Cockeyed (4 page)

What to do? Brake? Speed up? Combinations? Time lingers more than it should in circumstances like this. It hung around in my car, making more of itself, piling on, the feeling of its dead weight slowing me down, drawing out the drama of expectation and allowing me to witness each potential calamity in slow motion until, eventually, I arrived on the other side, astonished and safe.

Not one car had careened or locked its brakes as I'd crossed the street. Not one car had touched another car. Not a single person had been hurt. It must have looked beautiful from the sidewalk, as if I'd divined a pause, a perfect rest in the busy traffic, then cut through, effortless and smooth. A fish in a stream.

I wanted to puke. Immediately I pulled over and parked on the side of the road until the panic and nausea dissolved. What was I supposed to do now? Emergency lights, I thought, that's what they're called, emergency lights. I flicked them on. They didn't help. I got out and ran back to the intersection to look for what I'd done. It was daft, but something in me wanted to see if my accident left some kind of trace. Not a thing remained. Cars slipped by in their usual way and the stop sign across the street declared what I should have done. Nobody waited to chastise me. Nobody demanded I apologize. It was as if the accident had never happened. So I took my cue and agreed to keep it that way. A promise was made, instead, a promise to be more careful, to be less hasty, to be focused, to be happy with whatever song is playing in my cassette deck. Back into the car I climbed, turned off the emergency lights, and pulled away, nonchalant as a poacher with his catch.

My second accident happened some months later. It even earned me a title. All hail the Rock King of Langley.

The few dwindling back roads of my hometown are darkened by thick stands of trees. When I was a teenager, you wouldn't find much out there other than turkey farms, Christmas tree nurseries, houses set far into their fields, and the occasional business that surprised the side of the road with a few muddy parking spots. You might find a decaying John Deere dealership out there and a forgotten TV repair shop from the 1950s. That's about it. Gas stations were the only other oasis of light I remember seeing on a night drive. Like a good son should, I had just topped up my father's
tank at one of those gas stations before I ascended my throne.

Leaving the station, I nosed the car to the edge of the road and checked for oncoming traffic. Black to the left, black to the right. The country road was moonlit and empty. I flicked my turn signal on and dumped the clutch. The engine accelerated, its hum grew louder, then an alien crunch and grind overtook my ears. Up went the car. The front popped a wheelie and dropped, as if the Acadian had pounced on some massive, unsuspecting prey. I wasn't moving anymore.

From my strange new perspective, I stared up at the clear evening sky instead of down the clear, open road. I took a quiet moment to tally how many un-good things had just transpired. When I turned the key, the car started again. I surged with relief. But easing forward wasn't easy. It wasn't even possible. The car sputtered and stalled. Down in front, little revealed itself other than what I thought was the road I should be driving home. What I'd heard and seen didn't make sense, so I got out, and my first step took more leg than usual.

What I'd taken to be the road wasn't the road at all. Under my feet I felt a nice patch of lawn that I'd turned the car on to. More worrisome, though, I'd made it almost halfway over a line of large, decorative boulders. My car—my father's car—had impaled itself on one. Now, together, rock and vehicle made something like a Pontiac lean-to. Stonehenge, I thought.

My Stonehenge had its tourists, too. Their eyes watched me from inside the gas station's store. Nobody approached,
though, and nobody seemed interested in offering me some engineering advice. Maybe the two gas jockeys hadn't noticed what I'd done to their lawn, after all. Either way, I wanted out of my embarrassment as fast as possible. Damages shmamages, if it took a little more grinding to get the job done.

I climbed back in, which is to say I climbed back up, and put the car into neutral. My hope was that the car might slide off the rock. Reptiles and dead things always slid off rocks on those animal documentaries. The Acadian didn't give. I got out and tried to push, but it still wasn't going anywhere. A voice called from the gas station's door. One of the two jockeys.

“Hey, man! Are you, like, stuck or something?”

“No, I'm just fine,” I shouted back. I waved, too, the way people do when they pass on pleasure boats. I thought the affectation would deter him. Long, long way to go if you want to walk over here. Got to wave, it's so far. “There's no problem,” I said. “I'm just, I'm just checking something.”

I hopped up into the car again. I had to leave, no matter what. How would I explain to my parents that I was perched on a stone about ten feet shy of the turn? I started the engine, put the car in gear, and fed it all the gas I could. The tires spun, caught, and set off a fantastic noise as I launched from the rock and landed on the lawn in front of it. Now, instead of crucified on a boulder, I was safe and level. Sort of.

A new challenge revealed itself. Had I looked harder, I might have noticed the lawn wasn't simply edged by boulders, but encircled by them. My father's car was free, and in the middle.

I got out and tried to look confident. I was a man with a plan, a stranded-car plan. This time a different voice called from the gas station.

“That's much better! Good for you!”

Over the car's roof I could see the two jeering gas jockeys silhouetted in the store's doorway.

“That's it, I'm gonna call Clover Towing,” the first voice said. “Don't do anything. I'll get a tow truck to . . . I dunno, lift you or something.”

“No,” I called back. “It's all fine! I'm just . . . leaving. See you later. Thanks anyway.”

I was uncertain what to do other than go. I put the car in gear, aimed for the smallest big rock, and gunned for it. The anticipated noise erupted underneath. The car lifted and dropped on a slant as I humped over the wall and back into the gas station's tiny parking lot, a couple of decorative boulders rolling after me, a few feet from their craters.

“Very good thinking!” The cheerleading gas guy could barely contain himself. “You are a smart one, aren't you.”

His colleague was less impressed. “You stupid fuckhead!” he shouted. “You big fucking fuckhead!”

I nosed the car to the edge of the road. When I found it for sure, I lit my turn signal for the gas jockeys, and sped away. The word “fuckhead” floated in my open window one more time, so I gave a couple toots on the horn.

I intended to keep the story to myself, but the light of day didn't help. The next morning my father left the house for work. A few minutes later, his heavy boots stomped back into the kitchen. Oil covered his hands and wrists like a pair of
evening gloves. I continued to shovel cereal into my mouth and pretended not to notice him. Standing at the sink, he lathered his hands and broke the silence.

“So, it seems we have a bit of an oil leak out there.”

I didn't look up from reading the cereal box. “Really?” I said. “Well, I guess the Acadian is getting old.”

“How do you know I'm not talking about your mother's car?”

I chewed and pretended I could only hear my crispy cereal.

“Put your shoes on and we'll have a look together. You'll learn something.” He paused for added effect and dried his hands on a tea towel. “Maybe I'll learn something, too.”

My parents were a mighty talent at that sort of threat. They never directly chewed us out. First they tossed a line, one that told us something was coming, something swift, inevitable, and just. They'd let us feel the pressure in the room change and let us stew in the vacuum. Usually it was enough to pull the confessions loose.

I knew I was nailed, but I made it out of the kitchen without giving in to any wrongdoing. I hoped that my performance could outlive Dad's suspicions. We stood beside the car for a moment, then he motioned for me to have a look underneath. The street appeared to have dissolved into a pond of oil.

“Wow,” I said. “How'd you notice that?”

“Funny thing, see the metal there under the door and all along the side?”

The bottom of the car no longer held a smooth line. It
looked like the lip of a clam shell. “I noticed that first and then the oil.”

“Yeah, I guess it's kind of hard to miss.”

“Uh huh.”

Dad fixed his expression. As I spoke, he looked at me as if waiting for me to finish something I wanted to say.

“Guess that's quite a bit of work fixing a bad leak like that.”

“Uh huh.”

“Goddamn cars, eh? Always something to fix.”

“Uh huh.”

“Say, who do you think is the best mechanic in Langley?”

He didn't answer.

“The best besides you, I mean.”

“You know, Ryan, it's a funny thing. The car wasn't like that yesterday. Today it leaks oil, and yesterday it didn't. Call me crazy, but I'm thinking last night something happened? You would be the last person in the car, too, so I'm thinking . . .”

I copped to it before he outright stated, in no uncertain terms, it was my fault. Better to admit it than to hear the blame. But the making of Stonehenge turned out to be a difficult phenomenon to describe.

“Rocks?” my father scowled. “Explain this to me again. Where did you find these rocks?”

“I didn't find them. They were just there.”

His scowl deepened. “And how exactly did you get my car on top of them?”

Again I described how, in the dark, the patch of lawn had looked like the road I tried to leave by, and how the rocks weren't there, but then they were.

“Of course,” he said. A big smile broke under his big moustache. “Of course it was the grass, the grass that looked like a road.”

“Right.”

“And it was the wall of rocks.”

“Right.”

“The ones you missed.”

“Yes.”

“But then found underneath the car.”

He didn't believe a word of it.

At dinner that night, one of my younger brothers, Rory, asked if I could drive him somewhere. He probably didn't have anywhere pressing to be, really, being twelve, but the two of us liked to go out in Dad's car, buy junk food, and goof around. Rory was a nervous kid, a bit of a loner, and I liked taking him out with me. The first time I drove him somewhere, I asked if he wanted to shift the gears. He looked at me with disbelief, like I'd offered him my bank account.

“Really? You're gonna let me change gears?” he asked. “But I don't know how.”

“I'll tell you which gear and when. Maybe I'll let you steer a little, too, If you want.”

His face told me that I was now more than his older brother. I was Santa Claus, and perhaps superhuman. Then his nervousness overtook him, as it always did. “But what if we get in an accident?” he said.

“Jesus, would you relax? We won't get in an accident. I'll be in control. I'm trying to offer you some fun here. Don't be such a suck.”

“I'm not being a suck. I just don't wanna get in trouble.”

“That's why you're a suck. We're supposed to get in trouble sometimes. I'm your big brother. I'm supposed to teach you this kind of stuff. Relax, for chrissake.”

With Dad's car I'd tried to become the older brother I'd always wanted, the one who taught his kid brother how to smoke, light a bottle rocket, and drive a stick-shift. Sharing the car with Rory quickly built that kind of trust and friendship between us. We started to become real brothers there.

After that, Rory always wanted a lift somewhere. This time, when he asked at dinner for a ride, my mother informed him that the Rock King would be on foot for a while.

“Who's the Rock King?” Rory asked.

My father pointed his fork at me but didn't explain my new title.

Rory found it hilarious. “Ryan is the Rock King,” he sang, “king of the rocks, the one who rocks out on top!” He wanked on an air guitar, repeating my new name, and made pouty, guitar-solo faces.

The name stuck for weeks and ridiculed my story. I heard the doubt. My excuse sounded like a cartoon to my parents. Today they insist they believed me, but today I'm a blind guy whose diagnosis made sense of the rocks that punched a hole under the driver's seat, among other things. Holes in the eyes, holes in the car, and more holes in the stories.

From that moment on, I wasn't allowed to drive my father's car at night, not until, he said, I was a more experienced
driver. As it turned out, I would only drive a car once more in the dark. That's when I crashed for the last time.

Most accidents might not have given away my growing blindness. They would look too much like accidents other people could have. A missed sign, a poorly judged turn, a distracted change of lanes, too much speed. My final accident had a character unto itself, though, one that we couldn't name clumsiness or inexperience. Speed was a factor, but not in a way anyone could understand.

I remember the sound of my mother marching down the hall to find out what my father and I were arguing about. At three o'clock in the morning, most debates a seventeen-year-old boy could be having with his father won't be going very far. Mine was no exception. My girlfriend was waiting outside on the porch, which didn't help my chances.

“But she's lost her keys,” I explained, “and nobody's home, or at least nobody answered when she rang the bell a few times. She can't just sleep on the lawn, right? So I said she should walk home with me and stay overnight here. I thought you'd be cool about it.” Some sarcasm, I felt, might add colour here. “But I guess turning her out will be better.”