“Fiesta” by Bill Vernon

When Bill Smith awakened, his bedroom clock showed 2:43.

Out the window was dawn. The alarm hadn’t gone off. Was he late for work?

He grabbed his battery-powered wristwatch: 7:20. Adrenaline jolted him into action. He shaved, skipped brushing his teeth, dressed, gathered the essays he’d graded yesterday into his briefcase, and raced outside.

The air was so fresh, Bill inhaled deeply and felt better. The driveway was wet. It must have stormed and briefly knocked out power last night. He’d slept through it but felt good with the 40 minutes of extra sleep. If he hurried, he could still meet his 8:00 o’clock class.

Suddenly, unlocking the car, he was afraid. “If Little Baby starts, I’ll be okay.”

He’d bought the car from its original owner and had no trouble with it despite 70-some thousand miles of wear, except for replacing the battery. Bill had balked at the $40 a mechanic had asked for to check it over. Now he wished he’d paid it before buying the car. Now he worried about making a bad deal.

The Fiesta started with a turn of the key.

Reliable. As he’d thought, it was a good car.

He backed up and noticed, next door, a car also backing out of its drive. Pete, who was behind the steering wheel, didn’t return Bill’s wave, maybe angry at Bill for asking Pete two days ago if his new car was a Chevy. “It’s a Cadillac,” the man had said nastily.

As they reached the street together, heading in opposite directions, Bill considered apologizing to Pete when they next spoke. Bill could explain his remark had been an honest mistake, although in truth it might have been a bad joke. Bill knew the logos of both manufacturers but couldn’t remember what his actual intentions had been, calling it a Chevy.

Pete was a public relations executive for the area’s power company. Kate had insisted, as Bill had also, that they live in Oakwood because of its good schools and secure community, but materialistic business values that Bill despised infested the suburb.

Kate? God, just now he’d thought of her. She’d become pregnant and developed a medical problem. They’d begun sleeping in different rooms, and she’d taken maternity leave from teaching middle school kids. Here Bill was, forgetting her while zooming off into the inner city.

After his classes, he’d call her and see how she was feeling. Thus, he focused on driving.

***

Looking ahead more alertly, he found himself a half mile from home, zipping down Brown Street, already past the Patterson homestead historical property and among university buildings. He vaguely remembered having passed two slow cars in his lane and running through the Stewart Street intersection, although the light had turned red within braking distance.

Careful! No need to be reckless, he told himself, easing up on the gas, slowing more for a student jaywalking. That let a red light catch him. “Damn!”

The engine idled, gently shaking his car. “You’re okay,” he said. “Take it easy.”

The estimated time of arrival at school from here was just 10 minutes, and that thought helped Bill remember his community college’s rule: students had to wait 10 minutes after the class’s start time before assuming the professor was absent and class canceled. Yes, with 20 minutes’ cushion, he’d surely get there in time to teach his students.

The light turned green, but the car ahead didn’t move. Bill honked. The driver raised a middle finger in sight, then chugged away, deliberately slow, maybe, and cars in the oncoming lane prevented Bill from passing him. Probably workers arriving at the hospital for duty.

The traffic light at Wyoming Street then caught him, but the bastard ahead, having held him up, raced through the intersection and was gone.

Bill gripped the steering wheel as if to strangle it.

Be cool, he thought.

***

As this red light turned amber, noticing no traffic on Wyoming, Bill stomped the accelerator, and the little car leaped forward, its strong pick-up surprising him. It zoomed past the old firehouse, through an intersection, and approached a car dawdling in its lane. He eased off the accelerator, but little baby didn’t slow down. The engine roared, and when he applied the brakes, they whined.

Bill jerked left around the car, then back into his lane. Seeing no traffic ahead, he braked more softly and depressed the clutch, but that provoked a grinding noise. The car raced through another intersection, luckily not busy, and he finally thought to turn off the engine. That worked.

Now the clutch was depressed. He shifted into neutral but couldn’t shift into 2nd. The car coasted to a stop, and smoke billowed from under the hood.

Jesus! Bill looked for a place to pull over. Ahead on his left was the new firehouse, and across Brown from it was an automobile parts store’s empty parking area.

Momentum carried Bill over a small curb off the street into that lot where he managed to brake and stop parallel to the building, but across the two white lines of an angled parking spot. Just then, smoke entered the car, and it smelled like steam from a broken hose. He hurried out, opened the hood, and flames leaped up. Fresh air he’d just let in had fed the burning.

Bill looked at the station across the street. Three firemen were outside.

Bill screamed, “Hey, my car’s on fire!” And pointed.

One of them waved back. “Okay!”

Bill looked back under the hood. The flames and smoke were retreating.

“What else can go wrong?” Now he’d miss his eight o’clock class for sure.

One good thing, however, was that he knew two firemen assigned to this station. He golfed with them. Nice guys, funny, even crazy.

***

They were not among the three who came to Bill’s rescue, though. The ones outside had gone indoors, donned bulky uniforms, turned on red streetlights, stopped traffic, driven a huge fire engine across the street into the lot, and parked parallel to Bill’s little car, dwarfing it.

As the three men strolled close, the driver said, “So what’s cookin’ here?”

Bill said, “The accelerator stuck, and the engine caught fire. Flames were shooting up when I yelled to you,”—he glanced at the driver—”several minutes ago.”

All four stared at Bill’s engine. Soot blackened the inside of the hood, the air filter, and the engine assembly below it. One of the men reached inside with his heavily gloved hands, unscrewed the air filter, and lifted it out.

That revealed threads of embers glowing around the carburetor.

The driver said, “You, sir, are lucky that experts are available. I’ll handle this myself.”

He took his gloves off, put them beneath his left armpit, wet his right index finger and thumb with his tongue, reached inside, and squeezed the embers between his fingers.

“There you go, sir.” He withdrew his hand. “Nothin’ burning now. Your fire’s out.”

One of the others said, “That’s a nice car you got there.”

The other said, “You lookin’ to sell it?”

Derisive humor, reminding Bill of the two firemen he knew.

Almost speechless, he said simply, “Thank you.”

“No thanks required, sir. We’re here to serve the public,” one of them said.

The wise asses dismissed any need for paperwork, his name, address, anything. Bill decided not to mention the firemen he knew.

He watched two of the professionals go into the street and stop traffic while one backed the big engine across the street and into its stall.

***

Bill shoved his car, still in neutral, out of the way, he hoped, into a corner of the parking lot. He put the car in reverse—now it shifted normally—and locked the doors. Using a notepad and pencil, he copied down information from a notice posted on the business’s front door: hours of operation, phone number, address,, and store name. With a briefcase in hand, he started hiking through the awakening city’s southern downtown area to its western edge by the river.

What had happened and what would happen intrigued him now: it was something he might write about in a poem or story. He’d miss his first class, but now his situation was clear. He wasn’t stressed, although he was walking fast, cutting across streets in the still sparse traffic. He was confident that he’d reach his office and phone in 15 minutes.

Passing through the morning shadows and sun’s bright light, skirting familiar buildings on familiar streets, he sensed that these ordinary things contained mysteries and possibilities that he was seldom aware of.

Nothing was certain, but he knew this future: after informing the dean’s office and the department chairperson of his situation, he’d meet his 9:00 o’clock class. After that, he’d inform the auto parts store, which opened at 10:00, that his car was in its lot and promise to have it towed from there as soon as possible. He’d arrange with the Ford dealer just north of downtown to have the disabled car delivered there, then arrange with Triple-A to have the car towed when he could hike back over to the auto parts store to ride along to the Ford dealer’s service area.

He still liked his little yellow car, its convenience, ease of starting, ease of pushing, and lack of interest to car thieves. He doubted that it was kaput. It might require a new carburetor, fuel pump, fuel line, and/or choke. A new air filter for sure, maybe a new fireproof lining inside the hood. He hoped it would not be too expensive to repair.

He imagined his weekly golf outing in two days. He’d probably meet his two fireman friends. They were hackers like himself. Friendly and likable. He might ask about the three guys who’d come to his aid.

Then again, maybe not. He bet those three guys would have treated him with more respect if his car had been a Cadillac like Pete’s. Yet their joking might be a sign of friendship, their acceptance of him as a person of equal status.

Kate? Damn! He’d forgotten her again. Well, he’d also telephone her about 10, when she was usually waking up, right after he finished with his second class of the day. She’d be amused to hear about his adventure this morning.