Saint Isaias Boner posted:

She walked through my door like a used-car salesman homing in on a mark — a high school maths teacher from Tuscon trading sideways from some beat up jalopy to another, trying to convince himself that a different ride might give him a new lease at life, maybe rekindle some of the sparks he used to see in his wife's eyes before they had the children and grew cold and apart, indifferent to one another as they went through the daily motions. His jacket, worn at the elbows from too much teaching, his shabby chinos buffed and shiny with age, his scuffed shoes, the patchy, grey mustache and musty toupee all speaks of a desperate man, a crumpled and lonely victim of the modern world, living paycheck to paycheck and staring over the grim precipice of redundancy, teetering on the very edge of relevance. One more push from that principal - a younger man, still with a full head of hair, earning twice what the faded old maths teacher's bringing home, living high on the hog and not giving a drat about the little guy, a guy no longer on the up-and-up or even stalled in the slow lane of middle age but somewhere near the beginning of the downward slide into yhe black night of senility - and he'd be gone, another nobody disappearing into the void of nowhere, with no one to miss him or even mark his passage. The saleman has his number and moves in for the kill, his mouth full of glittering teeth like a leopard shark, ready to take this guy for all he's worth - not much, perhaps, but in this topsy-turvey world it's kill or be killed and you take what you can get. Nothing personal, but sometimes you've got a yard full of dinged-up 1980 Crestas you've got to shift. No, this guy will pay sticker price on the 1979 Datsun 310 with moderate rust. The Datsun 310, a creditable successor to the Cherry F-II line of motor vehicles and known overseas variously as the Nissan Pulsar and the Nissan Cherry, was a hard sell thanks to its lack of an automatic shifter, its small size and its cost compared to the more popular 210. Still, he sizes the guy up just like this dame was eyeballing me, he'll take the car, I'd take the case. And just like this salesman, she was bad to the bone, overselling on servicing and options, charging extra for rustproofing, chucking a few bucks onto the bill for kicking the tires before shoving the unpopular vehicle out of the lot and into some poor sap's life. That maths teacher would thank the salesman for the grift, just like I thanked the broad for coming to me with her tale. She was tall, like the Toyota Cresta in relation to the Datsun 310, with legs that stretched as long as the mileage on that beat-up old rustbucket. You could tell she'd been round the block once or twice even if she dolled herself up to turn back the clock much like the salesman using his drill on the Datsun 310's odometer to make it look as though it had traversed fewer miles than it had in fact traversed. But her dress, plunging at the neckline like the resale value of that Datsun as it putters off that sunblasted lot in Tuscon made it all worthwhile, her cleavage as deep as the crack the old teacher failed to spot in the Datsun's rocker cover before signing the papers. He must have known deep down that car'd be trouble, and I should've listened to that same voice, growling deep in the back pf my mind, telling me to show this tramp to the door. But it was too late - she was sauntering over to me like that Datsun 310 snaking its way through the Patagonia - Sonoita Scenic Road, smoke curling from her lips like the oil burning away on that cracked engine, and she had me. She sat down across from me, leaned over the desk and began spinning her story - a web of lies and deceit, but I was on the hook like that maths teacher for that loan on a broken down old Datsun 310.