The Rolling Stones were snarling on the car’s eight-track and Wizard was telling a stupid joke when my right front tire left the pavement. We slid off the S-curve and cut into a field of ripe corn like a harvester. Stalks shattered. Leaves whipped through the windows. Wizard laughed. I pumped the brakes and we thudded to a stop.
“My dad is going to kill me.” I clicked off the music. It was replaced by a late summer’s chirping and croaking. “He’ll take my license.”
“Calm down.” Wizard stopped laughing. “The car’s still running. Right?”
“Yeah. It’s running”
Behind us, from the nearby farmhouse, people shouted and dogs barked.
“Then get out of here! Or your old man will have to pay for this mess.”
I stomped on the gas. We plowed further into the field.
“The other way.” Wizard laughed. “Back up.”
I shifted into reverse. The rear tires spun.
“Rock it!” said Wizard. “Like in the driver’s ed movie.”
I rocked the car free. We slid backwards crushing corn until reaching pavement. Flashlight beams poked at us like searchlights trying to catch World War II bombers. The barking sounded closer.
“Your lights!” said Wizard. “They’ll see your plates!”
I turned them off and hit the gas. I was still in reverse.
“The other way.” Wizard wouldn’t stop laughing. He was having a great time. “Go fucking forward.”
I felt a thud against the rear bumper. I heard a yelp.
“Go damn it!” Wizard yelled. “Go!”
I shifted gears and took off. Without headlights, I couldn’t see and almost ran off the road again. I turned them on after we turned the far curve. We hit sixty getting away but my heart was thumping faster.
“Shit. I think I hit a dog.”
“Don’t worry about the dog.” Wizard turned on the eight-track. “Animals shouldn’t be running loose.”
I was scared. One week after I had passed my test, Wizard and I had gone to a burger joint where I bumped a parked car. Wizard told me that no one saw it happen and to drive away. Wizard was wrong. That night, a fat old cop and a thin young cop came to the house. The fat cop talk-talk-talked. Finally, he said, “How would you feel if it had happened to you.”
I had wanted to say that it didn’t seem to be my fault. I had looked behind me while backing up—just like in the driver’s ed movie—but the corner of my front bumper swung around and scraped the other car. I did what I had been told to do! But it was easier to say nothing. My dad paid for the damage and told me that if I screwed up again, I wouldn’t drive until I was 21.
Just outside of town, I parked under a street light. The first thing I did was look at the back bumper. I didn’t see any blood on the chrome, so I hoped for the best. We plucked the stalks and leaves off the car. In town, we spent two dollars at the spray-it-yourself car wash hosing off mud.
“See.” said Wizard. “Your old man won’t know.”
I said nothing. I was looking at the back bumper and thinking about the dog.
“Come on, Dandelion and her mom are waiting.”
#
Dandelion and her mom worked at the Miracle Mart. It was an emporium of ill-fitting polyester clothing, trashy toys, and shoddy small appliances squatting in an ocean of cracked oil-stained blacktop. It anchored the far edge of the town’s strip of weary motels, bars, burger joints, auto parts stores, and used car lots. Dandelion’s mom was a cashier. Dandelion worked at the snack counter for a few hours after school. She was keeping the same hours during summer vacation.
Dandelion and I had met four years earlier in our seventh-grade drama club. Since then, we’d both been in all of the school plays. At first, I’d visit her to practice our lines. But we started talking about school stuff and then other stuff and then just hanging around together. I’d never asked her to a school dance or a boy-girl-type-date because I’d convinced myself that she wasn’t interested in being anything beyond the friends that we were. But honestly, I was just too chicken.
Dandelion and her mom were waiting next to the rusty dumpsters that flanked the Mart’s employee’s entrance. Two months ago, her mom’s car crapped out and Dandelion had called me to ask if I could drive them home. She said that they’d need a ride for a few nights. But her mom’s car never got repaired and the nightly ride home became a routine. The system worked. My mom said it was nice for me to help them. And after the first week, Dandelion’s mom starting giving me money for gasoline. It was more than necessary. A lot more. What Wizard and I didn’t spend on pizza and burgers we wasted on gasoline for aimless joy-riding. I guess my dad never checked the mileage.
Dandelion’s mom was smoking a cigarette. She strutted to my car like a runway model with sharp clicking high heels. Wizard—always the gentleman—jumped out to open the rear door for her. She slid inside and everything instantly smelled like a bottle of spilled perfume. Wizard slipped in next to her and asked for a cigarette. Dandelion sat in the front.
“Sorry I’m late,” I said.
Dandelion shrugged.
Looking at the rear-view mirror, in the flash of her mom’s lighter, I saw Wizard pushing himself right up against her.
“All day standing at that cash register I’m dying for a smoke,” she said with a giggle. She had her red-nailed hand on Wizard’s arm. She always touched the person she was taking to. “I’m ready to puff up half a pack!!” She giggled again. Giggles were her punctuation marks. Wizard laughed along with her.
I thought of the dog and wondered if I could ever laugh again. I must have frozen in place, because I suddenly turned to see Dandelion looking at me with her eyebrows pushed together.
“Sorry I was late,” I said.
Dandelion said nothing.
All the way to her house, Dandelion’s mom giggle-droned while her cigarette pack’s cellophane crinkled and her lighter flashed.
Dandelion lived in a subdivision called Garden Meadows. Identical tiny houses spaced five feet apart lined a maze of narrow streets. People in other parts of town called them slabbies because they didn’t have basements. I couldn’t understand why the mildewed pit under my house made it better. The driveways were short and there were no garages, so cars were jam-parked on both sides of the street.
A ’62 Oldsmobile Jetstar 88 was up on blocks in their driveway. Dandelion’s mom said that her friend would fix it. But he needed parts. Her friend was an over-weight guy named Jim. When I’d visit Dandelion on weekends, he was always there drinking from a quart bottle of beer. I pulled behind the Jetstar with my car’s ass end poking into the street. Dandelion’s mom invited Wizard and me into the house. I wanted to leave. But Wizard was already following her inside.
Their house was full of Dandelion’s books. In addition to theater, Dandelion loved poetry. She hunted for books of poetry and books about poetry at flea markets. She wrote poetry in wire bound notebooks with covers that she decorated with pasted-on pictures of flowers cut from magazines. Their house was also full of her mom’s cosmetics. Dandelion’s mom put paint and perfume on herself the way Dandelion put words in notebooks. Lipstick tubes, eyeshadow pallets, little brushes, fingernail files, bottles of nail polish and perfume cluttered every table and had fallen onto the sofa and chairs. In the four years since I first visited, I’d never seen Dandelion wearing makeup or her mom reading.
“You boys get something to eat.” Dandelion’s mom called over her shoulder as she went to her bedroom.
Wizard was already in the kitchen. I went to one narrow bathroom that was squeezed between the two narrow bedrooms. A half dozen nylon stockings were hanging on the shower curtain rod. I knew that they didn’t belong to Dandelion because at school, where she couldn’t wear jeans, she always wore knee socks. Makeup stuff covered the toilet tank. I had closed the door when I heard the phone ring in a bedroom. In this house, sound surged through walls.
“Giggle . . . you always call when you want something . . . oh all right, sometimes I want something too . . . giggle. A problem with your car? Well, I could ask my daughter’s friend for a ride. You’re at the Weasel? OK. Giggle. I’ll be there.”
Whenever I was at Dandelion’s house, I tried to piss quietly by spraying the side of the bowl. But tonight, I just let it rip. I didn’t care.
At the kitchen table, Wizard was eating a sandwich and drinking RC Cola. Dandelion was writing in a notebook.
“Are you all right?” She asked me when she looked up. “You don’t look well.”
“I’m fine.” I was anything but fine. And I knew it showed. While washing my hands, I had imaged them covered with the dog’s blood. I could still see that vision in my mind. “Fine.”
Dandelion looked at me with her eyebrows pushed together. From the drama club, she knew when my acting was bad.
When Dandelion’s mom asked me for a ride to the Weasel Inn, I wanted to say no. But it was easier to say nothing. She was wearing a very open white silky sleeveless top that was barely held up by shoestring straps, a pleated white micro-mini skirt, and white Nancy Sinatra high heeled go-go boots. Regardless of the weather, she always wore the same type of clothes when she went to the Weasel Inn. I called it her Weasel Wear.
The four of us left the house. I got into the car first and was about to turn the key, when Dandelion’s mom giggled, said that she had forgotten something and went back inside. The car was hot. I got out to wait. After ten minutes, I told Dandelion that I was only allowed out until midnight.
“I’ll see what’s keeping her.” Dandelion went inside.
Can’t Get No Satisfaction blasted from the eight-tract. Wizard had slipped into the driver’s seat, twisted the key to accessory, and turned on the tape.
“Jesus Wizard! Turn it off. You’ll run down my battery. Damn it! Get out!”
“I’ll tell you what’s charging my battery.” He cocked his head towards the house. “You can tell she’s not wearing a bra!” He got out of the car singing, “I know Jim gets satisfaction . . .”
A guy and a woman in the house next door started yelling at each other. Their barbed words poured from their open window. It was about something that someone had said twenty years ago. I turned the Stones back on.
“What the fuck?” said Wizard laughing. “You’ll run down your battery!”
I turned the music louder and wished I was somewhere else.
#
The Weasel Inn was a big white windowless cube trimmed in blinking purple and pink neon past the strip off a highway cloverleaf. Cars were jam-parked on its lot like they were in the streets and driveways of Garden Meadows. But these cars were new and polished and expensive. They were Cadillacs, Lincolns, Corvettes, Mecedes-Benz, customized Mustangs, and low-slung foreign jobs with strange nameplates.
The only other open business nearby was a truck stop. Everything else was dead. There were some old gas stations, a burger-joint from a defunct chain, a soft ice cream place, and buildings that had been empty for so long you couldn’t tell what they had been. Each place had a sun-faded sign put up by T.J. Eckleburg Equities proclaiming it to be a prime commercial investment opportunity. The parking lots for these opportunities had once been chained off but the barriers had fallen down and a spill-over of idling semis and vans from the truck stop sat on black top that was being crushed into gravel and growing into weeds.
“Jim said he’d be inside,” said Dandelion’s mom. “Pull up. I’ll get him.”
I let her off and parked where I could watch the door.
“Hey there’s Gary!” said Wizard. He pointed towards some drivers who were long-haired guys in their early twenties standing near their rigs and vans talking and smoking. “I’ll be right back.” He left the car.
“Doesn’t Jim have any friends who could have helped him?” I asked Dandelion.
“Friends? Probably not. You don’t know Jim like I do.” She had spat out his name as if it had tasted rancid.
“What do you know about him?’
“Well for starters, he likes fucking my mom.”
I flinched. I had never heard her say anything so raw before.
“He treats her better than dad did. Measure your expectations from him and you can’t know any better.”
She had never mentioned her dad before either. Her few words about Jim and her dad left a bitter miasma lingering in the car. I turned on the radio and wished I was somewhere else.
#
A half an hour later, the ten o’clock news started reporting the weekly body counts like baseball scores. I clicked it off.
“I’m only allowed out until midnight. Maybe someone can get a message to your mom.”
We were walking through the Weasel’s lot when a shadow appeared from between two parked cars. The shadow smelled like sweaty armpits and sour wine. It was Crab. He dragged his useless legs and twisted body using a rusty metal walker that was as old and as battered as he was. One of its legs was badly bent and the rubber caps on the ends were missing, so each step was a click and a scrape and a sigh that skewed him sideways.
“Hi boys!” said Crab. Even when I was with Dandelion, he always said “boys.”
“Hi Crab,” I said as we walked past him. He had been a teamster before a truck backed into him. He mooched off the truckers and begged spare change in parking lots. Crabbing away from us, he looked like a dog balancing on its hind legs.
“Jesus Christ!” I uttered softly. But it was loud enough for Dandelion to hear.
“What? You’ve been so weird tonight.”
“Ever wonder who hurt Crab and how it happened? Now he’ll always be this way.”
“Maybe he can get help somewhere.” Dandelion sighed. It was the cliche that everyone says about a problem they don’t want to think about.
I should have dropped it, but instead I said, “People give him change. That really helps.”
We were scowling at each other. I couldn’t remember ever being so short with her.
“Got five bucks?” said Wizard. He had trotted over from the trucks. “Gary has two six packs in his truck that he’ll sell for five bucks.”
All summer trying to score any beer had been impossible. The cops were running what they called the Save Our Children Campaign. They hassled clerks to check ID and used bullshit excuses to stop cars driven by teens to search for booze.
I looked towards Gary and the other drivers. Some wore faded army fatigues. Gary was about five years older than me. He’d been drafted and shipped to ‘Nam after dropping out of school. He returned with a handful of medals, a pound of hash, and a shoebox full of instamatic snapshots of bloody bodies strewn about burnt villages. He had stories too. These weren’t heroic John Wayne stories. He told of gambling and thievery aboard troopships and in barracks; deals and swindles in back-street black markets; debauchery with whores. They were the same as his photographs—visions from a delirium.
Every day, I saw more long-haired guys just past their teens with jobs like mechanics and truck drivers. Many had been to ‘Nam. I couldn’t figure them out. They were adults but, they were nothing like my parents. And, except for Dandelion’s, everyone’s family was as identical as a tract house.
Our mothers’ universe was the kitchen and laundry and supermarket. Our dads were the WWII VFW crowd. Parents preached and scolded and argued. Dads preached that the war taught lessons of pulling together and getting a job done and the depression taught lessons about hard work and the value of a dollar. We were scolded for everything we did. Especially our attitude. And parents argued about money. Money! Always money. Every night our dads stared at the television chain-smoking cigarettes. The TV’s glow and the nicotine haze turned their world blue and yellow as they grew old. Disappointment had found them on the other side of their war. Tonight, I saw that, in their own way, they were as injured as Crab.
The shadow of my generation’s war getting closer. My dad repeatedly told me that the army would straighten me out. Looking at Gary, I didn’t see any straightening. He displayed apathy and disdain nourished by the unpleasant surprise of reaching his eighteenth birthday and finding himself a victim of his time. I realized that he’d carry pain that would never fade.
“Hey! Did you zone out?” said Wizard. “I said five bucks.”
“Forget it,” I said. “We’ven’t time to drink it. It’ll be warm.”
“We’ll drink it tomorrow. I’ll hide it and put in the ‘fridge tomorrow when my parents aren’t around.
“Here,” said Dandelion. She reached into a pocket of her shapeless jeans and pulled out a five. I’d never seen her carry a purse. Wizard snatched it and ran off.
I wanted to ask her why she had paid for the beer. At illicit teen parties, Dandelion carried a beer can in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. The can remained full. And the cigarette touched her lips only when she lit it. She’d talk and laugh while putting down and picking up the can and gesturing with the cigarette. Props. I began to wonder how much of her acting went beyond the drama club. I realized that her shapeless clothes and no makeup could be props to repel the Jims of the world. I hoped I was wrong, but I sensed that some experience, or the fear of it, had hurt her.
“Let’s go!” It was Jim. “I can’t wait all night.”
Jim and Dandelion’s mom had come up behind us. Jim was short and wide. Dandelion’s mom in her heels made him look even smaller. He wore a blue demin jacket that pinched across his shoulders. He clutched a small paper bag with the name of an auto parts store on it. Wizard was already at my car with the two six packs. Dandelion sat in the front. Her mom giggled as she squeezed in the backseat between Jim and Wizard. Jim scowled when he saw Wizard pushing himself right up against her.
Jim’s car was on the side of a nearby road. He opened the hood and reached for the distributor cap. Dandelion’s mom and Wizard sat on a guardrail chain-smoking her cigarettes. Wizard was pushing himself right up against her. She was giggling with her red-nailed hand on his arm. Jim came back to my car, removed his jacket and tossed it into the back seat. He took the auto parts bag back to his car. Dandelion and I leaned against my car waiting. I worried about getting home by midnight. Dandelion crossed her arms across her chest.
“Are you cold?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said.
I pointed to the back seat. “Want Jim’s coat?”
“I’m not that cold.”
Jim called for me to hold a flashlight. He huffed and puffed as he reached over the engine to change the condenser and set the points. His shirt pulled up to expose a stomach that reminded me of coiled white worms. His junk flashlight wouldn’t stay on.
“Christ!” he said. “Hold it steady!”
“Did you get the parts for the Jetstar too?” I asked.
Jim said nothing.
When he got his car running, Dandelion’s mom got in. She sat in the center of the front seat to be right up against him. Jim said that he’d follow me to Dandelion’s house. I thought his idea was nuts. I should follow him in case his car crapped out again. And it’d be best for Dandelion to go with him so I could quickly get home. But it was easier to say nothing.
I drove slowly trying to stay together while watching his headlights in my mirror. But another car got between us and that’s why I slipped through a yellow light as it was turning to red. I had wanted to stop, but the car behind me was too close. When we both were through the light, the driver showed his annoyance by blasting his horn as he passed me. I slowed and looked in the mirror, instead of Jim’s lights, I saw flashing red. I pulled over.
“The cop is after the car that passed you,” said Wizard.
Wizard was wrong. The cop pulled his cruiser askew in front of my car and got out. He was the young thin type. I had pulled over under a street light and turned on the car’s interior lights but the bastard drilled his flashlight’s beam into my eyes when he demanded my license. As I handed it to him, I knew I wouldn’t drive again until I was 21.
“Hey man!” said Wizard. “That light was yellow!”
The cop turned his flashlight’s beam onto Wizard’s face. Then he flashed it across the backseat. It spotlighted the two six packs.
“Get out and stand behind the car,” he said. We got out.
He reached into the back seat with his free hand. He picked up the six packs one at a time saying “Oh my! Oh my!” He put them on my car’s roof smiling like a little kid at Christmas.
I was about to say that the beer was mine. And that I smashed the corn. And hit the dog. Then, I could tell the farmhouse people I was sorry.
“It belongs to my mom,” said Dandelion.
The cop came around to the back of the car. He looked at Dandelion and smiled, “Honey, I don’t see her.”
“Here she is!” Dandelion said. Jim’s car scrunched the gravel right behind the cop.
The cop snapped around. He dropped his flashlight. His hand went towards his holster. I was wishing that this night had never happened.
“Mom!” shouted Dandelion. “You left your beer in the car. You forgot your beer.”
The cop turned. “You. Be quiet!”
“Hey Jim!” shouted Wizard, “You guys left your beer in the car!”
“You be quiet! Too!” The cop was flustered. “Everyone quiet!” He twisted back and forth trying to watch us and Jim’s car at the same time. Typical. Cops and teachers and parents always became disconcerted when things happened that didn’t fit the circumstances as they wanted them to be.
Dandelion’s mom slid out of Jim’s car in a manner that purposely flashed her legs and more. Jim was all smiles as he approached the officer. Using exaggerated bonhomie, like an insurance salesman, he told how I had helped him with his car. He added a lie about the beer.
“I’ll just have to be more careful,” said Dandelion’s mom. She giggled while she toyed with a strap on her top that kept sliding down. In the cool night air, her nipples were poking through the silky material. The cop was trying not to look. She smiled at him. “I get distracted!” She giggled while she pushed her hips sideways against Jim, Jim grinned. I thought of a school play as they performed a temptress and glad-hand routine designed to get them out of trouble. They were good. I wondered under what other circumstances they had used this act. Dandelion looked at the ground. She must have seen them do this before.
I had picked up the cop’s flashlight and moved next to him. The cop turned to me. “I wondered why you were driving so slowly.” Driving slowly! What crap!
I handed him his flashlight. He was in his mid-twenties. Military short hair. Perfect posture. His uniform looked as if he’d been born in it. I took a chance. “Were you in the service?”
“Marines. Two tours in ‘Nam.”
My dad was in the Marines in WW II.” That wasn’t true. My dad had been in the army. But I thought it’d help. “How we doing there?”
He took a deep breath. He shook his head. “I know this. Thirty, forty, maybe even fifty years from now, when people ask what went wrong and why, I’ll be able to say, ‘You can’t blame me!’”
I nodded. He noticed. It wasn’t for the reason he must have thought. When he talked of blame, I realized that he’d forever carry resentment the way Gary carried pain. I wondered how people the same age could be so different.
The cop gave me my license. And he gave everyone a clumsy little speech about being careful. He seemed eager to drive away. Without saying anything, Dandelion got into the backseat of Jim’s car so I could go directly home.
#
“I love how we bullshitted that cop!” Wizard was laughing. “And did you see those nipples!”
“Wizard. Shut up.” It felt good to say that.
“Why’re you so sore? Hey! That was the turn to my house!”
“You can walk.”
At ten to midnight, I parked in front of my house. I saw my dad pull the living room curtains aside. They closed. Finally, this night was coming to an end.
“When can you drive me to Dandelion’s house to get my beer?”
“It’s not your beer.” I opened a back door to roll up the windows and lock the car. “Dandelion paid for it.” I picked up a bundle from a corner of the back seat.
“What’s that?”
“Jim’s coat.” A pocket bulged. I took out Jim’s wallet. It was thick. I opened it. I took out his money.
“Shit! How much is there?”
“A lot!” I quickly flipped through the bills. I saw mostly twenties and tens and at least one fifty.
“Do you think he’ll miss a little?”
“He’s not getting any of it.” I pocketed the money and closed the wallet.
“You keeping it?”
“No. I’m going to use it to help Crab.”
“He’ll buy wine by the case!”
“I said I’m helping Crab. I’m buying him a new walker. And clothes.”
“Any charge cards in that wallet?”
“I’m not looking.” I put Jim’s wallet in his coat and rolled it into a tight ball. I pushed it into the drain opening in the curb that ate baseballs. “It’s gone.”
“You keeping any money?”
“I said I wasn’t.” I pulled the money from my pocket and peeled off some bills without looking at them. “Remember, Jim took off his coat and draped it over the guardrail.”
“I remember.” Wizard said taking the cash. “I saw Jim drape his coat over the guardrail.”
For once, he was serious. I gave him more money.
#
The corn had been harvested.
“Why are we here?” said Dandelion.
“It’s a nice drive.” I was looking out my side window towards the farmhouse.
“Are you looking for something?”
And then, I saw it. It was a German Shepherd-type dog missing a front leg. I whispered, “I’m sorry.”
The dog was like all of us; running loose and limping into the future.
###
John Rawski attends classes and workshops at Thurber House—a literary arts center located in the former home of New Yorker cartoonist James Thurber. His creative writing has appeared in Half and One, Fauxmoir, Tomorrow and Tomorrow, and Riverwind. He is a retired attorney and enjoys building model trains and cooking with cast iron skillets.