Kill Switch Read online

  Because I said so. I said I am lost. And I said, Daniel? I said, Daniel…

  I could have cried, I could have. He would have punched me dead in the face, which would have helped.

  I am sorry, Da.

  You didn’t come.

  I am sorry. I am sorry.

  So they came.

  How did they hear you? How did they know to come?

  You mean when you didn’t come?

  Yes. Da. I mean that. Yes.

  People can hear, Daniel. Don’t be silly. People can hear, easy. Except you, I suppose.

  God. I am sorry, Da. I swear, I will never not hear you again. Never.

  3

  I love the prerain weather. It is my favorite weather of all. If it were just always on the verge of raining, and then never actually raining, I would be the most contented guy. The roll-in of the clouds is to me an exciting event, that small breeze, the slightly wet smell of the air. I just love it.

  My father does not agree.

  “Let’s just forget it,” he says, all tense as the signs start pointing that way.

  We probably won’t forget it. Because we have an agenda. This summer, we all seem to have an agenda that nobody talks about. It has something to do with me leaving for college. It has unmistakably got something to do with my grandfather as well. There is a last time feeling to almost everything we do now, whether that is true or not.

  So Dad has made more family outing plans this summer than all of the previous ten summers combined. Today’s big plan is to go to the antique auto rally, outdoors up at the Governor’s Mansion. The governor doesn’t live there, but one did at one time, and based on the size of the place, and the grounds and the number of classic cars that were his when he was alive, the man governed more operations than were strictly legal, in my view.

  But that does not matter. What matters right now is that it looks like rain.

  “Why would we want to forget it?” Mom says, standing in the living room doorway with one of the three picnic baskets she has been working on for the last forty-eight hours. She does gold-medal picnic, my mom.

  Dad, on the couch, leans straight backward to look through the lacy curtains. “Because, look,” Dad says without even gesturing. He could be asking her to confirm that he has swollen glands. She knows him better.

  “Come on, Scott, we are not snowmen, we won’t melt. We can survive the afternoon even if there is a little bit of rain. It’ll be a great day.”

  “It won’t be a great day,” Lucy says, swishing into the room with another full basket, plunking down beside Dad, “but it will be pretty all right.”

  “Sure, Dad,” I say.

  Da is not down the hall yet from his marathon morning grooming, but he would more than agree. He is showering, shaving, sprucing, doing the still thickish regions of his hair up with his beloved “hair tonic,” and whistling his trademark happy tune. For whatever reason, the theme song from The Deer Hunter has always meant high spirits for him.

  “Hear that?” Mom says, pointing in Da’s perfumed direction.

  “I hear it,” Dad says with resignation.

  Dad doesn’t love the cars thing, and to the untrained eye it is not even all that obvious that he loves his father (my guess is he does), but one thing is beyond dispute, his father loves, loves, loves the car thing.

  “Tallyho,” Da says, stepping up right behind Mom, as if he has really surprised her. With his scent, he couldn’t have surprised her if we chloroformed her first, but never mind.

  This does make Dad a little bit happy, because of his agenda. He badly wants to achieve something with these days, even if it can be hard to tell what.

  “Reminds me of the old, old days, Pop,” my dad says to his dad.

  “We never missed the classic car show at the mansion.”

  “We never did,” Dad says.

  “And you always argued with me when we got home, right in this room, every time, about which car was the best car in the world. Remember? Jeez. Remember?”

  “If these walls could talk, huh?” I say, trying to fit in somewhere.

  “Then I’d have to kill the walls,” Da says.

  Things go a little quiet.

  We go to the mansion.

  It never gets past a little light mistiness, and really the day is almost perfect for a picnic and a stroll. A stroll across beautiful lawns, around a handsome, stately home, around a collection of the finest machines ever built, and above all, a stroll around a bit of family life and history.

  “How old was I, Pop, when you first took me to this show?” Dad asks as we weave along the row of Studebakers and Pierce-Arrows parked on the great rolling lawn.

  “Not too sure,” Da says, watching the cars closely, stroking his chin as if the answer is in the bodywork. “Six or eight, I suppose?”

  “It was the first big thing we did together, I remember that. I sure remember that.”

  Awkward. That is what I remember about these two most of all. Always awkward. I never have any trouble getting along with either of them, but boy, whenever we are all together we are one gimpy vehicle, one wheel short or one too many.

  Dad is trying, though. For his own reasons, he is putting his shoulder into it this time.

  Can’t really say the same for Da.

  “Don’t know why everybody finds the fifty-seven Chevy so special,” Da snarls, walking straight away from his son and toward the offending car. “The fifty-five was better.”

  Dad stands motionless in front of the Studebaker Lark he thought they were bonding over, and watches his old man’s back.

  “He gets distracted pretty easily,” I say.

  “He does,” Dad says with no emotion. We follow after Da.

  “You’re right,” Dad says when we catch up. “And I remember you always said the same thing, remember, about the Thunderbird and the Corvette. Oh, the ’Vette used to drive you to distraction. Remember that, Pop?”

  “Bugs!” Da says.

  “What?” Dad and I both ask.

  “Bugs!” Da says, and he means it. He goes stomping up the slope toward the mansion and toward the source of his irritation. “No, mere age does not a classic make. No proper car show that calls itself antique and classic has any business rolling in a bunch of these foolish little Volkswagen…”

  Dad stands still again, watching his father rant his way up the hill to give one of the remaining pieces of his mind to three perfectly innocent little cars.

  Dad’s face, not normally the most expressive contraption, is drained and defeated.

  “You know how he is, with The Condition,” I say.

  He stares some more.

  “He comes and goes,” I say. “Does it with everybody.”

  Dad works up a small, sharp, sad smile for me.

  “Not at all, Danny. This is memory lane. The auto show with Pop was always just like this.” He pats me on the shoulder, heads in the other direction. “I’m going back with the girls. Keep an eye on him, and come on back when you get hungry.”

  Just like old times.

  “Come on, Dad, don’t go,” I say, though honestly I’m not all that bothered. They are a handful together, and will never get it right. But still, we should be able to manage better than this.

  “I’ll see you in a bit,” Dad says, and he doesn’t sound mopey, so okay. “Go watch him before he does something antisocial.”

  He means nuts. Whenever he wants to use a more accurate term for his father-mental, demented, loony tunes-he says antisocial instead. I interpret that gesture as love. I do.

  “Da,” I call as I see him climb into the driver’s seat of an old sea-foam-green fat convertible. All the signs clearly state not to get into the cars. The iffy weather has made the already quiet event very sparsely populated today. It’s here for three days, and most people are holding out for tomorrow’s promised sunshine. So there is no uproar when Da bends the rules, and the nearest plaid-jacketed old guard is probably off having his cucumber-sandwich break. Th
ey lean a bit heavily on the honor system here at the mansion.

  “Da, you cannot do this,” I say, standing at the driver’s door like I am a carhop from the days when this car was new, waiting to take his order. He feels it as well.

  “Give me a double cheeseburger and a root beer float, sweetheart. And get your skates on.”

  “Da, come on, they will make us leave if you don’t get out of there.”

  “No, they won’t.”

  He is pulling the very big, green steering wheel this way and that, bouncing in the seat like a little kid. It is a lovable old thing, this car. It’s either led a sadly boring life or has been adoringly restored, because it is immaculate. The leatherette upholstery is almost the exact color of the glistening paint job. Big white sidewall tires and lashings of chrome. The white canvas electric top has been retracted to taunt the rain. The two doors are fat. The car is adorably fat.

  “‘Rambler American,’” I say, reading the raised silvery lettering as I walk around the back.

  “Nineteen sixty-two,” he says.

  “Very good,” I say. “You do know your cars. Now come on out, huh?” I am leaning over the passenger door now.

  He laughs, stares straight ahead, still juking the wheel as if he’s going somewhere. “I do know my cars. And I won’t be getting out. Because this is my car.”

  Uh-oh.

  “Please, Da. I mean, you know it isn’t your car. What would your car be doing in this show? How could that be?”

  “Because they took it off me.”

  These are the moments when I too want to use those words I should not use. But he is being totally nuts, textbook nuts.

  “Who, Da? Who took it off you?”

  “They did. And they shouldn’t have. Said the car was too distinctive. ‘If you’re not a shadow, you’re a bull’s-eye’ was the saying then. They had no right. That was too far. That is when it becomes taking the man away from the man, just for the job.”

  He is trying my patience, and I have got a lot of it. I am sorely tempted, but jeez, he is being certifiably antisocial now.

  I have to get tough. As tough as I can be with the Old Boy, anyway.

  “Old Boy,” I say crisply. He looks at me and I tap my wrist, like when you want someone to notice the passage of the time. But I want him to notice something else.

  He looks down, and sees his copper MEMORY LOSS bracelet.

  He looks back up at me, where I am stupidly making the gesture.

  He makes a gesture of his own, at me, also with just one finger.

  “Da!” I splutter, and we neither can help laughing.

  “Hey!” comes the shout as the dignified old security dude comes ambling up the hill toward us. It has started sprinkling and he most likely was coming up to put the top up, rather than rumbling us. “Get out of there, you.”

  Da gets tired rather easily these days, so he’s always using little energy-conserving tricks. Therefore his finger is still in the air when he gets yelled at by the security guard in the plaid jacket.

  Da hates being yelled at, more than anybody else on earth. And he’s not too crazy about plaid, either. He aims the finger.

  “Right!” the security guard yells, from about twenty yards away. “You two are in serious-”

  “Come on,” Da says to me brusquely.

  “Come on, what?” I say.

  The engine starts up, a simple, muffled brummm.

  “Jeez-,” I say, and jump right over the door into the passenger seat as the Old Boy takes off down the lawn, slaloming between T-Birds and Model Ts and JFK Continentals with the suicide doors.

  “Da?” I call, just a bit nervously. “Da, how did you start this thing?”

  “I told you, Young Man, it is my car. Two wires, two fingers, and varoom. Couldn’t be worrying about keys all the time in those days. I had places to go.”

  “Holy-,” I shout as more mad plaids start appearing and it becomes as much an exercise in not killing people as it is a joy ride.

  “Okay, I believe you. Can we stop now? You did your thing, now they will probably be okay if you just give up.”

  The surprisingly solid old man thwacks me in the chest with his free fist. “That is a reminder, Daniel. Never give up. Understand?”

  “I understand, okay? Now, just… give up.”

  Thwack.

  “Okay, okay.”

  The plaid brigade have now given up. The dozen or so car buffs milling about seem not to have caught on yet that Da is not an official part of the show. He is pretty classic, after all. He beeps the horn, which is a semicircular chrome bar in the middle of the wheel. Without exception, every customer waves when he does it. He waves back, the straight-up-in-the-air wave that is a must in a convertible. I start doing it too. Feels great.

  There are sirens out there somewhere.

  “Da?” I ask, and figure that is question enough.

  He does not answer, but steers the car toward the innocent picnicking family ahead. They all jump to their feet, stand there staring as we approach.

  Da jams on the breaks and manages a sloppy fishtail skid, ruining some nice lawn.

  “Coming for the ride?” Da says, like an utterly antisocial, old James Bond.

  Lucy comes running.

  Da puts out his hand like a stop sign. “Sorry, sweetie,” he says. “This is no place for the ladies right now.”

  The car is a time machine, after all. It’s set us back several decades already.

  Dad is standing there with his mouth hanging wide-open. A cherry tomato rolls out.

  “Coming, boy?” Da asks.

  My dad, a boy? Well, I suppose. I suppose. He had to be somebody’s boy, at least once-upon-a. But boyish, I can’t see. And adventure, I can’t see—

  He drops his sandwich, runs flat-out in his black picnic shoes, and dives like a stuntman into the backseat.

  Da is laughing… yes, here I think “like a madman” is entirely appropriate. His son, my father, is floundering around the backseat, his lower half still outside the car because, really, he didn’t achieve much speed or airtime in his brave dash. I laugh too, as I turn to see Dad pop up when we officially leave the grounds of the mansion. His hair is blowing forward with the swirling wind, and he looks wildly into my laughter.

  “He is stealing a car!” Dad says, making me laugh harder with the sound of it.

  “I know,” I say.

  The sirens appear to be getting louder. Dad looks back over his shoulder at the sound, then at me again. “He’s stealing a really slow car!”

  “I am not stealing anything,” Da says, coolly reaching forward and clicking on the radio. Nothing happens.

  “It doesn’t work,” I say. “Too bad, it probably plays all old songs and commercials and nuclear bomb warnings and stuff.”

  Da just grins wisely. The rain has stopped again.

  “What do you mean, you are not stealing? About twenty people just watched you stealing. I am watching you stealing. Why am I even here? I must be… antisocial or something.”

  “Nuts, boy,” Da says. “Say it.”

  “Nuts. Totally, insanely nuts.”

  “Not at all. You’re a good boy and I am glad you came.”

  Then, like a sudden downpour, Da’s mood changes, he stops being silly, starts being… something else.

  “I owed you this, son. I’ve owed you this ride for a long time.”

  He doesn’t drive much these days, so under the best of circumstances he’d be a little rusty. Under the circumstances we have, it’s pretty hairy stuff. He seems to be fighting the wheel as much as steering it. It’s a big thing, like a bicycle wheel, and appears to take a large turn in order to make a small one. So he’s all over the wheel, and the car is all over the road.

  “Pop,” Dad says, “are you sure about this? I mean, I am glad you think you owed me a ride in a nice vintage car and all but-”

  Another mood shift. A soft anger comes over Da. “This car,” he snaps. “This car. My car. I owed y
ou a ride in this.”

  “How is this your car?”

  The radio comes on, out of nowhere. It took its sweet time, and it’s as if it had this song stuck in its throat since the sixties. Frank Sinatra sings at us that “it was a very good year,” and Da’s beaming mad, happy expression hints that he agrees.

  “How did it do that?” I ask.

  “Because it’s got tubes in it,” Da says, “like an old television set. Takes time for the tubes to heat up.” He strokes the dashboard like it’s a good, loyal old dog. “You just take all the time in the world, pal,” he says.

  His foot is all the way to the floor, and old pal is quite obviously going to take its time.

  “Pop,” Dad says, “how is this your car? That’s kind of wild talk.”

  “Because it is mine. Because I bought it and took care of it and loved it. Until they took it away from me.”

  “Who-?”

  Da takes a sharpish turn, and we all slide sideways with the Rambler’s squishy suspension.

  “Where are we going?” I ask.

  Da answers, sort of.

  “Oh, jeez, Pop. Really?”

  I look ahead just in time to see the handsome stone-and-steel archway of the cemetery pass overhead.

  “We need to make a quick visit,” Da says. “She needs to see us men all together, on a day out together. And she needs to see the car. She loved this car and will be very pleased we took it back.”

  That “we took it” thing has me suddenly getting visions of jail. I look back to Dad, who has sat way back in his seat now and looks a bit shrunken.

  I guess we’re going visiting. And, from the sound of the sirens, I think we’ll be a large visiting party. Hope you are ready for company, Gram.

  She looks ready. We drive the car so far up the winding roads of the place, I am sure we are on hallowed, unallowed ground. We pile out of the car and walk over the twenty yards to the grave, silent as monks, solemn as altar boys.

  It is the simplest of simple stones. White granite. Dates of birth and death. And

  ELLA CAMERON

  BELOVED

  She was a simple woman in her tastes.

  We all stand around her, staring for a minute or so, before Da steps aside like a game show host with a big cheesy smile and a sweeping arm gesture, introducing the car.