A Confession

Confession of sins is supposed to be good for the soul.  So I figure I'll make a confession of my attempted arson.  I offer no defense for this crime, since I need none.  The statute of limitations having run many years ago.

When my friend decided he no longer wanted to make payments on his new 1969 Chevy Nova, I offered to total the car for him so he could collect the insurance money.  As we were speeding along getting ready for me to wreck it into a collection of roadside boulders, he chickened out.  So we never destroyed it that evening.  Within a few days, however, he returned to his despair over making payments.  We discussed it for some time without any resolution to the problem.

Because of some movie (I think with Steve McQueen, but for the life of me I can't recall what it was about), we came up with a solution:  We'd burn the car.  Surely insurance would total it if burned.

So we parked it behind the Mountain Home Newspaper office, where we worked, and set the plan in motion.  My friend soaked the front seat with kerosene, lit a cigarette, tucked the lit cigarette into a match-pack, set it on the soaked front seat, and we went inside.  We were waiting for the cigarette to burn down to the matches, the matches to ignite, the ignition to set the kerosene afire, and the fire to destroy the car.  We waited.  And waited.  And nothing seemed to be happening.  We stayed in the front of the newspaper office, wanting to appear surprised when the news of a burning car was brought to us, but nothing happened.

I think it was an hour or more before we went to the rear of the building to check on how our felony was progressing, and noticed that in the upper glass block skylight there was flashing red lights, clearly showing flames licking upward from a burning Chevy Nova.  We thought it worked!  Now someone needed to notice it and call the police.  But we couldn't be the ones who discovered it.  So we retreated again to the front of the building and settled in to wait out the discovery.

When another hour or so had passed we again peeked into the back of the building and again saw that same flickering red light.  We retreated again.

Another hour later and still no sirens, no commotion, nothing.  We checked again and sure enough the red flickering was still underway.  We wondered what it was about a Chevy Nova that would let it burn for hours once ignited.  Then concluded that if no-one else was going to make the grim discovery, we could at least see the results of our handiwork directly instead of through glass block skylight reflections.

So we opened the back door and there sat the Chevy Nova completely undisturbed.  Intact, fully operational and not even singed.  Puzzled, we wondered at what we'd been seeing flickering these past hours.  It turned out to be the outdoor sign of Jovial Jerry's bar, whose sign was on the sidewalk outside the bar with which the Mt. Home News shared a parking lot.

Well the Nova didn't burn.  When we inspected our crime scene it turned out that kerosene will put out a lit cigarette without igniting.  The cigarette was there, soaked with the seat, and the matches were unusable as well.  The only damage was a cigarette burn to the front seat upholstery.

Well my friend had suffered so much from the hours of anticipation and was so relieved at the failure, that he determined to just keep the Nova.  However, from that day till the day he sold it it always stank of kerosene.

There, confessing my sin does make me feel better.  Maybe I'll cover some others in the future.