Читать книгу The Last Studebaker - Robin Hemley - Страница 11

Lois had lived in only two different houses her whole life: her father's and Willy's. She didn't know what it felt like to be without I some small utensil or piece of furniture. She was leaving a lot behind with Willy, and had made a list of things to look for at garage sales: dishes, glasses, chairs, window blinds, a coffee table. Also, a glass butter churn. Though she'd never churned butter in her life, she had owned a butter churn before. For fifteen years it sat on the mantle. Then, in the middle of packing up, the churn had slipped and shattered on the floor. Practically speaking, she didn't need a butter churn. Still, it topped her list. She'd discovered that owning something for fifteen years made it pretty close to necessary.

The same could be said of Willy, though she couldn't replace him that easily, and she didn't want to. Still, she added him to the list, down near the bottom. Next to his name, in parentheses, she wrote: “Hah! Good luck.” She meant good luck finding him again. She also meant good luck if she did find him again. Either way, she wasn't getting a bargain.

Lois searched for garage sales much like a diviner going after water. Instead of scanning the classifieds, she simply aimed her car through neighborhoods, trusted intuition, and watched for signs. In this way, she almost always spotted a garage sale every half hour. Often, there'd be two garage sales on the same block. Giving garage sales tended to be contagious in a neighborhood.

She had discovered the best kinds of sales over the past year, also the ones to avoid. Estate sales consisted of an entire accumulated life dissected on a lawn for people to browse through. Multifamily sales promised bargains, too. Church sales, by comparison, bored Lois. All church sales looked alike, and offered up the same items: heaps of wrinkled clothing, baked goods, Up With People and New Christie Minstrels records, and inspirational books.

Some people held garage sales almost every weekend. Lois didn't appreciate these professional garage-sale givers at all. She considered them charlatans who lured people like herself to sales that had been depleted months before.

Some people didn't know the meaning of garage sales. They seemed to think anything and everything had value, and couldn't differentiate between collectibles and junk. Most of the time, Lois didn't even need to stop at these sales. She could tell the kind of sale just by driving past. The worst ones usually had two racks of faded clothes on the porch or in the yard and a couple of card tables topped by can openers and ancient shavers and waffle irons and jelly-jar glasses. Didn't these people know that only a fool would pay a dollar for a set of five washed-out tin pie plates? Or buy a toaster with a frayed cord? Warped beer coasters with stains? Broken golf clubs? Coverless People magazines? Why did these people think they could get away with it? Was this the best show they could put on?

Old garage-sale signs upset Lois the most. A lot of people didn't bother dating their signs, and a lot didn't take them down from telephone poles or the backs of stop signs when the sales were through. Nothing felt emptier than driving past a garage-sale site that had been panned out months ago.

If you wanted to go garage sale-ing with Lois, you had to wake up early. By eleven in the morning, sometimes ten, the best ones had been picked clean. By then, the garage-sale ladies had swarmed over every good garage sale in town. The garage-sale ladies were a bunch of scavengers like Lois, only more organized and deadly. They buzzed from sale to sale like a grasshopper plague, showing up early and devastating the crop, reselling it later to the antique stores around town.

The most thrilling moment at a garage sale for Lois was when she pulled up to the curb in front of a promising one. Her feet magically guided her to the best bargains at the sale, as her eyes scanned each item. Maybe this time she'd come across the find of a lifetime. She didn't know the name of this find, but she thought it waited for her: the one item that would coalesce all her dreams of happiness into one hard relic, one profound bargain.

She parked in front of a brick ranch house. The yard consisted of dirt with patches of weeds and grass surrounding a flagpole without a flag. A lone bush sat beside the cracked concrete walkway. All sorts of debris covered the porch. At first, Lois didn't see anyone there, but then she noticed a man who seemed entombed like a pharaoh in the midst of his possessions. The man wore a porkpie hat decorated with fishing lures, and his face had settled with age into a featureless pudding.

“Real fine day for a sale,” the man said when she'd come halfway up the walk.

The fact that the man could speak amazed her. He hardly seemed human. She imagined him shrunken and porcelain-glazed, collecting dust on a junk shop shelf, with his porkpie hat and fishing lures, and a small plaque underneath him: World's Greatest Fisherman.

Lois started ferreting through the piles of knickknacks for bargains. She forgot about her list. It wasn't the real reason she had gone garage sale-ing anyway. Over the last year she'd become a garage-sale junkie. She bought plenty of things she didn't need, plenty of stuff that had nothing to do with her life. Something about garage sales soothed her. Something that made her forget her problems.

She took out her list and scanned the items. Nothing matched. Nothing at this sale seemed even slightly unusual, much less useful to her. While she sorted through the items, the World's Greatest Fisherman smiled and bobbed his head like a dashboard ornament. She tried not to look his way.

A dirt bike set out in front of the porch seemed to be the showpiece of the sale. From there, things got worse. A bowling trophy with a golden man swinging a ball stood in the middle of one of the card tables that had been set up for display. A “Peanuts” lunch box lay on its side next to the trophy, and beside that a set of three “Dukes of Hazzard” TV trays. Also, empty perfume bottles. Giant plastic cups from a convenience store. A plaster statue of a Chinaman with a coolie hat hauling buckets of water. A faucet. A vinyl pocketbook with a broken clasp. A green planter shaped like a frog. A telephone table with its varnish flaking away. Tragedy and tawdriness lingered in these objects. Nothing about them soothed Lois.

“If I could get a bottle and stop up today, I'd make a fortune,” the man on the porch told her.

She felt a rush of nonsense knock at her insides, hollering to be let out. She knew it was childish but suffered from some kind of moral or emotional defect that wouldn't let her stop acting like a fool, even when she knew better. Her kids had grown used to it. Willy had, too. But she hadn't. When this headlong foolishness overtook her, she couldn't do anything but surrender. A voice would say, “You don't really mean this,” but she always ignored the voice. Until it was too late. Things she didn't mean just burst out of her.

She walked to the porch and grabbed the railing. She put her foot on the top step and leaned forward. The man smiled from his folding chair.

She flipped her hair with her hand. Lois had frizzy and unmanageable red hair that she was forever flipping from one side of her face to the other. She'd sweep her whole arm across her forehead, a dramatic gesture like some vamp in an old movie. Her hair sometimes obstructed her view, but she didn't think of herself as a temptress. Tall and sturdy, she didn't go for much in the way of makeup or current fashions. Her only concessions were the earrings she wore, exotic ones from the Orient that jangled like wind chimes when she walked or swept back her hair. Her favorite earrings were a pair of brass frogs from Malaysia. Most often, she wore jeans and men's workshirts and sometimes an old vest. She also wore a silver locket with the initials SG on it. Inside were turn-of-the-century photographs of a boy about three years old and a girl about six. She didn't know who these children were, but sometimes she'd unhinge the clasp and study their sweet faces, wondering where they were now, if they were still alive, if their lives had been happy. She'd found the locket at a garage sale like this one.

She picked up a dish from the table on the porch. “My lawd, will you look at this?” she said. “It's a genuine JFK plate. My man is Kennedy crazy. Just loco. He must have three dozen of them plates by now. Won't eat off nothin' else. I set out some ‘I Like Ike’ china the other day, but Mac wouldn't hear nothin' of the sort. He starts hollerin', ‘I want my JFK and I want it now.' Lawd, sometimes he's just like a little baby with all his carryin' on.”

“You can't find that JFK ware these days,” the man said, pointing. “That's a bargain.”

“Sure is,” Lois said. “I ain't never seen it so low.”

She held up the plate to the sunlight and tapped it with her knuckles. She liked the idea of serving a meal on a JFK dinner plate. If you covered it with the right kind of food, say, mashed potatoes and gravy, you'd have a real surprise when you scraped bottom. There'd be Kennedy in full color, resurrected under gravy, leaning across his desk, come back to tell you something momentous.

She didn't think she was doing any harm putting this man on, slipping into his life, wearing him like a forgotten sweater with moth holes. He reminded her of her mother's brother, Uncle Chick. Lois's father had always made fun of Chick, saying, “When God handed out brains, Chick thought he'd said ‘Rain,’ so he ducked for cover.” True, he was slow, but he was Lois's favorite uncle when she was young. She didn't care about his brains. He'd talk about any subject under the sun, whether he knew anything about it or not. And no matter how young the person speaking, or how foolish the words being said, he'd listen patiently to whatever anyone told him.

“Where you visiting from?” the man said to Lois.

“Visiting?” Lois said. “How do you know I'm visiting?”

“Just don't sound like you're from around here.”

“West Texas,” she said. “Lubbock, to be exact. You ever been there? Best beef in the world.”

“No ma'am,” the man said. “Never made it that far. Amy and me sightsaw the Tennessee Smokies, but that's the furthest south we got. I sure would have liked to have sightseen Texas, but I guess I ain't gonna make it now.” He looked at Lois and smiled. “What you doing up this way?”

The nonsense kicked at her insides again. She bit the JFK plate, rapped it with her knuckles, then put it close to her ear.

“I come up for the garage sale-ing,” she said.

“No!” said the old man. “All that way?”

The man stared at her. For an awful moment she felt as though she'd gone inside him, that she'd entered through his open mouth and become trapped there. She flipped her hair back the other way.

She didn't know what to say. She'd carried this too far. She wanted to calm down now and sink back into her normal self. She hoped the man wouldn't say anything else to get her going again.

She started ferreting among the objects on one of the tables: an Avon bottle in the shape of a rearing stallion, a plastic outhouse with a little boy inside who turned around and peed when you opened the door. She ogled each object as though it was precious and one of a kind, holding each one up against the sun.

Then she noticed a doll that looked like a cross between FDR and Maurice Chevalier, with gray hair and a chiseled jaw. A geriatric Ken doll. The doll had absolutely no dignity, maybe because it had no clothes except for a pair of white plastic gloves that were inseparable from its hands. The doll had a smirk, the seedy grin of an exhibitionist, and seemed completely delighted with its spindly legs and enormous pot belly.

Lois had never seen a doll so odd. She started bending the doll's limbs in all directions. First, she stretched out one leg en pointe like a ballet dancer. She made the other leg do a high kick. Then she bent the wrist of the left hand as though extended for a kiss. The other arm dunked an invisible basketball. Meanwhile, the doll, which had a smooth rump and no genitalia, smiled divinely like the belle of the ball.

She looked back at the man on his porch and grinned, imagining what she must look like, a woman in her late thirties fascinated with an elderly Ken doll. The man smiled back and nodded. He seemed to think her behavior perfectly natural.

“I never been down to Texas,” the man said, his voice slow with wonder and wistfulness over that fact. “Amy and me sightsaw the Tennessee Smokies, but that's the furthest south we got.”

Lois wanted to use her normal voice again, but knew she couldn't without hurting his feelings. She'd committed to this cornball identity. To make up for it, she told him she wanted the Old Ken doll for her daughters.

He flipped the doll over in his hands, studying it like a jeweler examining a diamond. “I'll take a quarter,” he said finally.

“How about a nickel?” Lois said, her bargain-hunting instincts too ingrained to ignore.

“I have to get a quarter. How about I throw it in with the JFK ware? I'll give you the lot for five. The little naked feller and the presidential china.”

Lois had forgotten about the JFK dinner plates. She didn't want them, but felt obliged after all her foolishness. She gave the man five dollars and gathered up her junk. The man didn't do anything with her money, but just held it in his hand. “You have a pleasant stay in South Bend,” he told her.

Lois did not feel good about her purchases. Here she'd gone out to find a place to live and had been sidetracked into a garage sale. Instead of bargains, she'd wound up riding around South Bend with a stack of plastic commemorative plates and a nude doll perched on top of the heap. Just thinking about this made her nearly suicidal.

If Lois had gone directly home, the trip would have taken her fifteen minutes, but at her pace she circled South Bend for half the day. Old Ken joggled and the plates clacked together in the back seat.

Somehow she made her way to the old Studebaker buildings, where her father had worked so many years, though she hadn't planned on ending up there. In one of the old Studebaker plant parking lots, Lois sat in the car with her hands on the steering wheel, staring at a sign above the first floor of one of the buildings: “Avanti.” She didn't think about it as the name of a car, but as a philosophy. An arrow shot across the skinny letters on the sign. The letters slanted from left to right as though swept along in the arrow's draft. Lois thought Avanti meant something like “Let's go fast and break our necks” in Italian.

A hundred windows, half of them boarded, lined the brick factory with the Avanti sign. Lois still remembered her father complaining about the Fiberglas hulls of the Avantis, how difficult they were to shape. “This Fiberglas is stubborn,” he'd griped to her mom one day. “It doesn't know how to behave. You can't bang it into a sensible shape like metal.” This stood out in Lois's memory because her dad didn't usually gripe and didn't like that kind of behavior in others. He believed that griping made people weaker than they already were. “We must know what we're doing or we wouldn't do it,” he'd added to make up for his complaint. That's how her dad had always spoken of Studebaker. Not the royal “we” but the familial kind, like management cut him in on every decision it made. Studebaker had encouraged that kind of feeling. The company slogan was “Always give the customer more than you promise,” and Lois's dad believed it.

Lois remembered a day when he came home glum and silent for lunch, not griping, but not talkative either. Lois had stayed home from school that day with a slight fever. She didn't say anything when her father mentioned the rumor, and neither did Lois's mother, who set out a bologna sandwich and a bowl of soup in front of him, then snapped on the radio. Lois's father raised his spoon to his mouth, his hand just staying there for three or four full minutes before he pushed his food aside and rested his head on his arms. Lois couldn't remember the words of the radio announcement now, only the somber tone. The plant closed three weeks after Oswald assassinated Kennedy, and, to Lois, the tone of the announcement seemed the same. Just as sudden, just as unbelievable.

“I'm sure we wouldn't have done it if we didn't have to,” was all her father said.

“What's this ‘we’?” Lois's mom said.

“There's got to be a good explanation,” he said.

“A lot of good that'll do.” She took a chair and sat down and looked at him directly. “What about your retirement fund?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I'll find out.” Then he shook his head and said, “They've got to give us an explanation. You don't just drop out without explaining yourself.”fought her way through the front door

Hypocrite, Lois thought now. Well, Avanti to you, Daddy.

A couple of the old buildings at the plant were still in use, but only a store selling old parts had any relation to the old Studebaker. A painting of a Commander adorned the side of the building, and above that the words PARTS FOR STUDEBAKERS. LARK. HAWK, AVANTI. TRUCKS. A chubby man wearing a white shirt and yellow shorts stood beneath the sign, looking in her direction. He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, and waved to Lois as though she always showed up in the parking lot about this time of day. Lois put the car in reverse and spun gravel.

No matter what, today wasn't going to be a complete waste. She headed for Martin's to buy some necessities for her family.

Lois fought her way through the front door past Willy's dogs. She carried her groceries into the living room and through the den, where Gail sat with her knees up in Willy's leather recliner, her eyes on the tube, her hands picking away at a Fruit Roll-Up. She looked at Lois and said, “Who are you?”

“I'm your mother, I guess,” Lois said.

“You guess?” Gail stared at Lois suspiciously and said, “The kitchen's over there.”

“Where's Meg?” Lois said.

“You mean the pug-nosed wonder?” Gail said.

“I mean, Meg.”

Lois hated the word pug and tried to discourage Gail from using it, which made her use it all the more. Pug reminded Lois of Pekinese. True, Meg had a small nose, and in Lois's heart of hearts, she supposed the nose could fairly be called “pug.”

Gail stuck her arm out straight, her finger pointed toward the kitchen, her eyes still on the set.

Lois walked into the kitchen, where Meg sat at the table, reading a book. Meg dog-eared a page and set the book down. “My nose isn't pug, is it?” she said.

“Of course not,” Lois said, dumping the groceries on the counter.

Gail and Meg didn't look at all alike. Gail, with her short hair and bony figure, looked like some slight teenage boy who one day would shoot into the clouds, to basketball height and beyond. Already she was taller than most girls her age and many boys. In that way, she'd taken after Lois.

Meg, the runt of the family, was shorter than most ten-year-olds. In a family of giants, Willy and Lois had always wondered where Meg might have come from. Her face was round and her hair, which sometimes seemed light red and sometimes blonde, fell long and straight in front of her shoulders. She liked to wear white T-shirts and blue-jean overalls. Gail had a uniform, too, one that Lois thought of as “Dress to Depress.” Her normal outfit consisted of a black T-shirt with the lightning-jagged logo of her current favorite band. Today, she wore “Anthrax” across her chest. While Gail preferred black for her torso, she encased her legs in blue, though just barely. She liked to wear jeans with rips and holes, from which frayed threads dangled. Also, bandanas enthralled her. She wore one around her forehead, and one on each leg. She looked like one of the leads in a heavy metal version of Les Miserables, her clothes tattered, her wounds tended with tourniquets. Not that Lois minded her daughter's appearance. Gail simply went about in costume for a high-school play on a stage without boundaries.

Lois washed her hands at the kitchen sink and told Meg to help her with the groceries.

“What about Gail?” Meg said.

“Gail, come in here and help with dinner,” Lois yelled.

A few moments later, Gail tromped into the kitchen with a weary expression and a stiff-jointed monster walk, her arms in front of her. Lois prepared dinner while Meg and Gail did the dishes from the night before. Lois asked Gail where Willy was, and Gail got a stern look on her face and said, “Dad said he wouldn't be home for dinner.”

Just like him. They had come to an agreement, and now he'd broken it. For their last week living in the same house, they'd decided to at least eat dinner together, all four of them. So Gail and Meg wouldn't think there was any rancor between Lois and Willy.

“Did he say where he'd be?” Lois said.

“God, how would I know. Am I Dad's major confidant? Am I the FBI?”

Meg, who dried the dishes faster than Gail washed them, stood at her sister's side and looked in the air as though waiting for a bus to arrive. “Well, I'm standing here,” she said.

“You're not supposed to just wipe them off,” Gail said. “You're supposed to put them away, too.”

“They're not dry yet.”

“So dry them, you twit,” Gail said.

Meg looked over at Lois and moaned.

“Okay girls, that's enough.”

Gail looked slyly at Lois and said, “By the way, you're in trouble with Dad. Guess who forgot to take him to work this afternoon?”

Lois picked up a carrot and started to peel. “Was he angry?” she said.

“Fuming,” said Gail.

“Jesus,” said Lois, tossing the carrot into the sink. Willy had his car in the shop and none of his old Studebakers worked.

“We're not even married anymore,” she told her daughters, rehearsing what she'd tell Willy. “Besides, I was looking for a new place for us to live.”

Neither of the girls said anything to that. Gail picked out the carrot from the soapsuds and handed it to Meg, who wiped it off with her towel and set it beside the drying dishes.

To Gail and Meg's horror, Lois served dinner on the JFK plates. She also brought out Old Ken. She straddled the doll on the faucet so that it shot between his legs. His hands clutched the sides of the spigot, and as always, he seemed joyous at his nudity and even more perverse-looking than before.

Gail looked exasperated and said, “Honestly, Mom.”

Meg, on the other hand, acted as though she'd never seen anything funnier. She shrieked, covered her mouth with her hand, stabbed her fork in the direction of Old Ken, and gasped, “He looks like he's on a bucking bronco.”

“That's not supposed to be a horse between his legs,” Gail said.

“I know that,” said Meg, putting her fork down and giving her sister a hooded look. “I think it's funny no matter what he's doing. Isn't that right?”

“That's right, honey,” Lois said with an enormous grin. “No matter what he's doing,” and she tilted back her head and started laughing. Gail joined in, despite her attempt at sullenness. Even Meg, who tried to bite her lip into an angry look, started giggling.

Gail stopped laughing and said, “I suppose you didn't find anywhere for us to live.”

“Don't worry, I will,” said Lois.

“Dad said if you don't find a place by Wednesday, he's kicking you out in the cold. We can stay.”

“How kind of him,” Lois said. “But if he wants to kick me out in the cold, he'll have to wait awhile. It's only May.”

“Be serious, Mom,” Gail said. “Why don't you show some responsibility for once?”

That sounded like Willy talking. Obviously, Gail saw her mom as the villain.

Lois stood up. “Okay then,” she said. “Let's find a place to live.”

“What do you mean?” Gail said.

“Just what I said.”

“Now?” Meg said.

Lois told them to wait in the kitchen. She returned a few minutes later with a globe and a copy of the classified section of the paper. “In case we don't find anything in the classifieds, we'll find some other town, some other country.”

“Great,” said Meg.

“How about some other planet?” Gail said.

Lois flipped open the classifieds and said, “Nope. Too small.” She flipped another page. “Too large.” She flipped another page and said, “Too expensive.”

The girls exchanged looks and Lois said, “I guess we'll have to go to France or somewhere.” She tossed the paper over her head.

“Mom!” said Gail, laughing. “You're crazy.”

“So?”

Lois turned her attention to the globe and gazed at it like a crystal ball. Then she passed it to Gail. “Go on, close your eyes,” she said.

“What for?”

“We're going to pick our destination. Like this.” She gave the globe a spin and stopped it with her finger. “Czechoslovakia,” she said. “Here. You have a try.”

Gail looked unsure, but then she drew her fingers across the stubble of the Rockies.

“You've flipped out completely,” Gail said, but she closed her eyes. Lois felt she'd won a small victory then against the rational step-by-step world Willy lived in. From now on, she'd have to spend more time with her daughters, unteaching them everything they'd learned from Willy.

Gail spun the globe. After a few seconds, she stabbed the air and her finger skidded along the surface of the planet for a thousand miles before stopping in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. She smiled, but when she opened her eyes she looked disappointed.

“Oh, you know what that means?” Lois said. “You were a citizen of Atlantis in a past life, and your soul wants to return.”

“Maybe it just means the planet is two thirds water,” Gail said.

“Look, if you want to travel the globe with me, you're going to have to broaden your vision. I don't tell everyone this, but I used to be Gertrude Stein in a past life. That's why I'm so attached to France.”

“Who's that?” Meg said. “Did she live in Atlantis, too?”

“That's a good question,” Lois said. “She probably did. Go ahead and give it a whirl.”

Meg turned the globe. “Here,” she said, stopping it with her finger.

“Detroit, Michigan,” Lois said. “You can do better than that, can't you?”

“She used to be Henry Ford,” Gail said.

“Come on, one more try,” Lois said. “No matter what, this next place is where we're headed.”

Meg spun the globe while Lois clapped and yelled, “Free spin, free spin!”

Much better,” she said. “Peru.”

“Peru,” Gail said, groaning.

“Come on,” Lois said, standing up.

“I don't want to go to Peru tonight,” Gail said. “I'm too tired.”

“Where's your sense of adventure?” she said.

Lois grabbed Old Ken and led her daughters to the car. Of course, Gail and Meg fought over who would sit in front, but it was Meg's turn, so Lois promised Gail she could sit in the front on the trip back from Peru, as soon as they started crossing the Andes. Gail said she didn't want to sit in front anyway, and demanded to know where they were really headed at ten in the evening.

Lois put the car in neutral. She hadn't decided yet where to go, though she didn't tell Gail that. Instead, she danced the doll in front of Gail, across the top of the backseat. “We're going to the land of the Incas. Are we there yet? I'm hungry. I've got to go to the sandbox.”

She pushed the insanely-smiling doll in her daughter's face.

“Stop that, Mom,” Gail shouted, grabbing for the doll. “Stop acting like a child.”

Lois was too quick for Gail. Still, she obeyed her daughter and straightened up at the wheel. “Very well,” she said in a chauffeur-voice. “Instead of Peru, would daughter prefer Bonnie Doon?”

She saw a pair of headlights pull up the drive in back of them. She couldn't make out the car, but she knew who it was. The car came to a stop and the passenger's door opened. Willy walked around the car out of the glare and bent down by Lois's window, giving her a look.

“Just out for a drive, officer,” she said.

“We're going to Peru,” Meg said.

Willy nodded like he hadn't heard. He stood up and put a hand on the roof of the car. “You were supposed to take me to work,” he said.

“You were supposed to be here for dinner,” she said.

“When are you going to grow up?” he said.

Lois shrugged. From the backseat, Gail added, “That's what I keep wondering, Dad.”

Willy gave the car a tap and leaned in again. “Anyway, I'm glad

you girls are still up. I want you to meet Alice. She's waiting in the car back there. I was thinking we could drive over to Bonnie Doon or Dairy Queen.”

Gail stepped out of the car in a flash. “I'll have a Reese's Blizzard,” she said.

Meg gave Lois an unsure look. “Go ahead,” Lois said. She kissed Meg and told Willy not to keep them out too late. She hoped Meg would ask her about Peru. She wanted to tell her daughter 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.