The Old Grey Mare

The Old Grey Mare



I raced down the black tunnel of the interstate, my eyes locked on the ever shifting but ever familiar patch of visible road. Miles and minutes blended as I passed through them, lulling me into a soporific state. It was New Year's Eve and I was driving my ex-girlfriend, her suicidal, transgendered cousin, and their friend back to Jackson. We’d been passing out pills earlier, chugging them down with vodka, chasing it with more pills and some pot to top it off. I'd had some of the pot, some of the vodka. I thought they were all asleep until Missy, the friend I’d been ignoring all night, spoke from the back seat.

"Hey, is your car supposed to smoke that much?" she said.

I glanced in the rearview for the first time in maybe an hour. A wall of white smoke rose against the black limbo of the night sky. I took the next exit into West Memphis while Missy tried to wake Ariel and her cousin, Everett.

The darkness of early morning broke into the grid of a Wal-Mart parking lot. It was mostly empty. I pulled into a spot not too close to the building and killed the engine. Smoke poured from under the hood and enveloped the car as I opened the door. No flames yet. Missy and Everett got out. I went around to Ariel's door.

"Come on," I said.

"I'll stay in the car," she mumbled, eyes still closed.

"The car's on fire."

"I'm tired."

"Sweetie?" Missy cut in front of me and leaned in close to Ariel, speaking in soft tones. "You've got to get out of the car. It's going to blow up."

She dragged Ariel out and we stood, blinking in the sodium light.
"Think it'll blow?" someone asked.
There was a chorus of shrugs.
It wasn’t until we’d walked to the automatic doors of the store that I realized I probably shouldn't have parked so close to the other cars, but I wasn’t planning on going back to that car now. I was in a kind of shock: one minute I'd been driving, the next we were on fire.

Not that I was surprised. I'd had that car for two years, ever since my first car was totaled by a drunk driver (not me) coming back from a fishing trip with a truckload of empties and nothing else to show. My Dad spent a couple thousand on a 1986 Chevy Cavalier and pocketed the rest of the insurance money. It overheated the day after he bought it, so he took it to a buddy and told him to tinker with it. The next day, it overheated again. I was ready to take the damned thing back, but Dad held on to that car like a snapping turtle waiting for thunder. He would pay some buddy to fix it; I’d take it out and drive it till it broke down, which wasn’t usually that far. Mostly, the car tended to overheat. Sometimes it idled too high, sometimes the alternator went out; these were all fixable things, but they implied a larger problem that no-one could pinpoint. It was the overheating that stumped everyone. My father blamed me. He thought I was taking the new parts off the car and selling them for drugs. I was impressed with his opinion of my mechanical know-how and business savvy.

After about a year, my brother-in-law discovered that the fan had been wired to run backwards. We gave him a beer, and he rewired it. I drove the car to town to get gas, and it broke down again.


* * *


Inside the Wal-Mart, I tried to convince the man at the help desk to loan me a fire extinguisher. He declined.

"Well, then can you send someone out there with one? My car's on fire."
"Sorry," he said.

"Well, can you call the fire department? The pay phone's broken."
This was a lie. I didn't actually know where the payphone was.
He shook his head. I was astounded. I didn't know if the guy didn't believe me or was maybe worried that they'd be liable somehow.
"Look," I said. "My car is on fire in the parking lot. When it explodes it's going to
take a couple of other cars with it. Your customers' cars. Now I'm not trying to tell you how to do your job, but I suggest you call the fire department before those customers come out to find nothing but shards left of their vehicles." He stared at me, unmoved.
I’d done all I could, so I walked away. Ariel and the others were gone. I wandered deeper into the brightly lit maze of Chinese imports until I noticed an annoyed-looking manager and several stock boys heading purposefully toward the back of the store. I followed them to the bedding department, where Ariel and the bunch had piled pillows on the floor and were sleeping on them. I ducked behind an aisle and watched the ruckus as they were woken and led away.

I found them grumbling in the alcove where the video games and carts are, a sort of liminal space between the real world and the inside of a Wal Mart.
Outside, flames rose from the hood of my car. They were small and quick, like when a piece of paper burns.
"They said we couldn't come back in," Everett said. "I tried to tell them we're stranded ‘cause your car's on fire." I didn’t respond. His thin, pale face was sullen. Mascara circled his eyes, creeping down his cheeks. As people passed to enter the store, they stared at his spiky blond hair, made up face and rock-star clothes with a range of looks from curiosity to disgust.
"I should fucking sue you," Everett yelled back inside the door.
"Anybody got a cigarette?" Ariel asked. No one did.
She turned green eyes on me as if for the first time. "Hey," she said, her voice softening. "Let's walk."

She took my arm. I felt my whole body grow warm.

Outside, smoke pasted the parking lot. She snuggled up to me, leaning blond hair on my shoulder, her breasts warm on my arm.

"I'll let you kiss me if you buy me some cigarettes," she said, turning full lips up to me.
"All right." I leaned towards her.

"After," she said. "And if you're nice, I'll be nice."
We kept walking. "What kind do you want?" I asked.
"I'm joking," she said, pushing me a little. "What's wrong?"
I shrugged and motioned towards my car.
"You're wound so tight," she said. "You should laugh. What else can you do?"
We walked back inside and sat on a bench.
"I thought you were going to get some cigarettes," she said. "I can't go in, or I would."
"I thought you were kidding."
"About the kiss, not about the cigarettes," she said, showing me a smile that meant “now”.
I went inside for the cigarettes. Everett yelled orders as though I was a drive-through window, and I ignored him. Maybe I was spending my New Year's Eve in the doorway of a West Memphis Wal-Mart, but at least I hadn't been thrown out. I could come and go as I pleased. It was something.




* * *


The fire truck arrived and here came the guy who'd refused me a fire extinguisher earlier, running out with one and making a show of being on the scene. We lit cigarettes and watched the flames eat at the sky as they pried the hood open. The firemen sprayed the Wal Mart fire extinguisher on the engine, and had the fire out in seconds. Everett and Ariel cheered.

I went to meet the firemen when it was out.
"Do you know what caused it?" I asked.
"Maybe electrical," one of them said.
"You might want to be careful," he added. "The battery melted pretty bad, so if you drive it, be careful of the acid."
He was a young guy, with the plastic, angry face and dead eyes of a cop. "Do you think it would drive?" I asked him, suddenly hopeful.
A thoughtful look crossed his face. "Well no, but I mean, just be careful."
"Thanks for the advice."
They packed up and left me with the ruins of my car. I tried to imagine all the money my father had spent to keep the thing running. All wasted, now. I’d pissed my fair share away, too. A few months earlier, I’d made big plans to move to Fayetteville to go to college, but the transmission had gone out on the car, and all the money I’d saved had to go to fix the thing up. So much for my plans of getting out. The car was a weight I'd blamed for holding me back. And now it sat smoldering in the parking lot of a West Memphis Wal Mart on New Year’s Eve.

I dug through the glove box and removed everything that might connect me as the owner of the car, though I would later realize that I forgot the license plate.
After the firemen left, Missy called her mother's boyfriend. We spent the rest of the night and most of the morning waiting for him to pick us up, dozing on the hard benches. On the ride back, I sat on the van’s cup holder, in between Missy and her mother’s boyfriend. In the back, Everett kept asking someone to hurt him.
"Twist it," he said, holding out his finger.
Ariel twisted it and he moaned. When we were in school, there had been a tradition that kids would trash Everett’s car for homecoming. The football players beat him just like his father beat him. Eventually, he’d become what he thought they wanted—someone who enjoyed the abuse. Maybe that was his way out, or maybe he was just lost and didn’t realize there was a way out. Wherever he was, Ariel was there too, but I didn’t want to be there with them anymore.
Missy's mom's boyfriend dropped us off. I stumbled through the dawn light of New Year’s Day, and for the first time in my life, it truly felt as though a line had been drawn. This day, this new stream of time was separate from what had gone before. I went home and called my father at work.
"My car burned up in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart in West Memphis," I told
him. "I'm home now." And hung up.
I went to bed, and he called back a half-hour later.
"We need to get it towed someplace," he said. "And we'll have to pay for storage fees until we can get it. We'll have to get it towed back here, I guess. That'll cost us."
"Why do we have to get it towed?"
"If we leave it in the parking lot, they'll impound it."
"And then what?"
"Send it to a junkyard, I guess," he said. "And we won't be able to get it back."
"We don't want it back, Dad. It burned. It's a heap. Leave it there. Let them tow it. They can deal with it," I said.
He was quiet.
"It's done," I said, and hung up.
I waited for him to call back but he didn't, so I went to bed.



C.L. Bledsoe

Posted over on Hamilton Stone Review