New Car

Fiction. I wrote this story to explain the presence of items burned and melted in a fire pit on Quartzville Creek in Oregon in July.

There’s no use dwelling on it, I thought. What’s done is done. Focus on now: campfire, nice river, half a bright assed moon. Into the fire go the remains of dinner: a pre-made mac and cheese in a box, three out of six beer cans, wrapper from a slim jim. A ‘92 Chevy Cavalier blocks the campfire from the highway across the river. I pace around the fire, processing things. Do I have regrets? Yes, I have them. May they fade in my memory. 

In ten years, I will scarcely remember even the car chase, frames of which keep surfacing when I drive too long and my mind starts to slide around, my eyelids grow heavy and I am dropped into sleep like a baby dropped from it’s mother’s arms. I fight my way back up into consciousness and driving, and at those moments, I remember. I remember the stench of dog in the car. The dog that was dead by the time I got in. The dog that still stinks up the car when I spill something on the seat or leave the window open in the rain. I can smell a whisper of it now in the smoke.

It’s emotionally taxing, this burning of things. When I deceive someone, I feel some sense of the pain and suffering and anguish I’m inflicting on the mark. I feel that this sensitivity makes me better than other crooks, who are psychopaths, and at the same time this is a thing I have to transcend to do my “job”. This sensitivity makes me good at my job, so I don’t want to transcend it completely. Is it possible to know about feelings in detail, but not have to feel them? You can know about someone’s knowledge. You can know that they know you only have half a tank of gas, and will have to stop somewhere in a 100 mile radius. That’s pretty important, short term. But let’s say you know someone is “Sad”. “Sad” is not that important in the right now. If you're playing poker and you find out the guy across from you is sad, that might be useful if you're going to go all night, but not as useful in the right now as knowing he has two pairs. Knowing he’s sad is more useful if you want him to buy some crypto or mortgage his house, but then you need to know what kind of sad. Is he drunk by midnight? What’s he sad about? To offer him an escape, you have to understand what he’s running from, emotionally. I can’t do that without feeling for the guy.

To know, one has to feel things. To act, one must deaden those feelings. It’s an ironical circle of life type of thing, so I guess, even though it's uncomfortable, it's the universe being in balance. Of course it must be thus.

I processed physical things as well. Out of a duffel bag came a series of folders containing opened mail: credit card offers, bank statements, mortgage receipts… Into the fire. It was a burn everything situation. Credit cards out of his wallet, into the fire. Pages ripped from a spiral notebook, proof of car insurance, a university student ID card, everything into the fire.

I had been parked, running the engine, waiting for them to come roaring out of the house. There was the flight through the storage space complex, the random extras, the girl, that woman, the kid. Fuck’s sake what was a kid doing there? What were any of them doing there? Its good to be curious, but it's also good to know when there is no hope of getting answers so you can get to work on forgetting the questions. 

It was unfortunate for everyone, the way it went down. Dinah didn't deserve it, though she could have avoided most of it if she had just been able to control herself. Peter did deserve it, as far as I was concerned, which meant that he didn't really deserve it, but I just happened to dislike the man. Dropping a dime on Peter was easy, taking his car was easy. Tolerating him while he was alive, drunk, yammering on about some podcast, that was hard. But its best not to fuck with a man whilst he cleans his gun and Peter was always cleaning his guns. If he was alone, he had Joe Rogan on, or Sean Ryan, Joko or some other nut and when someone was there, it was Peter talking, delivering his very own podcast, and sometimes it was both at once. 

Peter talked like he was a part of something. Like he was developing himself for something, cleaning his guns for some reason, preparing, so it was tempting to see him as formidable, but when the biker guy walked in and put one in his forehead, I dropped all speculation about what kind of person Peter really was. 

“Peter, that was Peter, right?”  The biker was wearing jeans with a wallet chain and a black hoodie, long hair pulled back, and some kind of neck tats. He hadn't come on his bike, there had been no noise outside the trailer, so that was smart, but the neck tats seemed dumb, and also it seemed weird to ask who he just shot. His plan had apparently been to bust in and take control somehow, but here Peter had a gun in his hand, empty because he was cleaning it, so he had to cap him, and now he needed to figure out what was what so he could finish up as best he could.

Me and Dinah looked at each other, me not knowing much and her understanding nothing and ready to scream. The dog wasn’t barking, so that meant the dog was dead.

“Yeah, that’s Peter.” I said, trying to sound competent enough to be useful but not so much as to be threatening, and understanding this was not the right time to make requests.

“Cool, cool. Mind if I sit down?”

“Sure.” I said. Dinah settled into a catatonic state that was perfectly appropriate for the situation. 

He plopped down onto next to Dinah and kept his 45 in his right hand with the finger on the trigger as he fished out a pack of American Spirits from the pouch of his hoodie and made eye contact with each of us. While looking at me, he shook one loose onto his lap and put the pack back in his pouch. He had to lift his hips up to fish the zippo out of the pocket of his jeans while sitting down and he looked at Dinah while he did that. Then he looked down at his nose at the cigarette and brought the gun hand up out of habit to block the wind as he lit his American Spirit, finger still on the trigger, barrel pointing at the ceiling.

His left hand moved like water. It looked like it returned the lighter to the pouch without him even asking it to and I got the sense that this is how he would like things to go, just fall into place without having to think too much.

His eyes and gun returned to me and he smiled. This was a nice moment for him. “Jeremy?” 

“Yes?”

“Look man, I’m here for a simple reason. Can you guess what that is?”

“Money?”

“Bingo! Check out the big brain on Jeremy!” I would have cringed, you know, blasting in here and quoting Pulp Fiction is a little on the nose. He was too young to have seen it when it came out, must have seen it recently. It must have made an impression. 

He had a weatherbeaten face and sun wrinkles around his eyes, deeper than they should have been for his age, and the pale outline of wraparound sunglasses from temple to temple. He had been riding for a while, a season at least, but he seemed less like an enforcer than a prospect, someone disposable, sent to do a thing that might go south, or which just wasn't that important. It was important to him to return with results. With money.

Unfortunately, there was only one money. It was all in one place. I had planned to parse it up after Peter was distracted or sent away somehow. I had even thought about giving some to Dinah. To keep her quiet and to make me feel better. 

“Ok, well, where is it y’all?” He looked from me to Dinah, who was still catatonic.

“It's under the closet. There’s a loose panel in the floor.”

Dinah’s head whipped over to me. She didn't know I knew that, and it meant things.

“Les go.” He stood up and gestured for the two of us to precede him into Jeremy’s bedroom. We stood up, but I paused. 

“Hold on. Peter’s got guns everywhere. I just want to get you the money so you can go, but I don't want you to be surprised when there’s like a shotgun behind the door or whatever he’s got.”

“Oh, ok. Well, here's how we’ll do it. You’ll go back there first, I'll keep this gun on you, and if you move too fast or grab anything I don't like, I'll just shoot you. Cool?” He sounded really bad ass saying this with the cigarette in his mouth and gesturing with the 45. I wondered how many pounds that trigger was set at. 

We went back there. It was a mess. There were probably guns but if he hid them, they were under dirty clothes. I moved toward the closet.

“Nope, you sit there on the bed. Dinah, I want you to bring out the money. Go.”

I sat on some clothes on the bed. It was clear Peter slept with his dog. Looking back at the guy I saw, above the doorframe, a short pump shotgun. It wasn't literally sawed off, just a shortie, 12ga pump with a pistol grip, right above his head.

Dinah was pulling things out of the closet to uncover the floor. Boots, a bicycle pump, a couple plastic storage tubs. From her knees, she pulled up on something and a piece of plywood came loose and she set it down outside the closet. She looked down.

“So far, so good honey. Now come up with something I'm gonna like.”

“There’s a gun on the bag.”

“That’s ok. I don't want to see it. Just move it off and leave it under the house and bring up the bag.”

A few hours later, after we loaded everything into his van: guns, radio gear, money, and some boxes I didn't know what was in them, me and Dinah watched the doublewide go up in flames as the van drove out to highway 84 and made a left. I was surprised we were standing there and not in the burning trailer, but then he did seem to have the goods on us, and could call on us again in the future. 

It was time to establish a new understanding with Dinah. This was going to be tricky, and would require all the strategy and sensitivity I had. 

“Dinah?” 

At the sound of her name, she turned from the inferno and walked to her Toyota Camry, got in, drove to the highway, and turned right.

She was my ride, so this left me with Peter’s 92 Chevy Cavalier. He had described it as a stealth car, being a big piece of shit that no one would suspect the driver of it to be capable of anything consequential in any way. I got in, keys fell down from the visor. It started fine. I drove out to the highway and sat idling for a minute. No cars were coming, but I like to use my turn signals even when no one is there because I want to live in the kind of world where people do that, once I decide which way I’m going. My right hand fumbled around the steering column looking for the old style signal lever.

I drove all night, turned off in a small town, followed another highway, turned off onto a feeder road into some mountains, turned off on a forest road, and slept in a pull out. Ate at a diner. Drove the next day, filled up at a gas station a couple times, and found myself at this turnout, finally ready to take stock. 

I’d picked up a few things at a truck stop: a t-shirt that said Real Tree, new socks and boxers, toothbrush and toothpaste, food, and an air freshener that hung from my rearview mirror. On the air freshener, it said “New Car”, but it was in the shape of a christmas tree. 

It didn't fix the smell in the car, which was of Peter’s dog. That dog had been dead at least a couple days, but it was still stinking up this car. Stealth indeed. But I wasn't complaining because there was about two thousand cash in the glove box. There was, of course, guns, which I had chucked in a river somewhere in Oregon. The rest was a lot of car trash, some clothes, food wrappers, a Lee Child paperback, a couple flashlights, and what I'm sure Peter called a Bug Out Bag, filled with a first aid kit, non-perishable food, a bunch of paracord, a carabiner, a knife, and yet another gun. 

I burned everything I could not use. What the fuck was I going to do with 100 feet of paracord? There was some wire I think was for making snares to catch small animals. I left it by the firepit for the next guy, who maybe would be trying to survive after the collapse of civilization. What still seemed useful went back into the black backpack. I knew a junkyard in Austin that would take the car, a place I could maybe start over, if certain people would allow me. If certain bridges there could be un-burned. If the Cavalier would go another 3k miles. It was my best option. Well, probably not, probably, there were thousands of other better options, but I was limited by what I was able to visualize and Austin is what came up. It would be two, maybe three days of solid driving. Some edibles would help, and a new phone. It’s easy to find both in the time and place I am heading through. My biggest problem now is the smell of that dog. The dog that never barked, piping up now over the new car smell.