That's My Bix!

Car People I’m just your average guy. Not much to look at, not much in the whole brains department. I ranked 56th in my high school class of 112. That is pretty much me right there, squatting in the middle of things, trying not to get noticed too much. I had a job after school in the parts department of a local car dealership, Andersen Chevrolet, and when I graduated, it seemed pretty logical to stay at Andersen with the intent to work my way up to selling. Anyone can tell that selling is where the money was from looking at the salesmen, with their giant class rings and wardrobe from the Penneys in Iowa City. Selling cars seemed like it suited me just right, but my boss Gus didn’t think so. “Bobby”, he said, “there’s people people and then there’s car people. You and me is car people, Bobby.” He’d usually pat his meaty paw on my shoulder right then and it would be hot and, more often than not, moist from sweat. His father is our town’s butcher and runs Lieke’s & Sons Meat, only the Sons part is Gus’ brother and not Gus. We didn’t talk about that fact very much, although in some ways, car parts are a lot like cow parts. It all fits together and makes the animal go. I was pretty happy at Andersen Chevrolet. Once I caught myself getting misty-eyed with pride when I saw a Chevy commercial and that “Like a Rock” song playing and knowing that in some small way, that was what I did, made America strong like a rock, one shock and strut at a time. And walking in from the employee parking lot, smelling that mixture of WD-40, Turtlewax and wet pavement while the little triangular plastic flags snapped at me from above? That was just about my favorite part of the day. But three years after graduation, I was still sitting on the stool behind the parts counter, hunting and pecking parts numbers into an ancient greasy computer for $6 an hour. One night, after John Madden made X’s and slashes on the screen on Monday Night Football, I was a little antsy, so I stayed up late and watched a show by a man with enormous teeth, trying to sell you his self-empowerment program. Right then, I decided that there was no reason that I couldn’t be following my dreams and start right away. So the next day, I wandered down the road to Andersen’s main competitor, Rivers Executive Auto. “Bobby,” Mr. Carleton Rivers Senior said. “I’ve been doing business in this town for thirty-two years and I can see you have potential.” He hired me right then for selling cars three days a week and Saturdays. REA, as we always called it, was a class act. The lot was filled with lots of imports. If you wanted an Audi or a BMW, you went to talk to someone at Rivers. The general feeling at Andersen was that the people at Rivers were a bunch of pricks and assholes. That was the punch line to this great joke that Zubby in the detailing shop told, but damned if I can remember how the rest of that went. Something about a proctologist I think. I’m real bad at remembering jokes, to be honest. I have three nice clean ones that I tell during awkward pauses during a sale, because every good salesman should know some jokes. I memorized them from the Reader’s Digest. I keep trying to memorize more, but it just seems like my brain can only hold onto three at any one time. Most people don’t buy more than one car a year, so that works out just fine. And after two weeks, I sold my first car, a 97 dark green Volkswagon Passat to Mr. Richard Davis, the head of Tuckerton Mutual. It was a present for his daughter who just graduated with really good grades from Princeton. Rich, as he asked me to call him, clapped me on the back just like we were on a golf course or something and the best of buddies and it was the greatest feeling in all the world, knowing that you’re finally doing something you’ve always wanted to do. I think I finally understood what Brett Favre feels like when he throws a killer pass, or maybe Dale Earnhardt Jr. when he rounds the last lap. And to think that I had that infomercial and Mr. Rivers to thank for it. Otherwise I would have been still sitting behind the parts counter down the street, listening to Diego tell stories that started “So I was doing her from behind.” Which were always pretty good stories, though, as you can well imagine. Mr. Rivers gave me a victory present’that’s what he called it’when I sold that Passat, and said “Good job, Bobby! Keep it up!” which made me feel pretty good. It was a nice silver key chain with the REA logo on it. I don’t use it, because I’d just scratch it up, but it looks real nice. That’s one of the things I like about Mr. Rivers. He never treats you like you’re his employee, but instead like we’re all part of the Rivers family. That’s what he says, even. “You’re part of our family now.” Just like any family, there were family politics. The sales team consisted of a team of eight, including five guys that collectively had been selling automobiles since Ford was playing with Tinker toys. We called them the Poker Gang, because they played poker every Tuesday night and came in on Wednesday mornings looking grey and smelling like sausage and cigars. The other three of us just sort of orbited around their little group, which was fine with us. We all got along pretty well, for the most part. Mr. Rivers is partially retired and mostly only comes in on Fridays to sign our paychecks, so his son Carleton Rivers The Second walks around, acting like he’s the boss. In my opinion, he’s not my boss until a ‘II’ appears in the name on the dotted line of my paycheck. Carleton The Second never says that we’re part of his family. Or at least he doesn’t say that to me. I think because I accidentally called him Junior during my first week. I had heard a bunch of the guys in the garage call him Chuck Junior and assumed that was what he preferred until everyone heard me call him that and started laughing behind coughs. Carleton The Second pretended not to notice me for a long time. But then a few days after I sold the Passat and got my victory present, Carleton The Second strode toward me across the lot, looking all the world like a bull going for a red flag. “Bobby? Hi, can I talk with you for a minute?” he said, like he was my boss or something. “Sure can! For as many minutes as you want!” I grinned a little but Carleton the Second didn’t smile back, so then I stopped. “I saw that you sold the 97 Passat to Rick Davis the other day. How did that go?” I broke out in a big smile. “Oh, it went great! It was a graduation present for his daughter and I think she’s going to like it.” He looked up at me from under a peaked eyebrow, sort of sideways. “Did you happen to see the Lexus he drove up in?” I nodded warily, starting to feel like this was a test. “Well, I was watching that sale and I noticed you took him right over to the older imports.” “He said he wanted a used car, something that was young feeling for his daughter but also safe and moderately priced. And that wasn’t brown.” “Ok, ok, but you walked him right by a Lincoln LS and the Saab 9S. Here’s the thing, Bobby, Rick Davis is one of the wealthiest men in town. There’s no reason on earth that he should have walked off this lot with anything less than a 20K sale.” I wanted to say something about how Mr. Davis liked to be called Rich and not Rick because it was bugging me the way that Carleton The Second was acting like he was Mr. Davis’s best drinking buddy. Instead I finally ventured “But he specifically said he wanted something moderately priced for his daughter. And he was real happy, too!” “Yeah, I’ll bet he was… you talked him into saving ten grand. Here’s the thing… consider the person, consider the clues that they give you. He drove onto the lot in a Lexus. He was wearing an expensive watch. That means you can push to a higher end, and that means a bigger commission for you. I know this was your first sale, so it’s no big deal… it’s just something to think about in the future, ok?” I was about to say something about how it wasn’t right to force someone to spend more than they want to spend just because they make more money, but Carleton The Second just grinned an automatic deal closer grin and then walked with long strides back across the lot as though he had just given me the best gift ever. After that, he always acted real helpful. Constructive criticism, I think he called it one time in a sales team meeting. Carleton The Second always liked to use those kinds of words, like “goal building” and “building our business,” which was dumb because he was very fond of reminding us how it was his business and not ours. It’s not that I didn’t pull my weight on the lot. I landed potential buyers, but lots of times, I would come in for my afternoon shift and there I’d see the nice couple with the baby that I had talked to the day before and had practically test drove every car on the lot. But there they were talking to Ira Stone, one of the Poker Gang. Then once I talked to a real nice young guy who was looking to buy his first Beemer. After I sold him a nice silver 2002 524, Carleton The Second pulled me aside again and told me that I had just snaked Ira on the deal and that it was a low down trick and he won’t put up with such things in his establishment. So he gave the commission to Ira and there Ira sat, with his own commissions and also a bunch of my commissions and there I sat, barely making my draw. I didn’t say anything to him about it though. Just got more careful about reminding the unsures that they should come back and talk to me, Bobby Gershack. It was the week before Thanksgiving, a blustery Friday that couldn’t decide if it wanted to snow or not. Car salesmen hate snow days because it means that each and every speck of snow needs to be cleared off the cars. Snow on the cars is customer repellent. I suppose they didn’t want to be reminded that they were freezing their tuckus’s off while car shopping, but to the car world, it means that the sales staff would be outside with chapped wrists and wet gloves, knocking snow off of everything and then sweeping the snow off the blacktop so the customers wouldn’t have to tromp through a drift to check out the latest Jaguar. Mr. Rivers and Carleton the Second were off at a convention in Las Vegas, enjoying the fine desert sun. Mr. Rivers allowed the employees with the most seniority to take turns being in charge, which meant that the Poker group had a rotating turn at the helm. It was Ira’s turn this time. Most of the sales staff were huddled under the overhang in front of the showroom, speculating whether it would snow or not and if it would snow before the end of the day, or overnight, which meant that Saturday’s morning crew would be out there, soft brushes in hand. I was one of the Saturday early guys, so you can pretty much believe that I was sitting there, wishing the guys who had the afternoon shift would stop their cackling. Cheri, the only woman employed by REA who wasn’t a receptionist, took a long drag of her Virginia Slim and sent me a sympathetic look. I rolled my eyes back at her and she smiled back. I liked Cheri, not just because she laughed through her role as the butt of the majority of the Poker Gang’s jokes, but also because she taught me about how the hardest part of selling cars wasn’t the selling cars part but other things. Things like Carleton the Second. Like Ira. ‘Would you look at that?’ one of the Poker Gang guffawed. ‘Look at da wittle girl! She’s my granddaughter’s age!’ I squinted out across the rooftops and spotted a girl purposefully weaving her way between the cars. ‘Granddaughter!’ laughed his buddy. ‘I’d say Great Granddaughter, jackass. But I’ll bet that she’d pass for my niece!’ A wave of laughter erupted at this, another of their Poker jokes, I suspect. Ira straightened up his tie and pulled his hands out of his gloves. ‘Well, we’ll see if maybe she wants to sit on my knee.’ He raised and eyebrow at his cronies and then laughed at his own joke until his face turned a little red and some sputum hit the pavement and blended with the salt crystals that someone had spread in case it snowed. ‘Bobby’s turn,’ Cheri spoke up nonchalantly from behind the pack. They stopped and looked at her quietly. ‘It’s Bobby’s turn.’ She sounded for all the world like a preschool teacher correcting a rambunctious group on the playground. Ira regarded me and then shrugged. ‘Go on, boy! Ain’t going to sell nothing to her anyway!’ I slipped my hands out of my gloves and into my pockets so they’d be warm but not sweaty when I shook her hand. I found her standing next to a silver 2000 Mercedes E55, one of the more expensive cars on the lot. It was a lease return that Carleton The Second had picked up from an auction in Florida. Half the sales team was certain it was never going to sell in Iowa. ‘Hiya there!’ I said to her back as she peered into the car windows. Her white fleece hat had ears, like a kitty cat. She jumped backwards, her backpack purse sliding off her shoulder, and looked up at me. She was beautiful, the sort of sad delicate beauty of girls who spend too much time in libraries, breathing dust and not getting enough sun. She had blonde hair the color of corn silk, tucked neatly behind her ears, in which sat earrings that seemed too big to be real diamonds. The way her clothes were put together, I guessed that the earrings were probably real. But it was her eyes that made me stop short. The color reminded me of a bowl that my Aunt Trudy got my grandmother from England, that was all light blue with white raised plants and people on it, but it was more than that. Once I remember hearing Diego talk about the water off Puerto Rico and how just staring out at the ocean would hypnotize him and make him excited to live and at the same time feel like sinking down into it until he hit the sandy bottom. And that’s the way I felt right then, as though I could have stood there looking into her eyes forever. ‘Hi!’ She gave me an immediate unguarded smile. ‘I’m Bobby.’ ‘I’m Katie.’ ‘Hi Katie,’ I said automatically. ‘Hi Bobby.’ She watched me with those enormous blue eyes. We both stood there for a moment. I rocked on my heels and then remembered that the salesman was supposed to be in charge. ‘So, can I help you find anything?’ ‘Um’ well, I like this.’ Her face cast downward and was reflected in the tinted glass of the Benz. &AAkA7wC,AL0-Nice car. You have excellent taste.’ The corners of her mouth curled a little. ‘Actually, it’s not my taste really. My grandmother’ my grandmother used to have one very similar to this one.’ ‘Grandma had good taste then.’ ‘Well I loved it too,’ she added quickly. ‘She used to pick me up from school on Fridays and drive me home with the sunroof open. And I’d usually be so tired that I’d crash out in the backseat and have these incredible dreams. And then the car would pull up to a stop at the gate, it would wake me up.’ Her gaze drifted to the pinpoint where the road met the horizon beyond the cornfields, and in that moment, there was something there on her face, something frail and beautiful and ghostly hiding there, just beyond my reach. Her lips parted. Then she sighed, squinted and shrugged everything off. My hand wanted to touch her, wanted to light upon shoulder, maybe then graze up to her cheek and let my thumb brush away anything that might have fallen, but then I thought better of it and just stuck my hand in my pocket. She cleared her throat. ‘So, yeah, my father says that he’ll buy me whatever car I want. So, um–this one is nice.’ She allowed her face fall blank, her voice was completely dead. ‘Ok, yeah!’ I exclaimed, a little too loudly. ‘Would you like to take it for a test?’ She looked up at me and then smiled a perfect smile that reminded me of school pictures, her mouth moving but her eyes staying the same. ‘Perfect!’ ‘Ok, let me get the keys to open the box and then you can take her out.’ I spun on my heels and trotted back to the sales area, knowing that by rights, I should be going on the test drive with her. We’re supposed to go on test drives with anyone under thirty and any customer who comes in by themselves, but for some reason, I felt like I had to show her that I trusted her with this or she’d walk off the lot and I’d never see her again. ‘Perfect,’ I heard her say softly to no one. Two and a half hours later, Katie and the Benz hadn’t yet come back. Most test drives last about twenty minutes. It was four o’clock and the lot was about to close. Ira was furious. ‘What do you mean, you let her take the car! Just take it? You didn’t drive along with her!? You didn’t even get a copy of her driver’s license! You don’t even know her last name!’ Ira spat a bit on my REA jacket. While he had every reason to be angry, he really shouldn’t have been mad about the copy of the license. We were a small town dealership and very rarely took a photocopy of a driver’s license. Mr. Rivers thought it seemed unfriendly, but Ira was just looking for more things to scream, so I didn’t bring that up, just let him holler. ‘By rights we should call the police! Doesn’t matter, Junior’s going to be back from Vegas tomorrow. You’d better hope that’s a drive and ditch, boy-o! Because the only way you’re going to save your job is if that car ends up back here without a scratch.’ Ira stormed out the glass double doors of the show floor towards his ivory Town Car. ‘Don’t worry about it, Bobby. It happens to all of us,’ Cheri said softly behind me. ‘Has it happened to you?’ I asked her. ‘Well’ no.’ I heard her take a breath as though to say something else and then let it escape slowly. ‘Yeah’ that’s what I thought.’ ‘Listen, Bobby, Ira’s right. It’s probably a drive and ditch. It’s that time of year, you know, the college kids up at the University are pledging fraternities and sororities, that kind of thing. You know why there are no church bells in the entire county? Because every fall they get thrown over a bridge into the Iowa River. It’s a prank. Either that or the car might turn up in the lot sometime in the middle of the night. You know, like they wait for everyone to leave and then return it. Big joke, har har, it’s all just so they have something to tell their grandchildren. You’ll see, sweetie. It will be ok.’ ‘Carleton the Second is going to shit a bird. Absolutely shit a bird.’ I didn’t like to swear. My mom always told me that it was a sign of poor upbringing, but this seemed like a good time to do it and it made me feel an ounce better. ‘It will be ok,’ she repeated, but I don’t think even she believed it. I left the lot without saying anything. A slow light snow was falling with grey battleship clouds threatening more to come. The back of my throat burnt like old metal and rust and battery acid and yet sickeningly sweet like antifreeze. I took the long way home, between fields of finished sunflowers and walls of dried corn stalks. A stolen car! And it was my fault. There would be police in the morning. I was in trouble, no bones about it. I thought about my time at Andersen Chevrolet, about the parts department, about Gus saying that he and me, we were car people and not people people. And that’s the thing about cars… once you understood them, you knew what made them run and what things made them stop running. People, you just never could trust what you knew about them, not like cars. I thought about the night as it stretched out ahead of me. I’d get home, heat up a Hungry Man dinner, peel back the foil to expose the tater tots, and sit with a Miller High Life watching television. And I thought about how they’d probably make me clean the snow off the cars in the morning before they fired me. And that’s when I saw the Benz. The shape was unmistakable, a stylized lump of platinum having no rightful business among the yellow stalks of corn. And when I got close, I could see the windows all down. At first I worried that they were busted out, but that just seemed silly, thinking about the girl smashing out the windows. Unless she had been a decoy and had given the car to someone else. A boyfriend maybe. And I could see my dealer plate on the back with my neat “Bobby” written in Sharpee above the number. It just about broke my heart. I parked my truck next to the car. If I was lucky, it was a drive and ditch, like Ira had said, and the keys would be somewhere nearby. In fact, if I was real lucky, I could walk the cornfield and find them glittering within the tractor ruts before nightfall. Maybe she hadn’t thrown them too far. I had decided that she had been alone. It was a dare, maybe for a sorority. There couldn’t be a boyfriend. No. Not Katie. I hopped out of the truck, and groaned when I saw that the sunroof was open too. I wondered how long everything had been open. Had the snow fallen into a cold or a warm car? If the leather was ruined, it was just as bad as a stolen car as far as Carleton the Second was concerned. I stuck my head in the window and exhaled when I saw the keys dangling from the ignition like a lady’s earrings. On the front seat, her white kitty cat hat and backpack purse, open. And then a medicine bottle and a can of diet soda and a puff of wadded Kleenex. And that’s when I noticed that Katie was in the backseat. She was laying there, hands folded under her cheek, looking for all the world like a doll. I hung half in and out of the window, my fingers grasping the door, and held my breath, waiting for her chest to rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall, because she must have been only napping there on those fine leather seats, had to have been only napping. And when my lungs caught on fire, I took another gasp and held my breath again, counting to sixty in my head until my ears pounded. Then I exhaled. But she never stirred. No tiny sighs, no soft exhales, no goose bumps making the tiny blonde hairs of her arm stand up. Nothing. Snowflakes dusted her cheeks like tiny freckles and all I could think was that they should have been melted but they weren’t. It should have melted. My own arms were covered with pin prickles of ice water. She wasn’t napping. Maybe it had started out that way, but it wasn’t a nap any more. Somewhere in the distance, a train whistled in the thin light. I reached in through the window and opened the door softly, like I was worried about waking her up. A quick turn of the keys and the good old German engine came to life with a sotto voce growl. I clicked the car into reverse and pulled out slowly, feeling the stalks of corn brush against the undercarriage. I put it into drive and eased off the gravel onto the long grey ribbon of road before us. I thought about Katie. I thought about how sad she must have been when she walked onto the lot. I thought about how I had wanted to grab her right then, fold my arms around her and hold her while seven car salesmen watched from forty feet away. I thought about how the sunflower field looked like a choir of children, bowing their faces as I drove Katie past them. The railroad tracks ran parallel to the highway out of town. The whistle blasted a low dirge into the crisp air and my face froze in the wind from the open sunroof and we were nose and nose with the engine of the train, racing along at 45, 50, 55 and climbing. The late day sun was sinking down behind the skeletal black trees, turning all of the frost into magic and the train was blowing, clearing our path and I was thinking the Benz and me and Katie, we could just drive like this into forever.