09/16/03’s illustrious band:

Kidnapper Car

Brought to you by The Other Amy S.

Amy was referring to the 1988 Buick LeSabre she's had to drive for the last few days while her own car was in the shop. When she described the loaner to me as a kidnapper car, I knew exactly what she meant.

Amy and I were both little girls during the 70s, and apparently we both received the same solemn cautions about kidnappers. We played outside with the knowledge that kidnappers were everywhere, even in our small towns, waiting to whisk children away from their parents and friends and schools and pets. They lurked behind every hedge and tree, maybe even behind the mailbox on the corner where my friend Ann and I bade each other farewell on ominous summer nights.

Yes, we knew all about kidnappers. What our mothers and teachers didn’t tell us, older sisters and their friends gladly filled in. Kidnappers were grimy-fingered older men who smelled like rest homes but ate breath mints to cover it. They might even offer us some, but we must never accept or, like Persephone trapped in Hades by the pomegranate seeds she ate, we’d become their victims and their slaves forever.

Kidnappers had exceptionally long arms for reaching little girls from behind mailboxes, and scruffy beards that would rasp against our necks when they grabbed us close and warned us not to scream. Kidnappers carried knives, too, sharper than our dads’ hunting knives, so they could cut off a girl’s ear -- always a girl’s, not a boy’s -- and send it to her parents in a shoebox to convince them to pay ransom. This was a certainty; Ann’s teenage sister Kathleen told us so.

And kidnappers drove four-door sedans like Amy’s LeSabre, like the ones the bad guys always drove on TV. We heard about suspects fleeing in dark four-door sedans over the police radios on the cop shows; we knew all about it. Kidnappers drove kids in their sedans to seedy-looking farmhouses outside of town and kept them in dark basements, tied to chairs. If you were tied up, you couldn’t fight back when they came to cut off your ear. You couldn’t run.

But we ran. We ran through every recess, every afternoon, every summer. Ann and I were on youth track teams from the time we started school, both sprinters, both good ones. And part of our speed was due to the kidnappers. We ran through the park, dodging swingsets; we ran up and down the hill of my back yard, dodging the shadows of the huge pine trees on either side. We ran to the mailbox equidistant from our two houses, where one friend would watch the other until she reached her front door, then race back home to safety. If you saw your friend get kidnapped between the mailbox and home -- always a possibility -- the rule was to scream as you ran back so all the other kids would know to get inside and tell their moms and call the cops. We had this all planned out.

Planning wasn’t enough, though, because we knew the kidnappers were out there. So we practiced. Ann and I and our gang played a game that consisted of one girl standing in the middle of the alley yelling, “Kidnappers! Kidnappers! Run run run!” Then everyone had to race for cover under bushes and behind trees and in shed crevices too small for an adult kidnapper to get through. The last one out of sight was “caught” and had to sit out. If you weren’t fast enough, the kidnappers would get you. We were fast.

No rides in the kidnapper car for Ann and me, or for Amy, or for anyone we knew. For a while, when we were older, we thought our games were silly childish play. But maybe they were good training. We no longer listen for a girl in the alley shouting warning; now we have mace, self-defense courses, cell phones and nation-wide abduction alerts. But if someone did roll up in a dark four-door sedan, if someone did yell Kidnappers!, we’d still know just what to do.

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