El Camino
By Aaron Michael Morales
The smoke billowing from beneath the El Camino’s hood went unnoticed by the people driving past the Food Giant on Country Club Road. But even if they had seen it they wouldn’t have stopped because the sight of a car overheating and catching fire on a summer Tucson afternoon was not uncommon. Everyone had seen his share of burnt out shells on the roadside, the metal carcasses deserted by their dismayed owners, or cops spraying a flaming car with a fire extinguisher. As common as cactus.
One driver, Cesar Valdez, wouldn’t have stopped if someone had offered to pay him because the flesh on his arms and face and chest was still scarred from two summers earlier when his car had overheated in a Circle K parking lot and he had lifted the hood and pulled off his shirt and wrapped it around his hand, then used it to grab the radiator cap and twist, thinking at the last second that maybe he should’ve let the car cool a bit, having forgotten his father’s warning to always test the radiator hose first because he was rushing to get home to his new girlfriend who liked to greet him at the door dressed in skimpy black lace lingerie and a set of handcuffs dangling from one wrist, which still pleased and baffled him-the way he’d scored this sweet guerra chick-but remembering the danger of an overheating engine just as the threading on the radiator cap released from the lip of the opening and blew with such force that the bones in his right hand shattered when it hit the edge of the open hood, but Cesar didn’t feel it and couldn’t have screamed if he had because the white hot water that exploded from the radiator melted his skin on contact and blinded him, which was a good thing, he thought later, because he was glad he hadn’t seen the looks people gave him when he had tried to scream but only stumbled backward, skin sliding from his chest and arms, into the Big Block ice machine where he collapsed on the asphalt, convulsing and bleeding and gasping for breath. Three days later, when Cesar awoke in the hospital his first thought was to call his new girlfriend-just to tell her I’ll be home soon and wait for me and then we can do that dom/sub thing you like so much baby. But she never returned his calls.
So even if Cesar had seen the El Camino smoking in the food giant parking lot and the woman frantically ordering her kids out of the back, he wouldn’t have stopped for every dirty dollar in Tucson.
