Robert Butler - Mr. Spaceman

I have let my thoughts grow intrusive now. The music stops. I stop. I am before a sleeping space and so I choose this one. And soon we are in the speaking place. Sitting before me is the tiny, elderly form of Viola Stackhouse. And though she cannot place the things that are inside her directly inside me, we do speak as one, we shape these words as one. My husband Arthur buys Buicks. He always has. He says the Buick LeSabre was the one American car they never forgot how to build, even in the bad days of the late seventies and into the eighties, when the Japanese came and took over our car market because so many of the US makers seemed to forget how to do it right.

And you know, it’s always been an uncomfortable thing for me, his love of Buicks. All these years I’d rather be riding around in just about any kind of car except a Buick. But what could I say? There’s no way for a wife to even begin to explain a crazy thing like that to her husband. It was just a feeling. Whenever it’s come time to trade our car in — about every two or three years, Arthur loves to trade in a car with no more than forty thousand miles on it for a new one — when it’s come time, I’ve always tried to suggest this car or that instead. But it’s his thing, you know. It’s something he’s done all his life, always Buicks, which I guess he got from his father. When better automobiles are built, Buick will build them, Arthur has always said to me. And what could I say to that? “Please don’t, I’ve got this unexplainable aversion to every car you’ve ever bought”?

But sitting here now, I suddenly remember. Pretty clearly, though it’s been a long time. Is that a bad sign? Am I about to die or something? Or is it just senility? Whichever, there’s this one thing that comes back to me. A 1929 model Buick. My mama was going to leave my papa and she and her boyfriend and I, we all of us got in the boyfriend’s 1929 Buick roadster to drive to Reno for her to get the divorce. They lifted me into the rumble seat — I was, what, five years old, I guess — and we took off from in front of the Hotel Senator in Sacramento, where my mama and I were staying temporarily, and she wrapped me up in the chenille spread she got off the hotel bed. It was a morning in the middle of October and the weather was pretty nice. It wasn’t very cold out. I was swaddled up and I know I didn’t like her boyfriend, exactly, but I didn’t hate him, even though I knew what was going on here.

It was my mama I loved the most, she was with me all the time and I was aware even then that I didn’t see my papa very often, though I think that was from him trying to make money and not from running around with other women. Over the years, as an adult, when I thought about what happened between my mother and father, I always came to that conclusion. And Mama said this was okay, what was happening, and though of course I wanted things to be settled and normal, in the way any child wants her family to be, as long as I was with her and she was saying it was okay, I wasn’t as unhappy about the breakup as you might expect.

He was my father’s business partner. They were stock brokers together in their own little firm in San Francisco, where we lived. And they were both of them the same kinds of damn fools as the rest of the country through the twenties, playing a high-stakes game and thinking you never had to fold your hand and walk away. Though listen to me. I love to gamble. Maybe not love it. I get something I need out of gambling and I keep doing it. But at least I know how much I’m ready to lose, and when I lose it, I know how to find my way to the door.

But none of this about the situation is new to me. I had plenty of time growing up and being an adult to think out the issues and all of how things went in my family, how my mama divorced my papa and she went on to a life of, more or less, chaos after that. I’m getting off what it is that just came to me. What’s new in my recollection is the drive to Reno, and that Buick. He had a Buick and I was wrapped in a bedspread and my mama and her boyfriend were in front of me, the backs of their heads, in the roadster’s main seat and I was in the rumble seat and they paid me no attention at all. She snuggled up to him and he put his arm around her and it was like I wasn’t there at all. It was just me and the Buick.

And that was fine. It was a wonderful car. I can see that. My mama’s boyfriend had paid maybe fifteen hundred dollars for it, which was enough to support two families for a whole year back then. And I think the seat was leather and it was more comfortable than our couch at home. And I could hear the Buick’s motor. Most of the cars in the street made a terrible racket, sputtering and burbling and coughing away. But this Buick purred. Even idling at a corner while my mama and her boyfriend waited too long having a kiss and somebody behind us would honk his horn and yell. Even then, the Buick was making this low, smooth sound, right underneath me, it felt like, and all the other stuff didn’t concern me. The Buick was holding me tight and talking to me low and sweet and then it carried me away, fast, making the wind blow in my hair.

My word. I loved that Buick, didn’t I. This doesn’t explain a thing. The Buick carried me into a quiet, green world, meadows and folds of land and fields filled with low growing things, vegetables I knew, but I could name nothing, no vegetable, no tree, no fold or lift of land, I had no words at that age to name anything. Except the jagged edge of mountains before me — I knew those were the High Sierras — my mother’s boyfriend had told me this name before we began — and we rose to them and the Buick whispered to me, reassured me, carried me up and into a forest and we rose gradually, for miles and miles, and the road began to twist and turn and I was okay with all of this. I saw, once, among the trunks of the trees, the dappled flank of a deer and, briefly, its dark eyes. I was something like happy.

But it was getting cold. The sun was there, free and clear in the sky, and yet, even as it seemed to get brighter as we climbed, it gave off less and less heat. I wondered at this. I began to tremble with the cold. I hunched into the seat, pulled the bedspread tighter around me, but it was a thin thing, I realized, there was so much of it wrapped around me that you’d think it would make anyone warm, but it was very thin and as pitiful as the sun. I looked at my mother and her boyfriend and they were snuggled close and they did not seem to notice the cold at all. And the Buick was carrying me and whispering still and I wanted it to warm me, as well, but it could not.

Then we were over the top and we began to descend and suddenly the world changed. It was all rock and dust and scrawny things growing and patches of grass that hunkered low and looked like the scum between the tiles in our bathroom. And I was trembling and the road was sharply angled and I could look down for what seemed like miles, down these long folds of barren rock, and I felt like there was something gripping me by the shoulders and wanting to pluck me from the seat and throw me down this mountain and I pressed myself down, tried to make myself as heavy as a boulder, and I asked the Buick to please not let me go. And it didn’t. The Buick held me and it held to the road and it wound us down the mountain and the air was growing warmer and I was listening carefully again to the Buick’s voice and I was okay.

And then there was a catch in the voice. The engine coughed and stammered and coughed again and my mama’s boyfriend cursed and I suddenly was aware of the road and it was angled sharply down and there was a great dome of rock off one way and a sharp drop the other way and the road was narrow and the Buick shuddered a little and I said to it, softly, No. Please. But the engine fell quiet and the brakes whined and the boyfriend cursed some more and my mama was making little gasping sounds and I didn’t care about those two at all, not at all, I spread my hands out from under the bedspread and I laid them flat on the Buick’s leather seat and I prayed for the car to come back to life, to carry me on to a place where I’d be safe and everything would be okay forever.