TickTock

One

Out of a cloudless sky on a windless November day came a sudden shadow that swooped across the bright aqua Corvette. Tommy Phan was standing beside the car, in a pleasantly warm autumn sunshine, holding out his hand to accept the keys from Jim Shine, the salesman, when the fleeting shade touched him. He heard a brief thrumming like frantic wings. Glancing up, he expected to glimpse a sea gull, but not a single bird was in sight.

Unaccountably, the shadow had chilled him as though a cold wind had come with it, but the air was utterly still. He shivered, felt a blade of ice touch his palm, and jerked his hand back, even as he realized, too late, that it wasn't ice but merely the keys to the Corvette. He looked down in time to see them hit the pavement.

He said, "Sorry," and started to bend over.

Jim Shine said, "No, no. I'll get 'em."

Perplexed, frowning, Tommy raised his gaze to the sky again. Unblemished blue. Nothing in flight.

The nearest trees, along the nearby street, were phoenix palms with huge crowns of fronds, offering no branches on which a bird could alight. No birds were perched on the roof of the car dealership, either.

"Pretty exciting," Shine said.

Tommy looked at him, slightly disoriented. "Huh?"

Shine was holding out the keys again. He resembled a pudgy choirboy with guiless blue eyes. Now, when he winked, his face squinched into a leer that was meant to be comic but that seemingly disconcertingly like a glimpse of genuine well-hidden decadence. "Getting that first 'vette is almost as good as getting your first piece of ass."

Tommy was trembling and still inexplicably cold. He accepted the keys. They no longer felt like ice.

The aqua Corvette waited, as sleek and cool as a high mountain spring slipping downhill over polished stones. Overall length: one hundred seventy-eight and a half inches. Wheelbase: ninety-six and two tenths inches. Seventy and seven-tenths in width at the dogleg, forty-six and three-tenths inches high, with a minimum ground clearance of four and two-tenths inches.

Tommy knew the technical specifications of this car better than any preacher knew the details of any Bible story. He was Vietnamese-American, and America was his religion; the highway his church, and the Corvette was about to become the sacred vessel by which he partook of communion.

Although he was no prude, Tommy was mildly offended when Shine compared the transcendent experience of Corvette ownership to sex. For the moment, at least, the Corvette was better than any bedroom games, more exciting, purer, the very embodiment of speed and graceand freedom.

Tommy shook Jim Shine's soft, slightly moist hand and slid into the driver's seat. Thirty-six and a half inches of headroom. Forty-yep inches of legroom. His heart was pounding. He was no longer chilled. In fact, he felt flushed. He had already plugged his cellular phone into the cigarette lighter. The Corvette was his.

Crouching at the open window, grinning, Shine said, "You're not just a mere mortal any more."

Tommy started the engine. A ninety degree V-8. Cast iron block. Aluminum heads with hydraulic lifters.

Jim Shine raised his voice. "No longer like other men. Now you're a god."

Tommy knew that Shine spoke with a good-humored mockery of the cult of the automobile- yet he half believed that it was true. Behind the wheel of the Corvette, with this childhood dream fullfilled, he seemed to be full of power of the car, exalted.

With the Corvette still in park, he eased his foot down on the accelerator, and the engine responded with a deepthroated growl. Five-point-seven liters of displacement with a ten-and-a-half-to-one compression ratio. Three hundred horsepower.

Rising from a crouch, stepping back, Shine said, "Have fun."

"Thanks, Jim."

Tommy Phan drove away from the Chevrolet dealership into a California afternoon so blue and high and deep with promise that it was possible to believe he would live forever. With no purpose except to enjoy the Corvette, he went west to Newport Beach and then South on the fabled Pacific Coast Highway, past the enormous harbor full of yachts, through Corona Del Mar, along the newly developed hills called Newport Coast, with beaches and gently breaking surf and the sun-dappled ocean to his right, listening to an oldies radio station that rocked with the Beach Boys, the Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Roy Orbison.

At a stoplight in Laguna Beach, he pulled up beside a classic Corvette: a silver 1963 Sting Ray with boat-tail rear end and split rear window. The driver, an aging surfer type with blond hair and a walrus mustache, looked at the new aqua 'vette and then at Tommy. Tommy made a circle of his thumb and forefinger, letting the stranger know the Sting Ray was a fine machine, and the guy replied with a smile and a thumbs-up sign, which made Tommy feel like part of a secret club.

As the end of the century approached, some people said that the American dream was almost extinguished and that the California dream was ashes. Nevertheless, for Tommy Phan on this wonderful autumn afternoon, the promise of his country and the promise of the coast were burning bright.

The sudden swooping shadow and the inexplicable chill were all but forgotten.

~

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