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Authors: John Updike

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BOOK: The Centaur
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Hummel’s Garage adjoined the Olinger High School property, a little irregular river of asphalt separating them. Its association with the school was not merely territorial. Hummel had for many years, though not now, served on the school board, and his young red-haired wife, Vera, was the girls’ physical education instructor. The garage got much trade from the high school. Boys brought their derelict jalopies here to be fixed, and younger boys pumped up basketballs with the free air. In the front part of the building, in the large room where Hummel kept his accounts and his tattered, blackened library of spare-parts catalogues and where two wooden desks side by side each supported a nibbled foliation of papers and pads and spindles skewering up to the rusted tip fluffy stacks of pink receipts, here a cloudy glass case, its cracked top repaired with a lightning-shaped line of tire tape, kept candy in crackling wrappers waiting for children’s pennies.
Here, on a brief row of greasy folding chairs overlooking a five-foot cement pit whose floor was flush with the alley outside, the male teachers sometimes—more of old than recently—sat at noon and smoked and ate Fifth Avenues and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Essick’s Coughdrops and put their tightly laced and polished feet up on the railing and let their martyred nerves uncurl while, in the three-sided pit below, an automobile like an immense metal baby was washed and changed by Hummel’s swarthy men.

The main and greater part of the garage was approached on an asphalt ramp as rough, streaked, gouged, flecked, and bubbled as a hardened volcanic flow. In the wide green door opened to admit motored vehicles, there was a little man-sized door with
KEEP CLOSED
dribblingly dabbed in blue touch-up paint below the latch. Caldwell lifted the latch and entered. His hurt leg cursed the turn needed to close the door behind him.

A deep warm darkness was lit by sparks. The floor of the grotto was waxed black by oil drippings. At the far side of the long workbench, two shapeless men in goggles caressed a great downward-drooping fan of flame broken into dry drops. Another man, staring upward out of round eyesockets white in a black face, rolled by on his back and disappeared beneath the body of a car. His eyes adjusting to the gloom, Caldwell saw heaped about him overturned fragments of automobiles, fragile and phantasmal, fenders like corpses of turtles, bristling engines like disembodied hearts. Hisses and angry thumps lived in the mottled air. Near where Caldwell stood, an old potbellied coal stove bent brilliant pink through its seams. He hesitated to leave its radius of warmth, though the thing in his ankle was thawing, and his stomach assuming an unsettled flutter.

Hummel himself appeared in the doorway of the workshop. As they walked toward each other, Caldwell experienced a mocking sensation of walking toward a mirror, for Hummel also limped. One of his legs was smaller than the other, due to a childhood fall. He looked hunched, pale, weathered; the recent years had diminished the master mechanic. The Esso and Mobilgas chains had both built service stations a few blocks away along the pike, and now that the war was over, and everybody could buy new cars with their war-work money, the demand for repairs had plummeted.

“George! Is it your lunch already?” Hummel’s voice, though slight, was expertly pitched to pierce the noise of the shop.

As Caldwell answered, a particularly harsh and rapid series of metallic clashes sprang up in the air and flattened his words; his voice, thin and strained, seemed to hang hushed in his own ears. “No, Jesus, I have a class right now.”

“Well what is it then?” Hummel’s delicate gray face, bleached by spots of silver bristle, alerted timidly, as if anything unexpected had the power to hurt him. His wife had done that to him, Caldwell knew.

“Lookit,” Caldwell said, “what one of the damn kids did to me.” He put his injured foot up on a severed fender and lifted his trouser leg.

The mechanic bent over the arrow and touched the feathers tentatively. His knuckles were deeply ingrained with grime, his touch silken with lubricant. “Steel shaft,” he said. “You’re lucky the tip went clean through.” He signalled and a little tripod on wheels came rattling by itself across the bumpy black floor. Hummel took from it a pair of wire cutters, the type that has an elbow hinge on one jaw to give extra leverage. As the string of a helium balloon slips from a child’s
absent-minded fingers, so fear set Caldwell’s mind floating free. In his dizzy abstraction he tried to analyze the cutters as a diagram: mechanical advantage equals load over force less friction, length of lever AF (fulcrum = nut) over length FB, B being biting point of gleaming crescent jaw, multiplied by secondary mechanical advantage of accessory fulcrum-lever complex, in turn multiplied by mechanical advantage of Hummel’s calm and grimy workman’s hand, clenching action of contracting flexors and rigid phalanges five-fold, MA × MA × 5MA = titanic. Hummel bent his back so Caldwell could brace himself on his shoulders. Uncertain this was being offered and reluctant to presume, Caldwell remained erect and stared upward. The beaded boards of the garage ceiling had been painted velvet by rising smoke and spider traces. Through his knee Caldwell felt Hummel’s back shift with twitches of fitting; he felt metal touch his skin through his sock. The fender shuddered unsteadily. Hummel’s shoulders tensed with effort and Caldwell clamped his teeth upon an outcry, for it seemed the cutters were biting not into a metal shaft but into a protruding nerve of his anatomy. The crescent jaws gnashed; in a swift telescopic thrust Caldwell’s pain shot upwards; coruscated; and then Hummel’s shoulders relaxed. “No good,” the mechanic said. “I thought it might be hollow but it isn’t. George, you’ll have to come over to the bench.”

Trembling through the length of his legs, which seemed as thin and rickety as bicycle spokes, Caldwell followed Hummel and obediently set his foot up on an old Coca-Cola case the mechanic rummaged out of the sooty rubble beneath the long workbench. Trying to ignore the arrow that like an optical defect in his lower vision followed him everywhere, Caldwell concentrated on a bushel-basket full of discarded
fuel pumps. Hummel pulled the chain of a naked electric bulb. The windows were opaquely spattered with paint from the outside; the walls between them were hung with wrenches aligned by size, ballpeen hammers with taped handles, electric drills, screwdrivers a yard long, intricate sprocketed socketed tools whose names and functions he would never know, neat coils of frazzled wire, calipers, pliers, and, stuck and taped here and there in crevices and bare spots, advertisements, toasted and tattered and ancient. One showed a cat holding up a paw and another a giant trying in vain to tear a patented fan belt. A card said
SAFETY FIRST
and another, taped over a windowpane,

Like the outpouring of a material hymn to material creation, the top of the bench was strewn with loops of rubber, tubes of copper, cylinders of graphite, threaded elbows of iron, cans of oil, chunks of wood, rags, drops, and dusty scraps of all elements. This tumble, full of tools, was raked by intense flashes of light from the two workmen down the bench. They were fashioning what looked like an ornamented bronze girdle for a woman with a tiny waist and flaring hips. Hummel put an asbestos glove on his left hand and plucked a broad scrap of tin from the heap. With the cutters he sliced into the center and, abruptly deft, cleverly folded the piece into a cupped shield, which he fitted around the arrow at the back of Caldwell’s ankle. “So you won’t feel the heat so much,” he explained, and snapped the fingers of his ungloved hand. “Archy, could I have the torch a minute now?”

The helper, careful to keep his feet from tangling in the
trailing wire, brought over the acetylene torch. It was a little black jug spitting white flame edged with green. Where the flame streamed from the spout there was a transparent gap. Caldwell locked his jaw on his panic. The arrow had been revealed to him as a live nerve. He braced for the necessary pain.

There was none. Magically, he found himself at the center of an immense insensible nimbus. The light startled into being sharp triangular shadows all around him, on the bench, on the walls. Holding the tin shield in his gloved hand, Hummel without the protection of goggles squinted into the blazing, purring heart of Caldwell’s ankle. His face, dead-pale and drastically foreshortened, glittered fanatically on the points of his two eyes. As Caldwell looked down, a wisp of Hummel’s tired gray hair strayed forward, shrivelled, and vanished in a whiff of smoke. The workmen watched mutely. It seemed to be taking too long. Now Caldwell was feeling the heat; the touch of tin began to boil against his leg. But by closing his eyes Caldwell could envision in the top of his skull the arrow bending, melting, its molecules letting go. Something metal and small chinked to the floor. The pressures encircling his foot lifted. He opened his eyes, and the torch went off. The yellow electric light seemed brown.

“Ronnie, could you get me a soaking wet rag?”

Hummel explained to Caldwell, “I don’t want to pull it through hot.”

“You’re a damn good workman,” Caldwell said. His voice was fainter than he had expected, his praise empty of blood. He watched Ronnie, a one-eyed boy with shoulders like tummocks, take an oily rag and plunge it into a small bucket of black water standing under a far electric bulb. Reflected light bobbed and leaped in the violated water as if to be free. Ronnie handed the rag to Hummel and Hummel squatted and
applied it. Cold wet dribbled into Caldwell’s shoe and a faint aromatic hissing rose to his nostrils. “We’ll wait now a minute,” Hummel said, and remained squatting, carefully holding Caldwell’s pants leg up from the wound. Caldwell met the stares of the three workmen—the third had come out from under the car—and smiled self-deprecatingly. Now that relief was at hand he had a margin in which to feel embarrassed. His smile made the helpers frown. To them it was as if an automobile had tried to speak. Caldwell let his eyes go out of focus and thought of far-off things, of green fields, of Chariclo as a lithe young woman, of Peter as a baby, of how he had pushed him on his Kiddy Kar with a long forked stick along the pavements under the horsechestnut trees. They had been too poor to afford a baby carriage; the kid had learned to steer, too early? He worried about the kid when he had the time.

“Now George: hold tight,” Hummel said. The arrow slid out backwards with a slick spurt of pain. Hummel stood up, his face pink, scorched by fire or flushed in satisfaction. His three moronic helpers clustered around jostling to see the silver shaft, painted at its unfeathered end with blood. Caldwell’s ankle, at last free, felt soft, unbraced; his shoe seemed to be filling with warm slow liquid. The pain had changed color, had shifted into the healing spectrum. The body knew. The ache came now to his heart rhythmically: Nature’s breathing.

Hummel bent down and picked something up. He held it to his nose and sniffed. Then he set it in Caldwell’s palm still piping hot. It was an arrowhead. Three-sided, so sharply pointed its edges were concave, it seemed too dainty a thing to have caused such a huge dislocation. Caldwell noticed that his palms were mottled with shock and exertion; a film of sweat broke out on his brow. He asked Hummel, “Why did you smell it?”

“Wondering if it was poisoned.”

“It wouldn’t be, would it?”

“I don’t know. These kids today.” He added, “I didn’t smell anything.”

“I don’t think they’d do anything like that,” Caldwell insisted, thinking of Achilles and Hercules, Jason and Asclepios, those attentive respectful faces.

“Where do the kids get their money? is what I’d like to know,” Hummel said, as if kindly trying to draw Caldwell’s mind away from a hopeless matter. He held up the headless shaft and wiped the blood off on his glove. “This is good steel,” he said. “This is an expensive arrow.”

“Their fathers give it to the bastards,” Caldwell said, feeling stronger, clearer-headed. His class, he must get back.

“There’s too much money around,” the old mechanic said with wan spite. “They’ll buy any junk Detroit puts out.” His face had regained its gray color, its acetylene tan; crinkled and delicate like an often-folded sheet of foil, his face became almost womanly with quiet woe and Caldwell became nervous.

“Al, how much do I owe you? I got to get back. Zimmerman’ll have my neck.”

“Nothing, George. Forget it. I’m glad I was able to do it.” He laughed. “It isn’t every day I burn an arrow out of a man’s leg.”

“I wouldn’t feel right. I asked a craftsman to give me the benefit of his craft—” He groped toward his wallet pocket insincerely.

“Forget it, George. It took a minute. Be big enough to accept a favor. Vera says you’re one of the few over there who doesn’t try to make her life more difficult.”

Caldwell felt his face go wooden; he wondered how much Hummel knew of why Vera’s life was difficult. He must get
back. “Al, I’m much obliged to you. Believe me.” There was never a way, somehow, of really getting gratitude across. You went through life in a town and sometimes loved the people in it and never told them, you were ashamed.

“Here,” Hummel said. “Don’t you want this?” He held out the arrow’s bright shaft. Caldwell had absent-mindedly slipped the point into his side coat pocket.

BOOK: The Centaur
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ads

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