Karl Wagner - Why Not You and I?

Harmon thought he saw movement farther down along the ravine. He started to call out in earnest, but decided that the general clatter and crash of the junkyard would smother his words. There was the intermittent mutter of the machine shop, and somewhere in the distance a tractor or towtruck, innocent of muffler, was dragging stripped hulks to their doom in the jaws of the yard’s crusher. Grunting, Harmon climbed down from the wreck and plodded toward where he thought he’d glimpsed someone.

The heat seemed worse as he trudged along the rutted pathway. The rows of twisted sheet metal effectively stifled whatever breeze there might have been, at the same time acting as grotesque radiators of the sun’s absorbed heat. Harmon wished he had worn a hat. He had always heard that a hat was a good thing to wear when out in the sun. He touched the spot on the top of his head where his sandy hair was inclining to thin. Unpleasant images of frying eggs came to him.

It smelled hot. The acres of rusted metal smelled like an unclean oven. There was the bitter smell of roasting vinyl, underscored by the musty stench of mildewed upholstery basted in stagnant rainwater. The palpable smell of hot metal vied with the noxious fumes of gasoline and oil and grease — the dried blood of uncounted steel corpses. Underlying it all was a sickly sweet odor that Harmon didn’t like to think about, because it reminded him of his smalltown childhood and walking home on summer days through the alley behind the butcher shop. He supposed they hosed these wrecks down or something, before putting them on the yard, but nonetheless…

Harmon’s gaze caught upon the sagging spiderweb of a windshield above a crumpled steering wheel. He shivered. Strange, to shiver when it was so hot. He seemed to feel his intestines wriggle like a nest of cold eels.

Harmon supposed he had better sit down for a moment.

He did.

“Morris?”

Harmon blinked. He must have dropped off.

“Hey, Morris — you OK?”

Where was he?

“Morris?” The voice was concerned and a hand was gently shaking him.

Harmon blinked again. He was sitting on a ruined front seat in the shade of an eviscerated Falcon van. He jerked upright with a guilty start, like a junior exec caught snoring during a senior staff meeting. Someone was standing over him, someone who knew his name.

“Morris?”

The voice became a face, and the face a person. Arnie Cranshaw. A client. Former client. Harmon decided to stop blinking and stand up. On the second try, he made it to his feet.

Cranshaw stared reproachfully. “Jesus! I thought maybe you were dead.”

“A little too much sun,” he explained. “Thought I’d better sit down in the shade for a minute or two. I’m OK. Just dozed off is all.”

“You sure?” Cranshaw wasn’t so certain. “Maybe you ought to sit back down.”

Harmon shook his head, feeling like a fool. ‘Til be fine once I get out of this heat. Christ, I’d kill for a cold beer right now!”

Not a well-chosen remark, he suddenly reflected. Cranshaw had been his client not quite a year ago in a nasty sort of thing: head-on collision that had left a teenaged girl dead and her date hopelessly crippled. Cranshaw, the other driver involved, had been quite drunk at the time and escaped injury; he also escaped punishment, thanks to Harmon’s legal talents. The other car had crossed the yellow line, no matter that its driver swore that he had lost control in trying to avoid Cranshaw, who had been swerving all over the road — and a technicality resulted in the DUI charges being thrown out as well. It was a victory that raised Harmon’s stock in the estimation of his colleagues, but it was no’t a victory of which Harmon was overly proud.

“Anyway, Morris, what are you doing here? ” Cranshaw asked. He was ten years younger than Harmon, had a jogger’s legs, and worked out at his health club twice a week. Nonetheless, the prospect of lugging a semiconscious lawyer out of this metal wasteland was not to Cranshaw’s liking.

“Looking for a fender for my car.”

“Fender-bender?” Cranshaw was ready to show sympathy.

“Someone else’s, and in days gone by. I’m trying to restore an old muscle car I bought back in the spring. Only way to find parts is to dig through junkyards. How about you?”

“Need a fender for the BMW.”

Harmon declined to press for details, which spared Cranshaw any need to lie about his recent hit-and-run encounter. He knew a country body shop that would make repairs without asking questions, if he located some of the parts. A chop shop wasn’t likely to respond to requests for information about cars with bloodstained fenders and such grisly trivia. They’d done business before.

Cranshaw felt quite remorseful over such incidents, but he certainly wasn’t one to permit his life to be ruined over some momentary lapse.

“Do you know where we are?” asked Harmon. He wasn’t feeling at all well, and just now he was thinking only of getting back into his little Japanese pick-up and turning the air conditioner up to stun.

“Well. Pearson’s Auto Yard, of course.” Cranshaw eyed him suspiciously.

“No. I mean, do you know how to get out of here?”

“Why, back the way we came.” Cranshaw decided the man was maybe drunk. “Just backtrack is all.”

Cranshaw followed Harmon’s bewildered gaze, then said, less confidently: “I see what you mean. Sort of like one of those maze things, isn’t it. They ought to give you a set of directions or something — like, ‘Turn left at the ’57 Chevy and keep straight on till you pass the burned-out VW bug.’”

“I was looking for one of the workers,” Harmon explained.

“So am I,” Cranshaw said. “Guy named Milton or something. He’ll know where to find our fenders, if they got any. Sort of like a Chinese librarian, these guys got to be.”

He walked on ahead, tanned legs pumping assertively beneath jogging shorts. Harmon felt encouraged and fell in behind him. “I thought I saw somebody working on down the ravine a ways,” he suggested to Cranshaw’s back.

They seemed to be getting closer to the crusher, to judge by the sound. At intervals someone’s discarded dream machine gave up its last vestiges of identity in great screams of rending, crumpling steel. Harmon winced each time he heard those deathcries. The last remaining left front fender for a ’7 °Cyclone might be passing into recycled oblivion even as he marched to its rescue.

“I don’t think this is where I want to be going,” Cranshaw said, pausing to look around. “These are pretty much stripped and ready for the crusher. And they’re mostly Ford makes.”

“Yes. Well, that’s what I’m trying to find.” Harmon brightened. “Do you see a ’70 or ’71 Montego or Torino in any of these?”

“Christ, Morris! I wouldn’t know one of those from a Model T. I need to find where they keep their late-model imports. You going to be all right if I go on and leave you here to poke around?”

“Sure,” Harmon told him. The heat was worse, if anything, but he was damned if he’d ask Cranshaw to nursemaid him.

Cranshaw was shading his eyes with his hand. “Hey, you were right. There is somebody working down there. I’m going to ask directions.”

“Wait up,” Harmon protested. He’d seen the workman first.

Cranshaw was walking briskly toward an intersection in the rows of twisted hulks. “Hey, you!” Harmon heard him call above the din of the crusher. “Hey, Milton!”

Cranshaw turned the corner and disappeared from view for a moment. Harmon made his legs plod faster, and he almost collided with Cranshaw when he came around the corner of stacked cars.

Cranshaw was standing in the middle of the rutted pathway, staring at the mangled remains of a Pinto station wagon. His face looked unhealthy beneath its tan.