John Updike - Rabbit Is Rich

"Two more TRs?"

"Two more convertibles, out back." By now the kid is scared, white in the face so his eyelids and eartips look pink. Rabbit is scared too, he doesn't want any more of this, but things are rolling, the kid has to show him, and he has to react. They walk back along the corridor past the parts department, Nelson leading the way and picking a set of car keys offthe pegboard fastened next to the metal doorframe, and then they let themselves into the great hollow space of the garage, so silent on Sunday, a bare-girdered ballroom with its good warm stink of grease and acetylene. Nelson switches off the burglar alarm and pushes against the crash bar of the back door. Air again. Brewer far across the river, the tip of the tall courthouse with its eagle in concrete relief peeking above the forest of weeds, thistle and poke, at the lot's unvisited edge. This back area is bigger than it should be and always makes Rabbit think somehow of Paraguay. Making a little island of their own on the asphalt, two extinct American convertibles sit: a '72 Mercury Cougar, its top a tattered cream and its body that intense pale scum-color they called Nile Green, and a '74 Olds Delta 88 Royale, in color the purply-red women wore as nail polish in the days of spy movies. They were gallant old boats, Harry has to admit to himself, all that stretched tin and aerodynamical razzmatazz, headed down Main Street straight for a harvest moon with the old accelerator floored. He says, "These are here on spec, or what? I mean, you haven't paid for them yet." He senses that even this is the wrong thing to say.

"They're bought, Dad. They're ours."

"They're mine?"

"They're not yours, they're the company's."

"How the hell'd you work it?"

"What do you mean, how the hell? I just asked Mildred Kroust to write the checks and Charlie told her it was O.K."

"Charlie said it was O.K.?"

"He thought we'd all agreed. Dad, cut it out. It's not such a big deal. That's the idea here, isn't it – buy cars and sell 'em at a profit?"

"Not those crazy cars. How much were they?"

"I bet we make six, seven hundred on the Merc and more on the Olds. Dad, you're too uptight. It's only money. Was I supposed to have any responsibility while you were away, or not?"

"How much?"

"I forget exactly. The Cougar was about two thousand and the Royale, some dealer toward Pottsville that Billy knows had it but I thought we should be able to offer, you know, a selection, it came to I think around two-five."

"Two thousand five hundred dollars."

Just repeating the numbers slowly makes him feel good, in a bad kind ofway. Any debt he ever owed Nelson is being paid back now. He goes at it again. "Two thousand five hundred good American -"

The child almost screams. "We'll get it back, I promise! It's like antiques, it's like gold! You can't lose, Dad."

Harry can't stop adding. "Forty-two hundred for the little chop-clock TR, four thousand five hundred -"

The boy is begging. "Leave me alone, I'll do it myself. I've already put an ad in the paper, they'll be gone in two weeks. I promise."

"You promise. You'll be back in college in two weeks."

"Dad. I won't."

"You won't?"

"I want to quit Kent and stay here and work." This little face all frightened and fierce, so pale his freckles seem to be coming forward and floating on the surface, like flecks in a mirror.

"Jesus, that is all I need," Harry sighs.

Nelson looks at him shocked. He holds up the car keys. His eyes blur, his lower lip is unsteady. "I was going to let you drive the Royale for fun."

Harry says, "Fun. You know how much gas these old hot rods bum? You think people today with gas a dollar a gallon are going to want these eight-cylinder inefficient guzzlers just to feel the wind in their hair? Kid, you're living in a dream world."

"They don't care, Dad. People don't care that much about money anymore, it's all shit anyway. Money is shit."

"Maybe to you but not to me I'll tell you that now. Let's keep calm. Think of the parts. These things sure as hell need some work, the years they've been around. You know what six-, sevenyear-old parts cost these days, when you can get 'em at all? This isnit some fancy place dealing in antiques, we sell Toyotas. Toyotas."

The child shrinks beneath his thunder. "Dad, I won't buy any more, I promise, until these sell. These'll sell, I promise."

"You'll promise me nothing. You'll promise me to keep your nose out of my car business and get your ass back to Ohio. I hate to be the one telling you this, Nelson, but you're a disaster. You've gotta get yourself straightened out and it isn't going to happen here."

He hates what he's saying to the kid, though it's what he feels. He hates it so much he turns his back and tries to get back into the door they came out of but it has locked behind them, as it's supposed to do. He's locked out of his own garage and Nelson has the keys. Rabbit rattles the knob and thumps the metal door with the heel of his hand and even as in a blind scrimmage knees it; the pain balloons and coats the world in red so that though he hears a car motor start up not far away he doesn't connect it to himself until a squeak of rubber and a roar of speed slam metal into metal. That black gnashing cuts through the red. Rabbit turns around and sees Nelson backing off for a second go. Small parts are still settling, tinkling in the sunshine. He thinks the boy might now aim to crush him against the door where he is paralyzed but that is not the case. The Royale rams again into the side of the Mercury, which lifts up on two wheels. The pale green fender collapses enough to explode the headlight; the lens rim flies free.

Seeing the collision coming, Harry expected it to happen in slow motion, like on television, but instead it happened comically fast, like two dogs tangling and then thinking better of it. The Royale's motor dies. Through the windshield's granular fracture Nelson's face looks distorted, twisted by tears, twisted small. Rabbit feels a wooden sort of choked hilarity rising within him as he contemplates the damage. Pieces of glass finer than pebbles, bright grit, on the asphalt. Shadows on the broad skins of metal where shadows were not designed to be. The boy's short haircut looking like a round brush as he bends his face to the wheel sobbing. The whisper of Sunday traffic continuing from the other side of the building. These strange awkward blobs of joy bobbing in Harry's chest. Oh what a feeling.

Within a week, at the club, it has become a story he tells on himself. "Five thousand bucks' worth of metal, crunch. I had this terrible impulse to laugh, but the kid was in there crying, they were his cars after all, the way he saw it. The only thing I could think of to do was go stand by the Olds with my arms out like this." He spreads his arms wide, under the benign curve of the mountain. "If the kid'd come out swinging my gut would've been wide open. But sure enough he stumbles out all blubbery and I take him into my arms." He demonstrates the folding, consoling motion. "I haven't felt so close to Nelson since he was about two. What makes me really feel rotten, he was right. His ad for the convertibles ran that same Sunday and we must have had twenty calls. The TR was gone by Wednesday, for fifty-five Cs. People aren't counting their pennies anymore, they're throwin' 'em out the window."

"Like the Arabs," Webb Murkett says.

"Jesus, those Arabs," Buddy Inglefinger says. "Wouldn't it be bliss just to nuke 'em all?"

"Did you see what gold did last week?" Webb smiles. "That's the Arabs dumping their dollars in Europe. They smell a rat."

Buddy asks, "D'you see in today's paper where some investigation out of Washington showed that absolutely the government rigged the whole gas shortage last June?"