Chevette Dreams by Len Kruger
At one point in her life, Judy would have thought this humorous. But now
she paid property taxes and carefully read brochures from the municipal
sanitation department. She learned that abandoned vehicles can attract rats.
"Rat harborage" was the official term; it haunted her with visions of
dispossessed rats flocking to a safe haven. They would breed under the
bucket seats and conspire in the glove compartment. And when the weather got
cold, they would surely seek the warmth of a house that was cherished and
pampered by its grateful owner.
The neighbors were a group of five in their early to mid twenties who rented
from an absentee landlord. From a bedroom window, Judy could look into their
living room -- their shades were never drawn -- and watch them co-mingle over
beers and take-out Chinese. Behind them, bicycles leaned against a radiator
and mountains of old newspaper stretched to the ceiling. Their front screen
door had a hole in it which, over the past two years, had grown like a stain.
"It's supposed to be like that," Dan had told her, a sheepish smile on his
face. "Makes mail delivery easier." Judy would laugh uneasily. She used to
live in houses like this, back in the days when she was in law school and
struggling to establish herself.
Dan was the elder statesman of the house and the only one Judy knew well
enough to talk to. The others shot her stony looks when passing her on the
sidewalk or while taking out the garbage. Judy often wondered what they
thought of her, always complaining to Dan about their yard or their
unraked leaves or the racket they made late at night. But most of all, the
car.
She liked Dan, he was pleasant enough. He knew lots of people in the
neighborhood and he always had a story about a local mugging or a restaurant
going out of business. He talked humorously about his job as a lobbyist for
an environmental group. But somehow the car intruded into every
conversation, like a family scandal that could not be ignored. "So when are
you going to get that car out of the garage?" she would ask him. He would
laugh nervously and commiserate with her like it was something out of his
control.
"The car belongs to Lynn," he told her one Saturday morning.
"Who's she?" Judy asked.
"He. Lynn's a guy who used to live here. Before you bought your house."
Dan told Judy the "car in the garage" story. Lynn lived in the house three
years ago. One day he walked into the garage, eating a powdered donut. He
got in the car, put the donut on the dashboard, and started the engine. He
put it in reverse, but nothing happened -- the transmission was shot. He
turned the car off and ate the rest of his donut. Three years later, the car
was still there. Lynn was gone. Dan shrugged his shoulders. End of story.
"So will this Lynn person ever come back and take care of his car?" Judy
asked.
"Last I heard, he's either in Washington State picking apples or up in
Alaska canning fish on some boat."
"Great. Do you think that maybe you could get rid of the car?"
"I can't do that," Dan said. "It's not my car."
"Do you think that maybe you could give me Lynn's address so I can contact
him about this?"
"I wish I could, but Lynn's not the type who leaves an address."
"Well, who told you he was in Alaska? Maybe I could talk to that person?"
"You don't understand," Dan said. "Lynn could be anywhere. Absolutely
anywhere."
Battalions of rats are invading Judy's house. They come through light
fixtures, water pipes, heating vents. They scuff up the kitchen floor, put
paw prints on the refrigerator. They get into the good china, shattering
saucers and capsizing gravy boats. They dance on the stereo speakers,
swaying their little paws to an imaginary beat. Judy is frantic. She looks
out her bedroom window and sees a man standing next to the garage eating a
powdered donut. His hair is long, his blue jeans tattered, and the white
powder flecks his full dark beard. He faces the demolition of her house, but
does not appear to notice any of it. Their eyes meet, briefly, and a flicker
of recognition passes over his face. "Lynn?" she calls out, "Is that you?"
He stands there, oblivious, peering into the distance.
In the summer, the lawn next door grew knee high with grass and weeds. Dan
attacked it with a scythe. He wore orange rubber gloves to ward off
blisters, a floppy straw hat, and long black pants covered with swatches of
dry paint. Sweating and grunting, he swung the scythe with brutal uneven
strokes, sometimes missing completely, sometimes sending clods of dirt flying
into the air. This bothered Judy. She cut her grass with a gleaming, well
oiled push mower. Her vegetable garden had tomato plants tied snugly to
wooden stakes pounded deep into the ground. A gravel path wound from her
garage to her front door, and every week, Judy raked the gravel, spreading it
out evenly and picking the stray pieces off of her thick even grass. She
felt the house next door cheapened her efforts, or what was worse, mocked
them. She complained to Dan, wrote letters, left notes. Nothing changed.
She chalked an anonymous message on their trash can, writing left handed so
they wouldn't recognize her handwriting from the notes she had left in their
door. The script looked childlike, or even maniacal, as though she had used
a ten foot long piece of chalk, barely in control. "STOP TRASHING OUR
NEIGHBORHOOD," she wrote. She thought a minute and added, "OR ELSE." Or
else what? Judy wondered. She could lead a mob of angry neighbors. They
would surround the house with torches glowing in the night, illuminating
their outraged murderous faces. For shame, for shame, they would cry, as
they circled the house, wheeled out the Chevette and set it ablaze.
Judy phoned her sister Kay, who lived in the Chicago suburbs with a husband,
two kids, and another on the way. "The yard is one thing," Judy said, "but
the car is a direct threat. It's a rat harborage."
"What else is new, Judy?" Kay asked. Judy had always been the achiever in
the family, but it seemed like the more she achieved the more she complained.
"And these people are supposed to be environmentalists," Judy said, "That's
a laugh."
"Who? What people?"
"The people next door."
"So who are these people next door?" her sister asked, an exasperated edge
in her voice.
Judy didn't really know. Except for Dan, turnover was high and Judy was
never sure who lived there. Beds and dressers were carted in and out with
amazing regularity. She grew to recognize certain sounds: a screen door
slamming, snow caked boots kicking against a front step, voices male and
female, shouting and laughing. They had dogs that barked and cats that
slinked and scratched outside her window. Once she even thought she heard
the screech of a parrot, very late at night, as she was lying in bed,
sleepless and near tears.
Powdered donuts. They sit at a table and she watches him eat donuts, one
after another. Powder hangs in the air like a fine mist. She draws it into
her lungs, feels it itching between her toes.
His eating is defiance, as if each donut represents a repetition of the same
argument, over and over. She wants to tell him that his car is ruining her
life. "This is how it starts," she wants to say, "and this, you bastard, is
how it ends." She wants to speak of rat harborages, to draw diagrams and
flow charts of systematic vermin propagation. She wants to grab him by
his white powder beard and shake and shake until she sees the powder
leaving his body like a plume of smoke, like a spirit dissipating into the
atmosphere.
She leans over the table, grabs his soft whiskers, pulls him towards her.
She kisses him, licks the sweet powder off his lips, then her own.
One evening, Judy answered the phone and heard, "Ms. Judy Kent, this is
Joseph Blau from the metropolitan police department. How're you doing
tonight?" She felt a rush of panic. A phone call from the police. But his
voice was relaxed, chatty, as if he was sitting in front of a fireplace,
blowing on a steaming cup of hot cider. He wanted a donation for the
Christmas dinner dance.
"OK," Judy said breathlessly.
"We really appreciate your support," he said.
"You guys deserve it," Judy said, "People are so out of control."
"Thanks so much. It's people like you, Ms. Kent, who give our community
hope and make our jobs as law enforcement officers a little easier."
Judy agreed. She thought about bringing up the topic of her neighbors, but
decided against it.
"Have a good evening," Joseph Blau said.
Judy hung up and smiled to herself. Joseph Blau. . . a strange name, kind
of exotic. He seemed like a really nice guy, someone she would like to get
to know, but then Judy could never be sure. She never knew what to believe
from the men she had known. She thought of Andrew, her old boyfriend whose
Christmas gift had just come in the afternoon mail. "Andrew the meat
magnate," her sister Kay had called him. They met at a ski resort in
Colorado two years ago.
"I'm from Chicago," he said, watching her shiver in the ski lift. "This
isn't cold."
"Chicago? Really? Kay lives there."
"Who's Kay?" he asked, grinning. He told her that he had inherited his
father's stockyard business and made millions of dollars marketing steak gift
packs through the mail. He told her about the advertising slogan he put in
his newspaper ads and flyers: Don't Make a Mis-Steak. He also told her that
he was over his divorce and that he really cared about her.
They dated for six months, each visiting the other on weekends. It ended in
a beach house in North Carolina. She straightened up the living room and he
couldn't find his sunglasses because they weren't where he had left them. He
told her she needed to learn how to relax, to loosen up. "What are you going
to do next," he sneered, "rake the beach?"
He apologized, then kept going. "One thing I learned from my divorce is the
importance of feedback. Let me give you some feedback."
Feedback, Judy thought, as if he was going to walk her into a control room
and hook her up to a screen while carefully adjusting the horizontal and
vertical holds. He recited the list calmly, rationally. She complained too
much. She was compulsive. She talked too much about herself.
Judy was shaken. The worst part was not what he had said, or even that she
knew he was right. The worst part was that as she heard her faults laid
out systematically, she knew that she did not want to change. She
reflected on past relationships, tried to imagine future ones, and decided
that Andrew would probably be the last one.
Judy dropped Andrew's annual Christmas present on the kitchen counter. The
Pleasure Pack: six filet mignons, four T-bone steaks, and three sirloin
strips. The steaks were packed in dry ice, wrapped in crisp wax paper. Judy
opened the package. The dry ice gave off thick clouds of cold steam. She
was careful not to touch the ice, careful not to burn her hands. The steam
filled her lungs and fogged her eyes. Outside, trees bent in the wind. A
cold front was coming in from Siberia, Alaska, someplace unbelievably cold.
She heard noises from the alleyway. Dry leaves swirling. Some glass
bottles rolling against the pavement. Sounds of scattering, a prelude to
encirclement and attack.
A long distance phone call from Alaska. Judy accepts the charges.
"Lynn, is that really you?" She sees him standing on the deck of a
windswept trawler, next to the railing. Foamy waves slap against the hull,
salt is in the air. He's shivering in a flannel work shirt with its top
button buttoned against his throat. His beard is brittle and crystalline.
The phone is cradled between his ear and shoulder, and with his free hands
he opens cans of herring, one after another, and dumps them into the ocean.
"The car," Judy says, "what about the car?" There is silence on the other
end of the line. Judy hears the sound of a can opener grinding, then the
sound of scraping, metal against metal, over and over.
"You never do what I want you to do," Judy complains. The phone receiver
is burning cold in her hand, hard sticky ice against warm skin. She shuttles
the receiver back and forth, right to left hand, left to right.
"I'm listening. Talk to me, Lynn," she pleads. "When are you coming home?"
When Judy was in college, she got A's in every course except for third
semester calculus. She stormed into her teaching assistant's office and
slapped her exam down on his cluttered desk. "What's wrong?" he said, a
guilty smile creeping onto his face, "B. You did very well."
Judy explained that for one of the problems, she got the right answer but
did it a different way. "The wrong way," he said. He had given her zero
points.
"It's not fair," she said.
"As Jimmy Carter once said," he mused, picking at his beard, "'life is not
fair.' Or was it 'life is unfair?' There's a difference, you know. Think
about it."
Judy thought about it still. She thought that if only the car in the garage
was gone, her life would be better. Two thousand pounds of rusting metal
scarred her civic pride and infected her dreams. It wasn't fair. She called
the police and lodged a complaint. A hassled unfriendly voice explained that
the police couldn't do anything as long as the car was contained in a garage.
She telephoned Dan and requested his landlord's address and phone number.
Dan apologized. He didn't know the phone number. "He lives in Florida. We
do everything by mail," he chuckled. His tone shifted, conveying concern.
"Let me know if there's anything else I can do for you, Judy."
She wrote the landlord a long intimidating letter which threatened legal
action: "Be advised that I am a member of the District of Columbia bar
and I am prepared to handle this matter personally." She had the letter
notarized. She included snapshots. She enclosed photocopies of sanitation
department circulars, with the words "rat harborage" highlighted in yellow
magic marker. There was no response.
Drastic measures had to be taken. Judy went to the hardware store and
browsed the pest control aisle stocked with roach bait disks, mouse house
glue traps, flyswatters, flying insect killer sprays, and fumigating fogs.
She contemplated her options. Traps or poison. Her eye was caught by a
can of rat poison labeled with a crude line drawing of a rat sticking its
nose into a small dish of white powder. The rat seemed tentative and
skittish, as if unsure of its intentions and unaware of its sins. Advanced
formula, the can said. Flavor attractive to rats, can kill in one feeding
when used as directed. Then, in big bold letters: IT IS A VIOLATION OF
FEDERAL LAW TO USE THIS PRODUCT IN A MANNER INCONSISTENT WITH ITS LABELING.
"This is what I want," Judy whispered to herself, shuddering. "Just in
case."
She peers into the distance, waiting. The train tracks are caked with newly
fallen snow. Telephone poles stretch into the horizon, their wires dripping
with ice. She can see the train now, a string of bright yellow, red, and
blue boxcars emerging from a colorless horizon. Cottony plumes of white
smoke rise from the engine and diffuse into a gray sky. The train shears off
the track's soft cover of snow, a cascade of white powder dispersed into the
wind as the engine slices into the station.
He stumbles off an open car, carrying a worn knapsack tied to a walking
stick. He is in rags, flannel patches undone and flapping in the cold wind.
"Lynn?" she calls out, "Is that you?"
His arms wave a feeble greeting. His face is grim. Gently, she strokes his
wild soft beard. His breath mists, and she breathes its sweet coolness deep
into her lungs. She holds him in her arms, feels him shudder against her
body.
It was a cold Saturday morning in February. Two inches of snow had fallen
the night before, a fine feathery dusting. Judy was scraping the snow off
her sidewalk when she saw Dan walking quickly out of his house, head down.
"Dan!" she shouted. He stopped, wheeled around.
"Oh hi, Judy." He smiled.
"Still no word from your landlord," Judy said.
"Oh well, he's like that . . . we don't bother him, he doesn't bother us."
Dan shifted his feet, as if waiting to be excused. Judy plunged the shovel
into a snow bank. In the distance she could hear the whine of a tire
spinning against ice. She proceeded cautiously. "You're not going to
believe this, but . . . I was wondering if you'd like to come over sometime
and have dinner. Any evening's fine. I was just thinking we've been
neighbors for two years now and I've never had you over."
A cloud of worry passed over his face. His eyes darted.
"And I promise I won't bug you about the car. How does tonight sound?
Around seven thirty?"
"Sure, I guess so."
"Got nothing better to do, right?" Judy said, pulling the shovel out of the
snowbank, banging it against the sidewalk, shaking loose the caked snow.
They are riding in the Chevette, going west on I-70. The car shakes and
sputters like an old man, outraged at his own infirmity. The interior is
peeling plastic, the tailpipe a frayed tube of cardboard. Lynn clicks on the
radio and there's a jolt of static, a rusty nail piercing Judy's eardrum.
She hears rustling sounds coming from the glove compartment. Little bodies
panicking, jostling for position.
The Chevette rolls through toll booths, Lynn throwing in quarters, long
sweeping hook shots. The Chevette crosses state lines. You've Got A Friend
In Pennsylvania. Wild Wonderful West Virginia. Sohio Welcomes You To Ohio.
Hazy mountains advance through the front windshield horizon, recede through
the back. The ride is suddenly smooth and fast. They glide along a train
track bed, through a long corridor lined with the backs of people's houses,
crumbling alleyways, junkyards. Judy stares out the window, her nose pressed
against the cool glass. She sees stained mattresses strewn in high weeds.
Discarded dishwashers broken apart, their heating elements exposed. Elderly
couples sip hot chocolate and overlook the tracks. They sit in junked
chairs, the gray stuffing bulging through torn cloth and leather. They wave
at the Chevette, a green metallic blur streaking towards the bright western
sky, beyond the reach of icy paws.
They sat at the dining room table, facing each other over the good china.
Two candles burned at eye level. The steaks covered their plates, like
continents spanning the globe.
"Do you have any ketchup?" Dan asked. His eyes were earnest, like those of
a little boy's.
"Ketchup!" Judy said. "I don't believe it. These are prime steaks. Maybe
you'd like me to grind them up and make you a hamburger?"
"Sorry."
"I'm kidding, I'm kidding," Judy laughed, getting up to fetch the ketchup.
"So tell me something funny," she shouted from the kitchen, "I always like
your stories."
"Well. . . we have to find a new housemate. Kara's moving out to get
married. Did I ever tell you about our system for interviewing prospective
housemates?"
Kara. Judy assumed she was the one with the short black hair and the long
dangling earrings. Judy remembered once standing behind her in a checkout
line at Safeway. They had stared at their items in their carts, pretending
they didn't know each other.
Dan started to talk about his "system." He told her how they would put an
ad in the Post and invite about 20 people over for interviews. They were
very selective. After the person left, they rated him or her on a scale of
one to four smiling faces. "Kind of like a movie review, you know?" he said,
chuckling.
"I used to live in a group house. We used to do stuff like that." Judy
said. "How funny."
"It is fun," Dan said, swallowing, "especially with the bad ones. I mean,
some people require us to modify the scale. Like for example, four frowning
faces. Or faces with little dunce caps." Laughing, he saved the best for
last. "Once we gave some guy four hangman stick figures. You can imagine
what he was like."
"So what did Lynn get?" Judy asked. The words came out crisper than she
intended. Dan stopped laughing. He ran his fingers over his beard. It was
neatly trimmed, close to the roots.
"Lynn? Oh God, I don't remember. After a while all those smiling faces
blur together, you know? That was a long time ago."
"What was he like? Do you remember that?"
"Kind of bizarre. He had some horrible job out in Virginia somewhere. I
really didn't know him very well." Dan was speaking slower, more
deliberately. "He stayed in his room a lot, listening to call-in shows on
the radio. Once, someone told me they heard a Lynn from Northwest -- it must
have been him -- harangue the talk show host about some international
conspiracy at the National Weather Service."
"A kook," Judy murmured.
"All I know is he hated living in DC. I guess that's why he left."
"I guess so," Judy said.
Dan ate his steak quickly, leaving only a splotch of ketchup on his plate.
"This was great," he said, "thanks."
"Yeah, well maybe we could do it again sometime? I can only eat so much
steak by myself."
"I'd like to, but actually . . ." he paused, "I'm moving to Seattle next
month." He told her he was going to be the director of an environmental
action group. He was going to buy his own place. He was so tired of living
in group houses.
Judy felt something deflate inside her. He was leaving. They were all
leaving. Some day the house would be full of strange faces, unaware of Dan
or Lynn or why a car sat rotting in their garage. Perhaps they would haul
the car away, sell it to a junkyard where it would be stripped and compressed
into a green metallic block. She could buy it from the junk dealer and put
it into her living room as an endtable. Perhaps it would go with the couch
and that would make her happy.
"What about the car?" she said, without irony, without guile, without
calculation. Dan shrugged his shoulders, all innocence.
"What about it?" he asked helplessly.
"It poisons my life."
Dan said nothing. His eyes reflected candlelight, gleaming like the eyes of
a small animal, cornered and afraid.
"I hope you saved room for dessert," Judy said darkly. She went into the
kitchen and returned with a silver dish covered with a cloth napkin. She
removed the napkin with a dull flourish.
Powdered donuts.
"It was supposed to be a joke," Judy said with a joyless laugh. "But
now. . ."
Dan sat quietly, as if committing all the details to memory. "I'd better
go," he said.
Judy watched him go away. She turned off the lights in her living room and
stood at the window, looking into the house next door. There was Dan talking
and gesturing, there was Kara with the short hair and the long dangling
earrings. They laughed and carried on, two grinning, leering, riotous faces.
From Judy's bedroom window she could look out onto their garage. She could
see the dark hulk looming. It seemed like it would sit there forever, its
headlights cloudy, its tires flabby, gradually descending into the earth, a
long slow leak. Judy walked back into the dining room and turned on the
lights. She looked at the donuts, still on the table, sitting in little
dunes of fine white powder.
The northernmost reaches of Alaska. Point Barrow. The Chevette sits at the
end of an ice encrusted pier. Judy and Lynn watch icebergs floating in the
sea, dull foothills of ice, their edges worn round and flat by the wind.
Judy knows that icebergs thrive beneath the surface. She imagines immense
spires of glistening ice, extending far into the depths. A jagged
crystalline world she can only imagine.
The car's heat is flagging. The oil light blinks. Lynn puts the Chevette
in reverse, but nothing happens. The transmission is shot. Cold air is
coming through the vents. Judy knows what she must do.
Powdered donuts. She slowly raises one to his mouth, enticing him with its
sweetness. He pauses, unsure of his intention, unaware of his sin. Her wet
lips tremble, bracing for one final kiss.
The green Chevette had sat in her neighbors' garage since Judy bought her
house two years ago. It was an open garage, and whenever Judy carried her
garbage to the alleyway she could see its expired DC tag, the faded
Dukakis/Bentson sticker, and the clever messages traced in the dust. "ELVIS
IS ALIVE AND OWNS THIS CAR" was the latest offering.
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The Blue Moon Review, All Rights Reserved.