Roadside Assistance

There’s a place on the drive out to my parents’ house where the road takes a sudden vertical turn. Town ends here. The houses are built in clusters right up to the base of the hill, then end suddenly and the chaparral takes over. There’s a three-way intersection with a stop sign, offering one last chance to go another way. There’s a fire hydrant, too; this is the last one, the end of the city water system. There’s a sign announcing the end of the 45mph speed limit, and another warning of lessened shooting laws. Climb the hill and there’s a view worth note. On a clear day, you can see downtown and the bay from thirty miles away and two thousand feet up. Some mornings, the whole world is buried in a blanket of fog, and the higher peaks of the county poke above the blanket like islands in the sea. At night, it’s a living system of electric lights.

I always liked to drink in the last sight of those lights in my rearview mirror when I came home late at night. It cheered me, a bit, to think about the people that those lights represented. Then the road would turn and descend into the next valley, and the lights would disappear from sight.

One night, as I dipped into that next valley, I encountered a thick fog at the low points of the drive. This was not uncommon. The road rose over hills and fell into valleys, and there would be fog at low points and not at the high. This carried on for a few miles, and, very near to home, I suddenly encountered a small SUV stopped in the lane. Clearly this was dangerous, especially with the fog, and I was able to slow in time to stop behind it. Its lights were on, and when I turned my radio down I could hear its horn blaring incessantly. I decided to try to pass it on the left, slowly to check it out. The front of the vehicle had collapsed inward, smashed in with some force, and the whole vehicle crumpled into half its normal length. There appeared to be no other vehicles around, and I had to stop to help. I pulled my truck passed the wreck and parked in the shoulder, then grabbed my flashlight and ran back.

A man appeared from a house on the hill above the road, and he came running down, yelling that his girlfriend was calling 911. We connected and ran to the wreck together. The horn still blared, as if laid upon. We reached the driver’s window and saw a woman, probably in her seventies, looking frantically about but unable to move. The man I was with—a few years older than me, with a short mohawk and no shirt—asked if she was okay.

“What did I hit?” she asked, dazed and frightened.

“Are you hurt?” he demanded to know. She didn’t respond coherently, and panicked even more. He tried to open the door, but it was locked. “Ma’am, I need you to unlock your door.”

“It’s not locked,” she insisted, though he and I could both clearly see that it was. “What happened?”

 The man got frustrated. “That goddamn horn is scaring her. Ma’am, are you pressing the horn?” She didn’t understand the question, even after he repeated it. “We need to kill the horn.”

He stepped around to the front, and I followed him. I admit I was a little unnerved myself, and I was glad to have him there because he was level-headed. He pried away some broken pieces of the hood while I held my flashlight for him, and behind the passenger side headlight he found and cut a pair of wires. The horn died instantly.

We walked back around to the door. “Ma’am, are you hurt?”

“I can’t move my legs.” Her legs were clearly pinned by the crumpled steel, but we couldn’t tell much about their condition from outside the car.

“I need you to unlock your door so we can get you out.”

She mumbled something, then, “What did I hit?”

“There was a truck,” the man said. “They were waving for you to stop but you didn’t.”

“I didn’t see anything,” she said defensively, a little more in control of her nerves now.

I hadn’t seen the truck either, so I asked, “Did they just bounce?”

The man looked over at me but didn’t answer, probably because it was a stupid question.

Headlights became visible to the east. “Make sure they stop!” the man barked at me. I took my flashlight and ran up the road waving it. The car slowed and stopped. I walked up to the driver’s side and explained the situation. The driver pulled off the road and got out to look around. Another car came, and I directed them carefully around the wreck; they didn’t stop.

Eventually, a firetruck showed up and the firemen took the man’s place at the woman’s window. I stayed my post on the road, waving off passing cars. Soon enough there were cops and an ambulance, but the firemen had not yet made any visible progress extracting her from the wreck, except that they’d placed a gurney beside the car. A highway patrolman relieved me from my traffic directing, and another cop wanted to hear what we had to say about the wreck. Pointing at my truck on the side of the road—with its multiple dents and broken body panels—the cop asked, “And that’s the other vehicle?”

I laughed. “No, that’s just my truck.”

“Then what’d she hit?”

My compadre explained what he’d seen. When he finished the story, he asked me if I had a cigarette. I did, and I smoked one with him. Another cop walked up to my truck with his flashlight to check it out. I called out that it was mine, and yes, I drove it here that way.

Eventually, the officer in charge instructed us to leave. He didn’t have to tell me twice, but I looked back at the woman to see if they’d made any progress. They hadn’t.

I wonder what happened to her.