Уолтер Тевис - The Color of Money

“I don’t like riddles.”

“Sorry,” Arabella said. She splashed water on her ankles and then bent to begin soaping her feet. “I don’t think I’ve ever understood growing up.”

“I was more of an adult at thirty than I am now.”

“You have to be grown-up to see that.”

“You have to be grown-up to do something about it,” Eddie said.

The first thing he saw when he came in the double doors was the row of machines: PacMan, Donkey Kong and Asteroids. They were in a basement anteroom, with a Pepsi dispenser and a row of pay phones. It was nine-thirty in the morning and no one was playing. Eddie walked past the machines, pushed open another pair of double doors and found himself in a poolroom of sorts. There were eight four-by-eight Brunswick tables in front and four Ping-Pong tables in back. Behind them was a row of a half-dozen pinball machines. To his right toward the far end of the room was a counter; behind it stood a sour-looking old man with dirty-looking white hair. He wore a striped shirt and a necktie, and he scowled at Eddie. From the ceiling hung long rows of fluorescent-light fixtures, several of which were flickering. The floor was covered with pale green plastic tile. From a radio on the desk beside the old man came the voice of the morning talk-show host Eddie had listened to, while opening up his own poolroom, for years.

After a minute the man looked in Eddie’s direction and raised his eyebrows. Eddie turned and walked out. He would rather sell used cars than work in a place like that.

The sign said FOLK ART MUSEUM, but the place he parked by looked like a junkyard. There was a fence made of rusted bedsprings, each separate frame decorated with a painted metal cutout in the middle. The one nearest the car showed a man in a sombrero holding a red guitar; next to it was a giant daisy, its yellow center sun-faded and with rust at the edges of the white petals. The entrance, Arabella said, was around at the side. She led him past more cutouts—a top hat, Popeye, a crouched tiger—to a wide gap in the bedsprings, with a giant rabbit head at each side. Eddie looked at these a moment as they went through and saw they were made from the hoods of junked Volkswagens painted pink, with the big ears cut from fenders and welded on. They were not cute rabbit heads; they had wicked grins.

Eddie and Arabella were on the road to Connors, Kentucky, where he hoped to find and play pool with the man called Ousley. This junkyard that Arabella wanted to write about was on the way there.

The area inside the fence was the size of a football field. Filling it like a mad cocktail party were dozens of metal figures, most of them life-size and quasi-human. Near him was a steel woman with an enameled face and enormous breasts; it took Eddie a moment to realize the breasts, painted flesh color, had been made from automobile headlights. The body was car bumpers, the arms were exhaust pipes, the head was a piece of a muffler, and the beehive hairdo was of wires and springs, with sequins glued to the metal. The face had a horrible grin, a grin that was both come-on and deathly. She was dressed in a black rayon slip and stood on a small pedestal made of two-by-fours. On this sat a neatly lettered card reading NEW YORK MODEL.

“What do you think?” Arabella said. There was no shade in the yard, and she squinted up at him amusedly.

“It gets your attention,” Eddie said.

At the far end was a kind of shed with an enormous amount of clutter, mostly of rusted metal car parts. Arabella led Eddie that way, past figures of brightly painted women made from manifolds or exhaust systems or fenders or what appeared to be small boilers. Each had a pedestal and a card, with names like EVERYBODY’S AUNT HILDA or KINDERGARTEN TEACHER. Some of the women had the heads of animals. One of these chillingly bore the face of a praying mantis.

As they approached the shed a shirtless man emerged from the shadowy piles of junk that filled it. He was short and squat and heavily muscled. When he came out into the light, Eddie could see that his forearms were covered with tattoos. He looked to be in his sixties and angry.

“Hello, Mr. Marcum,” Arabella said. “I’ve brought a friend.”

The man squinted at him suspiciously and then at her. “You’re the Weems lady. Did you find me a Heliarc?”

“No,” Arabella said, “I told you I couldn’t afford it. This is Ed Felson.”

Marcum, who was even shorter than Arabella, peered up at him. Then he held out a stubby and scarred hand. “She’s a good lady,” he said, nodding toward Arabella. “I can’t get nothing out of her, but she’s a good lady.”

“You make all these yourself?” Eddie looked back at the field full of metal women.

“Every goddamned one of them. You wouldn’t have a beer in that car of yours?”

“No.”

“Maybe you could get us some.”

“After a bit, Mr. Marcum,” Arabella said. “I want to show Eddie your sculptures.”

“What happened to that young man? I thought he was going to sell my things in Lexington.”

Arabella looked at him a moment and then spoke carefully. “You were asking for more money than Greg could pay. He said there would be no deal.”

“We were just haggling,” Marcum said. “He could have called me back.”

“Greg wasn’t able to invest anything near what you were asking. What I want to do, Mr. Marcum,” Arabella said clearly, “is interview you. I’ve brought a tape recorder.”

“They said I was going to be on television over a year ago but nobody came by. Maybe I wasn’t pretty enough.”

“This isn’t television. I want to do an article for Kentucky Arts magazine.”

“Is there money in it?”

“It might get some attention for you.”

“Shit,” Marcum said. “My neighbors give me all the attention I want. Money’s what I could use.” He turned to Eddie. “You can buy us some beer at the A&P. Just take a left and go two blocks.”

“Okay,” Eddie said. “What about Miller’s?”

“Get Molson’s, if they got it,” Marcum said. “Heineken’s is all right too.”

“I’ll get the recorder out of the car,” Arabella said.

As Eddie handed her the little Sony from the backseat, he said, “Who’s Greg?”

“An art dealer.”

Eddie put the key into the ignition. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“That’s right,” Arabella said. She put the strap over her shoulder and walked back into the junkyard. Eddie drove off, remembering the youthful face of the man in the newspaper. He could visualize the two of them—Arabella and the artistic young man—fussing over Marcum’s crazy cartoon “sculptures.” He got a six-pack of Molson’s and a bag of Cheetos at the supermarket and then drove away.

Eddie walked around the yard in sunshine, drinking a beer from the bottle and looking at the statues as though they were people at a party. The materials they were made of were appropriate to the looks on their faces, to the insolent way they stood and stared forward. He felt an affinity for the anger of the old bastard, banging and welding his gallery of bitches in this dead-end coal-mining town. Arabella was back in the shade sitting on a rusted boiler interviewing Marcum. It was one of those surprisingly warm November days when the odd gust of wind could chill you while the open sun made you perspire. Eddie finished his beer, stared for a while at a chromium woman with a chromium dog on a real leash, and then walked back to the shed.

Arabella stood up at he came near. Apparently she had finished. Marcum was opening another beer for himself. “I saw you looking at the woman with a dog,” Arabella said. “I’m trying to buy it from Deeley.”