There are 284 million cars on the roads today. And yet, you can often tell if even one of those cars feels out of place. That ordinary object’s misplacement may not be readily obvious at first; but, an intuitive feeling will slowly nag at your subconscious before flooding into your consciousness.
What follows is my own elusive experience with an old green car that I knew just didn’t belong there.
I was in the third grade. My parents and I had just moved into town from the country. The house we moved from had been unfinished and so there was not an actual door bell. There was a screen door that opened up onto the unfinished main floor and then an interior door that led to the section of the house that we had been living in. That interior door had no lock.
So, when we moved into a duplex in town, we finally had a lock and a doorbell. I was fascinated by both and decided to play around with them.
There were two doors in the front of the duplex. Our front door opened up to seven descending steps that would go down into our unit. The front door next to ours opened up to seven ascending steps that would go up to the neighbor’s unit. There was an old lady that lived up there above us.
So, after school, my mom was down in our unit in the back making dinner in the kitchen. I was out front playing on the wooden stoop by our front door. I was paying with the lock and the doorbell because I’d never really used either one before. The lock on the door was activated by pushing the interior handle in and turning it. So, I engaged the lock on the door, stepped back outside, and then shut it. This meant I was locked out. I then rang the door bell and laughed as my mom came up the steps and opened the door for me. I was intrigued.
I had to do it again. I locked myself out and rang the door bell. Again, my mom came up the steps and opened the door for me. I laughed once more.
Surprisingly, my mom was not mad. She was just matter of fact and went back down to continue making dinner.
I was going to lock myself out a third time. I was having so much fun.
A little voice inside my head asked me to reconsider. What if my mom got tired of climbing up the steps to open the door for me? What if she was slower to open the door for me? What if something caused a delay in her reaching the door as quickly for me?
And then something I must have been unconsciously paying attention to came into the forefront of my mind. To the east of me, something sped to the south quickly. It then turned west and I could then see it jetting towards me. It was a green four door old car. It passed me and the duplex fast. The car then turned north.
Odd. This was a quiet residential neighborhood and a very slow street. No one drove fast through here. Ever.
And. No one circled the block. Ever.
This car had just turned twice in an almost complete circle around me. Why?
I continued to play with the lock on the door. It would be so fun to lock myself out again. It would be so fun to ring that doorbell that I had never been able to use before. Having my mom walk up the stairs and unlock the door for a third time would really make me laugh hard this time.
And there it was again. To the east, I could see that same green car rushing south. It quickly made the turn west and rapidly approached me just as it had done before.
Odd. This was the second time this car was circling around me. Why?
Whereas, before the car quickly sped past and turned north; this time, the car stopped right in front of our duplex and right in front of me. I watched it as if I was a deer caught in headlights.
Two guys quickly got out of the car. I took note of their feet. They were running. As soon as their feet passed the public sidewalk and entered the crisp green grass of our private lawn, I immediately turned to the front door.
I had not locked it. It swung open upon my touch. I stepped inside. I hurled the door closed. I engaged the lock. I then did the best thing I knew at the time to do: I jumped down the stairs, ran into my room, and hid under the bed.
I listened.
This made no sense. In our small town, people parked in driveways. If you were visiting someone, you parked in their driveway. If for some odd reason you weren’t going to park in someone’s driveway, you parked in front of their house. You never parked in front of someone’s house unless you were going to their house. For instance, if you were visiting the first house on the block, you’d park in front of the first house on the block. You wouldn’t park in front of the second house.
I continued to listen. If these two guys knocked on our door, I would hear it. My room was right in the front and right next to the steps leading up to the door. If these two guys rang our door bell, I would certainly hear it as well.
After what seemed like an eternity but was in fact just a few moments, I got up the courage to peek my head through the bottom of the curtains and peer out the window. They were gone.
It was completely wrong. However, I couldn’t make sense of it so I let the memory drift from my mind.
**************
About a year later, we had moved to the other side of town. We had moved into an actual house. One afternoon, my dad took my mom and I out for a drive. It was something people did while living in a small town. You’d get in the car and slowly drive through the streets looking at different houses and areas of town. My dad would say something like “So and so painted their house” and my mom would say something like “So and so built a new fence.”
Inexplicably, we ended up driving by that duplex that we used to live in. It was just as I remembered on the same quiet residential street. My dad then turned onto the main road just west of the duplex. And then, oddly enough, he turned further west onto a dirt road that I had no idea existed.
This stretch of dirt road was hidden from the rest of the town. This run down stretch of road had shacks and extremely old houses lining the side of it. It felt so barren.
And then I saw it.
It was as if something long forgotten had actually been with me all along.
Parked right next to the second shack along the dirt road was that old green car that didn’t belong there.
It was the same old green car.
It was that same old green car that I had circled me twice a year before.
I immediately ducked down and hid. My dad slowly inched past the shack and the old green car. As if struggling to move forward, my dad finally managed to turn back onto the main paved road and headed to another part of town.
When we got home, I knew I had to say something. However, I was too scared to say what had happened to me out loud. So, I wrote my experience down in a note and handed it to my mom. She read it and just said to me, “They were probably there to see the old lady that lived above us.”
I sulked away seemingly understanding why I had never bothered to share my story with anyone up until now.
I knew those two guys were not there to see the old lady that lived above us. For one, they hadn’t even knocked. I was listening to every single sound in those fearful seconds hunched under my bed. Those two guys had not even stepped upon the rickety wooden stoop. For two, they certainly had not tried her doorbell. We could always hear her doorbell when people used it. For three, everyone that visited that old lady always parked in the driveway. For four, these guys were rough. They had ratty shirts and tattoos on their arms. Back then, tattoos were very uncommon. For five, these guys never came to that duplex neither before or after that day.
Having seen that car parked just off to the west of our duplex, it finally seemed to make sense. To anyone observing me that day, I looked like I was locked out of that duplex. I was trying the doorknob, unable to get in, and ringing the doorbell. They likely glanced upon me by accident on their way home. They circled the block to verify that I was still there. They grew confident thinking I was actually locked out. And, they were probably working up their nerve.
The fact that they started running towards me without saying a word means they were extremely confident. Thinking I was locked out, they didn’t think they had to say anything.
It always confused me that there were two of them. How on earth, my third grade mind reasoned, would two people agree to do such a thing.
However, many years later, there was a talk show on TV in which the topic came up. In the discussions, there were groups of people involved. And so the whole thing made a lot more sense and it told me just how close I had come to being a part of that old green car that didn’t belong there.