Willard Freund had found out about some fool contest, first prize a thousand dollars. By God he knew as much as anybody, he said, about customizing cars. He had to read Henry the contest rules in the magazine, and he had to show him the drawings he’d done this afternoon. They went to the lean-to room in back, and Henry sat down on the side of his bed and closed his eyes, listening to Willard read. Willard read slowly, like a man reading nothing but headlines or a lawyer stressing the importance of every phrase. When Henry would look at him, frowning a little, trying not to seem too skeptical, Willard would lean over the table farther, reading more slowly and insistently than before. It went on and on, stipulation on stipulation, and Henry’s mind wandered to when he’d been Willard Freund’s age. Old hollyhocks and the yellow brick houses of Putnam Settlement, over by the mountain, rose rectangular and dull in Henry’s mind. People he’d known a long time ago came back to him, and people who’d been younger then, still full of life. There was his father, huge and motionless as a boulder down in the bottom of a gorge, and Doc Cathey, parchment-skinned, grinning, swinging his serpentine walking stick, squinting over his cheekbones. There was Callie’s mother, soft and white and bosomy in those days, and Willard’s father, sly and casual, drawing out the faults of a holstein while arithmetic clicked behind his fat-lidded eyes. They’d had great hopes in those days. There were important things to do.
“Damn it, Henry, it’s a natural,” Willard said. “Christ, they’ve ruled out all the real competition. No pros, no relatives of GM or Fisher or anybody that counts! And look!” He spread out his drawings and Henry got up and went over to the chair across from Willard. He adjusted his glasses and drew the nearest of the drawings to him. A needle-nosed, wing-fendered car, high in back, tortuously drawn on yellow paper.
“I thought you wanted to drive, Willard,” Henry said.
“Hell’s bells, I could drive to the moon and back on a thousand dollars.” He jabbed at the paper with one squared, big-boned finger. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know, Willard,” he said. “God knows I don’t know much about designing cars.”
“What do you think, though?” He was squinting, his cheek muscles tensed, watching Henry’s face.
Henry looked down at the paper again, first through his glasses, then over them, and Willard got out a cigarette and lit it.
Henry said, “It’s a fine-looking car all right.” Then: “There is one thing, maybe. It doesn’t look—” He couldn’t find the way to say it. He tried to shrug it off, back down and merely praise the car, but Willard pressed him and, finally, feeling like a fool, he let it come out: “It doesn’t look like you.”
“It what?” Willard said, half-standing up.
“I told you I—”
“Well what in hell is it supposed to mean?” He couldn’t decide whether to be mad or puzzled. “Look, maybe it’s really crap or something, and maybe I didn’t draw it so pretty, but it is supposed to be a car, I wasn’t trying to make a picture of my goddamn face.”
Henry pulled hard at his lip, trying to think, and his seriousness, if nothing else, made Willard calm himself and wait. “Put it this way,” Henry said. “It doesn’t look like anybody, it just looks like a picture of a car. Take old Kuzitski’s truck. It looked like Kuzitski, you know what I mean?”
He shook his head, cross.
“Well, take Burk’s secondhand Cadillac, then. Would you have a car like that?”
It was useless, of course. The more he argued the less Willard saw it. Henry flipped through the magazine, pointing to cars and their drivers—and the truth was, the more he pointed the less Henry Soames saw it himself. He sat with his chair close to Willard’s now, his arm around Willard Freund’s shoulders, and though smoking was sure to kill him, Doc Cathey said, he smoked his pipe, for Willard smoked cigarettes like a trucker, one after another.
He quit at last. “Maybe it’s nonsense,” he said. “I guess it is.” And he tried to talk merely about how the air would flow, where the weight would sit—things he knew for sure he knew nothing about.
When they talked about Willard’s father and farming and old Kuzitski’s accident—all this later that night—Willard smoked less and Henry quit. The boy crossed his knees and leaned back in his chair across the room from Henry just as Willard’s father always had, or had when Henry had known him. They seldom met now. And yet even at moments like this Willard Freund did not quite seem at ease.
“Sorry, Willard,” Henry said as Willard left, a little after one-thirty.
Willard smiled, cocking his head, looking off over Henry’s shoulder. “Don’t matter,” he said. “I guess the whole thing’s a pretty dumb idea.”
“I never said that,” Henry said seriously.
“No. Well, we’ll see.” He winked, pulled down his sweatshirt a little, and went out.
Afterward Henry lay in his bed going over and over it in his mind. He was sure he was right, even if sometimes looking at pictures in magazines he couldn’t seem to see it. The only real question was whether or not it was important, whether or not it had anything to do, really, with designing a car. As he lay thinking, or brooding rather, his mind all at once called up the image of George Loomis’s house, and for some reason Henry was shocked. A gaunt old brick house among tamaracks, the round-topped windows always dark except for the eerie flicker thrown by the television he kept in the kitchen. There were maybe fifteen, sixteen rooms, and George Loomis hardly set foot in more than three or four. But maybe that was different, he thought. A hand-me-down might be something else again. Give George a choice of the kind of house he’d live in, and sure as day. … But then he knew it wasn’t true. A man did things to the world but also the world did things to him, and that was the house all right. If something or somebody didn’t interfere, that would be George Loomis.
He lay looking up at the ceiling for a long time, thinking.