20.
 It was late afternoon now, and the days were getting shorter. October in California was still warm, though it was cold around Antonio's station already, and by five the sun was almost gone from the sky. As he drove up the hill in the strange new car, getting the feel of it, the fast 1600 cc. Engine, he glanced outside and saw the gravel blurring by. He felt the wind rushing through the open window. The sun began to set as he drove by the hill where he and Eve had picnicked and suddenly it was like a memory of long ago. He remembered his mother's kitchen, smelling of chlorinated cleanser and fresh roses. Long ago, in the grave, taken in a car crash from which he'd barely survived, an only child. He'd built a life for himself, gone to college, found a good job, married Susan, had the little—and then, the fire. Starting over from nothing wasn't going to be so easy again. Driving gave him that sense of running from something and going somewhere at the same time.
It was dark when he turned the corner and stopped. There was the house, barely 100 feet ahead on the cul de sac. He could hear the children already. In a minute he could meet them. He started to put the car in first, and hesitated. This was just how it had been: coming around the corner, seeing the fire engines, seeing the house engulfed, his heart torn out, no, he could never go through anything like that again.
In the lamplight, he saw Eve step outside wiping a pan with a cloth. "Tom? Is that you? Is that your new car?"
He saw the flames. He saw the firemen running backward as the second story collapsed into the street in a sea of cinders. A dry summer wind had blown sparks from someone's chimney and the sparks had lodged in the dryness under the eaves.
"Tom?"
He heard a woman screaming. That was Susan, dropping the phone as flames and smoke shot up the stairwell from the first floor, pushed by fresh air from open windows and venting through the upper story skylights.
A.J. put the VW in reverse and backed out in a circle on screeching tires. Then he shifted through the gears, forward, as the car took on the rhythm of the road. The familiar streets of Cougar rolled by under the car. He heard the singing of the tires, and his heart felt free again. Or not really free, but running from something and at the same time running toward something. Some shining hope over the horizon. He put Cougar behind him, running on the open freeway, toward Los Angeles.
He drove fast and straight, A.J. tightly in panic stricken control, Tom begging him to turn back. It was A.J. who kept the car flat out so the wind buffeted it along the miles. It was Tom who glanced back and saw the distant wink of flashing lights, the wailing and keening and howling of a siren so far away he could only hear it when the wind was right. It was A.J. who kept blindly driving as fast as he could, never looking back, totally wrapped in the fog of his panic. It was Tom who kept peering back to make out the police car with the extra blue light in the emergency flasher bar on its roof. It must be going flat out 95 or better, slamming back the wind like a jet going Doppler, tearing up the road with its steel belted tires, with its siren growing louder and closer, gaining on them but surely, minute by agonizing minute.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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