Gangster Runningboards
Clarence Wolfshohl
June 30, 2024
It was a ’35 Ford 4-door sedan,
my first car. Headlights perched
on the fenders like crows on a branch.
No trunk, spare in a continental kit
on the turtle back, jack and tire tools
gotten by folding out the rear seat.
I bought it from Uncle Al for $35.
His chow dog had somehow gotten shut
inside and ripped the upholstery.
I covered the seats with burlap bags.
It was our gang who rode in it.
Darrell, later to be my best man,
and he was. Charles Mercy,
who all called just Mercy
because we four compadres needed some.
Rodney Brown, who fifty years later
at a class reunion, asked if I
still had the old beast.
It was gray, faded, powdery.
My father’s cousin—I guess mine, too—
Frank, who drove his ’29 Model-A
he had bought new to Indianapolis
from San Antonio every May to watch
the races in person, and this was the late 50s,
he and I replaced nearly all the wiring
in it over the couple years I had it.
And he told me to scrub the car
with Ajax to take off the powder
and make the car shine.
It worked.
It was the same model we saw
in some forgotten gangster movie:
Edward G. Robinson or George Raft
shooting down rival punks in a blaze
of Tommy guns. The shooters stood
on that black sedan’s runningboards
as they raced past their foes
and ratty-tat-tated them
in a crescendo of background music.
We had gangster runningboards.
And it was Rodney Brown—
the other two already dead by that class reunion.
Mercy killed in Vietnam in his twenties.
Darrell, who broke up my wedding
with a shit-eating grin, dead of a heart attack
in his fifties. So only Rodney and I
were left of the gangster runningboard gang,
and he asked if I still had the car.
Native of San Antonio, Clarence Wolfshohl has been active in the small press as writer and publisher for sixty years. More recently he has published in Southwest American Literature, The Mailer Review, New Texas, New Letters, and Texas Poetry Assignment.
