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New snow crunched under their feet as they left the White Spot. It swirled around them like an icy plague.

“We got dumped again,” the old man muttered. He drew hard on a butt that flared orange, then sank into gray. He pitched it into a snow bank.

“You want to drop me Four-Forty?” Peter asked.

“You wanna go today?”

“What?”

“Look, it’s been snowing the whole time we’re in there. I ain’t got snow tires.”

“It’s Christmas Eve, Dad!”

The old man held his arms out, waving at the falling snow, as if gathering it as evidence, furiously making his case for inaction. Peter walked past him to the car.

“You be quick, hah?”

“I’ll be quick.”

“Know what you’re getting?”

“I’ll be quick.”

“’Cause this keeps up, how we getting home? No snow tires.”

“You can just drop me.”

His father may have considered that as he turned the ignition and heard the engine gasp. Wipers tossed new powder off the windshield, showing the spidery crack that slithered past the rear view mirror.

“Yeah, an’ you walking home with packages. It’s not like a bus runs out there. And you in sneakers.”

“It’s all I got.”

His father smoothed his hair, then pressed a red ear with his palm. He seemed to shiver.   “I got Totes at home. An extra pair. You can have ‘em.”

“Thanks.”

The road through the park to Route 440 had not been plowed, but traffic had kept the snow from accumulating. “Park’s clear today,” the old man said, referring to the walkways, not the street. “None of that element. Cold’s the best cop.”

“That’s what they say.”

“Yeah, well they’re right, whoever the hell they are.”

The park road wound up a hill, the crown of which revealed a broad vista of the surrounding county. Black water sloshed against a concrete sea wall, above which rose the snow-capped oil tanks of several sprawling refineries. Mountainous, but without majesty, these vessels of potency and poison marred the landscape and dominated the community. The line between servant and master was blurred and subverted, until animate served inanimate, engine bowed to fuel, and the extant being sacrificed himself to the extinct. Peter watched his father’s jaw slacken and his leaden eyes drop from snowy sky to obscured horizon to the hood of the car. A metaphor for his life, Peter wondered, or the daily drama of the commute which for thirty years had relentlessly played upon this road?

The park exit was one of several roads that formed a maze leading to Route 440. Gray slush obscured the lane markings and impatient drivers jockeyed for position to make the necessary lane changes to either continue south or veer east. Peter felt the car hydroplane at least twice.

“No tread,” his father winced. “Goddamn bald tires. I shouldn’t even drive ‘til spring.”

“Just don’t tailgate.”

“I’m just,” his father hit the gas, “trying to not get cut off. Leave these jerks a sliver of space and they’ll cut right in front. Like this guy. Look at this jerk!”

A dingy Plymouth Duster was edging into their lane.

“He’s signaling.”

“He can wait for an opening!”

The car lurched forward, then the breaks locked. The car veered left where it hit a patch of slush and skidded into the rear of the Duster. Glass shattered. Plastic split. Metal screeched. Peter sunk deep into the passenger seat. His father banged his elbows on the steering wheel. “Goddamn. Goddamn.”

A Black man in his thirties, wearing a corduroy coat, split at the shoulder seam, got out of the Duster. Peter’s father struggled to roll down his side window. “Oh great, great. No I gotta deal with this. On top of it all, I gotta deal with this element.”

The Black man signaled to someone in the car to stay put, then hunched his shoulders against the cold and walked to the back of his car.

Peter’s father squinted at the back window of the Duster. “How many’s he got in there?” he asked.

The back window of the Duster was dark with grime. There was one head, maybe another or that could just be a headrest. “Don’t know,” Peter answered.

“I ain’t getting into it here,” his father coughed. He spun the wheel hard to his right, jerked his head over his right shoulder, and pulled into the next lane. The Black man hopped toward the window.

“Where you goin’, man?” He slipped in the slush, then righted himself. “Shit. Where…?”

“Make the left,” the old man barked. “Then pull to the shoulder.”

“You ain’t runnin’?” the Black man pitched his voice up.

“Just go to the shoulder.”

The Black man signaled his disgust with a wave of both arms, then hopped back to his car. Peter caught a peak at the passenger in the Duster, a Black woman, probably in her sixties. “Look for a cop,” the old man spat.

“He’s got his mother in the car with him,” Peter sighed.

“You think the parents got any control over these?” His father made the turn, then slowed, edging onto the shoulder, stopping before they got too deep in the snow. “C’mon, get out. You ain’t my Momma.”

Peter got out of the car, his feet sinking into the ankle deep snow, the wet canvas of his sneakers biting hard. Standing shoulder to shoulder, they waited for the Duster. It pulled up about ten feet behind them. The Black man approached with papers in hand. He clicked a ballpoint pen repeatedly. “Alright, let’s just do this so we can go. You got papers?”

“Yeah. I got papers.”

“So?”

“You ain’t thinking of going to the insurance company with this?” His father forced a laugh and rolled his eyes to the sky. “Unless you got a twenty dollar deductible. Or else you got other work you need done.”

“Hey, mister, you hit me.”

“It’s a busted lamp. And some cosmetic shit. It wasn’t exactly a fashion plate to begin with.”

“What you sayin’?”

“I’m saying there’s no fault insurance. No fault means everybody’s at fault. Means the sucker who got hit’s at fault. So unless you’re going way over your deductible, you don’t want to go near your insurance company with this shit. It’s just going to send your rates through the roof.”

The man dropped his arms to his side. “So you just picked my pocket.” He jammed his hands into his jacket. “You just picked my pocket like a hun’erd dollars.”

“Hey, you cut me off.”

“On Christmas Eve. A hun’erd dollars.”

Peter’s father looked away into the Four-Forty traffic as the man turned and walked back to his car. The man swallowed his anger and said some consoling words to his mother, then started his engine. Peter and his father stood shoulder to shoulder as the Duster pulled past them, spraying a gray mist which stained them from the knees down.

“You can’t give into them,” the old man muttered.

Back in the car Peter rubbed his palms on his thighs. His father stared at the windshield, now flecked white, the crack still spidery, slithering inexorably downward. An odor rose from his father, tobacco and stale beer, warmed by the car heater and creeping carbon monoxide. The old man aspirated like a leaky radiator, then snapped the directional downward and twisted the steering wheel to the left.   Traffic sped by without regard for the rapid click and blink of the turn signal. The frenetic stream shunted them aside, while its hammering pulse surged forward, onward, piercing the gray. They sat in suffocating inertia.

Eventually the traffic broke and the car lurched forward, skidding slightly before righting itself. Neither spoke. Peter stared off into the distance, waiting for the Four-Forty Mall to rise above the low horizon marred by seedy no-tell motels and snow-capped mesas of discarded tires.

“Looks like the Catskills,” his father laughed. “Such an eyesore. Snow hides it real good.”

Peter didn’t answer.

“You hear that?” his father asked.

“Hear what?”

“There’s a rattle.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

The old man put pressure on the brakes, then let up. “Now?”

“No.”

“I guess you got friends now go skiing,” his father said. “Rich kids are into that, huh?”

“No one’s ever mentioned it.”

“No, I guess they wouldn’t. They got a sense. No matter all kids wears jeans and tee shirts. They got a sense where the money is. Who’s got it. Who don’t.”

“I guess.”

“There.”

“What?”

The old man stared wide-eyed at Peter. “We gotta stop.”

There was a Body Shop a quarter mile before the mall. His father pulled the car into the lot. “Just a precaution. You can sit. Don’t worry.”

The old man got out of the car and shrugged against the cold. Ducking his head, he made his way to the office. After a few minutes, he brought out a middle-aged man in coveralls with thick grease on his hands. The mechanic gesticulated wildly, shaking his head often and pointing to the garage. Finally, Peter’s father put his hands on the mechanic’s shoulders and nodded confidentially towards him. The mechanic shrugged, nodded and pointed again to the garage. Peter’s father smiled and patted the mechanic several times on the shoulder. The mechanic walked back to the office, and Peter’s father popped open the driver’s side door.

“He’s going to look at it.”

“Look at what?”

The old man fumbled with the ignition. “It’s misaligned. I got a shimmy in the steering wheel. Shouldn’t drive it in normal conditions. Let alone this blizzard!”

“Dad, it’s a broken headlight!”

The old man shook his massive head. “It’s the whole front end. They’re gonna put it up. Probably take a couple of days. Cost a fortune, too. But hell, the safety….” He focused intently on Peter’s eyes. “We’ve got to think about safety, Son.”

“Fine, fine.” Peter flung off his safety belt. “I’ll walk.”

“We’ll cab it.”

Peter got out of the car and started walking toward the highway. The snow covered most of the shoulder, but the mall was only a few hundred yards away.

“I’m calling a cab!” his father yelled.

“You take it,” Peter called back. He rose onto his frigid toes and started to trot down the side of the highway. For a few short minutes, the cold was exhilarating and the rapid movement made him giddy. When an icy wind pierced his chest, Peter threw back his shoulders in triumph over the elements. His eyes teared. His nose ran. But this was a suffering he could endure, a primordial tension, a synergistic dynamism, a far cry from the preternatural decay his father would call safety.

The mall was a disaster. A celebration of the gauche and trivial, everything was either tasteless or inconsequential. Peter could not find a single gift that had any giftness to it. This was perhaps not so much the fault of the merchants, as the customer. Peter knew he was demanding too much of a simple present. But a Christmas present was more than simply a token gesture; it was more than a sign of affection. It was a demonstration of love on the only day of the year when expressions of love were permitted, and as such, it was also an act of contrition. It was a plea for forgiveness, a cry for absolution for loving only when love was possible and failing to love on all those occasions when love was required. Peter knew his annual practice of purchasing indulgences was corrupt at its core, but that didn’t mean it was cheap, or hypocritical or shallow.

And it was necessary. He knew that between family members, certain things must be spoken, those words of life that stave off death, or else, as was becoming more and more apparent, the family becomes strangers to each other, and death and decay set in. Yet Peter’s unspoken words of love and affection were so entangled with words of neglect, hurt and betrayal, that to articulate one was to murmur the other. Better to let all words lie dormant, like a multitude of sins beneath a blanket of snow. The gift must speak what Peter could not. And that gift would not be found in a strip mall in northern New Jersey.

Then Peter thought of the car. What would the holidays be without it? He and his sisters would be trapped in that house, with no way to visit friends, get to parties, no way to even get to a freaking movie. Trapped breathing their parents’ smoke while staring catatonic at the TV. Caroline especially would miss it. Even though the old bomb embarrassed her, she was constantly begging for the keys. Her life would be absolute hell without the car, and she would make everyone else suffer with her.

Peter decided, I’ll pay for the repairs. That’s the perfect gift: freedom, mobility, the power to separate oneself from ones family at a moment’s notice. “That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”

Peter trudged back to the Body Shop and found the wildly gesticulating mechanic seemingly beating a squadron of invisible flying monkeys with a flying monkey wrench.
Across the garage, several grease-stained underlings alternately nodded to him and tried to ignore him. Peter approached reluctantly.

“Excuse me, sir,” he muttered. “I’m Peter Jackson. My father brought our car in about an hour ago.”

“What now?”

“I was just wondering what the estimate was and how soon…”

“How soon?” the mechanic barked. “What, he change his mind?”

Peter shrugged. “When did you say it would be ready?”

“I…Look, I said we can bang out the dent, give a new lamp…’cause I got one in stock…I say take about an hour and a hundred bucks. He asks can I keep it around, I figure he don’t wanna come back today, like who would? So, I ain’t moved on it, but if you want it all the sudden….yeah we can move on it.”

“Hundred bucks?

“Right.”

“He said something about the alignment.”

The mechanic shook his head. “Didn’t say nothin’ to me. I don’t think a little ding like that’s gonna queer your alignment. But we can put it up if you want.”

“No,” Peter muttered. “Don’t bother. Just the dent and the lamp.”

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