WILLODEAN (THE CUPITOR CHRONICLES Book 1) (22 page)

“What are we going to do now?” Mag whined.
I watch dad disappear over the hill. 
I shrugged my shoulders at Mag and walked up the driveway.
She followed me. 
“What are we going to do Willodean?” She hopped and skipped in front of me,
behind me, beside me, around me, revolving like some irritating planet. 

“I don’t know Maggie.” I snipped. “I’m thinking.” Mom was at the green stamp store hoarding up kitchen items with Aunt Marlene and God knows, that might takes days.
I had no idea what we could do. 
I heard a squeal
behind us a distance away.  I
turned to see Maw Sue at her mailbox across the road. “The Ranchero.”
I whispered. 

“What?” Mag said loud and curious. She was bending down on the grass with her hands cupped. She opened them to peek inside and a large cricket jumped out making a daring escape.

“Just come on.” I said.  I grabbed her by the shirt tail and we
headed towards the garage behind Maw Sue’s place.

The Ranchero was the only clear option to eliminate boredom. When I say 
clear
, I’m 
really, really
, 
really
stretching things.
There is nothing transparent about it.  The vehicles
color is two s
hades of vomit, brown and beige. 
The Ford Ranchero is the ambiguous statement of all automobiles. 
It was male. It was female
. The advertisements in dad’s car magazines said, 
More than a car! More than a truck!
 When I read it the first time, I was like, “Well, shit fire Mr. Ford. What the hell is it then?” The mere invention signifies that Henry Ford at one time or another, no doubt suffered a severe personality crisis or an identity crux.

We climbed inside the cab. 
It smelled new, as it should since
Maw Sue took care of her vehicles. 
The Ranchero was our ticket to travel.
Alleviate boredom.  Explore, travel the world, as dad says. 
The next step was obvious. Dad said every automobile should have a namesake. We had Brutus, of course, a fair name considering the abuse dad puts him through. And then there’s Lena’s four door Ford galaxy named Miss. Just M-I-S-S. Plain and simple. Dad said it had to have a dainty name like a girl fart, a soft poot, barely audible.
Lena gave him the eye, as always, but the name stuck.  When dad drives her, she transforms into a loud gaseous fart heard for miles.  It’s like a scary,
blue streak of
gas that continues on and on. 
Dad said he’s just blowing the soot out, which is mandatory for all knuckle busters, in accordance with
Motor Madness Magazine
. Dad’s lead foot and eccentric auto knowledge drove Lena crazy, which led to accusatory tree pointing, enraged screaming fits, beer can crushing, MD 20/20 drinking, belching, burnt cornbread, door slams, rebel flags flying, the world blows up, God Save the Queen…
the end.
That
was pretty much the just of it.  I took it a step further and believed that I damn well better have my driving skills down pat and maintenance scheduled regularly or my life will be in the shitter.  I wasted no time.  I was going to practice in any vehicle I could get into. 
After forty miles in the wilderness, cutting corners and narrowly missing a sand lizard, Mag and I finally agreed upon a name. 
Flash Fannie
. Flash being the male gender and Fannie being the female gender.
Fannie the dashboard dame. Flash the testosterone tachometer.
It was perfect.
 
For the long trip, we brought a travel bag with essentials, extra clothing so we could ditch the patchwork pedal pushers once we arrived in Africa. The mere thought of natives seeing us dressed in patches was embarrassing. For snacks, peanut butter sandwiches and two packages of Kool-Aid, just in case we got stranded in France or Iberia and couldn’t read the menus. And last but most important, our paddle talk, a red plastic doohickey, similar to a ping pong paddle, except it had a flip note pad attached
with red letters and messages.  And since our home, honored silence with a crown and scepter, the paddle talk was the
comm
unication device of the century. It allowed us to talk and never say a word. 
In essence, we beat the system, kind of like screwing the government, which according to dad was as good as it gets. Unfortunately, the device was limited in vocabulary. Of course, one never knows when the phrase HOT TO TROT, WANNA PARTY or GET LOST might come in handy to the occupants of the car idling next to you at the red light. Mag and I had a notepad and marker in the back seat and wrote our own messages, like
hey shit head
 or 
ass wipe
.  We
taped
the notes to the paddle talk and held it up to strangers in the next lane. 
Our parents were clueless to the shenanigans.

Of course, we had no idea that F
lash Fannie would be our demise, unlike our other adventures. 

“Road trip rebels!” Mag yelled. “Whoo
hooo!” She bounced up and down on her knees. 

“Go out knowing.” I
screamed out the window and fist pumped the air.  I drove like my genes were fueled with gasoline. 
We sped down cobble roads and veered between older stone houses in F
rance where the roads were a tight squeeze.  Old people sat outside and waved us on. 
“Farewell Monsieur. Come back wee-wee.” or something like that.
We hadn’t learned French. 
For an hour or so, Mag and I lived vicariously inside a world of our own making. That was the beauty of Flash Fannie and road trips. We could trade up maps and time machine anywhere we wanted. In a flat New York second we were in South Carolina doing donuts in the parking lot of the Snap & Save. We drove to Pennsylvania and searched for elusive blood sucking vampires. We sped to Virginia and hung out at the Ponderosa, and rode horses with little Joe and Has Cartwright. “
Yee-haw.
” We yelled
out the window as we said bye.  Then w
e drove down some old dirt roads and ended up in Mayberry. Barney Fife showed us the ins and outs of carrying a gun and Andy showed us the town. Aunt Bee fed us pie and then we shot the shit with Opie down by the river and tried our luck with catfish.
Yep. 
Our travels were epic. People heard of us and knew us by name. “Why looky there.” They’d say. “It’s Willodean and her sister, Maggie. Why don’t yawl come on in and stay awhile.” So we did. We racked up four thousand miles a day. We learned the mechanics of stop, go, start, look both ways, burn out, smoke tires, fish tail, curve ball, revving,
and pop the gears.  We learned
how to drive eighty and properly spit out the window and how to flip off those cracker jack-asses that the mad hatter says got their GD license in a cracker jack box. Everything was going great until we shifted gears and accelerated into the outskirts of hell.

“Tree! Turn-turn.” Mag said.
She acted out with her hands. 
“You’re gonna hit a tree! TURN!”

I reacted in fear which I was prone to do. 
I couldn’t think straight. 
We were moving.
Actually moving—not play or pretend,
but actually moving. 
In panic, I did what dad does and floored it. We kept rolling backwards.
I panicked more. 
I had not mastered the art of driving backwards yet. It wasn’t in the manual. That was for James Bond or those Dukes of Hazard boys, 
not me
.

“I gotta pee.” Mag said whiny.  Her face was
contorted
and she held her legs together. 

“Well now is not the time Maggie.” I screamed. “Can’t you see we have a situation here?” Apparently, Mag thought it was part of the adventure as if I was supposed to fly into a rest area so she could hop out and unload. That’s when a multitude of events happened simultaneously. The pendu
lum on our travel clock stopped.  It
warped everything
in our vision to slow motion. 
I heard Mag’s shrill voice. At the same time, the ceiling sucked my body upwards and lurched my stomach into my throat. Mag shot up in the air like a gymnast. A loud foghorn blew and an atomic wind gust rushed inside the cab. We were two astronauts held by gravity, floating in mid-air. Mag’s hair looked like long spikes of weeds. A vortex of noises filtered inside the cab, a reverse vacuum that sucked, then released us, to plunge to what I
was sure would be our deaths. 
When I hit the seat, and snapped to reality, all I could think about was motor maintenance and skill, so my legs automatically locked up on the brakes. My ears bled and burned with a
loud screeching horn blow.  A violent wind rushed by and
F
lash Fannie rocked side to side. 
Out of the corner of my eye,
the butt end of an eighteen wheelers trailer flies down the road.  We must have got to close and the push of air lifted Flash Fannie’s bumper into a g
ravitational hex while we glanced at death's door. When we were positive we didn't want to die—it plopped us down like a jilted lover at the altar. In the aftermath of the Houdini car trick, the hell that was
in the wicked branch of the Hart family tree, broke loose. 
O
ur Randy McNally map ripped to shreds—our travel itinerary disrupted—road trip rebels detained, interrogated, dismantled.

Mag and I
shook limb to limb.  Our near death e
xperience
had stilled us.  We had no idea we
were about to witness
one more, far more dangerous. 
We looked up to see Maw Sue in a mad dash across the front yard, her face crooked, wild and spewing fire like monster. Her
MD 2020 face should have warned me.  It surpassed all stages of mad dog, I had ever seen before.  She was a streak of wild colors.  T
he yellow daisies on her housecoat billowed in the wind behind her like scattered flower petals. Her fuzzy blue house slippers were kicking up dirt like two hairy animals in a stampede. She held a green spatula above her head whipping the air like mashed potatoes and wildly petitioning the God of heavens and shouting, “Jesus, God Almighty!”

My mother literally dropped from thin air. 
She
was strangling a blue dishrag and in a fast strut, somewhere between walking and sprinting, her yellow pants sparking fires with each stride.  There was a tree
with low branches and the spindly limb fingers snatched her coal black beehive right off her head
and she never missed a step. 
This was bad. Very, very bad.
 The wig swayed side to side like a pine cone Christmas ornament. Dad was behind her in an awkward trot
in an attempt to not foam the beer in his hand. 
I’m not entirely sure which garnered his attention more; his troubled daughters or the wig
in the tree. 
By the look on his face, I’d say the wig won hands down. Before long, neighbors came to porches up and down the street. Mr. and Mrs. Montalongo, who never missed a thing, were front and center, gawking from their perch and documenting our various states of offense to use it against us. Papa Hart was the last to show up,
covered in dirt and sweat and dragging a garden hoe. 
Maw Sue
possessed of the devil, swung the door open and glared without blinking.  It was the first time I had ever been scared of her. 
One of the fuzzy blue animals smashed the emergency brake which made a loud thwacking noise. She nudged me back and fumbled with the gear shift.
I hadn’t realized until now, my legs had been locked on the brakes the whole time and somehow while learning the gears, I had left it in neutral.  My hopes of getting a driver’s license were dwindling. 

“Jesus Christ!” Lena said festered with anxiety. “You could’ve got smashed to bits!” S
alvia spit from her coral lips and she sighed.  Then she
turned into an octopus with more arms than I could count. Miraculously and so good, I don’t know how she did it, she jerked Mag and I out of the cab at the same time and commenced to swatting the daylights out of us with the blue wet dishrag. All anybody heard was popping, swooshing and screaming. She grabbed our chins and gave us a brisk jaw-jacking which consisted of numerous tilts, left, right, up and down, sideways—while she spewed a considerable large and damning Old Testament shit storm. Then unexpected, code unknown, she went to hugging and kissing us on the forehead and
talking nice. 
It didn’t last long.
 In a snap she’d revert to the dishrag and jaw jacking until she was tired, then back to kissing and being nice, then dishrag, jaw jacking. This bizarre behavior was as ambiguous as Flash Fannie.
Swat. Hug. Swat. Hug
. Mag and I didn’t know if we were being punished or praised, 
or both.
 The
women did most of the work, Lena mostly while Maw Sue stood in the background like an angry shadow with pet blue monsters at her feet.  The men were like bystanders, Papa Hart leaning on his hoe and dad beside him, drinking his Papst Blue Ribbon.