The Muslim Car by Joe De Quattro

It turned up in our driveway some time in the late 1980s, after a series of lemons including a gigantic cream colored Buick Electra 225 that would stall precisely at thirty-three miles an hour, and a tacky red spoke–wheeled Cadillac Coupe DeVille that mysteriously dripped water from the ceiling whether it rained or not.

“It’s orange,” my mother said. From the bank of kitchen windows, her face made leaden and ashen by a screen, she looked down into the driveway.

“So,” my father said sharply. “What the hell does color have to do with anything?”

I had been returning, by way of backyards, from a friend’s house when I came upon this scene—the tenor, iciness, and distance typical of my parents at this point in time—and though I could have walked right into the frame and engaged in virtually any kind of adolescent criminality without notice, I nevertheless hung back out of sight near the garage.

“So,” my mother said, “I will not be seen driving an orange car.”

My father ignored this, even whistled a bit (falsely, I thought), and ran a cloth over the small, boxy vehicle.

“You can’t say they don’t make them like this anymore,” he said loudly, energetically. “Hear me? I said can’t! You can’t say it!”

The fulminating pride evident in his voice here was special, something he reserved for those objects or endeavors my mother more than likely would have put out with the garbage or smashed to pieces with a baseball bat if she’d had the nerve. Among items on the shortlist: a two-foot-tall Franklin Mint glass sculpture of a dolphin diving upward out of a foamy wave, which she would remove from the coffee table whenever we had company (I couldn’t recall the last time); an enormous reproduction of Francesco Beda’s gaudy The Chess Game (not a player among us) hanging on the wall above the mantel, and directly below this a chiming clock that when engaged sounded like someone falling down a flight of stairs while playing an organ; in the garage, largely untouched, an expensive “robotic” sprinkler that was meant to move on its own as it followed the path of an open-valved hose (the few times it was put to use it remained stationary while the large rear wheels dug up the grass); and in the backyard, in futile attempt to separate us from our neighbors and obtain that commodity of the well-off (privacy) a sickly-looking living fence of Evergreens that failed to thrive due to the cover the woods at the edge of our property provided.

On top of this there were the cars, which turned up it seemed every few months (we were always a one-car household), often a source, depending on mechanics or reliability, of frustration for my mother, and, depending on aesthetics, embarrassment for me. Apart from the aforementioned Buick and Cadillac, during the preceding few years there had been a white 1970 Mercedes SL 100 with tail fins (in our possession for two weeks before it was totaled); a yellow, very speedy Toyota Corolla; a blue Dodge Omni that my mother liked above all the cars my father had brought home; and, just prior to the appearance of the Muslim car, a green Peugeot 405 Diesel, which we all referred to as “the tractor.”

“And do you know why you can’t say they don’t make them like this anymore,” my father was saying. I knew he didn’t expect a response, and, more importantly, I knew my mother wasn’t about to give one, something I still tried to see as a little rhetorical game between them, rather than the result of their spastic death march.

“No,” he said, answering himself, “of course you don’t. That’s because it’s one of the first they ever made.”

“It’s old,” my mother said. “It looks beat up.”

“It’s used,” my father said, “and that doesn’t mean it can’t be the first. They started making them, then stopped. Only one you’ll see around here.”

“How much?”

He looked up through the window and deflected. “Do you want to take a ride, or not?”

The only thing I knew for certain about my father at this time was that he appeared to do one particular thing quite frequently: buy and sell small businesses. He had owned, at least since I’d been conscious enough to be aware, a fish market, a transmission shop, an ice cream truck, a small diner, and two taverns. On the afternoon he arrived home with the Muslim car, he’d (we’d) been living off the proceeds, now growing alarmingly thin given the intel I picked up, of a sale nine months earlier of a small laundromat.

“It gets great gas mileage,” I heard him say.

A moment later my mother raised a dish towel and, still looking down at the orange peculiarity in the driveway, silently wiped her hands. This gesture, which I’d observed countless times before, was an economical masterpiece at once indicating contempt and immovability. Beneath a frizz of dark curls she then retreated from the window like a sinner from a confessional.

I remained where I was a few moments longer watching my father. The early autumn Saturday afternoon light that still possessed a moist frond of summer warmth seemed to frame him more awkwardly than ever: a man in his mid-fifties, out of step in this neighborhood and certainly out of place in this affluent town twenty miles north of Boston, wearing a red blazer, brown pants and a yellow Oxford shirt (all clean, nothing threadbare), and gazing with pride at this strange automobile, now apparently our family car, and already turning the heads of one or two of our neighbors as they drove past in a late model BMW or Mercedes.

When I finally emerged from where I’d been standing, making, without intending to, enough noise to draw attention, my father didn’t look at me. I went on, quickly walking across the front portion of the driveway, beneath the netless, rusted thirteen-foot-high basketball hoop, and up the stairs of the deck.

“Made in Malaysia,” he said. He emphasized the first part of the word so that it sounded like May, and though I only vaguely recognized the place from a forgotten social studies or history class, I knew he’d mispronounced it.

“Where?”

“Indian Ocean,” he said dreamily.

He wasn’t a formally educated man, but he was a willing student and smart in a self-made way, and though his geography was incorrect (the car was actually a 1971 Paykan Deluxe, built in Iran as documentation in the glove box showed), later I would find that his crude classifications weren’t, technically speaking at least, altogether wrong.

“How can a car come out of an ocean,” I said without expecting a response and playing, I suppose, my own part in that rhetorical ice age which had descended on all of us.

I stepped back a few paces in order to get a better look at the car. If there was a logo that read Paykan or Deluxe or anything of the sort it was impossible to tell, for the one faded piece of silver logo writing above the left rear taillight was in Arabic. On the hood, flush, was an emblem with the image of a muscular looking horse in blue, set in a faded white shield. Up close the orange paint was even more garish, and the wheel hubs and fenders showed rust that looked like dried blood. It seemed solid enough, though, and by the time I came around and slid into the passenger seat, my father was already behind the wheel, his hand on the ignition and waiting, clearly, for me to close my door. I had the impression that the car wouldn’t start unless this happened. In fact as he sat there a moment, and though he’d driven it home only a short time earlier, I was certain it wouldn’t start. There was a junkyard atmosphere about it, as if it had been sitting untouched in our driveway the last eighteen or nineteen years, a home for spiders and vermin. But it started immediately, and with what seemed like only the slightest turn of the key.

“Like a cat,” my father said.

“Is that good?”

“Very good,” he said.

Inside the car was barren and stripped of any accoutrements: wires extended from where a radio had been, the plastic casing around the speedometer was cracked, and the stick shift, which was long and thin, had no knob, only rusted threads.

We whined fast back down the driveway and as the garage door receded I saw that the interior of the vehicle was extraordinarily clean. In fact for a moment I had the impression that there was no windshield before me, the glass was that pristine. It was when I reached out in order to touch it that my eyes fell upon the round, black plastic case with a clip affixed to the dashboard.

“No,” my father said when I tried to open it. “Later,” and, for the time being at least, nothing further was offered.

§

We sped. My father drove the Muslim car, which was quiet and quickly agile, as if he’d been driving it a long time. He guided the steering wheel from the bottom with fingertips only, forearms resting on thighs. On his face, despite the raw quality of the car, was an expression of someone deeply pleased, even entranced, by what was wrapped around them. We drove through town with the windows open and the early autumn air blowing in, then on out to the highway.

“But there must be others,” I said loudly, realizing only after I’d done so that I was responding to conversation, between him and my mother, for which I hadn’t been present. “Other cars like it,” I clarified.

“Why must,” my father said, interested.

“Well,” I said, “this one got here, didn’t it? You think it was the only one ever to do that?”

He smiled. “That’s right. Only one.”

After this, for the next twenty minutes or so and simultaneously wanting and not wanting to spot one, I kept my eyes peeled for other Muslim cars.

“There,” I said, and pointed, “look.”

My father laughed softly. “Tercel,” he said.

We drove toward the ocean, the terrain at once foreign and familiar. I’d been here before, many times in fact, but perhaps because the car, despite its stripped-down safari-esque minimalism, felt so radically different from any of the cars my father had brought home previously, much of the landscape I was looking at appeared new. We came upon sea marshes with tall reeds, stark white gulls bobbing on the wind as if on wires against blue sky, and yellow and brown and red decked lobster shacks, the air suddenly briny and pungent and rich and almost off-putting, until we reached Seabrook.

“North,” my father said softly. He had brought the car to a stop in front of a seawall leaving us with a view of the horizon, then took out and lit a cigarette. Immediately after this he pulled from his coat pocket a wrinkled piece of paper upon which he had written the name of the man, Irfan, who had sold him the car that morning. The paper contained, I saw, a number of other words in both my father’s and, I had to assume, Irfan’s handwriting, none of which I was able at that time to understand.

As he looked this over, his lips silently moving, my attention turned again to the one item of interest in the car: the round black case fastened to the dashboard. Despite the earlier warning I reached for it once again, and as soon as I did my father intercepted my hand and opened the lid himself. I moved myself up on the seat so I could see better.  

“Not any compass,” he said softly as if I had just referred to it as such, “a Qibla compass.” He double-checked his notes, then nodded to himself, and when I repeated the word he corrected me.

“No, key-bla, key-bla. Like this, look at me, look. Key-bla.”

For the most part it seemed like any other compass I’d seen before, a main dial pointing north, but with another pointing to the right, to the northeast. This second dial had the letter M attached to it.

“How people pray,” my father said.

“Who?”

He looked at me, his lips trying to find the proper shape for the pronunciation.

“Muslims.”

“Maw-zlims.” I said it the way he had.

“The people who pray here,” my father said, but uncertainly, almost impatiently, and pointed at the M. “No matter where you are, anywhere in the world, it will always point to the Holy Land.” He was looking at me intently, searching. “You know how your mother looks at the Cross? This is where their Jesus was born,” and again he pointed, tapped the M with his finger. It reminded me, in placement only, of the little red and white statue of St. Joseph my mother had fastened with super glue to the dashboard of the blue Dodge Omni she had liked so much. I remembered that the paint on Joseph’s face had peeled a bit or melted from the sun, making him look very sad.

“So is that what we are now?”

“What,” my father said.

“Maw-zlim.”

He looked at me angrily. “You’re what your mother says you are,” he said, then exhaled smoke against the windshield and put his head back.

Neither of us said anything for a while. We didn’t pray. We were Catholic, or I was at the behest of my mother and my father was in the process of lapsing. And certainly we didn’t understand what any of this was, at least I didn’t, and I had doubts that my father, despite his earnest efforts, could have. But it all seemed to have made a deep impression on him, it made him proud, and I suppose in his stumbling way he felt it was important to explain and, moreover, get right.

“You don’t tell her,” he said darkly and looked in my direction with his eyes only. “She wouldn’t under—your mother wouldn’t appreciate any of this. Hear me?”

I nodded, and for some time he smoked in silence and looked out at the ocean which to me appeared wine-dark, cold, frightening. Mostly I kept my eyes on the Qibla compass in order to see if the second dial, steadily pointing to the northeast, would change direction.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” my father eventually said in a lighter tone of voice. “Don’t you let anyone ever tell you that freedom is free. Freedom is never free. Only thing truly free is dignity. You know what that is?” I believed I did and nodded. “All a man has is his dignity, and that can appear in anyone, in any state, rich or poor, religious or not.” He looked me over covetously. “Okay?”

“Yes.”

“Look at me,” he said, “Hey. You understand?”

“Yes,” I said again.

But I could tell he doubted this (he was right to do so), and a moment later, as if wanting his next actions to erase these last words, he flicked the cigarette out the window, closed the compass lid abruptly, and started the car.

Nothing more was said. We drove back a different way than the one we took to Seabrook, out through Hampton, with the ocean to our right, and, to our left, a long string of colorful and noisy but mostly empty arcades soon to close for the season. At the sight of this I felt an urge to weep and couldn’t understand why. Now I might think that it was witnessing resistance against an inevitable endpoint, the knowing autumn goodbye of it all despite the inviting perpetual colors and lights, that even my youthful self found obvious. I held myself, though, and instead turned my gaze back toward the water. Eventually, with the sky beginning to darken, we made a turn up near some large, expensive looking houses set among the sand dunes, then picked up the interstate going south and headed home.

§

Over the weeks of that autumn my mother begrudgingly drove the Muslim car to church, to her friends’ houses, to the market, never once inquiring about the compass on the dashboard (not that I knew of, at least), and it was always my father, if it was our turn, who drove me and my friends anywhere. Initially I dreaded this, just as I had dreaded him driving us in those giant, supposedly luxurious American models with all their comic failures. The first time in the car my friends eventually came around to asking about the compass, and my father showed them, stating that that’s all it was, a compass the previous owner had placed there. “For when I get lost,” he had said into the rearview mirror, causing John and Ben to laugh wildly. At first, sitting in the passenger seat, it struck me as strange and painful the way they had laughed, but when I saw how my father looked at me I realized he was in on the joke, even if it was at his own expense. Lost was foreign to these boys—my friends, sure, but at a complete and total economic level above us. In their world, lost was only heard or read about in adventure stories or seen in movies. Their fathers worked corporate jobs, and their houses and their yards, the cars their families drove and the food they ate and the clothes they wore, none of this was out at a distance. Never a struggle to reach. Never lost on them. Adults in their world didn’t utter such a word, lost, and my father, I could see, understood this. The times we were all together in the car he would ask, just before starting the engine, “who wants to get lost?” to roaring, rolling guffaws from the backseat.

As autumn deepened I found that the Muslim car was the first thing I would look for when I came down in the morning and, perhaps because I never could feel it was truly ours, experienced a nervous kind of joy or glee whenever I discovered it sitting in all its orange glory in the driveway. At night, before going up to my room, even if my mother and father were home and occupied in separate parts of the house, I’d look out across the calligraphic, trapeze-like shadows the wind and the branches and the streetlights made of our yard, just to make sure it was still there. And on more than one occasion, I snuck into the car to see if the second dial of the Qibla compass had changed direction, though it was always the same, steadily pointing to the northeast. In these moments I had a sense that we had done something, my father and I anyway, come into possession of something probably no one we knew would understand, even if we didn’t either. It became difficult to imagine anything coming before or after.

§

But with the start of winter, and as my mother had gloomily predicted, the first real snow of the season rendered the Muslim car undriveable. Late one afternoon she got caught at the outset of a freak Nor’easter and had to flag down another driver in order to make it home.

“That’s it,” she told my father as she stomped and flew through the house. “Barely an inch and I was all over the place.”

“Where?”

“I asked you weeks ago,” she said, ‘“what happens when it snows?’ But what do you do? Nothing. You don’t even change the tires. I almost froze to death, there’s barely any heat. And in these shoes!”

“Where,” my father said again.

“Parish Road, but by now someone’s probably towed it or knocked it off into a ravine. Hopefully.”

My father put on his un-lined London Fog, which he wore as his winter coat. It was a real storm now, blowing sideways and scary, but he trudged out nevertheless in his galoshes and tweed fedora, the fingers of his black leather gloves stiff like blades as they sliced the air at his sides. I felt worried. Parish Road was a good two miles away, more likely three in such weather, but no one protested. I watched him, and when he was out of view, I stayed at the window looking into the fading pearly light. I pictured him walking, now on Shawnee, then up the hill of Lincoln Street, until I found I couldn’t see him in my mind any longer. It happened suddenly. The image of him in his gloves and fedora and trench coat simply slipped away and I found that no matter what I did I couldn’t put it back. I tried several times—gloves, hat, trench—but nothing I did recalled his image. I wondered if it was because I somehow felt, and though there’d been nothing in his manner to suggest this, that he wouldn’t return. For a moment then I saw him once more, not presently but in some later incarnation, living in a small place of his own, paneled walls, a television, sliding glass doors that led to a terrace overlooking trees and sameness. In this, I imagined his face differently. Not happy, but not hard and set either, as it sometimes appeared to be. It was in the eyes. I was unsure how this made me feel.

At the window the snow sounded like sand against the glass. For a bit longer I tried to regain a mental picture of my father, trudging, red-faced, even dignified, but it was no use, I’d lost him, and I felt overwhelmed for a moment by a terrible kind of fear until my mind became occupied, fully enveloped, by the image of what it was he was going toward: the Muslim car, stuck somewhere out on Parish Road. I could see it with perfect clarity, even if my father was nowhere to be found, its orange hulk like a beacon, or like a rising sun, or maybe like the first or last embers of a fire, burning brightly against all that accumulating white.

Joe De Quattro is a Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction writer and a finalist for december magazine’s 2015 Curt Johnson Fiction Award.  His fiction has appeared in Five2One Magazine, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, The Writing Disorder, The Carolina Quarterly, Turnrow, Carve, Zahir, The Washington Review, and Oyster Boy Review.  He is currently represented by literary agent Jess Dallow, has an MFA in Fiction from Bennington College, and lives in California.