a tale of two cars

part 1

My entire life, I’ve only known one soul who answered to the name of “Lucky.” That’s not all that surprising, when you think about it, most folks I know can’t win for losing. The real question is, what made him different? I mean, nobody gets named Lucky at birth, right? And yet, you could have followed old Lucky around for days or even, I don’t know, months or years, and it would never have occurred to you to say, Man, Dame Fortune really has taken a shine to this guy. Still, it’s all anybody ever called him. Heck, aside from relatives, there wasn’t but a handful of people who could tell you his given name. So, how did he come by it then, the name Lucky?

If you’d of asked Carol back in the day, she’d of said she started it, referring to that long ago night down at Crummy’s when she first laid eyes on him. Problem with that is, she knows better. Not to mention, she was hardly the first pretty girl to take one look at him and say to herself, This guy thinks he’s gonna get lucky. So … next theory. All right, how about the fact he suffered only superficial injuries from the run-in he had with that knife-wielding exotic dancer—talk about an airtight case of naming—Bee-Jay DeVigne. Oh, well, sure he was fortunate to get out of that fix in one piece, and it’s a close call, I admit, but I don’t think, when all is said and done, it was the kind of incident people generally point to and exclaim, What a lucky son of a bitch! As for that business about him pulling a Lucky Pierre with the comely pair of hitchhikers who turned up at his trailer that one time—Judas Priest! How does a rumor like that get started?

Of all the stories about how Lucky came to be called Lucky—turns out there’re quite a few, once you look into it—one of my personal favorites involves his father back in Buffalo, New York. Seems that the old man got so ticked off at him for forgetting to call on his birthday—one of the big ones, forget which—he stopped using Lucky’s birthday in the Pick Six, and the very next week, sure enough, he gets five out of six, and the number he doesn’t have is Lucky’s. Now, that’s a tempting explanation—got kind of an upside-down, stranger-than-fiction quality to it, which I like—but the fact is, like all these theories, it doesn’t go back anywheres near far enough. So, where’s that leave us? Well, not to change the subject, but if you’d of gone by Lucky’s place sometime during that last month or two before he and Carol finally got hitched, you’d of seen a Ford one-ton in the driveway, sure, but then you’d of found yourself asking, like I did, What’s with that pea-green Peugeot? What’s with the Chevy Caprice? And thereby hangs a tale, which, unlike a lot of these other tales, is so sweet and innocent you won’t believe it. But it’s true. I got it straight from the horse’s mouth.

Lucky lived just off the highway then, in one of those ramshackle houses you see along the North Coast, not a hundred yards from the edge of a cliff overlooking that gray, sullen chunk of sea they got there. I knew he was having to deal with a boatload of out-of-town guests in the days leading up to the wedding, so I headed up a couple nights before the big event, snagged a fifth of Bushmills, and went and grabbed him and took him down to the beach, which, needless to say, we had all to ourselves. It was a cold night, but not too windy, and bone clear, which is a rarity for that stretch of coastline—the sky was dripping with stars straight down to the horizon. We got us a nice little driftwood fire going, huddled up close, cracked open the Bush, and commenced to reminisce on all the years we’d hung together before I got married, then after my breakup, till his Carol came along. It was a lot of ground to cover, back and forth, from the hitchhiking and freight-hopping to our trail crew days—all the characters we’d known, the snakes and bears and card games, the dusk to dawn Nevada excursions, my accident on his motorcycle, his with my axe, and such like—and we managed to put a sizeable dent in the Bushmills before we’d exhausted that line of malarkey, after which Lucky proposed a toast. “To the boys!” he said.

We each took a slug from the bottle, then observed, as was our custom, a brief moment of respectful silence. Lucky reached into his jacket pocket, took out a tin of Copenhagen, offered me a dip, which I declined, then secured himself a pinch. Carol wouldn’t let him chew around the house—which, she was right, it’s a filthy habit—but Lucky never could kick it.

“You get her a nice ring?” Sounds like a non sequitur, but it shows you the direction my thoughts were drifting.

“Oh, Christ, the ring. It’s one of them hair-looms.” That’s how he pronounced it, like “hairball,” for effect. “My mom tells me, ‘This was your Great Aunt Em’s. You remember? The one who went crazy? Mazel tov, darling.’”

“Your mom,” I said and shook my head. This is how far back we went, me and Lucky. I’d actually met his mother, who moved to the West Coast shortly after divorcing his father. She was a real piece of work. “You got the chopped liver ready?” I asked.

“Tons.” Lucky shot a jet of brown saliva into the fire. Tzzzlit. “Chopped whale liver.” A gray whale had beached near where we were sitting not two months earlier, apparently. He said it smelled like forty tons of fish gut dipped in hot roofing tar.

I laughed and flipped another piece of driftwood onto the fire, which caused a sudden burst of sparks, followed by a silent float of spent ash that dusted our shoulders like confetti. “Tell me about the silly-ass Peugeot. Like to know about that Caprice, as well.”

“Ha, Jack! Thought you’d never ask.”

“Un-huh.”

He spit again. We both watched it boil away. He poked a stick at the fire, trying to get it to burn with less smoke. More sparks flew. Then he flipped the stick in. He could have waited. Anyways, it was burning just fine now. He took a breath, cleared his throat, and dove into the story I’m here to tell you.

Seems that an East Coast acquaintance of his had owed him some money, and he and Carol had gone back East that summer before the wedding to visit family and celebrate their engagement and whatnot, so he got to thinking, kill two birds, and looked the guy up in New York. Now, as so often happens, this particular debtor’s assets turned out to be a little squeezed at the cash end of the spectrum, but there was this “late-model” Peugeot, which he’d given to his ex-girlfriend, who was an actress or something, before they broke up. Seems that the ex-girlfriend went and abandoned the car in a farm field up near Woodstock, and, hell, he had no use for it, living in New York and all, so if it would help to square things, Lucky was welcome to her. What the heck, Lucky figured, bird in the hand, so he took the car.

“How’d you find it?”

“Ex-girlfriend.”

“And it ran?”

“Heck, yes. A little balky starting, for sure—flooded her on the first go-round—but she parley-vooed real nice eventually. Now, there’s no clutch to speak of, and kind of car she is—French car—she’s going to nickel and dime you to death, but hey …”

“So, that’s the Peugeot.”

“That’s the Peugeot.”

So, the next order of business, they hopped in the Peugeot and drove up to Carol’s sister’s place in Boston. Turns out Carol’s grandmother, recently deceased, had left some stuff that had to be sorted through—chairs, tables, carpet, a mirror—stuff—and her sister didn’t want any of it. So Carol got to thinking: they were planning to move into a bigger place at some point, weren’t they, and they did have a car now, didn’t they? Think irresistible force, moveable object. They ended up cramming the Peugeot fuller than an Okie’s jalopy—trunk roped down, stuff piled on the roof, carpet roll hanging out the window—and hit the road again. Next stop: Buffalo.

“So, we get to Buffalo”—take it away, Lucky!—“and Woolly—that’s what everybody’s always called my old man, though he’s bald as your knee as long as I can remember—Woolly takes one look at Carol, and at the loaded-down Peugeot, and first chance he gets he pulls me aside.

“‘You ready for this?’ he asks me.” Lucky was doing an impression of his dad working a cigar.

“‘For what?’ I ask him.

“‘For what?!’ he says, shakes his head. We’re standing in the living room; Carol is outside rummaging through the Peugeot for her overnight bag. ‘For this!’ he says, waving his cigar at the open door.

“I just stared at him. What a knucklehead, he’s thinking—I know that look—but these homecomings are rare, and he doesn’t want to spoil things. ‘Marriage,’ he whispers.

“‘Marriage? What’s marriage? Marriage ain’t gonna change me,’ I tell him. I’m just baiting him now.

“He looks around the room, grasping for inspiration. It was an effort for him, patience, always has been. ‘No. You’re right,’ he says, finally. There was a velvet painting on the wall, a seascape, just like this”—Lucky gestured at the dark water encroaching on us with primordial force—“but, like, four feet by three feet. Well, old Woolly’s eyes had settled on it, then widened. I was looking at it myself, trying to read his mind. The velvet ocean was black except along a line of breakers, which were silver, shining. Woolly begins to grin, and his grin grows wider. ‘It’s like you’re swimming toward shore and the tide starts going out.’ He pauses, waiting for the image to sink in. ‘You’re the same person’—he nods, I nod—‘it’s just that all of a sudden you find yourself having to stroke a lot harder than before.’”

That caught me off guard, and I burst out laughing, gave Lucky a couple good whacks on the back, and stood up. “Hell yes!” I yelled at the real ocean, “I’ll drink to that!”

Lucky stood up, handed me the bottle. We both took hits off it, then turned around to get some warmth on our backsides. The stars were vibrating.

“You got to give him credit,” Lucky said, “made me laugh out loud. ‘Okay,’ I told him, ‘advise me.’

“Woolly was still grinning, real pleased with himself, but now he had to face it: he was out of inspiration, and Carol was coming up the front walk, overnight bag in hand. ‘One woman at a time from now on,’ he says, coughs, ‘no matter how hard it gets.’

“‘What gets?” I say, egging him on.

“‘Son,’ he says, ‘you’re in worse shape than I thought.’

“Right about then we heard a loud clatter coming from the garage. ‘Gladys,’ Woolly says, the wife. ‘Sounds like she made it home.’

“‘You think she’s all right?’ I ask. It was really quite a loud noise.

“‘Oh she’s fine,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘But the garbage cans have about had it.’

“Well, it turns out Gladys had been driving this big old Chevy Caprice that was way too damn big for her. The woman’s maybe four foot ten dripping wet. Damnedest thing to see her in it. You know that little pea brain they say dinosaurs had? That was Gladys in this automobile. She had no idea where the front end of the beast left off and the rest of the world began. Apparently, she was forever running over garden tools or tagging the mailbox or smashing into the garbage cans at the back of the garage.”

“Not a good match.”

“Not a good match. Now, don’t get me wrong, Gladys is a sweet little lady. And you’d have no way of knowing this until you’d spent thirty seconds talking with him, but my old man sells used cars for a living. So it looks like what happened was, old Woolly just drove the thing home from the lot on Christmas Eve and told her, Honey, this is for you. And she just thanked him and went ahead and did the best she could with it.”

“So …”

“So. A light goes on in my head.”

(To be continued)

Thomas Shane is a contributing editor for Arcadia. His stories can be found online at Per Contra, Mount Hope, and trans lit mag. Other publication credits include Aethlon, American Way, Elysian Fields, Light, Other Voices, River Oak Review, Slippery Elm, and Trajectory, and the anthologies Fresh Water and When Last on the Mountain: The View from Writers over 50. He has also been runner-up or finalist in a number of writing contests, including the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, the International Imitation Hemingway Competition, and the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Contest.

For more work by Thomas Shane visit his page at Online Sundries site.