How To Steal a Car

by Pete Hautman

  “Did you find a dead rat yet?” I asked.

  “Why would I want a dead rat?”

  “I thought you were going to put a dead rat in his car.”

  “Where would I get a dead rat?”

  I shrugged. I was not about to advise him on dead rat procurement.

  Will took the straw out of his iced coffee and twisted it into some weird shape—a rattrap, maybe. It took him about a minute of intense twisting and folding, and when he was done, he straightened it, blew through it to puff it out, and put it back in his drink.

  “No rat. I need you to help me steal his Hummer.”

  See what I mean? You steal one car and all of a sudden all your friends decide that’s what you are.

  “Look,” I said, “just because I stole one car—and I didn’t really steal it; it’s more like I borrowed it—that doesn’t mean I’m your designated car thief. I got the key for you. Steal it yourself.”

  “I don’t know how to drive,” he said.

  “I don’t see how that’s my fault. You’re the one who didn’t take the test.”

  “My parents think you have to be twenty-five to drive,” said Will, all pitiful and hangdog, a look he does particularly well.

  “I don’t get why you’re so pissed at Alton,” I said. “I mean, I know he’s a stuck-up jerk, and it was shitty of him to tsunami you, but isn’t stealing his Hummer kind of extreme?”

  “Why did you think I wanted the key?”

  “For the dead rat!”

  “He’s been telling everybody I’m gay.”

  “Really?” I wanted to ask, Are you? But I didn’t.

  “He told all the guys at Ducky’s I’m gay.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I wouldn’t care if you were,” I said.

  “The guys, they don’t really think I’m gay, but they’re having fun giving me shit about it. It’s a pain, y’know?”

  I could see where that would be a pain.

  “That’s not all,” he said. “You remember when Alton asked Jen out last May?”

  “Sure. She said no.”

  “Well, he’s also telling everybody that you and Jen are lesbos. And that I’m like your beard.”

  “I think a beard is a girl who dates a gay guy.”

  “Whatever. I just thought it would be fun to borrow his Hummer.”

  I sucked down the last of my drink. I had to admit, the idea of boosting Alton’s Hummer was sounding a little less crazy.

  Just for the record, Jen and I are not lesbians.

  Roast chicken, wild rice, steamed kale, and a salad. I got away with not eating any kale. The rest of it was pretty good though. My mom can cook.

  “You don’t have much to say tonight,” she said to me.

  “I’m thinking about the white whale,” I said. “I know it’s a metaphor but I don’t know what for.”

  “How far are you in the book?” my dad asked.

  “Chapter four. The entire chapter is about a bedspread.”

  He laughed.

  “I’m not kidding. And I have a hundred and thirty-one chapters to go.”

  He laughed harder.

  “Did you read it?” I asked.

  He helped himself to more chicken. “I read the CliffsNotes version.”

  “Michael!” said my mother.

  “And I saw the movie,” he said with a grin.

  “I’m sure you’ll get through it,” my mother said to me, giving my dad her we-must-set-an-example look.

  “Metaphors in famous old books are always about politics,” my dad said. “Or sex. I’m sure it will all make sense by the time they get to the harpooning.”

  “Did you know that everybody thinks we’re lesbians?”

  “Who?” Jen asked. “Everybody who?” We were talking on the phone so I couldn’t see her, but I could tell from the nasal sound in her voice that she was lying on her back with her head hanging over the edge of the mattress.

  “Everybody. Alton Wright’s revenge for you not going out with him.”

  “I couldn’t go out with him because my parents have this ridiculous ‘no car dates’ rule!”

  “You’re supposed to say it was because you are devoted to Will, our one true love.”

  “Oh yeah. That too.”

  “Will wants me to steal Alton’s car.”

  “Really? And do what with it?”

  “He has an idea.”

  I put on my black-on-black auto theft outfit and sneaked out about an hour after midnight. Will was waiting behind the garage.

  “Hey,” he said, looking me over. “Cool.”

  “Let’s go.” We started walking. “Where does he live?” I asked.

  “Over by General Mills.”

  I stopped. “That’s like four miles from here!”

  “So?”

  “You could have told me.”

  “Sorry.”

  By the time we got to Alton Wright’s house it was two in the morning. The Hummer was parked at the curb, under a streetlamp. All the lights in the house were off. We stood in the shadow of a crabapple tree and looked around to make sure there were no late-night dog walkers or other signs of life. All we saw was a raccoon running across the street. My heart was starting up its mosh pit again. I grabbed Will’s hand. It was cold and sweaty.

  “If we get caught, this was your idea,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “I can’t believe you talked me into this.”

  “Me neither.”

  There is no real difference between scared and excited. Think roller coaster. Think first kiss. Think stealing a car.

  I don’t know what triggered it, but after we stood there saying nothing for about two minutes, I felt my body start to move. A couple of seconds later I was unlocking the car door. I jumped in and stared at a completely unfamiliar set of controls. It took me almost a minute to figure out where the key went. Finally I shoved it in and turned it and felt the engine rumble. Will was banging on the passenger window. I fumbled with the buttons until his door clicked open. He jumped in and we took off.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” he said. I looked over and he was grinning all across his face.

  I knew exactly what he was feeling.

  The Pit was a sinkhole in a vacant tract of land just on the other side of the freeway. A few months later it would get turned into a landscaped pond in the middle of a new commercial development, but back then it was a deep hole about a hundred feet across and filled with water. Local legend had it that the hole was five hundred feet deep and there were old cars and dinosaur bones and whatever down at the bottom. It used to be a popular swimming hole, but after years of crazy parties, the number of broken beer bottles reached critical mass and then somebody threw a dead raccoon in there and it floated there for days. Even after it sank, this dead-animal smell sort of hovered over the pond, and after that nobody swam there.

  There were a bunch of trees and bushes around most of the pond, but there was one place you could drive right up to the edge. I pulled the Hummer up as close as I dared and stopped. The headlights skimmed the top of the pond; I could see various unidentified things floating there. They looked to me like dead bodies even though I knew they were just plastic bottles and bags and branches and stuff. I turned the lights off and we got out. The muddy, slippery bank below us sloped steeply down to the water ten feet below. A rotten, fishy odor hung in the still air.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “Now we test the underwater performance of the Hummer H2,” Will said. His voice came out high-pitched.

  “I am not driving into the water,” I said.

  “Put it in neutral. We’ll push it in.”

  I don’t know how much a Hummer weighs, but there was no way. It was like trying to move a tank.

  “Pull it forward,” Will said. “Just a little. So the front wheels are over the edge.”

  It took him a few minutes to talk me into getting back in the car and trying it. I kept on
e foot on the brake and sort of jerked the Hummer forward a few inches at a time.

  “A little farther,” Will said. He was standing outside, looking at the front wheels.

  The nose of the Hummer was pointing slightly down. I eased up on the brake for just a second and felt the SUV move another couple inches.

  “Just a little more,” Will said.

  Again, I eased up on the brake and felt the front tires go all the way over the edge. I jammed my foot down hard on the brake, but this time the vehicle kept on going, sliding over the lip of the bank, moving slowly but unstoppably down toward the water. I froze with my foot on the brake and my hands locked on the steering wheel. I think I was screaming.

  “Stop!” Will shouted. Like I wasn’t trying.

  The Hummer slewed sideways on the muddy bank and began to tilt to the right. I know I was screaming at that point. There was an awful splashy crunch as it tipped onto its side. I fell across the seats and whacked my head against the passenger window as the Hummer slid nose first, on its side, into the water. I flailed around in the dark, trying to figure out which way was up. For some reason my brain wouldn’t accept that the driver’s side of the SUV was now above me. I could hear Will shouting, but it sounded like he was a mile away, and then water started pouring in through the open window, which actually helped me get my bearings. I twisted around and got my feet on the passenger door and stood up and grabbed the edges of the driver’s-side window and pulled myself up. I was half out when Will grabbed me and pulled me all the way and we both fell with a shout into the water, and again I was disoriented, not knowing which way was which, but somehow I got my head back above the water and managed to splash my way to shore, and so did Will, and then we were on the slippery muddy bank spitting and gasping and making retching noises, or at least I was, and Will was going, “Shit, shit, shit!” and then I was sobbing and pummeling him on the shoulder with my fists and all we could see of the Hummer was the left rear taillight sticking up above the scummy brown surface.

  That was the closest I ever came to getting killed.

  Will walked me all the way home. It was a long, drippy, squishy walk. For the first part of it we didn’t say much, just listened to the squoosh, squoosh, squoosh of our wet shoes. Then Will said, “Your squooshing is louder than mine.”

  “That’s because I got wetter,” I said.

  “I think we both got as wet as is humanly possible.”

  “Yeah, but I was wetter for longer.” I noticed that Will was walking funny, like he was bowlegged. “How come you’re walking weird?”

  “I’m having crotch problems.”

  “Explain.”

  He stopped and tugged at the wet legs of his jeans. “It’s like they’re climbing up my legs.”

  I started laughing, then Will was laughing too, and then he was walking with his legs really far apart, swinging them all stiff and holding his arms out in front like a zombie, and we both started laughing even harder.

  That lasted about a block.

  What was strange was that the whole way home we never talked about what we had done. I kept seeing the image of that one taillight sticking up out of the water, and imagining myself stuck inside the Hummer, all drowned and bloated like the dead raccoon.

  It was four-thirty when I sneaked back in. I threw my stinky, sodden clothes in the washer, took a long shower, and went to bed.

  “Are you on drugs?” my mother asked me the next morning.

  I pulled my bedspread off my face and glared at her.

  “I’m just tired.”

  “It’s eleven o’clock. I’ve already been to my Rotary club meeting, gone grocery shopping, and gotten a haircut.”

  “Your hair looks nice,” I said.

  “Thank you.” She gave me the Look. “I heard you taking a shower in the middle of the night.”

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  She gave me some more of the Look, then said, “Well, it’s time to get up.” She walked off to perform her next highly productive task, leaving my door standing wide open which she knew I hated. I checked my clock just to make sure she wasn’t lying. She was lying: It was only 10:53. Which meant I’d had about five hours of sleep. I sniffed. I sniffed again. Something smelled fishy. I sat up and sniffed my arm.

  It was me. Rotten fish-smell girl. I’d thought I’d washed it all off when I got home, but the nose-wrenching aroma of eau de pit had penetrated my pores. I got out of bed, headed for the shower, and promised myself that I would never, ever let Will or anybody else talk me into doing anything stupid ever again as long as I lived.

  Ha.

  I spent the next few days half expecting a SWAT team to surround the house and arrest me for Hummer-drowning, but nothing happened—except that four days later Alton Wright was driving a brand-new Toyota FJ, eyeball-searing orange, paid for by his parents. So it was almost like we had done him a favor. Will went back to his original plan, saying he was going to find a dead rat someplace and hide it in Alton’s spare-tire compartment.

  “Why not a dead squirrel?” Jen said. “They’re easier to find.”

  “It has to be a rat,” said Will.

  There are many reasons to steal a car. The most common reason is because the car thief needs to get someplace, and a car is the best way to do that. Other reasons to steal a car are money, thrills, and revenge. If you steal a car to get back at somebody, though, you are probably only getting back at their insurance company.

  I heard my mother say once that the hardest part of being a parent is not knowing which of the things you say to your kids is going to stick. Well, relax, Mom. Ninety-nine percent of it doesn’t. But still, I knew what she meant, because that little remark my dad made about reading the CliffsNotes version of Moby-Dick—I don’t even know if he was kidding or not—really got to me. I mean, there I was struggling with “Call me Ishmael” (the lamest opening line since “In the beginning…”), with five-hundred-some pages to go, and my dad tells me I’m more or less wasting my time. Unless he was kidding, which he might have been. So I was a little peeved at him and ready to give him a taste of the silent treatment when he got home, but he was all stoked over the latest development in the Elwin Carl Dandridge case and didn’t notice me being pointedly sullen.

  “I’m going to get it thrown out of court,” he said to my mother, pouring himself a celebratory scotch on the rocks.

  “That’s wonderful!” she said. I was surprised she didn’t jump up and down and clap her hands.

  I, crushed into the sofa by the weight of Moby-Dick, turned the page. I was on chapter fifteen—a hundred twenty to go—and Ishmael still hadn’t met Captain Ahab, let alone any white whales, but he had a lot to say about clam chowder—an entire chapter, actually. My father’s verbal victory dance, disgusting as it was, was far more interesting.

  One of the private investigators who worked for my dad’s law firm had turned up a witness who claimed that he and Elwin Carl Dandridge were partying at some bar downtown at the exact same time victim number seven was being raped in the back stairwell of her dormitory. The witnesses even had a cell phone shot of Dandridge standing at the bar in front of a TV that was showing a baseball game. According to my dad, the particular game on the TV—once they got their experts to testify which inning of which game it was—would corroborate the witness’s testimony, proving that Dandridge was not the rapist.

  “I thought they had his DNA,” I said.

  “They do! That’s what makes it so great. If he couldn’t have done that one rape because he was someplace else, then all their DNA evidence for all the rapes becomes suspect. And best of all, the bar he was in is a gay bar.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “Well, if Dandridge is gay, then why would he go around raping girls?”

  “But…he’s guilty, right?”

  “If he was someplace other than the scene of the crime, then no.”

  “But what about all the other rapes?”

  He shrugged and si
pped his drink.

  “That sucks!” I said.

  “Kelleigh!” said my mother.

  “Well, it does. What if he gets off and then rapes me?”

  “I’m sure that won’t happen,” my mother said.

  My dad swirled his scotch, listening to the ice cubes clinking the sides of the glass.

  That night I couldn’t sleep. I kept smelling dead fish, so around one o’clock I changed my sheets and took another shower and got dressed and decided to go for a walk in the middle of the night. On the way out the back door I noticed my dad’s car keys hanging there, so instead of going for a walk I took my dad’s Lexus for a drive.

  I didn’t really think about it much; I just grabbed the keys and went. Almost like it was a normal thing to do. I didn’t even think about what my dad would do if he caught me.

  There are thirty or forty lakes in the Twin Cities area. I drove around seven of them and only got lost once. It was a quiet, dark night with hardly any traffic and no moon. Very peaceful. I didn’t even turn on the radio. I just drove until the gas gauge was on empty, then went home. It wasn’t nearly as exciting as stealing somebody’s car for real, but it felt good to be driving around on my own. When I got home I poured most of the gas from my dad’s lawn mower gas can into the car so he wouldn’t notice that his car was suddenly on empty. Then I sat on the front porch for a while. It smelled like roses and cigarette butts. The rosebushes were sort of a hobby of my mom’s. The cigarette butts that littered the ground between the roses and the house were my mom’s too. She had been sneaking smokes ever since I could remember. My dad and I never said anything about it.

  I sat there for like an hour, then went inside and took

  another shower and climbed into bed and fell asleep almost right away.

  Just so you don’t get the idea that I have only two friends and that we are locked in some weird sexless triangle, I should tell you about the Vails.

  Jon and Jim Vail are almost twins, but not quite. They were born ten and a half months apart, but they are both starting twelfth grade in the fall. Jon, the older one, is Will’s big sister’s ex-boyfriend, and Jim is the one Jen had a secret crush on and the one I once almost had sex with in the basement of his house—and I maybe would have, except his mom started yelling something down the stairs and we freaked and quit doing what we’d been about to do.