Impala

by S.A. Solomon

For Joyce

 

It was raining, and the Impala handled sloppily. It steered like a cruise ship, but she knew what to do, because Glen, a former Navy pilot, had taught her how to drive and how to deal with sluggish controls. “Renée” (her mother, now gone, had given her the name), Glen would say, “you’re in charge of the machine. If you fight it, the machine will respond, and that may be your last mission.” Here he made his hand into a jet to simulate a nosedive. “Kaput, finis . . . splat.” He always made her laugh, even when he made her angry, but until now, she had always listened to him.

He’d picked up the pieces after her mother left. Literally, since she—Renée—had smashed all the dishes and crockery in the kitchen of the government housing unit where they lived. She had no recall of this incident. Until he retired on disability, Glen had worked as a contractor for NASA in a classified capacity. She was too little to understand the whys of her mother’s departure, but as she got older, various interested parties (usually female) seemed eager to offer her their versions. She didn’t credit any of them. All she knew was that Glen took care of her, and in the times when he couldn’t take care of himself, she did. She owed him that.

When the Impala began to wander, she gently tapped at the wheel and the car responded, straightening out on the rain-slicked, nearly empty highway. She glanced at the speedometer. She was within the posted limit. She was about to cross the state line and couldn’t afford to be pulled over. It would be a “cluster-fuck,” as the boys in her school liked to say. She hated that expression, evoking as it did (and as it was meant to) a female body pinned down by male members. The boys said it because of that, mouthed it meaningfully, hungrily.

If it was rape they meant, why not just say so? Cowards.

She knew what they meant because they’d shown her.

She was fifteen at the time and couldn’t just pick up and leave, like her mother had. And she couldn’t tell Glen, who would go gunning for them, or worse, report them and expose her to ridicule and shame with this public outing, a shame there was no coming back from.

She had a better solution.

There were plenty of guys in her school who wanted what she was prepared to offer, but only one who could give her what she needed in return. Protection.

Panda was a shot-caller. You didn’t have to know anything about what he actually did to understand that. You could tell by the way the others acted around him. He was feared, and therefore respected.

So she was a gangster’s girlfriend, so what?

At first it was thrilling, a dangerous rush. But then she began to crave and need the rush, couldn’t detach herself, even when his affections, the butt slaps and possessive neck grabs, turned into blows and bruises she’d had to hide from Glen and her teachers. (Almost worse were the insults, the insinuation that she was “damaged goods” because of what those boys had done to her. She soon realized that Panda wasn’t rescuing as much as recycling her. She would be expected to repay him in kind.)

Her teachers paid attention to her because, they said, she had “promise.” Promise? What did that mean? She didn’t owe them anything. She turned in her homework assignments on time and didn’t routinely fail tests. That put her in the ninetieth percentile of her grade at the high school. It had nothing to do with the teachers or even Glen. It was because of her mother, who, when she thought Renée couldn’t hear or understand, would ball up and hit herself with her own fists, would call herself dumb, dumb, dumb. And she wasn’t. Her mother was smart, as smart as any man, Glen always said. But someone had taught her that she was stupid.

Glen wasn’t like that. Glen had loved her mother. He’d met her at the blackjack table in the Seminole casino down in Hollywood. She nearly always won, had an affinity for the cards. It had gotten her banned from more than a few tables. Glen had tried to get her to teach him this skill, or trick, whatever it was, but she couldn’t. Or wouldn’t.

Renée had searched for the meaning of this. Dumb why? Was it because her mother had allowed herself to get pregnant and therefore trapped? (Renée didn’t know who her father was. She’d never been told and didn’t care enough to look for him once she was old enough.) Mama had finally freed herself, dropped Renée at a strange day care, where she wasn’t even registered, leaving Glen’s name and phone number pinned to her hoodie pocket. He’d gotten the call at work. That was when he still worked. She vaguely remembered the day care ladies cooing, not over her, though they acted like it. They weren’t cooing before Glen, with his NASA ID badge clipped to his belt, drove up in the apple-red Impala, a 1976 Custom Coupe with a V-8 engine, a Turbo-Jet 454. He’d restored it himself. That’s what he had designed at work: rocket engines. (Though she wasn’t supposed to know that.)

She hadn’t been asked to be born a girl. She would have preferred to be male. Not because she didn’t feel “female.” But because males were in charge. She couldn’t stand the pervasive feeling of being controlled when a man entered a room with women in it. She didn’t understand why she had to accept it, but as she grew up she understood that it was a kind of social compact. You might as well question the existence of God, or the weather. (She’d tried that too—not the weather, which was empirically provable, but “God.” It hadn’t gone over well in her conservative community on Florida’s Space Coast.)

And Glen, who had taught her the tricks of machines and the laws of flight, couldn’t counsel her on the laws of the girl body—how it would rage with passion and want, but suggest no acceptable outlet. Glen would not, could not, advise her against fighting the delicate instruments under her control. It was a confounding mystery to him, beyond logic or the rules of engineering.

He had taught Renée how to change a tire, which had started the trash fire she was running from. Well, not started. It had begun in school, when detectives wanted to talk to her about Panda’s “gang ties.” She’d been suspended for some doodling in her notebooks, which they’d seized from her locker (no doubt because of one of the helpful “tips” that students had been encouraged to submit through an “anonymous” hotline—a joke, because nobody was anonymous in their small town). The detectives said it looked like a gang symbol, and after all, she was the girlfriend of Panda, the “alleged” leader of the local clique of a notorious international criminal gang the authorities had a hard-on for.

They wanted to interview her, but she had nothing to say.

Panda wanted to talk to her too.

What “gang activity” had she observed? the detective assigned to the case (a woman who acted like she was on Renée’s side) wanted to know.

What did they ask you? Panda would want to know.

She had observed nothing—only that, after word had gotten around that she was Panda’s girl, the boys who had tormented her (the sons of NASA employees and of the families stationed at the nearby military base) left her alone.

She hadn’t had to answer any questions yet, because the police needed Glen’s permission. They hadn’t contacted him, but it was only a matter of time.

Meanwhile, Panda had sent word around to find her. She couldn’t stay home from school because Glen would notice. He was in a sober phase, having traded painkillers and booze for Jesus and taken up with a churchgoing lady. This lady acted like she wanted to mother Renée, but that was just for show, she knew. Anyway, she didn’t need a mother. One had been enough.

Renée had realized it was time to go. Maybe that was what her mother had bequeathed her, an instinct for when it was time to take flight, while Glen had taught her the mechanics of it. She’d slipped the Impala’s keys off the hook in the spotless kitchen (the churchgoing lady again). Glen kept the vehicle in the carport and never drove it now. He had so many DUIs it was safe to assume that he wouldn’t be needing it in the near future. He sometimes let her drive, with him copiloting. They’d gas it up and go for soft serve at the Taystee Treat on the Cape.

He would probably miss her, but he had the comforts of the Lord and of the church lady. When that failed, the pills would be there, waiting.

(This hard-core version of Renée stepped in whenever she needed backup. But the hardness would melt away like runny ice cream when she started to feel the pain of abandoning Glen, who, for all his faults, had chosen to parent her when the ones whose job it was had run away from it. From her.)

She’d grabbed her gym bag with a change of clothes and the grocery money from its tin in the kitchen cabinet. It was her turn to go food shopping. Glen was big on discipline and chores when he was sober.

The Impala’s powerful engine started up immediately and hummed, idling, as she adjusted the seat and checked the mirrors. She backed slowly into the cul-de-sac and shifted into drive, pulling out of the apartment complex and onto the nearby highway access road. She rolled down the windows, tuned the radio to the oldies rock station (another of Glen’s influences), and headed north.

* * *

It was dusk on I-95 when it happened, a few hours later, in the green gloom of a conservation area somewhere past the urban sprawl of Jacksonville. The intermittent rain had stopped, but she had to watch for the branches littering the highway after a flash storm. And you never knew when the next band of showers was going to come through, decreasing visibility to next-to-nothing. Her hands felt slick on the wheel and she wiped them on her denim shorts. Her phone, sitting on the bench seat next to her, buzzed. Panda’s photo flashed up on the screen. He had already texted her like twenty-five times and she hadn’t answered.

The creature was fast. It raced across her field of vision and was gone, almost before she was aware of it. She stomped on the brake, the instinct all wrong. It was too late to avoid whatever it was she’d hit. The Impala fishtailed on the wet pavement. Glen’s training kicked in and she turned into the skid, not fighting it as the big car slowed and slid toward the shoulder. The seat belt dug into her waist. She tapped the brake and straightened out, but something was wrong. The wheels were off-kilter, the car jolting as it rolled. She’d blown a tire.

She pulled completely off the highway into the breakdown lane, as she’d been taught, and got out on the passenger side, away from the road. She’d missed landing in a drainage ditch by a few yards. She walked around the car to inspect the damage. The blowout was in the right rear tire. As she rounded the front of the Impala, she saw the point of impact. There was blood and gore on the left wheel well. It looked bad, like when the Kelly kid had tied a stray cat to his ATV and gunned it to see how long the animal took to die. He and his friends had timed it, taking bets. They were cops now, most of them. Glen had had his run-ins with that bunch. He didn’t like their way of doing things.

The animal was nowhere to be seen—or heard. Either she’d killed it, which was likely, or it had crawled off to lick its wounds and die in peace. She mouthed a silent apology to it and returned to the rear of the car. There was a spare tire in the trunk. The only question was, could she remember how to change it? It had been a long time since Glen’s lessons. She viewed the assembled tools—jack, lug wrench, wheel wedges—with some trepidation, and set to work. If she couldn’t do the job, she would have to hitchhike, that was all. She’d hitched before. It was risky, but there were ways to protect yourself. Truckers often had a soft spot for runaways; the big rigs that traveled with a relief driver, like a husband-and-wife team. It was, if not quite illegal, frowned upon for them to pick up riders, but sometimes they’d give a kid a break.

She had nearly finished loosening the lug nuts on the blown tire when a pair of headlights loomed in the dark. The last one was stubborn. She was sweating, her grip slipping on the wrench, and it jumped out of her hand. “Shit!” she muttered, searching the ground for it. She had a utility lantern and soon located it on the grassy strip. Glen prepared for everything, she thought with a pang, then hardened her heart. He probably hadn’t even noticed she was gone, holy-rolling with church lady on the convertible couch. She wiped her hands on the rag and got back to work.

A few cars had passed without slowing, so she didn’t worry until the vehicle’s bright lights stopped behind her, the glare washing over the Impala and illuminating the trees with their glossy leaves. A drizzle had started up again. A man in a windbreaker got out. She couldn’t see what make or color car it was, just that it didn’t appear to be a marked highway patrol. That was good. She kept an eye on him as he approached but continued to coax the frozen metal part. She would probably need the can of WD-40.

“Hello, young lady. What seems to be the trouble?”

She looked up at a middle-aged man of medium build and average height, short dark hair, brown or hazel eyes (it was hard to tell in the glare) examining her in turn. Her hair was pulled back into a bedraggled ponytail and grease streaked her hands. She looked for the rag, but couldn’t find it, so she wiped them on her shorts. His gaze followed.

“You’re soaking wet,” he said. “Why don’t you give me that”—he meant the wrench—“and I’ll take care of it. A little thing like you driving this big car all by yourself? I’m surprised your mama and daddy let you out on a night like this. What is the world coming to?” He reached for the tool.

She shook her head and clutched it tightly. Her body was on high alert, the delicate instrument registering threat, and she shivered involuntarily.

“Take it easy, tiger. I’m just trying to help. You must be freezing. Here,” he said, shrugging off his windbreaker and coming close, crowding her, “why don’t you put this on?”

She backed away.

“Hey, come on now, I’m not going to hurt you. I’m in law enforcement—well, retired now, but . . . Look, here’s proof.” He reached for his wallet and flipped it open to reveal an official-looking silver badge, which proved nothing. He could’ve ordered it off the Internet.

“What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?” he said. When she still didn’t answer, his reassuring smile dropped away. “Do you understand English?” he demanded. He glanced around, looking for something—or someone. “Are you alone? Were you driving?” He grabbed her utility lamp and swung it toward the trees, as if to flush out a fugitive hiding in the underbrush. “I may have to call this in. Let me see your license. You’d better have one.”

Actually, she didn’t, just a learner’s permit. “Keep away from me,” she said.

“Don’t be scared, girlie. I’ve got a daughter your age.” Like that was supposed to reassure her. “What’s your name? I should probably report this, but I’ll tell you what. If you’ll just calm down and let me help you out, we’ll get this baby up and running and you’ll be on your way.”

Report what, to whom? That she was a girl alone on the side of the road with a disabled vehicle? That, apparently, was a crime. Or, maybe, not letting a man help you was the crime?

“Thanks, but I already called Triple A,” she said. “They’re on the way.”

“A know-it-all, hey? You don’t even have your hazard lights on, or a flare. It’s dangerous on the highway at night. I can’t be responsible for that, if something should happen to you.”

Was that a threat or just the protestations of a man who believed, who’d been taught, that he had authority over “females”? He wasn’t a first responder, someone with a duty to intervene (though what he’d be intervening in was still a question. This wasn’t the scene of an accident—or a crime. Yet. And that yet nagged at her, woke the rage that flared when she felt—when she knew—that her “femaleness” was being turned against her and used as an instrument of terror).

But she couldn’t scream or run. There was no one to hear, nowhere to run to. She could lock herself in the Impala and call 911. But again, how long would it take for someone to come? And wouldn’t that just be the beginning of the end? They’d send her home and she’d be right back where she started.

She didn’t know if the man was actually a threat, although her body was telling her that he was, that she should get away while she still could. After all, this was north Florida, notorious for its drifters and serial killers, who didn’t look all that different from her pious, law-abiding neighbors.

Renée tightened her grip on the lug wrench.

The man watched her.

“Don’t do anything you’ll regret,” he said, then laughed bitterly. “You know what? I’ve had it with you modern women. You don’t need men, is that it? You’ll get along fine without us? Well, good on you. Listen, a real man doesn’t want a girl like you either, trust me. You’re better off with your own kind.” He almost spat the last words but didn’t elaborate. He didn’t have to. She nearly smiled and bit her lip. The situation was far from funny. If anything, it was worse now, because she’d made him angry.

He turned away, as if to leave, and her brain told her, at this evidence of her eyes, It’s okay, it’s over, but her body, the delicate instrument, doubled down. Her arm swung up and over, the wrench connecting with his forehead as he spun around and lunged at her. She felt the tool hit bone; blood spurted from his split scalp. He reached out to grab at her, at the wrench, at consciousness, then went heavily down, rolling into the drainage ditch. Murky water from the rains lapped at the edge, closing over his body. She waited but he never surfaced.

She put him out of her mind as she finished changing the tire. It required all of her concentration: to safely jack up the heavy vehicle, swap the flat tire with the spare, thread the lug nuts, then lower it back to the ground to tighten them. She felt a sense of accomplishment as she did this. She returned the tools to the trunk and walked around the Impala one more time. Everything looked shipshape, as Glen would say—or as shipshape as it could get until it was checked out by a mechanic. That tire would have to be replaced, of course.

The breeze had picked up and she was sweaty and chilled. She took her hoodie out of the gym bag and put it on, shivering. She heard the lapping of water coming from the drainage ditch. How odd, she had almost forgotten about the man: her mind had closed over the violence to allow her to do what she needed to do to get moving. Now it washed back over her: fear, rage, a delayed sense of helplessness. But she wasn’t helpless. She’d proven that.

She was frightened again, irrationally, since if the man were alive, he would have surfaced already. She heard a noise and gooseflesh prickled on her arms. She cocked her head, hearing the faint whoosh of faraway traffic and the evening trill of peepers in the swampy woods.

And something else, a faint whine coming from the direction of the trees.

The animal was mortally wounded. It was a wild cat of some sort, rare, perhaps—a Florida panther? As she approached, it hissed at her, even in its agony. She pulled off her hoodie and came close, speaking to it in a soothing voice. It quieted, probably to save its energy. Its life was draining away. The edge of the wheel well had caught and dragged the creature; breaking its back, maybe, since it quivered, its heart thrumming against her hands, but didn’t struggle when she wrapped it in her jacket and took it to the car. In the light she saw that it had a tufted face. A bobcat, probably. Its fur was bloodstained. It was more dead than alive, but she couldn’t leave it there.

That spark of life was precious, worth more than the predator’s in the ditch. He’d gotten the burial he deserved. (Though she knew what the hypocrites back home would say: every life is precious in the eyes of our Lord. Every life like theirs, she thought. Men who were forgiven each time they strayed, abandoning their families, only to be taken back by the “females” who were expected to be meek and submissive and, above all, obedient. Females who were instructed to forgive the trespasses against them.)

She pulled back onto the highway, feeling the Impala drift to one side as it compensated for the spare tire. It felt like days had passed, yet it had only been a few hours. She would have to stop and sleep at some point, but not now. Not here.

She remembered how, one spring break, she and Glen had gone on a road trip and visited the Okefenokee Swamp. This was before his come-to-Jesus period, when he talked to her about science and empiricism, so she would have something to fight back with when the teachers at her school taught “intelligent design” as an alternative to the theory of evolution. This infuriated Glen: he would mock them, saying he had an alternative theory of flight for them to test: they should jump off a tall building and flap their arms, saying, I believe I can fly, three times, really fast.

Kaput, finis . . . splat.

In the swamp, they had learned about epiphytes, air plants whose seeds landed on tree branches and lived there, drawing sustenance from airborne nutrients and the shed foliage of their host. The cypress trees were ancient, centuries old, subsisting on the peaty soil. There were carnivorous plants too: flycatchers and sundews, which secreted a sweet liquid that attracted and trapped insects, then absorbed and digested them.

It was kind of like what had happened to Glen, Renée thought. Desperation made adults do strange things.

Bobcats lived in the swamp too, she knew, like the one breathing shallowly next to her on the cushioned seat.

She pressed the gas and the Impala sped across the Georgia state line, carrying them through the night and into the swamp where she would take the animal, returning it to the primal muck that had given it life, and was waiting to receive it.