MELANIE CARLSTAD / CRASHING THE FORD
My man and I went to a bar right after crashing his Ford. He was the only one who didn’t tell me to go to the hospital. I said to him, “Dallas, I couldn’t possibly go there, please never make me go.” And he said, “There are so many other places to go, why would we ever go there? Let’s go to the bar, and then let’s go to the ocean.”
The crash was with a dark blue electric car, and its occupant remained inside it when Dallas and I climbed out of his ruined Ford.
“Do you need help?” I asked the woman in the car.
“How about you worry about yourself?” she said. “Call yourself an ambulance and leave me in peace.” The woman stayed where she was with her electric car askew in the middle of the intersection.
The first time Dallas and I crashed was in his pickup truck, also a Ford, and long gone now. He drove me in the pickup along narrow, hilly roads in the summer, the sun and sky filtered through thick green leaves hanging lazily over the street. We crashed it on a cool, foggy night outside a party where two boys stood at the door and told us to go home. “Kendall found a bat,” they said to us. “You don’t wanna go in there anyway.” I sat with Dallas in the truck after that and we looked at the big white house where the party was, finishing the beers we had brought to share. When we finally drove off, he totaled the truck only a few blocks away and we left it there in the bushes, promising to come back for it later.
In the middle of the intersection, Dallas helped me out of the car, glancing at the silent woman in the electric car adjacent to us. We left the crash scene as it was, steamy and tranquil, and called a taxi to take us to the bar. “We didn’t know we were going before the crash,” I told the driver. “But now we know.”
“I think you should go to the hospital,” the driver said. He looked at me with wide eyes in the rearview mirror.
“No,” I said. “We’re going for drinks.” Dallas took out his phone and dragged his fingers along the cracked screen, texting our friends to come and meet us.
In the bar, Dallas got into the music, performing a jerky, fearful dance for us. I watched him thrash and it was like my eyeballs turned to liquid and dripped down my face. He was gripping the edge of the bar, his hands clenched hard so his fingers were hot and white, and baring his teeth. His tangled hair whipped back and forth as he moved. The walls were plastered with posters that advertised people with black eye makeup and protruding tongues. The music was screaming. Leather was everywhere, black and meat-scented. A cross above the doorway seemed to glow as Dallas flung his body around beside me.
“Your man is so hot, Lavender,” my friend Jane said to me. Her hair was curly and warm to the touch. She sipped her gin and tonic and turned away from him to look at me, her leather jacket making rubbery noises as she moved. When she saw me full on in the dim lighting of the bar, she said, “Oh my goodness, what’s wrong with you? Maybe you should go to the—”
“Silence, Jane,” I said. “You’re my most wonderful friend. I have never seen such eyes.” Jane smiled and fondled her bulky silver locket, and Dallas swooped over her shoulder like a bat. He shout-whispered in her ear, “I used to have a necklace just like that, Jane.”
“By the way, everyone, we have good news,” I said. “Dallas is getting a new car soon.” Jane was staring at Dallas, who was tapping his collarbones where the necklace would have rested.
Our friends Tyler and Gideon were beside us feeding each other peanuts. They were the most beautiful people in the bar. Tyler wore all denim and had long, black and yellow hair. Gideon wore snow pants and a nose ring. They both drank sixteen ounces of water after every shot of tequila because they knew that hydration equaled beauty. Tyler turned to us. “What’s it going to be this time, Dallas?” he asked. “A Ford, perhaps?”
The second time Dallas and I crashed we were driving in his Ford Fiesta through a state park with eucalyptus trees rising around us. We were telling stories and sharing a bag of popcorn. Dallas kept one hand on the steering wheel and dunked the other into the bag for handfuls of salty kernels.
“I built a mortar and pestle in middle school woodshop,” Dallas told me. “My teacher said it was poorly crafted. So, I punched him in the face and stole his wallet.”
“Not bad,” I said. “I stuffed my first bra in middle school. My father was very sick then. We thought he was going to die, but he didn’t.”
Dallas plunged his hand so deep into the bag of popcorn that I could feel his knuckles dance on my thigh.
“He was always going to the hospital,” I continued. “So I went to his dresser with the grease stains on top and stole his socks and stuffed them in like there was no tomorrow.”
We gazed at the peeling, oily trunks of the eucalyptus trees drifting past us. “You know what these do, Dallas, when they catch on fire.” He had his mouth wide open, smashing popcorn in past his teeth with the palm of his hand. “THEY ECK-SPLODE! AAAAH!” I said.
“You’re a sick bitch, Lavender,” Dallas said. He looked away from the road to give me his radiant smile and get more popcorn. A car came around the bend from the opposite direction, and we collided with a blinding smack. The airbags shoved themselves against our bodies and the Ford Fiesta was ruined.
In the bar, Tyler and Gideon kissed while Jane took flash photos of them with her point-and-shoot. They squealed and hunched over the small camera to see the pictures, then handed it to me and Dallas. Gideon had one eye half open in the photos, and the flash had turned the sliver of exposed eyeball a cool, unnatural red.
“This is going to be the photo for our holiday card,” Gideon said. “Our mothers will sob. What’s yours going to be?”
“This year maybe I’ll go to the beach and take a picture of the sand,” I said. “But I never make holiday cards. I’m not interested in the mail.” I handed the camera back to Jane. She took it with both hands, wiped it off, and tucked it away in her bag.
The bar grew darker and more crowded. As strangers squeezed past us to crowd around tables, they stared with hostile curiosity at our group. Dallas ordered more drinks and his face began to look like the bubbles in a glass of champagne, glittery and weightless. I had worshipped him since the moment the car skidded and torpedoed through the air, my hand in his all the while, and I had loved him longer than my entire life.
The third time Dallas and I crashed we were having a heated conversation in his Ford Five Hundred. My father had recently disappeared while piloting a tiny airplane in the Californian sky. “How could he disappear like that?” I asked. “It’s impossible.”
“Amelia Earhart did it,” Dallas said.
“My dad is nothing like Amelia Earhart,” I said, and my voice carried out the window, scaring a rafter of turkeys on the sidewalk. It was fall then, and cloudy every day. “He’s doing amazingly well. He’s always been a great pilot.”
“Maybe you should start saying your dad was nothing like Amelia Earhart,” Dallas said.
“You know what I mean? He was doing amazingly well. Just to be safe.” What Dallas said made me scream. Moments later, the Ford Five Hundred was done for, and my father was never found.
A thick, happy man bumped into Dallas as we leaned forward on our stools in the stuffy din of the bar. Dallas chatted inaudibly with the bartender, then turned to us, expressionless.
“Nice guy behind the bar,” he said. “I actually raised him from perdition a while back. He’s from Missouri.”
“Tons of magicians out there,” Gideon said. “I went to a buffet once with a magician, right there in St. Louis. He absolutely killed me. I’ll never forget it.”
“Did you know Missouri is the show-me state?” Dallas said. His voice was loud and he held onto my wrist where it rested in a puddle of cold water on the bar. “Lavender,” he said. I felt his eyes descend from my incognizable face to my breasts. “Show me. Show me. Show me.”
Gideon released another peanut into Tyler’s mouth, and Tyler crunched down on it, looking at me. “Lavender,” he said. “Have you seen yourself? I mean, doesn’t it really hurt?”
“I’m not going to the hospital, Tyler. You can’t make me go there,” I said. “I’ve seen the inside of those places. It’s not that I don’t know what I’m talking about. They keep you there. They steal your clothes and feed you no solid food. You’re lucky if you make it out alive. Do you want us getting wrapped up in a fate like that?” I was tired of holding my head upright, so I gently lowered it to a more comfortable position.
“You know what I think you should do?” Tyler said. He propped his elbows on the bar and looked at Dallas, then back at me. “I think you might as well lie down out back with the cigarette butts and let it happen.”
“What do you say, Dallas?” I asked, forcing my head up to look at my man.
“I can’t understand what you’re saying, Lavender,” Dallas said. “You need to enunciate.”
The dark, hot room we were standing in seemed to groan and stretch with the strain of the bodies stuffed inside it, and we began to push and squeeze our way out of it, earning more stares from the people pressed against us on all sides.
“Please, god, help that woman,” someone shouted as I reached the door. My friends nodded while looking at me, and the door whooshed open. We stumbled out, our arms and legs loosening and our necks growing longer in the immense openness of the sidewalk.
Jane had fallen asleep at the bar and was rubbing her eyes, taking in the harsh night sky. “What are we going to do now?” she asked. “We could have stayed in there forever if we hadn’t left.”
The five of us piled into Jane’s car, Dallas in the passenger seat and me tucked between Tyler and Gideon in the back. The car smelled like cookies and pine needles.
Jane drove us through the hilly streets. It was a cold, rainy night, but there were lights on everywhere, and the beams streaked across my vision in yellow, blue, and red. Dallas muttered directions to Jane and we drove along the edge of an enormous park with sand on the ground and tarps draped among the bushes. The trees were dark green, almost black. I waited for the car to crash all over again. Instead, it rolled to a stop on ground softer than pavement, and Tyler and Gideon jumped out, took their shoes off, and ran away screaming. When Dallas took my bony hand and pulled me from the car, there was a blast of wind and a roar in my ears. Grains of sand nicked my skin. I looked in the direction we were walking to see out of nowhere the crashing, hungry darkness of the ocean. Dallas was pulling me to it, and the cold vast ruthlessness of the water appalled me.
Melanie Carlstad’s short stories can be found in X-R-A-Y and Catapult. She talks about her dead cat in the present tense and is originally from the Bay Area.