Jim Gish
Harvey Dollar’s Used Cars
Harvey Dollar tried to sell Miss Lucille one of them cut rate cars he has got at Dollar Used cars. He smiled like a possum eating shit and said, “Sure, it is ten years old, but the odometer says forty–two thousand miles, right on the money.”
For a long time now, Miss Lucille had been nursing her ’78 Pinto’s death rattle wheeze, with which it practically begged to be shot and put out of its misery. So Miss Lucille asked Ethel May Kurtz where she could get a good, cheap car, and Ethel May, who is in her Missionary Society group and a trusted confidante, said she would try Harvey Dollar because she’d sent several friends in his direction, and they were all satisfied.
Now, what Ethel May did not tell Miss Lucille was that Harvey was married to her ugly niece, Eunice. What Ethel knows for the sure and righteous truth is that the niece wants to leave Harvey, who is a tightwad and a sleazeball, and unless Harvey sells some cars, Eunice will bring her obnoxious four-year-old son, Melvin, back to Ethel’s house to “stay a day or two” which might turn into six months or a year, at which point Ethel might just catch the Greyhound to Louisville and get her old job back at the Woolworth’s grill in order to escape her relatives and their tendency to suck a person dry down to the moldy core. So what Miss Lucille is getting is a slanted representation of Mr. Harvey Dollar, which she will find out soon enough, as will she rue the day she ever considered Ethel a friend of virtue and veracity.
Miss Lucille dickers in that way she knows to dicker on the price of the ‘96 Taurus saying, “I want you to know I ain’t got any money.”
And Harvey smiles with those two gold caps he’s so proud of and says, “Yes, but Personal Finance has got some money right over there across from the courthouse, and, anyways, everybody gets a loan for a car. It is the American way.”
So finally, Miss Lucille lets herself be persuaded over to Personal Finance where Tiny Kenny Roll gives her thirty pages to sign, which, for all she knows, says that she is pledging to sell her house and kill her cats and offer them to pagan gods, but she has put her trust in Ethel and Ethel believes in Harvey Dollar and Harvey trusts Kenny, although neither of them looks very prosperous or trustworthy. It is like a miracle when, half an hour later, Harvey gives Miss Lucille the keys to the Taurus.
Harvey Dollar is smiling and crossing his fingers, praying fiercely that the car will actually start and the transmission will not fall out. Kenny Roll is standing over in his office door smiling as he imagines taking the sales document home to his girlfriend, Thonda Lee, to show her that he is on his way to his first million and maybe she will let him make love to her again like she did two months before.
Miss Lucille is smiling because now she has got a car which does not have rusty quarter panels and will no longer be the ugliest car in the parking lot at the Pentecostal church where vehicle status determines who gets to sit in the front of the choir.
Miss Lucille starts the car and turns on the gospel station where Elvis is singing “How Great Thou Art.” She drives around the town square twice and stops at every stop light long enough to wave at her friends. And she is aware of how they wave in that tentative manner and then bend to whisper to each other, “I think Lucille has stolen a car,” although Lucille imagines they’re saying, “Look! Lucille has gotten herself a fine automobile.”
The trouble starts the following morning. Miss Lucille goes out to her car, meaning to go the Piggly Wiggly and get some of that cut rate bacon they mark down on Thursdays because the expiration date says it will be rancid within twenty four hours.
“You just put it in the freezer,” she announces to Tollie Dowler, the man who runs the meat counter, “and when you thaw it out, it tastes just as good as new.”
Tollie nods in an agreeable way because it is always easier to agree with Miss Lucille. If a person disagrees with her, she gets red in the face and sputters made up scripture until one no longer cared about the initial question.
Anyway, Miss Lucille slides into her new car and turns the key, taking a deep whiff of the interior which has a new smell to it. What she gets in return is a moaning noise and then a hissing sound. Neither of these, she notices, is a starting sound, the kind one promptly expects from a new car the second day one drives it. Miss Lucille turns the key three times and gets the same noises. At which point, she gets out of the car and closes the door and goes into her kitchen where she sits down for five minutes and reads the Bible.
She has just finished the verse that says, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” and was wondering if that meant it would be all right for her to go next door and throttle Stacy Delrepp, who sometimes sunbathed nude in her back yard and once called Miss Lucille a “silly old bitch” right to her face. But her attention returns quickly to the matter at hand, which is getting her car started and going to the Piggly Wiggly.
Miss Lucille gets her sweater on a second time, feeling like the car has had time to cleanse itself of whatever evil spirits were circulating.
She crawls into the car, turns the key, and right on cue, the car starts up and runs as sweet as a morning song. Miss Lucille nods her head emphatically as though to say, “I may be an old woman, but I know what I know.”
It is only two blocks later that the car wheezes once more, spits out a huge cloud of dark smoke and stops dead in the middle of an intersection.
Miss Lucille tries to start the car three times. Then she closes her eyes and says a little prayer that nearly always works in bad situations.
“Dear God, help me in my hour of need. I am sorry that I ever had bad thoughts about Darl Farkinson when I hoped he would die from a lightning strike and then it happened a month later. Keep me ever in Thy mercy, Amen.”
She opens her eyes as the horns of other cars around her begin squawking. She closes her eyes one more time and says, “Make this damn car start.” Then she turns the key and hears a high whining noise that sounds like her car is pretty much finished with trying to do what it is supposed to do.
Miss Lucille exits the car and walks off into the Piggly Wiggly parking lot, leaving the car sitting there and muttering to herself that Harvey Dollar is an agent of the devil, and Ethel, who recommended him, is now an ex-friend who can damn well find herself a new ride to the Frisch’s in Hopkinsville for the Friday Fish Special.
In the Piggly Wiggly, Miss Lucille goes straight to the office and asks Lazy Ass Leonard if she can use the phone. His lips get that bee stung look that he has copied from his idol, Elton John, when Miss Lucille reaches past him and grabs the phone and starts to dial Triple AAA.
“If that is long distance, you will paying for it, Missy,” Leonard says.
“Eat shit, Leonard,” Miss Lucille tells him, completely forgetting about her seventy-two years in the Baptist church and her sainted mother’s admonition against profanity.
“I thought you was saved,” Leonard says dramatically, covering his mouth like an ingénue from a 40’s movie who has been told her slip is showing.
“I was saved until about ten minutes ago, but now I am ready to kick some ass over this damn car I bought from Harvey Dollar. I think God will understand, and if he don’t, I will just go straight to hell and burn for a million years. I don’t give a damn.”
Missus Cloyd Wilson, the Baptist piano player, overhears this standing in the green bean aisle ten feet away, and she promptly swoons, clipping her head on the edge of an aluminum shelf.
Triple AAA is busy, and Harvey Dollar does not answer his phone. Miss Lucille steps over Missus Cloyd, speaking down to her silent form in rapid, clipped syllables, “Sorry, you had to hear that Missus Cloyd. Life is full of sharp surprises.”
Out on the street, Hoke Lord and Dickie Varbel, who have been smoking dope all morning, decide that someone needs to move the car out of the intersection. So they abandon Hoke’s ’87 Ford Ranger and walk to where the offending car is clogging up morning traffic. The Clugg traffic cop, Buster John Holloway, is standing there writing a ticket when Hoke nods to him and reaches in to pull the gear shift into neutral. By the time Buster John thinks to yell for them to stop, Dickie and Hoke have thrown their weight behind the car and started it across the intersection and toward the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly. Dickie is trying to steer and push at the same time, but when the front wheel hits a man hole cover, the steering wheel jerks out of Dickie’s hand thus detouring Dickie and the Taurus and Hoke down Water Street.
By now the Taurus is picking up speed down the grade. Buster John is chasing after the boys to tell them they cannot move a car when he is giving it a ticket. Dickie keeps digging in his heels and yelling, “Whoa! Whoa!” but the Taurus is not a mule and does not understand commands, although it understands momentum really well.
The car is now doing fourteen miles per hour. Hoke trips on some loose pavement and falls on his face. Dickie turns it loose because he can’t run that fast, especially with his pot saturated lungs begging for relief. Buster John stops because he sees very clearly that Taurus is about to run through an intersection, jump the curb, and probably slam through Phyllis Detrick’s redwood fence.
So as Dickie and Hoke and Buster John watch helplessly, the Taurus hurdles the curb, shatters the fence and dives nose-first into the swimming pool, missing Phyllis, who is sitting in a deck chair, smoking a Salem Light and drinking a Chocolate Raspberry Cappuccino, by about fifteen feet.
Phyllis sits there, observing the Taurus as it gurgles and becomes submerged. She looks up to see Buster John, Dickie and Hoke walk through her shattered fence.
“I never had a Taurus in my swimming pool before,” she says.
“That car nearly killed you,” Buster John tells her.
“Yeah, but it didn’t,” Phyllis says. “My mama said God does everything for a reason, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out what lesson I am supposed to learn from this.”
“Nobody knows the mind of God,” Dickie says, and sits down in a deck chair next to Phyllis.
Hoke hunkers down on the balls of his feet like he does when he sitting with his uncle and cousins around a fire listening to the coon dogs run.
“Reverend Bill Chase thinks he knows God’s mind,” Hoke suggests, “but he is just sad because he has got a short pecker. I tried to tell him six months ago, but he just said he would pray for me. I don’t think people with short peckers like to discuss it much.”
Just then Miss Lucille totters up and stands with her hands on her hips, taking in the whole breadth of the scene, her Taurus, and Buster John, Hoke, Dickie and Phyllis.
“Phyllis Ann,” she admonishes, “cover up your titties.”
Phyllis Ann squints at her.
“Miss Lucille, you mind your own business. I did not invite you or your car into my pool or my life.”
Miss Lucille shakes her head in a meditative manner and sits down in a lounge chair.
“I am sorry, Sugar,” she apologizes. “Up until fifteen minutes ago, I was a Christian and I tried to save folks my whole life. It is none of my damn business if you want to sit around with your titties out. I am going to burn in hell anyways since, as soon as I get some energy back, I intend to catch a ride over to Harvey Dollar’s car lot and cut off his nuts.”
Buster John has been watching, first one person and then another, trying to decide at what point he needs to assert his jurisdiction. But he is completely baffled and lowers himself to a sitting position against what is left of the redwood fence.
Dickie rolls a joint and offers it to Hoke, who takes a hit and hands it to Miss Lucille.
Miss Lucille takes the joint and shrugs.
“I can only burn in hell once, and it looks like I am going to, so I don’t think it matters what else I do.”
Phyllis asks if anyone would like a cup of coffee. She emerges two minutes later with four cups on a serving tray.
As Buster John sips his coffee, he looks over the scene. The car is still gurgling a little in the pool. Miss Lucille is toking on a joint while she and Phyllis speculate about what it will be like to live a million years in Hell together, sort of like roommates discussing a color scheme.
Dickie is sitting on the edge of the pool with his legs in the water looking placidly at the blue sky.
“I just think the world is going crazy,” Buster John says. “I might as well go, too.”
He sits down between Hoke and Miss Lucille and waits for the joint to come his way.
Jim Gish was born and raised in Western Kentucky among the rogue Baptist tribes. The author is a writer, a college instructor in psychology, and a counselor for the Lotus and Phoenix website. Gish has published over 50 short works of literary fiction, humorous fiction, and horror fiction; and has won a number of prizes including first place in the FISH FOOD fiction contest and first place for a national contest sponsored by PHOEBE, the James Mason University writing magazine. The author hopes he will be remembered as an admirer of the grand human pageantry in all its raucous diversity.
