Cara's Inheritance

"Let me get this straight, Cara; when you were eleven years old, you were driving along this same road with your grandfather, and he just keeled over and died?" The thought eased my foot off the gas and forced a glance at the speedometer, a common enough reflex for any driver who hears about a mishap. We were in Cara's car, but she rarely drove. With her limited attention span, Cara remaining in the passenger's seat kept the world a far safer place. And, since her Nova had more miles on it than Chevy's engineers intended, I pulled double duty as her mechanic whenever we were together.

Sitting with her back to the door and one foot sprawled across my legs, she pointed out the windshield with the joint in her hand. "Yeah, but we were on the other side of the state, closer to Minnesota," she told me. "I asked him a question, and he didn't answer me right away. Sometimes Pappy took his time. He was like, a really deep dude..." She stopped talking for a moment, looking down at the bowl of beads and half-finished necklace in her lap as if she might find an answer there. After a couple of minutes, she came back. "Then the truck just started drifting, and he tipped over onto me."

"Wow, you're lucky you didn't, I don't know, die in a fiery wreck or something."

Handing me the joint, she thought about it and exhaled. "We weren't going real fast. The truck just kinda slid into a ditch off the side of the road and rolled onto its side. I couldn't get out of my door cuz it was jammed into the ground, and there was all this bramble pressing against the window. I ended up climbing over Pappy and out the window."

"So," I started to say, interrupting myself by taking a hit. "You said he left your inheritance in these libraries we're going to. What did he leave for you? And how does it pay for you to go out on tour?"

The tour in question was the Dead's spring '77 east coast swing. The Grateful Dead always played the northeast in the late winter or early spring. Some of their best shows came on those slush tours. For serious Dead Heads, the trek – even from California – proved well worth it. Cara said she hadn't missed it for years. I'd just turned twenty at the time, and the six years Cara had on me seemed like a lot. I assumed she knew what she was talking about. She'd followed them for years, since the early '70s when Pigpen was still alive.

I'd met Cara at an Oakland Coliseum show a few months before. The band opened the rare daytime show with Might as Well. After that, the acid kicked in, and I was too high to have stored much in the way of reliable memories. I've heard the tape a few times. They closed the first set with Dancing in the Streets and opened the second with Samson and Delilah. Overall, a good show, not great. I'd seen them for the first time the summer before in Hartford, and when the tourist season ended in Metuchen, Connecticut, the little beach town where I grew up, I hitchhiked out west.

Wandering around the parking lot after the show, I saw Cara sitting on the hood of her car with another girl. They looked decidedly confused and sad. The confused part was widespread. Confused, as in dazed and confused, as in I'm still pretty high, and what do I do now? Cara was pretty in that unremarkable movie extra sort of way, but she looked sad too. When I asked why she told me Burt Nova wouldn't start.

After nixing the idea of questioning why she'd given her car a porn star name, I offered to fix it. I'd worked in my uncle's Texaco station since I was old enough not to be in the way. My cousin Skipper worked there too. He's like a big brother to me, and I spent much of my childhood puppy-dogging in his footsteps. If it burns gas, Skip can work on it; and wanting to follow his lead, I picked up a good bit about cars.

Those early Nova's are one of the more reliable vehicles to roll out of Detroit in the '70s. The 250, straight-6 runs forever, and that good ol' American steel, as long as it doesn't spend too many winters on salty roads, will outlast the owner. If the wrong person puts in a stereo, though, they'll screw up the electrical system.