How To Steal a Car

by Pete Hautman

  What most people don’t get is that deuteranopes see just as many colors as regular people. My dad—who is also color-blind—explained it this way: Deuteranopes see an infinite number of colors. There is an infinite number of blues and yellows, and we see those colors just fine. So even if red looks like gred or reen, we still see more colors than anyone could ever count. A deuteranope’s infinity of colors is just different.

  By the way, my deuteranopia is one reason I dress the way I do. It’s a lot easier to get dressed if you don’t have to ask somebody what color your socks are.

  I should also mention that color blindness is rare in girls. You have to get the gene from both parents. My dad told me I should feel special, but mostly I don’t think about it, which is why I didn’t think to mention it until now.

  The Hallsteds are an older couple who live next door to us, but in the summer they spend most of their time at their cabin up on Lake Vermilion. They always leave a key with us just in case there’s an emergency, like a broken pipe or a tree falling on the house or something. The Hallsteds have two cars: an SUV that they drive up to their cabin, and a Cadillac—possibly green—that stays in their garage.

  The key to their house was hanging on our key rack, right next to where my dad’s Lexus key was supposed to be.

  It took me a while. First the key didn’t work in their front door, so I had to go around to the back. Then I had to find the keys to the Cadillac, and that took me forever because instead of hanging them up someplace like normal people, the Hallsteds put them in a drawer. The garage was a problem too. I couldn’t figure out how to get the electric door to open. There’s usually a button, right? But there was no button, just a bunch of switches that turned lights on and off, and I got worried that somebody would see lights flashing in the supposedly vacant Hallsted place.

  I finally figured out to use the remote control in the car. Duh.

  So the garage door went up and the lights came on, not just in the garage but the outside lights too—a string of them all along each side of the driveway, like, Look! Look, everybody! Somebody is stealing the Hallsteds’ car!

  I backed out fast and closed the door with the remote and hoped nobody had called the police.

  I knew Taylors Falls was about fifty miles north of St. Paul, but I didn’t know exactly where, and of course the Hallsteds did not have a map in their car, which was ridiculous.

  I drove north on I-35 until I got out of the city, then stopped at a gas station and bought a map for $4.95 that Jen was going to owe me for. I was thinking of all the nasty things I was going to say to her when I realized that I didn’t have to wait—I had my cell with me. But when I called Jen’s cell it shunted me over to her voicemail. I hung up. And then I started to worry. Because Jen is a person who would never, ever let a ringing phone go unanswered.

  Jen had told me she was at the Frostop drive-in.

  “There’s only like one street here. You can’t miss it.”

  Taylors Falls was only a few blocks long. It took me about thirty seconds to find the Frostop, an old-fashioned drive-in, kind of fun and trashy-looking, with a giant mug of root beer for a sign. No lights, no people, no cars. I pulled in, parked, and got out and looked around.

  No Jen.

  “Jen!” I shouted. My voice sounded small and loud at the same time. Jen didn’t answer.

  Where would she go? I mean, assuming she hadn’t been kidnapped, or raped and killed, or worse.

  I tried calling her again. No answer.

  I had no idea what to do, so I got in the car and sat there for a while, but that was both boring and nerve-racking, so I drove around the block with the window rolled down. I noticed some lights about three blocks away. A gas station. I drove over and pulled in and there she was slumped against the wall by a Mountain Dew machine, looking like the sorriest homeless girl you ever saw.

  According to Jen (I’m going to shorten this because it took her half an hour to tell it), they kicked her out of the Frostop right after she talked to me, and then she hung around on the street for a while, but these nasty-looking guys in a pickup drove by twice, the second time real slow, and they were staring at her, so she ran down to the gas station. She tried to call me again but her cell was dead.

  “I knew you’d find me,” she said.

  “You’re welcome,” I said.

  Jen looked around the Cadillac as if she was seeing it for the first time.

  “Hey,” she said, “I thought your dad had a Lexus.”

  I don’t know how long the police car had been following us. I had just turned off the freeway and we were driving east on Thirty-sixth when I finally noticed it. I was pretty sure I hadn’t done anything wrong, but he was right behind me. I hoped I didn’t have a burned-out taillight or anything.

  I said to Jen, “Don’t look, but there’s a police car behind us.”

  She turned and looked. “Omigod,” she said.

  “I said, don’t look.”

  She turned back around and slumped low in her seat. “Omigod,” she said.

  I couldn’t keep my eyes off the rearview mirror. Waiting for his lights to start flashing. We were coming up to the intersection by Cub Foods when the traffic light turned yellow. I had enough time to make it through the light. The police car behind me had to stop. I was just starting to breathe normally when I saw his lights begin to flash, and he drove right through the red light and came after us.

  I turned left at the first side street and punched it.

  Some people think Cadillacs are grandma-grandpa cars, but the Hallsteds’ Cadillac took off so fast my head slammed back into the headrest. Jen let out a shriek. I made a screeching right turn at the end of the block just as the police car turned off Thirty-sixth, then another quick right into an alley and I punched it again. I wasn’t looking at the speedometer but Jen told me later we were going seventy miles an hour down that alley. When we got to the end I had to slam on the brakes. I thought the car was going to roll over when I skidded out onto Thirty-sixth and almost smashed into a minivan. There was no sign of the cop. I made a quick left onto Regent and just kept going straight, blowing through three stop signs without even slowing down, until I was sure we’d lost him.

  Have I mentioned that Jen was screaming in my ear the whole time?

  In movies, stealing cars looks very dramatic and exciting with lots of high-speed chases and screeching tires, but in real life it is something that happens quickly and quietly and mostly nobody notices except that the car is gone. But sometimes even the most careful car thieves must go to extreme measures to get away from the police. It is this possibility that makes auto theft so exciting.

  We left the car in the parking lot of a dental clinic—not the one I go to. Jen only had to walk a few blocks to get home. I had to walk almost a mile, and when I got there with my right ear still ringing from her screaming, I saw a cop car at the end of the block, sitting at the curb with the lights off. He must have gotten the license number off the Hallsteds’ Cadillac and was watching their house. I stood behind the Frankels’ garden shed to see what he was going to do. After about twenty minutes, he turned on his headlights and pulled up in front of the Hallsteds’ and got out and rang their bell. Then he went back to his car and sat there for a few more minutes before driving away.

  I sneaked back into the Hallsteds’ and put the car key back in the drawer. It was four-thirty by the time I crawled into bed. Four hours later my mom woke me up to go to our mother-daughter Pilates class.

  Our Pilates instructor was a woman named Pilar who was, I think, half Mexican and half android from the future. No matter what she did—even some impossible-to-look-good-doing-it thing like scratching her butt—she did it gracefully. Also she was seventy years old and looked forty. My mom was thirty-nine years old and looked twenty-nine, so I am expecting to age gracefully as well. Pilates is supposed to help because even if you get all wrinkly or flabby or bald you can still stand up straight and do things like bend over to pick up a pen
ny, even though it isn’t worth it for just one penny. Pilar could practically make that penny jump off the floor into her hand. Pilates is all about knowing where your center is.

  The class was my mom’s idea, of course—once again, she’d read a book or article about successful parenting that said mother-daughter activities produced healthy bonding. I’m not making fun of my mom. She means well, and we both like the Pilates class. It gives us a few minutes to talk on the way there and back, but we don’t have to talk at all during the class. Pilar had some good ideas too, like that it helps to visualize an action before trying to do it. You imagine yourself bending like a pretzel and pretty soon you can practically tie yourself in a knot. She liked to say, “Head,” pointing at her head, “then core,” pointing at her center.

  That day my mom let me drive home. I backed out of the parking stall, pulled out onto the street, and brought the car smoothly up to precisely thirty miles per hour.

  “You’re getting very good,” she said.

  “I’ve been practicing.”

  “You have? With Dad?”

  “In my head,” I said. “Driving the car in my head. Just like Pilates.”

  Jen had left me a couple texts I ignored, being somewhat perturbed at her for a number of reasons that I hadn’t had time to sort out yet, mostly having to do with her going to Taylors Falls with Jim Vail and then making me risk going to jail to come get her and then screaming in my ear so loud my right ear rang for hours. I was stewing over that instead of reading while slumped in the big chair in the TV room with Moby-Dick in my lap (Pilar would have shaken her head gracefully and told me to align my neck and shoulders) when my mom summoned me to assist in her latest culinary effort by going to Byerly’s for some capers.

  “The little tiny ones,” she said, handing me a five-dollar bill. “The ones about the size of a peppercorn.”

  “Can I take the car?”

  “Ha-ha. No.”

  “I’ll be super-careful. It’s only six blocks.”

  “All the more reason to walk,” she said.

  “What if they cost more than five dollars?”

  She rolled her eyes, then took her five back and gave me a twenty.

  “I’ll expect change,” she said.

  I noticed as I was leaving that there was a white card stuck on the Hallsteds’ front door. I walked over and looked at it. It was a small envelope from the police department. I put it in my pocket to give to my dad later.

  After buying a jar of capers for $4.65, I walked over to Charlie Bean’s and ordered a Phrap-o-chino. I figured it might power me through another twenty pages of Moby-Dick. My plans for Ishmael, however, were interrupted by one Deke Moffet, the most disreputable member of the soon-to-be senior class. Except he wasn’t really a member anymore. He’d dropped out last spring.

  “Hey, did you pay for that drink or steal it?” he asked.

  Deke was sitting at a table with Marshall Cassidy, the second-most-disreputable member of the soon-to-be senior class. I had always made it a point to never associate with either of them, but it wasn’t like me to ignore someone who had spoken to me.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  Deke and Marshall were your standard-issue middleclass suburban juvenile delinquents—not recently shaven, longish hair, rock ‘n’ roll T-shirts, jeans with possibly authentic rips and stains, and a few hunks of cheap silver jewelry in their ears and probably elsewhere. Deke was kind of muscley and not bad-looking, and Marshall was thin and hard and nervous like a whippet. They weren’t exactly scary unless you were scared of teens in general, but you wouldn’t want either of them to watch your purse while you went for a swim.

  Deke looked at Marshall and they both started laughing.

  That was when I should have walked away. Instead, I asked them what was so funny.

  “It’s just you don’t look like a booster,” Deke said. “You look more like a Young Republican.”

  “Church-choir girl,” Marshall added.

  “What’s a booster?” I asked.

  “You know—booster,” Deke said, like if he kept repeating it, it might mean something to me. When I still didn’t catch on, he said, “Somebody who steals cars.”

  “You’re crazy,” I said, and turned away so they couldn’t see my face turn red.

  Deke called after me, “If you ever want to pick up a little extra money, you just let me know.”

  I walked home clutching the jar of capers in one hand and my Phrap-o-chino in the other, trying to figure out what to do. Only two people besides me knew about me stealing cars: Jen and Will. One of them had to have told Deke. And I’d have bet my life it wasn’t Will, because Will hated Deke Moffet almost as much as he hated Alton Wright.

  Which meant I was going to have to strangle Jen.

  It turned out that capers are little green pickled flower buds that are an essential ingredient in something called veal piccata, which is thin slices of teenage cow sautéed and served with a lemon-caper sauce and pasta on the side. My dad went crazy over it. He is always quite good at offering praise. Even when dinner is not so good, he finds something nice to say. As for me, I did not enjoy it much. Too sour. I don’t think the capers helped, and neither did the subject of Elwin Carl Dandridge, which my dad was completely obsessed with and couldn’t stop talking about even at the dinner table. My mom was wearing her adoring-wife face, smiling between tiny bites of lemony, capery veal.

  The judge in the Dandridge case had ruled that the bad DNA result (since they supposedly had found Dandridge’s DNA on a victim he supposedly couldn’t possibly have raped because he had been watching baseball at a gay bar at the time) was not sufficient cause to rule out the DNA evidence from the other rapes. My dad was pretty peeved—he said some nasty things about the judge—but he’d also come up with a new angle on the whole deal. He’d found out that Elwin Carl Dandridge had a twin brother who lived in Shakopee, just twenty miles away. Even better, the brother had a record for sexual harassment.

  Maybe you don’t know this, but identical twins have identical DNA.

  “How come it took you so long to find out he had a twin?” I asked.

  “They were both adopted. By different families.” He cut a wedge of veal and coaxed a few capers onto it with the tip of his knife. “Even Dandridge didn’t know he had a twin until two years ago—they were separated at birth.” He put the capery veal into his mouth.

  “Does this mean that raping is genetic?” I asked.

  “Oh, Kelleigh!” said my mother. “Sexual harassment is not rape.”

  “This is absolutely delicious, Annie,” my father said.

  “If they’re both perverts and they’re twins, doesn’t that mean something?” I asked.

  “Not necessarily. It would certainly not be something I’d bring up in court. John Britton—the twin—drives a delivery van, so he drives all over town. He only has a solid alibi for one of the rapes.”

  “Do you think he did it?” I asked. “The twin?”

  My dad shrugged. “The fact that a twin exists casts doubt on Dandridge’s guilt.” He cut another piece of veal. I noticed that he always cut triangles, whereas my mother cut her veal into rectangles. I looked at my own plate and wondered how I cut the meat. I could not remember. I picked up my knife and fork and pushed the tines of the fork into the thin slice of teenage cow and sawed at it with the knife, detaching a strip of meat. I guess I’m a strip cutter. I scraped off the lemon sauce and the capers and put it into my mouth and chewed. I wondered if I had a twin. I wondered if she was color-blind. Maybe I was secretly adopted and I had a twin who was out there stealing cars—that is, if criminal behavior, unlike meat cutting, was genetic.

  When I called her after dinner, Jen swore she never said a word to anybody about me stealing cars. I couldn’t see her face, but usually I could tell if Jen was lying, which she does sometimes. From the sound of her voice, I didn’t think she was lying this time.

  “By the way,” I
said, “the police were waiting at the Hallsteds’ when I got home last night.”

  I could hear her suck her breath in.

  “They left a note on the door,” I said.

  “What did you do?”

  “I gave the note to my dad.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He just read it and didn’t say anything. I think he doesn’t want to worry me. You know, about there being dangerous criminals in the neighborhood. So you’re sure you didn’t say anything to anybody?”

  “No!”

  Which left Will.

  I rehearsed calling up Will and accusing him of telling Deke Moffet that I was a car thief. It didn’t play. For one thing, Will had despised Deke Moffet ever since Deke pantsed him in seventh grade right in the school foyer with like a million people watching. And even if he hadn’t hated Deke, I just couldn’t see Will blabbing to anybody.

  I dialed his cell number.

  “Hey,” he answered.

  “Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Not much.”

  “My dad’s figured out a new way to get his pet rapist back on the street.”

  “Cool.”

  This was why I didn’t call Will on the phone very often.

  I said, “So…have you talked to Deke Moffet lately?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know. Have you?”

  “No. Why?”