I Got a Car To Sell You

By Ryon Moody

Toby walked down the stairs, tripped on the bottom step, and broke the heel of his last pair of "real" cowboy boots. "Shit," he said as he stumbled out to the waiting furniture truck, down a shoe. He hopped on one foot as the noon-day sun beating down on him and the pavement and flopped down on the rust-eaten running board to survey the damage. The well-worn heel had snapped clean off from the tan boot, and he spit out some unfinished gum in disgust.

"Dammit," he said.

Stacy had given him these, at least he thought it'd been Stacy. The blur of selling ten cars a day and running on a bump for breakfast and lunch back then kind of made things fuzzy. He turned the ostrich-skin boots over in his hand and saw the name "Stace" and a heart cut in the arch.

"Solves that mystery," he said to himself.

"What's that gabacho?" Ricky was waiting in the passenger seat, a Spanish romance novel perched on his ample belly.

"Busted my boot," Toby said, tossing the broken shoe behind the bench seat.

"So what you want me to do Chips?" Ricky said. "Give you a hug?"

"Let's go," Toby said, scowling as he slammed the door.

He started up and drove the truck out from in front of the ratty apartment building with a squeal of rubber and bumped over a curb that had been run over by a thousand trucks. They joined the flow of trucks heading South towards Nogales. Ricky said nothing as they sped along the highway, the chairs in the back of the truck softly rattling.

"Hey," Toby said after thirty minutes of silence from the both of them, "you ask your brother about that loan?"

"Nah," Ricky said. "You got no collateral so why bother?"

"I figured."

"You really want to open a furniture store? After driving for all these years?"

Toby said nothing. Ricky shrugged and turned back to his book. Toby thought about getting up in the morning and, instead of going out and trying to start some shit-box panel truck just to jump on the road and dodge traffic for hours on end, starting up a lathe and carefully turning a piece of wood into a graceful table leg.

The road beneath the truck was a clean-cut saw on wood, vibrating his hands on the steering wheel.