Old Joe's Pink Cadillac
Everyone liked Joe. Ben, a bachelor who lived across the alley, had a special fondness for his neighbor...
I’m resending this because the book trailer fell off the monthly post on some posts. I think it’s worth a look!
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Old Joe’s Pink Cadillac
By Janelle Meraz Hooper.
The townspeople were wrong about Joe not having family. The old black man had a daughter, but she never visited her father unless she needed money. And then she stole it.
The few passersby who drove down the alley in the old part of town seldom noticed Joe’s little home that sat behind a big Victorian house. That was mostly because Joe kept Elizabeth, a pink Cadillac, parked right in front of the stick structure. The old Coupe de Ville, reminiscent of one of Elvis Presley’s cars, was so big it blocked a lot of the house from sight.
Most nights, after work, Joe could be found with his head stuck under the hood of the collectible car, murmuring loving, encouraging sounds to the eye-catching lady who once ruled the highway.
The one-room house that Joe called home would be called a shack by some, although they would have to admit it was a very pristine shack. The little structure was originally a one-car garage for the two-story Victorian that sat on the front of a shaded lot near the center of town. Joe’s little house in back sat right on the edge of the alley, as if the big house was ashamed of its little sister and begrudged her presence.
During World War II, when housing was short, lots of similar conversions were made in the town outside the gates of Fort Sill, Oklahoma. The fort that called itself the Artillery Center of the World drew a huge influx of artillery trainees, desperate to house their families. A bizarre atmosphere was created that saw more than a handful of newly inducted soldiers from wealthier backgrounds go door-to-door with satchels full of money, hoping to buy houses. These men, unsure of their future, wanted to spend every available minute with their loved ones, and their liquidated wealth created a seller’s market for homeowners who, until then, had not thought of selling.
Soldiers with fewer means searched for anything livable. Almost overnight, homeowners, who suffered from a strange combination of opportunity and patriotism, converted garages, spare buildings, and even sheds into emergency housing for soldiers and their families. A few of the structures, like Joe’s, were still being used as living quarters, but most had been converted back to their original use years ago, after the war was over and they were no longer needed.
Joe’s little shack was tiny, but proud. Its canary yellow paint was never allowed to peel, and its red asbestos shingles on the roof sparkled brightly in the sunlight. Inside, the spotless windows were covered with white curtains that were so clean they seemed to glow. By contrast, the large, Victorian house at the front of the lot it belonged to was so rundown it was almost unlivable. The main purpose of its huge, sagging wraparound porch seemed to be to provide shelter for a whole passel of feral cats that lived in weathered and dilapidated cardboard boxes strewn haphazardly around from one end of the porch to the other. Crooked shutters hung loosely around the windows, and seemed destined to blow completely off during the next windstorm.
No one in the neighborhood knew where Old Joe, as they called him, worked, but he went there almost every day. He seemed to spend all of his spare time, after work and on weekends, on the car that hadn’t moved once since his friend parked it there before he went to Vietnam.
If he had friends in town, no one ever saw them, but he always had a smile and a wave for his neighbors who respected Joe’s penchant for privacy. The man seldom left his own yard, and the neighbors considered it a treat whenever the quiet man knocked on their door to visit and ask for an occasional favor. Usually, he needed a ride to the doctor, or a loan of five dollars when he ran short. His offer to pay for the ride was always refused, and the money he borrowed was always promptly repaid on his payday. People liked to say Old Joe was just as dependable as one of the cannons on Fort Sill.
Everyone liked Joe. Ben, a bachelor who lived across the alley, had a special fondness for his neighbor. Years ago, Joe had chosen to move to the white side of the laurel hedge the city had planted to separate the whites from the blacks. Ben suspected Joe’s move had something to do with wanting to get away from his ex-wife. It was a gutsy decision, and Ben admired him for it. Through the years, the once all-white, intimidating neighborhood that Joe chose filled in with Asians and Hispanics. At dinnertime, the air was filled with wonderful smells of different cultures mixing together in the hot air, and the smells from Joe’s kitchen fit right into the mix.
Ben’s effort to see that his friend was well and had everything he needed was always appreciated by the old guy. Especially on hot nights, Ben would walk across the alley to say hello and make sure the old man had ice for his icebox. Temperatures in the Oklahoma town could be as high as a hundred and eight degrees or more in the daytime during the summer, and the town’s senior citizens were sometimes known to suffer from dehydration.
On those nights, Joe would pull two bottles of beer out of his icebox, and he and Ben would go outside and sit on Elizabeth’s hood to cool off. There, in the dark, they’d listen to the crickets chirp, and the cats hiss at each other on the Victorian’s porch. Sometimes, houses away, they’d hear a couple squabbling until they both decided it was too hot to fight.
Too hot to love.
Too hot to sleep.
Eventually, cats and people would quiet down for the night, and Ben and Joe would be left under a star-filled sky with only the crickets and lightning bugs for company.
The townspeople were wrong about Joe not having a family. The old man had a daughter, Cascade, but she rarely visited her father because she was usually in jail. She’d spent the better part of her young life in a women’s maximum security prison outside McLoud, Oklahoma. The same prison where her mother had been a frequent guest before she died of an overdose. Convicted of a long list of petty, and not-so-petty crimes, Cascade came and went from the correctional facility several times. Each time, she expanded her knowledge of crime and how to execute it thanks to the tutelage of her fellow inmates.
After many years of trying to help his daughter get a new start, Joe finally gave up. No longer did he hope for a pleasant visit from the tough ex-convict that he used to lovingly call his daughter. He became cautious whenever she had a release date coming up. His checking account and savings books were hidden in the bottom of his black metal lunchbox and taken to work every morning. His spare cash was hidden each night before he went to bed, usually in an empty carton of cottage cheese, hidden at the back of the icebox. Cascade hated cottage cheese. Most important of all, Joe took the keys to his pink Cadillac to work with him every day. He no longer tried to lock his front door because Cascade would break a window to gain entry if the door was locked. Trying to keep her out just wasn’t worth the trouble.
A look at the calendar confirmed that he would soon be due for another visit from his ungrateful, felonious daughter. The poor man heaved a heavy sigh and pushed down the memories of the cute little girl he had left with her mother when he was assigned to Korea.
While he was away on an overseas assignment, Cascade had hit her teenage years. Left in her mother’s care, the once sweet child had morphed into a hellish teen, fallen into the wrong crowd, and started to miss school. The sad part was, no one noticed. Carol, Joe’s wife, banked by his monthly allotment check to her from the army, spread her wings and flew—with the help of street drugs—into rougher and tougher territory. The local beer joints all knew Carol as an obsessive party girl who prided herself in being one of the last patrons to close down a tavern. She also took the last offer of a ride home every night, even if the ride wasn’t to her home. At the end of the month, when she began to run out of drug money, her mood changed. She became argumentative, moody, and just plain dangerous.
Cascade suffered from her mother’s radical personality change. So much so she began to stay out all night when her mother was having her moods. No one noticed. No one would have cared except Joe, and since he was in Korea, he didn’t know. He’d never forgive himself for that.
But there was a limit to his caring. Years of fighting in the courts to keep Cascade out of jail, only to have her leave the courthouse and get into even worse trouble, finally forced the stressed father to give up. He’d spent every dollar he had and many that he’d borrowed to give Cascade a new start. He had nothing left of his own. When he reached sixty, he took on some extra work to buy an old black and white television, but Cascade stole it when he was at work one day. The little television table he’d bought at the thrift shop for it was still in the corner of the room. Only a clean, starched doily adorned it.
The only joy in Joe’s life was the pink Caddie that he promised to watch for a friend when he went to Vietnam. The man had never come back. When he’d realized his friend was gone forever, Joe walked to the store and purchased a pint of Old Turkey Bourbon. Then, he curled up on the spacious front seat of the car with the bottle and cried for hours. When the pint was empty, he placed it in the glove box. It seemed to be right at home in the old car, like the thin black tie with white musical notes that hung behind the rearview mirror.
No one ever came to claim the Cadillac, and Joe filed paperwork to make it his. He began tinkering with the car in the evenings, using extra cash from his paycheck to buy parts for the old Caddie. Elizabeth was a beaut. At least once a month, someone knocked on his door and offered to buy her.
But Elizabeth wasn’t for sale. She never would be. The old girl was Joe’s life, and he looked forward to the day he’d drive her to Oklahoma City and enter her in one of the big car shows. She was almost ready. All he was waiting for were new kingpins that were due to be delivered any day. These last parts were critical. If the kingpins that were on the car were defective from age, the steering could fail. Joe had purposefully left this repair for last, so he wouldn’t be tempted to drive Elizabeth before she was completely rebuilt. Until the last parts came in, Joe busied himself waxing the exterior and cleaning the interior one more time. The car was a source of pride for Joe, and he had never been happier.
His high spirits were short-lived. Cascade landed on her father’s doorstep one morning when she was sure her father would be at work. She sneered when she found the door unlocked, as if she had already beaten him. She had hours to search his house for anything else that could be pawned or useful, but she didn’t need that long; he didn’t have much. She found some coins and his old wedding ring. She tore the house apart looking for anything else that could be pawned. She was disappointed that her dad had never replaced the small black and white television she’d stolen from him the last time. She was hoping that, by now, he’d replaced the old set with a color television that she could steal. Angry because he had so little, she trashed the little house after she failed to find the emergency cash she knew he always had hidden somewhere in the house. The old fool. He had nothing to show for all of his hard work. When she raked through the icebox at the end of her search, she finally found the emergency cash in the cottage cheese carton.
She took it. Well, it was an emergency. She was broke.
That old man she rolled at the bus station didn’t have more than a few bucks. It was an impulse hit, and too late she’d remembered that everyone on the bus knew she’d gotten on outside the women’s prison. It wouldn’t be long before they came up with a name. Her name.
The keys to Elizabeth posed a bigger challenge. Finally, she gave up and decided to hotwire the car. On her way out the door, she snatched the small, framed black and white photo of her and her mother from her father’s bed table. It was the only photo Joe had—of anybody.
Off she flew, at a high rate of speed, driving with the top down and rapper music on the radio so loud the sound waves punished the air. Enjoying her long-awaited freedom from prison, she rolled down her window and let the wind whip her hair, and laughed at the poor jokers who weren’t driving a pink Cadillac. Whenever she saw someone walking on the side of the road, she swerved over so far she was always surprised when she missed. Behind her maniacal laughter, her mood was grim. She would be going back to prison soon. They wouldn’t go easy on her this time, so she had nothing to lose if she actually hit someone.
The highway took her to the turnoff for the Wichita Wildlife Refuge, and she followed the sign for Mt. Scott. Instead of slowing down when she negotiated the sharp curves, she sped up. Still laughing, she tossed the stolen frame with the photo out of the car while she steered with one hand. She had no use for a picture of a drug addict and a stupid little girl in a white communion dress. She had no idea why she’d swiped it in the first place.
It was the middle of the week, and no one else was on the road, so no one saw her miss the curve when something popped in one of the wheels. Not even Cascade would ever know how many times she flipped the car before it crashed into a pile of big, red, sandstone boulders. The music on the radio still pounded, but Cascade had stopped laughing. Forever.
When Joe came home, Elizabeth was gone, and the inside of his house was wrecked. Even the little ceramic chickens he’d bought at a garage sale one Saturday and lined up on the windowsill in his kitchen had been smashed with a rolling pin, one by one.
He knew it was Cascade. It had to be. Apparently, hotwiring cars was one of her newer skills because Elizabeth was gone and her keys were still in his pocket. A quick search of his house revealed that, this time, she had found his stash of emergency cash. Elizabeth was almost on empty, and Joe figured the cash would be enough for a couple of fill-ups.
Joe sat down on his front stoop and waited. For what, he didn’t know. Maybe she’d bring the car back, but he didn’t think so. She could be in the next state by now. He’d have to report the car stolen; Cascade would be going back to jail. His eyes filled with tears and he didn’t see the police car pull up to the very spot that Elizabeth had filled for years.
“Mr. Casey?” The policeman quietly asked, “Mr. Joe Casey?”
Joe nodded. “She wrecked it, didn’t she? How bad is it?”
“I’m afraid it’s totaled. Do you know the woman who was driving the car?”
“Yessir, that would be my daughter. Can you arrest her? The car was stolen.”
The policeman cleared his throat. “I’m afraid she didn’t make it, Mr. Casey. The car went off the road and she died instantly.”
Joe cried out in disbelief. “No! How could she die? In that big Cadillac? How could she get hurt in that car?”
“She was driving at a high rate of speed up Mount Scott. It looks like, at one of the curves, something went wrong with the steering. She spun out of control and rolled the car off the road and into some big boulders. There were no seat belts in that car, and she got thrown through the windshield; her head hit a rock.”
Surprised, Joe looked up at the officer, “I had never driven the car; I was just restoring it for something to do.” Joe looked away and shook his head in wonder, “Putting seatbelts on her never crossed my mind but, knowing Cascade, she wouldn’t have used the seatbelt anyway.”
The officer finished his report and moved on. Joe sat there on the stoop for a long time. Thinking about his little girl and where everything had gone wrong. Cursing his wife for not taking care of her. Cursing himself for not—somehow—fixing things when he came back from Korea.
He filled out the insurance papers and forgot about Elizabeth. Except to remember that it was her fault—and his—that Cascade had died. He felt totally alone, and if he’d stopped to think about it, he would have realized his loneliness was because he’d lost Elizabeth. He’d lost Cascade years ago, and he’d long since stopped grieving for her.
One day, the insurance check came in the mail. It sat on Joe’s kitchen table for days before he finally picked it up, opened it, and discovered it was for thousands of dollars more than Elizabeth was worth. Cascade. The extra money was for Cascade. The unexpected zeros on the check brought him no comfort.
Joe banked the money. There wasn’t anything he wanted. His days were a lot like they were when he had Elizabeth, but that was like saying the parade was just the same as always, only without the band. One Saturday, he came home from the grocery store and found Ben sitting on his porch.
“Joe,” Ben said. “Let’s take a drive. There’s a yellow Cadillac downtown that has your name all over it. It needs work, but I think you’ll like it.”
And like it, he did. The car was just like Elizabeth, only a few years newer.
The afternoon was sunny. With Joe at the wheel, they decided to take the old girl for a spin. The beautiful weather and pleasant company drew conversation and laughter out of the two men who had been neighbors for years. Out in the mountains, the air was dry and almost smelled as if there was a fire somewhere. Even though it was September, the temperature was in the nineties, and the fallen leaves were being grilled by the hot red sand beneath them. The insides of their noses were coated with the dry fragrance of fall. Neither of the men complained.
Too late, they realized they’d wandered onto the same road Cascade had driven when she’d taken Elizabeth on the joyride. They were both quiet for a while. They continued to the top of the mountain because there was no way to turn the big car around on the narrow road. At one of the steep curves, they stopped to examine some boulders that looked as if they had been hit by a car. Maybe the car had been Elizabeth. They surveyed the road, looked at the boulders, and wondered if this was the place Cascade had flipped the pink Cadillac. It was possible, but they couldn’t be positive. Still trying to figure it out, they walked down the road a bit and looked back, and tried to imagine Cascade accelerating on such a steep curve. It didn’t seem possible. What could she have been thinking to speed anywhere on this road? Still unsure, they were headed back to their car when something shiny in the weeds at the side of the road caught Ben’s eye. He bent down and retrieved the photo Joe’s daughter had hatefully tossed out of the car; it was still protected by the glass. He handed the frame to Joe. This was the place. The place where everything Joe had in his life came to an end.
When they got to the top of Mount Scott, Joe picked up the photo of what used to be his family. With one last look, he flung it as far as he could into the brush along with a lot of his pain. There on that mountain, with Ben to comfort him, Joe broke down and cried. He was finally able to face reality; everything he had was gone. Worse, whatever he’d had was never that good. It was time to start over.
On the way back home, under a warm sun, the jubilant mood of the two returned, and they began to talk about the car. Joe decided to buy the Cadillac, and Ben offered to help him restore it. The first thing the old girl needed was a name. Tentatively, Joe suggested Priscilla, after Elvis’s wife, and Ben readily agreed. The name fit. Someday, Joe and Ben would take Priscilla to a car show in Oklahoma City. Maybe they’d win; she was a beaut. Just like Elizabeth was.
The end.
Books by the author:
Geronimo’s Laptop
Geronimo, Life on the Reservation (a play that toured the United States))
A Three-Turtle Summer
As Brown As I Want: The Indianhead Diaries
Custer and His Naked Ladies
Bears in the Hibiscus
Boogie, Boots, & Cherry Pie
Free Pecan Pie and Other Chick Stories
The Slum Resort
A One-Way Cruise to Africa, Terror on the Internet
How to Live on a Rocky Beach, Surviving Arthritis (out of print)
There’s a Mouse in the House! What Shall We Do? (Children’s stories. With Jacob Nicholas Studebaker