Red Turbo

I remember rain flowing down the windshield of my dad’s gold Buick Skylark while I waited, fidgeting with the metal buttons on my yellow raincoat. I lightly brushed my thumb over the embossed tops and tried to read the words without looking, pretending I was blind. One of the buttons half tore off from the fabric and hung loosely, dangling there, waiting to fall. My dad and social studies teacher, Ms. Kovalsky, spoke privately in her classroom at my church school while I sat fidgeting in the Buick.

I went to a small religions school run by the Seventh-day Adventists called Fort Meyers Junior Academy where I learned about Jesus, God, the Holy Spirit, Ellen G. White, and math. There I learned how to read from books that were just toned-down versions of the Bible. Instead of reading about the adventures of Dick, Jane, and Spot, I read about the hustle and bustle of Shadrack, Meshach, and Abednego.

Waiting in the Buick had become my own personal religious ritual. When my dad made his weekly visitations to Ms. K while I waited for them, I connected to it. I hallowed it and gave it a name. I called it the Pewick because of the smoke and dust that belched out of its tailpipe each morning the engine turned. I felt safe in the Pewick because it made me feel bigger than I was. I couldn’t see over the dashboard very well and my angle from the passenger seat limited my view to only dark clouds and the tops of heads, as cars would pass by. The torn seat that irritated my leg and the tan doors and dashboard were pleasantly faded from the Florida sun. If I wanted to, I could lay stretched out in the front seat and still have room to reach over my head. The Pewick was a beast, grinning through a bug mosaic flanked by smeared headlights that demanded respect as it passed any insignificant Accord or Camry. Even the palm trees bowed as it passed.

I wasn’t sure why I had to wait in the school parking lot every week. I was never a troublemaker, usually keeping to myself most of the day. My grades were adequate, not straight A’s but good. Why I had to sit and wait, thumbing my yellow raincoat buttons never came up and I never asked. So when my dad sat down red-faced in the car and started the engine, I silently stuck my arm out the cracked window to feel the rain as we drove home. The rain felt like a thousand bees stinging my hand. When I pulled my hand in after it got numb and rested it on my leg, it looked red and swollen still tingling from the rain.

I remember my dad’s shoulders slouching over the steering wheel while his stomach pooching forward and rested below it. It barely skimmed the bottom of the wheel. His shoulders sunk forward, forcing his head down and causing him to look up incessantly while driving. His face was in permanent bearded inquiry. He wore the same red flannel shirt he had worn since I can remember with tan pants, brown loafers and no socks. He was balding but claimed it was his brain's fault for taking up too much space. From long hours in the office and visitations, I never saw him much, or so I remember. I did a lot of jumping and waving. However, those rides home from school exonerated all his absences and rare times we spent together.

Bob Dylan sang “Slow Train” from the tape player as water sprayed onto the curb of the road. My dad loved this album because of its tribute to Gospel. His inspiration meant something to my dad. It meant something to me too. Whenever he started singing through the speakers, I knew the car had to be quiet; so when he asked me to roll up my window I was already halfway there. Bob Dylan was my dad’s favorite musician because he only sang about what was real and important. My dad said that Dylan's quality was rare and that I could learn a lot from him when I got older. I determined to like Bob Dylan and his music because of that. I would listen to him every night for years so I could pretend my dad and I were still in the Pewick, still driving and never making it home—just going in a constant state of motion with the window down and the muggy Florida wind blowing through my hair.

Dad gave me a knowing look and pointed to the red turbo button on the dashboard, or at least that’s what he said it was. It had no use. The button had been broken for some time. The word LIGHTS was printed on it in bold white letters. He pushed the red button, the whole world changed, and the palm trees suddenly blurred— the effect of the turbo of course. I asked how fast we were going and my dad said, “About a hundred,” with a wink and clenched his lips in mock concentration. Knowingly, I would nestle into my seat. We weaved in and out of traffic, up on the sidewalk; we sped between two semi-trucks. We soared through the air. We became the "Dukes of Hazard" and every cop and robber movie that dodged gun bullets. While driving home from school we assumed the hero’s role in our own mini-series.

The rain poured down as if Titan dropped the sky to catch his breath, making the windshield wipers worthless. The clouds turned in and the sky darkened, speaking in a low rumble as my dad looked sternly at the road, scolding it. Shadows seemed to cover his eyes and his cheeks were hollow as from sleepless nights. That was the first time I could imagine my dad in a scary movie. He usually looked so harmless, never raising his voice and always staying out of heated conversations with my mom if I was around. I could hear them at night with my ear pressed to their bedroom door but I can’t recall anytime that I actually saw my dad lose his temper or get angry. I stopped looking at him so this wouldn’t be the first.

“Seatbelt,” he finally said.

Twenty years earlier, with a full head of hair and bright eyes, my dad joined the Jesus Movement bearing Bibles and tie-dye shirts. He hung out on street corners and in nightclubs. I think my dad wanted to be “normal” too or at least find out what that meant. He dropped out of his first year at college to make a pilgrimage across America where all he found was some time in Colorado as a ski instructor, a longer stay in Houston working construction, and a short, six-month visit across the border for a glassy eyed brunette he met while hitchhiking in El Paso. He left Mexico soon after he arrived. I remember him not recalling why, just that he left “disillusioned” he would say. With his direction gone bitterness nestled in and kicked his once liberated theology out the back door. He moved home to Daytona Beach, Florida, lived with my grandparents for a few months, and then re-enrolled in college because of the intolerable persistence of my German grandmother. He went back to Tennessee to finish a degree at Southern Adventist Missionary College where he struggled to find his calling.

Not long after he arrived as a despondent Jesus-loathing misanthropist, the prodigal returned to religion on bended knee via Anne Harden—a true Southern belle. In that first brief glance, his faith restored. He decided to marry Anne and her slender legs that made her hips dance as she walked. My dad said that when he first met my mom, he could have tied two brooms to her hips and she could have swept the sidewalk behind her with every step. The county would have paid big money.
She ignored him completely at first. His hair was too shaggy; his clothes hung loose and were usually tattered. He didn’t own a tie and his past never stayed where it belonged. She wanted a well-behaved Adventist, with a trimmed beard, so she could play the piano at Friday night vespers and raise her children to respect their elders and avoid liberal religious ideologies.

Eventually, he cleaned up and became the pastor of a small church on the Golf Coast of Florida. He stayed there. He asked the church members to call him Pastor Rick. Anne finally married him after he bartered his pastoral future as proof of a stable life and they settled into more responsibility than expected. My dad was planning to become an Indiana Jones kind of pastor who chased down lost souls with witty comments and harrowing adventures. Then narrowly escaping the devil and his demons in a getaway car. He would leave them shaking their fists and shouting curses. Instead of his fantasies coming true he quickly realized that God’s real work was spent on hands and knees, brushing and blowing hot air to dust off old rocks. Weekly preparation for sermons, visitations, and church politics were not as spiritually exciting as he’d hoped.

Back in the Pewick, my dad cautiously turned right as the trunk swung wide into the other lane flaunting a bumper sticker that read BAGGAGE DISPOSAL. He had a poor sense of irony.

The front seat seemed to stretch out making the distance between us more obvious. His hands jerked the wheel straight as it shook violently from the side-wind. A semi-truck pulsated on the wet road beside us, unpredictably speeding up and slowing down. I remember seeing the chains from its underside, a spare wheel, and the hitch, all moving in an unsteady rhythm. The truck merged closer and almost sideswiped the Pewick. We surged forward, avoiding an accident. The road became unpredictably dangerous and the red turbo button at this point had become a distant memory.

Heavy rainstorms in Florida sometimes come in short and violent bursts, so when the rain let up and pinkish-blue clearing emerged to our right just above the passenger side mirror, I didn’t trust it. Florida weather’s a tease. I relaxed a little in the sticky seat as Dylan segued to “When You Gonna Wake Up” with a broken guitar strum. Out of the cracking speakers he chanted, When you gonna wake up, when you gonna wake up/When you gonna wake up and strengthen the things that remain?

The palm trees swayed back and forth searching for the best angle to catch the fragmented sun and seagulls hunted for food along the edges of a canal behind stucco-roofed houses. A sign read PRIVATE PROPERTY as we approached my neighborhood.

The air smelled like freshly rinsed asphalt and gasoline as we coasted into our pebble driveway. I could see my mom preparing vegetables out of plastic-wrapped containers from Publix through the small kitchen window. A palm tree leaned over the driveway to the left of the front lawn, and a long wooden fence at each corner of the house extended several feet from the sides, then back, stopping just short of the canal system linking the neighborhood. My brother and I spent days floating on inner tubes in the canal and jumping off our small dock. A large oak tree towered over the house from the backyard, where we attempted several times to build a tree house that summer. My brother was sent to a boarding school in Orlando every school year called Forest Lake Academy. With him gone, I lost interest in the project leaving the tree to fashion the finest in splintered wood and rusty nails. It didn’t look dangerous to me but my mom said it was a safety hazard and I shouldn’t climb it without supervision and a tetanus shot.

We pulled into the driveway, waited for the garage door to open, and finished parking. I looked down at my sleeve. It was dry now, but still cold from the rain. I tapped my jeans with my fingers, opened the car door, slid off the tan seat, and pushed the door closed with both hands. While my parents spent their time alone together, studying the Bible or something, I would stay outside pretending to crush giant turtles and walking mushrooms with my imaginary oversized black boots: a Nintendo fantasy. The gravel would then turn into hot lava, but at that moment, all I saw was dirt and stone.

As I walked to the house with my backpack over one shoulder, my dad locked the car. I looked back and remember wishing there was some other way to protect the Pewick. I still do. It needed more than a door-lock. It needed a deadbolt linking two metal chains that draped over the roof with bodyguards posted at each end holding stern faces and automatic weapons. A small key in an outdated rusty lock wouldn’t do.

My dad looked up at me after pulling the key out of the car door and walked out of the garage. He said, “Your mom doesn’t need to know about the meeting, okay Cole. Now hurry and get inside before the rain comes back.”

I stumbled through the door, dropped my bag in the hallway and b-lined it to my room. There I threw my backpack on the floor and opened the chest at the end of the bed, tossed out the random stuffed animal and G.I. Joe man in the way until the two large plastic Ziploc bags full of Lego’s appeared. I pulled them out and scattered them on the carpet. Then carefully set an unfinished space rover with six wheels and a clear domed roof next to the pile from the top of my dresser. It was a project from the previous week. The rover still needed laser cannons on each side and a retractable platform. I carefully sifted through the loose Lego’s like a first year surgeon in the operating room looking for the perfect piece.

My mom shouted over the silence for me to wash my hands and get ready for dinner. It startled me. The distance from my bedroom and the kitchen spanned only ten feet, but my mom always shouted as if low flying aircraft made regular passes over the house.

“I’m busy right now,” I snapped back to her.

“What did you say?” My mom responded quickly, hoarsely; emphasizing "what" as a challenge that I know well enough to leave alone. “Don’t talk back to me.”

I turned to wash my hands.

My mom, now far from the image of the Anne Harden that refused to let my dad date her without a trim, was proud as a true southern belle despite her dependence. Her hair suspended stiffly above her forehead, taking hours of preparation and ounces of hairspray. She would never walk from one place to the other; she only marched. My mom grew up an only child by my single grandmother that instilled in her that same pride that would have typically refused to admit dependence on a man. But as a pastor’s wife her attempts of assertion conflicted with standards and expectations assumed of her by association. Her role was exclusively a support system for my dad’s ministry. She was there to greet everyone in our church before and after the sermon, give small anecdotes about my dad that reinforced his devotion to God, and organize potlucks and Bible studies at our house. It didn’t lend itself to independence like the one she would’ve liked.

In the bathroom, the warm water comforted me as I stared at my reflection faking different grins in the mirror. Inquisitive. Courteous. Happy. Ecstatic. Crazy? I turned the water off, face blank, waiting for something, anything. I suspended time to see if my face would change without me telling it to. The person that stared at me through the mirror did so deadpan, vacant, curious. I never realized that in that moment my life was so fragile that it would scatter like marbles on a wood floor after the slightest flick of a supernatural finger. My reflection turned first as I walked out the bathroom and flopped on the couch.

I turned on the TV and then realized the storm outside had strengthened since driving home. The windows shook in their frames and the oak tree in the backyard groaned heavily. On the TV, screen text scrolled along the bottom. It said, “High wind warnings for the following cities: Naples, Bonita Springs, Cape Coral, Fort Meyers, Sarasota…” and so on, including safety instructions. The news stressed that families decide on multiple escape routes out of town to avoid traffic on Interstate 75 or, for the stubborn that refuse to evacuate, designate a room in the house with the most stable foundation and a place to take cover. The storm was more severe than they expected.

I had been through many big storms before this one; it was just something I became accustomed to while living in Florida. I felt the experience must be similar to the end-times, as if they told me about in Sabbath School. The stories of the second coming always had a scary quality to them, but I was reassured that the remnant would be spared from the tribulation based on prophecies by Mrs. White. She was our own personal prophet. Every denomination should have one.

In her books, she gave explicit descriptions of how the end times would look: the day would turn to night, the sun would shine blood red, the stars would fall, and out of the east a small cloud, about the size of a man’s fist, would slowly come closer until it consumed the sky. Then all the earth’s dead who were saved would raise out of their graves and float up to heaven to be with Jesus standing there on the cloud with his hands at his sides, palms out. The end times had to follow according to her prophesies a certain sequence. It was something out of Revelation. I had a chart somewhere. So these storms were just little samples of what it was really going to be like.

My religion made paintings of the images that Mrs. White wrote. The painting had everything happening at once with people nonchalantly stepping out of upturned graves with a three-piece suits, flowery dresses, and pleasant looks on their face. They would look up and raise their hands while in the background other people would already be floating toward heaven. These paintings were all over the church halls; all colored brightly like a scene from Thomas Kincaid. It seemed odd to me that everyone in the paintings seemed perfectly normal and bland. None of the ones coming out of the grave was disfigured from burns or decapitations or deterioration or however else people look like after being buried. I expected many people to look like the night of the living dead or something, especially the real old ones. I asked someone in my church about that one Saturday and they said that Jesus gave them new bodies. That made sense at the time.

Mrs. White was also the one who said we should forget about eating meat all together even though she apparently ate tons of it. That was debated in Adventism, much like everything else she wrote. No one would agree to disagree or concede a point; they just kept reciting passages from her books proving different things and saying that the other person wasn’t a good Adventist because they thought she said something different. I asked my dad why not everyone could just have their own opinion. He told me it was because they were afraid. I never really understood that.

At dinner, we sat down at an oval table with my parents at each end eating silently, listening to the storm rage outside the dining room window. It was practically impossible to concentrate from all the rattling and banging that was happening outside. The wind flung debris across our back yard: mailboxes, tree branches, paint buckets and children’s toys. My parents ate the vegetables and mashed potatoes on their plates slowly and cautiously so they wouldn’t disturb the storm. Too quick of movements would get its attention. Their eyes darted back and forth; they looked at each other across the table and said nothing. The lights started to flicker and would blink out for seconds at a time.

My mom started to say something but the oak tree disrupted her when it forced its way through the window, making her words come out as a gasp. My dad jumped out of his seat while I still sat at my place, wide-eyed and distant. Dishes scattered across the floor and my parents rushed into the kitchen yelling for me to follow them. I stood up from my seat slowly, stepped back to survey the mess. This had never happened before. I couldn’t move, not from fear but an overwhelming sense of astonishment. I could never have feared the forces of nature because God controlled that. He would never hurt his remnant. He needed us. I walked into the kitchen with my parents.

The canal in the backyard crept into the house through the space under the door, soaking the carpet. The walls rattled unhinging, shifting, and breaking from the wind's force. A lightning flash and then a crack of thunder compressed my ears leaving them ringing, then darkness. The motion that once swirled outside picked up paper, wood chips, and glass shards in the dinning room where we were just eating. I remember watching my house tear apart from inside the kitchen in silhouette. The intensity of the moment felt surreal to me, as if I was dreaming it and somehow had control of the ferocity of the storm. I egged it on. I felt that surely the rainbow of light that sheltered all God’s children in the time of trouble as in Mrs. White’s books would surround my family. While the world was being destroyed, we would be spared, hand in hand, singing praises to God in our church clothes like all the Adventist paintings that depicted how glorious the second coming would be.

Snapping out of my trance, I looked up at my parents holding each other in the kitchen with fear streaming down their cheeks. I took my mom’s hand and lead her out of the door to the garage. Dad came close behind. Once inside the garage, the walls shook violently, vibrating a hammer, crow bar, a wrench set, and shelves of multiple lengths of nails rattling precariously. We scrambled into the front seat of the car, my mom first, then me, and my dad close behind. Heads together, arms around each other, we sat and listened as our house and all that we owned fell into itself. We heard the thunder, the cracking ceiling, the whine of bending wood as it snapped from the winds force, the clatter of metal tools and nails unhinging. There was a sharp crash that sounded like broken glass. It sounded like something broke through the windows of the Pewick, but it happened so fast that I didn’t pay attention to it and continued looking straight ahead, as the ceiling collapsed, sealing us in. The noise that surrounded us in the garage soon faded to a dull rumble, as a TV would sound if a down blanket were thrown over it.

Blackness and the noise of distant destruction surrounded us underneath the rubble of what was our garage. I looked out of the front windshield. From my viewpoint, between my parents, I could see a crack in the fallen debris. I could look through it as if I was looking through a peephole from within a homemade bunker while the world blew apart from nuclear war. The clouds bubbled and flashed with electricity. I remember wondering what it would feel like to stand outside in the middle of the storm. Would I be torn apart from the splinters that flew like bullets in the hundred fifty mile winds or would Jesus protect me? I lingered on the thought of a million little pieces of wood and debris bouncing off my chest, while I stood there and laughed, feeling nothing because of the protective light that surrounded my body.

I wondered if Bob Dylan ever had been through a storm like this one and had written a song about it. I would find that song and play it over and over again if I could. Looking down at the dashboard, I saw the red turbo button that read LIGHTS in bold white letters through the darkness. It seemed to be glowing. Leaning forward I read it aloud. I remembered how my dad started calling it the turbo button when I would ask what the letters spelled before I knew how to read. I took hold of my dad’s hand still clinging to a fork with bits of mashed potatoes. With my other hand, I took my moms. I stared into her tear-stained eyes, which shone a deep blue that I never noticed before that moment and will never forget. I told her it would be okay in my calmest voice. I told her not to worry we were protected. My mom looked past me and said nothing. Her bottom lip sucked against her teeth as she breathed. I lifted my parents' hands and placed them on top of each other. My dad’s hand was heavy. I held them, cupping them, extending my arms with their hands still in mine. My eyes fixed on the dashboard. I reached forward and pushed the red turbo button that read LIGHTS in bold white letters.