DRIVE SLOWLY AND CAREFULLY
While she read exit numbers and destinations signs aloud,
she remembered what she wanted to ask him. So he told
his daughter there was a
car driving somewhere out there
on the roads of America that once tried to cut
his arm off.
He used to work in a Detroit car factory the size of a city.
It
had everything a city did, good and bad. There was even
a black market where he
bought her a ring. Inside there,
through rows of machines and car shapes, and
all the car
making sounds, he had worked in the deepest part of the city
turning metal into cars. He used to attach doors to the frames
and the doors
came to him hanging in a row from a track
running the ceiling. It was dangerous
work. There was a
union hospital that was usually filled with wounded and
his
last job had been Vietnam. He showed his daughter
the scar that ran his arm,
where the sharp edge of a door
caught him with its steel. But he told her it
was also
like Alice
in Wonderland down there and she could have
run miles and miles of
tunnels and worlds down there
before she could find him.
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