Their cars will be like their yellow coats and sharp shoes and the greasy perfumed stuff they use to slick back their hair: hud and vulgar.
The purple car was loaded with swoops and darts of chrome. It had fenderskirts. The hood ornament was huge; Chief DeSoto’s head glittered in the hazy light like a fake jewel. The tires were fat whitewalls and the hubcaps were spinners. There was a whip antenna on the back. From its tip there hung a raccoon tail.
‘The low men,’ Bobby whispered. There was really no question. It was a DeSoto, but at the same time it was like no car he had ever seen in his life, something as alien as an asteroid. As they drew closer to the clogged three-way intersection, Bobby saw the upholstery was a metallic dragonfly-green — the color nearly howled in contrast to the car’s purple skin. There was white fur around the steering wheel. ‘Holy crow, it’s them!’
‘You have to take your mind away,’ Ted said. He grabbed Bobby by the shoulders (up front the Yankees blared on and on, the driver paying his two fares in the back seat no attention whatsoever, thank God for that much, at least) and shook him once, hard, before letting him go. ‘You have to take your mind away, do you understand?’
He did. George Sanders had built a brick wall behind which to hide his thoughts and plans from the Children. Bobby had used Maury Wills once before, but he didn’t think baseball was
going to cut it this time. What would?
Bobby could see the Asher Empire’s marquee jutting out over the sidewalk, three or four blocks beyond Puritan Square, and suddenly he could hear the sound of Sully-John’s Bo lo Bouncer: whap-whap-whap. If she’s trash, S-J had said, I’d love to be the trashman.
The poster they’d seen that day filled Bobby’s mind: Brigitte Bardot (the French sex-kitten was what the papers called her) dressed only in a towel and a smile. She looked a little like the woman getting out of the car on one of the calendars back at The Corner Pocket, the one with most of her skirt in her lap and her garters showing. Brigitte Bardot was prettier, though.
And she was real. She was too old for the likes of Bobby Garfield, of course.
(I’m so young and you’re so old, Paul Anka singing from a thousand transistor radios, this my darling I’ve been told] but she was still beautiful, and a cat could look at a queen, his mother always said that, too: a cat could look at a queen. Bobby saw her more and more clearly as he settled back against the seat, his eyes taking on that drifty, far-off look Ted’s eyes got when he had one of his blank-outs; Bobby saw her shower-damp puff of blond hair, the slope of her breasts into the towel, her long thighs, her painted toenails standing over the words Adults Only, Must Have Driver’s License or Birth Certificate. He could smell her soap
— something light and flowery. He could smell
(Nuit en Paris)
her perfume and he could hear her radio in the next room. It was Freddy Cannon, that bebop summertime avatar of Savin Rock: ‘She’s dancin to the drag, the cha-cha rag-a-mop, she’s stompin to the shag, rocks the bunny hop . . . ‘
He was aware — faintly, far away, in another world farther up along the swirls of the spinning top — that the cab in which they were riding had come to a stop right next to the William Penn Grille, right next to that purple bruise of a DeSoto. Bobby could almost hear the car in his head; if it had had a voice it would have screamed Shoot me, I’m too purple!
Shoot me, I’m too purple! And not far beyond it he could sense them. They were in the restaurant, having an early steak. Both of them ate it the same way, bloody-rare. Before they left they might put up a lost-pet poster in the telephone lounge or leave a hand-printed CAR
FOR SALE BY OWNER card; upside-down, of course. They were in there, low men in yellow coats and white shoes drinking martinis between bites of nearly raw steer, and if they turned their minds out this way . . .