Comrade Anita

I ran down the brightly-lit, tire-smelling Pep Boys aisle, five quarts of their finest motor oil tucked under my arms making sloshy noises as I bounded for the door and threatening to displace the filter nestling against my armpit. The retarded kid who had been sweeping the floor hollered after me, but just as other store employees were about to give chase, Anita and Uncle Lester turned the corner on two wheels and screeched to a stop outside the door. I tore the door of the wheezing car open and leapt in, slamming it behind me and dropping my ill-gotten lubricant bottles onto the floorboards as we peeled away, leaving a cloud of white exhaust as a token of our passage.

Pretty words, no? But some background is required for true appreciation. Uncle Lester was a member of a fun-loving group of Communists who had announced a contest. The object was to race across the country without causing any money to be spent whatsoever. This meant not only spending any ourselves, but not causing any to be spent in furtherance of our goal. My opinion of Communism is one of amused indifference, but it sounded like a fun trip. Anita was our referee, an acne-scarred wisp of a girl in cargo pants, a STOP PLATE TECTONICS shirt, boots, one of those knitted hats Slavic grandmothers wear, and a sweater coat. She was a disgruntled college dropout, I had learned the night before as we sat around with a stolen bottle of Tanqueray. Her job was to keep an eye on us and make sure we followed the rules.

Now, I'm sure some of the other teams were hippies, probably bicylcing and bumming rides, not doing anything illegal, but we were Team Theft. Team Peace and Team Keep On Truckin' were the only ones we'd had any contact with, and they were clearly of the aforementioned sort, but we were out to win this thing. I'm not entirely sure why; this being a Communist event, there wasn't much hope of a fabulous prize for the winner. But doing this thing halfassed wasn't part of the agenda, so we had liberated the only vehicle our limited street smarts could provide for, a column-shift equipped Chrysler Cordoba with a crushed velvet interior, a curious odor, and about half a quart of oil, and that none too clean. Hence the necessary acquisition of oil.

This brings us back to where the action was. We pushed the rusting behemoth into the woods to the side of a forgotten back road, managing to get the front wheels up on a large root to provide room under the oil pan. I started the draining process into an empty milk jug while Lester switched the license plates and Anita sat on a tree trunk and chain-smoked, putting the butts in a little baggie she carried around, for proper disposal later.

I was doing okay with the oil, I thought, having only done it a few times. I hadn't spilled much on the ground and had capped the milk container and tossed the old filter into a plastic grocery bag so it wouldn't get sludge everywhere. I screwed the new one in and felt for the hex nut that I'd removed to drain the old stuff.

Not on the ground. Not in any of my pockets. Not in any of the conceivable places it could have rolled to. I must have mashed it into the dead leaves on the ground when crawling back under the car, but the subtle searching I engaged in failed to uncover the wretched thing. A more thorough investigation would have attracted the attention of my traveling companions, and I don't respond well to embarassment. In fact I cry like a little girl. Options, I needed options. A stroke of MacGuyver-inspired genius found me soldering a bit of tinfoil I found in my pocket over the hole with a lighter, which kept the breach sealed temporarily, at least long enough to get us back on the road. The panic wasn't gone yet, though, just dulled. For the next three nights, while the other two slept, I would sneak off to the nearest town and look for the same model car in the hopes of stealing its drain plug and ending my worries. Each night I failed, returned, added to the ball of melted aluminum around the hole, and went to bed. Then, one morning while Lester peed at a rest stop in Nevada, Anita came up behind me, tapped me on the shoulder, smiled broadly and handed me the missing nut.

I never got an answer out of her, and am still not sure whether this was a wacky prank of her own, a test of my skill as required by her position, or (and this is unlikely) an act of charity. I do like to think sometimes that she saw me leaving every night, saw me crawling under the car, investigated and found the patchwork job done to the oil pan's orifice, and stolen the proper part somewhere. But just in case it was malice, I yoinked her earrings while she slept one night.

The rest of the trip was a lot less eventful than I'd hoped. It was a lot of sitting and taking turns driving with no help from Anita, who was there strictly as an observer. She didn't respond terribly well to my collection of whimsically offensive pickup lines either, despite our shared secret. Drive, shoplift, drive, siphon gas, drive, dine and dash. We didn't even win, but that's another story.