Guest Fiction: Blacktop

She wished she could have died, yesterday.

The wind in her dull blonde hair, the Continental’s tank full of eye watering expensive premium gas and her favorite music, just the right combination of songs playing through the Quadra-Sonic stereo wired to an equally antiquated iPod.

It had been a good morning, strong hot coffee, warming her as the cool morning breeze rushed in through the open windows, later it would be hot, way too hot. But at that moment it was glorious, she was the goddess of Wixom, flying over the smooth black interstate, she and the car were one, a living (dying she amended) machine.

Looking back, she could have happily died then and there if she could have taken that last moment and stretched it out for all eternity.

1976 Lincoln Continental Mark IV, at least that’s what it said on the little plaque under the hood. Over the years the car had evolved to become truly hers, even more so than whomever bought it new. A breathed on 460 built by a long-gone speed shop, a hood punched through with louvers, lowered suspension with springs made in a century old Detroit factory. A set of real wire wheels, duals, no cats. She had never bothered to order the Marti Report to find out the production info and selling dealer; this was her car, they had bonded.

The morning after found her slumped against the front tire, her ass damp with the morning dew. The hot sun rising with sharp rays, each advertising the unbearable heat that was coming up right after this commercial break.

Instead, she would die of heat stroke and thirst (but mostly that other thing) on a secluded parking lot facing a closed-for-the-forever-pandemic rest stop.

It wasn’t even her favorite car, and she had owned plenty, rarer ones, more expensive ones but this old Lincoln had been with her through thick and thin. From shiny to dull and rust spotted back to near showroom new again. Always said it would be her bug out ride if the zombie apocalypse arrived. I guess Covid would do in a pinch.

Her ex didn’t want her to buy it from the old English guy all those years ago, but she did. A seventies era Duesenberg, resplendent in vinyl and chrome, she was hooked the moment she saw it. It’s the car she learned to change oil, plugs, and tune a carb on. It was the car she drove the kids to school in, the package shelf still has a hole if you look close for a child’s seat tether. And it was the car she stuffed whatever belongings she could carry into when she finally had to leave.

There would be no golden years, no seaside cottage to welcome family and friends, no holding hands and watching the sunset, not even a Seinfeldian Del Boca Vista to get dinner at four pm and gossip around the community pool.

She didn’t feel at home here anymore, the world had moved on and she hated it for changing. She hated that her children would never have the same opportunities to fuck things up that she had. To enjoy the Cold War certainties of us vs. them and that we were on the winning team.

A taste of the suburban dream had not been enough, so close to grasping the brass ring she felt it slip out of her fingers and drift further and further beyond her reach with each passing year. Cold comfort that she had millions for company.

She almost welcomed the diagnosis, the excuse to quit, take the money she had been saving for a home or retirement (it would never be enough) and go on one last road trip. Maybe drive all the way from Ann Arbor to the Keys and swallow a load of pills and tequila while the sun went down sitting in the plush leather seats of her beautiful old car.

Almost made it she announced in a thin whisper to the empty parking lot that morning. The pain and the blood, (don’t forget the blood), had come in polluted waves yesterday afternoon. She has spotted the rest stop and its lit-up Pepsi machine. Making a last-minute turn, convinced that only a cold cola would do, she had collapsed beside her Mark IV without the strength to crawl back in to get her cell phone and call for help. The kicker was that the Pepsi machine, aglow with cheerful promise, was out of service.

She began to cry self-pitying tears, thinking of her children, thankfully safe but scattered to the winds across the continent and beyond. So smart but so dumb, had she squandered her time or risen above what was expected.

The smells of oil, rubber the feel of the chrome rim against her back was comforting, they had been constants since her youth. First watching and helping her father, then with cars and projects of her own. Hey pop, I’m comin’ home she thought, and the tears came again.

When the tears were exhausted, calm not panic reigned, it would be over soon, either nothing or life everlasting…if there was an afterlife it better not be some, we are all one kind of fuckin’ kumbaya shit. I better be chatting with Elvis and Thomas Jefferson over drinks tomorrow or I will be pissed.

Almost lights out, her vision must be going the parking lot shimmered in the gathering heat. A figure moved across the blacktop; her eyes struggled to find focus. A cool shadow fell across her, blinding her to all but a black shape of a man and a hand outstretched.