What Drives Up Must Spin Around

It was one of the shittier $300 cars I had.

A Plymouth minivan, shit brown and smelled like old, worn-out car.

I bought it off David, who ran the junkyard. It never worked right, and no matter how much wrenching I - or anyone else - did to this piece of shit, it was destined to break down on a weekly basis.

But here we were.
This was the piece of shit I had to drive, to get me back and forth to college every day, and to work on the other days.

And it was winter.
Toward the end of the day.
I had just picked Dad up from the bus stop. He wasn’t currently allowed to drive.
I’d also picked up my sister and one of my brothers.

This was the price I had to pay. I was the family chauffeur.

It had been snowing all day. Coming down off and on—sleet and snow.
The little back road we lived on never got plowed. Never.
And we were basically the last house on the street.

I was cautious—and uncomfortable.
I didn’t like driving with all of them. NJ would complain the entire time, and Fletcher would egg her on.

It didn’t help that Dad was always drunk by the time I picked him up.
He would berate me for driving like a pussy.

“Give it some gas, it’s just fucking snow.”

His tone was harsh and slurred.

The car was already sliding around everywhere.
I didn’t want another accident on my record—insurance was already a beast.

So when we finally turned onto the little backwoods road, I really wasn’t in the best frame of mind.
I just wanted to be home and in front of my computer.

This road, on good days, was a mix of gravel and dirt.
On rainy days, it was muddy.
And on snowy days—it was treacherous.

Today was an icy day. It was lethal.

There was an initial dip in the road as you turned off 810.
The house on the corner sat lower than the road to the right. Uphill and woods to the left.
The road climbed a bit after that, and then got even steeper as it bent around to the left.
A steep drop to the right led to other folks’ homes. After that bend was Fillipè’s house.

He worked at Nimbus running their technology, and had given me my first Zip drive and some other spare computer parts.

After Fillipè’s house was ours—on the Y to the right. Another house sat to the left of us.

On this day, as that shit-brown Plymouth climbed up the sweeping curve, I didn’t have enough speed.

The wheels suddenly started spinning—freely—against the ice-covered road.

The kids in the back screamed.
Dear old Dad started throwing insults my way.
Obviously, this was all helping the situation.

I didn’t know what to do. My foot had doubled down on the accelerator as we started sliding backward.

Like a heavy plane out of fuel, we could no longer fight gravity.

I reached for the emergency brake—the ratcheting pedal at the far left edge of the footwell.

“Don’t you fucking dare do that!” Dad yelled at me.

I’d seen the way his driving worked out in the past, so fuck it.
Doing the opposite of what he said couldn’t honestly be that bad.

I pressed it in—all the way—past the ratchet point where it would release when I let up.

And I did. Quickly.

That minivan spun around so fast, it was like a bullet from a gun.
The force threw my foot off the e-brake, and my other foot had never left the accelerator.

It was a perfect 180.

We careened out of the little dirt road back onto 810.
I pulled the wheel hard left so we wouldn’t go over and off the other side of the road.
The van lifted onto two wheels before settling into its new direction and coming to a stop.

Thankfully, there wasn’t anyone else on the road.

I just sat there for a minute.

The kids were quiet in the back—suddenly aware of their own mortality.

“You fuckin’ moron,” my dad slurred.
“I told you—you weren’t going fast enough.”

“Ok,” was all I said.

I backed the car up and pulled into the dirt road again.

“Hey Jean, how about you and Sterling get out. You can walk it. It’s not too far.”

They got out.

Ok, asshole, I thought to myself—and hit the gas.

We slid up that hill. The back end of the van went over the side a bit. No matter.

I plowed it sideways—sliding into the tree where our driveway Y’d off.
Enough to dent the passenger side pretty good—and block Dad’s door.

I got out and walked up our driveway.

Time for another $300 car.