An excerpt from C. Mallon's Dogs:
What had gone wrong with me didn’t start out with the car. It didn’t end with the car, but the car played a serious part. My friend Dylan bought it used. He got it off a guy called Styrofoam Bob. Bob was this great big autistic kid living in his parents’ converted garage on the west side of town. He was probably in his mid-thirties but everybody would tell you that he had the mental capacity of a little kid. I didn’t think that was true at all. I hadn’t ever understood that. Bob had dropped out of the high school. People were ugly to him there. It made him afraid. For a long time he would only go out at night. You’d see him walking out late in the neighborhood, big gumdrop body, top-heavy, that weird, goofy way that he walked with his knees locked. Broad hands held out right in front of him, cut up in streetlight, making shadow puppets on the split cement and talking to nobody, all by himself, all the time. Kids throwing trash from their scrapped sedans. Kids shrieking terrible things at him. Bob’s mother got him a job, how she wanted him back in the daylight. He worked part-time at the big-box store out by the mall complex, stacking steel shelves too high up for a regular man to reach, bagging the groceries, cautious and totally thoughtful. He did a really good job. His mother drove him there three days a week and his mother would pick him up after. You’d see him waiting on her, sat crosslegged on the curb in his work shirt and his big jeans, sneakers come untied and shoelaces dragging in the dry dirty gutter. I would see her around sometimes. I thought about her sometimes. I thought she had to be so tired. Somebody got to Bob when there was nobody watching him. Somebody sold him the car in bad faith. That was a cruel thing. They cleaned him right out of his savings. He paid what they wanted in cash. It hurt me to think about that. I figured it must’ve been a true blessing for Bob anyhow. Nobody watching him. Something he bought just because he was wanting it, and he had money, he’d worked for that money, and all of his money belonged to him. The car belonged to him. Bob loved the car like nobody had ever loved something before. You’d see him washing it out on his driveway. Dish soap and warm water, big yellow sponge looking just like a regular sponge in his big hands. His hands were always chapped bad from the time that he spent on the car. Anytime he closed his fist tight the knuckles would split up and bleed. He chewed and he gnawed on the pink, itching canyons forged into his quilt skin. His hands looked like hamburger meat. Bob had a lot of sensory problems. He couldn’t stand the grease feeling of all the petroleum jelly smeared onto his skin. They’d spread it on him just like it was peanut butter. It got to be so bad that his mother had to take him to the family doctor. Goldfish and rainbow aquarium gravel. Crayons in the waiting room. She had them slather Bob’s raw hands in lanolin cream and then bind his hands up in long yards of white gauze and tough, flesh-colored medical tape. They sent him back out on the world with his fists tied, the heavyweight champion, nothing won, and he cried hard, and they gave him a grape sucker.
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