the car chase

This field is not just a road underneath the tall grass. It is a vinyl record, and this pickup truck is the needle. It is playing a recording of a red-faced child banging pots and pans, it is desperately tracing every boom and clang, leaping and slamming and creaking to keep up, even though I am going only 10 miles an hour. My reving engine is the child’s experimental screams and groans, as my front tires leave the ground. The headlights are off. Fireflies are splatting against the windshield, ejaculating one last burst of light and then fading away. There are dozens of them, painting a map of a dying city. Suddenly, my wheels find silence. I squint through the bug bodies. It seems to be a dirt road. I turn hard left, and drive for a while at a slow speed. Then I click on the head lights and speed up casually, as if nothing has ever happened. I think of what a friend said to me, trying to explain the beauty of the car chase scene. “If you drive fast enough, and good enough,” he preached slowly, “you can get away.” This is it, a mantra. The cop is not on my tail. He didn’t see me veer off into a field. I have a story to tell people, I start thinking. I need some victory music. I don’t have the courage to put it on though, as I look in the rearview mirror. I also don’t think it was a good way to ditch a speeding ticket. It was a spasm of brazen attitude, like a jolt of annoyance or fury. Now I am also lost.
Needless to say, the next day at KFC was mostly spent going over the car chase in my head. I tried to think how it could be in a story or a movie. My girlfriend was impressed. She likes to speed up and swerve going through toll booths, so they can’t take a picture of her license plate. Of course, I was driving her pickup on my car chase, and although I protected her insurance from another ticket, she is bound to notice that I wrecked the alignment. The sound is chicken plopping into grease vats. I hear reving engines.
“I think this truck is driving funny.” She says when she picks me up. “It wants to go left.” We are headed to her little sister’s high school graduation. “Did you get my sister a card?”
“I got an eighteen rack of bud.” I say defensively. “I intended to write something on it.” Her sister and I are pretty chummy. I always ask if she’s got a DD before I buy her friends booze.
“Don’t let my dad catch wind of that.” I am watching ditches and mounds go by, interrupted by misspelled signs with bendy vinyl letters. I am a very happy passenger, with my legs propped up against the dash. I squint into the late Texas sun. I should’ve showered after KFC. I smell like grease. Her hair is pulled up on her head, very blond from working outside. There are splotches of paint on her bandana.
The sound is chicken plopping in the fry-a-lator. There are register beeps, the ones that haunt me when a friend’s cell phone rings. The thrill of my car chase is completely gone, I wouldn’t even mention it. I need to get out of KFC, I think. My girlfriend’s little sister is going to UT to study engineering. She got a laptop. I got poisoned at her party; I am allergic to watermelon and I ate some fruit salad. My chest seized up and I started to sweat and shake. I was proud of my stoicism at first, but I’ve canceled it out by complaining for the past few days, about a lingering asthma. Watermelon is a very wussy allergy. My girlfriend has a new friend, Carlos, from New York City. I’m not jealous, she has a lot of dude friends. But I do feel a little like Simone’s boyfriend Andy from Pee Wee’s big adventure. We are going to take him to Trail dust tonight,where they use paper towels for napkins. He always tries to drop in little things about how the city life is so much different. “We watch Seinfeld reruns out here, too”, I said spitefully the last time we hung out. He laughed. He is going to UT also, for graduate school. I never liked school. I liked coming home after school to light cans of WD-40 on fire. I miss my friend who loves car chases; he followed a girl out to California. Some pudgy black kids come in the front, singing “Kentucky fried chicken and a pizza hut,” flapping their arms like chicken wings and drawing a hut shape in the air.