The Last Studebaker. Robin Hemley
that they'd go some other night, but Meg didn't say a thing. Lois realized that even her youngest daughter didn't believe her.
Lois watched the three of them in her rearview mirror. Both Gail and Meg went into the backseat. Lois tried to make out the features of the woman at the wheel of the car, but the headlights made it impossible.
The car pulled away and Lois just sat there for a while with her car still in neutral. She put the car in gear. Maybe she'd go to Peru on her own, she thought. As she turned around in the drive, she caught something in her headlights, and braked. One of Willy's dogs, a three-legged mutt, blocked her car. Willy had named all his dogs after drivers on the NASCAR circuit. His other dogs were named Rusty Wallace and Bill Elliot. Dale Earnhardt, the three-legged one, tottered and growled softly. Lois toyed with the idea of running Dale down, but instead she tossed Old Ken out the window and watched the mean little dog hobble after it.
THREE
If Henry Martin were a pirate as his landlord claimed, then he held his position in life reluctantly, if not unconsciously. He didn't mean to take things that belonged to others. He didn't mean to break things all the time. He didn't mean to be so forgetful. But if he'd learned one thing over the last two years, it was this: accidents happen. Mysteries abound. Civilizations collapse and disappear. Great dynasties wither away. Fortunes turn to dust. People vanish, explode, self-immolate, are run through, drowned, crushed, minced, diced, or swallowed whole.
A lot of accidents could kill you, and then your only luck was that, generally, only one accident killed you at a time. If you died in a heap of metal and glass on some back road, for instance, that exempted you from being bitten by the deadly coral snake.
Sid Junkins, on the other hand, was a determinist, a logical, decent man with a plan, master of his destiny, who fervently believed a fellow could rise buoyantly from the seventh ring of hell if he found a hobby or girlfriend or, in Sid's case, ran a vitamin franchise.
Henry listened to the Sid Junkins Doctrine respectfully, with the same patient smile he used on Jehovah's Witnesses and Electrolux salesmen.
Sid, silver-haired and bearded, sat cross-legged on the scratchy indoor/outdoor carpet he'd installed in Henry's attic room about 5,000 years ago. Sid's house, a sprawling turn-of-the-century thing on Notre Dame Avenue, had seven bedrooms, four chimneys, and massive limestone pillars. How Junkins afforded the place, Henry could never figure out. One thing was sure: he hadn't made the money with vitamin sales.
As he talked, Sid rolled a joint. “What are you doing here, Henry?” he said. “What are your plans? For the future, I mean.”
“For the future?” Henry said, considering. “I think I'm going to Macri's to get some coffee.”
“For a hundred dollars I could set you up with your own distributorship,” Sid said. “You could be a vitamin mogul like me. Think about it.”
“I don't want to sell vitamins,” Henry said.
Henry looked like a starving POW with his scraggly beard and hollow face. Carla had once told him he had the eyes of a fanatic. Now he seemed more like a frostbite victim whose extremities had chilled pound by pound, leaving only his eyes still glowing.
The rest of him seemed to be shrinking to nothing. In six months, he had lost twenty-five pounds, his hair had thinned, his build had turned wispy, and his ribs had begun to show.
“Here, you want some?” Sid said, handing the joint up to Henry, who sat nearly nude on his bed. He wore only a pair of B. V. D.'s with a striped elastic band that had lost most of its spring over the years. The underwear had a couple of holes in the rear and a faint pee stain in front.
At least he could walk and talk. Eighteen months ago, he'd been comatose, and when he awoke, delirious. For two weeks he'd believed a guy nicknamed Hollywood lived beneath his pillow. He'd known someone named Hollywood ten years earlier, as a freshman in college. Hollywood hadn't even been important to him. The guy had stayed up most nights playing five-card stud and smoking grass until he flunked out. So why, when Henry awoke from a coma in the hospital, did he imagine Hollywood skulking beneath his pillow, yelling out, “Read ’em and weep,” and “I cut my baby teeth on this game”? Why didn't he fixate on his mother or, more appropriately, Carla and Matthew? Delirium has its own rules. It had perhaps sent him Hollywood, the most shallow individual Henry had ever known, as punishment, to while away the creeping hospital hours.
Now, more than a year later, he'd been almost completely physically rehabilitated. Tiny scars from broken glass made a patchwork on his forehead and his right hand hung limp, without feeling. Not bad though. Considering.
“What am I doing?” Sid said, snatching the joint away. “You don't need any of that. Your mind's altered enough as is.” Sid took a drag and held his breath. His eyes grew small and he smiled faintly. Henry had always thought it strange that a man who sold vitamins for a living also sold pot on the side. Sid claimed this as his only indulgence, besides reggae music. Sid claimed indulgences the way most people take deductions on tax forms.
“I'd give you the boot if I had any sense,” said Sid. “But I don't. I'm too understanding. I can't even turn away Bible salesmen. If someone comes to me hungry, I feed them. That's the way I was raised, but there's a limit, even with me. You've got to stop filching other people's food.”
Henry understood. He didn't mean to take advantage of his housemates. He'd just forget to eat for a couple of days, then would go downstairs to raid the refrigerator. He thought the food he was taking was his own. He wouldn't have taken it otherwise.
Taking food wasn't the only problem between him and the others. One day, returning home on his bike around dusk he'd pedaled lazily through his neighborhood. The humidity of the day still clung in the air, but Henry enjoyed himself anyway, pedaling forward and backward, just trying to keep his balance and not making headway in any direction.
Henry aimed his bike for the path of a lawn sprinkler making a wide bell of water over the sidewalk. As he launched himself down the street, he heard a distant scream. He stopped and waited. Nothing. The air rasped with insects and the whirring of sprinklers. Still, he waited and heard it again, but this time closer.
A women dressed in a T-shirt and running shorts came sprinting around the corner of a large gray house, through the lawn and the path of the sprinkler. She looked like an evening jogger, only she shrieked as she ran. The woman looked familiar. She wore her hair in a poodle perm and had a wide face and squat body. She barreled right past him with a determined look, as though trying to run a personal best.
“Rhonda?” Henry said.
She stopped, jogging in place, turned around, and shrieked at him. Then she set off again.
Henry dropped his bike and took off after her, yelling, “Wait, what's wrong?”
Rhonda looked over her shoulder and kept screaming. She veered into the street and crossed to the other side. Henry followed.
She changed direction again, ran past Henry and up the front steps of the boarding house. Henry took the steps two at a time, but arrived too late. She slammed the door in his face and locked it. She continued to scream from behind the door, but then her screams turned into wails like an ambulance. The wails retreated down the hall and he heard another door slam. The basement. That's where her apartment was.
He went around the side of the house and'knelt by the window of the apartment he thought was hers. He put his face close to the glass and hooded his eyes with his hands while he peered in. Rhonda's face popped up like a balloon in front of him, their two faces separated only by a thin windowpane. Her mouth hung open and her hands shredded the air.
Someone tackled him. He felt he had tumbled into hell, that Rhonda had transformed herself into a demon whose screams would always echo in his head. His arms were pinned to the ground and he heard a voice say, “Hold him. Don't let him go.”
Two frat boys, who introduced themselves as Tod and Jimmy, held Henry until the police arrived. One of them sat on his chest, while the other paced the