I don’t recognize the two boys who carry my son.

I search their faces for some familiarity, something in the curve of the mouth or the shape of the nose that will remind me that they’d once played soccer with Brandon or had ridden the bus with him to elementary school. Nothing –- not the pierced eyebrow of the taller one or the Chinese character tattooed on the shorter one’s neck – remind me of anyone smiling in a team photo or waving goodbye from a bus window. I can’t identify a trace of boy in these sullen teenagers who carry my son to the couch without explanation.

“Is he hurt?” my wife asks. Small lines near the corners of her mouth, like cracks, seem more pronounced than I remember.

They drop Brandon on the couch rather than lying him down gently. The smell of liquor seeps through my son’s pores and fills the living room with each exhaled breath. The two boys pass me wordlessly, probably wishing they had left Brandon on the front porch instead of carrying him inside; their clothes smell of marijuana as they slide by, turning their shoulders to avoid touching me.

“He’s okay,” I answer. “Just drunk. Passed out.”

The shorter boy, the one with the tattoo, snickers at that, but they’re already out the door.

“What’s your name?” I ask, my voice loud and sharp. “Are you the Harrington boy? Jim’s son?”

They hurry out the door, leaving me standing in the middle of the living room clenching and unclenching my fists.

Katherine sits on the edge of the couch, and touches Brandon’s hair, his face, his shoulders, checking for damage. “Are you sure he’s not hurt?”

“He’ll be fine. I’ll stay up with him with him. Get some sleep.”

Katherine frowns, deepening those lines that have appeared so suddenly and uninvited, like the gray hair silvering my temples.

When did we get old?

When did Brandon?

“Wake me if you need me, all right?” She rises and heads to the stairs, rubbing my shoulder as she passes. There’s sadness in her touch, an acknowledgment that we’re moving together into a new phase of parenting, a phase we’re not quite prepared for.

From our driveway, an engine roars to life. I don’t know the make – Ford, Chevy, Plymouth – but I know the type without looking: a teenager’s first set of wheels, the kind that barely passes inspection, the kind that me and my buddy Sean had when we were Brandon’s age.  I’m not surprised to hear the tires squeal or the horn held in a continual blare as the boys peel down the street, probably with the headlights doused.

I’d have done the same thing.

The house is quiet after Katherine goes upstairs and the engine fades. I turn to Brandon. His shoes, unlaced army boots, are caked with mud, and I wonder where he’s been, imagining him vomiting in bushes or passed out on some lawn after a night of birthday drinking with friends I do not know. The boots slip off easily, and I take them to the front hall, locking the door and turning off the porch light before returning to the living room.

Then I do something that would’ve horrified me if my father had done it to me when I was sixteen; I go through my son’s pockets. I start with his gray hoodie, looking for –what? A bowl? A nickel bag? Condoms? His jacket yields nothing but a few crumpled dollars, a package of mints, and a one-ounce bottle of Visine.

They haven’t changed the label in thirty years.

Like a cop, I pat the front of his jeans, expecting to feel the outline of a lighter or a plastic pill bottle through the faded denim. All I feel is his cell phone and pull it out and place it on the coffee table. I roll Brandon on his side and shove my hand in his back pocket and tug free his wallet. I open it and find seven more crumpled dollars and a slip of paper with the name ‘Linda’ written in a girl’s swirling hand above a phone number, the ‘i’ in her name dotted with a heart. I flip through the plastic credit card slots, searching for rolling papers or a joint. I find nothing, just his high school I.D., his library card, and learner’s permit that he had gotten earlier this afternoon, the afternoon of his birthday. I had offered to drive him, but he said a buddy would take him. I hope Linda, who signs her name with floating hearts, gave him a ride to the DMV.

I toss the wallet on the coffee table next to his phone and sit in a chair facing the couch, leaving Brandon unconscious on his side, realizing I’m different from my father: I know what to look for. If either of my parents had found my bottle of Visine when I was in high school, I would have mumbled something about allergies or hay fever and they would have believed me. What else could possibly bloodshot a teenager’s eyes?

The chair squeaks as I shift my weight. Tomorrow, when Brandon is sober, I’ll need to talk to him. What will I say? What can I say? Who the hell am I to lecture anyone?

I try not to think of Sean, but that’s impossible. I knew all the old memories would flare as soon as I’d heard that engine rumble to life in my driveway. I can picture us, both impossibly young, our bodies tan and hard, bent under the hood of that Dodge, working on it every chance we got.

“I love this car,” he always said. “A 440 under the hood, eight cylinders, Detroit fuckin’ muscle.”

“She’s still not running right,” I’d answer, adjusting the carb, or dicking with the fuel pump, or playing with the belts, or whatever I was trying to fix while Sean went on about our car.

Technically, Sean owned the Charger; the title was in his name, but it was our car. We bought it off of Chuck Mancuso the summer Sean and I turned seventeen and kept it up on blocks in Sean’s driveway while we worked on it. We used parts we found at my uncle’s junk yard – a radiator, a passenger-side door, front seats – and tools Sean borrowed from his father’s collision shop. Sean’s dad would order the parts we couldn’t find, so we only paid wholesale, or Sean would just take them from the storeroom when his dad wasn’t around. We worked on the car most of the summer, pouring every dime we had into it, busting our knuckles when a wrench slipped, trying hard to get the grease off our hands at night but never getting it all so our palms were constantly black lined.

The only book we cracked that summer was Chilton’s Auto Repair.

It took us until mid-August before the Charger could even pass inspection. By then, the days had already grown shorter.

Sean didn’t want to take it out that night; that was my idea. He wanted to paint it first and not let anyone see it until we pulled into the school’s parking lot on the first day with the engine revving.

“They’ll all come up to us,” he’d said. “They’ll want to touch it, run their hands along the fenders and finger the chrome. They’ll want to hear the engine and ask to drive it, but we won’t let them.”

I couldn’t blame him for wanting to paint it first. The Charger’s original color was bright blue, but our passenger side door was white and the hood tan, both parts cannibalized from wrecked Chargers at the junk yard. The tire wells were black primed where we’d cut out the rust and fitted new metal. It needed to be painted, but I couldn’t wait.

I was seventeen and the summer night was warm with possibilities. So I talked Sean into it, and we cruised around town, drinking from sweating beer bottles and doing one-hitters at stoplights. I was driving and felt as powerful as the horsepower under the hood.

I don’t remember whose idea it was to go to Ohio Street.

We talked about it enough during all those days we worked on the Charger: how we’d take on all comers, shut them down, and then spray our initials under the bridge.

In the 70’s, Ohio Street was a lonely stretch of road lined by abandoned warehouses. When manufacturing headed south, there was nothing left to warehouse, so the red brick buildings were boarded up and the gates padlocked. It was one of those forgotten roads perfect for street racing. Nobody went down there. There was no reason to, except to race.

We heard all the stories from the older guys who hung out the junk yard, scavenging parts for their own cars: how they ran for pinks or money and how every summer someone would spin out or flip over when they hit the bend right after the overpass. I wasn’t worried about wrecking or winning any money. I just wanted to see how fast The Charger could go.

“Are we early?” Sean asked, as we turned onto Ohio Street.

“Maybe we’re late.”

“It’s not even dark yet. Maybe they don’t race every night.”

I pulled on my beer and gunned the engine, the only noise down there.

“So what do you want to do?”

“Let’s just wait and see if anyone shows,” I said.

We sat on that forgotten road with the engine idling and drank warm beer and smoked dope as the skies darkened and those haunted looking warehouses receded into shadows. We listened to the radio, argued about bands, talked about girls, and waited for someone to show. Nobody did, and I begin to wonder if Ohio Street racing was just junkyard talk.

“Fuck it,” I said, after a while. “Let’s race anyway.”

“Against who?”

“Us.”

I pressed the accelerator until the RPM needle redlined then popped the clutch. The tires squealed and smoked and the Charger hurtled forward.

“Christ,” Sean said, spilling his beer.

I ran through the gears, watching the speedometer climb, wanting to see where we’d top out.

Thirty.

Forty.

The needle mesmerized me.

Sixty.

The power vibrated in my crotch. Sean rebel yelled out the window, the wind blowing back the sound and his hair.

Seventy-five.

We rocketed under the overpass.

Eighty.

We rounded the bend.

And there he was.

Frozen.

A rusting shopping cart on the shoulder filled with empty bottles.

Still holding the beer can he retrieved from the middle of Ohio Street.

Wearing a green Army jacket in the middle of August.

I stood on the brake pedal, the squealing tires mixing with our screams as I fought the wheel. The air filled with the smell of burning brake pads and spilled beer. I saw the curly hair that hung to his shoulders, his scruffy beard, his accepting expression.

The Charger smashed into him at eighty-five miles an hour with a haunting, soul-leaving sound of an exploding headlight, twisting metal, and shattering bones.

I was six blocks away before I pulled over.

“Jesus. Jesus. Jesus,” Sean kept repeating. Tears ran down his face. “Jesus.”

“I couldn’t stop. I was going too fast. He was just there.”

“Jesus.”

“What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know. Jesus.”

A siren wailed and Sean and I looked at each other, his eyes big and wet like they were made of pure pupil. The siren grew louder as it neared us. It was moving fast.

“Christ.”

We saw the fire truck turn on Ohio Street and race away from us, the siren fading as the distance between us grew.

I opened the door and leaned out, retching until there was nothing left.

“We got to get out of here,” Sean said.

Two days passed before a highway crew found the body. A small article appeared in the paper about the unknown man found alongside Ohio Street. The police asked for people to come forward if they had any information on the hit-and-run or the identity of the victim.

Nobody thought it strange that we replaced the bumper, the grill and the headlight; we’d spent all summer swapping out parts from the junk yard. Sean’s old man said we should have painted it bright blue like the factory original, but we told him black was  much cooler, that the girls would love it. He shook his head and muttered, Kids.

My stomach lurched each time our phone rang or someone knocked on the door.

A week later there was a second article. The police had identified him from VA records: Robert J. Simmons. Twenty-nine years old.  Address and next-of-kin unknown.  He had survived two tours in Viet Nam only to be killed on Ohio Street.

There were no more articles after that.

Before school started, Sean and I sold the Charger to his cousin from Pennsylvania who had come up for Labor Day.  We split the money.

The nightmares started right after.  Sometimes the collision would play out as it happened, but other times the Charger would be caught in an endless skid, the tires screeching, the brakes trying to grip, and Robert Simmons would just stand there, staring at me through the windshield, holding that beer can, waiting for the impact that never comes. Even now I’ll sometimes wake up screaming and Katherine will hold me, wipe my face with soft palms, and beg me to tell what’s in my dreams.

I always answer that I don’t remember.

I didn’t see much of Sean after we sold the car. Everyone thought we’d drifted apart because we didn’t have the Charger anymore, but we drifted apart because the Charger was always between us. After we sold it, we never spoke about that night again, as if our silence could bury what happened.

Brandon rolls over on his back and moans in his drunken sleep, pulling me away from that damn Charger. I move to him, and sit on the edge of the couch.  He groans again, this boy, my boy, the child I’ve kept safe and protected for sixteen years, the one who thinks I give money to the homeless because I’m a good man. How will he see me tomorrow if I tell him about Ohio Street, if I warn him about what can happen when he’s out trying to see how fast he can go?

I brush the hair from his forehead, then let my fingers trail down his cheek, dreading when he opens his eyes.

Stephen G. Eoannou earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte and has taught at both Ball State University and The College of Charleston. His work has appeared in the Barely South Review, Boomtown:Explosive Writing from Ten Years of the Queens University of Charlotte MFA Program, Pulp Modern, and will be forthcoming from Echo Ink Review and the Young Adult Review Network. Eoannou lives and writes in Buffalo, New York.