All I Have in This World (13 page)

“We?”

“What?”

“You said
we're
going to buy it.”

“As in either you or me.”

“How about both of us?”

Now it was out there, in the world. In the car lot, at least. In the space between them.

M
ARCUS WASN'T SURE HE
understood her at first. It caused him to sputter.

“I don't . . . what?”

“How about we go in on it? Buy it together and share it?”

“And why would we do such a thing?”

“Because we both like it and we both need it and because I have other reasons and something tells me you do, too.”

“Something tells you? You mean something besides me tells you things about me?”

“You haven't told me very much. Where you come from, where you're going.”

“But what besides me—something I said or didn't say, or the way I said something or the way I drove, whatever—could tell you something about me?”

“Do you really want to have a conversation like this in a used-car lot?” said Maria.

“I don't have certain places where and only where certain things can be talked about. And I don't go in on cars with women I meet in used-car lots in Texas.”

“You mean as a rule you don't.”

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“Do you have rules about such things?”

“I have a loose understanding of what is and what is not sensible behavior. For instance, I have known since I was able to walk and talk not to get in a car with some stranger.”

“And yet you did,” she said. “You didn't hesitate, either. Just hopped right in.”

“I see what you're trying to do.”

“What?”

“Make me out to be this rule-bound, uptight guy who misses out on life by playing it safe.”

She laughed. Not in an entirely pleasant way. “What do you do when you're not driving to Mexico?”

“What do I
do
?”

“For a living?”

“Why does this matter to you?”

“Just curious. You sound sort of like a lawyer.”

“Actually? I'm a farmer.”

“Really? What do you farm?”

“Carnivorous plants.”

She laughed again. This time with a bit more color and oxygen. But not out of delight; out of ignorance, he decided.

“Venus flytraps?” he said.

“Oh, right. We had one in our fourth-grade classroom. Johnny Rodriquez killed it.”

“Gouged it with a pencil, trying to get it to bite the lead.”

“How'd you know?”

“I know Johnny Rodriquez. I mean, I know the Johnny Rodriquezes of this world.”

“So is your trip to Mexico work-related? Are you taking your business across the border, like everyone else in the States? Or are you trying to import Venus flytraps to, say, Chiapas?”

“I think Mexico has its hands full
exporting
plants.”

“While we're sort of on the subject,” Maria said, “it's maybe not too smart to leave your truck with everything you own in it a half mile from the border and go wandering off for a hike.”

“Apparently not. Especially dumb if you happen to drive a F-150.”

“I don't know anything about cars. What's so special about it?”

“Mexicans love a Ford F-150.”

“Mexicans do?”

“Apparently.”

“Before you say anything else about Mexicans, I should tell you that my father was Mexican, which makes me half-Mexican. Just so you know.”

“Before you go thinking I'm some cracker, I should tell you that a Mexican Border Patrol agent is the one who told me that Mexicans love a F-150.”

“Did he also tell you that he is allowed to say such things but you aren't?”

“He did.”

“Then he's an idiot. He's no more allowed to say them than some white Venus flytrap farmer from North Carolina.”

“On the other hand, it's just a preference. It's not like saying all Chinese people are bad drivers. There is nothing wrong with loving a Ford F-150. It's an excellent vehicle for farmwork.”

“And you think all Mexicans are farmworkers?”

“No,” Marcus said. “Though the majority of Mexicans I have come in contact with where I live are engaged in some form of seasonal agriculture.”

“You expect them to find work in banks?”

“God, no. I hate banks. The bank took my farm away from me.”

“They just snatched it? For no reason?”

He said nothing.

“Sounds like something that might happen in Mexico. Not North Carolina.”

He said nothing.

“So if you don't like banks, I am assuming you plan to pay for this car in cash?”

He said, “Yes.”

“Good. Me, too. I mean, actually, I can write a check or I can cash a check and bring him the cash later, either way, whatever he wants. I bet he'll take my check, though. So how much do you think we should offer him?”

Marcus was thinking about the bank. The bank did not take his farm away from him. Rebecca did not leave him. It was probably not even Mexicans who stole his truck. “Mistakes were made” is a phrase that made you feel slightly better for a while after you uttered it, for its passive construction put the onus on the mistake, as if the absent subject of the sentence—the implied “I”—were walking contentedly down the street, and out of the heavens dropped the net that was the mistake, scooping up the innocent “I” and dangling it above the sidewalk, trapped, foiled, ruined.

“The bank did not take away my farm. I fucked that up. I took it away from myself. And from my family. See, that land had been in my family for centuries.”

“Family,” she said after a silence, and she seemed about to elaborate but stopped herself, as if whatever she was going to say on the subject struck her as obvious, fatuous, or just plain wrong. Marcus so appreciated her decision not to finish this thought that later, looking back on this strange day, he decided this might well have been the moment when his resolve, his doubt, his instinct toward survival through fitness, crested its Continental Divide, after which the rain that was this woman's fierce desire to share, of all things, a Buick Electra with a man she had just met flowed toward a new—foreign, unfamiliar—ocean. Not his Atlantic. Not her Pacific. Somewhere equidistant: the muddy Gulf of Mexico.

“Offer him two.”

“Two hundred?” Maria said.

“God, no. Even if it's twenty years old, it runs good and the mileage is low. He'll want more, but he'll come down. For you. Since he's a family friend, I mean. I did not figure on making a deal so quickly, so I don't have that much on me, but I can head back to my hotel and have it for you in an hour if that's okay.”

“Of course,” she said, so quickly that he wondered whether she was even listening, whether whatever desire was driving her to purchase a car with a stranger meant more to her than when she was repaid or even whether she was repaid at all.

That she trusted him so readily did not mean that he ought to treat the transaction so casually himself.

“Before you go, though, there are terms to go over.”

“What terms? Can't I just write him a check and be done with it?”

“Not with him. Terms to discuss with
me.
”

“Oh. Well. What terms?”

“Whose name will the title be in? What about maintenance? How will we share it? What sort of schedule? Three and a half days on, then we switch? Or every other day?”

“I'm pretty flexible,” she said. “Can't we work all that out later?”

“Actually,” he said, “I've changed my mind.”

“Why?”

“Because you want it too bad. Because you've let desire cloud your reason. Because you're impatient, and impatience breeds sloppiness.”

Instead of arguing with him, she looked away, at the multicolored plastic flags strung between telephone poles lining the lot. Marcus did not find her reaction encouraging.

“I think I need to know more,” he said.

“About what?'

“About why you're doing this.”

She nodded, as if she was about to tell him more. But she didn't. Instead she said, “I can see how you might think I am impatient. I get it. And I get why you'd want to know more. But if I have to tell you exactly? I couldn't. I can't do that. So if that is your deal breaker, if you need to know everything up front before you enter into this, I guess it's time for me to apologize.”

“For what?”

“For taking up your time.”

“It's okay,” he said, because it felt okay. Marcus had time. He liked thinking of something besides his own failure, his shameful escape. He'd grown so defensive when she'd intimated that he was rigid, but in fact he had his list in his back pocket. That it included items like a song by Cream among his most pressing needs only meant that he wanted to be seen as a more interesting and less conventional person. Some woman named Maria with whom he might share a Buick was also not on his list, but maybe it was time he quit making lists of things he had and things he needed.

He was suddenly exhausted from the previous night's travails, the lack of sleep. The BLT and cheddar had long since been consumed by the effort it took to stand in a car lot in the hot sun circulating words and the ideas they suggested.

“Do you know that taco place just a few blocks from here? Across the street from that grocery store?

“Azteca?”

“See if he has two keys. We can work out the rest of the details over lunch. What are you drinking?”

“Dos Equis. Get a pitcher, with extra limes.”

“Trying to get me drunk?”

“You don't strike me as much of a drinker.”

“Well. it's a good thing I'm not,” he said, “because one of us has to drive.”

B
OBBY
K
EPLER TALKED TO
her about things she barely understood—titles and tags—and Maria might have paid more attention had there not been something in the way he spoke to her, and looked at her, and eventually did not look at her, that made her consider, instead of what buying a car with a strange ex – Venus flytrap farmer would do for her—how it might help her in ways she
felt
more than would ever be able to say, had she been forced to say it—how such a thing might look to others. But Bobby Kepler did not know that she'd just met Marcus that afternoon on the lot. Unless it was obvious?

Maria liked to think that she was beyond worrying about what people thought of her. All these years she had worked hard to cultivate an impervious air. She had convinced herself that she came across not as aloof but as confident and secure, but of course she cared. She'd never met Bobby Kepler or heard his name before that morning, but here she was, studying the corners of his mouth to see if they tightened with suspicion.

Well, it was her money. She'd wasted way more than twenty-five hundred bucks on rent money in the past six months. She wrote out a check, signed the paperwork.

“Any questions?” said Bobby Kepler.

“Only,” said Maria, “I wonder if there are two keys?”

“Afraid you'll lose one? I hear you, I'm bad for that myself. Pre-owneds don't usually come with a spare but I can run down and get you an extra made and have it for you when you come back to pick up the vehicle.”

Walking to the restaurant to meet Marcus, Maria decided that her father had cared too much what people thought of him. She had not seen it then, for she hadn't seen
him
then, had barely noticed him unless he was waylaying Randy with his talk of horsepower and Holley four-barrels. At the time she thought he'd abandoned her just as she reached puberty, as if the changes in her body and, far scarier, her personality were threatening to him somehow. His retreat, however, had nothing to do with her, her maturity or moods, for those changes happened to be timed to her mother's switch from first shift to third. Or, as Maria had come to think of it, her mother's long stint of double shifts, which now seemed synonymous with her two-timing, emphasizing her mother's most notable strength: her tireless devotion to the completion of the task at hand.

But her father just hurt. He lost one job, got another, quit that one; eventually he hardly ever left the house. Maria wondered whether he was so embarrassed by his wife's public abandonment that he put off going to the doctor until the cancer had spread to this lungs. From which she might deduce that caring too much about what others thought was potentially lethal. Though not caring—shrugging off entirely the opinions of others—might extend your life, but the years you'd gain would also be isolated, lonely.

There was always somewhere in between, a spot sweet with middleness, a compromise. You never hit it straight off, unless by accident. You worked to find it and you worked to keep it as you settled into that realm of not quite this and definitely not that, the slender but accommodating province of Somewhat.

When she arrived at the restaurant, Marcus was waiting for her on the patio, attempting to eat a taco, only he had no idea how, having obviously been brought up on the much less interesting but more manageable bread. Above his nose he held the taco, swooping it mouthward for a bite. She would have laughed had she not just bought a car with the man. But it wasn't as if she had to share meals with him, or political opinions or, for God's sake, bodily fluids. Just make this work. She could make it work, and regardless of how badly he handled a taco, she believed he could, too.

Lawrence Simpson was a big man. When he went to buy a car, he'd had in mind a car that could handle his size up front—steering wheel needed to tilt, seat needed to move way on back. He'd picked a Buick because he had driven his mother around in her LeSabre growing up in Cleveland. Ronald Stallings, whose wife sung in the choir with him, had got on over at a Buick place owned by a white man out toward Bedford and had given Lawrence a fair deal on an Electra, light blue and brand new. He kept his car extra clean inside and out and he was careful at the high school where he taught math to park as far from the building as he could. There was no separate lot for faculty, and some of these students, seemed like they should never have been granted a license, the way, when classes got let out, they took to squealing up and down the street with their windshields shaking from the bass, to where babies a block away woke up crying out of their naps.

Lawrence had so far not suffered a scratch on his Buick, but he knew the kids would gather to watch him climb in or out of it and slap each other's hands, falling all out over how his car sank when he got in and sprung back up when he got out. He'd see them off to the side, falling out and high-fiving, but what could he do about it? Put them all in detention? Lawrence Simpson had been fat all his life. He had taken a job out here with these small-town folks and he had got to where he liked them. Nice folks mostly, and kids are going to make fun wherever they live, and around here there wasn't so much to do besides watch some fat somebody get in or out of a car. Kids are just going to make fun. Shoot, he did. He stopped acting ugly when he started going to church regular in college, but he still liked to cut up some with the women in the cafeteria and some of the other teachers. And at least those kids did not have to see him get out of his old car, that Nissan. Shocks on that car were so sprung the cops took to stopping him, acting like he was hauling drugs. Said one side of the car was leaning, and all it took for them to see why was to walk up to the car and see the way his stomach pushed up against the steering wheel even with the seat as far back as it would go. Being a black man in the United States of America, even up here in Ohio, where they like to act like all the racists are down south still, he was used to cops stopping him for not a thing in this world. Since he had owned his Buick, though, not one time had they yanked him off over to the shoulder.

Lawrence loved his Buick. It was the first new car he had owned. He didn't make all that much money teaching but he didn't have a whole lot to spend it on. He sent some every month to his mama, paid his bills. Rest he guess he ate up. He used to pray all the time for God to cut out whatever inside him made him so blessed hungry, but God said, Lawrence, I made you big for a purpose and you must not question that purpose. Lawrence didn't drink or chase women, which left him enough every month after he paid off his loan for the Buick to eat about what he wanted.

Lawrence was getting his classroom in order one morning when Althea Thompson stopped by. Althea was a pretty girl, and the way she moved down the hallway it was clear this fact had been pointed out to her.

“Hi, Mr. Simpson,” said Althea in that cotton-candy voice of hers.

“Althea,” said Lawrence. He did not believe in being garrulous with his students.

“Your room look good.”

“Thank you, Althea.” He used to try and correct the children's grammar, but he was so busy telling them what not to say, it just made them favor even more incorrect usage and slang. So he decided long ago to lead by example. He spoke in a voice clear and deep, and at church when he sang the old hymns and contemporary gospel that filled his heart with love for the Lord Jesus Christ our Savior, it felt sometimes to Lawrence as if all the humiliation he had endured on account of his size was worth the thunderous voice he lifted up in worshipful praise to the Almighty.

“Mr. Simpson, I know you're busy. I'm in the homecoming court? You know we getting ready to have our homecoming parade on Friday? Well, Miss Carruthers, she's in charge, she wanted me to ask you, could we use your car in the parade?”

“Miss Carruthers did?” Miss Carruthers was a white home-ec teacher with hair that looked to Lawrence like straw out of a scarecrow. He had hardly any more than spoken to that woman, and how did she come to know what he drove?

“Mr. Simpson, you got a
nice
car.”

“Thank you, Althea. And what would be involved in this? There wouldn't be anything applied to the surface of the vehicle, would there?”

“Oh, no, sir, we're not going to mess with it. It'd just be, you know, all of us in the homecoming court, we get to ride in the parade.”

“And the parade is Friday afternoon the day of the game, is that correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And what time would you be needing me to show up?”

“Well, see, you could just give us the keys right after fourth-period bell rings 'cause, see, we got to go—”

“Hold up, child,” said Mr. Simpson. “Who I'm going to give my keys to, now?”

“Well, you can just let Miss Carruthers have them if you want.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Well, see, it's going to be—do you know Derek Lee?”

“Basketball?”

“Yes, sir, he on the team. See, he's my escort.”

“Is he your boyfriend?”

“No, sir, I said he's my
ess
cort.”

“And you're asking me to let that boy drive my Buick?”

“Just in the parade. He's not going to, like, drive it to Atlanta.”

“And Miss Carruthers is going to oversee all this?”

“Yes, sir, but I mean, we're only going to be needing it for, like, one hour or two hours.”

Mr. Simpson sighed. Was it vanity that made him say yes? Pride that some white home-ec teacher with hair looked like it was pulled every morning out of a hay bale knew him as the owner of a sky-blue Buick Electra? Letting that basketball player drive his car made him so nervous that the night before the parade he stopped off at the bakery and ordered a German chocolate cheesecake with cherry topping and ate half when he got home and prayed to God for guidance because he had about decided he was going to take a taxi to school and say his Buick was in the shop, because he did not like the way that basketball boy walked around the halls after the bell had rung like he was the principal, and he could not believe he had agreed to let that boy drive his Buick, and then he ate another two slices and then he prayed some more over it and over his weight, and God never came back at him telling him to call a cab in the morning, so he had no choice but to go on ahead and let that boy drive his Buick.

The next afternoon when he found Miss Carruthers he said he hoped she understood how special his car was and how he kept his car clean and regularly serviced and it was not a play toy, and she said in her white countrywoman way, “You have a beautiful car.” Took her ten seconds to get the world “beautiful” out of her mouth. Made him feel a little bit better, though. He asked her where the best place to watch the parade might be, and she told him right downtown by the bank because it turned onto Main off Elm right there next to the bank and that way you couldn't see any of it coming, so it just came around the corner and surprised you.

Mr. Simpson had arranged to watch the parade with some of the other teachers and he told them what Miss Carruthers said about where to watch the parade and they all said that sounded fine. The street was filling up with merchants who must have left their stores wide open and all the young ones were sitting up on the curbs waiting to fill their pockets with Jolly Ranchers and Tootsie Rolls, and because Mr. Simpson had grown up over in Hough, where junkies would run right out and stick a gun in your neck if you went rolling down there with all your windows open throwing stuff out in the street and for sure no merchants would leave their stores unattended to stand out and cheer on the football team, and because he was filled with something he guessed might have been pride in this community, which he had felt in his two years here only with members of his congregation, and because even those smart-mouthed, sassy children who lined up in the parking lot waiting to watch him get in or out of his car and laugh and clap and ridicule were of God and God was in them, Lawrence Simpson felt like reaching his arms out wide and gathering those he could encompass and pulling them to his chest.

He could hear the drums of the marching band for blocks, bouncing off the tops of the buildings, before the ambulance, its lights flashing and its siren singing, came around the corner. That Miss Carruthers had set them up right, for theirs was a fine spot to view the parade. First came the band playing that “Rollercoaster” song by the Ohio Players out of Dayton. Lawrence listened mostly to gospel but sometimes he switched the radio to a Top 40 station and he remembered liking that song back when it came out, and even though the band was squawky and the two boys on the tuba who were supposed to be laying down the bass could not keep time, the drums off the buildings and the trumpets stair-stepping up and down that funky riff had Lawrence swaying a little. Half the kids and some of the grown-ups were straight-out shaking it in a way that would have seemed to Lawrence shameful had there not been such pride in the air. Everybody clapped and hollered when a flatbed truck carrying the football team swung around, the boys hanging all off the back and calling out to their friends and cutting up.

Then the first car carrying the homecoming court came around the corner, and Lord, it was a Corvette with that Debra Joyner he had tried to teach simple algebra stretched right out across the hood. Surely sweet Jesus Althea would not . . . but before he could even start to breathe hard, here came Althea atop his Buick. She was wearing some tight dress and black lacy stockings and had her high-heeled shoes splayed out right up by his ornament. Basketball Derek caught sight of Mr. Simpson in the crowd and, seeing the look on his face, raised a finger off the steering wheel at him and grinned, and the worst part of it all was not how that girl stretched out across the hood of his vehicle had lied in order to defile his Buick with her wanton posturing but the way the sunlight cut down off the roof of the bank and lit the side of the Buick and made the shape of its rear look to Lawrence
like
a woman.

It was then that Lawrence understood what he had to do: take that Buick back to Stallings even though he knew he'd take a big loss on it. He would not dare sell it local, because it would not do to have it anywhere here where he might run into it. Up the street the band had stopped to show off some stepping and the Buick was stuck right in front of him and he raised his eyes up to the blue above the buildings across the street rather than look at what had seemed to him when he bought it a heavenly hue.

He had loved that car. He had worshipped it in a way that he ought not to be worshipping some craven image cast not in the glow of godliness. He already had his food to say, God made me how I am and I'm not perfect, and he did not need any other thing to atone for when judgment came. He loved that car, loved it so much, too much, it had to go on away from here.