My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (25 page)

“That was horrible,” I said as we were driving in the dark, about an hour later. Neither of us could get the image of the dying black Labrador out of our minds, out of our conversation.

The mood became morose in the Jeep, tinged with the mystic. It was a four-hour drive from Seattle to Twisp. Had I known, I don't think I would have agreed. Somehow, Seattle usually seems like it's two hours from everywhere else in Washington. Maybe I'm spoiled because I grew up with Texan distances.

Steph told me once again about the time Cleo was hit by a car, at the end of her leash, how they had turned one of those dark corners in the North Seattle neighborhoods she likes to walk with a sense of impunity. Once, she said, there was a couch on a street corner and she and Cleo stopped for a nap; that's how safe she felt out there, and I bit my tongue and kept quiet. But this night, she said, this night was a rainy wint'ry night, and Cleo had extended the full length of the extension leash and entered into the road and was clipped badly by a Buick.

“And I just flipped out,” she said.

I knew Steph really well by this time, and Steph flipping out was not something pleasant. She could grow five times her size with histrionics.

Cleo's back leg was broken in a compound fracture, had been brought up into the back wheel well. She'd gone into shock and was looking at Steph like she was asking for permission to die.

Steph denied her that privilege and brought the dog back, she said, by bullying the poor Persian fellow who happened to be driving across their path that night and having him take them both to the emergency pet clinic on Aurora.

Steph can bully quite a bit out of most people is the lesson here.

They'd gone out on a date after, Steph said, but he didn't speak enough English to get along.

“Besides,” she said, “from what I could make of it, he wanted a wife to stay at home and cook dinner for him and his mother.”

“That's . . . um,” I tried to respond, “I don't think ... well, it's good that he took you to the vet clinic, I guess.”

I was trying to imagine dating someone, even getting across the idea of a date, with someone who not only ran over your dog—hey, that's a rom-com waiting to happen—but also can't speak your language, when we rounded a wide, cliffside corner of a deep, dark mountain road with no lights whatsoever and turned directly into a four-vehicle traffic jam, about ten thousand feet into mountain air and an accident just waiting to happen, and I once again had to slam on the brakes and bring the Jeep to a measured halt.

Sonofabitch.

What
now
?

The darkness of the mountain night was ignited with the amber hue of hazard lights and brakes, and periodic, careening vehicles streaming past—at first slowing, then understanding the curiosity of spectacle, then deciding it wasn't their affair and moving on, headed off into the prolonged darkness down the mountain range, back onto their own business. But we—Steph and Cleo and me—we decided to make that little cluster of crazy ours, as I pulled over and set my own lights to signal “hazard.”

“Are you sure you want to get into this?” I asked Steph.

We had driven around that long mountain curve and came up scared when we saw the cars, four of them: three lined against the shoulder and the fourth, the one causing trouble, tipped into the embankment, the front two wheels off into the dtch and the back two tires raised in the air. This was all happening in the blind corner of a curve, so that any cars coming fast around the corner had just a second to see the car and make an adjustment. It was going to be a fatality any second now, especially since it was on a cliffside.

This was nightmarish, especially for me.

And I recognized the Volkswagen Passat from earlier, parked alongside.

They'd apparently passed us, after Steph and I had stopped at a convenience store and let Cleo pee, and were now trying to make up for their vehicular dogslaughter, presumably.

Steph was in the passenger seat and looked over at me, and I could see that she'd already come under her moral authority code: We do what's right. And right now, that meant we had to help. She didn't even have to say it; I saw it all in her face.

“We have to help this,” she said.

I did the shortcut myself, and I knew I couldn't leave without doing what was needed. I don't feel that way anymore.

I said, “All right. Stay here for a moment. Keep her down.” I meant the dog.

Steph's door was nearly flat against the mountainside, and Cleo was animated to annoyance with anxiety, so Steph grabbed her collar and pinned the dog down to keep her from leaping out of the Jeep and becoming another casualty that night.

I caught my breath, timed the cars whipping around the corner, and then left the Jeep.

It was dangerous, but not exactly “combat-dangerous.” But almost. It was “danger-close” combat.

The car in trouble was a late-model Pontiac driven by a younger woman in Ugg boots, who may or may not have been inebriated, and who had lost control of the vehicle and miraculously survived a spin on the road but ended up teeter-tottering on the embankment, with another Mexican woman as a passenger.

Two of the boys from the Passat had the bright idea of hopping on the back of the car, pressing it down to get traction, while the driver was gunning it in reverse. It was a front-wheel-drive vehicle. Had their plan worked, the two boys would have been run over. The car was adjacent to the highway, and, after backing over the two hipsters, the car would have then been traversed into the highway, into oncoming traffic. Everything about this plan was a complete catastrophe about to happen.

Somehow, I think because I was older than everyone else, I automatically slipped into sergeant major status and began barking orders as soon as I emerged from the Jeep. And cars continued whipping around that corner with no warning, the acoustics on that mountaintop that night giving no indication of the danger coming at us at seventy-five miles an hour.

They just appeared ... and then they were gone—showing up with nothing nearing the indication that they'd even noticed the clusterfuck of cars on the blind side of that corner before they raced off into the dark of the night.

Even eighteen-wheeled rigs came out of nowhere: The Doppler effect was on their side, not ours. It was just a matter of time before someone was going to die.

“You two! Get the fuck off the back of that car!”

Voooooooooooooofff!

“What?” they yelled back.

“Off the fucking car! Get this one out of the way; the Jeep has a tow hitch. Does anyone have a chain or towrope?”

“We ... we have some hiking rope!” I heard someone else yell, from the other side of the Pontiac.

Inside the vehicle, the girl was still roaring her engine, and her front tires spun without purchase in the ditch, which was well lit with her headlights.

Then another trailer came around with a horrifying noise.

“
Goddammit!
” I yelled, because I was looking the other way. Even out here, you couldn't hear if someone was coming around that corner, and thus you had no chance to react.

“You!” I yelled to some bearded guy standing across the road with his hands in his pockets, trying to keep warm, and then I noticed he'd been talking to the kid who had been holding the dying dog.

“Get across the road and tell us when there's another car coming! You hear me?! Warn us when there's someone coming!” I pointed to a triangulated place where he'd be able to see down the road and still be able to yell at us, where he'd have a line of sight to an oncoming car. He nodded with exaggeration and gave me the thumbs-up signal. Fine.

I banged on the top of the car and told the girl to stop with the roaring and then directed the owner of the Hyundai that was parked between the Pontiac and the Jeep to get it out of the way; the Jeep had the hitch and the power to pull this car out of the ditch.

“Move it over to the side of the—”

“CAR!” the kid over on the side of the road yelled, and sure enough,
ZZOOOM!!

This car seemed to slow down, and I saw brake lights over my shoulder, but I ignored them and focused on what was in front of me.

“Fuck,” I said. “All right, get your—”

And here I was handed the hiking rope, which looked like threaded plastic, and the guy who owned it was now under the elevated back of the car—

“CAR!”

And there was nothing I could do but hope that—

ZZZOOOOM!

FUCK.

“Get out from under there!” I yelled at the kid, who was heroically looping the thin cord around a brake line. Jesus Christ.

“Come on, man, get out. This isn't going to work. Who owns the Passat?”

“Trevor,” said the kid standing next to me. I can't even describe him now. I don't remember his face. Just his fear.

“Where's Trevor?”

“Trevor!” two of the kids began yelling.

Trevor was the kid who had hit the dog.

But never mind that now.

Trevor ran up, his hoodie still bloodied from the dog.

“In your trunk, under the cover, in the spare tire, you have a towrope. It's nylon and flat and rolled up with two hooks at either end. Find it and bring it here,” I yelled.

Then I turned to the two kids standing next to me, who had been trying to pin the Pontiac to the ground.

“Don't let her out of the driver's seat. You two stay—”

“CAR!”

ZZZOOOOOOOMMM!

“Stay out of the road, and stay right here! I'm going to back the Jeep to this po—”

“I can't find it! There's nothing here!” from Trevor, at the Passat.

“Look in the side! In the side compartment!” I yelled back.

“OH, I found it!!” he yelled back.

“Then bring it here!” I think,
Jesus; that was lucky
.

“CAR!”

VARRROOOOMMMM!

Fuck.

I thrust myself into the driver's side of the Jeep and took a deep breath. It was suddenly quiet, in the Jeep.

Steph and I didn't look at each other.