The Confessions of Frances Godwin (27 page)

“This is a real original. Not restored. Not repainted. Original tires. Original paint,” he said, as if he’d been listening to Ron, next to me.

I had to look at the screen to understand the bid. I could hear the numbers, and I was starting to understand the auctioneer’s filler words, which were like one of those prayers that some monks repeat all day long.
“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a miserable sinner.”

I started to feel faint. Looking at the car. Seeing it. It was like seeing Paul for the first time, like walking into his classroom for the first time, or like walking along the Janiculum with Sister Teresa and seeing him sitting on a bench feeding the pigeons. Like opening my eyes and seeing him sitting on the couch after the Shakespeare party, touching my hair to wake me up, though in fact I was wide awake, telling me it was time to go home. Or like seeing Stella for the first time, the doctor holding her by her feet.

I started remembering all the times Paul and I had sat in this car, in the cockpit, Paul with his portable oxygen supply. His hands on the wheel.

“I used to sit in the car with my husband,” I said, “when he was dying. He drove it around the parking lot a few times. That was it.”

“Five fifty.”

“I reread almost half the
Aeneid
in the cockpit of that car. We’d open the garage door so we could look out on the parking lot, people walking by, stopping to wave.”

Ron bid five seventy-five. I shut my mouth.

The auctioneer asked for six hundred. Over and over. Bascomb went into a frenzy and seemed by the strength of his enthusiasm to push it past six hundred thousand. Two ring men huddled with the bidders in the front now, one on Einstein and one on the man in the hunting jacket. Bascomb himself kept hammering away at Ron. Talking to him the way he might talk to an old friend.

After a couple of dramatic pauses the bidding edged up to seven hundred thousand and change ($720,000) before the hammer came down. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but Ron put his arms around me and Lloyd Bascomb was pounding me on the back, pounding Ron too.

The instant the gavel came down, the car was no longer mine. That’s the way it works. It now belonged to a tall bald man with short, straight mustaches that matched his short, straight eyebrows. Ron. We walked out together next to the car, driven by one of the Bascomb agents. By the time we got to the Bascomb office I was crying.

“I’m sorry,” Ron said. “I’m sorry.”

I couldn’t stop crying, even though a check for $720,000, less commission, was waiting for me at the Bascomb office.

“Where did the money come from?” I asked.

“They know me here,” he said. “And I have a line of credit.”

“Must be a long one,” I said.

I’d already surrendered the title, along with the car, so all I had to do was show some ID and pick up my check. I folded the check in half and put it in my purse. You’d think a check that size would take up a lot of space, but it fit comfortably between a twenty dollar bill and a little single-use floss envelope that I carried for emergencies.

“Look,” Ron said, “how about a cup of coffee.”

“I’m all right,” I said.

“I know how it is. I sold a four twenty-seven just like this one four years ago and I’ve never gotten over it.”

“You know why I’m crying?” I asked, surprising myself. “I’m crying because I never drove it. All these years it was sitting in our garage. My son-in-law was crazy to drive it. He stole it once, and my husband called the police. He had a pretty serious record—my son-in-law did—and spent some time in jail. After my husband died—I never really saw it after that, maybe two or three times. We kept a tarp over it. But I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be bothering you with this. It doesn’t matter.”

“Would you like to drive it now?” he said.

The Bascomb driver got out and shook Ron’s hand.

Ron held the door. “Get into the cockpit,” he said.

“Do they really call it a ‘cockpit’?” I asked.

“You’ll see when you get it.”

“I couldn’t do that,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, and “Of course you could.” He took my arm and maneuvered me into the cockpit. “Sit tight. I’ll just be a minute. I’ve got to call my insurance agent and tell him to put the car on my policy.”

“I won’t know what to do,” I said, thinking of the Bill Cosby show, which I’d watched several times on YouTube.

“You know how to drive a stick shift?”

I nodded.

“Then there’s nothing to it. You need to brake with your left foot, that’s all. That’s why the pedals are skewed to the left. But take it easy till we get some new tires.”

The figures on the speedometer, I noticed, went counterclockwise, all the way up to 180 MPH.

“What about seat belts?” I asked.

“Wait till we get some insurance and some new tires.”

He made the call on his cell phone. Once the car was insured, I turned the key and the car roared. I eased it out of the lot and we drove out a long diagonal street, Binford Boulevard, to a tire store near the beltway. “I already ordered the tires,” he said. It was hard to hear over the roar of the engine, even though we were going only twenty-five miles an hour. At first the car leaped and bucked, but by the time we got to the tire store I had it more or less under control. “Cokers,” Ron said. “Corky Coker bought up all the molds for the old fourteen-inch polyester tires. I had to order them online.”

“What if you hadn’t gotten the car?”

“Then I’d have four extra tires.”

It didn’t take long to get the new tires balanced and aligned. Ron got me hooked into the complicated five-point harness, hooked himself in, and we were back on Binford Boulevard heading out toward the Hampton Inn. When we came to the end of Binford Boulevard I started to follow 69 north toward Fort Wayne (and toward the Hampton Inn) but Ron told me to head west on the 465 beltway.

“Do your braking before you start the turn,” he said as we approached the entrance ramp. “Use your left foot on the brake. Now find your apex, your racing line, halfway between the shortest possible turn or corner and the longest possible turn or corner. You want to minimize your time in the corner and maximize your speed at the same time. It takes a while, but you’ll figure it out.”

My apex? My racing line?
I thought of the imaginary line that Stella used to guide the trailer into the tight spot between the Wilkins truck and the Leshinsky potato truck.

“As you let up on the brake,
push
the top of the steering wheel into the turn. Don’t pull it. Hit the gas as you come out of the curve. You want to feel the center hold when you accelerate.”

I was glad we were going only fifty miles an hour. I had a little time to think.

Pulling out of the curve. Speeding up. I could in fact feel the weight shifting toward the rear. Could feel the power.

“Aim high in your steering.” He had to shout.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Look all the way down to the end of the road,” he said. “And keep your eyes moving. Look in your mirrors.”

I did what he said.

“Hug the centerline,” he shouted, and “Relax. This is a sports car, don’t hold up traffic.” He laughed.

At sixty miles an hour it was getting harder to hear—over the wind, over the roar of the engine. But not impossible as long as we weren’t accelerating.

“Now pass that big ugly Lincoln,” he shouted. “Get his attention first, make sure he knows you’re coming. Center yourself on his outside mirror.”

I remembered my father teaching me how to drive in the cemetery—Hope Cemetery. A police car came into the cemetery and pulled us over. The cemetery, the policeman said, wasn’t a place to teach someone to drive. I was never sure why not.

“Don’t pull into the left lane and then slow down. Put the power on and keep it on till you’ve passed him. One smooth motion. When you speed up you throw the weight onto the back tires, and that gives you more traction. Keep the weight back there. Now doesn’t that feel good?”

It felt very good. I pulled back into the right lane. And then we passed another car, and another, till we were passing everything on the road.

We got up to eighty when passing and then I slowed down to seventy.

We passed the exit for 31 north to Kokomo and South Bend, and the turnoff on 865 west, which cuts over to 65 north to Gary.

“We’re going to take I-74 west to Champaign,” he put his mouth up to my ear. “I want you to work on your cornering.

I thought we’d been on the road about twenty minutes, but I was going so fast now I didn’t want to look at my watch. I cornered onto I-74, heading toward Galesburg, or was it Kentucky, I wasn’t sure. I did my braking before the exit, looked for the apex, for the racing line, lost it in the turn, found it again as we got onto I-74. I could feel the rear tires balancing as we came out of the curve.

Ron was silent. Relaxed.

“Open it up a little,” he might have said. I couldn’t hear the words, but I could understand his hands. “More. More.” He was making a rolling motion with his right hand.

We went faster and faster. It was unnerving at first. But then I got a sense of control.

At ninety miles an hour I was afraid to take my eyes off the road. The car shuddered and bucked, and my arms were getting tired, but Ron kept up the rolling motion with his hand and I kept my foot on the pedal till the speedometer touched 100. The tachometer, which was partially blocked by the steering wheel, was at 4000 RPMs.

How many gears were there anyway? Was there still another gear? I couldn’t hear Ron. And I’m sure he couldn’t hear me. But he wasn’t signaling me to do anything and I thought we’d reached the top of the gear chain. We flew past fields of beans, then small developments with young trees. We passed signs for Brownsburg, Pittsboro. The next big town was Crawfordsville.

I was aware of everything. We were up to a hundred and five now.

This was what Jimmy wanted, wasn’t it? Had he pushed it up to a hundred miles an hour on I-80? Probably not. The original tires wouldn’t have been able to take it. I suddenly remembered bringing him a sack of roofing nails when he was working on the porte cochere, handing him the sack out the window of my little study, both of us laughing at a squirrel that had jumped down on the roof and seemed to be admiring the new shingles. I remembered the animal vitality of his Caliban, a sort of natural man, uneducated, untrained, whose mother could control the moon. A man with a grievance: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, Which thou tak’st from me.” I remembered the way his muscles rippled under his tattoos. And of course how desperately he wanted to drive the car. And why not? If we’d let him drive the car . . . and for a minute or two I thought that the person sitting next to me was not Ron but Jimmy, and I wanted to explain, and then for a few minutes
I
was Jimmy. Jimmy in all his animal vitality. I was alive. I was flying.

Ron shouted something in my ear and started to make a braking motion with his hands. In the mirror I could see a flashing red light behind us. Ron had already seen it. Maybe some instinct had kicked in. He pointed at the mirror and made more braking motions with his left foot.

“The radar gun must have been in that disabled car on the shoulder,” he shouted, when I’d slowed down to seventy. Then sixty, fifty, and so on.

I got a ticket, but the cop was very nice. He wrote on the ticket that I was doing ninety. Not one hundred. Over a hundred miles per hour would have been a felony. I handed over my license and put the ticket in my purse to show in lieu of my license. In case I got stopped again.

“See those crows over there?” the cop said. “Know how fast they’re going?”

“No idea.”

He pointed his radar gun at them. Took a while to get an accurate reading. “Twenty miles an hour,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said. He waited in his car for us to drive off. “You’d better drive,” I said to Ron.

“You’re doing fine,” he said, “but keep it under seventy on the way back.”

“My daughter’s going to wonder what happened to me.” I’d forgotten about Stella and Ruthy.

“It will be all right,” he said, and I knew it would be. Stella pretended to be angry when we finally got back to the Pepsi Coliseum, but her anger didn’t run very deep and didn’t conceal a series of small smiles.

The ticket was expensive, but worth it. Later, back in Galesburg, I attended a traffic safety class at Carl Sandburg College in order to have the ticket expunged from my record. The instructor was a nice man with no sense of irony at all. He took his work seriously. We learned that by going seventy-five miles an hour instead of sixty, from Galesburg to Monmouth, a distance of 17.2 miles, you’d save only three minutes. Was it worth it? To save three minutes?

The class was one long session. Four hours. The instructor’s day job was trainer at a truck-driving school. I told him my daughter was—had been—a trucker and was really good at backing a truck up. He said they spent most of their time at the school working on backing up. I filled out some paperwork. Later I got a response from the State of Illinois. The ticket had been expunged. As if it had never happened.