This comes from my short story collection, Leaving Arizona. I like this story because it represents a theme that carries through a lot of my short stories. I’ve written about it here previously, but coming of age through crime is interesting. This is two young men, clearly lost in life, making bad decision that alter their lives. There are many ways to come of age, some of them violent and bad.
Anyway, I hope you like it. Part I below.
Galaxie Under The Stars
Joey had a 1963 Ford Galaxie. It was a piece of shit. But I didn’t have anything except the old ten-speed my mom gave me before she split for Phoenix on my sixteenth birthday. And that didn’t make for the best getaway vehicle.
“Pull the plate,” Joey said while tossing a duffle bag into the backseat.
I looked around his parents’ garage and wondered what they might be wondering about us. If it was my dad, he’d probably just think I was jacking it to one of the old Playboys he knew I’d found in his nightstand back when I was fifteen. But Joey’s parents were different. Sitting in the living room watching re-runs of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Joey’s old man might have slipped his Miller Lite into a koozie and wondered if his kid was about to get himself killed. Joey’s mother—she would’ve been flipping through an old Home and Garden—might have asked herself if Joey would make it to college graduation before getting arrested. After all, Joey’s brother didn’t even make it to high school graduation. Derek, he got himself popped at fifteen years old for running cases of hard cider out the back of Tom’s, a grocery store just down the road.
“Pull the fucking plate, Mike,” Joey said again, this time standing right next to me.
I grabbed the screwdriver off Joey’s father’s workbench and got to work. Three screws and the rear plate fell right off.
“Where’s the fourth screw?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Ask your sister.”
I didn’t have a sister, but I laughed anyway and slid the license plate into one of the drawers on the workbench. “You got the other one?”
Joey leaned into the Galaxie and pulled out a different license plate. He handed it to me, and I started to ask about it, but I stopped. Didn’t matter where it came from. I screwed it in place, and I thought about the days when Joey and I didn’t need to go to this much work just to steal something.
Ten years ago, Joey and I were too young to be left at the mall by ourselves. But my mother did it anyway. Thirteen with no money and no idea when Mom would be back. We didn’t have much choice. We had to steal from the toy store.
Neither of us suggested it. We both just ended up there, walking down the empty aisles, lifting toys of the shelves, putting them back. Then, at the back of the store, I looked up and spotted a black dome. A security camera. “Do it on one of the other aisles,” I had told Joey.
“Do what?”
“Take something.”
“You fucking take something.”
So I did. And he did. Nothing too expensive, though. We got out of there with a couple Nerf guns shoved down our pants.
I stood back up after getting the new plate on, and asked Joey if he’d caught the Suns game.
“Fuck the Suns,” he said. “Lakers, man. Lakers.”
“The fucking Lakers? Since when?” I went around to the passenger side of the car and climbed in.
“We live one hundred miles from where the Suns play. Why should I care about them?”
“Because you live a hundred miles away, and because the Lakers are five hundred miles away.” I popped the glovebox in the Galaxie and pulled out the .38 revolver I’d stashed there earlier in the night. I flipped open the chamber, saw that it was loaded, locked the chamber back in place, and tossed the gun back into the glovebox. “And fuck the Lakers.”
Joey shook his head, went around to the trunk, popped it open. I couldn’t see what he was doing, but I knew he was checking the spare. He had a blow out on the highway to California six months ago. No jack stand, no tire iron, no spare tire. He sat there for hours. So now, he checked the spare tire on his piece of shit Galaxie every time he went anywhere.
Even when he was about to go rob a gas station.
Joey shut the trunk and came around to the driver’s side. “Let me tell my folks we’re heading out.”
“Sure.” I watched Joey head inside and thought about the first time his parents let me stay the night. My mother hadn’t yet split, and my old man still cared enough to beat the shit out of me. That night, it’d been a fight about cigarettes. I hadn’t even smoked them, just had the pack in my pocket, but Dad didn’t care. Said he’d rather raise a piece of shit thief than a smoker. I bet he’d never considered I’d be both. But that night, I cut the screen on my window, slipped out into the rock and clay behind our house, barefooted. I walked the three miles to Joey’s house, cutting through washes and dodging cacti. Joey’s mom asked if I was all right. Joey’s father grunted. But they both helped me get settled in for the night.
Joey came back out into the garage, two ski masks in his hand. “We almost fucked up.”
When he slid into the driver’s seat, I took one. “Where’d you even get these?”
Joey fired up the Galaxie’s engine and backed out of the garage. “My brother went to Ruidoso every winter with the whole soccer team—school-sponsored trip, or some shit. He’s got a shit pile of these laying around.”
Part II is out now! Read it now.