The Children of Juan Tabo (i)

Chapter 1

Jimmy taught Sebastian car things along the way. Things like how to double clutch, how to rev match and heal-toe, how to dead stick, how to burn out and why. But he taught him to care for cars too, how to inspect and change a fuse, how to find a vacuum leak and patch it, how to look on the pavement for clues and how to put two fingers in those puddles on the ground and work the fluid around and smell it to find where it came from.  

They used to love racing their cars down Montgomery Street more than anything. 

If you were ever in bed, dead asleep, and woke in a panic to honking and engines tearing down your neighborhood and sirens echoing and lights flashing through your windows, that was probably them out there, running for their lives.  

Sometimes Sebastian still closes his eyes at a stoplight, runs his fingers across the steering wheel and throws up a few thousand rpms and looks over to the car next to him and nods, chin up. Sometimes he still slows down on a busy highway, backs up all the cars behind him, and honks red, honks yellow, honks green and goes. Sometimes he still goes to Sonic, parks his car proper in reverse, orders a fresh Dr. Pepper, no ice, pops the hood and sits out there slurping, waiting. 

And sometimes he still takes his steering wheel off his car the way Jimmy used to when he goes anywhere and randos still look at him sideways, point and stare, point and ask questions like they’ve never seen a steering wheel their entire lives.  

Sebastian drove an ‘83 BMW 320i champagne coupe with the hood that popped open the opposite way. All the gauges were stuck. The car leaked gasoline. Every time a rando would say hey! nice car! Sebastian replied it’s for sale! But the car wasn’t a nice car at all and it wasn’t for sale, not really. You’d never seen such a thing. 

Once, the Beemer left him stranded on the side of the freeway and he had to walk a few miles with one of those red gas cans. No rando picked him up. None stopped to make sure he was okay. He could have been on his way to burn down anything. He could have poured gasoline down his shirt and stepped out into traffic.  

Jimmy drove that ‘93 Porsche 911, black and lean, like those Chevron toys with the bug eyes and big smiles, until Billie named it Ozzmatron and not a week later Jimmy was crawling out from under the thing. Now it sits there on the side of his house, the roof all caved in and gone, the stench of cigarettes and blood dried into the carpet. They stopped naming cars after that, bad juju, Jimmy said. 

After a visit with his mom in California, Sebastian left his BMW at her house. He traded it for her 2001 Toyota Camry, white and like every car on the street. She said she was worried the Beemer wouldn’t make the trip home, like she was worried about Seb breaking down somewhere in the Mojave Desert. But Seb knew this was her way of punishing him for dropping out of high school, again. 

Sebastian drove the Camry home to Albuquerque. And he grew used to the silly car. Randos stopped coming up to him in parking lots to ask him mundane car questions that he knew they didn’t even understand. He used the air conditioning, how fancy, and he never worried about a thing like the car not starting before work or stalling at a red light. He never worried about putting his groceries in the trunk. He’d flick a bogey out the window and not worry about the car catching fire. And when he put gas he stopped checking the small things like the tires and the oil and the clutch fluid and he just leaned on the side of the Camry, staring off into nowhere like everyone else at the gas station while the pump did all the work. 

They stole the Camry right out of his driveway. It was there and then gone. I was just in the damn thing, Sebastian told the police, why would I make that shit up? It was dead of night Christmas morning. Sebastian and Jimmy opened the garage to the empty space of the driveway. Seb stayed under the garage door, existing only where he stood, so sure the car would reappear. But Jimmy stepped through and out into the street and he too was soon gone. 

Sebastian thinks about that night a lot, the first time his car was stolen, Jimmy walking home and all that. He thinks about all the things he could have done different and all the things he might have done if he had any sense in him, if he hadn’t been frightened of everything in front of him, everything that dared to stare back.