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Christopher Gronlund presents Hell Comes with Wood Paneled Doors. Read by me, the author, Christopher Gronlund.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Ring of Fire”
“Doesn’t this crap car have air conditioning?” Mom said. We weren’t even two miles from Aunt Margie’s and already she was complaining.
“Yes,” Dad said. “The AC is on, dear.”
“Why is it so hot then?”
Dad waved his hand in front of the air conditioning vent. “Feels fine to me.”
“Well then maybe it’s just my side,” Mom said, trying to figure out how to crank the AC so it would be colder. She couldn’t figure out which lever controlled the temperature, so she lit a cigarette instead.
“Can I have one of those?” Aunt Margie said. Mom pulled another cigarette from the pack, lit it using the one she just started, then passed it back to her sister. The car filled with smoke.
“You two need to crack the windows if you’re both smoking in the car,” Dad said. Mom ignored him—Aunt Margie looked for the window handle. She had never been in a car with electric windows (she may have not even known they existed), so I showed her how things worked, and she cracked her window.
“Put that window back up, Marge! It’s a million degrees outside!” Mom said. She complained about the heat in the dead of winter, and every summer we were all constantly reminded how the heat would one day be the death of her.
“Mary, please crack your window,” Dad said. “I don’t mind if you smoke in the car, but it’s not fair for those of us who don’t smoke to have to inhale that—“
“Not fair?!” she interrupted. “I’ll tell you what’s not fair, James! Packing me into a steaming hot car with shitty air conditioning and then telling me I can’t smoke. It calms my nerves. If we roll down the windows—even a little—I’ll melt!” With all the makeup she plastered on her face each morning, maybe there was some truth to that statement. The woman’s face was like a kid’s birthday cake: colorful, soft, and gooey. I had seen her makeup run on really hot days back home—she looked like a plastic clown doll melting in a fire. But still, I had to agree with Dad—it was not fair to expect us to inhale her smoke, just because she was uncomfortable.
When Dad gave in and rolled Aunt Margie’s window up from the master control on the driver’s door (she thought it was magic!), I rolled my window all the way down and hung my head out, inhaling the fresh air.
“You roll that window up right now, Michael!” Mom said. I kept my head outside, though.
“Now, young man!” she shouted.
“No! I can’t stand the smell of your cigarettes!” I yelled back. Standing up to her that morning while trying to pack Elvis and Olivia had given me new-found courage, and I wasn’t going to let her win this time, either.
“I don’t care,” she said. “A truck can come by and take your head off! What do you think about that? Do you want people looking at you and saying, ‘Oh, look! There’s that little boy without the head!’ Think what they’ll say about me!”
Mom made everything about her. Had a truck really taken my head off, she’d definitely mourn, but she would also figure out a way to turn the spotlight on herself. I can hear it now: “I tried warning him, but he didn’t listen. Had he only listened. I guess I wasn’t a good mother—I guess I fell short on my responsibilities. Oh woe is me…” She might even evoke pity from strangers, but those who truly know her would be thinking, “He had you as a mother? No wonder the boy stuck his head out the window to be chopped off by a passing truck. I’d have done the same…”
Mom wasn’t about to be outdone. “Well fine, then,” she said. She cracked her window and flicked her ashes right into my face. I went to pull my head back in, but couldn’t—the window had rolled up to my neck and was getting tighter! I screamed; not just a little yell, but a blood-curdling, terrified scream…then I could scream no more.
I couldn’t breathe—I couldn’t fill my lungs with enough air to force another cry for help. I thought Elvis must have climbed over the seat and got hold of Dad’s master controls and rolled the window up on my neck as a joke, but I could hear Mom and Dad yelling from inside. This was clearly serious stuff—no joke at all!
“James, roll the window down!” Mom was as terrified as I was. In one way, it was reassuring because she really did care about us, but on the other hand, it scared me even more because when you’re a kid and an adult is afraid of something scaring you, you know it’s serious.
“I’m trying!” Dad yelled. His voice cracked in panic and I knew that was even worse than Mom losing it. “It won’t roll down!”
I gazed down and saw the lines on the highway racing by. I tried taking a breath, but had no luck. Everything started to fade in and out. I felt Aunt Margie pulling on my legs—she thought she was helping, but it only made it harder to breathe! I tried shouting, “Stop!” but couldn’t generate the energy.
Dad pulled to the shoulder and eased the Inferno to a gentle stop. The next moments of my life passed by in flashes. I saw Mom open her door and leap from the passenger seat. She set Lucky on the roof and came toward me. Behind her, I saw Dad slide across the hood in slow motion, like a cop from a bad TV show racing to someone’s aid. Then things went black.
During the next flash, I heard Mom shouting, “Lucky, no!” as he sat on the roof licking my ear. He dug inside with his tongue, as though he were hoping to dig deep enough to taste brain. I saw Dad’s face—I never saw him look more frightened in my life, not even the time the twins thought it would be funny to lay in the middle of the street like they had been run over (complete with fake blood on their heads), right as Dad came home from work. I suppose Elvis’s uncontained laughter as Dad approached, shaking his chunky little body, could have been mistaken for convulsing at a distance. For a brief moment, the look of horror on Dad’s face was unmatched only by the look of anger when he realized he’d been had by his two youngest children. But I wasn’t faking a thing; I was in the process of dying right before my family’s eyes.
When I awoke, I was lying on the side of the highway with Mom, Dad, and Aunt Margie huddled over me—the twins stayed in the back of the Inferno, no doubt disappointed to see me breathing on my own. Lucky stood on my chest, staring. “Are you okay, Buddy?” Dad said. I inhaled and coughed; few things in my life were as satisfying as that breath. Air rushed into my lungs, carrying oxygen to my head and everything came into focus. I was alive!
“Give him room!” Mom said as I sat up.
“What happened?”
Dad told me how the window rolled up on my neck and it wouldn’t go down. Mom tried breaking the window, but had no luck; Dad stopped her repeated attempts, worried if the window broke, a shard would cut my jugular vein and not only would I be suffocating, but also bleeding to death. The two grabbed the window on either side of my head and pulled down with all their strength, lowering the window just enough that Aunt Margie could pull my head free.
I just knew it was the car—it was out to kill me. First the salesman; there was just something wrong about him. From the way he dressed, to the way he moved and talked…I was convinced there was a lot more to him than just another greasy, used car salesman out to make a quick buck, selling lemons to unsuspecting customers. Then Lucky’s eyes glowing red. In Lucky’s long list of ailments and strange habits, red eyes were not in his repertoire. And finally the window rolling up on my neck—it was clear the car was out to get me! It was all making sense.
Then I heard Dad say, “The motor in the door’s stuck. Your window won’t go up or down.” He had my door open and was messing with the window controls. “Not an uncommon thing with electric setups like this.” Leave it to Dad to put a dent in my theory.
I got to my feet and now that I was all right, Mom had to say it. “See, I told you to keep your head inside the car and you didn’t listen. See what happens when you don’t listen, Michael?”
I climbed into the car and scooted over behind Dad, where I sat the rest of the trip, wanting to be as far from that door as possible.
* * *
A few miles down the road, I heard the twins in the back rummaging through a bag of marshmallows. I remembered how hungry I was, now that I was no longer subjected to the sight of toothless hillbillies eating tree rodents. Dad must have been reading my mind.
“I sure could go for a sandwich,” he said. “How about you, Michael?”
“That sounds great!”
The twins, mouths stuffed with marshmallows, said, “We’re hungry, too!”
“I thought y’all wasn’t hungry? There was plenty of food back at the house y’all passed on,” Aunt Margie said.
Dad tried sparing her feelings. “Yeah, and it all looked so good, too, Margie. Hated passing it by, but I wasn’t hungry until we started driving again. Something about the open road that hits your stomach, right guys?”
“Right!” we said.
“I shoulda brung some squirrel, or somethin’.”
“Really is too bad you didn’t,” Dad said, holding back laughter. He didn’t dare make eye contact with me in the rearview mirror. If we looked at each other when one of us was about to crack up, that was it. “I was just thinking a fried squirrel sandwich sure would hit the spot right about now, but it looks like we’re stuck with baloney. Want to grab some sandwiches from the cooler, Michael?”
“Sure.” I reached back over the seat, careful not to bump my arm on Aunt Margie’s cigarette, which she held at arm’s length near Mom’s window, as though it bothered her as much as it bothered me. Dad insisted Mom crack her window if they were going to smoke.
I grabbed a sandwich for Dad, my Mom, and me. The ice in the cooler had melted, so the sandwiches floated around like little cellophane baloney boats. I asked Aunt Margie if she wanted one, but she rubbed her belly and said, “Nope, I’m still full.” I opened my sandwich and started eating around the soggy parts.
“What about us?” the twins said.
“Get them yourselves,” I said. “The cooler’s back there with you.”
They weren’t satisfied with that reply—they were out to get someone on their side and make an issue of things.
“Mom! Michael didn’t get us any sandwiches!”
“Michael, get your brother and sister something to eat,” she said with a mouth full of white bread, processed meat, and mayo. She let Lucky take a bite directly from her sandwich as she swallowed and took a drag from her cigarette.
I fished two more sandwiches from the cooler and handed them to the twins.
“We’re not hungry anymore!” Elvis said.
Olivia followed up with, “Yeah, looking at your face ruined our appetite!”
“Let’s not argue,” Dad said.
“We’re not arguing,” the twins said. “We’re just not hungry anymore.”
They handed their sandwiches back to me and Olivia said, “Put these back, Dummy.”
“You put them back!”
They both shouted, “MOM!!!”
Mom had had enough. She was enjoying her sandwich, her cigarette, and her dog and was not about to let us ruin the moment.
“All of youse, shut up!” she bellowed. “Don’t make me tell your father to pull this piss-poor excuse for a car over!”
Suddenly, as if the car heard her, it veered out of control. Dad fought the steering wheel, struggling to get the upper hand as we skidded about the interstate. He finally regained control and pulled over. We were all terrified, except Dad, who remained calm and collected throughout the ordeal. He stepped from the Inferno and shook his head as he looked at the driver’s side front tire.
“Goddamnit…”
“Don’t swear at God, Daddy,” Olivia said.
“I’m not swearing at God,” he said. “I’m asking him to damn this car to hell. There’s a big difference.”
“What’s wrong?” Mom said, knowing full well what the problem was.
“Flat tire.”
“Another one?!”
“We must have hit something in the road.”
“Well fix it!”
“I can’t,” he said. “I used the spare this morning. I’ll have to head up the road and buy a tire, somewhere.”
He shielded his eyes from the sun with his hand, looking ahead. “It looks like there’s an exit up a ways—I shouldn’t be too long.”
He pulled the flat tire he changed earlier from the back of the car and carried it along the shoulder.
“Don’t be too long,” Mom said, proving she didn’t hear a word he said.
We watched him make his way along the highway until we didn’t see him anymore; then the twins decided to mess with me.
“Daddy swore at God,” Olivia said to me.
“Shut up.”
“You shut up!” Elvis said.
“You’re both so stupid,” I said. “There is no God.”
“Mommy, Michael says there’s no God!” Olivia started with the fake tears.
“Don’t listen to your brother,” Mom said. “He’s gonna go to hell if he keeps that crap talk up.” She turned around and gave me the look. The look was meant to intimidate us, and I’ll admit, when I was younger, I would have preferred a beating with the sauce ladle over my mother’s evil eye.
“Michael, stop telling your brother and sister there’s no God. You know better than that.”
“You don’t believe in God, Michael?” Aunt Margie said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I just don’t.”
Aunt Margie looked at me sadly. “That’s a cryin’ shame.”
I actually felt guilty. I didn’t believe in God, and I was never that crazy about Aunt Margie, but I could see she was hurt. She tossed her cigarette out Mom’s window and said, “Well, I’m gonna get me some shut eye ‘til Jimmy gets back.”
Mom gave me another look and said, “That’s a good idea.”
“Yeah!” the twins said, as though it were some kind of final blow directed at me.
I grabbed an issue of Avengers and pretended to read. It drove my mother nuts that I didn’t believe in God. I came from a Catholic family and there were things you just didn’t say. “I’m an atheist,” was one of those things. I didn’t have a problem with religion; it just wasn’t for me. It seemed more a scare tactic the way it was wielded in my family, than a thing of beauty and eternal salvation. To hear Mom tell it, you’d expect Jesus and God standing beside her, all threatening you with sauce ladles for your sins! I simply didn’t believe in a divine good and I definitely didn’t believe in pure evil. But that was all about to change.
I heard Mom snoring and noticed she still had a lit cigarette. I always had visions of our house burning down from her dozing off while smoking—I had a recurring dream Lucky and I were trapped in the flames, unable to escape. I quietly poked my head over the front seat to see if I could grab her cigarette and put it out so nothing would happen. Lucky was facing the glove compartment, but when he heard me moving over the seat, he turned his head all the way around, à la Linda Blair in The Exorcist! His eyes glowed red.
I yelled out loud, opened my door, and leaped out. A pickup truck beeped its horn—I almost stepped directly into interstate traffic. I ran around to the side of the car and stood face to face with a fire!
Aunt Margie’s cigarette had rolled into the dry grass and started things burning. It wasn’t a huge fire, but it was spreading right up against the Inferno.
“Get out of the car!” I yelled, waking everyone. Mom and Aunt Margie panicked; they wanted to leap from the passenger’s side, but they would have jumped right into the flames. They climbed out the driver’s side and were almost hit by a van. The twins shot out the back and left the doorgate open, so I rummaged around for a fire extinguisher.
Right beside the first aid kit that came with the Inferno, I found one! I pulled the extinguisher’s pin while running around the car, pressed the release, and FOOM!!! More flames were spreading everywhere!
I gave the fire extinguisher another burst and the fire spread even more. I smelled gas—the fire extinguisher was filled with gas! I looked at the writing on the side of the extinguisher before throwing it to the side—it said, “And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire. Revelation 20:15.” A lake of fire was forming on the side of I-79, thanks to the Inferno!
“What did you do, Michael?!” Mom shouted. I didn’t have time to argue—I ran to the back of the station wagon, grabbed the cooler, and dumped its contents on the fire, hoping that would do the job. I choked on thick, black smoke, but got a lucky hit—most of the fire was extinguished; those places still burning were easily put out by a few well-placed stomps with my foot.
“What the hell?!” Mom said, petting Lucky.
Aunt Margie added, “Michael, what have you done?!”
“What have I done?! More like what have you done, Aunt Margie? Your cigarette started the fire.”
I dug around and found her butt in the grass, on the edge of the charred area. I picked it up.
“Does this look familiar?” I said.
“Oh, Lordy. I didn’t mean to start a fire.”
“You need to watch it, Marge,” Mom said. “If that fire got up under the car’s gastank, we’d all be dead. Can’t believe you.”
Mom took her position as big sister by just a few minutes seriously, and deep down reveled in the moment anytime she could belittle my aunt. Mom wouldn’t give up until she got a rise out of Aunt Margie. “We could have been killed.”
“I’m so sorry,” Aunt Margie said. If she had a tail, it would have been planted firmly between her legs. “I didn’t mean to.”
“Well think next time,” Mom said. “You can’t just flip a cigarette out the window or fall asleep smoking—“
“Mom!” I shouted, pointing at the Inferno.
Smoke billowed from the front seat and rolled out the window. I realized she didn’t have her cigarette—she had dropped it in the rush to escape from the car. I held my breath and opened the door. A small fire burned on the floorboard, melting the carpet into a sticky mass. I grabbed an issue of Vogue and beat the flames down while Gia Carangi stared up at me from the cover.
Aunt Margie stared at Mom, but was still too frightened of her older sister to speak up.
“How’d that fire start?” Mom said.
“You and Aunt Margie need to stop smoking.”
“Yeah!” Even the twins agreed with me.
“I didn’t start a fire, Michael.”
“Yes you did, Mom,” I felt a need to speak up for Aunt Margie, since she lacked the courage to do it herself. “You were just yelling at Aunt Margie about flipping her cigarette out the window and starting that fire,” I said, pointing to the charred grass. “But you started a fire inside the car!”
“That’s different,” Mom said. “I was rushing to get out.”
“It doesn’t matter. You both need to be more careful.”
I put the cooler in the back of the car, climbed into the back seat with a comic book after the smoke cleared, and waited for Dad. The twins climbed into the back and went to work on a fresh bag of marshmallows. Mom and Aunt Margie got in and didn’t say a word for ten minutes. When the silence was finally broken, it was Mom.
“I sure could go for a cigarette about now,” she said.
“Yeah, me too,” Aunt Margie said.
“If you’re gonna smoke, go stand where the fire was and be careful.” I wasn’t going to put out any more mistakes.
They got out and stood in the charred circle. I heard Mom say to Aunt Margie, “It’s all your fault…”
I read two issues of X-Men, three issues of Fantastic Four, a Donald Duck comic, an issue of Spiderman, and a Detective Comics before Dad returned. Mom and Margie were back outside, on their seventh cigarettes. Dad carried a big bag of food, and was rolling a new tire along the shoulder with a stick, so he wouldn’t have to bend over. As he neared the car, he sniffed the air, smelling the singed grass.
“What happened?” he said.
“Marge started a fire,” Mom said.
“I wasn’t the only one.”
“Is everyone okay?!”
“Yeah,” Mom said. “Marge flipped a cigarette out the window and burned down half the county.” She pointed to the scorched circle and ruined baloney sandwiches.
“Least I didn’t set the car on fire,“ Aunt Margie said.
“What?!” Dad said.
“Calm down, James.” Mom searched for the best way to break the news. “I wouldn’t have dropped my cigarette if Marge didn’t start this fire. I could have burned alive in there; that car’s a deathtrap. I had to jump out quick. I dropped my cigarette on the floor and it burned some carpet.”
Dad poked his head in the passenger side window and took a look. A small circle of red carpet melted away in the fire, revealing part of the black, metal floorboard. He looked in the back, at the twins and me.
“Are you guys okay?”
“We’re fine,” I said.
“Why don’t you all stand by your aunt and mother while I get this tire on?”
We stood outside while Dad swapped the punctured spare for the new one. He put the spare in the back and got inside. Mom and Aunt Margie started climbing back in with their cigarettes, but Dad said, “No more smoking in the car.”
They stood outside and finished them, tossing the discarded butts to the ground. When they climbed in, Dad got out, walked around to where they were standing, and snuffed out the butts with his foot, making a statement about how careless the two truly were. He looked at the ground, shook his head, and got back in.
* * *
Surf music plays. A male voice says:
Thank you so much for listening to Hell Comes with Wood Paneled Doors–it really means a lot to me.
Theme music is provided by Belgium’s best surf band, Pirato Ketchup.
And if you want to know a little bit more about me and the other things I do, check out ChristopherGronlund.com.
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