What's The Worst That Could Happen?

47

When Stan Murch felt the need for temporary wheels, he liked to put on a red jacket and go stand in front of one of the better midtown hotels, preferably one with its own driveway past the entrance. It was usually no more than ten or fifteen minutes before some frazzled out-of-towner, vibrating like a whip antenna after his first experience driving in Manhattan traffic, would step out of his car and hand Stan the keys. One nice thing about this arrangement was that it wasn’t technically car theft, since the guy did give Stan the keys. Another nice thing was that such people were usually in very nice, clean, new, comfortable cars. And yet another nice thing was that the former owner of the car would also give Stan a dollar.

Thursday afternoon, the eighteenth of May, while thousands of miles to the west Andy Kelp was dressing John Dortmunder in the dog’s breakfast, Stan Murch drove away from the Kartel International Hotel on Broadway in the Fifties, at the wheel of a very nice cherry-red Cadillac Seville, and headed downtown to Ninth Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street, near the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where he was to meet Tiny Bulcher, the mountain shaped something like a man. There was a brief delay at that location, because Tiny was in the process of explaining to a panhandler why it had been rude to ask Tiny for money. “You didn’t earn this money,” Tiny was saying. “You see what I mean?”

The way Tiny was holding the panhandler made it impossible for the fellow to answer questions, but that was okay; Tiny’s questions were all rhetorical, anyway. “For instance,” he was saying, for instance, “the money I got in my jeans this minute, where do you suppose I got it? Huh? I’ll tell you where I got it. I stole it from some people uptown. It was hard work, and there was some risk in it, and I earned it. Did you earn it? Did you risk anything? Did you work hard?”

In fact, the panhandler at that moment was at some risk, and was working quite hard merely to breathe, for which Tiny wasn’t giving him credit. And now some taxis honked at Stan, which made Tiny look away from his life lesson. He saw Stan there in the cherry-red Cadillac, patiently waiting, ignoring all those cab horns. “Be right there,” Tiny called, and Stan waved a casual hand, meaning: take your time.

Tiny held the panhandler a little closer to give him some parting advice. “Get a job,” he said, “or get a gun. But don’t beg. It’s rude.”

Allowing the panhandler to collapse gratefully onto the sidewalk, Tiny stepped over him—displaying politeness—and walked around the cherry-red Caddy to insert himself into the passenger seat. “Quiet car you got.”

“It’s those cabs that are noisy,” Stan told him, and drove away from there and on down to the Holland Tunnel and through it to New Jersey, and then deeper into New Jersey to an avenue of auto dealers and similar enterprises, among which was Big Wheel Motor Home Sales. Stan drove on by Big Wheel an extra block, and then pulled over to stop at the curb. “See you,” he said.

“Stan,” Tiny said, “I want to thank you. This is a roomy car. I’m not used to roomy in a car. I remember one time I had to make a couple people ride on the roof, I got so cramped in the car.”

“How’d they like that?” Stan asked.

“I never asked them,” Tiny said. “Anyway, I appreciate you picking out this car, and I don’t even mind the color. Just so it’s roomy.”

“We’ll get roomier before we’re done,” Stan assured him, and got out of the Caddy to walk back to Big Wheel, where he got into a conversation with a salesman in which the salesman told some little lies and Stan told some great big lies, mostly about being a married construction worker off to different job sites all the time around the country, tired of renting little furnished houses here and there, deciding to get a motor home for himself and Earlene and the kids. So what’ve we got here?

“You’re gonna love the Interloper,” the salesman said.

So that was another lie. The Interloper was big, which was what Stan had asked for, but it was kind of tinny, and none of the individual rooms in the motor home were very big, and there was only one toilet. Stan and the salesman—who said his name was Jerry, which was probably true—took the Interloper for a spin, but it just didn’t satisfy.

Next they tried the Wide Open Spaces XJ. It was also big enough, and it had a good-size living room and two small bathrooms, so Stan took that one for a spin, too, with Jerry again on the front seat beside him and a cherry-red Cadillac again trailing along in the outside mirror.

But Stan didn’t like the way the XJ drove, big and boxy, like it would fall over any second, so back they went to the lot, where Stan rejected the Indian Brave because it wasn’t self-contained enough; you had less than an hour of electricity available in the motor home, before you’d have to find a trailer park somewhere and hook up.

Then they got to the Invidia. Unlike most motor homes, which are either chrome or tan, the Invidia was a pale green, like fresh spring grass. It had three bedrooms, two baths, a good-size living room, built-in furniture that folded away to make more space, plenty of septic capacity, and all the water storage and electric batteries you could possibly want.

Off for another test drive, and Stan got happier and happier. The Invidia held the road well enough in city traffic that he felt he could probably let it out pretty good on the highway, if need be, big though it was.

They drove here and there, back and forth, and then Stan said, “What’s that noise?”

“Noise?” Jerry looked startled. “What noise?”

“Something in the back, when we were stopped at that light. Lemme pull over here.”

Stan stopped at the curb as a cherry-red Cadillac drove slowly by, parking just ahead. Jerry got out of the curbside door, while Stan dropped the ignition key out the open driver-side window. Then Stan got out, and he and Jerry went around to the back, where Stan tugged on the license plate—being a dealer plate, it actually was loose, but didn’t really rattle—and tugged on the plastic housing for the spare wheel, and on the ladder going up to the roof, and finally said, “Well, I don’t know what it could have been.”

“Some other car, maybe,” Jerry suggested. “Stopped there at that light.”

“You could be right. Sorry about that.”

They went back around to get into the Invidia again, and Stan found the ignition key on the driver’s seat. When he palmed it, it was warm and waxy. He put it in the ignition, started the engine, and said, “Well, I don’t hear it any more.”

“Good,” Jerry said.

Stan drove back to the lot, and assured Jerry he didn’t have to see any more motor homes, he was pretty confident the Invidia was the one for him and his family, “though I’ll have to clear it with Earlene, you know how it is. I’ll bring her around on Monday.”

They shook hands before Stan left. “See you Monday,” Jerry said.

Well, no.