THE MAN IN THE BLUE MUSTANG
A friend and I sit beside each other in her Toyota as she pulls to idling at the curb of our neighborhood park. We talk things of minimal weight until she shudders suddenly and tells me that the man in the blue mustang killed himself. I catch the draft of air that had made her shiver. Chills shoot up and down my spine.
For weeks this past spring he loitered in our neighborhood. He did so in the insidious manner which causes the dwellers of an elementary school neighborhood to take notice, to turn their heads in his threateningly quiet direction, and to murmur word through the cul-de-sacs until every house for blocks knew of his existence by identifying phrase. His subtly unusual actions rose the hairs on the nape of the neck- parking his car in the middle of the road, pacing leisurely up and down the pavement nearby. This, a heel-to-toe tapping prance, was more a skip in the mere pattern of a pace than a pace itself, set in time to the rhythm of a cheerful whistle which came from between his dry lips. Driving slowly down the block, his powder blue mustang crawled at more a feline’s stalk than at a Mare’s noble gallop. Then it would stay parked for few days with no sign of life, until the engine roared to a snarl to purr and stalk down the pavement again.
He had once followed my friend home, a young woman the same age as I who lived in a cul-de-sac opposite the subdivision as mine, returning home just after dark as I often did in kaleidoscopic unison within the confines of the cookie cutter city blocks. She swung swiftly around and into the door to lock it behind her as he sat and watched from the street, the headlights steady on her, eyes in the dark. She saw him idling down the street near her house three different times in the next few days, his slow rolling tires sticky on the asphalt as they crawled. Her licence plates were stolen a week later. His shifty actions told everyone’s instincts his presence would end up detonating in some way, but not expected was the explosion of tension to fire backwards.
Tonight I sit beside her, two wheels balanced on the gutter of the sidewalk in front of the rusty metal children’s jungle gym. She relays to me the news that the man in the blue mustang drove east of town on the highway as police pursued him. He doused himself in thick gasoline and crashed his car into the embankment going ninety-five.
I shiver as I look out under the streetlamp and through the puddle of artificial light. Beyond that circle I cannot see what lies in the darkness. Sitting in a parked car, lights off and windows down. Looking forward at the darkened shrubs lining suburbia and the street ahead, this tale that seems at first ludicrous in light of my picket-fence memories here doesn’t seem far fetched in the slightest.
Across the leaves painted black by the midnight air floats the beginning flickers of a film, projected by the passing lights and intermittent shadows of a vehicle. Although it produces both light and dark I cannot see its whereabouts from where I sit. I wonder what else I cannot see from where I sit, and what pieces of the puzzle we are currently reflecting on are hidden in a shadow nearby.
