Boy Wonders by Cathal Kelly

Author:Cathal Kelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2018-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

THE SUBWAY

THE ONLY PERSON IN MY FAMILY who could drive was my father. He wasn’t very good at it.

Around the time I was four or five, he went on permanent disability and dedicated his waking hours to drinking. If you were going to get into a vehicle with him, it was advisable to do so in the morning.

On one of those early shopping trips, he pulled his pickup out of a parking lot and turned directly into oncoming traffic. There was a low-speed head-on collision. I was sitting in the front seat thinking that this was all quite exciting. The police came and everything.

The parking lot was in front of the liquor store. He’d been in there buying a couple of forties of Captain Morgan. I’m not sure how he talked his way out of that one, but he had a knack for escaping.

After my parents split up, my father downgraded to a decrepit Volkswagen Rabbit. It was so rusted out, there was a hole the size of a dinner plate in the driver’s side wheel well. This was literally a Flintstone car. You could push it with your feet.

He told me he’d bought it because it was good on gas. The starter went wonky. Rather than get the car fixed, my father’s solution to this problem was to shut the car off as rarely as possible. During the day, he’d leave it in his garage running. When he needed to go somewhere, he’d run out, cover his mouth, lift the door, wait for the cloud of carbon dioxide to drift off toxically into the neighbourhood and then head out.

He had a plan for the car. He was going to wreck it and get the Blue Book value from insurance. That was real money. He couldn’t just run it into a wall, of course. That would be suspicious. I still remember the Blue Book value—three thousand dollars. My father would say it a lot, hitting a high note on the second syllable—“three THOUsand dollars.”

Alongside drinking and using his home as a rooming house for oddballs and degenerates, pursuing this idea had become his job. I never did tell my mother about it. There didn’t seem much point.

The best way he could think to get away with his auto-destruct caper was to lure someone at a red light into a drag race. He’d get out ahead, slam on the brakes and the following car would catastrophically rear-end the Rabbit. With him in it. And possibly me.

In fairness, the seatbelts worked fine.

He tried this many times. Stop at the light. Significant look over at the guy alongside him. Total confusion on that guy’s part (“Why is this man staring at me?”). Theatrical revving of the engine. Anxious, false bursts toward the line. And then the launch when the light turned. Either the other guy didn’t take him up on it or the other car was so much more powerful than the pathetic Rabbit that it sped off ahead of us.

Of course, I knew it was a gigantically stupid idea, but there was no arguing with him when he was in that car.

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