Work Text:
How I love to drive my Buick
With my love sitting by my side
Pretty girl and shiny Buick
Fills a fella with so much pride
-Seth McFarlane, “My Love, my Buick, and I”
Unbeknownst to him, the car was actually bought for Flagg, under the fake name Richard Frye, in 1978 by a man named Kit Brandenton. It was a 1975 Buick LeSabre convertible, in Indigo Metallic.
Lloyd and Kit would have gotten along– they would have certainly understood each other's problems— (even Flagg sometimes gets them mixed up) but they would never learn the other existed.
This is partly because Frye/Flagg/Faraday loves to walk very, very far away from the places he stops. But mostly because, while Lloyd was locked up, Kit was snapped out of existence for the crime of being inconvenient. Come to think of it, their lives ended quite similarly.
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The first time Lloyd was in his car, it wasn’t his yet. Flagg was speeding it across the abandoned highway towards the setting sun, Lloyd in the passenger seat. He was busy basking in the feeling of the car’s air conditioning blowing on his newly washed face and clean clothes. More than anything, the feeling of a full stomach. He stared forward, nodding off and jerking his head up repeatedly. Flagg broke the white noise whoosh of air wrapping around the car.
“Sleep, Lloyd,” he said simply.
At the time it sounded to him like a suggestion, or an invitation. In hindsight it was probably more like a command.
Lloyd closed his eyes and rested his cheek against the seatbelt. The leather seats cradled him in the bouncing car and as he drifted off he thought, detachedly, shit… this is the best high I’ve ever had… I don’t gotta do drugs if I could just do this again.
Funnily enough, he would live the rest of his life clean.
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The car became Lloyd’s in Los Angeles. Though the first time he drove it he felt more like a bus driver, or a babysitter.
Flagg had stuffed the keys in his hand after driving Eric, the lawyer, off his rocker and telling Lloyd to drop him. “When you go back”. That’s what Flagg said, and Lloyd was tempted to ask why he wasn’t coming with him and Trashy, like how he got here, but had the good sense to hold his tongue. He wondered, too, whether this meant he could keep the car, or just borrow it. He felt a slight, teenage-ish giddiness flare up at the thought as they stood there in the L.A. settlement. It was a nice car.
So Trash Can man took the passenger seat, and they escorted Mr. Eric Strellerton into the back. Lloyd had to buckle him in and everything.
There was no conversation, the silence only punctuated by Trashy, who fidgeted and kicked his feet like a child, as he occasionally mumbled and hummed. Eric didn’t say a thing.
He had been a dick, but Lloyd felt a twinge of guilt at leaving him on the side of the road. He and Trashy were sweating in the AC.
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Flagg never did ask for the car back. Once, Lloyd and Whitney took a case of beer out in it and hit the road, far down Tropicana avenue, no destination in mind. After cruising for a while they stopped by a huge runoff pond, in front of a sign that read LOWER FLAMINGO DETENTION BASIN. They sat in the parked car and looked over the water.
Whitney passed Lloyd a cigarette. Both of their hands, their fingernails, were crusted with blood. Two people at a time that day. Freebasers, again. Whitney had Jimi Hendrix in the cassette player.
Neither of the two men said much.
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He quit driving it a couple weeks before the end.
He was sweating buckets, hands clenched around the steering wheel, staring forward. The little analog clock on the dash read 4:45 AM. It was pitch dark.
Laid across the back seat, staining the leather, was a mangled mess wrapped in a white sheet, that was once called Dayna Jurgens.
For the two hours out hysteria consumed Lloyd more and more, until he couldn’t take it anymore and abruptly slammed on the brakes in the middle of the road. It jerked him forward, sticking the seatbelt and slamming his chest against the wheel. He heard her- it- roll off of the seat and on to the ground.
Lloyd tore the door open and tumbled out of the car, gasping for air like a fish. He felt the need to scream, but found that not enough sound would come out, so he just let out these strange, distressed moans instead.
Whole body shaking, he dragged himself to the car and opened the back door. He continued to bleat weakly and began trying to drag her out only to find that the way her broken arms were bent had gotten her stuck under the seats.
This fact seemed to finally overload Lloyd’s brain. Suddenly, he felt a strange, eerie calm wash over him. His face went slack.
Pull it out of the car, Lloyd.
A voice in his head told him. His internal monologue nowadays sounded a bit like Flagg, but also like Poke, and a prison warden, and his father, and himself.
Feeling like he was watching a movie of the events unfolding, he slowly unstuck her and lifted her up, in bridal carry. He thought vaguely that he held her like this to toss her onto their bed once. Under the overwhelming metallic stench of blood (a scent that is all but unfamiliar to Lloyd Henreid) coming from the mass in his arms, was the scent of her shampoo. He could still smell her shampoo. Their pillows still smelled like that.
Focus.
He took a few steps and dropped her with a thud, face still blank, and turned to grab his can of gasoline from the glovebox before dumping it all over her, standard procedure. He got some on his shoes in the process. Maybe I’ll set on fire too, and I’ll die out here, the truer form of Lloyd thought. And it won’t have a thing to do with him, like I know it’s going to. I can die far away, and alone, like I was supposed to.
When he lit a match and dropped it, he walked unrushed from the fire.
He sat on the hood of the car, facing away from her, and stared into darkness. His throat stuck, and he felt tears coming on.
You know, the Buick’s trashed.
You could get a new car from the garage. The valets have a section where they park the luxury ones.
He stares. Had Flagg known the whole time Dayna was around? That she was a spy? It occurred to Lloyd suddenly that there was no reason for Flagg to tell him in the middle of the night. It was three in the fucking morning.
Focus on the cars, Lloyd.
He did. He wondered what colors they have in the garage. Because Lloyd didn’t actually know a thing about cars.