Stolen Cars

When I turned my head to the right and looked out past the kitchen window out into the rain, I could just see the front bumper of the car. It was a late nineties Explorer with Nevada license plates and an empty roof rack. I had never seen it before here at the park, but I guess that in itself wasn’t all that unusual. One of the things about trailer parks is that in their transient nature, unknown cars and people are not all that uncommon, even though I’d say we have a pretty tight knit community here. Still, there was something out of place about it, something about it being too close to the highway and hidden at the same time. I talked to Dewy and Ham later in the day after they came back from walking their dog, and they said they didn’t know whom the car belonged to either. It was clean, like either the owners didn’t have kids, or if they did they were so anal about everything that no Cheerio was left un-picked up. No stray pieces of paper, torn maps, pop cans or cigarette butts. Nothing that spoke to the kind of people the owners were, and in fact as the week went on, I was beginning to wonder if the car had any owners at all. No one in the park claimed it, but as it technically wasn’t “in” the park, but just out side it, we for the most part didn’t give it all that much mind.

It sat there for a week. Corlis came by and we talked about it for a while. I had started waffling between suspicion and indifference, from it being part of the Tacoma car theft ring that has vaulted our city into having one of the highest car theft rates in the country, to thinking it had simply broken down and that any day a tow truck would come for it and leave me sitting here asking the same questions about it until it finally faded from my memory.

Then last Thursday taking the older boy to school, I noticed another car had driven up. It parked a ways behind the Nevada car and the couple in it seemed in no hurry. When I got back, they were still sitting there in the same spot where they remained for the better part of the morning.

Close to noon the police arrived, chatted for a while with the couple and then left. The tow truck arrived at about two-thirty and by the time I got back from picking up the older boy from school, the car and the couple were gone. I had resigned myself already to never knowing the answers to this mystery. Resigned myself to the understanding that thinking about it wouldn’t do any good and just lead to sleepless nights.

Thursday another car shows up, this time the couple are both male and black. They pulled off the highway near the spot of the Explorer and sat all morning, smoking cigarettes, looking as if they were lost, or unsure of what to do. Sweetie, who was home at the time, saw them leave and turn into the alley behind the park about noon.

When I got home from the mill I did my best to follow where they might have gone, but there was no trace of them in the alley and I haven’t seen the them or the car since. Sunday morning Earl, who lives in the trailer across the way, took a tumble off his stairs and he and Heather spent the better part of the day in the emergency room while they checked him out and made sure he was fit to come home. When they got back to the park they noticed another car, this one a late model Honda, red with Washington plates, parked in the same spot the Explorer was.

This morning it was gone.

You know it’s not uncommon for the trailer park to do this, to present me little mysteries to unravel and untie. In fact it’s one of the reasons I live here, so I can wake up on any given day knowing the world is still a fascinating adventure, rain-washed and ready to be explored.