Excerpt
– Ed wins again, someone hissed, he dies.
– Ladies and gentlemen, O’Donnell began, reaching inside the
oil can . . .
Members crossed fingers and nibbled hangnails. They squeezed
crosses, mouthed prayers, stroked lucky charms.
– The winner of the Spring Festival draw this year is . . .
My friend says it was so quiet inside Ed’s garage that night you
could hear air escaping a radial.
For the winner of the Dodge Car Club draw the experience was everything
the previous attendees had said it would be. Five leggy beauties
piled into the vehicle for the languorous cruise along the parade route.
Miss Brake & Muffler was instantly besotted with the club’s appreciative
representative. Later that same evening, the smoke from the barbecue
pits dissipating, the last notes from the bandstand fading, the
couple took a spin up Little Mountain. There, under a draping laurel
vine, the beauty queen shared with the lucky draw winner the qualities
that had earned her that esteemed title.
Alas, it was the club’s final involvement with the festival. Ed’s
garage, encouraged by the cumulative efforts of termites, flopped
over on its side one gusty afternoon. Adulthood beckoning, the
membership soon disbanded.
Because he didn’t know what else to do, Ed applied to the military.
Because its brass couldn’t convince anyone else to sign up, he
was accepted. As for the Dodge, the central character in this story, it
vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared. I didn’t see much of
O’Donnell afterwards.
Sgt. McManus retired to a place not unlike the lake of his imaginings.
On torpid summer afternoons, his rowboat drifting in the afternoon
breeze, he often wondered about that car and the ruffians who
deified it. McManus went on to an old folks’ home and then a grave
without learning more.
Years later a police museum was built at the rear of the
station house. A call went out for exhibits. McManus’s widow was
invited to submit items of interest. She donated her late husband’s
many citations, his oft-used hickory stick and, because he always
wrote everything down at the end of each shift, his logbooks. They
hadn’t been opened in decades.
