Push Button Dodge Dart
By Patrick Quimby

I am sitting in the back, my little legs poke straight out and my feet can touch the front seat. The metal springs squeak with every bump and turn in the road, this is no soft glide technology vehicle. The color is a faded grey/blue, much like the mood today. My parents, mom and stepfather spent the evening (and night I can imagine) and morning arguing, fighting, and bickering back and forth. One of the conditions of us moving here is that he was not supposed to drive truck ever again, and leave us for extended hauls. But work is scarce and he is not driven or educated to do anything else. We are taking him to his ride in the next town over (over a mountain road) to catch his carpool to the trucking depot. The drive is tense and serene. With the pickup broken in half because of its rusty frame (salty roads) all we have is the 63 Dodge Dart to get us around. Further on is the lake, and we are too young to stay at home so our mother promises us a swim if we behave. It is the adults that need to behave, for names and broken promises are thrown around and tossed on the ground. Too much dirty laundry.
The car smells old, that old car smell. Musty, moldy almost. The tattered roof liner has strips that hang down and flap in the breeze. Windows down, the dust curls behind us on the unpaved roads like a wake from a yacht. Trails of dirt come thru the open window, it mixes with the sweat on my arms, and I taste it on my tongue.
It is still better to have the windows open, no A/C in this rig. The heater broke at some point over the winter, a mess of wires still hang down under the metal dash in the hopes of being fixed one day. My mom pulls over at the meeting spot as my step dad gets out, slams the door shut and walks over to meet his ride. We peel out of there in silence. Well silence among the humans in the car, but the vehicle itself clanking and chugging loud enough. The trees and fences whiz by, the small farms of this hilly Vermont landscape. My sister sits next to me in a custom bungee cord harness, no seatbelts in this car.
No transmission hump, no stick shift on the floor or on the column either. My mom punches buttons, much like an old time operator would for connecting calls. She downshifts to D2, Drive 2, for big hills as the breaks are squealing loudly. Big D for regular drive, R for reverse and so on. It is a feeling of relief inside the car thru the silence, we are a family again. The lake appears and disappears from view several times, a few miles away now. “Son a Bitch!” my mom blurts out from the front. She swears a lot but this time I can’t tell if she is talking about my recently departed step dad or the car. It is the car after all, the hills, the heat, and the Vermont dirt roads taking their toll on the old machine. It starts to steam and smoke and something goes “BANG!” so loud my sister wakes up from her nap. I push her dusty bangs out of her eyes, and pray to Jesus to fix the engine, even if it is just enough to get us to the lake. We coast down the last big hill, and my mom pushes the N button and we come to a hissing stop within sight of the small lake, or big pond. Here in Vermont they are used one in the same.
We take our things out and start waling towards the water, not even taking the time to lock or roll up the windows.
For the first time in months my mom smiles and looks around at all the beauty, free of that old junky car, free of the badgering husband. Looking back I wish I could have told myself that was the last trip in that old car, and the last time I would see that truck driver man.