heading for Veech’s Gas and Oil, which was man’s country. Ray Veech ran the garage when his dad was farming, and I thought I had some business with him.
The town was half-asleep with August and the depression. A checker game was going on in The Coffee Pot Cafe as I went past, but nothing else. A knot of people outside Moore’s Store waited for the day-old bread to go half-price.
In the window of Stubbs & Askew, the insurance agency, you could put up handbills. The biggest was a drawing of the giant farm implement shed that Deere &Company was proposing to put up on the block where the old brickyard had been.
Next to it a handbill advertised a rummage sale at the United Brethren Church:
BRING & BUY
Treasures, Trash, Bric-a-Brac
Down-to-Earth Prices
Lunch Provided by Our Ladies’ Circle
The last handbill was a schedule of the movies the Lions Club was showing at their outdoor picture show. They weren’t new movies. Some of them weren’t even talkies. It looked like a slow week.
I crossed the Wabash tracks past the grain elevator on my way to Veech’s garage, eating the dust of the trucks hauling in the beans. Veech’s garage had been the blacksmith shop, and they still kept the anvil inside. Now it was a one-pump filling station with an outdoor lift. I blundered along toward it. Then the dust cleared, and I saw her.
It was love at first sight, like I’d been waiting for her all my life. She stood on the pavement in front of Veech’s, shimmering in her loveliness. And so graceful she might glide past me as if I wasn’t there, leaving me in the dust.
She was a showroom-fresh Terraplane 8 from the Hudson Motor Car Company. A four-door sedan, tan, with red stripping and another touch of red at the hubcaps. Tears sprang and my eyes stung. I couldn’t help it. My hands curled like I had her steering wheel in my grip.
No car company had an agency in Grandma’s town, noteven Ford. But Veech’s would order you a car. Ray’d said nobody had bought one in two years. He ducked out from under an ancient Locomobile up on the lift, working a greasy rag over his big hands.
Ray was seventeen and man-sized, and I’d worked hard to know him because I wanted him to teach me how to drive. He’d given me a couple of lessons last summer, but he wanted two dollars for the full course.
People around here didn’t overreact even when they hadn’t seen you for a year. Ray jerked a thumb back at the Locomobile he’d been working under. “Threw a rod.”
I nodded like I knew.
But I couldn’t take my eyes off the Terraplane. “Somebody order it?”
Ray rubbed his stubbled chin with the back of his hand in a way I admired. “Who’s got seven hundred and ninety-five dollars? This baby’s top-of-the-line. Son, it’s got a radio.”
I wanted to ask him if he’d driven it. But that was too close to asking him for a ride and a lesson. We both knew I didn’t have two dollars.
“Hudson’s sending out their new Terraplane models to drum up interest. It’s the make Dillinger drove to outrun the cops. But, hey, you’d know that,” Ray said. “You probably took a gander at the body the Chicago cops put on display. You reckon it was really Dillinger?”
I shrugged. I could see this was the summer when I missed out on everything.
That night after supper Grandma said, “I suppose you kids want to go to the picture show,” meaning she wantedto go to the picture show. We were willing, though going to the pictures for us was the Oriental Theater in Chicago, featuring a first-run movie, a pipe organ, and a stage show with a dog act.
It was different at Grandma’s. On Wednesday nights the Lions Club sponsored the picture show in the park. They put up canvas walls, so it was like a tent without a roof. You sat on benches, and they showed the movie on a sheet hung from the branch of a tree. Everybody but Baptists came. Admission was a nickel a head or a can of food for the hungry. Grandma took a quart Mason jar of her
The town was half-asleep with August and the depression. A checker game was going on in The Coffee Pot Cafe as I went past, but nothing else. A knot of people outside Moore’s Store waited for the day-old bread to go half-price.
In the window of Stubbs & Askew, the insurance agency, you could put up handbills. The biggest was a drawing of the giant farm implement shed that Deere &Company was proposing to put up on the block where the old brickyard had been.
Next to it a handbill advertised a rummage sale at the United Brethren Church:
BRING & BUY
Treasures, Trash, Bric-a-Brac
Down-to-Earth Prices
Lunch Provided by Our Ladies’ Circle
The last handbill was a schedule of the movies the Lions Club was showing at their outdoor picture show. They weren’t new movies. Some of them weren’t even talkies. It looked like a slow week.
I crossed the Wabash tracks past the grain elevator on my way to Veech’s garage, eating the dust of the trucks hauling in the beans. Veech’s garage had been the blacksmith shop, and they still kept the anvil inside. Now it was a one-pump filling station with an outdoor lift. I blundered along toward it. Then the dust cleared, and I saw her.
It was love at first sight, like I’d been waiting for her all my life. She stood on the pavement in front of Veech’s, shimmering in her loveliness. And so graceful she might glide past me as if I wasn’t there, leaving me in the dust.
She was a showroom-fresh Terraplane 8 from the Hudson Motor Car Company. A four-door sedan, tan, with red stripping and another touch of red at the hubcaps. Tears sprang and my eyes stung. I couldn’t help it. My hands curled like I had her steering wheel in my grip.
No car company had an agency in Grandma’s town, noteven Ford. But Veech’s would order you a car. Ray’d said nobody had bought one in two years. He ducked out from under an ancient Locomobile up on the lift, working a greasy rag over his big hands.
Ray was seventeen and man-sized, and I’d worked hard to know him because I wanted him to teach me how to drive. He’d given me a couple of lessons last summer, but he wanted two dollars for the full course.
People around here didn’t overreact even when they hadn’t seen you for a year. Ray jerked a thumb back at the Locomobile he’d been working under. “Threw a rod.”
I nodded like I knew.
But I couldn’t take my eyes off the Terraplane. “Somebody order it?”
Ray rubbed his stubbled chin with the back of his hand in a way I admired. “Who’s got seven hundred and ninety-five dollars? This baby’s top-of-the-line. Son, it’s got a radio.”
I wanted to ask him if he’d driven it. But that was too close to asking him for a ride and a lesson. We both knew I didn’t have two dollars.
“Hudson’s sending out their new Terraplane models to drum up interest. It’s the make Dillinger drove to outrun the cops. But, hey, you’d know that,” Ray said. “You probably took a gander at the body the Chicago cops put on display. You reckon it was really Dillinger?”
I shrugged. I could see this was the summer when I missed out on everything.
That night after supper Grandma said, “I suppose you kids want to go to the picture show,” meaning she wantedto go to the picture show. We were willing, though going to the pictures for us was the Oriental Theater in Chicago, featuring a first-run movie, a pipe organ, and a stage show with a dog act.
It was different at Grandma’s. On Wednesday nights the Lions Club sponsored the picture show in the park. They put up canvas walls, so it was like a tent without a roof. You sat on benches, and they showed the movie on a sheet hung from the branch of a tree. Everybody but Baptists came. Admission was a nickel a head or a can of food for the hungry. Grandma took a quart Mason jar of her
Similar Books
