiet house for sleeping, a good house all around.

Beth wrote Sylvester in return. She thanked him for being a scrupulous caretaker. She assured him that he was welcome to stay in the house, regularly if he wished. She did not, for some reason, tell him about her marriage to Henry Ridgecraft.

In his next letter Sylvester asked if she would address her letters to him in care of her mother’s house. He said regular mail was important to the safety of an empty house. Also he would get her letters a day earlier, in case there was anything urgent that she wanted from him or wished to tell him. He said he hoped she wouldn’t feel funny sending letters to him at her old address.

“Not strange at all,” Beth wrote, though in truth it was. At first she felt as if Sylvester had become part of her family. After two or three cycles of letters, however, of Sylvester’s reports and her thank-you notes in reply, Beth felt at ease writing to Sylvester at her old home address. She began to add occasional anecdotes, as she had to her mother, telling Sylvester of her students; of teaching them to write; of making them ponder, for at least fifty minutes a day, things they read.

Sylvester wrote back that he had liked Zane Grey and Jack London from school days. Now he sometimes picked up a Louis L’Amour paperback at the grocery store. He asked if she could recommend to him some books along that line.

Beth wrote back to suggest Hemingway and Faulkner, then on second thought crossed out Faulkner. She explained that Faulkner might have won the Nobel Prize but his sentences would never win any As in her freshmen composition classes.

Sylvester wrote back and included in his letter one particularly long sentence from The Sound and The Fury, which he had found in the Deerlake Library. He said he could see what she meant about Faulkner. He also said that he had read The Old Man and the Sea. He had put the “closed” sign on his office building and read the whole book in one day. He said it was a good book, which to him meant the type of book he could see reading again sometime.

Beth wrote back immediately a rather excited letter, saying that he had hit upon the best definition of art—writing or painting or music that held up under repeated scrutiny, that got better with age. After that, Beth wrote less about the house and increasingly whatever came into mind—mostly about growing up in Deerlake. She told Sylvester things. How she had hated the choir director, Mr. Kinney, and his ugly pipe. How she thought the cheerleaders were an embarrassment to themselves. How she really had not liked school and could not wait to turn eighteen and graduate.

Sylvester wrote that he remembered her well from school. He said it had always seemed to him that she enjoyed school. And if someone like her hadn’t enjoyed school, then who ever did?

“Maybe no one,” she wrote back. “Maybe no one ever is really happy with her life,” she wrote. She was tired and it was late when she wrote that; when she should have been Hemingway, she was Faulkner. She wrote about her studies, about Alain-Fournier, a long rambling letter that held up her life in Deerlake to Meaulnes’s life in Fournier’s novel. She wrote that she, too, always felt like an outsider “ . . . even to myself,” she wrote. “Sometimes I feel as if there’s an explanation to my life that continues to escape me; that I’ve missed something noble, something sublime; that in some way I have cheated myself . . . life is so strange, so harsh,” she wrote.

Sylvester wrote back that he could find nothing by the Fournier fellow in the Deerlake Library, but said he was going to a used car auction at the Minneapolis Auditorium, and he would try a bigger library down there. As far as life went, he agreed it was an odd business, but he couldn’t really agree with her about no one being truly happy, because here he was, Sylvester Harjula, writing letters to her, Beth Anderson. He wrote that since high school, perhaps from the first time he saw her, he had admired her more than she ever knew. He said that April first, when she was to arrive back in Deerlake, was only two weeks away, and seeing her again would make him happier than she could know.

Beth finished reading his letter and looked up from her desk. Henry knelt by his stereo grooming one of his jazz albums with an electrostatic roller; the turntable circled emptily, waiting. “Oh dear,” Beth said.

Beth and Henry Ridgecraft drove into Deerlake in Henry’s Volvo on April first. Henry had been invited to give his paper, “Window and Door Imagery in Madame Bovary,” at the University at Urbana-Champaign, but Beth had prevailed upon him to come with her to Minnesota. “Just this once,” she said. For most of the trip Henry drove above the speed limit and did not look at the passing scenery.

In Deerlake, Beth directed him past the gas company and the feed mill, then across Main Street and the final two blocks to her mother’s house.

Above the slouched and faintly dirty snowbanks, the wide face of her old house looked white and fresh. For a moment she thought the house had been newly painted; then she decided it was just the cleaner air, the brighter slant of smalltown light. The front sidewalk shone gray and wet; it was the only bare concrete in the neighborhood.

“How does real estate move around here?” Henry asked.

“Move?” Beth said.

“Sell,” Henry said, “sell.”

“I . . . really have no idea,” Beth said. She was looking through the window into the living room. There were lights on. And blue striped wallpaper. She didn’t remember that wallpaper.

She walked onto the porch. The doorsill was sharp and square, a new piece of varnished oak. The doorknob had changed from iron to yellow brass. She tried her key. The tumblers turned. The door swung open without squeaking. Inside music was playing. A radio. Some country-western song.

She paused to knock on the door. “Hello?” she called. “Hello?”

The house smelled different. Gone were the brackish odors of old carpet and furniture and stewed tomatoes. Now she smelled fresh paint and lemon furniture wax and flowers. On the mantel was a white vase with two red roses.

“Not bad,” Henry said, steering her inside. “I’d buy this house.”

Beth’s heart began to thud. She followed the hallway toward the yellow-lit kitchen and the music. She smelled fresh coffee. On the table were two cups and saucers and, between them, a larger bouquet of red roses with a note.

“Where’s the bathroom?” Henry called.

“Upstairs,” she murmured. She stared, then turned to speak to Henry but saw only his legs moving up the stairs, shortening as they climbed.

At the table she slowly reached down for the note. “Dearest Beth,” the small handwriting began. She crumpled shut the note and caught her breath. There was noise behind her in the living room. Henry—she must quickly explain all this to Henry—so crazy, all of it, a big laugh for Henry, and of course she couldn’t fault him for laughing because she was to blame really, completely to blame, she must take full responsibility for this terrible—Then the front doorknob turned and the door swung open. Sylvester Harjula, dressed in a blue cap, a brown jacket, a pink shirt, checkered pants, all clean and pressed, stepped inside.

They stared at each other. Sylvester removed his cap. He grinned and his face reddened in the same moment.

“Sylvester—” she began, and started toward him.

“Beth—” he said. “Oh Beth.” He moved toward her and his arms came up.

At that instant, upstairs, the toilet flushed.

Sylvester froze. His arms dropped to his sides. Down the stairs came Henry’s brown shoes, his argyle socks, his gray wool slacks, his black belt and small potbelly, his gray sweater, his shoulders, the salt-and-pepper tip of his beard, and finally his face. Henry stopped midway to stare.

“Henry . . . Sylvester . . . Henry . . . Sylvester,” Beth said. The names went around in a circle and she did not know where, on which one, to stop.

Sylvester’s jaw went slack.

“Sylvester,” Beth said, “this is . . . my husband, Henry Ridgecraft.”

It was late in the afternoon. Henry had made one joke about Sylvester and the roses, then went to the basement to examine the furnace. After that he went upstairs for his nap.

While Henry slept Beth sat alone in the kitchen. She made a cup of tea but drank little. She sat with her hands folded around the warmth of the cup, and watched birds come and go at the feeder.

Chickadees.

Little sparrows with red crests.

A fat blue jay that periodically chased all the small birds away.

Later she blinked as Henry stirred upstairs. The cup was cold in her hands; it was six o’clock. Soon Henry came downstairs whistling. “Hey, I’m starving,” he called to Beth. “Let’s go out for dinner, my treat.”

He came into the kitchen with her coat. Beth stood up. She fitted her arms into the holes. Outside, they walked toward Main Street.

“Some little French place—or maybe Chinese—either will do,” Henry said jovially, and put his arm around her shoulders.

It was heavy and she shrugged it off. “The Hub Cafe on Main Street is all that’s open. It’ll have to do,” she said.

“Okay, okay,” Henry said.

Late sunlight slanted low through the intersections and divided Main Street, already dusky in the shadow of the buildings, into a three-block lattice of blue and orange. A handful of cars, none together, sat here and there. The curved, cursive Kinder’s sign hummed and clicked, then blinked on; one by one the letters flickered to pink. The final S buzzed, strained, but in the end could not muster itself to light.

Below the Kinder’s sign, gleaming darkly, sat a long car with an orange For Sale sign taped to its rear window. Something about the car—the sweep of its fenders, the slope of the roof—did not release Beth’s gaze. She squinted to see better. The black fins. The four doors.

“Hey, where you going?” Henry called.

Beth left Henry and crossed the street. A pickup with two teenagers passed. Its brake lights blinked on red as the teenagers swiveled their heads to stare at the Buick. Yes—the Buick LeSabre, their old LeSabre, the one her mother had bought, Beth realized. But it couldn’t be. This LeSabre looked newer, shinier than their LeSabre had ever looked, even brand new. Slowly Beth walked closer. The Buick’s paint gleamed deep obsidian black. In the curves of its chrome she saw Main Street both left and right, saw the asphalt below, saw the orange-and-purple sky above; saw her own face as if in a fun-house mirror, a wide face with round, open eyes, a face that for a moment she did not recognize. She looked behind her, but there was no one there. Only Henry across the street, and the pickup turning at the end of the block, coming back.

She turned back to the LeSabre and bent to look inside. The black seats, the dark carpet, the great jet plane dashboard with its round-eyed clock and the gleaming silver knobs—it was all exactly as she remembered. It was all the same except for, dangling from the radio dial, the Pine-Tree air freshener.

She suddenly looked up to Kinder’s. In the frosted window, centered in the oval of frost-free glass, was Sylvester Harjula. He sat in profile. He did not see her because he stared straight ahead. His left hand, holding a cigarette, held up his chin. His brown eyes, unblinking, gazed far away. The only movement came from his cigarette, whose smoke curled upward white into the white frost.

“Hey, come on, I’m hungry,” Henry called from across the street.

But Beth did not move. She stood in place and she stared at Sylvester Harjula. At the portrait of Sylvester Harjula. A living portrait but one already gone over into the future. As would she—she suddenly realized—if she moved from this spot. She who knew the answers to everything but had no knowledge—not one good clue—as to why or how or from where the questions ever came.

Behind Beth pickup doors slammed. Reflected in the Kinder’s glass, two teenagers wearing letter jackets over sweatshirts, their gray hoods pointed up, walked quickly to the Buick. They bent to look inside.

“Man, it’s cherry!” one said.

“Wonder what they want for it?” the second said.

“Plenty, I’ll bet,” the first said.

The closest one straightened and turned to Beth. In the shadow of his hood she could not see his face. “Hey lady,” he said, “is this your car?”