The patch held. All the way back up the highway Joe entertained nightmare visions of a calamitous blowout – the tire shreds, the car fishtails to the ditch, and he spends the night in the front seat looking up at the stars, setting fire to his stock to keep from losing his fingers. That would be rich. All the while the boss would be at some New Year’s Eve party marinating his liver and getting his giblets tossed by chorus girls. But he knew that wasn’t the case; the boss was probably at home with his wife, sitting in a chair, snoring by eleven with a book in his lap. At best a chaste dry peck on the wife’s cheek when the clock bonged in ’55.

The patch held, and the road was dry. He lost the radio around one – fine, nothing but twitchy hillbilly music. At two he pulled over on the shoulder to take a leak, and the only car he’d seen in an hour roared past, horn blaring; it was a little unnerving to think the guy had been behind him for the duration of the trip, just out of the sight of his rear-view mirror. At three he realized he was falling asleep, and he began to watch the fields for motel signs. Not a one, of course. He saw one around Sadieville, but the sign was coming off in strips, which suggested it was not a going concern. Probably offered free telegraphs in all room. He woke up a motel clerk in Corinth at 3:30, got a key, staggered through the door and slept in his clothes. The clerk woke him up at nine by opening the door and banging it into the chain – he muttered an apology, said he forgot Joe was in here, and retreated. Joe splashed his face with water, smoothed his hair back with his palms, and left. The clerk was standing outside smoking a cigarette, leaning against a cart stacked with towels. Not even a thank you. Not even a sorry.

Thirty miles down the road he realized he’d left his hat in the room. Maybe this was an omen. Some Chinese-style proverb. Ill fortune betideth him who loses his hat the first day of the year. Then again, this wasn’t China. And they probably didn’t say betideth, even in the middle ages. Even in Chinese.

Drive on.

The next morning he was back in Cleveland, still tired; the house was freezing when he got back, and the motel nap had thrown him off. He didn’t sleep until two, and the idiot birds woke him at six. Now he was in his second-best suit, grip in hand, standing in the hall of the 10th floor of the Hewitt Building, ready for the first workday of the year, looking at the name on the door.

Midwest Match and Novelty was painted on the pebbled glass in black and gold letters. It was no more impressive now than it was the day he first showed up for an interview, he thought. A guy expects a modern office with abstract art on the wall, blonde wood tables, blonde wood desks, blonde blondes typing or filing, brushed-metal lamps with those modern cone-shaped shades like they stole them off a rocket ship. Some place that looked like those offices in movies where career girls were always falling in love with a cad in Technicolor. But this was Cleveland; the modern world took the long road getting here.

Midwest Match and Novelty’s name had been painted in 1941, back when the boss opened up shop. If you looked close you could see the brushwork. Joe wondered if that guy was still around, sitting in the basemen waiting for someone to request a painted name, his brushes stiff as a dead squirrel. New tenants had signs hung by the door, nameplates made cheap at a stamping outfit, slid into a cheap metal bracket. A old tenant moved out, maintenance scraped the name off the window and put in a bracket. Joe wondered if the guy who did the painting now did nothing but take the names off. Hope not. Hell of a way to spend the end of your career.

He entered the office. There was a small waiting area with two gunmetal-grey chairs with black cushions, a tall spindly ashtray between them. A table with some magazines – American Rifle, Look, Saturday Evening Post back from the days when Franklin edited it, probably, and some dame rags from the boss’ wife. (Nice lady. Dry and churchy, but okay.) Another door led to a hallway – the door on the right was Joe’s glorified closet, the door on the left led to the other salesman’s office, and the boss lived down the hall. The other salesman didn’t design matches, though. That was Joe’s job.

“Hello? Who’s there?” the boss called. He leaned through the doorframe. A red-radish face on a pear-shaped body, glasses halfway down his shiny cuke of a nose. “Hell, Joe. Happy New Year!”

Joe liked him, but it was the way you liked a tree you passed every day, or the way you liked your neighbor’s cat. Nothing deep. Most of all he liked the boss for giving him a job. Of course the boss had neglected to mention the part about selling matches as well as designing them, and it had only taken a few days before the boss made it clear that “designing” meant taking pictures from the ready-art books and arranging them in unsurprising designs. But it wasn’t from malice. The guy just didn’t have the heart to tell him. As the months passed and Joe came up with new designs that sold better than the same junk MMN had been selling for years, the boss had eased up on him. In fact the boss seemed a little scared of him, sometimes. Like Joe would invent a matchbook that would take over the world, or something.

“Happy New Year to you too.”

“Well, it’s an odd numbered year,” the boss said. “We can just hope for the best.”

“What’s with odd numbered years?”

“Oh, I don’t know. They make me uneasy.”

“Chinese call them ‘The Years of the Lost Hats.’”

The boss pushed his glasses up and peered at Joe. “You look beat. You didn’t drive back all night, did you?”

Joe shrugged. “Except for the parts where I stopped, yeah. It wasn’t that bad. I like to drive.”

“Must be 400 miles!”

“Some of them paved, too. I laid over in Corinth.”

“Ah.” The boss nodded, as if he they were sage veterans of the road: Corinth, know it well, watch out for the bulls, ask for Sadie. The boss always liked to talk about his days as a salesman, but as far as Joe could tell he just drove around town and sold matchbooks and buttons to fellow Elks members. He liked to tell a tale about a Negro bar in Cleveland, but he told it every time.

“Anyway, I got that order to your old . . . associate. Everything’s fine. I just stopped in to see if you need me today. If you don’t I have to run the car in for a soft tire. Got a flat in Somerset and I’m not sure how long the patch’ll hold.”

“Oh, go ahead, there’s nothing pressing today. Did I tell you about that drugstore account? You can get to it tomorrow, no rush.”

“I did it before I left,” Joe said. “It’s on your desk.”

The boss looked at his desk, which was empty except for a one manila envelopes.

What did the man do all day?
-------

“You take a nail?” the mechanic said, peering at the patch. “’Cause nine times out of ten she’s a nail.”

“What’s the one time?”

The mechanic looked at Joe, puzzled. “What’s the one time what.”

“The one time it’s not a nail.”

“Oh. Glass.”

“Really? You’d think that would be more frequent. I mean, a guy sees more glass in a day than nails. You walk into a bar, it’s all glass. Grocery store, glass. Buy a pop, it’s glass. It’s not like guys throw buckets of nails out the window.”

“Well you’d be surprised,” said the mechanic. He sounded annoyed. Joe wanted to ask if he’d like to rethink that nails-glass ratio, but he let it ride.

“Okay, you need a new tire,” the mechanic said, wiping his hands on a rag. There was something about mechanics wiping their hands that always made Joe think about Pontius Pilate. “I can give you a set of four for $62.50, that’s this week’s special price. That’s a good deal.”

Of course, that’s what Barabbas thought. “Yeah,” Joe said. “Well. I just hate to spend that much on tires all at once. It’s like buying a box spring for the guest room, you know? It’s not exactly a big lift for your daily life.”

The mechanic, who probably had a hot rod and spent half his income on tires and the other half on tire catalogs, shrugged.

“Or I can do the Guardsmens for $58.50 with labor. Or I can replace this one for $13.50 plus labor and rotate the rest.”

Joe considered saying he needn’t bother, the tires got rotated every time he drove the car. But he figured the man had heard that one before. Hourly. “One’s fine. How long?”

The mechanic – Harv, it said on his jumpsuit in orange embroidered letters – looked around the bays, all of which were empty. “Hour,” he said.

Maybe the guy was expecting a noon rush. Well, he’d go upstairs and see if he could find something in men’s wear. This was when the bargains were good, where all the duds they couldn’t move in Santa season got marked down hard, and a guy could afford them without giving up bowling for a week. Joe took the escalator up, past the noisy main floor where pretty young women sprayed perfume on ordinary older ones, up past women’s clothing, up to men’s wear. Mostly deserted. He waved off a clerk and wandered from rack to rack, looking at the ugly remainders. He felt the clerk’s eyes on his neck, waiting for him to choose the wrong shirt. Joe turned around, and saw the clerk look away. Joe picked up a white shirt and held it up.

“You have this in plaid?” he asked. The clerk just stared, trying to decide how to deal with the barbarian. “Never mind, I see one.”

He got a new shirt – white, thin collar, a trio of embroidered triangles over the breast pocket. They looked modern and stylish, but he couldn’t quite say why, except that shirts didn’t have them last year. It looked like something you’d wear around blonde wood.

The car was ready when he went back down; while Harv wrote up the invoice Joe studied the matchbooks by the cash register. Not bad. Not much you could do with tires, really. Give them a face and hands and feet and make a mascot: Tommy Tire Sez: check your tread! That sort of thing.

He drove away expecting the car to ride differently, but it seemed the same. Fourteen bucks didn’t get you a new car, apparently.

He was halfway home before he swore and slapped the wheel. Genius. I have a shirt and a tire. But I’m still out a hat.