A red Dodge Van contains a sorrowful black man with glasses, a cigarette perched bored upon his quiet lips, some scattered clothes, and a spun wheel bearing on the front left tire. His van is dull, coated in grime of the days he was too morose to lift a hose or drive through spinning sprayers or pay some broke neighborhood kid or crack addict to wash the miles away, and the grime casts him as flat and non-glossy from my observation point. He slows, with concentrated frictional noise from the front left, and turns away into the unwinding nightfall of the neighborhood. He nodded at me and accidentally ashed his forgotten cigarette poking out of his facial profile. I nodded back in return and tapped my cig on the nearby ashtray.
Long, low-slung blue Olds bumps bass nonchalantly in our neighborhood that is now arriving home, starting dinner, bringing the mail and garbage cans up from the road, walking the dogs, or starting the grill or whatever each homedweller's scene may be. We all hear the bass--we are supposed to after all--and some of us caught outside turn to look at the laid-back driver. He stares ahead, out of the windshield as we stare in from side glass on each side of the street, and slows his pace. The bass surrounds us in a doppler wave of nearing and departing and the unhurried boat cruises onward to his left turn and eventual destination. The air seems crisper when he exits and I can hear wind, birds, and the traffic of the main highway.
This shadow was equipped with a lightbar packed with flashing blues and whites, a spotlight on the door, some scary decals expressing the affiliation with law and order, plain-jane wheelcaps, and a very scrutinizing driver looming at me in a slow coasting right turn. His black standard-issue vehicle spooks me like a caution sign of "oh shit" in my subconsciousness, but I do the typical play-it-cool trick. I sip my beer, blow smoke in his direction from my cigarette, glance around like something interesting is either preceeding or chasing his tail, and then look back at his unchanged, not-buying-the-routine face. He slows, then starts quick like he has received a desperate call for action, and speeds off up the street. I curse him for my blood pressure increase and then think of how I make about the same amount of money per year but don't worry about dying at my job...although I miss out on carrying around a firearm for all those dangling participles and comma splices.
Silver flash didn't slow for the turn, for the traffic, for the safety of others. Silver flash hit a curb making a loud pop on a black round tire and a driver swear and a passenger scream and brakes were not even involved until long after the event. Silver flash maintained his flash, albeit limping along clumsy and noisy, and made it halfway up the street. Outdoor porch lights flicked on and his car cut the engine. The driver door finally opened, followed by the hatchback, and light from the interior poured out. I saw his shadow stumble, heard movement of articles in the back, and then the clank of steel tools on the pavement. The car inched higher in my vision, then lower, then the wheel was removed, then the car was raised again, the puny temporary tire installed, the car lowered, the flat tire/wheel thrown into the hatch in frustration, some tense exchange of words, the light from the interior died. Then the car cranked and slowly drove onward through the winding streets of the neighborhood now the porch lights were extinguished and the drama was over with. I later saw the silver flash drive back out of the neighborhood with only one occupant, but it drove slower this time and took the time to apply the brakes before the turn although the turn signal was ignored.
A dirty brown truck, maybe it was rusty?, slowed in a expressed downwinding of engine power combined with the rapidly applied friction of brake pads arresting the forward motion of this vehicle, and the squeal of the suspension chorused the cacophony of clatter as the battered truck swung into the driveway. I reacted, half startled from my observations, into rising from my chair, and looked across the carport at my own rusty truck. No, it was there; it had not be stolen and is now being returned for some odd reason like no gas, this is a suck-o getaway truck, or carjacker guilt. Nope, this was a twin--a doppleganger--of my stagnant automobile. It moved, it created motion and travelled, it voyaged. It made it to me by some random coincidence and I saw that register in the hesitation of the backing out truck. The driver nodded his shadowy face at me and honked on his retracing of his miles and I felt like a baton had been passed to me in some higher-order relay race.
5 Cars, one of which was my truck's twin, in 40 minutes of neighborhood observation. Crazy reality.
