Demolition Derby
My parents' favorite sport was drinking-then-driving. By Bill Vaughn

In 1965, when I was in high school, my father, Ben Vaughn, married an attractive, petite blonde named Irene. She’d been managing the Yogo Inn in Lewistown, a big motel in a little burg at the geographical center of Montana. The area was bristling with the antiballistic missiles Ben spent his long working days helping to plant under the wheat. Like Ben, Irene had been married and divorced twice before. And she had two kids, one from each marriage. Debbie, her older daughter, was in high school, and Darlene was a bright and shiny little girl. My sister, Laura, and I liked our new family immediately, and played chase games with our new stepsisters for hours.

When I needed some money that first Christmas after their wedding, Irene, who had landed a new job in Great Falls managing a record store in the Holiday Village mall, hired me on as a temporary clerk. I was paid in cash money, and the store was always full of girls. And when I was broke the next summer she convinced the manager of the Holiday Inn, where she was working the front desk, to give me a job as a bellboy. I also got to drive the hotel’s airport shuttle, ferrying around Tennessee Ernie Ford, and the Boxtops, who were coasting on their hit, “The Letter” (Give me a ticket for an aeroplane, I ain’t got time to take a fast train).

But despite the initial good vibes of Ben’s third marriage the union finally became entangled in old patterns, bad habits, and booze. One Friday in December of 1974 Ben drove straight from his office at Malmstrom Air Force Base to a bar called the Cartwheel on Tenth Avenue South to meet Irene. He parked his big white Chrysler next to her great yellow boat of an Oldsmobile and stamped the snow off his heavy boots before going in. The evening began amiably enough. But their beginnings were always better than their endings. Chain-smoking over whiskey and vodka, they shared bits of the day with each other—who said what to whom, the condition of the roads, good bargains they’d seen in this circular or that.

Irene was now working as a bookkeeper for J.C. Penney’s on Central Avenue. Ben, who had risen to the highest grade he would achieve in the Civil Service before going to work for a private contractor, was required to drive from missile site to missile site in the wheat belt, checking the welds in the construction of the silos that would house the forthcoming Minuteman III. These postings were far better-paying jobs than his first one, in the sheet metal shops at Malmstrom after World War II. But the stress was wearing. Although it wasn’t as bad it had been during the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when America’s handlers, terrified of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, had pulled out all the stops to get their own ICBM system in the ground a.s.a.p. The pressure on workers up and down the pecking order was intense. When the three of us lived for a couple of years during the early 1960s on McKinley Avenue in President’s Trailer Park, after Ben had been transferred to Grand Forks, North Dakota, he came home every night with migraines and allergies that made his usual foul moods even worse.

By seven the Cartwheel had filled with people in a holiday spirit, giddy about the storm and the coming weekend. But at Ben and Irene’s table, one drink leading to another, the topic drifted as it always did from the world at large to Resolved: Whereas my kids are nearly perfect, your kids are worthless. Ben was upset that Irene was giving her older daughter money, and Irene countered that it was none of Ben’s damn business since he handed out money to me and Laura whenever we got in a fix. Ben defended us, of course, although finding something positive to say about me was a challenge.

I’d grown my hair in a long shock that looked like it was trying to escape, dropped out of college with three credits left to earn, and had started an underground newspaper that advocated worldwide socialist revolution. Plus, I had no visible means of support. Despite Irene’s helping hand when I was in high school I’d spent most of my senior year skipping class, driving around the back roads of Cascade County with my pals, drinking beer, hunting birds and game in and out of season, and offering my virginity to every girl that could stand to be around me.

Our house, which I called the Turkey Coop because that’s what it was when Ben bought it in 1953, became our favorite watering hole on the many days we avoided school. That is, until Irene came home early from work one fine spring afternoon to find us on the roof, singing like drunken sailors, empties scattered on the lawn, the kitchen scrambled.

Irene finished her vodka on the rocks and carefully set the glass on the table. “Rat hole? Your kids are the rat hole.”

A man on his way home dropped by the table to say hello. Ben schmoozed him vigorously in order to ignore Irene. When he finally left, Ben turned back to her, probably knowing what he would find. And, indeed, her response to this florid glad-handing was a set-piece, a well-practiced retreat into an expert silence that always drove him crazy because if nothing was said there was nothing to attack.

“Say something,” he ordered at last.

She rose from her chair and reached for her coat. “What’s the point?” Ben grabbed her wrist and told her to sit the fuck down. She shook him off and made her way with the synthetic dignity of the night-blooming alcoholic to the door, knowing he wouldn’t risk a public scene. Outside, the temperature had dropped and the snow was drifting. She drove judiciously down 10th Avenue, then south away from the light toward Rat Flats, our backwater neighborhood along the Missouri River five miles from town. On the last of the roller-coaster hills near the Ayrshire Dairy her Olds hit a patch of glaze and spun around twice before coming to a stop in the middle of the two-lane. The engine died. When she tried to get it started again it flooded. The wind was driving streamers of snow across the asphalt.

Ben downed his whiskey and slipped into his gray Air Force-issue parka, affecting a nonchalance that no one who knew him well ever bought. He went to the bar to pay the tab, exchanging bon mots with the seasoned troops arrayed around Smitty, the bartender. As was his custom following one of these public snits, Ben over-tipped. More pissed off with each passing mile, he was doing 60 by the time he reached the top of the Ayrshire hills.

When he suddenly saw the Olds in the middle of the road his first thought was: The bitch is trying to kill me. He knew enough about glaze to keep his foot off the brake. Maybe he could avoid a broadside disaster with some judicious steering, but getting around her cleanly without hitting the ditch would be tough, especially with all those drinks running round his brain.

He almost made it. But at the last moment his shimmying rear bumper clipped her front fender hard enough to send both vehicles spinning through a barbed wire fence and into a hay field, rooster-tails of powder flailing the air. The lights in a farmhouse nearby went on. Within minutes there were people on the scene helping the feckless travelers from their ruined cars. Ben and Irene were not only unscathed, they were even sobered. Sobered enough, anyway, to pass the scrutiny of the young sheriff’s deputy who showed up to call in the tow trucks and give the couple a ride home. There would be a good laugh back at the office when the deputy told the story.

If anyone of these men had happened to check, they would have discovered that this incident would be at least the third time the authorities had been called out to Rat Flats because of some fracas involving the Vaughns. A couple years earlier Ben and Irene had gone a couple rounds at the Turkey Coop resulting in black eyes for the missus and cuts and abrasions for the hubby. When he lunged for her after she had tried to scratch his eyes out, he had crashed through a sliding glass door. A deputy talked down the combatants, and no charges had been filed. 

The morning after their demolition derby on the Ayrshire Road Ben and Irene sat in the kitchen over eggs and grits, nursing hangovers and listening to the wind. Ben was penitent. He vowed yet again that he was going to cut back on the booze and get his temper under control. Irene studied him and sipped from her can of Diet Pepsi. On weekends and after work you saw her more and more often with a can of Diet Pepsi. Of course, there wasn’t any soda in it—the can served as her personal vodka transportation device.

While Ben expounded on the new leaf he was about to turn she wondered to herself what would have happened if they had made it home safe and sound the night before. Well, yes, it was true that her beautiful Oldsmobile would be sitting out in the driveway right now without a scratch. But she knew that she wouldn’t have fared so well herself personally.

This time, she decided, she’d been lucky.

COPYRIGHT © 2009 NILL VAUGHN