So I pretty much just dreamed this. Yep. It was a rather productive bit of sleeping.

The Wild Clark Sisters
Words: 823

The wild Clark sisters stole my father’s best car in the endless, sticky summer of 1965. It was a Mustang fastback, practically brand new and gorgeous like cars were in those days. It looked like some huge, hungry beast, running up and down the streets looking for prey. That car had a soul, you never see that now. Everything’s all smooth and round and not hungry at all.

It had been sitting on the lot for quite awhile by then. Dad would always find some excuse not to sell, the customer was never good enough, could never take care of it right. Truth was, he loved the thing too much. Probably more than he loved us boys. We weren’t to touch it, except to keep it washed and shined. It was a canary yellow color and it gleamed in the sun, you could see folks head crane as they strained to look at it, going by. Dad used to take it out at night, secretly, and drive it up and down the dark streets, pretending, no doubt, that he was a different sort of man.

And then the wild Clark sisters walked right up to his door and took it right out from under him.

Ellie Clark was the oldest and she looked, I thought, just like Tippi Hedren in The Birds, blonde and white as a snowstorm with those razor eyes. I’ll always remember the way she looked stalking across the lot in the sun, wearing that white tennis-dress (as if any Clark had ever set foot on a tennis court). Ellie came right up to me, bold as brass, and said, “We’d like to see that one,” like she hadn’t gone to school with me since we were both five years old. Behind her, Marian smiled apologetically. She wasn’t as pretty as her sister, but not so sharp either.

“Alright,” I said, and I showed them the Mustang. Ellie smiled like a new mother and ran her hands down along its sides. Dinie, the youngest, didn’t dither around. She simply climbed into the open back (we kept the top down in the summer-Dad said it made it look inviting) and sat in the back seat, like she’d been born there, like she’d never leave. Ellie, without so much as a by-your-leave, opened the door and slid into the driver’s seat. She put both hands on the wheel and grinned and I could see that she looked right sitting in the seat in a way my father-sweating and balding and running to fat-never would. Ellie and that car had the same heart, and it was a fierce and terrible thing.

Ellie turned her face up to me. She was wearing a shade of lipstick that I knew her mama would never have approved of. “We’d like to take this for a test drive,” she said and I knew right then that if I handed her the keys she would drive away and they would never come back again. The car was all gassed up, in case Dad wanted to take it out again later, they could go quite a ways if no one flagged the law too soon.

But I didn’t order them out of the car and I didn’t go get my Dad, even though I realized it meant an ass-whooping of the most unholy variety. “Where you going?” I said instead and Ellie shrugged.

“Away,” said Dinie, who had a shockingly raspy voice and steady dark eyes. Ellie nodded, agreeing with this assessment. She paused then, looking uncertain for the first time, and tapped her long fingers on the steering wheel.

“Aren’t we supposed to have an employee along, on these test drives?” she said neutrally, as if merely pointing out a simple fact. I looked at Dinie in the backseat and she looked right back at me, and her little heart-shaped face was about the best thing I’d ever seen and I didn’t think there was anything around here that could top it.

“That is so,” I said, clambering in next to Dinie. She didn’t slid over for me, and she was electric-warm, like a light bulb. I tossed the keys to Ellie, who caught them in the air and grinned like the cat that’s eaten the canary. The engine turned over with that rumbling-god noise my dad loved so well. Dinie’s hand snaked over on the smooth seats and clasped mine.

I used my free-hand to wave to my brother Alex as he sprayed down the used cars on the far side of the lot. He didn’t wave back and just watched with us go, looking gob smacked. We turned out on to the highway and Ellie didn’t have no trouble with that accelerator. Pretty soon the wind was beating at them, tossing their hair until it looked like bright, thin halos all around their faces. But no one talked about putting the cover up.

Not at all.