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Fort Stockton, Texas

April 1986

April of 1986 was not a particularly reassuring month for anybody who believed things were generally better left unopened.

It began, for Fort Stockton purposes anyway, on Monday night, April 21, when approximately thirty million Americans sat in front of their television sets while Geraldo Rivera spent two hours preparing to open a secret vault that had once belonged to Al Capone. Fort Stockton participated enthusiastically. The television over the counter at the Grounds for Divorce was turned to the special, although Lucinda had originally objected on the grounds that anybody who wanted to spend two hours watching a man discover nothing could sit at the back table and listen to Mayor Goodman. The mayor objected to this characterization, but not strongly enough to surrender his seat.

Hairless B29 had arrived forty minutes early. Rex Hall came straight from the pharmacy. Angus Hopper occupied his regular place with a cup of coffee and the expression of a man who had already decided that whatever was inside Al Capone’s vault wasn’t worth two hours of Geraldo Rivera. Brother Bob was there, Trixie had taken possession of the end of the booth, and even Sheriff Ray Vickers stopped in, although Ray maintained that this was purely coincidental and had nothing whatsoever to do with the possibility that Geraldo might find a body. The presence of a medical examiner standing by in Chicago had improved Hairless’s opinion of the program considerably.

“There’s somebody in there,” Hairless announced confidently.

Angus looked at him over his coffee. “Been in there fifty years?”

“Could be.”

“Then I doubt he’s in a hurry.”

For nearly two hours they watched historians talk about Capone, workmen attack concrete, Geraldo speculate, Geraldo interview people, Geraldo walk around, Geraldo speculate some more, and enough commercial breaks to finance the excavation of three additional vaults. Mayor Goodman spent most of the program developing a theory involving gold bullion, missing federal evidence and a second passageway nobody else had mentioned. Rex thought there might at least be documents. Hairless remained committed to a corpse. Angus ordered pie.

Then Geraldo Rivera finally opened Al Capone’s vault.

There was essentially nothing inside.

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Hairless stared at the television as though ABC had personally stolen something from him. “That’s it?”

“Apparently,” Rex said.

“We’ve been sitting here two hours.”

Angus took another bite of pie. “That’s on you.”

Mayor Goodman immediately announced that he had suspected from the beginning that the vault would be empty, which would have been a more impressive observation had he not spent the previous ninety minutes explaining where Al Capone probably hid the gold. Lucinda switched off the television and looked around the diner. “Anybody else got something we can open?”

Nobody did.

At least not that night.

Five days later, a nuclear reactor exploded in the Soviet Union.

Fort Stockton did not immediately understand what had happened at Chernobyl because almost nobody did. The first reports were vague. Something had happened at a Soviet nuclear power plant in Ukraine. Radiation had been detected in Scandinavia. The Soviets were saying very little, which Hairless regarded as proof that whatever had happened was considerably worse than whatever they were admitting. For once, Hairless’s system of international intelligence analysis was essentially correct.

Reactor Number Four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant had exploded early on April 26, throwing radioactive material into the atmosphere. The following day Soviet authorities ordered the evacuation of Pripyat, a city of roughly fifty thousand people that had existed largely to support the plant. Families were told to take documents, essential belongings and enough food for a few days. Buses carried them away from homes many of them would never occupy again.

At the Grounds for Divorce, the television remained on.

The conversation was quieter this time.

There are some events even Fort Stockton knows not to improve upon.

Rex explained radiation as well as he could. Brother Bob wondered aloud about the families who had been forced from their homes. Sheriff Ray watched the pictures coming across the television and said very little. Hairless, who normally regarded silence as an emergency requiring his personal intervention, was quiet too.

Eventually Mayor Goodman asked whether the radioactive cloud could reach Texas.

Everyone looked at Rex.

Rex slowly removed his glasses. “Why are you looking at me?”

“You’re the pharmacist,” Mayor Goodman said.

“I sell prescriptions.”

“Well, you’re the closest thing we’ve got.”

“To what?”

“A nuclear physicist.”

Rex looked around the table and realized, with some alarm, that this was probably true.

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By Monday morning, the possibility of radioactive fallout reaching Pecos County had been discussed at the Piggly Wiggly, Rex Hall Drug, the post office, the courthouse, three churches, two service stations and one table at the Grounds for Divorce whose occupants had collectively completed perhaps four college science courses, none more recently than 1968. Somewhere during the discussion Hairless learned the term half-life and immediately began using it in contexts where it did not belong. Mayor Goodman advised two people to wash their vegetables.

And that was approximately when the Zimmer appeared.

Nobody in Fort Stockton had ever seen anything quite like it. That was partly because nobody had ever seen a Zimmer Quicksilver before, but mostly because there was no immediately obvious explanation for why such a thing should exist.

The car arrived on Dickinson Avenue shortly before ten Monday morning, bright red and approximately as subtle as a cardinal landing in a bowl of oatmeal. It had an enormous chrome grille, enormous chrome bumpers, wire wheels with whitewall tires, a long hood, a compact passenger compartment and a rear deck that appeared to continue several zip codes beyond where Pontiac had originally intended the automobile to end. The overall effect suggested that somebody had shown a Pontiac Fiero photographs of a prewar luxury automobile and then left the two of them alone overnight with a fiberglass catalog and no adult supervision.

Hairless saw it first.

He was halfway through his second cup of coffee when he stopped talking.

This alone caused Angus to turn around.

The Zimmer eased into a parking space across Dickinson Avenue, sunlight exploding from enough chrome to interfere briefly with traffic coming from the west. Hairless stood and walked toward the window. “What in the hell is that?”

Within thirty seconds everybody at the back table was standing behind him. The script on the front fender said Quicksilver, with Zimmer beneath it, which Rex read aloud and Angus immediately pointed out was not expertise so much as literacy.

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The driver got out. He was perhaps fifty-five, silver-haired, neatly dressed and carrying a leather briefcase. He locked the Zimmer and walked toward Bluebonnet Loan & Trust without noticing that seven people inside the Grounds for Divorce were watching him. Hairless was already halfway to the front door before Lucinda spotted him.

“Hairless.”

He stopped.

“Don’t touch it.”

“I wasn’t going to touch it.”

“You were.”

“I was going to look.”

“Look with your hands in your pockets.”

By the time Angus, Rex and Mayor Goodman joined him on the sidewalk, Hairless was circling the Zimmer with both hands shoved deeply into his jeans. The car was magnificent and ridiculous, and somehow neither quality diminished the other. Its red paint gleamed in the West Texas sun. Chrome occupied enough of the front end to create measurable glare. The fourteen-inch wire wheels looked as though they belonged on something driven by a man whose family name appeared above the entrance to a bank.

Then Hairless noticed the interior.

“Red.”

Angus peered through the glass. “Whole damn thing’s red.”

The bucket seats were red. The dashboard was red. The door panels were red. The broad center console was red. Even the thick mouton carpeting was red. Wood trim appeared here and there apparently because somebody at Zimmer had eventually realized they had exhausted the available shades of red.

Mayor Goodman leaned closer to the window. “Radiation.”

Rex turned toward him. “What?”

“Could be.”

“What could be?”

“The color.”

Angus stared at the mayor. “The car is painted red.”

“Inside too.”

“Yes.”

“That’s unusual.”

Hairless, who had already spent most of the weekend studying Chernobyl through network television and whatever Rex could remember from pharmacy school, looked genuinely interested. “You think it’s radioactive?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You said radiation.”

“I said we shouldn’t rule anything out.”

“We can rule that out,” Rex said.

Mayor Goodman moved around the front of the car, where he encountered a mystery that was considerably more difficult to dismiss. The Zimmer possessed enough hood to cover a Buick straight-eight, a spare Buick straight-eight and perhaps a small riding mower. Yet nothing about the car seemed to indicate what kind of engine might actually be beneath it.

“Where’s the engine?”

Nobody knew.

This changed everything.

Hairless crouched in front of the enormous chrome grille and tried to see through it. Rex suggested that perhaps the car was electric. Angus asked whether he meant like a golf cart. Rex pointed out that electric vehicles did exist. Angus pointed toward the Zimmer’s vast chrome bumper and said, “That’s a hell of a golf cart.”

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Within twenty minutes, Fort Stockton had developed three principal theories concerning the Zimmer Quicksilver. The first was that it was an experimental Cadillac. The second was that it was European. The third, advanced primarily by Mayor Goodman, was that it incorporated some form of nuclear technology. Ordinarily the third theory would have died before reaching the Piggly Wiggly, but Chernobyl had been on television all weekend and Fort Stockton was temporarily experiencing elevated background levels of nuclear vocabulary.

By lunchtime, seventeen people had inspected the Zimmer.

The owner finally emerged from Bluebonnet Loan & Trust at twelve fifteen and stopped when he discovered a semicircle of strangers standing around his automobile. He hesitated before asking, “Can I help you?”

Hairless pointed at the car. “What is it?”

“A Zimmer Quicksilver.”

“We got that far.”

The man smiled. “It’s based on a Pontiac Fiero.”

There was a brief silence.

Angus looked at the Zimmer’s immense hood, then at the owner, then back at the hood.

“No.”

The owner laughed. “It is.”

Hairless immediately crouched again to look underneath, apparently believing that a Fiero chassis might be visible from the sidewalk if approached with sufficient determination. The owner explained that Zimmer Motorcars in Florida took the Fiero platform, stretched the car’s overall length and fitted it with custom fiberglass bodywork, chrome bumpers and all the other ornamentation presently causing a traffic problem on Dickinson Avenue. Underneath remained the Fiero’s transverse 2.8-liter fuel-injected V6, mounted behind the passenger compartment and driving the rear wheels through a three-speed automatic transaxle.

“Engine’s behind the seats,” the owner explained.

Every man present turned toward the rear of the Zimmer.

Mayor Goodman looked disappointed. “Then what’s under the hood?”

The owner smiled.

“Storage.”

Nobody spoke for several seconds.

Somewhere, spiritually, Geraldo Rivera felt a disturbance.

Hairless pointed toward the hood. “Open it.”

The owner looked at him. “Why?”

“We need to see.”

Angus nodded gravely. “We’ve had some trouble with that lately.”

The owner, who had apparently been in Fort Stockton long enough to recognize when resistance was futile, unlocked the car and released the hood. Everyone gathered around while he raised it.

They looked inside.

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Storage.

No engine. No turbine. No secret Cadillac prototype. No experimental Soviet reactor. No Al Capone. Just luggage space.

Hairless stared into the compartment for several seconds before shaking his head. “This whole damn month is turning out like this.”

The owner lowered the hood, then made the mistake of opening the driver’s door.

The interior stopped conversation again. Red bucket seats sat on either side of a broad center console. Red leatherette and color-coordinated trim covered almost every available surface. There was wood trim, air conditioning, cruise control and a Delco AM/FM cassette stereo. The leather-wrapped three-spoke steering wheel framed an 85-mph speedometer and a 6,500-rpm tachometer, while the thick red mouton carpeting looked deep enough to lose loose change, cuff links and possibly a Chihuahua.

Angus bent down and looked inside. “This is a Fiero?”

“Underneath.”

That word caught everyone’s attention.

Underneath.

It became the word of the week.

Because underneath was apparently where April of 1986 had decided to put everything important.

Underneath Al Capone’s vault was nothing. Underneath Soviet secrecy was a catastrophe. Underneath the Zimmer’s outrageous fiberglass body was a Pontiac Fiero. And underneath Hairless’s claim that he had understood the automobile from the moment he saw it was absolutely nothing whatsoever.

On Tuesday, April 29, television brought another disaster. The Los Angeles Central Library was burning. Fire raged through the building for hours, destroying hundreds of thousands of books and damaging hundreds of thousands more with smoke and water. Rex watched part of the coverage from behind the pharmacy counter and found himself more affected by it than he expected. He spent much of his life surrounded by printed material, from prescription references and medical journals to newspapers, magazines and the paperback westerns he kept beneath the counter and denied reading. Books were knowledge made physical. They could survive decades and centuries, passing things from one human being to another long after the people who wrote them were gone.

Until suddenly they couldn’t.

That evening Rex carried the thought with him to the Grounds for Divorce, where the Zimmer remained parked across the street. Its owner was apparently staying in Fort Stockton for several days on business, which meant the town had adopted his automobile without consulting him.

Hairless had spent the afternoon researching it and now knew its horsepower.

“One-forty.”

Angus looked unimpressed. “For that whole car?”

“Two-point-eight-liter V6.”

“That’s it?”

“Mid-engine.”

“We know where the engine is.”

“Independent suspension.”

“Fine.”

“Four-wheel disc brakes.”

“Good.”

“Electronic fuel injection.”

Angus looked through the window at the Quicksilver. “Still looks like Liberace designed a Fiero.”

Trixie, who had arrived halfway through the specifications, objected. “I like it.”

Four men looked at her.

“It’s dramatic.”

Hairless frowned. “It’s a man’s car.”

Trixie looked through the window at the red upholstery, red dashboard, red console, red mouton carpeting and wood trim. “Then apparently the man owns a lot of shoes.”

Lucinda laughed from behind the counter.

The next morning brought April’s final contribution. Somewhere in Massachusetts, Ashrita Furman completed 8,341 consecutive forward rolls over more than twelve miles. Nobody at the Grounds for Divorce knew who Ashrita Furman was. Nobody understood why he had done this. And nobody could determine what set of circumstances might cause a man to reach his seven-thousandth somersault and conclude that stopping now would somehow represent failure.

Hairless watched the television report and repeated the number aloud. “Eight thousand three hundred forty-one.”

Rex nodded. “More than twelve miles.”

Angus buttered his toast.

“Could’ve driven.”

That should have been the end of it.

It wasn’t.

At approximately ten thirty that morning, the owner of the Zimmer walked into the Grounds for Divorce. He had heard about the somersault record too. More importantly, after three days in Fort Stockton, he had begun to understand the local operating system. He ordered coffee, sat beside Hairless at the counter and asked the question Lucinda had been hoping nobody would ever ask.

“Want to drive it?”

Hairless stopped breathing.

Angus looked up from his toast. Rex lowered his newspaper. Lucinda closed her eyes.

“No,” she said.

The owner looked at her. “I was asking him.”

“I know.”

Five minutes later Hairless was behind the wheel of the Zimmer Quicksilver, with Angus in the passenger seat because Angus had made the tactical mistake of standing too close to the car when Hairless asked who wanted to go. The red cabin wrapped around them. Hairless adjusted the steering wheel, studied the gauges and turned the key. The 2.8-liter V6 fired behind him.

Behind him.

Hairless smiled.

That alone was worth something.

The Quicksilver pulled away from the curb, went east on Dickinson Avenue, reappeared ten minutes later going west, passed the Grounds for Divorce again going east and eventually disappeared altogether. Lucinda watched through the window until the Zimmer vanished.

“Where are they going?”

Rex folded his newspaper.

“Probably twelve miles.”

They returned forty minutes later. Hairless climbed out looking unusually thoughtful. Angus climbed out looking slightly ill, although whether this was attributable to the Zimmer, Hairless or forty minutes spent enclosed with Hairless remained uncertain.

Rex asked the obvious question. “Well?”

Hairless looked at the car.

It wasn’t fast, at least not in the way its body suggested it ought to be. One hundred forty horsepower was perfectly adequate, but the Quicksilver’s purpose was clearly not to rearrange anybody’s internal organs. It rode well. It handled well. The four-wheel disc brakes worked nicely. The air conditioning was cold. The seats were comfortable. The V6 sounded pleasant enough from behind the passenger compartment.

But none of those things explained it.

“It’s not what you think it is,” Hairless finally said.

Angus nodded.

That was exactly right.

The Zimmer looked like an exotic automobile, but underneath it was a Fiero. The enormous hood promised an enormous engine, but underneath it was luggage. The extravagant body suggested immense power, but behind the seats there were 140 perfectly respectable horses doing a job the bodywork had advertised as requiring considerably more.

Yet none of this made the Zimmer fraudulent.

That was the strange part.

It wasn’t pretending to be a Ferrari. It wasn’t pretending to be a Rolls-Royce. It wasn’t even particularly interested in pretending not to be a Pontiac. It was simply somebody’s idea of what an automobile could look like if nobody in the room ever found the courage to say, “That’s probably enough chrome.”

There was something almost admirable about that.

April had been a month when appearances repeatedly failed to explain what lay beneath them. A heavily promoted secret vault concealed almost nothing. A Soviet nuclear plant concealed a catastrophe until radiation itself began telling the world what had happened. A great library filled with accumulated human knowledge proved frighteningly vulnerable to fire. A man in Massachusetts discovered that forward progress did not necessarily require remaining upright.

And then there was the Zimmer.

Its secret was harmless.

Underneath all that extravagance was simply a Pontiac.

By May, the Quicksilver was gone from Dickinson Avenue, although nobody could say exactly when it left because Fort Stockton had finally stopped watching it continuously.

The story should have ended there.

Somehow, Howard Cosell got involved.

Exactly how Howard Cosell learned that a Zimmer Quicksilver had spent several days parked across from the Grounds for Divorce was never satisfactorily established. Mayor Goodman claimed he had contacted ABC. Nobody believed him, although everybody admitted this was precisely the sort of thing Mayor Goodman might do.

Nevertheless, during a brief television segment looking back on the stranger events of April, Cosell found himself seated between Bruce Jenner and O.J. Simpson. This was the sort of combination television produced in the 1980s without feeling any obligation to explain itself.

Cosell approached the subject with the grave authority of a man preparing to announce either the heavyweight championship of the world or the fall of a moderately important government. During the previous ten days, he explained, Geraldo Rivera had opened Al Capone’s vault and found essentially nothing. A nuclear reactor had exploded at Chernobyl. Pripyat had been evacuated. The Los Angeles Central Library had burned. Ashrita Furman had performed 8,341 consecutive somersaults. And, in Fort Stockton, Texas, a red Zimmer Quicksilver had appeared containing a Pontiac Fiero underneath.

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Cosell turned first to Jenner. “Bruce, you are an Olympic champion, a man whose athletic career was built upon discipline, preparation and the relentless pursuit of human excellence. What, then, do you make of a man performing eight thousand three hundred forty-one consecutive somersaults?”

Jenner thought about this for a moment.

“That’s a lot of somersaults, Howard.”

Cosell nodded solemnly. “Indeed.”

Then he turned to Simpson. “And you, O.J. You have spent a considerable portion of your professional life associated with automobiles, travel and the Hertz Corporation. What is your assessment of the Zimmer Quicksilver?”

Simpson studied the photograph Cosell handed him.

“That’s a Fiero?”

“Underneath.”

O.J. looked at the photograph again.

“Doesn’t look like one.”

And there it was.

The great lesson of April 1986.

Perhaps the only lesson available.

Things were not always what they appeared to be. Sometimes you opened a vault and found nothing. Sometimes you looked beneath government assurances and discovered disaster. Sometimes centuries of accumulated knowledge could disappear in smoke. Sometimes a perfectly sane human being decided the most efficient way to travel twelve miles involved putting his feet over his head 8,341 times.

And sometimes you lifted an enormous hood expecting to find an enormous engine and discovered a place to put your luggage.

Fort Stockton understood this better than most towns. We had Hairless B29. We had Mayor Goodman. We had the Grounds for Divorce. We had been living with the difference between appearance and reality for years.

The Zimmer Quicksilver simply put whitewalls on it.

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