“Hot diggity!” cried Mr. Mysterious. “Feel their love, Quint? Feel theirneed? Nothing like a brand-new eight-cylinder super prime A-l Studebaker to make a man feel like Helen just passed through Troy! I’ll stop now that there’s folks enough for arguments to possess and fights to keep.So!”
We stopped dead-center on Main and Arbogast as the moths collected to our flame.
“Is that a brand-new just-out-of-the-showroom Studebaker?” said our town barber. The fuzz behind my ears knew him well.
“Absolutely spanking brand-new,” said Mr. M.
“Iwas here first,Iget to ask!” cried the mayor’s assistant, Mr. Bagadosian.
“Yeah, but I got the money!” A third man stepped into the dashboard light. Mr. Bengstrom, the man who owned the graveyard and everyoneinit.
“Got onlyoneStudebaker now,” said the sheepish voice under the Hood. “Wish I had more.”
That set off a frenzy of remorse and tumult.
“The entire price,” said Mr. M. in the midst of the turmoil, “is eight hundred and fifty dollars. The first among you who slaps a fifty-dollar bill or its equivalent in singles, fives, and tens in my hand gets to pink-slip this mythological warship home.”
No sooner was Mr. Mysterious’ palm out the window than it was plastered with fives, tens, and twenties.
“Quint?”
“Sir?”
“Reach in that cubby and drag out my order forms.”
“Yes,sir!”
“Bengstrom! Cyril A. Bengstrom!” the undertaker cried so he could be heard.
“Be calm, Mr. Bengstrom. The car is yours. Signhere.”
Moments later, Mr. Bengstrom, laughing hysterically, drove off from a sullen mob at Main and Arbogast. He circled us twice to make the abandoned crowd even more depressed then roared off to find a highway and test his craze.
“Don’t fret,” said the voice under the dark Hood. “I got one last Studebaker prime A-l vehicle, or maybe two, waiting back in Gurney. Someone drop me there?”
“Me!” said everyone.
“Sothat’sthe way you function,” said Grandpa. “That’swhy you’re here.”
It was later in the evening with more mosquitoes and fewer knitters and smokers. Another Studebaker, bright red, stood out at the curb. “Wait till they see the sun shine onthisone,” said Mr. Mysterious, laughing gently.
“I have a feeling you’ll sell your entire line this week,” said Grandpa, “and leave us wanting.”
“I’d rather not talk futures and sound uppity, but so it seems.”
“Sly fox.” Grandpa tamped philosophy in his pipe and puffed it out. “Wearing that sack over your head to focus need and provoke talk.”
“It’s more than that.” Mr. M. sucked, tucking a cigarette through the dark material over his mouth. “More than a trick. More than a come-on. More than a passing fancy.”
“What?” said Grandpa.
“What?” I said.
It was midnight and I couldn’t sleep.
Neither could Mr. Mysterious. I crept downstairs and found him in the backyard in a wooden summer recliner perhaps studying the fireflies and beyond them the stars, some holding still, others not.
“Hello, Quint!” he said.
“Mr. Mysterious?” I said.
“Askme.”
“You wear that Hood even when yousleep?”
“All night long every night.”
“For most of your life?”
“Almost most.”
“Last night you said it’s more than a trick, showing off. Whatelse?”
“If I didn’t tell the roomers and your grandpa, why should I tell you, Quint?” said the Hood with no features resting there in the night.
” ‘Cause I want to know.”
“That’s about the best reason in the world. Sit down, Quint. Aren’t the fireflies nice?”
I sat on the wet grass. “Yeah.”
“Okay,” said Mr. Mysterious, and turned his head under his Hood as if he were staring at me. “Here goes. Ever wonder what’s under this Hood, Quint? Ever have the itch to yank it off and see?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“That lady inThe Phantom of the Operadid. Look where it gother.”
“Then shall Itellyou what’s hidden, son?”
“Only if you want to, sir.”
“Funny thing is, I do. This Hood goes back a long way.”
“From when you were a kid?”
“Almost. I can’t recall if I was born this way or something happened. Car accident. Fire. Or some woman laughing at me which burned just as bad, scarred just as terrible. One way or another we fall off buildings or fall out of bed. When we hit the floor it might as well have been off the roof. It takes a long time healing. Maybe never.”
“You mean you don’t remember when you put that thing on?”
“Things fade, Quint. I have lived in confusion a long while. This dark stuff has been such a part of me it might just be my living flesh.”
“Do—”
“Do what, Quint?”
“Do you sometimesshave?”
“No, it’s all smooth. You can imagine me two ways, I suppose. It’s all nightmare under here, all graveyards, terrible teeth, skulls and wounds that won’t heal. Or—”
“Or?”
“Nothing at all. Absolutely nothing. No beard for shaving. No eyebrows. Mostly no nose. Hardly any eyelids, just eyes. Hardly any mouth; a scar. The rest a vacancy, a snowfield, a blank, as if someone had erased me to start over. There. Two ways of guessing. Which do you pick?”
“I can’t.”
“No.”
Mr. Mysterious arose now and stood barefooted on the grass, his Hood pointed at some star constellation.
“You,” I said, at last. “You still haven’t told what you started tonight to tell Grandpa. You came here not just to sell brand-new Studebakers—but for something else?”
“Ah.” He nodded. “Well. I been alone a lot of years. It’s no fun over in Gurney, just selling cars and hiding under this velvet sack. So I decided to come out in the open at last and mix with honest-to-goodness people, make friends, maybe get someone to like me or at least put up with me. You understand, Quint?”
“I’m trying.”
“What good will all this do, living in Green Town and thriving at your supper table and viewing the tree-tops in my cupola tower room?Ask.”
“What good?” I asked.
“What I’m hoping for, Quint, what I’m praying for, son, is that if I delve in the river again, wade in the stream, become part of the flow of folks, people, strangers even, some sort of kind attention, friendship, some sort of half-love will begin to melt and change my face. Over six or eight months or a year, to let life shift my mask without lifting it, so that the wax beneath moves and becomes something more than a nightmare at three A.M. or just nothing at dawn. Any of this make sense, Quint?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“For peopledochange us, don’t they? I mean you run in and out of this house and your grandpa changes you and your grandpa shapes you with words or a hug or your hair tousled or maybe once a year, a slap where it hurts.”
“Twice.”
“Twice, then. And the boarders and roomers talk and you listen and that goes in your ears and out your fingers and that’s change, too. We’re all in the wash, all in the creeks, all in the streams, taking in every morsel of gab, every push from a teacher, every shove from a bully, every look and touch from those strange creatures, foryoucalled women. Sustenance.
It’s all breakfast tea and midnight snacks and you grow on it or you don’t grow, laugh or scowl or don’t have any features one way or the other, butyou’reout there, melting and freezing, running or holding still.
I haven’t done that in years. So just this week I got up my courage—knew how to sell cars but didn’t know how to putmeon sale. I’m taking a chance, Quint, that by next year, this face under the Hood will make itself over, shift at noon or twilight, and I’ll feel it changing because I’m out wading in the stream again and breathing the fresh air and letting people get at me, taking a chance, not hiding behind the windshield of this or that Studebaker.
And at the end of that next year, Quint, I’ll take off my Hood forever.”
At which point, turned away from me, he made a gesture. I saw the dark velvet in his hand as he dropped it in the grass.
“Do you want to see what’s here, Quint?” he asked, quietly.
“No, sir, if you don’t mind.”
“Why not?”
“I’m scared,” I said, and shivered.
“That figures,” he said, at last. “I’ll just stand here a moment and then hide again.”
He took three deep breaths, his back to me, head high, face toward the fireflies and a few constellations. Then the Hood was back in place.
I’m glad, I thought, there’s no moon tonight.
Five days and five Studebakers later (one blue, one black, two tans, and one sunset-red) Mr. Mysterious was sitting out in what he said was his final car, a sun-yellow open roadster, so bright it was a canary with its own cage, when I came strolling out, hands in overall pockets, watching the sidewalk for ants or old unused firecrackers. When Mr. M. saw me he moved over and said, “Try the driver’s seat.”
“Boy!CanI?”
I did, and twirled the wheel and honked the horn, just once, so as not to wake any late-sleepers.
” ‘Fess up, Quint,” said Mr. Mysterious, his Hood pointed out through the windshield.
“Do I look like I need ‘fessing’?”
“You’re ripe-plumful. Begin.”
“I been thinking,” I said.
“I could tell by the wrinkles in your face,” said Mr. M., gently.
“I been thinking about a year from now, and you.”
“That’s mighty nice, son. Continue.”
“I thought, well, maybe next year if you felt you were cured, under that Hood, that your nose was okay and your eyebrows neat, and your mouth good and your complexion—”
I hesitated. The Hood nodded me on.
“Well, I was thinking if you got up one morning and without even putting your hands up to feel underneath you knew the long waiting was over and you were changed, people and things had changed you, the town, everything, and you were great, just great, no way ofevergoing back to nothing.”
“Go on, Quint.”
“Well, if that happened, Mr. Mysterious, and
