The Dodge

My father always said that if any of his children got a tattoo they were out of the will. I have five. And for five years he never saw a single one. This could be attributed to his failing eyesight at 75 years old, but mostly it was because my wardrobe was fashioned around concealing them. Even during the summer months when the glass and steel of Manhattan became an incubator, I wouldn't put on a tank top. Even asphyxiating on subway platforms from the heat released urine fumes I wouldn't tie my hair back. When the backs of my knees got sweat rash from riding my Raleigh in jeans, I wouldn't dare wear shorts. And especially on the rare occasions we went to the beach for a bit of respite, I'd feign that Coney Island was too dirty for swimming and, why didn't we ride the Cyclone if we wanted to feel a breeze.

I forgot about the August heat. It was already cooling off in Seattle. I wasn't prepared for that immense block of air, so dense with degrees. It was barely porous enough to walk through from the doors of JFK to my dad's un-air conditioned Dodge Neon. I saw him approaching, swerving around the other vehicles and going too fast, as usual. He was waving to me and I hurried over, my rolling suitcase bouncing off my heels. But he just drove right past me so I called him.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I'm dealing with a lot at once right now, I'll be right back, just get ready to jump in.”

The second time he came around he had the passenger door open and I darted between two cars parked in the load and unload area. I threw the suitcase in, my dad steering and pushing it into the back seat at the same time as I held onto the door, hopping in at a trot once we had already gone past three different exit gates. People were staring. The car had no brakes.

As my dad pumped the petal and yanked on the emergency brake in stop and go traffic on the Van Wyck, the stinging sweat of fear and the mildew sweat of a boiling highway mingled. On that black strip of interstate my Levi's constricted the very flow of my blood as I sat, white knuckled and definitely not yelling obscenities at my father. Spots of age betrayed the muscles defining themselves in his arms as he gripped the steering wheel. Pools had gathered in my sneakers by the time I finally convinced my dad to get off the Grand Central Parkway. We pulled over on a side street in Queens near the L.I.E. I changed into shorts in the back seat as my father propped open the hood with a crow bar. Stepping onto the street the summer heat wave felt like radiation, rippling layers of the thick and oppressive fahrenheit seemed to move through my skin, baking me from within.

My father poured in the brake fluid and I crouched down, looking under the car for a possible leak and trying not to sear my palms on the scalding pavement.

“What's that!?” My father tends to yell when we have car trouble, so he tends to yell a lot.

“I don't see anything!” I yelled back because he is hard of hearing. I didn't see a stream of liquid, not even a drop, coming from the engine of the Dodge.

“On your ankle.” He wasn't yelling anymore. I paused on all fours by the red car. Suddenly the heat of the all the bodies and the energy pumping out of all the stores and the rays of all the sun reflecting all over the city was coming from my father's glare, staring down on me. Bent there, under a ton of molten anger in the middle of Queens, I looked up at him.

“That's my tattoo.” I couldn't tell if I was getting sunburn or if I was blushing with fear at having just said those words.

“You know what I've always said--”

“Well if we live to make it over the Triboro bridge then go ahead and change your will.” He yanked the crow bar out and the hood slammed. We got back in the car without another word. His exhale as he manhandled the car to crawl through a stop sign on the corner, was the first brush of a breeze I'd felt since the whoosh of the airport exit doors closing behind me.

“I was thinking of taking the Midtown Tunnel.” He said. “I don't want to risk your life on the bridge.”

That night a storm moved East across the island. Seventy mile an hour winds felled over one hundred trees in Central Park, large limbs scattered the Cross Island Parkway in Queens and the Pelham Bay Parkway in the Bronx. Some of the trees ripped from the ground dated back to the turn of last century, now they had become part of a passing wind's devastation. Yet, in all of New York City not a single person was injured.