Antonio Austin spotted the car from 100 yards away — red dirt caked onto tinted windows, the front bumper gone, smoke billowing out from under the hood. “Damn, I hate this car,” he said. He had sold the 2012 Dodge Avenger almost a year earlier for a down payment of $1,000, but lately it kept reappearing at his used car dealership with problems that were becoming more complicated and expensive to fix.
He grabbed a service intake sheet from his desk, packed his lip with chewing tobacco and walked outside into the stiff prairie wind of southern Oklahoma. The last few weeks had been among the most difficult of his 25-year career, with his inventory falling near an all-time low and his sales dropping even lower. He watched the Avenger clunk across the barren parking lot and stop in front of the service garage. The driver climbed out and banged her fist against the door.
“Can you believe this?” said Tailor Phillips, 28. “It died out on me again.”
“It might be nothing,” Antonio said, as he lifted the hood.
“How am I supposed to get to work?” she said. “Who’s going to pick up my son in an hour at day care?”
“Maybe it’s not as bad as it seems,” he said. “Let’s try not to panic just yet.”
He had been giving himself the same advice every day for the last month, as the earliest impacts of President Trump’s auto tariffs cascaded down from new dealerships to used car lots to foreign-made parts. Now the consequences were landing hardest at the very bottom of the American car economy, at places like Antonio’s Buy Here Pay Here in Lawton, Okla., on a commercial strip wedged between an Army airfield and a graveyard. Antonio, 46, sold mostly to customers with bad credit and little savings — people who couldn’t afford to care that Antonio’s cars were often more than a decade old and pieced together with secondhand parts. “My sales pitch is to get you from point A to point B,” he said.
Most of his customers paid their loans in biweekly installments, delivering him envelopes of cash to avoid the $5 credit card fee. Almost half were behind on their payments, and Antonio was barely keeping up with his own operating costs. Trump had told people to “be patient” and to expect “some pain” before his tariffs would boost American manufacturing and improve wages for the working class, but Antonio and his customers were already at a breaking point. It was a business with no margin for people with no options — and now the cars were becoming as much as 25 percent more expensive to buy, to refurbish and to repair.
“My life falls apart if I can’t drive,” Tailor said. “I’ll lose my job.”
“And I need you to keep working so you can keep paying,” Antonio said. “We’ll get you back rolling as fast as we can.”
A mechanic came over to examine the car while Antonio went to check on other customers. He needed to sell at least 10 cars each month to break even, but so far, he’d sold only three as his auto shop backed up with repairs. He usually fixed his customers’ mechanical issues for no profit in order to keep them driving and paying off their loans. The owner of a minivan pulled in to ask about his faulty air conditioning. “You can’t expect my cars to blow snowballs,” Antonio said. Another customer came to ask for an extension on her biweekly payment while she saved to pay for her husband’s cremation. “Take your time,” Antonio said. “You know I’m a pushover.” He reached into his pocket and handed her a few $20s.
Antonio knew most of his customers by name, and they loved him for his prices and for his eccentricities. He cursed and then quoted Scripture in the same sentence. He carried a gun on his hip while serenading customers. He was a vegetarian in cow country and a self-described “hardcore conservative” who had always been skeptical of Trump. Now, the administration’s new tariffs had begun to disrupt his supply chain, as the 25 percent tariff on imported new cars drove more buyers to the used market. Antonio’s dealership was spending a few hundred more to buy each wholesale car at auction and then spending more again to repair those cars because of rising prices on foreign-made parts, many of which came from China. He’d begun referring to his own dealership as “the mouse trap.” Every day, he was getting squeezed and feeling stuck.
Tailor called from across the parking lot and waved him over toward the garage. “I’ve got 15 minutes left to pick up my son,” she said.
“You’re in the rotation, but be patient with me,” Antonio said. “If I could make miracles happen, I would have left this place a long time ago. I’m short on people and waiting on parts.”
“Why is everything always getting worse?” she said.
“We’re already at the bottom,” Antonio said. “How much further down can we go?”
Tailor grabbed her 2-year-old’s car seat out of the Avenger and called her grandparents for a ride. On the way back to their house, she started to make a list in her phone of all the things she couldn’t do without her car: “Get the kids to school.” “Buy groceries.” “Work!” She sent a message to one of her bosses at a community access program, where she took care of people with disabilities and transported them around the city in her car for $13 an hour.
“I might not be able to make it tomorrow,” she said. “Car trouble.”
“Oh no,” her boss replied. “Again?”
Tailor reread the message and tried to guess at the tone: Was it empathy? Weariness? Impatience? Disbelief?
“It’s OK,” she responded. “I’ll figure something out.”
When she first drove the Avenger off Antonio’s lot in July, it felt like a steal. Most other dealerships had refused to work with her, since she was a single mother with a part-time job and a credit history of unpaid electric bills and thousands of dollars in debt for a phlebotomy program at Platt College that had left her with a handful of certificates but no career. Only Antonio had taken the time to listen — calling her references, offering a test drive. The Avenger had a roomy interior and good gas mileage, and she agreed on a biweekly payment of $185.
The first time she took it on the highway, the car shut down while she was traveling 70 miles per hour. It had been in the shop a half-dozen times since, and Antonio had replaced the throttle, the gas pedal, the fuse, the thermostat, the sparkplug and the ignition coil. He covered most of the repairs himself and billed her for a few others, but unlike the electric company and her cellphone provider, he never cut her off. She was $90 behind on her latest payment. She owed hundreds more for insurance and repairs. She had promised Antonio she would catch up by working more hours or getting a second job — all of which was predicated on having a working car.
She got a ride back to his dealership in the late afternoon. She walked to the garage and found Antonio standing over her car with one of his mechanics, Paul Saunders.
“You’ve got a hole in the radiator,” Paul said.
“Just do whatever you have to do to fix it,” Tailor said. “I need the car.”
“Believe me, I get it,” Paul said. His own car, a 15-year-old Plymouth Breeze, was sitting in the garage waiting on back-ordered parts for the suspension system. Paul hadn’t been able to drive to work for three weeks, which meant Antonio was ferrying him to and from the Travel Inn where he had been living for the past six months. He was one of Antonio’s best mechanics, capable of rebuilding anything from 18-wheel trucks to racecars mostly by memory, but now he was 55 and struggling with long Covid. He could be methodical and slow in the garage, especially after nights spent at the local Apache Casino.
“Paul will get you taken care of, but this isn’t some pre-existing problem on my end,” Antonio said. He explained that he would have to buy her a new radiator from AutoZone, which sourced them from China. The retail price had gone up by about $40 in the last month, which meant the repair would cost a little more than $300 even if Antonio only charged her minimum wage for Paul’s time and labor.
“This will probably have to be your bill,” Antonio told her.
“My paycheck was already short this month,” Tailor said. She had been hoping that Trump would boost the economy for the working class, or that she could apply for emergency financial aid as a member of the Kiowa Tribe, but now the emergency was already underway. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said. “I can’t afford any more repairs.”
“I’ll roll it over and cover you on credit,” Antonio said. “Just put an extra 10, 20 dollars on your next payment. That shows good faith.”
“You can afford to do that?” she asked.
“Oatmeal is better than no meal,” Antonio said. “But no. I really can’t.”
He told her the radiator would be fixed the next morning, but instead Antonio arrived at the dealership just after sunrise and saw a text message from Paul. “Boss, I’m not going to make it in today,” he wrote. “I’m not feeling good at all.”
“Can you at least do the radiator?” Antonio asked.
“Yeah, around noon. Can I get a ride?”
Antonio tossed his phone on the desk and started sorting through his customer files for overdue payments. “Problems. Problems. Poor people and their problems,” he said. He had begun his career in the car industry straight out of a housing project, hoping to transcend his own poverty. He washed cars, detailed interiors and finally got hired as a salesman on a dealership floor in Oklahoma City. One year, when the economy was booming, he sold enough cars to win a trip to Las Vegas, but he never felt comfortable with his gelled hair, his tie and his fake leather shoes. He decided to move to Lawton for the low cost of living and opened his own used dealership with the help of his wife and four children as they grew into adulthood.
Their plan was to sell a car to anyone who could pay $1,000 upfront — “a pound down, a rack back, a G for me,” Antonio told his customers. But lately, nobody in Lawton seemed to have that kind of cash outside of tax season, and Antonio had taken on loans and run into his own credit problems as he tried to keep the business alive. The tariffs had arrived like a slow leak — not a headline crisis, but a steady constriction that made every deal just a little worse for a dealership already on edge. He had started opening on Sundays to drum up more business and bargaining against himself, sometimes accepting trades as collateral or a few hundred less for a down payment so he could keep up with his own monthly bills. “I’m just a poor man trying to make it,” he said. “I am my customers.”
He looked out the window at the empty lot and started searching through Facebook, trying to track down buyers who had skipped out on their payments. Some people moved out of state with his cars and tried to disappear. Others totaled their vehicles and stopped paying. More than half of Antonio’s customers eventually managed to pay off their loans over two or three years, but almost as many fell behind and eventually had their cars repossessed.
“You’re 75 days past due,” he wrote to one customer. “Hurry up and bring me a chunk.”
“Your phone’s disconnected and you’re 38 days behind,” he told another. “What’s up? Throw me a bean or two.”
He picked up the phone and called a young soldier who was stationed nearby at Fort Sill. The soldier had purchased a used Dodge Ram at the beginning of the year and made payments on time for several months to raise his credit score. Then he’d used that score to buy a new truck from a high-end dealership and stopped paying Antonio. Now the Dodge Ram was sitting in a parking lot outside the soldier’s apartment, wasting away in the sun, costing Antonio money.
“I thought you were going to bring me back my truck this week,” Antonio said, when the soldier answered his phone.
“I was,” the soldier said. “I mean — I am. There’s no gas in it, and I don’t get paid till Friday.”
“I’m sick of waiting,” Antonio said. “The quicker I get the truck, the quicker I can turn it back around. I’ll bring over a gas can and come get it myself. Just put the key in the gas cap.”
The soldier stammered and then cleared his throat. “The thing is I wanted to clean it up real nice for you, top off the tank, bring it in myself,” he said.
“Yeah. Load some gold bars in there for me while you’re at it,” Antonio said. “But this is reality. I’m grabbing it today.”
He filled a gas can and drove out of the dealership and onto Hero’s Boulevard, passing Patriot Auto Sales and Liberty Tax. Lawton was an Army town where patriotism had been commodified, but its residents were being disproportionately flattened by the same economy that glorified them. A Yale study had shown that under the new tariffs, working-class people would lose almost three times as much of their disposable in come as the highest earners. Lately, Antonio had been repossessing a few cars each week. His office was filled with the artifacts that people left behind in their cars: a high school diploma, a Little League uniform, an American flag that had been draped over a casket at a military funeral.
He pulled into an apartment complex and found the Ram in the corner of the lot. He poured gas into the tank and put the key into the ignition, but the truck wouldn’t start. He turned the key again, and the engine was silent. “Are you kidding me?” he said. The truck had been sitting unused for days, and Antonio assumed its battery was dead. He went back to his own truck, dug around for jumper cables, revved his engine and tried starting the Ram again. Nothing.
“More wasted time, more wasted money,” he said. He called for a tow truck and started driving back to the dealership, and he was parking when his cellphone rang. He checked the number and then winced. “Hi, Tailor,” he said. “I’m sorry, but we fell behind.”
He listened to her for a moment, nodding along and closing his eyes.
“I’m not trying to lie to you,” he said. “My resources are limited. My time management is poor, and my people are struggling. I’ve got nothing but excuses for you this morning, but it’s the truth.”
Sometimes, the only way to escape his customers and their hardships was to close his office door, burn incense and read passages from the Torah or the Bible, seeking out the lessons of Scripture. Modern commercialism was a trap. An unjust economy was an abomination. All suffering was temporary. But, in this life, Antonio still had his $3,000 monthly lot rent coming due and almost no money in reserve. He flipped through his bills and tried to come up with a plan to buy and sell gold, or to start growing microgreens with his wife, until he was interrupted by the sound of someone shouting outside his door.
“Hey! Anybody selling cars?”
Antonio walked outside and saw a man who introduced himself as David Moses, 36. He wiped fresh paint on his jeans and then stuck out his hand. “Sorry, I’m on my lunch break,” he said. He explained that he’d left his construction job for an appointment to buy a car at a dealership up the street, but nobody showed up, so he kept walking down the block and stumbled onto Antonio’s lot with a pocket full of cash.
“What are you looking for?” Antonio asked.
“Anything, really,” David said. “I drove just about everything growing up in Chicago.”
“Point A to point B,” Antonio said, nodding, trying to keep the eagerness out of his voice. “When do you want it?”
“Soon. Maybe today?”
David said he’d been without a car for several months while he and his wife saved for a down payment, which had made life miserable in a part of Oklahoma with minimal public transportation. They had both been relying on Uber to get to work — $25 a day to ferry him to the construction site, $20 more to get her to the Salvation Army, another $15 if they wanted to take their two daughters, ages 4 and 1, to play at the park. To save money, they had been walking their girls to and from day care each day, pushing a double stroller along the shoulder of a commercial road for almost two miles. It was getting harder now that his wife was pregnant with their third.
“That Kia Soul over there might fit the bill,” Antonio said.
“I’ll go take a look,” David said. “As long as it fits the car seats, I’m not picky.”
“It’s probably going to be somewhere around 12 large,” Antonio said. “If you put a pound down, we can do payments of about $220 every few weeks. These tariffs have got everything going way up high.”
“I can manage the payments, but my credit isn’t great.”
“You’re here, so I already know,” Antonio said. He explained that he didn’t need to do a credit check. He said that both David and his wife needed to fill out an application with a list of local references, an Oklahoma driver’s license and a few recent pay stubs, and then it would come down to a character judgment.
“I need to feel confident that you aren’t going to disappear back up there to Chicago with my car,” Antonio said.
“Nah, I stay away from Chicago,” David said. “I like it better out here.”
“Nobody likes it here. Quit lying. Everybody goes home.”
“This is home,” David said. “We’ve been here four years.”
“Why do you like Oklahoma?” Antonio asked. “Because the weed is legal?
“No, I don’t smoke.”
“You like the casinos?”
“No,” David said. “You got me all wrong. I like that it’s quiet — a better place to raise a family. Chicago’s got too much going on.”
Antonio looked him over for a moment, taking in the tattoos, the calloused hands, the front pocket filled with a roll of cash. One car, one sale. It wouldn’t solve everything, but maybe it would hold things together for at least a few more days.
“I think you’re all right, David Moses,” Antonio said, sticking out his hand. “Let’s do business.”
He hadn’t even finished signing the sale paperwork when he heard another sound outside his office. This time, Antonio looked up and saw Tailor coming toward his door with tangled hair and mascara smudged on her cheeks.
“I know, I know,” Antonio said. “We’ve got a mechanic working on it now. No more delays, no more excuses. You’ll be driving home in an hour.”
“It’s too late,” Tailor said.
Antonio set down his pen and stared back at her. “What do you mean it’s too late?”
“I just got fired,” she said. Her voice broke, and she leaned against the door frame. Antonio motioned toward an empty chair, and she sat down and started to tell him about the last hours.
She had called out of work again that morning because of car trouble, and at first her boss had seemed understanding. Tailor had been working with the same disabled clients for a year, and they trusted her. She’d kept her hours under 30 each week so the organization wouldn’t have to offer her benefits. “I was loyal and good at my job,” Tailor said. But then her boss had called back a few hours later to say that she’d conferred with the rest of the management team. Tailor was “no longer needed,” her boss said.
“I’m so sorry,” Antonio said. “It’s brutal out there.”
“It’s not your fault,” Tailor said. “It’s just the way it is. Cars will do car things.”
“Yeah, but it sucks. I know you’re going through it.”
“It’s the mental part,” she said. “Like, how long can I keep surviving on willpower and spite?”
She sat in the office while the mechanics finished installing her radiator, thinking about the ways she could piece her life back together. She had worked a dozen other jobs in Oklahoma — training horses, running the cash register at Tractor Supply, cleaning houses — and she would start looking for another. She could line up interviews, mow lawns and find other odd jobs to keep up with her bills. But doing any of that required a car, which required making payments that she could no longer afford.
“I have no idea how I’m ever going to pay for this radiator,” she said.
“We’ll give you some time,” Antonio said.
“And what about my regular payments? I’m behind already, and now I’ve got nothing.”
“I know,” Antonio said. “I feel bad for you. We’ll absorb what we can while you get back on your feet.”
“That could take a while,” Tailor said. She looked down at his desk for a moment and wiped her eyes. “I might have to give the car back,” she said.
Antonio reached into a bin on his desk and found the keys to her Avenger. These were the margins that determined their places in the American economy: a slight price increase, a brief delay, another deal that neither side could afford.
“We want to keep working with you,” Antonio said. He walked her outside to the Avenger and handed her the keys. She turned the ignition, and the engine stirred to life.
“OK,” he said. “You’re good to go.”
