It’s a flashback, these waves on waves of heat, the searing heaviness of the air enough to make me recoil as I step out of the building at the end of my day’s work. In more hapless times, there was no refuge, and my latest skirmish with the mechanical infidelities of my reliable-up-to-lately commuter car left me with the lone option of climbing into a forty-one-year-old black French sedan with no ventilation beyond what blows in, at the speed of transit, through the little flap under the windshield when, and only when, I’m in motion.
Ordinarily, it’s a delight, but the heat saps my will from the moment I step out of my well-conditioned cave, and I have the grim reminder of my younger days when I had so few escapes from such things. So I step out of my building, fighting the urge to hiss like a vampire facing into the burning, trudge to the car, and head for home. The strange thing is that my little car seems to relish this heat, like it’s something to loosen its tired joints and set the petrochemicals flowing, so while I’m sweltering and reaching a nadir of overall desire to engage with the world, my old 2CV is practically giddy, being looser and more responsive than normal, and quicker, too, though that’s a relative term.
I battle my way through the traffic on the highway until I hit the point where I can bail out and make the rest of the trip home on more civilized and slower roads, albeit with untamed hills and valleys that render much of my trip like a roller coaster, where I plunge into the depths with a heavy accelerator so I’ll retain some fraction of the speed limit as I crest the next hill, and I distract myself from the pressure cooker by trying to come up with an exact metaphor for the experience of driving a car designed in the 1930s to get rural French farmers on the road.
It’s easy, when the image comes into focus. As a friend in the fellowship of Citroën enthusiasts says, a 2CV isn’t a car—it’s a creature—and it is my firm faith that this is the true and noble word. It is, and what kind of creature it is varies, but this afternoon, beating a hasty return home through uninhabitable skies, I know.
This car is as close as one can get to driving a beagle. It’s all floppy stubbornness, noisy joy, and often incomprehensible determination. It is a beagle, ears flapping wildly in the stream of overheated air, and it will allow me to guide it, but on its terms, because that is what beagles and forty-one-year-old French cars do. Everything else is just a machine for moving around in the asphalt horror of modern American life, just an appliance with a task and execution so dreadfully, insufferably dull that ever car has to come with an “infotainment” system to stop you from dying of boredom while you’re out getting groceries.
I sing.
I sing in my car, and it’s the aspirational kind, and, because the songs that are easiest to sing at the top of one’s lungs are often the old songs, or the show tunes, or the torch songs that existed before we all collectively decided that singing songs for ourselves was too much work, and too imperfect, and too challenging to our insecurities, but in a car with no radio and my brain stuffed with Ella Fitzgerald, I’m going to eschew all the usual fears and sing.
I’m midway through “Blue Skies,” spit-roasting at a stoplight, when I hear a polite “pip” of a honk from the pink Miata next to me, and I look over.
The driver is a beautiful, burly black lady of a certain age, beaded like a jeweled statue with sweat, in oxblood lipstick with a flawless line penciled in for emphasis, and she peels off a pair of oversized sunglasses and interrupts my aria.
“I don’t think I’ve ever loved you more than I do right now,” she says, brightly and with a broad smile.
I blush. How could I not?
“Oh go on,” I say, starting to set up a little coy quip that I always go back to as a happy comic habit, but she adds something even more enigmatic.
“You don’t know me yet,” she says, “but you’ll know me someday.”
I’m rendered silent, except that I’m smiling hard, in spite of how truly wretched the weather is, but before I can react further, the light changes, her sunglasses go back on, and she darts off, waving as she pulls away.
And that’s the thing—in a country where Citroëns are nonexistent and old ones are even more rare, where you can go a year or two before seeing another one, there’s this notion of being Citroën-famous in your region, where people see you all the time, no more than any other frequently seen conveyance, but they remember seeing you because you just cut an unfamiliar figure on the road. It’s a reminder, really, to repress any impulses you might have to commit a crime, even a small one, because you’ll get caught. There’s a magic, though, in being a vehicle by which someone’s day is briefly brightened with a smile or a chuckle, sometimes accompanied by an upraised phone camera as you end up in someone else’s photo library, and I think it’s why I teeter right at the edge of magical realism some days, where the moments I relate when I arrive home get an eyeroll and a bit of healthy skepticism, but it’s okay.
It’s just me and this beagle against the world, just for a bit, before I have to climb out of my metaphors and return to earth, where utility bills and calendars and chores await, and until then, we are both creatures, fresh out of a fairytale I haven’t finished writing yet, and there’s still a song in my heart, so I pucker up and whistle an extended and imprecise rendition of “Mas Que Nada” until I’m at my driveway and back to my life.
We eat dinner, I clean up, tend to my chickens, and my partner and kid sing together while I tend to the affairs of home life. As we’re all winding down, I step outside, drag the trash can to the street, and a vixen fox standing next to the forsythia about ten feet away suddenly screams one of those piercing vixen fox screams that is so uncannily like the sound of genuine murder that it comically stands one’s hair on end.
I dart in the house, still chuckling, and head for bed and beagle dreams.
© 2025 Joe Belknap Wall