The sun reflecting off a chrome bumper discarded by the side of the road like the wrapper of a fast food hamburger momentarily blinded Granny El Bee, and in that moment she saw her future. In that future, she almost died. Evangelho, the driver who sat beside her did, as had Wocjik and Sullivan who sat immediately behind her and Ibby, the translator who rode with her because interrogation was her responsibility. Dozens of others in the convoy of trucks, jeeps, and Humvees were injured, most seriously, vision loss, hearing impairment, cognitive deficits, amputation, hollow husks repatriated and consigned to Veterans Administration facilities like high school graduation rings pawned for a pittance by owners who preferred to forfeit than redeem. Prisons warehoused those with emotional or psychological injuries which played out as criminal misbehavior, drunkenness, assaults, spousal abuse, the occasional hostage taking. Suicides cleaned up the stragglers.
The first ten clicks had been peaceful, no friendlies, no hostiles, no stray animals, no children in tattered rags playing in the dirt, just dust tires threw up from the gravel road which ribboned out behind them and the glare of the sun that mummified moisture out of everything, living or dead. The bridge over the river looked as tranquil and serene as a photograph in the travel section of Granny El Bee’s Sunday paper back home. As the lead truck reached its far end of the bridge, as the trail jeep began to cross, a troll hiding beneath it detonated a bomb. Into the river the convoy plunged like Match Box cars swept away by an angry child. Granny El Bee, Sergeant Major to her comrades, remained conscious long enough to kill that troll, a clean shot which exploded its head like the overripe watermelons used for targets in the shooting gallery at the Hinsdale County Fair. In her prime, she targeted the seeds, not the melon. That morning, she was in her prime.
Or, so she told her grandchildren years later, when, old enough to hear her stories, they gathered at her feet. Maybe, she said, her rifle was the flash of light revealing her future. Maybe the bomb. Or, the sun as she tumbled off the bridge. The sparks when the brackish water of the river slapped her face before parting to let her enter. The sunlight which descended with her to the riverbed. She didn’t know. The whole experience, she explained, was like being trapped inside a fairy tale where no one lived happily ever after. Her grandchildren adored fairy tales. They did not need happy endings.
“Come closer,” Granny El Bee beckoned. “My voice isn’t as big as it used to be.”
A blanket cocooned Granny El Bee’s lap and legs in a polyester tent moth-eaten with peep holes. Since that day on the bridge, the day of the blinding light, her legs had been sensitive to heat and cold. With therapy and rehabilitation, swimming with weights strapped to her ankles, she had regained the ability to stand, but only for short periods; to walk, but not run; to climb stairs, one step at a time. Skin grafts enabled her to wear dresses and sleeveless blouses. Her face, by God’s grace, was as pristine as the evening of her Senior Prom. The troll had stripped her of her belief in God’s grace. Her beauty had not returned it. Beneath the blanket, leg restraints chafed her skin raw and red like a battlefield wound.
“Tell us the story of The Chrome Bumper,” Walker said. Her oldest grandchild, Walker had inherited Pappy George’s way of garbling syntax and tripping over multi syllable words. Smart as a whip, he compensated by talking in short sentences, simple words. A philosophy major at Pappy George’s alma mater, Walker loved to debate whether ‘this statement is false’ was true or not. In the years before the day of the blinding light when Granny El Bee was in college, she argued both sides of that proposition at the weekly meetings of Dr. Strange’s Philosophical Society; but beyond the ivory tower where chrome bumpers were discarded by the side of the road like the wrappers of fast food hamburgers, where trolls detonated bombs under bridges, where people with too much time on their hands wrote learned papers on whether ‘This statement is false’ was true or not, beyond that ivory tower, the joke had been on her.
“Why, I told that story last time. Wouldn’t you rather hear another? The Snake in the Sand Dune or The Canary and the Vulture?”
“The Chrome Bumper’s our favorite,” Walker replied. His philosophy classes enabled him to understand the truth of The Chrome Bumper was not in whether the story events actually happened. It was, as Granny El Bee insisted, a true war story. She had tried to explain this to Dr. Joblon with whom she spent an hour talking three days a week, Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, but in Dr. Joblon’s universe there was scientific truth and make believe and never the two did meet. She pitied him, living a life where the magic of ‘Once upon a time’ did not operate.
“My daughters and sons-in-law,” she told Dr. Joblon at least once weekly, “do not approve of my stories.” When the grandchildren were younger, they feared the nightmares they might have, but never did; the insecurities, the anxieties, which plagued the children of their friends, but not theirs; the warping of their children’s sense of right and wrong, the distortion of their moral compasses as if the earth’s magnetic field had reversed. With lawyers and restraining orders and involuntary commitment to an institution for the mentally deranged, they did their best to shelter them from the pollution of her stories, but somehow, whenever Granny El Bee opened her oven door, the grandchildren, wherever they were, however far away, whatever they were doing, sensed the aroma of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. Old enough to make their way over the river and through the woods to her cottage, some on bikes, others by bus or on foot, they were drawn to her like Hansel and Gretel to the gingerbread house, hungry for more sweets, hungry for more stories. When Walker was home from college, they piled into his car.
“Once upon a time,” Granny El Bee began, “in the days of my youth, cars had chrome bumpers. Boys polished them up shiny as God’s forehead so they could comb their hair in them. After dates, girls used them as mirrors to repair their lipstick before being taken home.”
“Did you do that, Granny El Bee?” the twins, Barbie and Jen asked. They spoke in unison with the precision of actors who had been rehearsing since birth. “Repair your lipstick?”
“Oh, I never let the boys kiss me. I saved all my kisses for Pappy George.” “You must have saved up a lot,” the twins said. “Where do you keep the kisses you save for us?”
“I bake them into chocolate chip cookies and whenever I need more kisses I eat another cookie.”
“Did Pappy George’s car have a chrome bumper?” Barbie and Jen asked.
In the corridor outside Granny El Bee’s room, Dr. Joblon observed her through the small one-way window in the door, something he did prior to each of their sessions to gauge her mood, her mental state, her grasp of reality. He was addicted to the peepholes. They brought out the voyeur in him. There was something pleasurable about spying, about the way it made him feel dirty as if he were getting away with something illegal. In her empty room, Granny El Bee was as animated as a teenage girl telling her best friend about her latest crush. Their session would be lively.
“The Chrome Bumper,” Granny El Bee said, “a story of many beginnings but one ending.” Sometimes it was a stone wall on a country road which ripped the bumper from the face of Pappy George’s car. Sometimes it was a truck passing too close across the front of the car. Sometimes it was an Improvised Explosive Device; or, a rocket or mortar; or, several rounds from an AK-47. Sometimes it was Granny El Bee herself, frustrated over the lack of armaments and armor furnished by the nation she was defending. Whatever the cause, the story always ended the same way: a chrome bumper abandoned by the side of the road like a fast food hamburger wrapper. She despised fast food hamburgers.
“Straighten my blanket, Walker, please.”
Her legs felt wet and soggy. Again, she was lying on the river bed beneath the bridge. Overhead, a ceiling of sunlight beckoned, heavenly from her vantage point, hellish to those on dry land. Silhouetted by light, shards of jeep and truck and Humvee, chunks of concrete, body parts, hands and feet, arms and legs, torsos, bits and pieces of a head, the troll’s head, settled around her. And one chrome bumper, origin unknown. None of the vehicles in the convoy had chrome bumpers.
“Was it Pappy George’s chrome bumper?” Herbert asked. Herbert, Walker’s kid brother and first cousin to the twins, was of an age where he’d rather kiss a frog than a girl.
Granny El Bee smiled with bemusement at Herbert’s question, the same bemusement with which she snarled at her commanding officer when he ordered her to abandon a truck loaded with weapons, ammunition, and rations because they did not have time to change a tire as they rushed to beat the British to a deserted oasis so they could claim credit for liberating what didn’t need liberating. Her CO’s lust for medals and promotions resulted in casualties. Two weeks later he died in a firefight, a corpse weighed down with decoration. Friendly fire. Her friendly fire.
“Once upon a time,” Granny El Bee said again, “when Pappy George was young, drunk, and hiding out from Vietnam in a national guard unit where his every absence was marked present, his pappy gave him a Deuce Coupe, yellow with a flathead 8 and suicide doors.”
“What’s a suicide door?” Jen and Barbie asked.
“Oh, you know from the last time.”
“Tell us again.”
“Train your mind to remember. If you don’t remember the past, you’re condemned to repeat it.”
“Why were they called suicide doors?” the twins asked.
“For the same reason the knob on Pappy George’s steering wheel was called a suicide knob. Your grandfather loved that car. He washed and polished it and tuned it every Sunday before church and changed the oil every 500 miles. And it was fast, the fastest car in the valley, so fast it took all comers at the drag races on the old mining road south of town. Piston money Pappy George called the hundreds of dollars he won every weekend.”
“Did you ride with Pappy George?” Barbie and Jen asked.
“He could have any girl he wanted except me. They lined up to ride with him and he would take them out to the desert. You can imagine what happened there, but never in the car. Pappy George always put his deuce coupe first.”
Granny El Bee yawned. Her head drooped forward. Her chin rested on her chest. Her head jerked up as if someone had touched a live wire to her neck, then settled back as if she were a dying swan. “It was hot, triple digit hot, the day the stranger rode into town in a deuce coupe just like Pappy George’s except for its color. The eighth or ninth consecutive day. Stark, the stranger called himself. No first name. Just Stark. Said he was born in a cave when asked where he came from. Raised in its shadows. His deuce coupe had a cherry red hood, an ice cap white body, and the shiniest chrome bumpers you ever saw.”
“Heard a rumor,” Buzz Gunderson, one of Pappy George’s faithful, told Pappy. Some said Buzz earned his nickname because he was always a little drunk; others from his Marine style haircut. In truth, his grandpa dubbed him Buzz after he set fire to the bee hives in his neighbor’s apiary. “Heard he was run out of New Mexico for playing chicken off the mesas,” Buzz continued. “Cops didn’t care as long as it was hoods being killed, but when some high school quarterback couldn’t bail because his sleeve caught on the door handle, that was different.”
“Dead weight,” Pappy George taunted Stark when he saw the bumpers.
“Dead weight,” echoed The Faithful, Buzz and Goon, Crunch and Moose, Chick and Cookie, who basked in Pappy George’s reflected light and hung with him in the parking lot behind Dawson High School, polishing their cars and whistling at the girls. They wore leather jackets over bleached white tee shirts with Luckies or Camels rolled up in the sleeve like epaulets, pegged pants, and except for Buzz, hair which flowed back from the temple in waves. Pappy George led them like a shepherd his flock.
“I’ll take you without shifting out of third,” Pappy George challenged, but Stark ignored him. Before long, Stark’s notoriety, who he was, where he came from, why he came to the valley, whether the rumors were true, lured the babes worse than James Dean or Elvis Presley in their primes. Poor Pappy George. The Faithful, dismissed by Stark for what they weren’t, still followed him, but as for the girls, only teenyboppers and weenyboppers fresh out of training bras lined up for rides. No more desert flings, not with statutory hanging over his head. The vacancy devoured his soul, his ego.
“What’s statutory?” Barbie and Jen interrupted.
“Statutory is what they call the sculpture of Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial,” Walker said.
“Granny El Bee,” the twins pleaded. “If we don’t know what’s statutory, how will we understand the story?”
Walker put his finger to his lips.
Granny El Bee closed her eyes and faded, once again, into the valley’s heat. “Two weeks later,,” she said, “Stark sent word he was ready.
“The mining road south of town,” Pappy George replied. “High noon on Saturday.”
“Crawford’s Cliff,” Stark said, “to see who chickens out first.”
“I’m not crashing my deuce coupe.”
“Steal a car. We’re playing guts, not speed.”
“That what you going to do?”
Stark smirked. “Show up and see.”
“One condition. I want to take you down first. Your deuce coupe against mine on the old mining road south of town. Quarter mile from a dead start. Midnight Friday.”
“Winner gets the loser’s deuce coupe,” Stark said.
For the rest of the week, Pappy George cloaked his deuce coupe in the garage behind his house where he tuned and re-tuned the engine within an inch of its life. He took out the passenger seat and every ounce of dead weight, even the outside mirrors and radio antenna. He burned the gas in the tank until there was only enough to go a quarter mile, invested in special tires, and polished it until it looked like a sunspot on the face of the earth. He trailered it to the starting line.
“I was the starter.” Granny El Bee said. “I stood in the center of the road facing the finish line holding a flashlight. Plato Ray, a DJ who broadcast from a pirate ship off the coast, was the judge at the finish line. The temperature was on the high side of ninety that Friday midnight. The Faithful sweated in their leather jackets and pegged pants. I held my breath as I lit the torch. Tires screeched in my ears. Air currents from the deuce coupes peeling forward pummeled me. The race didn’t take but a few seconds. They never did. Stark won by the width of his chrome bumper.”
“You cheated,” Pappy George screamed.
“I’ll take it off and we’ll race again.”
“Pappy George siphoned gas from Buzz’s car,” Granny El Bee said, “and they lined up for the rematch. Carrying less weight, Stark won by more than a foot. He drove away in Pappy George’s yellow deuce coupe followed by Plato Ray who drove Stark’s.
“The next night Pappy George hot wired a ’49 Mercury Coupe from Dean Wood’s used car lot. He and The Faithful gathered in the parking lot of the observatory at Crawford’s Cliff. The slot for the telescope smiled at the heavens. Beyond the parking lot, a field flattened by the summer heat ended at the edge of a cliff, hundreds of feet into a gorge where a river, millions of years ago, once flowed. A white post and rail fence rimmed the field, a decoration rather than a barrier. Half of Dawson High was there. Moose and Chick stood lookout for the cops. Goon and Crunch told dirty jokes to keep Pappy George’s spirits up. The Faithful drank beer and smoked cigarettes. Pappy George paced the white lines marking the spaces in the lot.’
“After,” Pappy George said when Buzz offered him a beer and a butt.
“He won’t show,” Buzz said.
“He showed in New Mexico, didn’t he?” Pappy George said.
“Put Crunch by the edge. When you’re opposite him, bail. Don’t face front. Look to the side. All you’ll see is Crunch. Nothing to be scared of.”
“If I don’t watch Stark . . .”
“Fuck Stark. No one’ll call you chicken if you bail.”
Granny El Bee rubbed her hands as if she were trying to massage blood intoher fingers. “A few minutes before midnight, the roar of lake pipes rose from Griffith Road, the road up the mountain to Crawford’s Cliff.”
“He’s driving my deuce coupe,” Pappy George said.
“You said you were going to steal a car,” Buzz said to Stark.
“No. I said you should steal a car. I didn’t have to.”
“I was the starter again,” Granny El Bee said. Her voice seemed to come from a hollow place inside her. “I stood back to the cliff so I wouldn’t see what happened. I lit the torch. Stark was off the line like he was drag racing. Pappy George popped the clutch and stalled. Stark rolled out of Pappy George’s deuce coupe on the far side of Crunch. It sailed off the cliff like a yellow bird taking flight. Its chrome bumpers flashed in the moonlight. A few second later we heard the crash and saw the fireball.”
“I want a rematch,” Pappy George shouted. “She stalled out on me.”
“Cowards don’t get rematches.”
“That night,” Granny El Bee told her grandchildren, “Pappy George started drinking. He became wild and reckless. He challenged everyone to play chicken off Crawford’s Cliff. No one took him up on it. Stark disappeared as mysteriously as he had arrived. The Faithful lost their faith. After graduation, The Faithful went off to college, but Pappy George remained in the valley, drinking, drag racing, playing chicken against himself. After two or three years, he sobered up enough to go to college himself, one of the Ivies where he was admitted as a legacy and stayed sober enough to coast through with gentlemen C’s. Years later he showed up at his high school reunion dressed like a gentleman rancher who had discovered oil on his back 40.”
“You were the starter,” he said to me as we waited in line at the wine bar. “Why didn’t you wink or something?”
“I was facing the finish line.”
“You could have wiggled.”
“That would be cheating.”
“Be true to your school and all that good stuff.”
“He didn’t challenge my school.”
Granny El Bee rested her hands on her knees. Her spine curved forward. “Pappy George laughed and bought a bottle of a merlot/cabernet blend.”
“Still drinking,” I said.
“Special occasions.”
“Life is a special occasion.”
“You got that right.”
A tear drooped from the corner of Granny El Bee’s eye. Trapped in the ridges of her skin, it glowed in the light of the table lamp. “Pappy George drank himself into oblivion that night and none of the now unfaithful were willing to drive him home so I volunteered. The next afternoon he called to thank me and invite me to dinner. On one condition, I said. If you show up as sober as a recovering alcoholic and don’t drink anything during the meal.”
“You were always hard to get.”
“We started dating. He always acted right when we were together although he reverted to his old ways when we weren’t.”
Granny El Bee’s blanket slipped and she pulled it up to her waist. “As historians like to remind us, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Pappy George asked me to marry him and I said I would if he signed a wedding contract promising never to drink or daredevil again and he did. I wish I could say I cured what ailed him, but the problems showed up other ways. He had an illness. It didn’t have a fancy name back then and it didn’t have magic pills to cure it and it made intimacy between us difficult, but we persevered for better or for worse because we had promised God we would. Still, I don’t think Pappy George ever got over what happened at Crawford’s Cliff. He was like a son forever eclipsed by his father’s shadow. He spent his entire life trying to step out of the darkness. For all his success, he never did.”
The hinges on the door squealed in arthritic agony as Dr. Joblon forced it open with his shoulder. His coat, as pasty white as the skin of his face, lacked color except for the identification photo clipped to his breast pocket. Faded like a snapshot left out in the sun, it blurred his features into a Rorschach test. The lower right hand corner of his clipboard had teeth marks, bitten off by a patient starving for attention. He hid the clipboard behind his back. Taking notes agitated Granny El Bee. Agitation caused setbacks. With each setback, recovery receded further and further into the past, buried beneath a pile of chrome bumpers in an auto graveyard.
“Top of the morning,” Dr. Joblon said.
“My grandchildren have come to visit. All of them. Walker and the twins and even Herbert. Say hello to Dr. Joblon.”
He made a mental note. The room was empty except for him and Granny El Bee, a bed, chair, desk, a shelf with framed photographs clipped from news magazines, the people in them labeled in Granny El Bee’s spidery penmanship, Walker, the twins, Jen and Barbie, Herbert; beside them, a wedding photograph of Granny El Bee and Pappy George, both with eyes wide open, afraid of the future.
“You know my stories. You just don’t wish to believe them.” Granny El Bee dismissed him with a coquettish wink, remaining mute for the rest of the hour.
That afternoon in the waiting room of Dr. Joblon’s office, Walker crossed and uncrossed and recrossed his legs, alternating between left and right every few minutes. Pain radiated from his left hip, up his side, down his leg. Sometimes it was sharp like thousands of bamboo spikes puncturing his skin; other times it burned like napalm on skin or itched like a hoard of fire ants crawling up his legs. He had had his fill of bamboo spikes, napalm, and fire ants in Vietnam. Today, it was an itching pain. The other people waiting room eyed him with suspicion as if he were a grenade whose pin had been pulled. Someday, he would explode. This would not be that day. He needed a new artificial hip, his third replacement, paid for by the VA, but with his wife institutionalized he could not spare the time for the recovery and rehabilitation. Without the rehab, there was no return on the investment of pain the surgery returned. The Impressionist prints crowding the walls did not calm him. If anything, they agitated him as flashing lights did an epileptic. It was the way they were jumbled together, no white separating them. If they were spaced better, set off from each other by blank wall, they would have the intended effect. He wondered if Dr. Joblon knew what he was doing.
“She told the chrome bumper story again,” Dr. Joblon said after Walker settled into the chair in Joblon’s office. “And the story of Crawford’s Cliff. They used to be separate, but now she conflates them.” The itch distracted him. Usually they talked in the corridor outside Granny El Bee’s room, observing through the one-way window in the door. Standing was less painful for Walker. Today, Joblon insisted they meet in his office.
“Was I her son again?’ Walker asked.
“Grandson. In college. A philosophy major of all things.” Joblon opened his file and stared at the top page.
Walker gritted his teeth. The fire ants had advanced up his torso. Whatever was written on that page had stolen Joblon’s tongue and Walker wasn’t sure he wanted Joblon to recover it. “Why don’t you give me a copy and I’ll read it when I get home.”
“She thinks she’s Laura Bush. That’s why she insists on being called Granny El Bee and refers to you as Pappy George.”
Walker visualized fire ants swarming over him. He wanted to rip off his clothes.
“There are two powerful forces at work here,” Joblon continued. “One is senility which drains her mind of rationality. You can see it by the way she gets tangled up in, This statement is false. The other is guilt from what George Bush did.”
“Why would she feel guilty about that?” Walker crossed and re-crossed his legs several times, hoping sudden motion would trade one pain for another, but his hip was at peace and the fire ants marched on.
“Because she thinks she’s Laura Bush. In your wife’s mind, Laura believed in her husband and stood by him, but over time guilt festered in her subconscious like a slow growth cancer. There must be something in your wife’s past, something she feels guilty about, as guilty as she imagines Laura Bush feels. As your wife’s mind deteriorates, the cancer of guilt grows more aggressive, the transference more complete. In her psyche, she blames the drag race and the chicken game for everything Pappy George did and for Laura’s being unable to stop him. She sublimates this into her own life through the story of the troll under the bridge. Eventually that troll will show up beyond the fence at Crawford’s Cliff, in the car with Pappy George, in line to buy drinks at their high school reunion.”
The ants marched up Walker’s neck. As he spoke, they flooded his mouth. Advancing up his cheeks, they blanketed his eyes. Joblon faded from view.
“And the chocolate chip cookies.” Joblon closed his file. “America at the time of chrome bumpers?”
Liss is a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Prize, the St. Lawrence Book Award, and the Bakeless Prize. His novel, Talking of Michelangelo, was published by Pierian Springs Press in 2025, Two short story collections and another novel will be published by PSP in 2025/2026. He has published 66 short stories and has won several awards for individual stories. Visit www.sfredericliss.com for more information.