January 15, 2025

Selling a Land Rover in Central Illinois

Alexander Fredman

Hard wind stung my skin when I crossed from the sheltered side of the car. Two deer passed in the distance. The large one lowered its head, and the other turned to face me. It walked three steps forward, then jolted back and began to run, dimming in the tall grass. I thought I heard a shot, a sound lost in the wind. But that’s just what I was made to think of. The large deer kept eating, alone.

The plain stood shivering around me. In memory, there is a limit, a vanishing point, but that’s not how it was. If I looked hard enough, I’d end up right back where I stood, watching from behind. The green car, a gray coat, a body braced against wind. I pitched my head back. A hawk diminished in the sky.

At a diner as a child, I saw a man pull a gun from his leather coat and wave it in the air, pointing it briefly at the waitress, then jabbing it toward the fry cook before he pressed it to his own temple. His face turned red as he held it. The restaurant got quiet. The fry cook walked carefully to him, a young guy, with his hands outstretched, as if they might deflect a bullet, and maybe they could have, but the man didn’t shoot. The fry cook took the gun from the man’s hand, and, with a swipe, he flipped the cylinder open. It was a revolver, a gun from a movie, what you think when you hear gun. I looked to my father, who held his mug up with two fingers laced in the handle. He took a sip of his coffee, then he stood up and walked toward the door. I grabbed what was left of my sandwich and hurried after him.

That was somewhere around here. Something to do with the way the trees looked or the fields, but I couldn’t place what was the same. We were driving home from Chicago. It must have been after Christmas. Snow laid in curtains across the dry corn.

A few minutes after leaving the diner, my father pulled over, walked to the edge of a field, and unzipped his pants. I followed suit. I was nervous. I tried to force a stream. The piss hit hard against the dry plant matter and beaded off. A soft fog rose, and I looked for my father, but he was back in the car, with the radio on, his face hard against happy music. Wide lines sank across his forehead. I looked up at the sleek blue of his car and the flat sky behind, the bare crowns of crops. I’d walked farther than I thought, and as I climbed the crumbling embankment, I thought of the sound of bullets falling on the diner floor. Rolling with a whistle across linoleum, revealing the contours of the ground, the spots where the floor buckled. Now I can’t remember if that was how it happened, if the gun was even loaded. Often the thing on which this all hinges escapes me. There is no one to ask.

Now, I was here to sell a car. It was an SUV, late nineties, British make. Once the stuff of royalty. It was already cheap when I bought it. I added twenty thousand miles over four years. Where did I have to go? Just to work. To the store. Some nights to get out of the house, I drove slow loops through suburban streets.

Now the car was even cheaper, and interested parties were few, and so I could be convinced to drive four hours north to let a guy look at it. In dim light, I hoped, so he wouldn’t notice the places where I’d patched the car’s chipped green with house paint. It was the last of what I had to discard.

I had called the guy when I was fifteen minutes from town, and he told me he needed three hours. So I took a left and then another. I got back on the road going the opposite way, made a right, told myself I’d lost my bearings. I liked that. It felt like falling. Like at the amusement park as a kid, strapped in a seat of a ride as its mechanism labored up a column, paused at the top, and dropped, falling a little farther each time. At the top, I had a view across dark farms and roads nestled into subdivisions. Homes were lit, each a solitary hive. Small patches of woods behind them, regrowth. The new interstate. With each rise of the ride, it was as if the interstate was being unfurled. The air glowed a freaky blue. Up there, I felt I could see the future.

Now, I drank old coffee. I watched the road before me. Then I passed a store I’d seen leaving the highway. I knew just where I was. The geography of memory made real. I pulled off by a field. It looked fallow, forgotten. Small mouse-like creatures darted through the grass. Maybe they were just mice. Their fur looked soft and their bodies bulbous. I kept looking from the ground to the sky, searching for something to link the two.

I decided to test the off-road prowess of my car. It couldn’t hurt if the car was a little muddy, maybe it could even help. Visions of Scottish estates, where bad paint looks good and blonde dirt crusts the fenders.

Here, dirt was red. Ruts and depressions hid beneath the surface of the grass. I felt sick from the bounce.


The man passed on the car, something about rust on the undercarriage. I don’t think he had the money. In the past, I would’ve been mad. I shook his hand and stood by the car as he drove off, as if I was waiting for the next prospective buyer.

When he left, I was the only car in the lot. I walked to the window of a shop and put my face to the glass. Wooden ducks sat on wooden shelves, in greens and browns and reds. There were a half dozen or so finished. Another few waited in some stage of creation. Blocks of thickly burled wood. Sawdust heaped against the walls. My wife would like them, though she didn’t hunt.

I returned to my car and drove. I scanned each intersection, searching for a pattern, for recognition—for, I realized, that diner.

We’d gone to Chicago to see my uncle. At the time, I didn’t know the purpose of the visit. My uncle was a kind man who figured only faintly into my childhood. Every so often, my father would mention him, usually in the context of a news story having to do with Chicago. About the new Dominican hotshot on the cubs: “I wonder how your uncle feels about him.” Or about the mayor: “I hope he won’t make things hard for your uncle’s business.” This wouldn’t have been the first time I met him, though I can’t remember a time before.

My father and uncle sat on twin leather chairs as I played with an old lacquered train set. My father stressed it was delicate. I rolled it slowly down the tracks, past plastic firs and ornate balsa houses, a gleaming white beneath. Snow. After a few hours, my father stood up and announced it was time to go. I was upset to leave. My uncle had no wife and no children. This arrangement struck me as sad, and I believed it was our duty to bring him home with us. I must have said something to this effect to my father because once we were in the car after stopping to pee, my father looked at me and said, softly, “It might not make sense to you. Or to me, for that matter. But your uncle knows enough to know what he wants.”

It was money that my father wanted. I can’t remember if my uncle gave it to him. I learned this from my mother, years later, in her account of the divorce. “You should know the way your father treats people,” she said. “And not just me. He was only interested in your uncle for money. Otherwise, he ignored him.” We were sitting at the kitchen table. She was folding napkins, and I was trying to help, clumsy with them. Blue fabric, washed-out and thinning.

I told her the story of the man with the gun. I never had before.

With tears in her eyes she asked, gently, “And how does that relate?” I couldn’t find the words, because it wasn’t made of words, it had to do with the image of my father sitting in the car, his reserve against the bright, rhythmic music. Only in memory did I notice how hard he was trying not to smile. I can’t guess what was on his mind then. And why was I even there? Did he invite me along for the company? I wanted my mom to know something about that trip. If there was some solution in it. But I was left only with that scene, a man smirking to himself in a big-engined American car on an empty road, white-gray clouds above.


Out front of a pancake house, a teenage couple sat on the hood of a tan truck, gesticulating wildly. I could not tell what tone their passion took. I rolled down my window. Fragments of advertisements drifted from their truck radio. I heard only the form of the words, like a language I’d forgotten.

I thought of the diner. What it would take to recognize it. Certainly the flooring would have changed. The name too. The old owner long dead. Beige vinyl cushions torn out and swapped for a more modern hue. Waitresses retired, cooks found jobs with better pay, less of a commute. Each component would have been replaced, one by one, until the whole place had turned over.

The young couple hopped off the hood and met for a hug, a brief kiss, then the girl walked to a car of her own. Each pulled lurchingly out of the lot, turning in opposite directions. The sun was low through the trees. A purple sky, a long drive to get started on. It occurred to me that I had no plan for if the car sold. No way to get home.

I lived in a bungalow with boxed rooms and a big kitchen. I could picture the tabby pacing the wide-beamed floors, curling to rest against a bare wall. Emptied of furniture, it felt vast and foreign, and I thought of the cat there, knowing that he was alone, that he would not sleep. It was my wife who had found him. He had been living in the bramble behind a churchyard. Hers was the first snap he came for. Shifty and shy, but he let her hold him. It had given me hope that she was going to church again. Each Sunday, she woke and dressed up, a wool skirt and white blouse, black buckled shoes shiny on her feet, hair done, right through the final Sunday.

I registered signs once they had passed. Exits, speed limits. Motels, all proclaiming Vacancy. I could stop for the night. It would be different to be alone somewhere she was never meant to be. I drove on.

At home, I walked softly, as if to not disturb her rest, terrified that I couldn’t any longer. The cat pressed against my leg. I fed him. I took what food was left in the house—a block of cheddar, bread, mustard—and ate beside him, my back against the wall, the house a childhood sort of empty.


A few days later, the house would be sold. The closing was long and depthless, a repetition of safeguards and circular language. I still had the car. Leaving the lawyer’s office, I began toward Chicago, going slow so as to feel the distance. The car was less packed than I had imagined, there was space enough for company—the cat sat in his carrier on the seat beside me, making low, unearthly sounds.

I listened to a country and folk station. I sang along to new versions of old songs I knew. Songs I’ve always known, so much a part of memory that it surprised me they lived out here in the present. Lights placed the road in cold relief against the forest. The station crackled, grew faint, the songs still loud but diminished, somehow, thinned. I heard a few last gasps of life, then the music was static. I drove on, listening to that static, in my unfilled car, through a drifting, windless place, until my radio caught a new station and sputtered to life.

Alexander Fredman is a writer living in New York. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Post Road Magazine, Salt Hill Journal, Soft Union, and elsewhere.

(view contributions by Alexander Fredman)