Cars: California Stories

CARS

California Stories

Ken Kuhlken

A Writer's Writer, and a Favorite of Discriminating Readers

Ken Kuhlken writes about characters most authors wouldn't touch. Raymond Carver, master of the short story

Ken Kuhlken brings a great new character--and a fresh voice--into the mystery field. Novelist Tony Hillerman

... entertains in a grand and thrilling manner. The Drood Review of Mystery

Kuhlken weaves a complex plot around a complex man, a weary hero who tries to maintain standards as all around him fall to temptation. Publisher's Weekly

Ken Kuhlken's uniquely fascinating Tom Hickey series traces one family through most of the 20th century. Novelist Timothy Hallinan

Kuhlken is an original, and in these days of cookie-cutter fiction, originality is something to be prized. San Diego Union Tribune

Tijuana in 1943. The U.S. at war, my war, and in this book I can see it again, smell it, it's that real.... Ken Kuhlken is the most original new voice, has the most original new vision, in the detective novel in a long, long time. Novelist Dennis Lynds

... brings the social and cultural scene of the period vividly to life. Publisher's Weekly

An intelligent, beautifully realized book that transports you totally into its world--and keeps you reading long into the night. Novelist Robert Houston

... fast-moving adventure that effectively combines mainstream historical fiction with the conventions of the hard-boiled detective novel. Booklist

... an intricate puzzle to solve.... this tale captures the history and atmosphere of the 1970s as well as the complex dynamics of a fascinating family. Booklist

A stunning combination of bad guys and angels, of fast-moving action and poignant, heartbreaking encounters. Novelist Wendy Hornsby

... a tale as sensitive and heartfelt as it is action-packed ... Crime, punishment and redemption. Kirkus Reviews

A wonderful, literate, and very ambitious novel that does everything a good story should do. It surprises, delights, it jolts and makes you think. T. Jefferson Parker, novelist.

Powerful, original, sometimes shocking and always thrilling ... takes readers into dark experiences and deep understandings that can't help but leave them changed. Novelist Michael Collins

Elegant, eloquent, and elegiac, Kuhlken's novels sing an old melody, at the same time haunting and beautiful. Novelist Don Winslow

© Ken Kuhlken, 1978, 1979, 1987, 1990, 2013, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-9965242-6-1

BISAC: FIC029000 FICTION / Short Stories (single author)

Smashwords Edition

Published by

HICKEY’S BOOKS

8697-C La Mesa Boulevard, PMB 21

La Mesa, California 91942

hickeybooks.com

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away. If you would like to share this book, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cars first appeared in Esquire; Ophelia in Death and The End in The Virginia Quarterly Review; The Murder Game in San Diego Noir; The Light in Reading Brother Lawrence; Then and On Earth in the San Diego Reader; "The Enemy in Crime Through Time; "Too Sweet" in Hollywood and Crime; "Mama's Boy" in Tequila Tales; and The Curse, in MSS.

TO FELLOW WRITERS

In the hope that this collection will prove valuable to any who study the writer's craft (and especially those who might sometimes wonder what to write about) I have added brief comments on the origins of the stories. You will find them on my wet site at kenkuhlken.net/cars

CONTENTS

I. Random Stories

Cars

Ophelia in Death

The Murder Game

The Light

II. Intermission

Then and On Earth: Jim Thompson in San Diego

III. The Hickeys

The Enemy

Too Sweet

Mama's Boy

IV. Otis

The Curse

The End

A Request

Ken's Other Books

About the Author

CARS

My first car was a ’55 Chevy, mine when my father died. Bingo’s mother called both of us orphans. It was a harsh word as she said it, loaded with scenes of derelict places and peril. But we decided being orphans would only leave us stronger.

I wedged two-by-fours in the shackles of the Chevy to give it a rake. I laminated wood for a shift knob, combed the junkyards for dual exhaust and glass-pack mufflers. I etched my name, Swift Henry, Bingo’s version of Henry Swift, on the dash in glitter and Day-Glo. It was a car for idling out of the school parking lot, for whipping the turn through the gate and burning rubber on the straight quarter mile to the drive-in. It was a car for runs to the desert on weekends, friends wedged four in back, three in front to share gas, with Bingo at shotgun leaning out into the wind.

The rings on the Chevy wore thin, bearings began to thump, and I fell for a newer model, a ’62 Chevy with white pearlescent paint, tuck-and-roll seats, and a Road Runner decal in the window. Bingo said in a week I could choose from more girls than I’d dreamed of. He found me a job at the Richfield station where he worked, and said he’d help with the payments. My mother cosigned.

I rubbed it out, gave it five coats of wax and detailed the chrome. I took up with Carla, a redhead, a judge’s daughter. She wore white hot angora sweaters, and her fingers tapped nervously on my chest as I drove. After midnight her father ran out threatening and grabbed for my door handle while Carla dove out the shotgun side. I jacked the clutch and left him to choke on fumes.

Carla chose her dad over me. I replaced her with Sandi, secretary of the student council, who had turned me down while I drove my first Chevy. Now she called herself foolish, walked me to classes and told me secrets. She told her mother we planned to marry in a year then asked for the key to the family's trailer at Angel's Camp, below the border. I spent my paychecks on gas and tacos, missed work too often, and got Bingo fired for filling my tank. He took it hard. Work was important, he said. Like slaves, we had to earn our freedom.

When a bill collector threatened to repossess, I traded my car's equity for a stock ’50 Chevy wagon with frayed seats and oxidized paint. Sandi drifted away. Bingo and I bought squirt guns, tracked her down in the halls each morning, and drenched her teased hair. The school counselor called us mean but wouldn't suspend us, so we called in sick, started the summer a week early, and shined shoes at a convention to buy tires for the wagon. At beach camps up the coast, we borrowed surfboards, climbed the cliffs and perched like eagles on the ledges, and played games with Chicano girls down from L.A. with their families, on straw mats away from the bonfires.

Then we’d spin off inland to attack the mountain roads, coast back home on our last tank to mow lawns and trim trees, to sell off old bicycles, phonographs, and baseball gloves for gas money and trunks full of groceries. Bingo brought along his brother’s volumes of Nietzsche and read them while I drove. Bingo said Nietzsche was the master of our age, the prophet of strength, willpower, and obedience to our dreams. We vowed to take charge of our destinies.

Back at school I signed up for auto shop and brought in the Chevy to give it a valve job. First the head disappeared, then the cam, then the tires and the radiator. I posted threatening notes on the bulletin board, but nothing came back. I sold what was left for junk and dragged my feet, skipped classes, kicked dents in lockers as I raged through the halls. I found unlocked cars in the parking lot and slumped behind the steering wheels, waiting for a change. I told my French teacher where to place his verbs. I gladly butchered frogs in biology. In the counselor’s office, I sat mute and glowered at her. My mother persuaded her not to expel me by pleading I had been troubled since my father died.

On a Friday night, Bingo and I caught a ride to the beach and climbed the cliffs by Fort Rosecrans, a U.S. Navy post and cemetery. We sipped Ripple wine and watched the fog light turn on the point below Bingo’s father’s grave. He had drowned long ago on a test flight. As we finished our second bottle, Bingo forecast the day he’d buy a new car, a Lotus or Ferrari, and drive it out of all he’d ever known, banging shifts and sliding curves to outrun even the hounds of hell. We lofted the bottles and watched then smash on the craggy rocks where Bingo said Spanish galleons had once gone down. Then we foot-raced to a tavern, hot-wired a V-8 Falcon Ranchero, and timed our speed back up Point Loma to the cemetery. I drove the first run, two-wheeling turns so the tires whined like the ghosts of sailors who, Bingo said, knew everything about everything, from crossing datelines and standing night watch on Arctic seas. When his turn came, Bingo cut over a minute off my time.

Well before closing time, we got sober and returned the Falcon. While we hitchhiked home, Bingo said we had better count our blessings.

My mother wouldn't sign for another car loan, so I begged her for cash. Somehow she raised $1,000. We found a stripped Model A roadster with street slicks and a basket Corvette motor. Bingo took a job at a parts house and charged what we couldn’t afford. We had it on the boulevard by Christmas vacation, racing the straightaway from the main light to the turn, a solid mile, against Mustangs, Oldsmobile Rockets, and Jaguars. I drove the setups, Bingo the hard runs, with Rhonda, my new girl, between us and squeezing us both, her thighs spread to clear the floor shift. In a month we owed money everywhere. Our bet was $50 the night a patrolman lay waiting. We had Gallo wine in the car, and my license was already suspended. I grabbed Rhonda and ran, yelling at Bingo to leave the roadster, but he waved us away. In the morning his mother called, just home from juvenile hall. She cussed at me and yelled that Bingo’s troubles were all on account of my cars.

In a week he was out of the hall. We sold the roadster to pay off our debts and the parts we had charged. What was left bought us a ’46 Chrysler limousine. I ripped out the middle seat, Bingo found a German radio, Rhonda covered a floor pad with velour. Bingo took the Chrysler on Fridays, Saturdays were mine, and on weeknights we doubled. Rhonda demanded the pad. She claimed the buttons on the front seat bruised her. Bingo’s girls were not so dainty.

We found high times through the spring, evenings up the coast in Laguna Beach and Hollywood, Bingo in the chauffeur’s cap he ordered by mail. But the summer approached ominously, as Bingo spoke of leaving town and of fates we couldn’t control.

On the way to the beach from the after-prom with Rhonda asleep, her head on my lap, I dozed at the wheel and hit a parked Mercury. Rhonda broke her arm, the Chrysler was totaled, and I got knocked senseless. Bingo was safe, sprawled on the mat. He arranged to pay for the Mercury, to keep us out of court.

With school out I took a job washing dishes, mornings and evenings, six days a week. Rhonda spent her days at the beach and turned to new friends. Bingo found work driving for a rental agency, delivering cars to Palm Springs. On my days off I rode along and quizzed him on where we could go and how we should live now that the future had come. He told me to find my own way. In Palm Springs he kept to business, refused to go out the nights we stayed over, tuned a jazz station on the motel radio instead, and sat watching the streets from the window. He was a world of private motives.

He left in the evening just as August came, in a '58 Rambler Rebel, the day after we paid off the Mercury. He folded the back seats down and tossed in the pad from our Chrysler and two suitcases he said held all he owned. He said he would drop the wagon at a rental affiliate in Las Vegas and write me in a few weeks from the East Coast.

As he pulled away, I shouted, Loser. Deserter.

I can still see him between the lines of the news, on the grade above Barstow bound flat-out for the Nevada line, the windows open and sand in his eyes, whistling loud harmony to the radio, hunched over the wheel, watching the road ahead for a thousand miles, seeing it all but the Santa Fe that clipped his rear end, lofted him through the windshield, and planted him in the sand headfirst beside a Joshua tree, his legs spread, his spine broken backward.

I sat in my room, took my meals there, listened to the thud of my heart and the soft scrape of tires outside the closed drapes. Bingo couldn’t speak and his legs were paralyzed, but he’d live. His mother called and told me to visit, to see him stiff and drooling, the empty blue of his eyes, and she blamed me because I taught him to drive then let him go alone. Leaving the phone behind, I went back to my room. My mother came and talked to me for hours in a monotone of sympathy, which grated my pride like a kick between the legs.

I packed a bedroll and a suitcase and dragged them to the closest freeway ramp. I rode in a hundred cars through states I