The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (51 page)

I happened to be in the neighborhood that morning and I heard part of his pitch: “Ever see a buggy like this? Take this little baby out on the highway and see what kinda courtesy you get! No teenager’s gonna try to fender-bender ya with this one! Depreciation? Why, hell! I know four members of the joint Chiefs of Staff and a C.I.A. my who drive these things regularly back and forth to the Pentagon. The styles don’t change, so it ain’t never obsolete—and you know how efficient a diesel engine is. The cannon? It’s the most effective turn signal you could ever use. The guy behind you has gotta be blind or three days dead not to notice it! Snow, ice, rain, muck, sleet, hail— why, hell, man!—this thing’ll go in any weather. Look at the way it’s built. What other car on the road has six and a half inches of bullet-proof armor? Visibility? You mean the slit there in front of where the driver sits? Why, that makes you keep your eye on the road. Nothin’ to detract you—no road signs, scenery, good-lookin’ broads in sports cars, or anything else. ‘Cause all you see is the road right smack dab in front of ya. Why, hell! If I could’ve latched onto ten of these during prohibition, I could’ve retired long ago!”

The buyer was a mild little mailman who had simply dropped by the lot to deliver two circulars and a letter from Harvey’s aunt. He drove off in the General Sherman tank, looking a little benumbed by the whole thing—and Harvey Hennicutt watched him pull out and stood at rigid attention, saluting, as the thing rumbled by.

Harvey wasn’t an innately dishonest man. He didn’t lie because he was some kind of devious bastard. It was just that his entire frame of reference was “the deal.” He had to buy, sell, and trade the way most people find it necessary to breathe. It was not the extra sixty-five bucks he ootzed out of a hapless customer but simply the principle of backing someone up against a wall and then slowly bending his opponent’s will until it dissolved. In the twenty-odd years I knew Harvey, I never heard him tell a stupid lie. They were all of them bright, well-conceived, and rather pure, as lies go. All of which leads to the story that he told me when last I saw him.

Now, normally most of Harvey’s stories can be overlooked—but not this one. The Harvey Hennicutt who buttonholed me out in front of his lot on that gray, sullen November day was a different man, and a different storyteller. Even the loud, garish sport coat that was his uniform and that screeched at you with its off-violet checks, the flamboyant hand-painted tie, the Stetson sitting on the back of his head could not disguise the grim, set, almost frightened look on Harvey’s face. And this was his story:

It was in September—a beautiful Indian summer late afternoon. A golden sun sparkled through the somewhat faded bunting that surrounded Harvey’s used-car emporium. It highlighted one particular banner that read: “Harvey Hennicutt’s Used Motors—Not a Dud in the Lot.” And there stood the cars—or rather, “lay” the cars. Because Harvey’s stock in trade was, and always had been, the antique lemon barely able to wheeze on and off his lot. Harvey was leaning against a car, cleaning his nails and watching a young couple examining a 1928 Buick at the far end of the lot. You had to see Harvey’s face to believe it on an occasion like this. He was a General of the Armies deciding the strategy of the attack. He was the psychiatrist analyzing the patient. Now he put on his most infectious smile—the one he saved up for the initial assault, and he carried it with him over to the antique Buick.

The young man looked up somewhat diffidently and nervously.

“We were just looking—”

“We want you to!” Harvey exclaimed. “We certainly want you to. Nobody rushes you around here. Nossir, young man, around here you can exhale, pause, check and re-check, think, peruse, contemplate, thumb over, wade through, and dip into.” He made an expansive gesture at the line of cars. “Be my guest, folks.”

The young man and woman blinked as the verbal wave hit them and bowled them over.

“We were...” the young man began hesitantly. “We were thinking of...you know...a nice four-door. Something under five hundred dollars and as late a model as we could go.”

Harvey closed his eyes, shook his head with a pained, desperate expression on his face. “You shock me, do you know that?” He then looked toward the girl. “Did you know that your husband shocked me just then?”

The girl’s mouth formed an O, and then plopped closed. Harvey tapped the fender of the old car.

“Do you know why you shocked me?” he asked. “Do you? I’ll tell you why you shocked me. Because you have succumbed to the propaganda of every cement-headed clod up and down this street. I said
propaganda!
” He pounded on the car and left a dent which he hurriedly covered-up with his elbow “They tell ya to go with the late models. Don’t they? They do, don’t they?”

Captivated, the young man and woman nodded in unison.

“You know
why
they tell ya to go with the late models?” Harvey continued. “Do you think they do that because they’re honest, law abiding, rigidly moral church-goers?” He shook his head and made a face like a minister suddenly observing a crap game in one of the pews. “Let me tell ya something, young man.” He waggled a finger in the young man’s face. “They push late models because that’s where the profit margin is! They’ll try to cram the post-fifty-fours down your gullet because they’d rather make a buck than a friend! They’d rather make a profit than a relationship!”

Again he pounded on the fender, forgetting himself—and this time there was the screech of metal as the fender separated from the body of the car. Harvey hid this disaster by deliberately standing in front of it.

“They would rather fill their wallets with cash, than their hearts with the fellowship of men to men,” Harvey continued.

The young man gulped and swallowed. “Well, all we’re looking for is good transportation, and we figured that the newer the car—”

Harvey threw up his hands, interrupting him. “Now, that’s where you’re wrong! That is precisely where you have gone amiss. That is the juncture where you have headed, off into a blind alley. You don’t want a new car. You don’t want one of these rink-dinks slapped together on an assembly line, covered with chintzy chrome, fin tails, idiotic names, and no more workmanship than you can stick into a thimble! I’ll tell ya what you’re lookin’ for.” Again he pointed a waggling finger into the young man’s face. “What you’re lookin’ for is the craftsmanship that comes with age! The dependability that comes with a proven performance! The dignity of traditional transportation.”

He drew back as if unveiling the Hope diamond, and pointed to the car behind him. “This is what you’re lookin’ for. This is a 1938 four-door Chevy—and this will get ya where ya want to go and get ya back.”

Harvey’s voice went on and on. The pitch took another four or five minutes. And while the whole thing sounded spontaneous it was all a practiced routine. He broke down his assault into three phases. First was the slam bang, “back-’em-up-against-a-wall” for the initial contact. The second phase was the one he entered into now—the quiet, rather beneficent, patient phase. Later came part three, the wrap-up. Right now, he smiled beatifically at the two young people, winked at the girl as if to say, “I’ve got a few little ones like you at home myself—and then, in a voice much gentler, pointed to the Chevy.

“Look. I don’t want to rush you kids. Rushing isn’t my business. Satisfaction happens to be my business. And I tell ya what ya do. Spend some time with that automobile. Look it over. Sit in it. Get the feel of it. Relish the luxury of it. Check and see how they built cars when cars were really built. Go ahead, my friend,” he continued, leading the young man over to the front door—and then hurriedly reaching out to grab the wife. “Sit in it. Climb right in there and sit to your heart’s content. What you really need is some candlelight and a good bottle of wine. Because this baby right here has dignity!”

Harvey heard the sound of a car pulling into the lot at the far end. He slammed the door on the young couple, raising a cloud of dust and an agonized groan of protesting metal, smiled at his victims through the cloudy glass, and then hurried over to the north end of ~ the lot where other commerce appeared to be waiting for him.

The “commerce” in this case was a model A Ford, driven by a silvery-haired old man with a face like Santa Claus and happy, guileless eyes. Harvey had a thing about happy, guileless eyes, because it usually meant a quick, and relatively painless, transaction. He walked up within a few feet of the model A. It chugged, whinnied, backfired twice, and finally came to an uneasy stop. The old man got out and smiled at Harvey.

“How do you do?”

Harvey ran a tongue around the inside of his mouth. “That depends, grandpa. If you’re here to park it—I’ll charge you nominal rates. If you’re here to sell it—you’ve gotta give me three and a half minutes to have my little laugh.” With this, he stepped back and surveyed the car, tilting his head in several different directions, walking around several times with an occasional look at the old man. Finally he stopped, heaved a deep sigh, put his hands behind his back, and closed his eyes for a moment.

“Well?” the old man asked quietly.

“I might give ya fifteen bucks. A junkyard’ll give ya twelve, and the Smithsonian might beat us both by a buck or two.”

The old man merely smiled a gentle smile. “It’s a wonderful old car and they made them better in the old days, I think...”

Harvey’s eyes rolled wildly, and he shook his head as if struggling for an almost superhuman patience. “Grandfather dear,” he said, holding out his hands in a gesture of resignation, “that is the old rhubarb. The saw. The turkey that everybody and his brother tries to peddle on the open market.” Then, mimicking fiercely: “‘Cars were built better in the old days.’ That, sir, is a fabrication beyond belief! Why, ten years ago they didn’t know how to build cars. It’s the new stuff that sells. It’s the new stuff that runs. It’s the new stuff that shows the genius of mind, muscle, and the assembly line!”

He very condescendingly, and with a kind of super-secretive air, leaned toward the old man. “I’ll tell ya what I’ll do—because I love your face.” He made a motion encompassing the man’s whole figure. “Because you remind me of my own grandfather, rest his soul. A man of dignity right down through his twilight years till the day he died saving a boatload of capsized people on the East River!” His eyes went down reverently for a moment, and then up again very quickly.

“I’ll give ya twenty-five for it. I’ll probably have to dismantle it and sell it wheel by wheel, bolt by bolt, to whatever itinerant junk man comes around. But twenty-five I’ll give ya!”

“Twenty-five dollars?” The old man looked at the car with nostalgia. “I...I kind of need the money.” He turned to Harvey. “You couldn’t make it thirty?” Harvey stuck a cold cigar between his teeth and looked away. “You try me, old friend,” he said in a grim voice. “You try me right down to the bare nerve of my most inveterate patience!”

The old man kept looking at Harvey “Does that mean—” he tried to interject.

Harvey smiled down at him with the same assaulted patience. “That means that twenty-five is going, going, going... twenty-five is gone!” With a single motion, his wallet was out of his hip pocket, and from a cash-packed interior, he removed three bills and handed them to the old man. He turned him around and pointed toward the shack in the center of the lot.

“You walk into that little office there,” he ordered, ‘2nd bring your car registration papers with you.” He looked toward the model A. “Did I say ‘car’? I meant...”He wiggled his fingers as though searching for a word. “That vehicle! I’ll stretch a point as far as the next man! But there are limits, my charming old friend, there are definitely limits.” With this, he turned abruptly and walked away back to the young couple still seated in the 1938 Chevy.

He peered at them through the window, wiggled his fingers, smiled, winked, ran a tongue over his teeth, and then looked skyward with suppressed impatience. In the process, he propped a foot on the rear bumper of the car and it immediately clattered to the ground. Harvey lifted it back into place, secured it with a kick, and then turned to walk over to the shack.

When he went inside, the old man had just finished with the registration papers. He smiled at Harvey. “Signed, sealed, and delivered, Mr...” He looked out of the window toward the giant banner. “Mr. Hennicutt. Here are the keys.” He placed a set of ignition keys on the desk, and stared at them for a reflective moment. Then he looked at Harvey with a small, apologetic smile. “There is one other item that I ought to mention to you about the car.”

Harvey was examining the registration papers and barely looked up. “Oh—do, do,” he said.