A 1949 Pontiac Silver Streak doesn’t just sit there. It lounges like a pregnant golden retriever, faithful, comforting, and swollen.
In 1956, I sat in the back seat of my uncle’s Silver Streak–uncle, aunt, mom, dad, brother, cousin and I all fit into that lump of a car, a trundling loaf of sourdough bread.
Fireflies lit up Ohio’s evening sky. Through the Silver Streak’s window, I watched them dance between me and the corner gas station and the stop light, which had advanced from amber to red as we came to a stop.
Instantly, the peaceful scene transformed. Behind us, tires howled; headlights glared, swerved, bounced. We lurched violently. Suddenly stilled, the headlights stared cross-eyed at the Silver Streak’s enormous trunk. All was silent, except for Uncle Chet, unrefined vocabulary seething in his breath.
Then the yelling began. First Chet, then the guy whose bumper had mangled our trunk. I don’t know how drunk a skunk can get, but he was all of it, and then some.
Chet dumped change into the gas station’s pay phone and called the cops. Meanwhile, the drunken driver somehow lurched into his car’s driver’s seat and blasted headlong down the country road.
Within minutes, a puzzled cop arrived. As Chet spilled the details to him, the policeman’s radio crackled. It was a quick call. “Which way did he go?” he bellowed. “The guy that hit you is the man we’re looking for!”
Long after the fireflies had extinguished for the night, Chet’s Silver Streak somehow crawled home with all of us still in it.
We all recognized the next morning’s newspaper headline story–drunk hits car at stop light, then speeds off.
But we could not have known the rest of the story.
The drunk man, car trunk filled with loaded firearms, so drunk he called his family, telling them he was coming to kill them all. On his way, drunk man’s car collided with our Pontiac Silver Streak. Discovering that his family had fled, he burned the house down. Drunk man was arrested for attempted murder.
Inside, in Chet’s house: us, greatly relieved.
Outside, in Chet’s driveway: the Silver Streak, bruised and heavy, a lump of a car, faithful, comforting, and swollen. And fireflies.