The Christmas Kid

The smell was loamy, decaying, rotting. They opened both windows and let the cold winter air blow around them. Mike turned off the heater. The smell remained.

“It’s like maybe an animal is caught in the engine or something,” he said. “Maybe a rat or something.”

“Well, pull over and let’s look.”

They stopped on Fourth Avenue and Mike got out and opened the hood. He peered into the engine, tried to look under the chassis, saw nothing. He opened the trunk. It was empty.

“I don’t know what the hell it is,” he said. “Tomorrow, when it’s light, we’ll go over it with a fine-tooth comb.”

The next day, the smell was gone, but Kelly and Mike examined the car in a gas station run by one of Cavanaugh’s friends. There were no traces of dead animals, no forgotten fruit or plant that might have rotted or decayed. The engine was clean, the chassis in good shape. On the floor of the trunk there was a faint outline of a stain, but it gave off no odor. Kelly wet her fingers from the station’s water fountain and rubbed them in the stain. There was no smell.

“Jeez,” Mike said, “maybe it was me.”

Kelly laughed. “Get out the Right Guard.”

“I guess I better.”

Kelly reported all of this to Cavanaugh, who smiled and dismissed the problem with a small wave of his hand. “Maybe it was one of those inversions you read about,” he said. “You know, from the stuff they’re always burning in Jersey and it floats over here and gives us diseases? Otherwise, how does it drive?”

“Like a dream,” Kelly said. “A real dream, Daddy.”

That night, as Kelly and Mike drove from Brooklyn to a party in Manhattan, the smell returned.

“Oh, God,” Kelly said. “What’ll we do?”

“I don’t know.”

“We’ve gotta do something, Mike!”

“Hey, don’t get mad at me, Kelly. Okay? I didn’t make the thing smell. And it’s your car!”

“But what if the smell sticks to us?” she said, her voice rising as Mike drove the Chevy across the Brooklyn Bridge. “What if it gets into us? And we sit at dinner tonight with these people, and we stink?”

“Just say we’re from Brooklyn,” Mike said, smiling.

“It’s not funny!”

He slammed the dashboard with an open palm. “Stop! Okay? No more! I don’t want to hear about it! If you’re worried, we’ll park and grab a cab, take the subway. Okay? But stop talking about it!”

They drove in silence to the party, and Kelly remembered a year when she was small and her father had taken then to Florida, and one night they drove on a road through a swamp, and the swamp smelled like this, too: rotting, dense, fetid, full of slimy things that died in the dark. Somehow…corrupt.

“I’m sorry,” she said, as they parked on an industrial street in SoHo. The party was in a loft down the block. “I just…It’s such a nice car. I wanted it to be perfect.”

“Look, Kelly, let’s forget it, okay? I don’t want to discuss it.”

She got out and slammed the door hard. “You are a real ass.…”

“Hey, why don’t you go to this party on your own? Okay? They’re your friends and it’s your car, and maybe without me around you won’t have to worry about the stink!”

She leaned on the fender and started to cry. Mike put his arm around her. “I’m sorry, baby. I really am. I am. Let’s just…We’ve gotta get rid of this car.”

But Kelly Cavanaugh didn’t get rid of the car. The next day she had it scrubbed again, steamed, cleaned. She had the mat removed from the trunk, replaced with a new one; there was some kind of stain on the metal beneath the mat, as if a chemical had burned its way into its surface; but nothing that should create an odor. Driving away, the car smelled fresh and clean.

And then at night, the fetid breath of the swamp once more engulfed her.

She went to her father and told him. He laughed, she protested, then he promised to see what he could do about getting rid of the odor.

“It’s not a matter of cleaning, Daddy,” she said. “There’s something else wrong with the car. It’s like it’s, I don’t know…cursed.”

Cavanaugh blinked. “I’ll check it out.”

The next day he called the city auto pound, trying to learn the history of the car, and got nowhere. He called a cop friend, gave him all the relevant numbers, said nothing about the smell, told a few jokes about firemen, laughed, hung up, and went about his work. Late in the afternoon, the cop called back. He had the history.

“The weird thing is this,” the cop said. “The car was found out at Kennedy Airport in the fall. No plates, no ID marks. Probably stolen somewheres, out of state. Dropped off here. But here’s the thing: there was a guy in the trunk. With three bullets in the head. A doper, they figure. He’d been there maybe a week, so I guess he was a little ripe.”

Cavanaugh thanked him and hurried home. He was watching the news when Kelly arrived from school. He turned down the sound.

“We’ll sell the car tomorrow, honey,” he said. “And get a new one.”

She looked at him and smiled. He turned back to the news.