I popped my trunk, got out of the car, and fished a tire iron from the wheel well. Without thinking I dashed across the highway and crept along the edge of the service road toward the motel.
There was a cluster of scrub maples and weeds at the southern edge of the place, and I crouched in the darkness, breathing heavily, waiting for Greer to make a move. It seemed like I waited a long time. Greer remained slumped in the front seat. I could hear strains of rock music coming from the open door of the car.
Tiptoeing from the brush, I managed to get within perhaps twenty feet of the Impala, where I took shelter behind one of the trucks. I could smell marijuana, and peering across through the windows of the truck’s cab I could see Greer, almost reclining, his head tilted back and his eyes closed, taking a long drag from a joint.
I crawled around the back of the truck and moved to a position directly behind the Impala. It took me perhaps two seconds to lunge forward and fling the car door wide open. Greer sat up straight, started to speak, and then turned his upper body away from me. The first time I swung the tire iron I hit him directly across the back of his head, almost at the base of his neck. When he hunched forward over the steering wheel, I hit him again, and he rolled over onto his back in the front seat. His eyes opened wide for a moment and then closed, and I heard a pitiful moan as I turned and ran.
Back at my car I settled in behind the wheel and tried to stop trembling. I rolled down the window and flung the tire iron out into the grass. I’d never really hit anyone in my life, and it was a strange, almost euphoric experience. The combination of rage and ecstasy is a feeling that I would have certainly described at that moment as wonderful. I tried to remember if I had said anything to Greer before I swung the tire iron, but I had no recollection, and regretted that I had not made some memorable statement. I also tried to recall at exactly what point, if ever, my actions had been premeditated. Did I even have what I could classify as a real memory of the moment I decided on a precise course of action, the instant I went to the trunk and removed the tire iron? I honestly don’t believe I did. The whole thing just happened, but I felt an immense sense of satisfaction, and had absolutely no regard for potential consequences.
The bottom line was that Francis Greer had ruined my life, perhaps once and for all. And at that point, sitting there in the darkness alongside the highway, I truly didn’t care. In that moment, for the first time in my life, the future literally did not exist in my mind.
I started driving back into the city. Somewhere en route I turned off highway 52 onto a dark little county road. There was no real thought involved in this decision. The road was entirely unfamiliar, but maybe I just felt like driving, and had some weird faith that I’d end up where I needed to be. I thought about all my days on the straight and narrow, all the times I’d awakened surprised to find myself where I was, and doing whatever it was I was doing; surprised by the clean-shaven face I’d see in the mirror every morning and the smiling man I’d frequently encounter staring me down from the family portraits around my house and on my desk at work. Some guys I suppose get a sort of disoriented feeling when they study a picture of themselves from an old high school yearbook. I’ve always had that same feeling whenever I see a photograph of my present self. I’m not saying I feel embarrassed or abashed; it’s more a feeling of befuddlement, almost like I’ve literally never truly recognized myself in whomever I was pretending to be at any given moment.
I don’t know, perhaps these thoughts came later. Maybe I wasn’t really thinking or feeling anything that night other than the blank rush of adrenaline. I know I was driving very fast. They’ve told me that much. And then all of a sudden there were a pair of bright lights hurtling toward me down that dark road. I saw the approaching car swerve into my lane, and then the driver—some punk, I’d later learn, eighteen years old and roaring on Old Style—killed his lights.
I was in the hospital for almost two months, most of it spent in rehab learning to crawl back into my body. It was like my body was this empty suit in the corner and I couldn’t do anything until I learned all over again how to put it on and move around in it. The whole time I was in that hospital there was a card from Francis Greer on the stand next to my bed. “Tough break, Richie,”it read. “Better luck next time.”
The doctors tried to tell me that I had to learn to remember, and that I had no recollection of what happened the night of the accident. That’s not true. I have a very precise memory of the accident; in fact, I know it was no accident at all.
The whole thing was deliberate, a game of chicken. The kid challenged me. I remember there was an instant when I could have jerked the wheel and conceded the lane, a moment when the collision could possibly have been avoided. I’d already yielded once; maybe two hundred yards before the crash I had instinctively swapped lanes with the oncoming car, but the other guy had followed my lead. And in those last few seconds I resolved I wasn’t going to budge again. I’d done enough budging.
The kid who was driving the other car was killed instantly, and I’m told that neither of his surviving passengers had any memory of the accident. I know exactly what happened, though. The little bastard would too, if he’d lived: I won.
TAKING THE BULLETS OUT
by Mary Sharratt
Cedar-Riverside (Minneapolis)
For over two decades, Neil had worked as a nurse in the emergency room at Hennepin County Medical Center. Many people burned out after only a few years, but he stuck to it the way he stuck to everything else. Someone had to extract the rubble out of a motorcycle accident victim’s raw thigh with a pair of tweezers. Someone had to be there to hold the hand of a teenager who’d just had a bottle of sleeping pills pumped out of her stomach. Neil never failed to comfort, even after seeing the fifth gunshot wound on a single day, the third woman with her teeth knocked out. He cleaned and disinfected their wounds. He bandaged them. He administered painkillers and spoke to them in a soft lulling voice. This routine had become such a part of him, he could practically do it with his eyes closed. He often wished he could indeed work blindfolded. In his twenty-five years in the emergency room, he had seen too much pain.
He tried to put it behind him the instant he stepped through his garden gate. In summer, he practiced his flute on the back porch, losing himself for an hour or more, playing Mozart, Debussy, or the Gaelic airs he had learned from his grandfather. But one particular evening, when he sat down to play, a string of obscenities exploded on the other side of the fence. The guy next door was yelling at his girlfriend again.
Neil hadn’t had much luck with neighbors in recent years, now that the neighborhood had become so rough and seedy. In 1969, when he and his former wife Gina had bought this little Victorian house, Cedar-Riverside had been vibrant and alive, the Twin Cities’ answer to Haight-Ashbury. A poet used to live next door. Neil and Gina had kept their back door unlocked to welcome the stream of friends into their kitchen. He used to leave his bicycle out on the porch all night. In those days, Neil could live off his music and odd jobs. He played with a folk band, had gigs in the Triangle, the Riverside Coffee House, and once in Dania Hall. Like so much else, those venues had vanished. Dania Hall had burned to the ground.