The Death Car

The Ford Fordor that Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were shot to death in on a windy, rural Louisiana back road became known as The Death Car. It toured the country afterward, dented like a tin can and riddled with holes from 167 bullets that had given their bodies the same treatment. We came to refer to my father’s blue, beat- up station wagon with its wood paneling and sloping hood like an ant eater’s snout by the same name: The Death Car. It sat in our driveway for a full year after his death, the newspaper he had bought on that day still waiting for him on the back seat. I had planned on grabbing the paper and saving it, adding it to the growing collection under my bed that commemorated important worldly events, but never did. When the car was finally towed away for use by some desperate charity, I wasn’t around to collect the memento mori.

When my mother kicked me out of the house for using heroin my senior year of high school*, I assumed she’d let me come back home. I assumed I’d have plenty of places to go and not being able to handle her guilt and worry, she’d not only let me come back, she’d beg me to come back. I was intensely wrong. My bad reputation and her itchy phone finger were formidable enemies, prefacing me like a disclaimer wherever I went. My arrival at any friend’s house always seemed to come after her phone call to their parents. Soon enough I had no place to stay that didn’t involve sneaking in through a window or an unlocked door in the middle of the night. So when I wore out my welcome or found the window locked, I’d go to my father’s car in the driveway, utilizing its broken door locks, and sleep inside, reading the newspaper on the back seat over and over again till I fell asleep.

One morning I awoke to my grandmother staring me down through the back passenger side window. The look of disgust on her face reached through the glass and shook me awake violently. She never liked our neighbors, but suddenly they were the most important people in the world. While her weighted glare had melted the window's glass, her greatest wish was to build it back up again tinted black.

My grandmother had always disliked my father, with his six children by two different women, his lack of papered education and uninspired employment history, but death had given him the ability to live up to a very basic parental responsibility, one worthy of recognition if only she could have seen past her grudges and embarrassment to acknowledge it.

When I had nowhere else to go, my father had taken me in.

© Fiona Helmsley

* her hope was to force me into going to rehab.

The List: Part 1 (draft)

She will pay, Illiana thought, she will pay. It didn’t matter that it was only the third day of the new school year; it didn’t matter that the consequences of the P.O.D she would be collecting on might potentially be severe. She was finally going to put that bitch in her rightful, awful place. For a moment she’d been distressed, but now she was actually thankful that she’d found The List. The Universe had done her a favor, maybe even called her to its service. Now she had a real motive, one that she could be sure of, one that no one could deny later or blame on the supposedly skewed recollections of a chaotic childhood.

Illiana had watched as Constance sashayed down five different hallways over as many school years, suffering in silence but wanting to scream as Constance navigated the neat lines of desks in various classrooms, a hello to this royal subject, a hello to that one- never once stopping at Illiana’s as if she wasn’t even good enough to tithe. Not that Illiana had wanted her to stop, but like they said in America, it was the thought that counts. Well, maybe Constance had stopped once and that was for tithing. Constance had asked Illiana if she had wanted to make a donation to the cheerleading squad’s Go Go Go Green Drive that she, of course, had been organizing. So that was all Illiana was good for. A few quarters in a cup. Oh and her boyfriend. Illiana’s boyfriend. Illiana’s boyfriend was good enough for Constance to try to steal.

Illiana had come across The List by accident. A happy accident, she now decided. Like a pregnancy by Tony would be a happy accident. Her Tony, not Constance’s. Constance had no Tony.

Illiana and her Tony had been doing their homework together. It was only three days into the 9th grade school year and the teacher’s were already coming on strong, her backpack so heavy on the walk home from school with books and various assignments that her muscles still ached even after her Tony’s thoughtful, tender massage.

Her Tony had many winning attributes, he could craft a bong from a soda bottle with just an unsharpened pencil nub, he knew in the parts per million the number of dead sperm that conspired to keep his sperm count so low (undermining, so far, her plans for the happy accident) but he was not good with academics in any form. So mostly Illiana, who was very good at academics in all forms, did his school work for him. That way, when they graduated high school in three years time, they could continue on together to the same college. This was not a fool-proof plan as Illiana was not in all of Tony’s classes, so he had to test on his own, based on his brain’s own retainments. But soon enough Illiana believed, under her own watchful eye and guiding tutelage, Tony’s powers of retainment would catch up with her own. She had even got him to agree to take the herbal supplements her mother mail- ordered from a doctor in Moscow that guaranteed (or your rubles back) to increase brain stamina. She had sold the idea to Tony by claiming that the herbs were a natural, potable Viagra of sorts. Not that he needed Viagra, but all young men found its stimulant possibilities rife with intrigue.

Sitting at her Uncle Henry’s dining room table that fate- divined afternoon, Tony had been distracted.

“Come on babe,” he said, his strong furry fingers groping at her small chest, “Touchesit?” Touchesit was Tony’s pet word for touch my dick- mouth, hands, elbows- do something with it. Acknowledge it and make it spout seminal fluid.

“Tony, this is important,” Illiana responded patiently. A lack of patience was most women’s fatal flaw when dealing with their men. “We have to stay on track. We can not risk falling behind. It’s only the beginning of the school year, let’s make a good start.”

“Let’s make a good whammy!” he replied, his fingers prodding lower, at the inside of her thigh. Whammy was his pet name for penetration. Back, front, hole. Her hole. Not Constance’s.

If vengeful thought alone could extinguish a life…

“Lets just get through the math baby; there may be a reward for a good student on the other side…”

“Ugh!” Tony said, “You get me too fucking hard! I can’t fucking focus!” He got up and tugged at the spot where his jeans had bunched up around his thighs. “Maybe I just gotta piss.” He lurched towards the bathroom, the width of his gait made it look like he was straddling a phantom pony. Through the door Illiana heard him lifting up the toilet seat. The sound of porcelain hitting porcelain made her smile. See, he is making progress, she thought. Usually she had to gently remind him to do so through the door.

It was then that she decided to figure out herself what his assignments were and unzipped his backpack. An aromatic state of disarray greeted her, a bruised apple, a half eaten bag of Cool Ranch potato chips; some lose cigarettes butts and one spiral notebook, its cover sticky with residual goo. This was not a promising sight as she had organized the contents of Tony's backpack at his locker that morning. It wasn’t his fault he was so disorganized, she reminded herself, Tony had been diagnosised with ADHD in elementary school but refused to take the medication as prescribed.

It was in that notebook, the one on which she had neatly written in black Sharpie marker TONY JANOWSKI SOCIAL STUDIES PERIOD 8 MRS FRANCO that she found it. Penned in Tony’s distinctive, baby caveman scrawl. Big block letters, childlike-troglodyte. The heading read: GRADES 9-12 MOST FUCKABLE BITCH’S. Before realizing just what it meant (this happened sometimes, it wasn’t delayed reaction so much as it was delayed translation, from English to her native Russian) she grabbed for the White- Out to correct Tony's bitch’s to bitches. But then comprehension crept in and just as her stomach dropped to her feet in an elevator ride to nauseous understanding, she heard the doorknob turn on the bathroom door. Quickly, she ripped out the piece of paper and stuck it in a notebook of her own.

“Baby,” she said sweetly as Tony approached the table, still pulling the zipper up on his fly. She had no idea what she would say next, but when in doubt a prefaced baby always provide a smooth surface upon which to build.

He cut her off.

“You know what,” he said, “I think I’m gonna head out. I’m fucking beat. We can try this again tomorrow. I just can’t fucking focus. I think I have blue nads or some shit.”

Illiana was not sure of many things. There were not many things in this life one could be sure of, her fifteen years had taught her well. But there was one thing that she did know and know above all else: Tony, her Tony was not going anywhere. Not now or not ever; he was hers and belonged here with her, here with her at the table and beyond, into eternity. Theirs was an eternity that would be built slowly, day by day.

And if they would not be studying at the table then…

Illiana jumped up from her chair, knocking over Tony’s glass of herbally fortified soda. She watched the leafy greens ride the brown, bubbly tidal wave to the table’s edge. She plopped down on the wet table cloth, spread her legs and pulled her panties to the side.

“Stick it in me, baby,” she said. The material of her skirt had no give and prevented her from spreading her legs as wide as she would have liked, so she stood up on the table and pulled her skirt up to waist, then sat back down. “I hope your cocks still wet from pissing, baby. Fill me up with it Tony, I want you to fuck me so hard I taste your cock in my mouth. Do you see how badly I want you to fuck me, Tony? You do want to fuck me Tony, don't you?”

Yes, her Tony had wanted to fuck her very much.

But because Illiana was his girlfriend, the soon to be (hopefully) mother of his child, she knew he had far too much respect for her to ever put her name on The List she had found in his backpack. His list of MOST FUCKABLE BITCH’S, the number one spot on that list filled by none other than her worst enemy, her arch nemesis, Constance Quinley.

© Fiona Helmsley