The Powder-Blue Dragon

"The Powder-Blue Dragon" is a short story first published in its original form in Cosmopolitan in November 1954. It was reprinted in a rewritten form in Bagombo Snuff Box in 1999 and Complete Stories in 2017.

Plot Summary

Kiah Higgins works at a car dealership in an old whaling town that now serves as a summer residence for the wealthy. Orphaned at sixteen, his parents died in a car crash. His boss Daggett is a New Yorker who only runs the dealership in the summer for out-of-towners. While running various business errands for him, Kiah goes to the drugstore to cash his first check with money transferred from his savings account, just to make sure it actually works. The druggist has no qualms cashing a check from "the most honest, hardworking boy in town" who also waits tables and pumps gas. But it's cars that are always on Kiah's mind, and he rhapsodizes to the druggist about the Marittima-Frascati. Daggett has one at his New York dealership and for two years it's won the Avignon road race over Jaguars, Mercedes, and other cars with "class". Returning to work, Kiah tells Daggett he wants to buy the Marittima-Frascati, which costs over $5600. Even after calling the bank to confirm Kiah has the money, Daggett tries to discourage him. Kiah says Daggett would understand if he'd grown up poor in this town and that he wants to start living. Daggett delivers the powder blue Marittima-Frascati, warning Kiah that the engine needs to be broken in and that he should keep it under 60 M.P.H. for the first thousand miles. He assures Kiah that there are only a dozen cars like it in the United States, and only "in Dallas and Hollywood".

Taking the car for its first drive down the turnpike, Kiah flirts with a young woman in a Cadillac convertible and follows her to a hotel cocktail lounge. When he goes in, however, he finds the young woman alone in a booth looking bored. Kiah orders a gin and tonic from a condescending bartender and tries to impress him with details about his car. The bartender asks who owns it and dismisses Kiah when he says that he does. He approaches the young woman who now recognizes him and he tries to impress her as well, but she mostly responds sarcastically. A young man, Paul, enters looking for his girlfriend Marion, the young woman with Kiah. She tells Paul about Kiah's car, to which he replies that he's obviously lying. Paul is driving a green British Hampton, the car Kiah was saving for before the Marittima-Frascati. Kiah replies he'd easily win in a race if his car were broken in. Paul laughs dismissively, bids the bartender Ralph goodbye, and leaves with Marion. Kiah realizes he now knows everyone else's name and no one has bothered to ask him his. Kiah races out to his car and easily catches up to them. Paul refuses to race and Kiah speeds off, pushing the engine harder, urging it to explode. The car breaks down and Kiah waits but the Hampton never passes. He hitches a ride back to town and tells Daggett what he's done, who then asks him "boy, why would you do such a thing?" Kiah insists that Daggett call him by his name and says he doesn't know why he killed it, but he's glad it's dead.

Original Version

In preparing the various stories of Bagombo Snuff Box for republication, Vonnegut found that this story, "The Boy Who Hated Girls", and "Hal Irwin's Magic Lamp" were upsetting "because the premise and the characters of each were so promising, and the denouement so asinine". As such, he rewrote these stories to some extent, calling them "fakes on the order of Piltdown Man, half human being, half the orangutan I used to be".

The action of the beginning is largely the same in the original, although the check Kiah is cashing is for Daggett and the druggist is far more resentful about it and unpleasant to Kiah in general, who is also more openly contemptuous of the wealthy summer residents. Daggett objects somewhat more forcefully when Kiah first wants to buy the car, saying he feels like a "dope peddler". The interactions with Paul, Marion, and Ralph are largely the same, except as Kiah leaves the cocktail lounge, Ralph advises him to "play in [his] own league" and forget about Marion. At the conclusion, Paul, in his black Hampton, does indeed try to race Kiah, but Kiah wins, destroying his own engine. His car dies just in front of Daggett's dealership and Kiah tells him that he won that one race and is satisfied. When Daggett berates him for being so foolish, Kiah cries but again responds that he's glad it's dead and that he killed it.