He left Houston with no particular destination in mind. He thought he would just head north and see what would happen.
His car was a gray Gran Torino which his stepfather had left him after dying of a combination of heart failure, kidney failure and some horrid skin malfunction. There had been a series of alcoholic episodes as well, after his wife had been killed in a crosswalk by a hit and run driver.
The Torino was in relatively good shape.
His stepfather had lost his license years ago and had parked the car under a huge blue tarp in the garage which also contained a vast collection of stuff from years of a pack rats life.
Both the mother and the stepfather were pack rats. He had come home after being away for several years to find them living in tunnels of boxes. The entire house was filled with stacks of old boxes, stuffed and browned with age, teetering above narrow passageways. He now knew why they had dissuaded him when he said he wanted to come visit.
There were boxes filled with bags, which contained more bags. There were boxes with newspapers, boxes with flattened boxes, boxes with old magazines, boxes of broken china, boxes of odd pieces of wood, boxes with bags of seeds from the trees and plants that were still growing outside the house. There were also odd things tucked away in a box whose contents seemed uniform. In one box of Life magazines he found several pictures of his father. In another, a box of old shoes, he found a box of jewelry including the diamond bracelet his father had given his mother after being awarded the patent for a medical device. There were also mice living in the boxes.
After he left he called the Health Dept and the Fire Dept. and ratted them out. He knew they would live like that forever and they wouldn't listen to him. They didn't even think it was a problem. When he had tried to throw out plastic food containers his mother would pull them out later, wash them and put them in a box with other to go containers. He knew they wouldn't stop on their own.
