The (occasional) Friday Nite Read

TIS THE SEASON

Cold. The smell of gasoline floods in…stings my nose. Something’s dripping. Fan’s running…humming…heater’s still on. Static fills the car interior, coming from the rear radio speaker…what happened to KOMA…go off the air? The whole state of Oklahoma go off the air? Car’s not moving…don’t hear the hum of tires on the concrete.

“Dave?”

Silence…Tiny should have said something…maybe I wasn’t loud enuff. A cold breeze wafted in the open window, ran down the door panel and swirled around my head, messed up my hair. Why is the window open? I opened my eyes, looked up…at least I thot it was up. It was dark…I couldn’t tell.

“Hey! Tiny,” I said, a bit louder.

Still nothing. I realized I wasn’t looking at the ceiling of my ’57, my eyes focused on the…floor? I pushed myself up…off the floor. Why are we stopped? Hey, what’s this? Blood. Mine? My right eye stung…something warm filled it…HEY…more blood…is that mine?

It was late when we left Storm Lake that January evening in 1962, …I had a headache, caused by too much drink last nite…and a small party this afternoon…decided to sleep it off on the way home…80 miles of it…at least a good hour and a half of driving…longer, if the hiway had more snow and ice on it then we figured…it hadn’t snowed that bad in Storm Lake, only a light dusting, not much to worry about…but out in the open, the wind would push ground blizzards across the Iowa two-lane hiways and blanket a lot of snow on the roadway. In that case, 80 miles would end up taking two, maybe two and a half hours. I’d asked Tiny to drive…he’d driven my ’57 quite a few times…with me and without me, and I trusted him…if I didn’t have to go to work when we got home, at 2 AM, I probably would’ve tuffed it out and driven…but I had a ten hour shift in front of me and an hour or so of sleep would help me get thru it a little easier.

I had no idea why the car wasn’t moving, figured we were home. Why didn’t he wake me? I yelled for Tiny again and wiped my eyes…blood filled one again, now I know what’s on the floor is mine. I felt around trying to figure out where it was coming from. Ow…my head, gash in the front…bleeding good, too. Don’t know how I got a cut from sleeping in the back seat but I’d bet Tiny could help me find out. “Tiny, what the hell?” I asked. The handkerchief in my back pocket was hard to retrieve from the position I was in, but I managed to get it to my head to slow the bleeding.

Tiny moaned. I pulled myself up from the back seat to see him behind the wheel, where he should be, forehead against the steering wheel, handkerchief covering it and soaked with blood. “You OK?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Think so. My head hurts.”

“Yeah, mine too. What happened?”

“Guess I must’ve fallen asleep.”

“Any idea where we are?” I asked. Had no idea how long I’d been asleep…but I was getting damned cold now. “Roll up that window. Where’s my coat? How long we been here?”

“I don’t know!!!” Tiny mumbled. “God dammit, give me a minnit to get my head straightened out, will ya? It hurts.”

“How you think mine feels?” I asked. “It ain’t exactly clear either. Find my coat, I’m getting out to see where the hell we are.”

“Look out the damned window, will ya?” Tiny shouted, anger grabbing at him. “We’re in a ditch, you think I know how the hell long we been here…or even what the last town was?

“I was hoping,” I said.

“Hey, you’re bleeding, too.” Tiny pointed at my head as I leaned over the seat to put on my coat. “Yeah, it hurts too…just don’t get any blood on the seat.”

I pushed the p***enger side seat forward, opened the door and put on my coat. It was cold…ground was frozen and weeds crunched as I walked the ditch. The wind whipped snow down the embankment, swirled around the car…the headlights were still on and played out in front…I could see, about 10 feet above us, up the embankment, a farmer’s field entrance. I turned, behind us, couple hundred feet, maybe a creek…I walked to its edge…frozen over but about eight feet below us…wind whipped up the side of the bank and deposited snow in a drift right at the edge. About twenty feet above the creek, one of Iowa’s ancient cement buffered bridges. Glad Tiny missed that one…probably would’ve been dead by now. Walking back toward the car, I noticed the barbed wire fence…oh ****! Bet that put some dandy scratches in the paint…I heard the p***enger’s side door open. “Tiny, see if you can find the flashlight.”

“Got it,” he said, closing the door and shining the light toward me. I motioned toward the barbed wire fence. “Oh man, I am sorry.” He shined the light around the side, couldn’t see any scratches and the fence was a full three inches from the side of the car…how he managed to get us stopped and not s****e up the side of the car I’ll never know. “Can’t see any damage…must’ve got ‘er stopped before I did any.”

“Well, that’s one good thing…but now we gotta figure out if we can get out of here…or walk.”

“I ain’t walking,” Tiny said. “Got no idea where we are or where the nearest phone is.”

The flashlight allowed us a look under the hood…the radiator wasn’t leaking and there weren’t many weeds in the grille…I shined the lite on the car’s path coming down the embankment …looked like we simply drove off the road and down…the weeds were flattened down but there was no sign the brakes had been locked up. Don’t know when Dave woke up nor how he got the car stopped without hitting something, but he did. I was thankful for that…there didn’t seem to be any damage to the car anywhere.

“Think we can drive out of here?” I asked.

“Bank’s pretty steep,” Tiny added. “Maybe with enuff speed.”

“Yeah, right. How’m I gonna get enuff speed?”

Tiny shined the flashlight behind me…toward the edge of the creek, then back past the car toward the farmer’s driveway. “That way. You’ll have to back up to the edge of the creek and get a good run…you walked over to the creek, is it frozen solid?”

“Seems to be. And what, angle up the side of the bank?”

“Bout the only way I can see…IF you can get enuff of a run.”

“Big if,” I said. “Guess we’d better see if the car will start first.”

It did…purred like the proverbial kitten…don’t think it even knew it was in the bottom of a ditch. I carefully backed away from the fence… and with Tiny behind me signaling with the flashlight, I clutched the ’57 back to where he was. I shifted into low and gave it a shot…tried to gain enuff speed in low gear…only ended up spinning the tires and not getting any traction…I got to the edge of the hill, where it started angling up, before I chickened out.

The next time was a bit better…I‘d figured that a slow start in low, then a quik shift to second right before the hill could get me up it…no chance…I got a quarter the way up before I ran out of steam…not enuff speed from the bottom. That’s twice…should I give it the third-time’s-a-charm try? I’ve resigned myself to the fact that we may not get out of the ditch and checked the gas gauge to see if we had enuff to keep us warm thru the night…if we idle it, warm the interior up and then shut it off, we would.

Tiny’s motioning with the flashlite…c’mon back, c’mon back. OK, one more try. I backed all the way to where Tiny was standing, stuck my head out the window and asked him how much more room there was…he stepped off a few more feet to see if it’s solid enuff…he motioned and I backed up, add another ten feet…the bumper of the ’57 sits inside the creek’s snow drift.

Tiny stepped to the window, “I’m getting damned cold out here. How ‘bout I warm up a bit before you try it again?”

“If I don’t make it this time, we’re going to have to spend the nite here. Hopefully someone will find us when it gets light…or we start walking in the morning.” I was sure Tiny wasn’t up for walking in the morning either.

“Man, if we don’t get home tonite, we’re gonna have the whole town looking for us in the morning,” Tiny said. “Wish I could remember what the last town was I went thru, give us an idea of where we are.”

“Yep, we may be only a few miles from home….your head OK? You warm enuff?”

“Guess so…my toes are still cold but I’ll stick them under the heater fan when you get out this time.”

“Hope your confidence is what I need this time. Let’s give it the old college try.” I decided to use only second gear this time…figured with the added distance in front of me, I might have a good chance of getting a decent run at it. The tires didn’t slip as much this time and by the time I angled up the side of the embankment, I was running hard…could see the edge of the road coming and the reflector on the pole marking the farmer’s field entrance. About ten feet from being out I felt the tires start to spin and the car slide a bit…I jammed my foot into the floor in an effort to give it that last little bit of power I could. It worked…the front tires p***ed the edge of the ditch and I was sure I was all but out…the rear tires dug in and kept digging until I felt them grab bare dirt…I rolled onto concrete and the tires barked. Good thing there was bare concrete there…I wasn’t about to let the car slip back down into the ditch. I was out. I clutched it, rolled to the other side of the highway and stopped. I got out and yelled at Tiny to come up.

“Can’t,” he yelled, somewhere over the edge in the darkness. “It’s too steep. Need some help.”

He was shivering pretty good by the time we got out of the ditch…but by then the car was nice and warm and the heater was blowing plenty hot air…he got in and took off his shoes. I grabbed the flashlite and checked the car over again…couldn’t see any damage at all, even checked the radiator again but there was no leaks. I cleaned out what weeds the grille had, checked the driver’s side for fence s****es but couldn’t find any, got in and drove the rest of the way home.

Tiny said he didn’t even know he fell asleep and figured we’d avoided a serious accident, especially just missing the bridge and drifting all the way across the oncoming traffic lane.

The whole time we were in the ditch and setting alongside the hiway after we’d gotten out, not one car went past…which is why he didn’t hit anyone on his way into it…but we’d have been in for a long cold nite if we hadn’t gotten out. It took another half hour to get home…I got to work over an hour late.

Copyright 11-04 Aden Rush/R.A.Jetter


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Back to the top for the nite crew!

 

Think I will go crawl in bed pull up a blanket. Brrr! How the hell are we all still alive? Must have been a lot of guardian angels around back in the 60s. Thanks Roger, have a good weekend!

 

Roger, I have never fallen to sleep driving, but I have woke up plenty of times while driving. Weird feeling!

Good read as usual. Got your PM. Not ignoring you, just busy with the Christmas thing.

Later, Tommy Mc

 

Another great read Roger, enjoyable as always...those of you who don't have the book really NEED to get it. It is actual reading for those who don't like to read...

 

cool man, just read somethin awful similar to it in a book i just got...