How To Steal a Car

by Pete Hautman

  “I think my dad would sell you Limpy for less.”

  Limpy was the one with the crooked foot.

  “No thank you,” I said.

  I had been looking at the photo of my grandma Kate a lot. I tried to imagine Grandpa John holding the camera and saying “Smile!” But the girl in the photo had only a sleepy half smile. You could see a little of her teeth, bright white against her dark lips and tanned skin.

  Her cutoff jeans were tight and frayed, and she had a pale L-shaped scar on her right thigh. Or it might have been a birthmark. Her halter top looked like a T-shirt that she had taken scissors to. Kate—her name had been Kate Unger back then—had probably left her home in Michigan wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and maybe a jacket, but by the time she met Grandpa John in Monterey she’d cut off and thrown away half her clothes. She had been just seventeen—I looked up her birth date and figured it out—seventeen years old on May 10, 1967. She’d taken off for California the summer after her junior year.

  In the photo she looked much older than seventeen and very erotic, like maybe right after Grandpa John snapped the picture they’d had sex right there in the middle of the day on the beach.

  The Volkswagen in the picture was faded green—or maybe pink, or pinkish green, if there is such a color—with a yellow hood. I wasn’t sure if the two-tone effect was intentional, or if it was a junkyard patch job, or even if it was their car. The words in the margin of the photo—Kate—Venice Beach—1967—were maddening in that they did not give the month. The photo could have been taken anytime after the Monterey Pop Festival, which was in June—I looked that up too. My dad was born April 17, 1968, so Kate must have gotten pregnant in July. But when exactly had the photo been taken?

  It was driving me crazy.

  I realized as I was dialing that I had never called Grandpa John on the phone before. I think that was because I was afraid Grandma Kate would answer and I’d have to listen to her raspy, whispery whining. I know that makes me a bad grandkid. I was so bad I was even a little bit glad she was gone. But I would have loved to have met the girl in the photo.

  “Hello?” Grandpa John sounded angry.

  “Grandpa? It’s me, Kelleigh.”

  “Kelleigh!” His voice changed. “Is everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine. How are you?”

  “Staying busy. That’s what they tell me I should be doing. I was just boxing up some of Kate’s clothes. I don’t suppose you’d be interested in going through them?”

  “Uh, sure…” I imagined box after box of saggy oldlady clothes. And then I imagined a pair of cutoff denim shorts. She might have saved them. Grandma Kate had been a little pack-rattish. “Yeah, I’d like that.”

  “I’ll set ’em aside for you. Anything you don’t want, which I imagine will be most of it, I’ll give to the church ladies for their sale. When are you coming up for a visit?”

  “I don’t know. Dad’s been sort of busy trying to get this rapist out of jail.”

  Grandpa John bellowed laughter. “Who’da thought a couple of peacenik hippies would end up raising a kid like that!”

  For a second I wasn’t sure if he was talking about me or my dad; then I figured out that it was Grandpa John and Kate who were the “peacenik hippies.”

  “You going to law school too, Kelleigh?”

  “Actually, I’m thinking of becoming a criminal. To give the lawyers something to do.”

  He laughed again.

  “Hey, thanks for sending me that picture,” I said.

  “Your grandmother would’ve wanted you to have it.”

  I was holding the picture in my lap.

  “What about you? Do you want me to scan it for you?”

  “I have lots of other pictures,” he said.

  “When was this one taken?” I asked.

  “Nineteen sixty-seven.”

  “I know, but what month?”

  “Um, we were in L.A., so I guess it must have been summer. Maybe July? I think by August we were back in the Bay Area.”

  “Was Grandma pregnant then? When you took the picture?”

  It took him a few seconds to answer.

  “I swear, the world went to hell the day we taught you kids to read a calendar.” He paused for a breath or two, then continued. “My guess is, it was right around that time. But we didn’t know it until later, of course. We were staying with this band up in San Francisco and she realized she was a month late.”

  “So you got married?”

  “Well, we waited a few months.”

  “And lived happily ever after.”

  “Yep. Why? You aren’t pregnant, are you?”

  “Grandpa! No!” I felt my cheeks get hot.

  “Good. You stay that way.”

  Desperate for a change of subject, I said, “The Volkswagen in the photo—what color is it?”

  “You’re the one looking at the photo, kiddo.”

  “I’m color-blind,” I reminded him. Or maybe he never knew.

  “Oh! Well, as I recall, it was faded-out red, with a yellow hood. At least that’s what Kate told me. I’m color-blind too, you know.”

  “Was it yours or Grandma’s?”

  He cleared his throat and chuckled. “Kate had the VW when I met her, but it belonged to this other guy she’d been with…” He trailed off the way adults do when they catch themselves talking to a kid like an adult.

  I said, “Like, her boyfriend before you?”

  “Something like that.” He chuckled again. “Crazy times. They’d split up just before I met her, and I guess—well, you knew your grandmother. She was feisty.”

  I remembered her mostly as whiny. But I didn’t say that.

  “I didn’t find out until later that she’d just gone and taken the guy’s car when they broke up. I didn’t know about it until he caught up with us in Santa Rosa and took it back.”

  “Grandma was a car thief?”

  “Just that one time,” he said.

  Most people think of car thieves as squinty-eyed young guys with tattoos and grease under their fingernails, but you never know who will steal a car.

  The fact that auto thievery might be as genetic as color blindness was both disturbing and reassuring. I couldn’t resist asking my dad that night at dinner if he’d ever stolen a car.

  He almost dropped his fork. “Have I ever what?” he said.

  “You know, when you were young. During those wild years you never talk about.”

  My mother stifled a laugh with her napkin.

  “I had no wild years,” said my dad.

  I looked at my mom, who shrugged and said, “It’s true.”

  “I talked to Grandpa John this afternoon—he sent me that picture? Of Grandma standing in front of a VW?”

  My dad nodded. “The one he kept on his desk.”

  “Did you know she was pregnant then?”

  He blinked. “I guess I never thought about it, but I suppose she was.”

  “So Grandma and Grandpa had this wild hippie free-love thing going on, and you never got in trouble the whole time you were growing up?”

  “Of course I got in trouble. But I certainly never stole a car!”

  “Grandma did.”

  “She did?” My mom had this quizzical smile. “Kate stole a car?”

  “Just one,” I said. “That Volkswagen.”

  My mom looked at my dad. “This is so much more interesting than talking about your rapist again, isn’t it, dear?”

  In our house my dad was supposedly in charge. He earned most of the money and he was the biggest and hairiest, but in some ways my mother was even more in charge, like a farmer poking an ox with a stick to keep him headed in the right direction. Some days she poked harder than others.

  “Don’t worry,” my dad said. “The Dandridge case is almost over. I’m going to plead him out. Turns out his brother is his fraternal twin, not identical, so the DNA evidence is back in play. And that photo of him in the bar with the baseball game? The game wa
s taped. It turns out he was at the bar the night after the rape. Elwin Dandridge has been a real disappointment to me. But I think I can get him a deal for three to five, because the DEA needs his testimony in a drug-trafficking case. I might even swing a suspended sentence with probation, if he agrees to go into treatment.”

  “For drugs? Or raping girls?” I asked.

  “I assume both. The judge is likely to—”

  My mother stood up suddenly. She picked up her plate and glass of wine and said, “I’m going to eat in the den.”

  We watched her go, surprised. What my mom had just done was, in her version of reality, the height of rudeness.

  I thought it was cool. A good hard poke to the ox’s ribs.

  Deke Moffet was very regular about taking his meal breaks from Wing’s Wild Wok, only this time instead of pizza he was eating a burger from McDonald’s. He didn’t say anything right away when I sat down. I waited.

  He said, “Don’t worry, I haven’t told anybody about the Hummer.”

  “Good.”

  “Marsh might have, though—he never shuts up. I wouldn’t worry about it. Nobody really listens to him.”

  I nodded.

  Deke said, “That what you wanted to hear?”

  “Yeah, but…can I ask you something?”

  He took another bite out of his burger and nodded.

  “When you stole all those cars, how did you do it? Break in and hot-wire them? Or what?”

  “Or what,” Deke said. He paused to swallow. “I wouldn’t know how to hot-wire a lawn mower. Besides, the kind of cars we were stealing, you can’t just cross a couple wires. We weren’t looking for stuff to chop. We were after the highbuck stuff—Beamers and Benzes. Cars like that got all this antitheft stuff built in. You pretty much gotta have a key.” He gave me an appraising look. “Why?”

  “I was just curious. How did you get the keys?”

  “I got my ways.” Deke hunched close over the table and lowered his voice. “I can get a key for just about any car, anywhere.” He sat back and grinned.

  “Then what?”

  “Then what what?”

  “You sold the cars to somebody?”

  Deke took another huge bite of his burger. I waited. One thing my dad told me once is that most people can’t shut up once you get them talking about their work.

  He swallowed. “I sure didn’t drive ’em into no pond.”

  “How much did you get?”

  “Depended on the car. This guy I know—my client, I guess you could say—he swaps out the VINs, replates ’em, and ships ’em out of state.”

  “What is ‘swap out the VINs’?”

  “Vehicle identification numbers. He gets a new title with a new VIN number.”

  “How did you get caught?”

  “We got pulled over for speeding.” He rolled his eyes. “That moron Marsh. We weren’t even in a hurry.”

  Being arrested for auto theft is no doubt very traumatic, as you can go to jail for it. It is not nearly as bad as rape or murder, however.

  I said earlier that the only times my mom drank too much were at Book Club and weddings. I left out this one other time: when Becca Ekman, my mom’s old roommate from college, came into town from New York a couple times a year and took her out for lunch. Martinis were Becca’s thing.

  They always went to The Oceanaire in the Hyatt, where they ripped a new one for every guy they’d ever met—which in Becca’s case, I gathered, was a lot of guys. I think my mom’s job was mostly to listen. She had told me a few Becca stories, I think in hopes that I would avoid following in her best friend’s footsteps.

  As far as I know, Becca had never stolen a car, but if she had I would not have been surprised.

  Becca always stayed at the Hyatt when she came to town, so getting back to her room after multiple martinis was not a problem. But Mom always had to take a cab home and then get a ride downtown with my dad the next morning so she could pick up her car from the hotel garage. She hates cabs. “Cabs are dirty and you never know who’s going to be driving them,” she says.

  Elwin Carl Dandridge was a cabdriver. I don’t remember if I mentioned that before.

  Since I had proven to be such an excellent designated driver in the past, Mom decided that I might like to drive her downtown, then do some shopping while she and Becca got wasted, then drive her home. This was only a couple days after my air-shopping experience at DSW. I didn’t know if I was into that kind of retail masochism again.

  “Shopping for what? I don’t have any money.”

  “If you promise to keep it under three hundred dollars, you can use my credit card.”

  Sold.

  I got back to the hotel at three-thirty, wearing a new black leather jacket. It was a ridiculously hot fashion choice for the middle of summer, but wearing it was easier than carrying it. My mom was standing outside the lobby entrance with Becca, who was smoking a cigarette. I had to admit that Becca looked cool, all fashion-model slim, blowing clouds of smoke past bright red lips, totally comfortable in a pair of heels that would have given me acrophobia.

  My mom also looked good, but not as good as Becca. I noticed that she was smoking too. I walked up to her and said, “Got a cigarette?”

  She did this drunken-recognition thing that would have been comical if she hadn’t been my mother, and if she hadn’t started coughing violently while dropping her cigarette.

  Becca said, “Cool jacket, Kell.”

  My mom was about as smashed as I’d ever seen her, talking fast like a meth freak and slurring her words and making hand gestures like a conductor. I was concentrating on getting off the parking ramp and out of downtown Minneapolis, so I hardly heard what she was saying—mostly Becca said this, Becca said that, blah-blah-blah—until we were finally on the freeway and I heard her say something about Dad.

  “…expect me to have dinner on the table as usual, he’s lucky he didn’t marry Becca—”

  “Dad used to go out with Becca?” I said.

  “Don’t be silly. I’m just saying, she’d have told him where to put his dinner!” She laughed. “Your dad—” She burped and made a sour face. “Remind me to never ever drink another apricot martini.”

  “Dad what?”

  “Do you know all the time he was in law school, and for the first five years of our marriage, he never once said ‘I love you’? You know what he said? He said ‘I luff you.’ And every time he said it, he’d laugh. A fakey little laugh. Huh huh. Like a kid. ‘I luff you, huh huh.’ Can you imagine?”

  I tried. I couldn’t. My big hairy dad saying “I luff you”? No way.

  “He says ‘I love you’ all the time,” I said. “I’ve heard him say it.”

  “He says it now, but only because now it’s not true. Before, it scared him because it might have been true. But then he just decided one day to lie, and once he decided to lie, it was easy for him to say it.” She extended her fingers and stared at her nails. She’d had them done the day before, getting herself all fixed up for Becca.

  My head was spinning with what she’d said. I mean, I was trying to understand it, trying to make sense of her words. Dad could only say I love you if it wasn’t true? Did that make sense on any level other than the multiple-apricot-martini level?

  My mother let her manicured hand fall to her lap.

  “He does it for a living, you know,” she said, sounding perfectly sober for the moment. “He tells lies.”

  Knowing that her martini lunch would incapacitate her, my mother had made a bean-and-lamb casserole and a salad that morning. When we got home, she put the casserole in the oven, took two Excedrin, and went to bed, asking me to wake her up at five-thirty. I went to my computer and spent the next hour on the Web.

  I did a search for “how to steal a car” and got twenty thousand hits. A lot of them were videos with hot-wiring instructions. I watched a few of those. Every one was different. Some said to cross the green wire with the red; some said the red with the yellow; some said
to cross all three. It looked really complicated. I could see why Deke had never learned to do it.

  One video showed a guy jamming the tip of a screwdriver into the ignition switch and turning it to start the car. But if it was really that simple, then why would all these other guys bother with the hot-wiring? Another video showed a girl breaking into a locked car using nothing but a tennis ball. She cut a small hole in the tennis ball, put the hole over the lock, and smooshed the ball with her palm. The sudden air pressure made the lock pop up. Cool.

  There were a few videos of guys actually stealing cars. Some of them you could tell were real—you could see how pumped they were, yelling and grinning and high-fiving each other.

  I heard my mom in the shower just after five. I erased my browsing history and went downstairs to read about Ishmael and his cannibal friend, Queequeg, who is actually the coolest character in the whole book. By the time my dad got home, Mom was acting and looking almost normal, although she was moving a little slow and her eyes were red.

  I decided to try an experiment.

  After dinner that night, during which there was no mention of Elwin Carl Dandridge, my dad put on his suburban warrior outfit and went out to attack the bushes with his electric trimmer. I helped my mom clean up the kitchen. She was looking a bit less hollow-eyed.

  “Are you hungover?” I asked.

  “I’m not twenty-five anymore,” she said, scraping the leftover casserole into a plastic container. “I don’t know how Becca does it.”

  “I noticed that Dad didn’t give us his usual update on his free-the-guilty-rapist program.”

  She laughed weakly. “I’ll finish up here,” she said.

  I went outside and watched my dad squaring off the boxwood hedge that divides our yard from the Hallsteds’, who were still up at their lake cabin.

  “Hey, Dad!” I yelled it loud to get through his earmuffs.

  He turned off the trimmer and pulled his earmuffs down around his neck.

  “What was in that envelope?” I asked.