The Red Scream

by Mary Willis Walker

  She pulled up to a tin shack that seemed to be the office. A hand-lettered sign said “NO TITLE, NO PROBLEM, NO MINORS.” Two cars and a truck in various stages of cannibalization rested on their axles near the door. The truck looked as if the entire front end had been amputated by a gigantic saw and one of the cars, a little red compact, was so crumpled it was barely recognizable as a car. Anyone inside would have been pulverized.

  When she entered the office, two men in overalls looked up at her from where they were squatting on the floor unpacking some boxes behind the wooden counter. “H’ep you, ma’am?” the younger one said, standing and dusting his hands on the sides of his overalls.

  Until this second Molly wasn’t sure how she would play this. On an impulse she decided to start out as a customer, rather than a journalist.

  “I hope so.” She pushed her sunglasses up on top of her head. “I’m looking for a ’72 Mustang hardtop.”

  “What parts?”

  “Any parts you have. I particularly want a 351 Cleveland engine and doors and a notchback trunk. But I’d like to look at any Mustangs you have from before ’75.”

  The man looked at her with his eyebrows raised. “Well, let me think. I know we got a old blue Mustang out there, way back in the old part of the lot, don’t know the exact date. Jeff, we got any other Mustangs?”

  “Check the computer,” the older man said.

  The man motioned her to the back where he opened the door to a small office that contained only one chair and a card table with a computer on it. Without sitting down, he typed in some commands and then typed some more, watching the screen flicker.

  “Just the one Mustang,” he said. “Blue one I mentioned. It don’t have the model listed here.”

  “Could I see it?” Molly asked. She felt ripples of anticipation in her chest, that old thrill of the chase getting under way. She’d moaned about making this trip, but once she got into a search, there was nothing more engrossing in the world.

  The man looked her over. “Sure. Come on.”

  He led the way to a back door. They stepped onto a grassy field that extended back for many acres and looked like a battlefield of burned-out car bodies, rusted metal parts, broken glass, and scraps of tires. It was the most unkempt place Molly had ever seen, and the ugliest. It was also unshaded and very hot.

  “It’s yonder,” he said, pointing to a far corner of the field and striding off in that direction, “past where the driveway ends.”

  She followed, stepping carefully to avoid the debris that was scattered everywhere. The driveway he’d referred to was merely a beaten-down path in the overgrown grass and weeds. “How long has the car been on the lot?” she asked.

  “Dunno. Long time. More than the six years I been here.”

  As they walked, Molly felt a sharp pricking on her ankle. She looked down and saw several huge mosquitoes there. Quickly she leaned down and slapped at them, leaving two blood smears on her skin.

  In the daze of her early rising this morning she’d put on her khaki skirt because it had been lying out on the chair and looked clean. Big mistake. The flats with no socks were a mistake, too. Damn place must be a mosquito breeding ground; they were everywhere. She brushed her hand around her ear where one was buzzing.

  “Real bad year for mosquitoes,” the man said, looking back at her. “All the rain.”

  As she followed him, Molly eyed his thick overalls and long sleeves with envy. She felt a prick in the center of her back and tried to slap at the spot, but couldn’t reach it. They were biting right through her damp T-shirt. She glanced around at the puddles of standing water and the tire segments and other junk that held water. It would be impossible to design a better breeding ground for mosquitoes.

  “You got an old Mustang you’re working on?” the man asked.

  Afraid he’d test her knowledge if she said yes, she improvised. “Uh, no. My son. I’m scouting for him.”

  As they passed close to a tin lean- to where tires were stacked up to the high roof, Molly stopped in her tracks and let out a little gasp. There next to the path lay a big white dog, its head reduced to a bloody mess of bone and fur. Clusters of black flies stuck to the blood and swarmed around the body.

  The man stopped and looked back. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, shaking his head. “Ain’t that a shame? Poor old Bomber. Best damn dog we ever had and look at that.”

  “What happened to him?” Molly asked, reaching down the back of her shirt to scratch a bite.

  “Dunno. We come in this morning and he was laying out here dead. Someone nearly beat his fool head off. We ain’t gotten around to burying him yet.”

  “Why? Was there a burglary?” she asked, looking around the yard.

  “We couldn’t find nothing missing, but as you can see, it ain’t easy around here to know.”

  Molly forced her eyes away from the dog and continued walking, stepping gingerly around the broken glass and sharp metal shards that lay everywhere.

  When they got to the back of the lot, the grass was longer, less beaten down, and it sliced at her bare calves. Sticker burrs caught on her skirt.

  The man pointed to the area where the high barbed-wire fence formed a corner. There in the shade of a squatty live oak, with weeds grown up to the bottom of the windows and vines half covering it, was a pale blue car. Molly’s heart sank when she saw how light the color was, but she plowed through the tall grass to get a closer look. The hood and the engine were gone. The windshield above the steering wheel had a small circular break with a network of cracks radiating out from it—the same exact configuration she’d seen on many of the cars they’d passed.

  When the man saw where she was looking, he said, “Didn’t buckle up.”

  He pushed his way through the weeds and managed to wrench the driver’s side door open. He squatted down to look at the dirty old sticker on the edge of the door. “A ’75,” he said, squinting at it. “Engine’s gone, but the doors look pretty good.” He walked around to the back and pulled some vines away. “Back’s a hatch, so that don’t help you none.”

  Molly looked at a rusted patch on the roof and asked, “Is this the original paint job, do you think?”

  He ran a thick index finger over a rusted spot and said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And no other Mustangs on the lot,” she said.

  “Computer says not,” he said, turning around and starting to walk back to the office.

  Molly walked beside him, feeling sweat trickling down her back. “How long has this lot been operating?” she asked.

  “Twenty years, maybe,” he said.

  She was so hot now and the bites were itching with such an intensity that she decided to blow her cover and speed up the process. “Did there used to be a black man working here? A man with one hand?”

  He turned and looked at her. “Oh, you must be thinking of old Calvin, nigger who runs A-One couple of blocks down Rosedale. Got in some trouble while back, armed robbery, I think. Served some time. But he’s back in the business now. Wondered though if he’d got in trouble again what with all the cop cars there this morning.”

  “Cop cars?” Molly asked, feeling vibrations running down her arms and into her fingertips. Something around here was on the move in a big way.

  As they walked back across the lot, Molly continued to slap at mosquitoes and scratch her bites. She had one particularly vexing one puffing up behind her left knee. As they passed the dead dog, she averted her head and held her breath, hoping they’d get around to burying him before long. It was getting hotter by the second.

  Back at the office, she smiled and gave the man her card, asked him to call her if he heard of a 1972 Mustang.

  As she drove the few blocks to A-One Auto Parts, Molly thought about how to approach this one. It would probably be best, and quickest, to identify herself as a journalist right away. But she would have to play it by ear.

  She pulled into the gravel and dirt parking area next to the sign for A-One Auto Parts. Ther
e were no police cars here now. A big sign said “NO DUMPING. ORDER OF HEALTH DEPARTMENT. $1000 FINE,” and another said “BRING YOUR OWN TOOLS.” Louie did have a remarkable memory. Eleven years later and he still remembered that sign.

  She walked through the opening in the Cyclone fence and climbed the cracked cement steps. At the top loomed a garagelike prefab structure. Behind it stretched acres and acres of junk-strewn fields filled with old cars, rusted radiators, hubcaps, crumpled license plates, black hoses, pipes, plastic bits, broken glass, and heaps of rotting tires. It looked like a place where nothing had been moved in decades. And the mosquitoes were everywhere. They’d already located her ankles and had worked up to her knees. She leaned down to slap and scratch. First chance she got she’d stop at a drugstore for some spray, if she survived that long.

  When she looked around and didn’t see anyone, she approached the garage, thinking the office must be inside. As she neared the door, she saw at the side of the building three large mounds on the ground. They were surrounded by swarms of buzzing flies. She backed up a few steps and covered her nose with her hand. The three dead dogs lay stretched out on their sides. Clouds of black flies almost obscured the bloody pulps where their heads had been. Judging from the bodies, two of the dogs had been tan and white pit bulls, and the third, a dark-bodied German shepherd. Someone did not like junkyard dogs.

  When she looked up from the bodies, she saw a huge black man—tall and burly with gray hair and a toothpick hanging out of his mouth—standing in the door. In spite of the heat, he wore a black Windbreaker and heavy black pants. She looked to see if he was missing a hand, but both were stuck in his pockets.

  “Howdy,” the man said with a scowl. It sounded more like a curse than a greeting.

  Molly’s immediate impression was that this was a man who would never fall for a lie, so she decided to play it as straight as she could in the circumstances. “Howdy.” She glanced over at the dead dogs. “Hear you had a little trouble.”

  “Lots of trouble, I ever find out who did that to my dogs.” His voice was low and menacing. “Where’d you hear about it?”

  “Man over at All Okay said he saw police cars here this morning.”

  “What’s it to you?” he said, looking hard at her.

  “I hate to see that happen to a good dog,” she said, watching his face. “Are you Calvin?”

  He paused, then said, “Yup.”

  “My name is Molly Cates. I’m a writer for Lone Star Monthly magazine and I’m looking for a car.”

  “What you mean?”

  “I’m looking for a particular car—a 1972 Mustang hardtop, blue.”

  He took a step back and lowered his head but not before Molly caught the astonishment on his face. He couldn’t have been more shocked if she’d asked for a Rolls-Royce in mint condition.

  Finally he looked up and managed a smile around the toothpick. “You pulling my chain,” he said.

  “No. Why would I? Do you have any old Mustangs like that?”

  His eyes narrowed. “You don’t look like a cop. So you must of just talked with them.”

  “Cops? No. Why?”

  “Because a car just like that got stole offa the lot last night.”

  She was half expecting it, but when it came she felt a jolt of surprise nonetheless: what had been a routine inquiry was now in earnest. She took a step closer to him. “Could you describe the car that was stolen last night?”

  “Maybe you should talk to the cops, lady. I already told them.”

  “I’ll probably want to do that, but first I’d like to hear it from you.”

  Calvin leaned against the doorjamb and looked off into the distance over her head. “Just what you said—Mustang, ’72 model, blue. Someone drug it off in the middle of the night. Cut a section outta the fence, kilt my dogs, and made off with it.”

  “What else can you tell me about the car?” she asked.

  “Engine was long gone, so I don’t know about that, but it was notchback.”

  “What about the color?”

  “Like I said, blue.”

  “What shade of blue?” she asked. “Light? Dark? Bright?”

  He shook his head. “Bright, I guess.”

  “Was it the original paint job, do you know?”

  “No. Course it weren’t. Mustangs never come in that color. It been repainted.”

  “Do you know what the original color was underneath?”

  He reached up with his right hand and took the toothpick out of his mouth. “Now how should I know that, lady? Car been on the lot years and years without anyone, including me, paying it no mind. Then it gets drug off in the middle of the night and next day you show up asking about it. I don’t give a fuck about the car. My dogs got kilt.” He jabbed the toothpick in their direction. “If I’d been here I woulda called ’em off and let the fuckers take it. Piece of junk. Weren’t worth it.”

  Molly glanced down at the corpses. “I’m real sorry about the dogs.” She paused to let that sink in before making her request. “What records have you got on the car?”

  “Nothing. Anything that goes back more than two–three years we got no records on. I explained it to the cops. It ain’t expected in this business.”

  “What about photographs or inventory records?” She glanced around the lot at the heaps of junk with a sinking heart. “Don’t you take inventory from time to time?”

  He shook his head.

  “How do you know what you have here without any records?” she asked.

  He took his index finger and tapped it against his temple for an answer.

  “So there’s not even a scrap of paper to prove that this car actually existed—an inventory or sales slip from when you sold parts of it off—anything that might mention it?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did you work here eleven years ago, Mr.—?”

  “Calvin. Yes. But if you’re gonna ask me do I remember buying this car, no. I been in this business thirty years, off and on, and I bought a lot of cars.”

  Molly smelled a dead end coming unless she could make something happen here. She reached in her shoulder bag and pulled out a photo of Louie, the one she had taken in the hall of the Hays County courthouse. She held it out to him. “Does this face ring a bell with you?”

  Calvin glanced at it, shook his head, and leaned back against the garage. His expression was bored.

  Molly kept holding the photo out. “He’s a small man, white, about thirty-five at the time. Skinny. Lots of tattoos on his arms. As you can see, dark hair, thin, combed back. Small eyes set close together. Long jaw. What you can’t see in this picture is he’s got lots of teeth, more than he should have. Moves kind of quick and jerky.”

  The man’s face remained blank. “Sound like half the crackers come in here,” he said.

  Molly sighed. “Well, could I see where the car was, please?” she asked, unable to think of any other course of action, but not ready to give up on it yet.

  Without a word he turned and disappeared inside the office. Then he returned in a few seconds. “Turned on the telephone machine. We got to make this quick.”

  He started walking along a gravel path leading away from the entrance. As he walked, he pulled his arms out of his pockets and Molly felt her pulse throb with excitement when she saw that the left hand was missing at the wrist. He turned his head quick to see if she was looking at it. “Viet-fucking-Nam,” he said. “Souvenir.”

  Molly slapped at her itching ankles and asked, “What else was stolen last night?”

  “Nothing I can figure, but we don’t keep real good track here, not computerized like some of the newer places.”

  They walked in silence through row after row of mutilated cars. Many of them had the same characteristic circular hole in the windshield above the steering wheel. Molly resolved to be more consistent about wearing her seat belt.

  Calvin stopped in a row of especially old and decrepit shells that had once been cars. Molly spotted the place wher
e the car had been even before he pointed at it with his toothpick. The grass was dead and there were indents in the damp earth where the axles must have rested.

  “Right here,” he said, moving his lips to make the toothpick point at it. “Why you so interested in this?”

  Molly walked around the outline on the ground, staring down. “A man who’s in prison, on death row, says this car could prove he’s innocent.”

  The man’s nostrils flared. He threw his head back and laughed up at the sky. When he was finished he looked back at Molly, tears in his eyes. “And you believe that shit?”

  “I don’t know yet. I need to find the car first.” She walked over to an old green Dodge that was right beside the empty space where the Mustang had been. It was that wonderful vintage of car that had the softly curved fenders. She rested her hand on the curve as she squatted down to look underneath it. The metal was so hot she jerked her hand away.

  She walked around to where the back of the Mustang would have been and looked down at a pile of some rusty metal scraps. “How do you suppose they got the car out?” she asked. “It wasn’t drivable, was it?”

  Calvin shrugged his massive shoulders. “Probably drove a truck through where they cut the fence and towed it right out.”

  “Did it still have tires?” Molly asked, still studying the pile of metal scraps.

  “Don’t think so. They could of put some on.”

  She leaned over to look closer at a piece of rusted pipe in the pile. About a foot and a half long. She thought she saw some spots of color—bright blue color. Kneeling, she reached out for it. Yes, there were indeed some splatters of bright blue. Just as she was picking it up, Calvin cried out, “Watch it, lady! You got yourself in a mess of fire ants.”

  The second before he finished the warning, Molly felt the first fiery stings on the tops of her feet. She dropped the pipe, leapt to her feet with a shriek, and took some quick steps back to get away from the mound. Then she stamped her feet and bent over and frantically brushed at the small red ants on her legs and feet. Some of them transferred to her hands and stung her fingers. “Oh, shit,” she said. “Ow. Damn.” She grabbed the hem of her skirt and used it to swipe at them. “God, I hate them.”