A Bad Brake

 

Scott Gould

 The blue and white milk truck with a bad parking brake. That was the story. While the parking brake was being bad, the driver stood stiffly somewhere in the courthouse, disputing a speeding ticket in traffic court. “Slow delivery means sour milk, so I don’t drive slow,” he told the judge. Meanwhile, his truck lumbered into motion outside of its own accord, down the incline, toward the rear of the parking lot where the cars baked in the morning sun.

 The milk truck exited the lot, taking on a Disneyish quality, no driver inside, only the whim of the road and the grade of the hill directing the steering wheel. In their cars, people yawned at the light until they snapped to attention and shouted at the idiot milkman who violated a yellow. They shot him the bird, then noticed that the driver’s window was empty, that the Hillside Dairy truck was a runaway.

 Through the intersection, over the low curb, it clipped a traffic light control box in a shower of sparks, then rolled into the parking lot of First Community Savings, its speed slowed in metallic rhythm by the cars it sideswiped. The first couple were totaled, knocked into unnatural angles. The next few in line were simply defaced, robbed of a bumper or a mirror or perhaps a piece of fender.

 Liza heard the noise as she sat behind the wheel, checking her deposit slip. When she glanced up and pushed her bangs from her eyes, she saw the back of the truck, the official Hillside Dairy logo cow, closing on her. She said, “I felt safe. Like it wasn’t really happening. More like a movie.” By the time the truck bumped her door and came to a heavy stop, it had slowed to a walking pace. “Barely a thud. Almost like the cow kissed me.”

She held onto her deposit slip and slid her belly carefully and uncomfortably under the steering wheel toward the passenger’s side.

*

 First, I pulled down the wallpaper, carefully so as not to tear it. I folded the sections, then shoved them in a garbage bag. Next, I removed the light fixture. I felt reckless, didn’t even throw the breaker. I could’ve been shocked. I left the two wires exposed, like a couple of wild, bristling hairs on a bald head. The things still in their boxes—the crib and the shelves and the mobile—I carried to the attic and made a spot for them next to the cartons of Christmas ornaments.

 After dark, I took a tennis ball and lay on my back in the unfinished nursery. There was no light to click on. I tossed the tennis ball into the darkness above me, where I thought the wires might be, trying not to hit the ceiling. A bump on the ceiling would bring Liza downstairs, and she would want to know what I was doing. I didn’t feel like answering more questions. We had all said enough for the day. I tossed into the dark, and when the ball reappeared out of the black, I had only a split second to spot it and catch it.

 I tossed for a half hour, it seemed. I was about to give up. I promised myself just a few more tries. Finally, I hit what I was probably aiming for all along. I struck the wires with the tennis ball, crossing them. The room exploded into a sudden, blue flash, then an orange afterglow and the thick smell of warm electric heat. Every light in the house must have blown. I heard the air conditioner go quiet, and while the ball bounced toward the corner of the room, I heard Liza above me, feeling her way toward candles.

*

 I was sure it had changed us, but funny thing—I was wrong. After the sparks, we continued to have conversations about nothing important, about everything. There was no particular face to forget, no powdery smell to recall in the gauzy moments before sleep, no leftover echoes in the hallway. There was only the remembrance of a raggedy, surprising bloodstain in the shape of a foreign country that Liza didn’t notice on her pants until a few minutes after the accident, when I picked her up in the lobby of the bank.

 So it happened, and it’s beginning to be over. We are the same people. We act almost like we always did. We didn’t switch banks. We didn’t sell our car. We talked about having our house rewired one day. We wait for other slow-moving things to strike us.