Chapter 4
Aloha
Aloha slid her bike up against the side of her house. She hopped off and turned to face the boys as they worked together to push the wreck up her drive way. Unlocking her garage door, Aloha shoved it all the way up and darted inside to push some things over to the right side of the drive way. The turn table scraped across the floor while she leaned into it, almost staggering under the resistance. Next time she got money, she was buying wheels for the stupid thing.
The head of the grease monkeys trotted inside to help her after he threw some bricks behind the wreck's tires. He blinked at her, "You live in here?"
Aloha grimaced, "I needed separation."
"Living with your parents?"
"Hm," Aloha dusted her hands on her jeans when they finished clearing a space just big enough for the vehicle to squeeze in through. "So what paperwork do I need to sign for this ugly thing?"
"Technically," He said slowly, "there isn't any."
Aloha squinted at him, immediately suspicious. "This car just didn't crash land in your garage, did it?"
"No...we actually found it in an alley half a mile from the square," He walked back out with her to inspect the topic of their conversation. He went rigid in her peripheral view when she touched the hood again.
"You found it."
"We called the station because its painted like a cruiser, but they didn't have any records of the car. Then we tried to look up its license plate. There's no records of it, either. There's no title, there's no numbers. This thing literally belongs to no one."
Aloha raised her eyebrows at him. "Then how can you just sell it?"
"The same way you just bought it." He shrugged, "finders, keepers."
The information made the hair on her neck stand up. This all sounded too good to be true, and more importantly, like a one way trip into trouble. Aloha may be an alcoholic that used gullible men to get from one place to another, but her fight or flight instincts were never wrong. Her gut was screaming at her that thiswasn't right.
She jumped out of the way when the boys kicked out the bricks, lined up against the vehicle's butt, and rolled it into the garage.
Aloha slid the bricks back behind the tires with her foot as a precaution. Then she took off her back pack and dropped it on the hood of the car, thunk. Every single one of the boys fled all the way to the curb in a cursing rush of man-child. She snorted at them. "You act like its going to attack you."
"Remember when I said it was special? It, uh, doesn't like to be touched."
Aloha stared. "Its a car."
He shook his head violently, "It doesn't like to be touched."
She swung her foot back and kicked the bumper of the vehicle hard enough to make a resounding clank. They squealed and scrambled for the Dodge. Aloha waved as the truck started with a roar and peeled down the road, dragging tow chains behind it. She rolled her eyes and stepped inside her garage, squeezed in against the butt of the wreck, and brought the door down hard in front of her. She kicked the lock down and sidled her way out.
Aloha stepped on her shoes to pull them off and padded across her garage to her fridge. She said, "So what do you think, Darla? What can we do with this hideous thing?"
The mannequin continued to stare at nothing, her poker face impenetrable. Aloha nodded her head along as she withdrew a couple of bottles from the frigid interior. She pushed the door closed with her toes and dropped herself over the back of the futon unto the worn cushions.
She uncapped the first, dropping the first between her back and the cushions. Aloha examined the new addition to her room with a curious eye while she sucked down her first beer of the day. "What to do, what to do, what to do..."
It was really the ugliest, most pitiful piece of work she'd ever seen. Aloha canted her head one way, then the other, and when that didn't help her think of anything she rolled to her back and let her head hang over the seat to view it upside down. All she saw there was how loose the undercarriage was.
"I know, I know, Darla." She took a long drink, "I just wasted my money, didn't I? Maybe I should stick to dumpster diving. More profitable that way."
The mannequin held her perky model pose but didn't say a word. Aloha sighed dramatically, closing her eyes as the alcohol warmed her up. She pushed herself up and stretched out on her stomach with her chin on the arm rest of the futon. She gave the mannequin her best lost puppy eyes. "You're not being very helpful. The least you can do is give me an idea, especially after everything I've done for you."
I'm talking to a mannequin. Aloha rumbled at the unwelcome logic in her mind, and it quickly tucked it's tail and fled. Another swallow of bitter drink. She looked at the car again, hoping it could tell her what it wanted her to do with it's corpse. Her eyes trailed over the ragged lines of it's crushed hood-
Aloha sat up. Her eyes narrowed with focus, following the ruin of the vehicle's front end. There it was, something she could actually work with. She slapped around on the concrete floor for the sketch book tucked under the futon. Finding it, she pulled the pen from the spiral and flipped to a page with enough room to sketch, and scribbled away.
If she could just find a way to tilt the vehicle up, prop it up on a stand like one of her smaller sculptures. If she could just cut into that hood, pull the torn edges up. If she could fill the would-be cavity there under the would-be open hood with art, with beauty...Beauty in ruin. The good in the bad. Potential in broken things. That was what she did, what she was good at.
Aloha only stopped to take a sip every now and then, trying to get the basics of what she wanted down. Once she had roughed in the piece, she asked Darla to bring her the markers on the table. Belatedly, she remembered that Darla was a mannequin and that she was drinking. Aloha groaned and forced herself up and sat down at her work table.
She sucked down two more coolers before she had finished, then, realizing that her project would require her to get some kind of saw out and that you weren't supposed to operate machinery while drunk, stripped off her clothes and spread out on her futon for a nap.
The ugly nightmare was still there when she woke later, less than an hour from sunset. Aloha blinked at it for several minutes before she became aware enough to remember that she now owned a wreck. "Coffee first," She mumbled at Darla while she climbed out of bed and dragged her clothes from earlier on. "I need coffee, then we'll cut that bad boy open."
Her father was in the kitchen. He turned to look at her, "Alo? How long have you been home?"
"Coffee," Aloha said, "I've been home coffee."
He raised his eyebrows at her in amusement and stepped out of her way. Aloha fished out the biggest mug she could find and waited impatiently for the pot to fill.
Her dad tried again. "Did you find anything at the auction?"
"Some scraps." Aloha croaked, "I'm going to start working with them. Requires power tools. It'll be loud for a while."
"What are you working on?"
"Big sculpture."
"Thats enlightening."
"Don't sass me. I need coffee." Aloha filled her mug and returned to the garage. She reviewed her sketches, corrected them in a few places, and woke herself up. The first order of business was to get that hood open and see if there was still an engine inside, and if there was, figure out how the fondue she was going to get it out.
Aloha had a pitiful power saw she used for larger projects, like cutting the slabs down for the horse sculpture that still stood in a frozen gallop on the turn table. It was the only thing she had, besides a sledge hammer, that could bust up metal paneling. She set both on her work table beside the sketch, then looked for a long sleeved shirt, gloves and her safety glasses. The first two were easy to find, but the glasses were illusive. She settled for a pair of ski goggles she'd saved from the streets.
Aloha pushed all of her sculptures further away and covered them with towels. She shoved her lap top under the futon cushions to keep it from getting damaged. Then she plugged the saw in and carried it to the wreck. Her backpack was still slumped on the hood, so she pushed it off with an elbow where it fell to the floor. Aloha yanked her goggles down and flipped the safety switch. She squeezed the trigger, and the saw blade screamed to life.
She brought the blade down slowly, bracing herself for resistance. The blade inched down until it made contact. Three yellow sparks flew, and the saw jerked in her hands with enough force to dislocate her arms.
The machine went one way, the saw squealed in agony and disconnected to fly the other. Aloha hit the floor with a scream and covered her head while the white hot blade sang through the air, sliced Darla in half at the waist, and buried itself in the wall across the garage. The blade-less saw smacked on the hood, bounced, and rolled across the concrete.
Aloha trembled, pressed against the bumper of the wreck. "What the fu-" She uncovered her head after several seconds, the only sound being the sizzling saw burning the material around it black. She peeked with eyes wide as dinner plates at the damage. Darla's legs, miraculously, were still standing. There was a clean cut across her waist that still smoked.
Once she was able to accept the room was clear of singing blades, Aloha shakily rose up. She pivoted to look at the hood. Not even a scratch, or at least not one that wasn't already there. That gut wrenching feeling of somethings weird here crashed through her full force and she found herself back pedaling away from the wreck. Her butt hit the futon and she sat stiff beside her mannequin's long legs.
How was the car not damaged? How had her room taken more damage than the car? She brought a hand to her lip and chewed on her nails. The goggles fogged over and her skin became sticky with sweat. She yanked them up to her hair line and wiped a palm over her eyes. Maybe she was still drunk? Maybe she needed more coffee, or maybe she drank too much and was high on the caffeine? Maybe the car was made of some type of alien stone that wasn't green, or maybe her saw was more pitiful than she thought?
Aloha reached down to the cord on the floor and yanked the plug free from the outlet. Things were getting weird, her mannequin had instantly lost half of her body weight and now Aloha really needed a drink. She chewed on one set of nails while the other hand tapped against her knee.
After several minutes of panicking, Aloha finally got to her feet and tip toed to the saw blade in the wall. It had sank almost completely in, the serrated edge peeking out by barely an inch. Aloha could feel the heat from the blade on her face when she bent to look at it closer. Then she went to the machine and found it helplessly broken.
Aloha swallowed noisily, the heat of anger slowly overpowering her shock. That saw had cost her more money than what it was worth, was the only tool of it's caliber she had, and a stupid wreck had broken it. She ground her teeth and glared at the car. She shouldn't have wasted the money on it, shouldn't have even chanced it. Aloha picked up the broken saw and dropped it on her table. She rubbed the fogginess from her goggles and pulled them back down over her eyes.
She took the sledge hammer. It weighed a ton in her skinny arms, but she braced it against her shoulder and strode toward the vehicle. Jumping on her toes, she swept the hammer down with all of the force she could muster. Metal made contact with metal. BAM.
Aloha landed hard on her back. Agony exploded in her stomach. Her lungs shrank in her chest and her heart pounded through every bone in her body. She gasped and hiccuped and wheezed. She couldn't see anything for a long time, or even think. When she could, the first thing she saw was red, and the first thought to enter her mind was, I'm dying.
The redness faded to a tint. Aloha found herself staring at the ceiling, and through the pain she felt something heavy right over the pulsing heart of her pain. She pushed herself on her elbows and looked down through her tears.
It was the metal head of the hammer, with less than an inch of the wooden handle still attached to it.
"Are you freaking serious?!" Aloha shouted. Her voice came out a hoarse screech. She glanced to her right and saw what remained of the splintered handle on the floor, almost exactly where the saw had laid.
Groaning, Aloha let herself fall back. "you ugly nightmare! No wonder they were in such a freaking hurry to get rid of you! I'll kill you in your sleep! I'll slash your tires! I'll get stupid drunk and puke all over your seats! I'll leave you at the curve and let creepy homeless people crawl into your seats and make it their home!"
It was excruciating to talk, so she snapped her mouth shut and rolled to her side. The hammer head clunked against the concrete against her waist while she curled in on herself to cry quietly. In a ditch effort of rebellion, she blindly kicked a foot out toward the car and hit her back pack instead. The pieces of metal slid out noisily across the floor. She kicked again, her pants leg dragging the shards of metal, and finally connected with the stupid tire.
The entire vehicle lit with arcs of blue electricity and Aloha screamed like a banshee before she scrambled to her feet and limped to the door and threw it open. "Its possessed!"
Her scream echoed through the house and her dad's footsteps pounded down the hallway. "Alo?! Aloha! What is it?!"
"I'm burning the house down! Women and children out first!"
"Aloha Paige!"
Poor Darla.
Aloha, her dad, Darla and the story belongs to me. Rest goes to their respective owners.
Thanks for reading and reviewing.
