The Golden Chevrolet

I.

First, there was nothing. Then there was the golden Chevrolet - racing over the hill, its headlights rising over the road like twin suns.

Again there was nothing as the road dipped, then an explosion of gold as Elder Matthews pushed his Chevy up and over the second hill, its tires lifting from the road a few inches. The engine whined then roared as the earth reclaimed the car.

There was nothing, then a righteous bellow as the golden Chevrolet crested the final hill and hit the makeshift ramp that Elder had cobbled together there a month ago, tearing up and over it, hurtling itself into the air like a javelin.

From the front steps of his house just past the peak of the final hill, Philip Buckley watched, wiry and thin in hand-me-down clothes that would be too big for years yet, ready to taunt Crazy Old Elder Matthews for another failed attempt. But for a moment, it looked like the real thing – like this time Elder would catapult the golden Chevrolet off of the Earth and into heaven. Time stood still for Philip, and frame by frame he saw the Chevy, pointed like a rocket at the morning's pale crescent moon, rear tires ten feet off the ground, the pure possibility of miracle all around it.

Philip didn't breathe. Elder didn't breathe. Even the sky held its breath as the Chevy sailed through it, the great golden hood catching the sun's light and hurling it right back, a challenge to the day.

But then, just as before, just as it always did, the car fell back to the earth with a crunch and a moan and brought Elder Matthews and his dreams down along with it. Elder took his foot off the gas and let the car roll to a stop in front of Philip Buckley's house, deflated.

Philip was on the front steps of the run-down house. He had leapt to his feet with the glory of this morning's jump, but was now back on his haunches. Philip watched Elder reach over and remove a bag of tobacco and a pack of rolling papers from the glove compartment and deftly roll a cigarette. The Oblivion had taken much, Philip thought, but it had not taken this. The long white fingers still remembered.

Elder lit the cigarette, holding the smoke deep in his lungs before exhaling a large grey cloud. It followed him as he stepped out of the vehicle, his long, thin legs, leading his long, thin body onto the asphalt. He stood there a moment, the sun illuminating his shock of white hair like a halo, his green eyes taking it all in.

Green hills rolled by, dotted with the skeletons of ancient houses like headstones marking graves long forgotten by people who'd long since found their own. Beyond the hills were the cliffs, and below the cliffs, a broad white beach shimmering with shells. He turned his eyes finally to Philip, who was perched on the steps clapping a slow clap.

“Boy, ain't you got anything better to do this early in the mornin than make an old man miserable?”

Philip widened his eyes.

“Why, Elder, you think I'd miss your best jump yet? I reckon they must've seen the sun glintin off your hood all the way out at the Watch Station.”

Elder ignored him and turned back to his car, inspecting it for damage. Much was ugly in this world but the golden Chevrolet was gorgeous. She had fenders like a burlesque dancer and a hood nearly a mile long. The ancients in the area, those that had been around before the Oblivion, knew her to be a Chevrolet for the Bowtie logo she bore on her grille, but none could recall what model she was. Her nameplate was gone when Elder found her - perhaps removed by her previous owner when they had painted her the most audacious shade of gold imaginable.

She had carried Elder as he fled the Oblivion all the way to the coast where the ocean breeze kept the Fog of Forgetfulness mostly at bay. Along the way, he asked everyone he met that was not a Foghead if they could recall what kind of car she was, but all they would do was lay their glazed eyes on the bowtie logo and say she was a Chevrolet. Elder thought it said a lot about humanity that it had managed to lose most of its memory in the Oblivion but could still recall a good logo when it saw one.

Philip let his eyes drift along the Chevy’s golden hood, up the windshield, and through it to settle on what was hanging from the rearview mirror. It was a beaded necklace, fashioned out of fishing line, with a Venus Sunray clamshell fixed to the end. Scrawled in a child’s hand on the delicate white inside of the shell was a name, “BETH.”

The people that lived scattered throughout the hills all seemed to think that Beth was the name Elder had given to his golden Chevrolet. So did Philip’s parents, but Philip didn’t quite agree. Why the shell, then?

If he was more self-aware, he might have realized that finding the answer to this mystery was why he had spent so many mornings this past month harassing Elder. But he was young and born into a world that had forgotten how to raise him.

He snorted a wad of snot into his mouth and hocked it at the road a foot away from Elder’s boots. Elder’s eyes flashed up at him.

“Shit, Philip, what the hell is wrong with you? Why you spittin at me?”

Philip sneered.

“Don’t flatter yourself, Elder. I ain’t spittin at you. Just spittin. Can’t a man spit from his own front steps?”

Elder pinched his brow and shook his head.

“Good lord, the boy thinks he’s a man. Your parents know you're up this early, mockin and spittin at Poor Old Crazy Elder Matthews?”

Philip shrugged.

“They’re still in bed. Probably be there till this afternoon. If you and that great golden beast don’t wake them, that is.”

Elder gasped.

“Oh, Philip, don’t tell me they been drinkin again. Why, I don’t think they’ve missed a day this week. You reckon they'll keep going?”

Philip shrugged again.

“You reckon you'll keep getting reacquainted with gravity right in front of my house?”

Elder lay a hard eye on Philip and leaned against the golden fender, blowing new clouds of smoke into the lightly clouded sky.

“Shit, son, if it were up to me, I’d have been free of gravity long ago and you’d have never even heard the name, Elder Matthews. But it ain’t up to me. It’s up to them up there when they want to let me get to heaven.”

Philip snorted.

“Pretty asinine way of gettin there though, ain’t it? Trying to leap into the sky in a car? Don’t make no goddamn sense if you ask me.”

“Well I didn’t ask you, Philip, now did I? I don’t need it to make sense to you or anyone else besides me, and God, and…”

Elder let the sentence hang but Philip finished it for him.

“And Beth.”

A thick silence settled around them punctuated by the distant lamentations of gulls. Elder stared at Philip for a moment then looked away, off past Philip’s house, down where the road ended before the cliffs at an ancient wooden guardrail, its posts crumbling with rot. The sun bore down on him as it had all those years and he felt like driftwood: trapped on a beach, spit from the sea, sunbleached and sunblind, the once-emerald of his eyes now faded to seaglass.

Philip shifted his weight and let his eyes follow the road the other direction, away from the cliffs, up to the Watch Station which broke the rolling line of the horizon like a blade sunk to its hilt. Its spires rotated, pointing eyes in all directions, watching for the bruised clouds of approaching Oblivion and the Fogheads, ravenous and forgetful of their humanity, along with it.

Philip wondered who was in the Watch Station and what they were watching now. Was it Elder Matthews, humiliating himself for the hundredth time? And if they were watching, were they laughing? If so, they laughed alone, the miles silent all around them.

Finally, Elder broke the silence.

“What the hell do you know about Beth, boy?”

The name left his lips like an invocation.

“Well I know who she ain’t: she ain’t the car, despite what my parents and the other fools in these hills say. But as to who she is? I don’t know. And I don’t think you do either.”

Somewhere within Elder, a door closed. He stamped his cigarette out on the asphalt.

“No I don’t suppose I do. But I don’t need to. Not to help her.”

He got up from the fender and started making his way back around the vehicle to the driver’s door.

“Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to try again. Why don’t you get back inside and make sure your parents are alright? Drinkin yourself to death is a real thing, and they’re well on their way to it.”

Philip leapt from the steps of the house where his parents lay resting in the darkness of the drawn shades, dehydrated, and uncomfortable – winding fresh coils of anger to spring on who or whatsoever dared wake them.

“Where do you get off talkin about my parents that way, old man? They may be killing themselves, but at least they have the dignity to do it in privacy instead of tearing around these hills in some stupid golden car for the whole world to see. Ain't you embarrassed?”

Elder turned back from the car. He approached Philip, his voice rising as he went until he was yelling in Philip’s face and Philip could smell the burnt tobacco on his breath.

“Embarrassed? Hell yes I’m embarrassed. Embarrassed for this desiccated and forgetful world and what it has done to our minds and our morality. Embarrassed for parents living in this world that have to make men and women of their children but have no memory of what that even means. Embarrassed for those children, children like you, that have to watch their parents struggle to remember things they’ve never even known. I’m embarrassed -”

Elder’s words were cut off by the sound of a door opening then slamming against its adjacent wall, and suddenly the screen door behind Philip exploded off its hinges as his father stepped out from the darkness of the house like a demon emerging from hell, his eyes stunned momentarily by the sun of this realm, his head swinging back and forth like a blind thing trying to locate its prey.

He was a large man, practically a bear, and his muscles rippled beneath his shirt as his eyes finally found Elder. He took the steps down from the porch in a single lunge and before Elder could even raise his hands the beast was upon him, lifting him from the ground by the front of his jacket with one hand, roaring into his face with the smell of whiskey and rotting meat.

Elder could only understand fragments of what Philip’s father was saying; he was being shaken so violently, it was hard to stay conscious. He was vaguely aware of Philip trying to stop his father with all the effect of a beagle trying to keep a Timberwolf from a kill.

“...the hell you think you are…”

“...about me and mine…”

“...wanna fly? Then fly!”

Elder suddenly felt himself arching through the air. He landed on his shoulder in the middle of the road with a loud snap. Pain exploded from the top of his arm. He tried to cry out, but couldn’t. The only sound that escaped his lips was a kind of gagging as he rolled onto his back and stared up at the gathering clouds, the vision of his left eye becoming obscured by blood from a gash over his brow. Suddenly the sun was blotted out and his right eye was staring up into the monstrous, purple face of Philip’s father.

“Get it straight, old man: if there ever was a God, the Oblivion got them too and they’ve forgotten all about us. There ain’t no heaven to get to Elder, only hell and it's here.”

He looked down at Elder, not a mote of pity within him.

“And even if they haven’t forgotten us, you think you’re impressing them, jumping around these hills in your idiot car and your pride, building ramps and making a big show, the safety of the road beneath you? If you had any faith at all you’d drive that car right through that fuckin barricade down there and off that cliff. Maybe you land right in God’s open arms and get carried off to heaven like a good son. Or maybe you just fuckin die. I don’t really care which, so long as you shut the fuck up and let me get back to sleep.”

He spit over his shoulder and turned away from Elder who lay crumpled in the street. Philip stood between his father and the golden Chevrolet, jaw hanging.

“Pop...you didn’t have to…”

His father’s lip curled.

“I don’t want to hear it, boy. Get back inside.”

Philip knew better than to argue. He looked back at Elder's ragged form. Whatever end he had in mind with his constant mockery, this had not been it. He tried to send a silent signal of remorse but could not tell if Elder received it before his father was upon him, turning him back and shoving him towards the house where his mother’s silhouette was haunting the doorway, black against the house’s black interior.

Under the weight of his father’s hand, Philip returned to the darkness .

II.

He awoke late that night to the sound of the golden Chevrolet’s engine rumbling to life. He crept from his room, waited by his parents’ door, and hearing only the labored breathing of his father’s apneatic sleep, slipped out the front door.

He emerged into a moonless, starless night. The sky was thick with clouds that hung so low they dragged themselves along the hills as they rolled by. In the distance, the Watch Station held its silence. This was not the Fog of Forgetfulness. Just clouds clutched close by the greedy earth.

Philip ran down the steps to the road where Elder was sitting in the driver’s seat of the Chevy with the door open, drenched in sweat and panting. Philip came around the hood and grimaced.

Elder had removed his jacket and rolled the sleeve of his t-shirt up, exposing a swollen, purple shoulder that looked like it had had a bomb go off beneath the skin. It was hideous in the yellow of the car’s interior light. His left hand was cradled in his lap while the other was attempting to roll a cigarette. Philip watched him struggling to get the paper to fold over the tobacco.

“Here, let me help.”

It was not perfect, but when he finished and held the cigarette out to Elder, Elder looked up, his left eye sealed with blood, and smiled.

“Well look at you, boy. You may make a man yet.”

He put the cigarette on his lip but did not light it. It hung there like the clouds hung on the hills, like a finger hung on a trigger.

Looking at Elder’s aged and broken body, Philip realized what he thought might be the greatest possible tragedy: a life lived too long. He opened his mouth to speak but found no words in it - opened his mouth again, but Elder cut him off.

“You see her?”

As Philip looked up to ask “who?” his eyes were drawn to a warm light emanating from the passenger’s seat. He gasped and fell back onto the asphalt, not feeling it cut into his palms.

Sitting there was the golden, spectral form of a little girl. Though she made no sound, she was laughing as she rocked back and forth to some unseen momentum, feet dangling over the seat but not reaching the floor, fingers clenched on the armrests.

Philip gaped.

“Yeah, you see her, alright.”

Even in this wavering, ethereal form she was beautiful. She had short bangs and a dress with flowers embroidered on the front. Hanging from her neck was a beaded necklace with a Venus Sunray shell attached. Philip could not see the name scrawled on the inside of it. He did not need to.

“Beth?”

Elder nodded and lit his cigarette at last.

“Beth.”

“She’s...she’s a ghost?”

Elder shook his head, wincing at the pain in his shoulder.

“Not a ghost. More like a phantom memory. Lost by someone in the Oblivion and now tethered to the place where she occurred: this car.”

Philip was stunned.

“A phantom memory? So...you never knew her?”

“Only like this. Scared the shit out of me the first time she showed up. Nearly wrecked.”

They both watched her in silence as she swung her head back, laughing, leaning to the left and right as the memory of the car sped around invisible turns. The purity of her joy - the joy of a time before the Oblivion - was breathtaking.

Then, as suddenly as she appeared, she faded away. They watched her go, then watched the emptiness where she had just been. Finally, Philip spoke, his voice reverent.

“What a beautiful memory.”

The smoke from Elder’s cigarette joined the low-hanging clouds as he sighed, and Philip heard centuries of sadness in the sound of his exhalation. When Elder finally spoke, his voice echoed from some vast canyon beyond time.

“Yes. Yes, she is. And I bet someone up there misses her.”

Philip looked up at the sky. He couldn’t see through the clouds but somehow he felt that Elder was right.

“You know, your father, asshole that he is, he ain’t entirely wrong.”

“What do you mean, Elder?”

But Elder didn’t respond. Instead he reached over with his good arm, unlooped the Venus shell necklace from the rearview mirror where it hung, and held it out to Philip.

“Take it. Don’t worry, she ain’t tethered to it.”

Philip reached out for it.

“What am I supposed to -”

“Remember, Philip. Just remember.”

III.

The following morning, Philip awoke to a sound like an explosion ringing through the hills.

Ignoring his parents’ angry cries, he ran from his house and into the morning chill then froze in the street, staring down the road at where the ancient, rotten barricade used to be. It was split apart - rent asunder like some great beast had ravaged its way through it.

“No…”

He sprinted down the road to the cliff, horrified of what he would find, the cold air of the morning stinging his lungs. But when he finally reached the cliff, steeled himself, and looked over to the other side at the beach below, the wreckage of the Golden Chevrolet was not there - just scattered chunks of wood from the broken barricade being lapped by the waves - driftwood returned to the sea.

It was silent all around save the whisper of the ocean below and the gulls. The land rolled away from the sea in its own sea of green hills and valleys, and in the distance, the spires of the Watch Station spun.

Philip looked up at the sky over the ocean, noticing for the first time that it was cloudless. In his mind he saw the golden Chevrolet as a needle, piercing a hole in the blue veil of the sky through which all the clouds had been sucked. He saw Elder as a saint with a garland of clouds. He saw Beth put back together.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out the Sunray necklace. It glowed happily in the morning sun, and he heard the echo of Elder’s words:

Remember.

That’s what Elder had asked him to do, to be a guardian of their memory: Elder’s, Beth’s, the world’s. To remember. Not to forget.

He turned and walked back to his house where his father was standing on the front porch fuming at having been awakened early for the second day in a row. The morning sun had sliced a triangle of light into the darkness of the house through the blackened doorway where the wraith-like silhouette of his mother watched from behind the door. Philip felt their eyes follow him as he came down the road and up the steps. His father bristled.

“Well, what the hell happened out there, boy?”

Philip told them.