Story #10: "The Knuckleball Artist" (Chapter 3)

On the showroom floor of Cougar’s Car Dealership, Reginald’s arithmetic comes home to roost, there's still a problem with the car antenna and a catastrophic, but darkly satisfying, slip in the shower.

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More than three weeks passed in What Cheer. Having been politely evicted from his home, Reginald now slept under the eaves of the concession stand at the Little League field. He couldn’t take possession of the Volkswagen from the local VW dealership because apparently the antenna had been screwed in at an odd angle by a distraught factory worker.

“While the Última Última is the last car of its kind, it’s still a vehicle burped out of a factory at 4:59 on a Friday afternoon,” the owner of Cougar’s car dealership explained. “That’s never a work week’s mechanical high-water, Reg.” It also turned out, as the factory in Puebla, Mexico had now been shuttered for a month, the car no longer had a factory warranty.

“I can’t let you take it home until we can find you a replacement antenna. You’ll thank me.”

He finally picked it up six weeks later. He’d never forget the moment: he was standing on the showroom floor and staring at the front license plate. “2003.” It didn’t have a rear license plate, but if he brought it up, it would be another six weeks. The salesman was scratching his head in front of the pegboard trying to find the right set of keys for the Última.

That was when The Boil called and asked him how his car was.

“How’s my car?”

“I’m in Iowa. I don’t see how I could possibly be the right person to ask about your car, Boil.”

But he did see. Reginald knew immediately he was about to have his vehicle repossessed by a locker room loan shark. There must have been more to that contract. He should have paid closer attention.

“The Beetle’s mine, Reg. Deals being what they are. You need to pay the Piper, so to speak.”

Another long pause.

“I’m the piper, Reg.”

“You lent me a $100, Boil. The Última Última will never be yours,” Reg shot back, struggling to remember the exact payment terms. An overweight kid was cheerfully scooping an overflowing bag of popcorn out of a glass popcorn machine shaped like a circus wagon. He would never be that happy again.

“Where are you right now, Reg?” The Boil went on.

“Cougar’s Car Dealership.”

“Well I hate to break it to you, but at 26.5% interest, penalties for early payment, and $142.07 a month processing fee, I’m afraid you’ll need to overnight me the title,” The Boil sighed cruelly.

Reginald didn’t know what to say. The Boil didn’t wait for Reginald to pick up the thread.

“Here’s what is going to happen: I am going to move to What Cheer, buy Cougar’s Car Dealership from whatever farmer owns it, and you will work for me until your debt is paid. You will pay your own salary from the interest you owe me.”

Emotion surged. Reginald struggled to open the driver’s door with the thumb-presser button so he could have this unpleasant conversation in private, but the car door was locked, and the salesman had dropped the keys behind the filing cabinet under the pegboard.

Reginald started out at a restrained whisper, but it wouldn’t last.

“Never, Boil. Not if I have to sell everything I own to keep it, not if I have to sleep in the backseat until I’m forty and store my winter clothes under the passenger seat...”

You know what? Restraint was pointless. He began shouting.

“… and hang my toiletries from the rear-view mirror and build a refrigerator out of the glove compartment.”

Reginald was clearing out the showroom. The salesman crawled out backwards from where he’d dropped the keys behind the filing cabinet.

“The Última Última is mine, Bobby. It’s all I got.”

Reg said the last part quietly, and something balled up in his throat, something worryingly warm and long forgotten, and he shouldn’t have kept repeating himself, but he did.

He said it’s all I got so many times you’d think it would start raining. The salesman fumbled to open the door and shoved Reginald into the front seat of the Beetle to make the commotion go away.

Curiously, through all this, even in his grief, the 6’ 4” Reginald would never forget that first time in the driver’s seat of his vintage Volkswagen Bug. The roof was much lower than he’d imagined – the crazy thoughts and memories that pop up even in sorrow. The memories took him back.

He remembered being ten and reading Popular Mechanics in a barber shop chair. There she was: a picture of a Beetle stuffed with people. The boy’s jaw dropped like a cartoon.

“Did they really fit 30 people in here, Mr. Johnson?”  

“Straight out of the Guinness Book of World Records. They wouldn’t lie, son.”

Reginald fell in love. What a memory.

It didn’t last.

He was brought back to the dealership by The Boil prattling on with heartless enthusiasm.

On the passenger seat, they’d dropped a small perfectly wrapped present. The best present wrapper at the dealership had tied it with a blue-green ribbon the color of the Última.

“For Reg. Glad we could find the antenna. It’s a road that’s winding and long. You were our favorite pitcher.”

Reginald opened the package to find a cassette tape of “Let It Be.” He’d never heard of these Beatles, and their name was spelled wrong, which was almost one problem too many in a day already at capacity, but the color matched the blue-green hood perfectly.

“Or listen to me, Bigs. There’s another option. You can leave the car on the showroom floor, hand those keys back to the salesman, and the Última Última will be mine. I will even give you an even $100 for it. Your debt will be paid in full. Or…”

He dragged out the silence like a game show host...

“You can work for me at Cougar’s, make $7.25 an hour, and live in a sleepmobile for the rest of your life.”

The Boil didn’t say anything after that. It was possible even he thought he’d made his point.

As for Reginald, the name “Sleepmobile” struck like a lightning-bolt: the second his one-time best friend said it, sad decades stretched out before him, straighter than the I-80 Iowa Interstate plowing through winter corn fields.

Reginald stared over the sparkling blue-green hood. The car antenna was still tiling at a curious angle.

In the end, Reginald had no choice. He had to work for The Boil to pay back the $100. What was intended that August of 2003 to be a part-time job “for a few weekends” turned into full-time, twenty-one years of employment.

Nothing in the entire state of Iowa changed during that entire time, not even the state minimum wage, and you can look that up for yourself. And for twenty-one years, on paydays, The Boil crayoned the full MSRP onto the front windshield where there was no way the wipers could reach. Reginald was up to $312,452.26.

But the Última Última still left Reginald with a scrap of dignity. She was mostly his, and on sleepless nights in the gravel Little League parking lot, Reginald would lie in the backseat with his long knees tucked in and his toes poking out of the rear pop-out vent windows. He’d stare at the tiny grid of holes in the torn fabric ceiling.

He’d comfort himself singing “Long and Winding Road,” his favorite song from the cassette tape. Even after it got gobbled up and jammed inside the player, he remembered the tune and words, and when Reginald got particularly in the dumps, the tune always came to him.

Reginald didn’t have a singing voice you could call public, but he did have a private one. More of a whisper really.

The long and winding road that leads to your door…

And when he sat in the back there and sang, it was like an orchestra quietly played with him somehow.

If he’d been drinking his favorite beer – a beer we’ll come to – Reginald would cross his eyes slightly and let the fabric roof holes line up and overlap. The exact moment the geometric fabric dots popped into 3D, he could escape for a minute and be grateful for the comfort of his one blessing:

Bobby “The Boil” Boyle, his one-time best friend, minor leagues roommate, and horrible boss, never made it to the Bigs.

“You did, and he didn’t,” he’d remind himself.

As bad as things turned out, that thought always made him nod his head and grin a little bit: a tiny-bit-guilty, only-for-yourself kind of grin. With a grin like that, it’s blue-sky mystery that twenty-one years passed and Reginald never made a single friend in What Cheer, Iowa.

Other than that one week with Cheryl – who we’ll also come to.

As for The Boil, he was a man of his word, and, oh brother, did he let you know it. He showed up to purchase Cougar’s Car Dealership the following week, far earlier than Reginald expected. He wore a plaster cast on his pitching arm. Shoulder to thumb.

It turned out, The Boil had his own personal disaster that August.

He’d been explaining the “pre-payment penalty accounting” to some big lug of a left-fielder out of Memphis who turned out to be surprisingly good at arithmetic – certainly for somebody at 284 pounds with a crew cut.

That left-fielder took a long look at the fine print below the soap dispenser, stood up terrifyingly straight, towered over The Boil, and was not happy. The Boil later explained it, “I must have slipped somehow, Mom.”

The fall broke his pitching arm forever.

“No,” Reginald would sneak in between song verses, “The Boil never made it to the Bigs.

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