Straight Man

explains, “and I didn’t pay what’s on that sticker either.”
    “I’m glad to hear it, Mr. Purty,” I tell him, noting the price on the sticker. I didn’t know used pickups could cost this much. Or new ones, for that matter.
    “I chewed him way down from there,” he says, unself-consciously.
    “You what?”
    “Got him to come way down,” Mr. Purty explains. “Young kid. Twenties. Played him for two weeks. Every afternoon I come in and look it over, ask him a new question, then leave. Every afternoon, a different question. How many miles to the gallon? You sure it ain’t been in an accident? How firm’s that price? Then I leave. Next afternoon,I’m back. Same thing. Finally, he don’t know whether to eat shit, chase rabbits, or bark at the moon. He didn’t want to give it to me for my price, but he finally had to. Put brand-new tires on it too. Radials, not them recraps.”
    I study Mr. Purty for a sign that he’s made a joke, but nothing. When I’m with him, I often feel like I’m the one who should be wearing a hearing aid. “It’s a beauty,” I tell him, though I know this isn’t the response Mr. Purty is really after. What he really wants is for me to ask him how much below sticker he got the kid to go. Previous conversations with Mr. Purty have revealed that he’s a man obsessed with deals, the kind of man who’d rather have something he doesn’t really want at a heavy discount than the thing he yearns for at full price. Cheap, is the way my mother sums him up.
    “Get in,” he says after a beat. “Have a listen to the stereo.”
    I start to say no, to tell him I’m in kind of a hurry. Despite Julie’s propensity for melodrama, her phone call, the more I think about it, has me worried. But I also realize that this means a lot to Mr. Purty, so I go around the passenger side and climb up and in. I’m a tall man with long legs, and even for me it’s a pretty good step up. I can’t help smiling when I think of my mother, “the aristocat,” who will require a helpful hand under her fanny.
    Mr. Purty turns the key in the ignition to its auxiliary position and slips a tape into the stereo. Patsy Cline’s voice thunders forth from the speakers at a decibel level loud enough to wake Patsy Cline. Mr. Purty lets it stay that way for a few seconds, until he’s sure I’ve had the full benefit of the system. “Good speakers,” he says when he’s turned the music down so that we can converse. “You’re like me, though, I can tell. You don’t like your music loud.”
    I admit that this is true.
    “How ’bout your ma?” he wants to know. “I bet she don’t like it loud either.”
    “You do that to her, she’ll have you arrested.”
    I can tell that Mr. Purty takes this warning seriously. Like most of our conversations, the purpose of this one is to allow me the opportunity to give him tips on how to handle my mother. I know her better than he does, is his thinking. What he doesn’t quite grasp is the size of the gap between my knowledge and his own. Even if he managed toget the phrase “chewed him down” correct, he’d be surprised to discover that anyone would object to it. He imagines that what his own approach needs is a little fine-tuning. I don’t even know how to begin to tell him how wrong he is.
    He punches Patsy out of the tape deck, inters her in the special compartment behind the gearshift, slips in another tape. It’s Willie Nelson this time, and Willie can’t see nothin’ but blue skies. “I picked up Patsy for your ma,” Mr. Purty explains. “Me, I like Willie. What about your pa?”
    “Unless he’s changed, he prefers silence.”
    Mr. Purty shrugs, as if to acknowledge there’s no middle ground between those who like music and those who prefer silence.
    I smooth my hand over the dash, admire the interior of this truck that Mr. Purty, poor bastard, has purchased to impress my mother. “Pretty spiffy,” I say, hoping one more compliment may release me from the cab. Fat chance.
    “It’s got antibrakes,” he explains, pointing at the floor, as if you could tell antilock brakes by looking at the pedal. “Extracab.”
    I admire the space between the seat and the back of the cab.
    “That tark’s usually extra,” he explains, “but I made the kid give it to me for no charge.”
    I myself have no idea what a tark might cost because I don’t know what a tark is, until I follow Mr. Purty’s gaze out the back window and into the bed of the pickup