Free Fear Itself by Duffy Prendergast Page A

him that I wished that I could, but I just couldn’t afford it. To which he replied in his raspy baritone voice,
    “How’s a dollar sound to you? Can you afford that?”
    His eyes bugged out grandly and he had to reach out to catch his teeth as they almost slipped from his mouth when he said that . He had lost so much weight since he had been diagnosed with cancer that his dentures no longer fit his gums causing him to look even gaunter than he was. I refused his offer at first. “Look,” he said, “I’m dying and I checked with the big guy and he said ‘no John you can’t take the mustang with you to hell .’ So what am I supposed to do with it? My kids never cared much for old cars. They’d just sell the Mustang. I want you to have it. You’ll take care of it. You’ll appreciate it.”
    So I struck a deal with him whereby I would tend his yard until he “croaked” and the car would be mine. He signed the deed over to me a few days later but I kept the Mustang parked in his garage as I had planned to surprise Catherine with it on her birthday which wasn’t until January twentieth. Catherine didn’t make it that far so it was time, as I saw it, to collect my vessel and escape.
    I walked through the garage man-door, past his greying wooden tool bench (covered with soiled red oil rags and two tins of oil- soaked engine parts) and his tall red mechanic’s tool box and his old blue air compressor and his red five gallon gasoline can and the sapphire- blue mustang convertible covered with a white tarp, and up the steps through the kitchen and into his living room. John and I had a comfortable arrangement where I was permitted to enter without knocking since his wife had died a few years earlier and he lived alone. I was welcome anytime, he said, although I wasn’t quite sure he meant that to mean the wee hours of the morning.
    I found John asleep in his ratty old lime-green recliner beneath the heat-lamp that he had hanging above the chair. The heat lamp had scorched a hole in the top of the recliner once when he had the light drooping too low from its flexible mechanical arm and the burnt cavity at the top of the chair was covered with silver duct-tape.
    John was snoring so I whispered, “Good morning John.”
    “Whaaa?” his eyes popped open like two eggs on a skillet, wide and white with milky-yellow-grey irises. His frazzled white hair stood out in tufts above his large ears. His jaw was thin, and a matte of thick grey stubble graced his wrinkled pale face which was huddled above a teepee of yellowish-white wool blankets.
    “Matt?” he squinted at me and then looked toward the window as if measuring the time of day by the amount of sunlight being broadcast into his living room , “What are you doing up so early?”
    “I’m sorry to bother you John.” I felt a little guilty for bugging him at seven in the morning.
    “It’s alright. The hour of the day doesn’t mean much at this stage of the game.” He reached for a grizzled yellow handkerchief and wiped his nose. “What brings you over here at this hour?”
    “I have to go John. I’ve come to say goodbye…and to take the car if that’s okay with you.”
    “Couldn’t wait til her birthday to give it to her huh?” He smiled big and his teeth appeared large against his gaunt grey face.
    He obviously hadn’t been watching the television news and I knew that he didn’t receive the newspaper anymore (he told me that the news of this world didn’t mean much when you got close to the next) and he evidently hadn’t been out of the house to receive the news of Catherine’s demise or my incrimination from his friends or neighbors. John said that they all thought that death was contagious and so they kept away.
    I didn’t want to waste a lot of time so I told a lie, “Yeah, I spilled the beans to her. We’re going to take a few weeks and head to Myrtle Beach and enjoy some sunshine. I thought it would be a good time. Do you mind if I take her