What We Do in Vehicle City

We live in a world now where anything can happen, in a town too big for just one sister city, street corners so full of possibilities boys spin in circles; their fathers decided this place was not enough like the flyer; they had followed a whole trail of discarded things north to a location stripped bare of its tree trunks, where men threw wrenches out of open windows until all of the cops were gone. Now we all have dreams that we’re at a party in Billy Durant’s driveway when someone starts pulling up the shrubbery around the carriage house. An AM/FM radio finds its way out an upstairs window and shorts out the lights in the big, expensive swimming pool. The police arrive and we begin to run the way we are always running in dreams. We find a car waiting by the sidewalk, take it east to where the plains roll up into hillsides, where the car starts groaning and shaking and quitting and we are angry and we keep saying, “This is not what we do in America. This is no way to make a getaway. This is the reason no one knows if the buried are really dead.”