Linda Leschak
Texas, USA
Larry hit the brakes hard and the trailer started to fishtail, a slow side to side motion that quickly built into a full scale jackknife. The speed of his truck and the weight of his load swung the trailer up toward the cab where he could see it coming in the driver’s side mirror. Steering into the skid, he glanced at the mirror on the passenger’s side checking for traffic behind him and was grateful for a clear road. The trailer started to right itself but then had a change of heart and continued its sideways crawl until it was at a ninety degree angle from the cab sliding along beside him. He heard it groan like the dying moan of a sinking ship. The tires screamed their protest as they skidded sideways along the road, their black smoke filling the air, the smell of burnt rubber choking him. There was a grating sound like metal on metal and Larry figured it must have been the corner of the trailer gouging into the back of the sleeper.
His cab was being pulled into the oncoming lane by the weight of the trailer as it listed to the side like a whale trying to beach itself. The back tires dropped off the side of the road into the sand and started dragging the whole rig with it. He saw trees rushing past on the left and felt the trailer buckle and slow as it hit one of them. But he was too heavy and too fast to be stopped by a single tree. The trailer sheered off a second one before wrapping itself cleanly around a third. It bent around the tree with an agonizing roar. The sudden change in motion twisted the rigging and flipped the cab over onto its side where it lay in a cloud of dust and smoke, still on the road but not going anywhere.
. . . . . . . . . . .
That’s the way Larry told it to us over and over again until we knew it by heart, until we felt like we were right there with him in the cab of his truck, sliding along the freeway in front of our house. It happened one early morning in June, right between the end of school and the beginning of harvest. Dad was already up, sitting over his first cup of coffee and planning out the day’s work. The rest of us were still in bed and didn’t see a thing. But we all heard it. And we felt it rip us out of our dreams and into the strange reality of something bad happening, something like a freight train driven through our house. By the time we piled into our clothes and ran outside, Dad was already there, up on the side of the cab and reaching a hand into the overturned truck to help the driver climb out through the passenger window. Later we’d hear Larry’s story, how he’d slammed on his brakes to keep from hitting our neighbor’s dog, Jasper, as it ran out onto the highway. How he hadn’t noticed the small blue Buick that was coming from the opposite direction and was swallowed up by the trailer, drug through the orchard and then pinned between the tires and that third almond tree. In fact, it was a while before any of us noticed that little blue car.
Larry had been carrying palletized boxes filled with cans of hydraulic fluid. Each box held four five-gallon cans; each pallet held sixteen boxes. Some of the pallets had stayed put, anchored down by thick bands of steel, still strapped to the tattered trailer bed. But several of the pallets hadn’t held their load and now boxes and cans lay sprawled across the highway fifty or so
yards in each direction. Scattered cans were crushed or ripped open spilling out thick, red oil that looked just like blood as it ran over the surface of the road and soaked into the sand around the trees. A few of the unspoiled cans were still in motion, moving east as if nothing had interrupted their trip.
“You OK?” I heard Dad ask as he helped Larry out of the truck. Course we didn’t know him as Larry yet. That was to come later.
“Yeah… yeah, I think so.” He jumped down onto the road and stood dusting himself off. “But hot damn, that was a hell of a ride! Did ya see the way she just rolled over like a whore in heat?” He didn’t seem to notice us kids standing around gawking but when he caught sight of us, his face changed a few colors and he started stammering. “Oh, man. I’m sorry, Sir,” and he looked around all sheepish like.
We all thought it was cute the way he apologized real nice to Dad for saying things we’d already heard.
“Name’s Larry, Larry Merritt, Sir.” He reached out his hand, “and I’m awful sorry about the language.”
Dad gave him a cockeyed look. “I’m Bill,” he said, finally, “Bill Carver and my sons Billy, Bobby and this is my little girl, Linda.”
We each nodded at the appropriate times and Larry said he was pleased to meet us. Then Dad said it didn’t seem so, given how he’d just plowed our orchard with his big rig.
We all watched Larry to see if he could tell Dad was joking. He was real good at it, could do it with his face stone cold. But Larry didn’t know that. He just stood staring and then his eyes sorta jumped around all wild like. I thought he looked like that jackrabbit I’d chased down and cornered against the back fence last summer. He took a slow step backward.
“C’mon now, Larry, I’m just givin’ you a hard time!” Then Dad grabbed his hand and pumped it up and down, rumbling that deep laugh he used when he knew he’d got someone.
The dust hadn’t even settled on the road yet and Dad was taking charge, “Billy, run and get eight flares out’a my service truck and light ‘em up in each direction. Bobby, start moving that traffic through the vineyard ‘long side the road.”
My brothers ran off to do his bidding while I stood waiting for my orders. I could feel the wet sand squeeze up between my toes and I looked down to see red oil flowing over my bare feet. “AAhhhh, Daddy, I’m bleeding!” I hollered. The two men looked over at me and then followed my gaze to my feet, now covered with thick, red ooze.
There was a momentary flash of panic on Larry’s face but Dad didn’t miss a beat. “Little girl, this isn’t the time; we got work to do.” He ruffled the hair on my head and walked away. But Larry just stood looking at me with an odd question on his face. ‘Gotcha again,’ I thought.
I tagged along behind while they looked over the damage and started talking cleanup plans. Larry’s truck was still smoking and making sounds like an oven does when it cools off, those odd ticking noises that don’t seem to fit with what’s going on. Although the trailer was off the road, the cab was completely blocking the west bound lane. Bobby had started steering the traffic into the eastbound lane and diverting the oncoming traffic through the vineyard opposite our house. A few of the early morning commuters had decided to stop and see what they could do, or at least see what they could see and then talk about later. Their cars were lined up alongside the road in either direction.
Among the half dozen people who stopped to gawk, there was one guy who didn’t quite mix right. He was wearing black slacks that were streaked with sand and grease and all tore up on one leg. His left shirt sleeve hung off his arm in shreds and he was wearing only one shoe. A jagged tear ran along his forehead and bled steadily into his left eye. He paced back and forth in front of the wreck, his eyes never leaving the place where the trailer had met the last tree. Other than an occasional swipe with his remaining sleeve, he seemed to not notice the blood running down his face or the debris he kept tripping over while he paced.
“Gawd damn! Gawd damn!” was all he said, over and over.
“You alright, son?” Dad put a hand on the guys shoulder, got him to look away from the
wreck.
“I’m alive, aint I?” Then he pointed to a hunk of wrinkled blue metal under the second axel. We all hunkered down to take a look under the trailer where we could see the thing was a car, or used to be at least. About that time Larry lost it, staggering off into the orchard, leaning hard against one of the trees. We all watched as he puked into the sand.
“What’s wrong with that boy?” This from the bloody guy who seemed to be doing better than Larry at the time. Later we talked about how he must have been in shock to stay so level- headed after being drug under the trailer and almost squashed like a gnat.
“Awe, that’s just Larry’s way of showing how happy he is,” I said and the guy looked over at me, a crooked grin on his face. “You know, happy he didn’t turn you into compost.” Dad was giving me that look that meant he’d had enough. “Guess I’ll go fetch that first aide kit,” I suggested before he could suggest it for me. And I ran off toward the house.
Mom was coming out as I went in. She’d been changing Timmy when the wreck happened and was just now making it out front to join us. Timmy was perched on her hip, held there by Mom’s right-handed death grip we all knew so well. He had his chubby legs wrapped around her narrow waist, latched on like one of those monkeys that spend the first part of its life clinging to its mother like a leach. Timmy had just learned to hold his own bottle and had it poked into his mouth, angled up to keep from sucking air. This freed up Mom’s left hand for doing other things, like carrying Dad’s coffee out to him. “You otta see that guy’s car, Ma!” I hollered as I headed into the house after the bandages and Neosporin. “Larry just turned it into train rubble!”
. . . . . . .
Seemed we were a whole day cleaning up. It was Dad and the boys who got it all organized while Larry made a bunch of phone calls trying to get his trucking company to pony up another rig so he could salvage whatever part of his load was still intact. While he was doing that, Dad got the boys to hook up the tractor and we all watched as he used it to upright the cab and limp it off the road to get traffic moving again. This was after he’d gotten out his Polaroid and took a bunch of pictures for the insurance company. And after the police had scribbled their report, gotten back in their black and white car and were gone.
Tony, the guy in the blue car, got hauled off to the hospital in spite of his protests. “It’s my car needs help more than me,” he argued as they pushed him into the back of the ambulance and drove away.
Once things got underway, it went pretty smooth. Billy fetched the wire cutters from the barn and cut loose the few pallets that were still hanging off the bed of the upturned trailer. Then we all sorted them out, some for firewood, some for stacking. The good ones got lined up against the wall of the house then we spent the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon throwing cans of oil. We formed a brigade; a line of men, boys and one thirteen year old girl and we threw each can down the line until it got to the person closest to the pallet. That person would stack it on the clean pallet and then swivel around to catch the next can. We kept rotating positions so each of us had a time in the middle of the line, a time at the head and a time as the stacker. The line kept moving around the truck, directing itself to where the unspoiled cans were. And it kept wading through gobs of red ooze that leaked from the punctured cans that lay strewn around, bleeding into to the sand. Later Dad would settle with Larry’s insurance company over the four or five trees that sucked up enough hydraulic fluid to kill their harvest for the next few years. And of course the two trees Larry sheered off during his wild slide into the orchard. Plus the one with the blue car impaled in its bark.
The cans weighed about nine pounds each and we worked for hours, pitching each one down the line as the July sun drug itself higher and higher overhead. Finally I got tired.
“I need a break,” I said and I sat down on the pallet we’d been stacking. I wiggled my bottom between a couple rows of cans and reached for the jug of water that was getting passed around.
Larry collapsed in the shade of a tree, panting and sweating like he’d run a marathon or something. He kept wiping a sleeve across his beet red face. “I was wondering when you were gonna say that. I couldn’t very well let a little girl outwork me.” And then he looked over at Dad. “Bill” he said all joking like, “if I wasn’t already married and your girl was few years older . . .” he shook his head and grinned, “well, we just might be talking right now.”
“Wouldn’t be talking to me,” I heard Dad answer.
It seemed he was trying to keep from looking at me but I caught it anyway. It was a look in my daddy’s eyes, raw and real and shining with a pride bigger’n I’d seen either of my brothers
put there. And it was right then when I felt something inside me swell to almost bursting, just before Dad took hold of the water jug, drank deeply and then eased himself up from sitting. “Time to get back to it,” he said.
Larry got himself a new rig after that and sometimes his route would swing him by our place. He always stopped, and Mom would set an extra plate when she’d see his rig pull up out front. He’d laugh and tell us how many people he’d bragged to about the little farm girl who worked circles around him. Fact is though, it wasn’t nothing to me, just another day’s work on the farm. Farming did you like that, made you into something outside folks had a hard time understanding. It got into your blood and stayed there. No matter that I’m a few decades and a thousand miles from it now, it’s still there, bubbling up through the sand, thick and viscous and red.