Interstate (25 page)

G
uy pulls out a gun. What do you do when someone does that? You can't duck; you're driving in the center lane of a huge highway and there's nobody in the front seat with you to grab the wheel. You've kids in back. They're the first things you think of, right?—first ones, but you think of yourself too almost at the same time because of whatever's self-preserving in you or something but more important that if he gets you he gets the kids. He shoots at you and hits, car could go off the road left or right and at the speed you're going and if he hits you good, there'd be a terrific crash. Car could go across the median strip and into traffic coming the other way, if it first didn't hit the guy's car or another one in that lane, or go across both roads, if it missed all the cars on them, and hit some trees in the woods on the other side. Or it could turn over on the strip because there's a little dip in it, or on the right side past the shoulder because there seems to be a trench there, or just turn over without any trench or dip because of your car's speed and that you lost all control of the wheel. One way or the other, if you get shot so bad where you immediately lose control of the car, kids won't have a chance, and guy's so close, his arm straight out and gun maybe three feet from your face, there's almost no chance he'll miss. So what do you do, for christsake, what do you? You yell, your first reaction, at the man “What the hell you doing, please don't, put it back, the gun,” and to the kids right after that “Duck, kids, duck, guy in the next car's got a live gun on us.” They scream, you're screaming, guy's laughing, driver's laughing so hard he's choking, and slapping the dashboard with his hand and steering with the other and gun's pointed at you and then slowly back to the kids and their car's still beside yours and keeping up with anything you're doing to get away from it, dashing forward, braking and fading back, and you're yelling “Don't, you can't shoot,” your window's open, sonofabitch tricked you into it, signaled something amiss with your car and wanted to tell you what, “please get away, there are kids there, don't aim that at them, have a heart, oh my God,” and then you think, what do you think? “Think, think,” you think, “think quick,” and you think “Off the road fast as you can, off, off, don't cut across to the strip as you can get killed doing it, get on the right shoulder right now,” and quickly check the rearview and right side mirrors, no cars anywhere near but theirs, swerve into the slow lane and they get in the lane you just left, onto the shoulder and they get in the slow lane and stay close beside you, gun still held straight out but now back at your head, and you're screaming and kids are screaming and their car keeps going when you start stopping and just when you think they're gone for good and you've come to a complete sudden stop and say “Kids, stay down,” gunman starts shooting. Youngest kid's dead, that's it. You know right away when you hear no sounds from her but plenty from the oldest. All your shouts for her to say something don't produce anything but more screaming from your other girl. Know when you then jump around and look back and down and see her on the floor in her blood, looking as if she were playing dead. Whatever you might have done it could have ended up same way or worse, right? What could you have done, and what could have been worse? You know what. Not you getting killed. Your own life for years has been just so much shit and will be infinitely worse after this. Nah it hasn't been that bad but for years you have been feeling frazzled and short of breath, there's been just brief stretches of pleasure and leisure and fun every now and then and some every-now-and-then semiserious satisfying rumination and work but for the most part it's been pressures and stresses and a lot of disjointed to coordinated running around at your job and for your wife but mostly for your kids, and now there's this, essentially ending it. What would have been worse is if both kids had been shot dead instead of one. Better than that but much worse than what happened, one dead and the other maimed for life. Both maimed like that? Better than one dead and the other maimed or okay, so better than the rest. Easy to say what would have been the best. You've thought lots of times before this about both kids dying at the same time, usually after you went through a new near disaster with them. Most of it regarding cars: couple of near collisions; also the time your car spun around on an oil slick on a narrow bridge and wound up facing a car bearing down on it. Driving them down the hill to school just after starting out but with the antitheft steering-wheel bar still locked to the brake pedal and you thought you were all going to die and screamed it out before you came to your senses in about five seconds and switched the ignition off and stepped on the emergency brake and turned the wheel to the right far as it would go and guided the car as best you could to a stop against the curb. Street corner where a truck climbed onto the sidewalk where the three of you were and came within inches of clipping them. When the three of you were on a plane to Europe to hook up with your wife—not a near disaster but a thought as the plane took off. In a rowboat when it capsized about a hundred feet out in a sound and for a while when it was getting dark you didn't know how you were going to get to shore without dragging them there. Opened windows in your in-laws' apartment—again, just a thought till you closed or lowered them all. Times you pulled out of a parking spot without first checking the left side mirror or turning around and looking at the street and though no cars had ever shot past at that moment, at least when the kids were with you, you wondered what if one had and crashed into you? Better, with those men, to have rammed their car with yours—this is what you could have done—and then veered right into the slow lane or, if that was the lane you were already in, onto the shoulder, but what good would that have done? Maybe sent their car out of control and where it might have gone into a ditch and rolled over or just scared the shit out of them, making them think “This prick means business, let's get the fuck away,” or maybe it only would have knocked the gun from the guy's hand when the two cars suddenly hit. Or maybe you could have slammed their car exactly where the gunman was, one sharp left into it that smashed the guy's hand, and then sped right to get off the road, or dropped back and, after checking your mirrors, cut across the road to the median strip and over it to the part of the highway going north or just stayed on the strip honking and your emergency lights flashing and you outside the car shouting for passing cars and trucks or a state trooper to stop and your free hand flagging them down, and if the men came back for you on the road going north or just across the strip, you could have got off it one road or the other and tried to do something else to escape them—made straight for a state police station if there was a road sign saying one was coming up. You don't remember seeing one when you drove south but maybe you missed it or there's one further on or is north on the highway a few miles or so but on the other side of it, like the station. But it could have ended up worse than what happened or you imagined so far. The guy could have shot you in the eye when he saw you making a sharp left at their car and yours could have gone off the road with you already dead and it could have been hit by their car or another one coming from behind or just crashed on its own because you were no longer controlling it, rolled over and exploded or caught fire, kids dead before the car stopped rolling or before it exploded, or dead in the explosion, or worse, trapped in the car and burned alive.

What do you do the moment you know your kid's dead? You say to yourself you don't know, she isn't dead, she might look it but she's not, all that blood around her and the expression she has and no signs of life anywhere can possibly be, can only mean, they have to be just that she's deeply unconscious, hit hard on the head when the car suddenly stopped and she was thrown against the front seat, cut in the head too, gashed, torn, scalp bleeds like hell, but not dead, in no way is she. So you think you should do everything you can quick as you can to help her if she's hurt and save her if she's close to being dead. That's what you should do, that's what you do, even if you think when you look at her again on the floor in back with all that blood around her and her expression the way it is and still no signs of life anywhere, that she's probably dead, could be, no, isn't. So you rush her to a hospital in your car. Before that you breathe into her mouth and pound her chest to get her lungs and heart going again if they've stopped. You don't pound her chest. You wouldn't know how. You'd hurt her before you helped her or chances of hurting her and maybe finishing her off, if she has any life yet, by pounding her chest are greater than not. And her chest has a bullet hole in it, or what you think looks like one—and that was a gun the guy shot—and probably a bullet inside. There's blood coming out of the hole and has to be the reason for all the blood around her, for she has no other cuts, gashes or tears you see after quickly scanning her from head to foot, and you press your hanky on the hole and when the hanky's soaked through you pull your shirt off and press it on the hole and then, when that doesn't stop the bleeding, a little into it, while you breathe into her mouth. Things you don't think will work but one chance in a thousand or tens of thousands or a million they might. You once heard—you don't think this then but it probably influences your actions in some underlaid way to do everything you can to help and save her, to do both at once, help-save, help-save, for you don't know how badly off she is but feel she has to be very badly off since she still isn't moving and doesn't seem to be breathing and still hasn't given a single sign of being alive. Anyway, to do everything you can for her right away and not just give up because she looks dead and start screaming and wailing and beating your head or think the only thing you can do for her is drive her to a hospital, if you can find one or in time. For where are you on this road? What exit was last, which one's coming up? Are you a mile or ten or even twenty miles from one? And you didn't hear this but got it from a friend in a letter he sent you more than twenty years ago, or a phone call. He'd settled on the other coast and was in a van with his son around Julie's age at the time and was high or drunk, he said, when the van got stuck and then stalled on the tracks at a railway crossing when a train was coming—no. He was going too fast around a sharp turn, he said, and the van went out of control and slammed into a wall. It was in fact a motorcycle they were on, boy holding on to him in back, neither in helmets—they weren't compulsory in that state then, not that he would have worn one himself if it had been the law, he later said, though he would have put one on his son if only because his wife would have made him or she wouldn't have let the kid on the bike, as he called it—and he hasn't ridden one since because of that accident and can't even get himself to be a passenger on one—when he lost control while trying to take an almost ninety-degree curve about thirty miles over the posted speed limit—“I was young, dumb, cocky and sloshed and thought I could make it with mph's to spare and give the kid one of life's biggest kicks and make him think his dad was great”—and flipped over a highway barricade and landed in some bushes though the kid hit a tree. The railway-crossing accident was a few years later when he was alone. He leaped out of the front seat when he heard the train whistling at him and the van was demolished. The boy had a hole in his head the size of a lacrosse ball, he said, and he could see the brains and bones it was so deep. There was no breath, wiggling or heartbeat and he blew air into the hole after he gave up trying to revive him by breathing into his mouth and pressing down on his chest. When people tried tearing him off the boy he yelled “Don't touch me or him, I'll kill anybody who tries,” and blew and blew into his son's head and after about a half hour of this the boy opened his eyes and, his friend swore, smiled and said “Hi.” It was a miracle, he said, or a million-to-one shot defying all laws of science and biology and everything any expert knows about them and he only thought to do it because after he stopped trying to resuscitate him in normal ways a fingernail scratched through his shirt into his back and he said “Ouch, whoever, get the fuck away,” and then turned around furiously to see who was still scratching him and there wasn't anyone even near but he heard the voice of his dead mother say “My dear, the trick's not to lick or quit but to freshen his intellect with your breath without letup.” So what's your point? The point's that though your friend didn't think this then he went against all odds and didn't give up when everything seemed hopeless for his son and people were even trying to pull him away—but you've said that, so what's next? What's next is you do it too, not into the bullet hole but her mouth, not thinking what your friend did but only remembering it weeks later and thinking it must have had an influence. Thinking now that it's a million-to-one shot she'll survive but chances of getting her to a hospital in time are even less, so if anything's going to save her it'll be this, though you don't know why. So you breathe into her mouth almost nonstop for about fifteen minutes while Margo, not close to the road because you don't want her getting hit by anything or the air suck of a truck or bus to pull her onto it, tries to wave cars down though maybe most of them think she's waving them away or just waving hello at them, when a car pulls over and driver asks what's up, anything he can do? and takes you in your car, for you don't want to stop your mouth-to-mouth breathing into her, to what he thinks is the nearest hospital though you have to know, he says, he's not from around here but has driven through it a number of times. Says he sees an H sign, follows it, no hospital or other H signs after a few miles, stops at a gas station for directions, parks at the hospital emergency entrance, you run in shouting for someone, help, your daughter, shot in the chest, maybe dying, please, anybody, it's an emergency-emergency, come quick, doctors and emergency equipment to your car outside, feeling by now they won't be able to do anything for her and maybe you should have tried finding a hospital yourself right after she was shot instead of spending so much time trying to revive her with your breathing but also that there just may still be a chance they will.