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“Funny thing is, I do. This Hood goes back a long way.”
“From when you were a kid?”
“Almost. I can’t recall if I was born this way or something happened. Car accident. Fire. Or some woman laughing at me which burned just as bad, scarred just as terrible. One way or another we fall off buildings or fall out of bed. When we hit the floor it might as well have been off the roof. It takes a long time healing. Maybe never.”
“You mean you don’t remember when you put that thing on?”
“Things fade, Quint. I have lived in confusion a long while. This dark stuff has been such a part of me it might just be my living flesh.”
“Do—”
“Do what, Quint?”
“Do you sometimes shave?”
“No, it’s all smooth. You can imagine me two ways, I suppose. It’s all nightmare under here, all graveyards, terrible teeth, skulls and wounds that won’t heal. Or—”
“Or?”
“Nothing at all. Absolutely nothing. No beard for shaving. No eyebrows. Mostly no nose. Hardly any eyelids, just eyes. Hardly any mouth; a scar. The rest a vacancy, a snowfield, a blank, as if someone had erased me to start over. There. Two ways of guessing. Which do you pick?”
“I can’t.”
“No.”
Mr. Mysterious arose now and stood barefooted on the grass, his Hood pointed at some star constellation.
“You,” I said, at last. “You still haven’t told what you started tonight to tell Grandpa. You came here not just to sell brand-new Studebakers—but for something else?”
“Ah.” He nodded. “Well. I been alone a lot of years. It’s no fun over in Gurney, just selling cars and hiding under this velvet sack. So I decided to come out in the open at last and mix with honest-to-goodness people, make friends, maybe get someone to like me or at least put up with me. You understand, Quint?”
“I’m trying.”
“What good will all this do, living in Green Town and thriving at your supper table and viewing the treetops in my cupola tower room? Ask.”
“What good?” I asked.
“What I’m hoping for, Quint, what I’m praying for, son, is that if I delve in the river again, wade in the stream, become part of the flow of folks, people, strangers even, some sort of kind attention, friendship, some sort of half-love will begin to melt and change my face. Over six or eight months or a year, to let life shift my mask without lifting it, so that the wax beneath moves and becomes something more than a nightmare at three a.m. or just nothing at dawn. Any of this make sense, Quint?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“For people do change us, don’t they? I mean you run in and out of this house and your grandpa changes you and your grandpa shapes you with words or a hug or your hair tousled or maybe once a year, a slap where it hurts.”
“Twice.”
“Twice, then. And the boarders and roomers talk and you listen and that goes in your ears and out your fingers and that’s change, too. We’re all in the wash, all in the creeks, all in the streams, taking in every morsel of gab, every push from a teacher, every shove from a bully, every look and touch from those strange creatures, for you called women. Sustenance. It’s all breakfast tea and midnight snacks and you grow on it or you don’t grow, laugh or scowl or don’t have any features one way or the other, but you’re out there, melting and freezing, running or holding still. I haven’t done that in years. So just this week I got up my courage—knew how to sell cars but didn’t know how to put me on sale. I’m taking a chance, Quint, that by next year, this face under the Hood will make itself over, shift at noon or twilight, and I’ll feel it changing because I’m out wading in the stream again and breathing the fresh air and letting people get at me, taking a chance, not hiding behind the windshield of this or that Studebaker. And at the end of that next year, Quint, I’ll take off my Hood forever.”
At which point, turned away from me, he made a gesture. I saw the dark velvet in his hand as he dropped it in the grass.
“Do you want to see what’s here, Quint?” he asked, quietly.
“No, sir, if you don’t mind.”
“Why not?”
“I’m scared,” I said, and shivered.
“That figures,” he said, at last. “I’ll just stand here a moment and then hide again.”
