Russell Banks - A Permanent Member of the Family

Okay, that’s a car to test-drive. But instead of driving just one car, she’ll try to find two more, so she can compare three. In very little time she has added a 2002 Hyundai with 87,947 miles, clean body, no dents or rust, good tires, and has found a metallic gray 2002 Ford Taurus that she really prefers over both the Hyundai and the Neon. It’s a large four-door sedan with a tan cloth interior, and this car too has a Low Mileage!!! sign, including the actual number of miles, 55,549. It’s stodgy and boring, the kind of four-door sedan a high school math teacher or a social worker might own, nowhere near as sleek and borderline glamorous as the Neon and the Hyundai. It’ll burn more gas than either, for sure. But the respectability and conventionality of the Taurus suit her. And unlike the Neon and the Hyundai, maybe because of its size, it does not feel used to Ventana; it feels pre-owned. Well cared for. By someone like her.

She takes another slow walk around the vehicle looking for scratches or dents she might have missed on her first pass, but there aren’t any to be seen. When she steps away from the Taurus, intending to take another last look at the Neon and the Hyundai before heading for the showroom, she hears from behind her the low rattling growl of a large animal and, turning, sees a gray dog coming toward her at full speed. It’s a thick-bodied pit bull running low to the ground five or more car lengths away and closing fast, eyes yellow with rage, teeth bared, growling, not barking, a dog not interested in merely scaring her and driving her away. It’s a guard dog, not a watchdog, and it wants to attack her, attack and kill her.

Ventana doesn’t like dogs to start with, but this one terrifies her. She scrambles around to the front of the Taurus and climbs up on the hood and on her hands and knees gets up onto the roof of the car. The dog skids to a stop beside the car and circles the vehicle as if looking for a ramp or stairs. Finding none, it tries climbing onto the hood of the Taurus as she has done and falls off, which only increases its rage and determination to get at the woman on the roof of the car, a terrified and confused woman trying desperately not to panic and slip and fall off the car to the ground. “Help!” she cries out. “Somebody help me! Somebody, come get this dog away from me!”

She remembers that you aren’t supposed to show fear to a dog, that it will only embolden the animal, so she carefully, unsteadily, stands up and folds her arms over her chest and tries to look unafraid of the beast as it circles the car. She wishes she had a gun in her purse. A person is legally entitled to carry a concealed firearm in Florida but she has always said no way she’ll own and carry a gun, a mugger will only turn it against her or use it afterward in the commission of some other crime in which a person gets killed. But now, forget all that liberal crap. Now she truly wishes she had a gun to shoot this dog dead.

She is a long ways from the gate where she came in, but the cars are parked side by side tightly all the way out to the gate so that, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, she might be able to get over to where the Hispanic girl or the black man can hear her cries and call off their vicious dog. She’s wearing sneakers, thank the Lord, and has good balance for a woman her age, and it hasn’t rained all day and none of the cars appears to have been recently washed, so the metal roofs are not slippery. She slings the strap of her purse over her shoulder and across her chest, tries to calm her pounding heart, counts to ten and jumps from the roof of the Taurus to the roof of the Mercury Grand Marquis next to it.

The dog sees her land safely on the Mercury and snaps at the air in that direction, forgets about climbing onto the Taurus and races to the front of the Grand Marquis, where he leaps scratching and clawing onto the hood. But once again in his frenzy he fails to gain traction and falls off. She decides to keep moving as fast as she can, before she thinks too much about what will happen if she slips and falls or if somehow the dog manages to get onto the hood of one of the cars and then to the roof so that he too can leap from roof to roof in pursuit of her, surely catching her and ripping into her flesh, pulling her to the ground, where he will kill her.

She leaps from the Mercury up and across to a white, high-topped 1999 Jeep Cherokee, from there to a 1997 Ford Expedition, the tallest and widest vehicle in the lot, the safest rooftop, impossible for the dog to get at her up there. She probably should stay there, but she decides to keep moving, to get to the fence and the gate and somehow attract the attention of one of the people who works for Sunshine Cars USA or somebody walking past on the street who will go inside the showroom and get one of the car people to come out and call off this animal.

She leaves the safety of the big Ford Expedition and jumps to the slightly lower roof of a dark blue, sporty 2002 Mazda 626 LX, then onto a red 2005 Kia Sportage. Growling and drooling, the dog follows at ground level, not taking his eyes off her for a second. There is no way she can escape him, except by staying up on top of the cars, moving gradually closer to the high fence via the roofs of the fancier, pricier cars, genuinely pre-owned now, not used, Mercedes Benzes, Cadillacs, Lincolns, and cars from more recent years, 2010, 2011, 2012, with lower mileage advertised in the window signs, 22,000 miles, 19,000, 18,000. As the mileage numbers drop, the price tags rise: Retail Price $15999, Special Offer $12999; Retail Price $18950, Special Offer $15950.

Eventually she arrives at the last row before the fence, and from the roof of a metallic silver 2012 Ford Escape spots the gate three car lengths in front of her, chained shut and padlocked. She looks at her watch; it’s six twenty, and she remembers that the Hispanic girl said they close at six. She is trapped in here, caged, imprisoned by a vicious, ugly dog that has nothing in its brain but a burning need to kill her solely because she accidentally entered its territory.

It occurs to her that she can call Sunshine Cars USA with her cell phone. She can explain her situation to whoever answers and get him to come back to the salesroom and unlock the chain, swing open the gate, put the dog on a leash and lead him away to wherever his cage is located so she can escape hers. From her perch atop the Ford SUV she can make out the Web site, www.sunshinecarsusa.com, and the phone number for Sunshine Cars USA painted on the big glittering sign atop the cinder block salesroom. She punches in the number and after a half-dozen rings hears the lightly accented voice of the Hispanic girl. “Thank you for calling Sunshine Cars USA. Our hours are nine A.M. till six P.M. Please call back during business hours. Or at the sound of the beep you can leave a message with your number, and we’ll call you back as soon as we can. Have a nice day!”

Ventana hears the beep and says to the phone, “You locked me in with the cars by accident, and now your dog has me trapped, and I can’t get out on account of the gate is locked. Please, I need someone to come unlock the gate and get this dog away from me. Please come right away! I’m very scared of this dog. Goodbye,” she says and clicks off.

In less than two hours it will be dark. Maybe by then the dog will have gotten bored and wandered off or fallen asleep somewhere, and Ventana can climb over the fence and set herself free. She checks out the fence. It’s nearly three feet taller than she. The spiked bars are too close together for her to squeeze through. She’ll have to climb over the fence, which she is not sure she can do even if she has time to spare. She will first have to get from the rooftop of the Ford Escape down to the ground, run across the six- or eight-foot-wide lane between the Escape and the fence and somehow in a matter of seconds pull herself up and over the fence. It looks impossible. There is no way she can do it without the dog hearing her and racing back from his doghouse or wherever the beast hangs out when he isn’t terrorizing humans.