The Christmas Kid

The Car

CAVANAUGH BOUGHT THE CAR at a city auction on Atlantic Avenue. It was a pale-blue two-door 1979 Chevy with only 21,000 miles on it, and the $800 price was a bargain. After finishing the paperwork and paying cash, he drove the Chevy to a car wash, had it cleaned inside and out, and then went home to Bay Ridge. That night, after dinner, he stood up and faced his wife, Marie, and his daughter, Kelly, and with a grand flourish handed the younger woman the car key.

“Oh, Daddy,” Kelly said. “I don’t believe it.”

“With an A average at Hunter,” he said, “you deserve it. Besides, I don’t like that you have to use the subway. All I ask is you drive safe, you use the safety belt. No drinking, you know. No speeding.”

“Daddy, I’m twenty years old,” she said, trying to smother her irritation. “I’m not a kid.”

“I know, I know,” he said. “But you never know what happens you get some numskull in the car. Come on, take a look.…”

The three of them pulled on coats and went outside and down the block. The car was parked in front of a grocery store, and it gleamed in the light.

“I love it!” Kelly said. “I want to drive it, right now.”

“It’s late,” Cavanaugh said. “Tomorrow’s Saturday. Take it out tomorrow. A nice long drive. Out on the Belt. Jones Beach, someplace like that.”

“He’s right, sweetheart,” her mother said. And that settled it. They went home, and Kelly called her boyfriend, Mike, and made a date for the morning. She said, “You’re gonna love it, Mike.” He said, “I’m sure I will.”

The next day Kelly and Mike took turns driving the car. They went to Coney Island for hot dogs; they strolled in the bright cold sunshine on the winter beach at Riis Park; they drove into Nassau County, stopped for coffee at a Howard Johnson’s, drove back. Before dinner, they sat in the car and necked. They agreed to meet later that night and go to a movie. Kelly said she wished a drive-in was open. “I’ve never been to one,” she said. “I just see them in movies.”

“We’ll go every weekend next summer,” Mike said.

That night, driving home from Manhattan, where they’d seen Terms of Endearment and Kelly had spent three full minutes crying in the lobby, they first noticed the smell.

“What’s that smell, anyway?” she said, opening the window. “It’s like Starrett City in here.” She checked the emergency brake; it wasn’t engaged. “Wow…”

“That smell isn’t rubber,” Mike said. He was driving now. “It smells, I don’t know, disgusting.”

The smell was loamy, decaying, rotting. They opened both windows and let the cold winter air blow around them. Mike turned off the heater. The smell remained.

“It’s like maybe an animal is caught in the engine or something,” he said. “Maybe a rat or something.”

“Well, pull over and let’s look.”

They stopped on Fourth Avenue and Mike got out and opened the hood. He peered into the engine, tried to look under the chassis, saw nothing. He opened the trunk. It was empty.

“I don’t know what the hell it is,” he said. “Tomorrow, when it’s light, we’ll go over it with a fine-tooth comb.”

The next day, the smell was gone, but Kelly and Mike examined the car in a gas station run by one of Cavanaugh’s friends. There were no traces of dead animals, no forgotten fruit or plant that might have rotted or decayed. The engine was clean, the chassis in good shape. On the floor of the trunk there was a faint outline of a stain, but it gave off no odor. Kelly wet her fingers from the station’s water fountain and rubbed them in the stain. There was no smell.

“Jeez,” Mike said, “maybe it was me.”

Kelly laughed. “Get out the Right Guard.”

“I guess I better.”

Kelly reported all of this to Cavanaugh, who smiled and dismissed the problem with a small wave of his hand. “Maybe it was one of those inversions you read about,” he said. “You know, from the stuff they’re always burning in Jersey and it floats over here and gives us diseases? Otherwise, how does it drive?”

“Like a dream,” Kelly said. “A real dream, Daddy.”

That night, as Kelly and Mike drove from Brooklyn to a party in Manhattan, the smell returned.

“Oh, God,” Kelly said. “What’ll we do?”

“I don’t know.”

“We’ve gotta do something, Mike!”

“Hey, don’t get mad at me, Kelly. Okay? I didn’t make the thing smell. And it’s your car!”

“But what if the smell sticks to us?” she said, her voice rising as Mike drove the Chevy across the Brooklyn Bridge. “What if it gets into us? And we sit at dinner tonight with these people, and we stink?”

“Just say we’re from Brooklyn,” Mike said, smiling.

“It’s not funny!”

He slammed the dashboard with an open palm. “Stop! Okay? No more! I don’t want to hear about it! If you’re worried, we’ll park and grab a cab, take the subway. Okay? But stop talking about it!”

They drove in silence to the party, and Kelly remembered a year when she was small and her father had taken then to Florida, and one night they drove on a road through a swamp, and the swamp smelled like this, too: rotting, dense, fetid, full of slimy things that died in the dark. Somehow…corrupt.

“I’m sorry,” she said, as they parked on an industrial street in SoHo. The party was in a loft down the block. “I just…It’s such a nice car. I wanted it to be perfect.”

“Look, Kelly, let’s forget it, okay? I don’t want to discuss it.”

She got out and slammed the door hard. “You are a real ass.…”

“Hey, why don’t you go to this party on your own? Okay? They’re your friends and it’s your car, and maybe without me around you won’t have to worry about the stink!”

She leaned on the fender and started to cry. Mike put his arm around her. “I’m sorry, baby. I really am. I am. Let’s just…We’ve gotta get rid of this car.”

But Kelly Cavanaugh didn’t get rid of the car. The next day she had it scrubbed again, steamed, cleaned. She had the mat removed from the trunk, replaced with a new one; there was some kind of stain on the metal beneath the mat, as if a chemical had burned its way into its surface; but nothing that should create an odor. Driving away, the car smelled fresh and clean.

And then at night, the fetid breath of the swamp once more engulfed her.

She went to her father and told him. He laughed, she protested, then he promised to see what he could do about getting rid of the odor.

“It’s not a matter of cleaning, Daddy,” she said. “There’s something else wrong with the car. It’s like it’s, I don’t know…cursed.”

Cavanaugh blinked. “I’ll check it out.”

The next day he called the city auto pound, trying to learn the history of the car, and got nowhere. He called a cop friend, gave him all the relevant numbers, said nothing about the smell, told a few jokes about firemen, laughed, hung up, and went about his work. Late in the afternoon, the cop called back. He had the history.

“The weird thing is this,” the cop said. “The car was found out at Kennedy Airport in the fall. No plates, no ID marks. Probably stolen somewheres, out of state. Dropped off here. But here’s the thing: there was a guy in the trunk. With three bullets in the head. A doper, they figure. He’d been there maybe a week, so I guess he was a little ripe.”

Cavanaugh thanked him and hurried home. He was watching the news when Kelly arrived from school. He turned down the sound.

“We’ll sell the car tomorrow, honey,” he said. “And get a new one.”

She looked at him and smiled. He turned back to the news.

“I mean, what do you need with a car that smells, right? We’ll get another one.” He hadn’t smoked for four years, but he patted his shirt pocket, looking for cigarettes. “So how was school?” he said. “How’s everything going?”