Eight years earlier, on a rainy July night, the White Stripes played ‘Fell in Love with a Girl’ on my car radio – tore the song apart, Jack White ripping his fingers bloody on his guitar, Meg White punching holes in the drums. I turned the volume up, up, up until the speakers distorted. I crammed the accelerator to the floor. My car skidded around a bend on Monument Road, the rain coming hard and harder, the headlights glinting off the black asphalt, and I didn’t care. Pine and oak forest slashed past. The roadside would reach out and pull the car in if I didn’t take my foot off the gas, and I didn’t care. I remembered then – like a punch in the gut – once, when I was six years old, after a hit-and-run driver came through, the body of a hitchhiker rotted for three days in the palmetto undergrowth and no one was the wiser until another hitchhiker happened by and oh, the smell.
Why, on a night like this – the rain falling hard and harder, Jack White ripping and Meg White pounding, my fishing rod, Dad’s .22, and three flounder in the trunk – why did that dead hitchhiker come to haunt me again? I was eighteen years old, I had a Buick Skylark that Dad let me drive when Jared didn’t need it for school, and I had a load of fish that I would fry on the stove so that when Dad woke in the morning he would smell breakfast and maybe, just maybe, come into the kitchen laughing.
Twelve years of daytime sun and night-time rain had burned and washed the smell of that dead hitchhiker into the sandy soil, and he had no business coming to wreck my mood now. I eased my foot off the gas, though the music kept playing and a jet of rain smashed against the windshield. I eased the gas, that’s all – I didn’t touch the brakes and I didn’t second-guess the joy I felt as I blasted into the blind dark – but that’s when my life went to hell.
If I’d kept my foot on the gas, I might’ve flown past the Bronson brothers and their broken-down Chevy Cavalier. Another car – all tail lights and brake lights to me – slowed for them and then sped away as I came up behind it. I might’ve done the same. I might’ve looked in my rearview and waved Bye bye bye. Or my tires might’ve slid on the pavement, and the boys and I would have risen through the rain on a cloud of gasoline flames.
If a hit-and-run driver knocked the ribs of a hitchhiker into his lungs and kept going, why didn’t I go, go, go?
The truth is, I stopped to help.
‘You’re always answering the door when you should stay in the kitchen,’ Dad said more than once. ‘Always picking up the phone when you don’t know who’s calling.’
Only a guilty man or a coward worries about who’s at the door, I thought. What worm is going to crawl through the phone into my ear?
But honestly, I could have kept driving. Should have.
I stopped, turned off the music, asked from my window, ‘Problem?’
Two boys stood in the rain. Kids. Too young to drive. Too young to be out alone on the side of Monument Road at three a.m. The hood of the Cavalier was up, the engine steaming. Black rain fell against the black night.
‘Um,’ said one of the boys, the smaller of the two, blond hair slicked down by the rain.
‘Yeah,’ said the other. Thick face, black hair.
‘You steal this car?’ I asked.
‘Nah,’ the big one said.
‘Right. How old are you?’
‘Seventeen.’
‘Right.’ I got out and looked under the hood. Blood on my hands from the fish. The wet gravel silent under my shoes. The rain slapping my face. In the dark – no flashlight – as if I knew what I was doing. As if I could help. Joyous in the late night. Free the way I felt at that hour. ‘The battery?’ I asked.
‘Don’t know,’ said the big one.
The little one asked, ‘Can you fix it?’
Engine steam might mean the radiator – even I knew that much. I touched the cap. Hot. ‘You have a cloth?’
The big one stripped off his T-shirt.
I wrapped it over the cap and tried it. Pressure held it tight. I tried again. Tight. I leaned into it and wrenched it with my weight. My hand slipped, and my knuckles raked across a metal bracket.
I swore. Shook my hand, the rain stinging the cut skin. Sucked the bloodiest knuckle. Wiped my hand on the T-shirt and threw the shirt on the ground.
The little one said, ‘Can you—’
I said, ‘It’s a mile and a half to the closest gas station. I’ll give you a ride.’
The little one wanted the ride. The big one wanted to stay with the car.
The rain came hard. The palmetto fronds on the roadside looked like slick black leather. ‘Decide,’ I said, ‘because I’m leaving.’
The little one looked at the other one and said, ‘Please.’
The big one balled his fists as if he might hit him, but he picked up his T-shirt and put it on, then walked to my car and got into the front passenger seat.
The little one said, ‘Thanks,’ and ran to the back seat.
I knew of a Shell station that I thought stayed open twenty-four hours. As we drove, the big kid hunched into himself. I guessed he’d had the idea to steal the Cavalier and he knew the blame would come down on him. When I glanced at the rearview mirror, the little one stared back with wide, nervous eyes. He was skinny, almost pretty, almost a girl.
‘You’re brothers, aren’t you?’ I said.
‘We don’t look it,’ the little one said.
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but I can tell.’
The tires hissed on the wet asphalt. The wipers snaked across the windshield. Our bodies steamed inside the car. The big one smelled of sweat and rain and cigarette smoke. You would have thought anything could happen.
The Shell station had closed for the night. But the neon yellow glowed like a bar of gold. Icy light shined from inside the empty minimart.
I drove under the pump canopy, and the rain silenced. Sheets of water poured from the canopy and the roof of the minimart. ‘Tough luck,’ I said.
The little one leaned over the seat. ‘Duane?’ he said to the big one.
‘Shut up,’ the big one said.
‘Don’t you have a phone?’ I asked.
Neither answered.
‘You can use mine if you want,’ I said.
Again, no answer. I figured the big one was deciding how to get out of the mess. I figured the little one was waiting for the big one to decide.
‘If you want to hang out here, the station will open in a couple of hours,’ I said.
‘Can you give us a ride?’ the big one asked.
‘Where to?’
‘We live by the airport,’ the little one said.
Twenty miles at least. ‘What were you doing over here?’
‘Driving,’ the big one said. ‘Some nights we do.’
‘Our dad used to live over here,’ the little one said, ‘before he moved to Miami.’
‘Shut up,’ the big one said.
I said, ‘I can’t take you all the way to the airport.’
They sat, silent in my car, the big one smelling of sweat and cigarette smoke, the little one looking like fear.
‘I’ve got to get going,’ I said.
They sat.
Then the big one got out of the car. The little one sat for a moment longer before getting out too.
‘Sorry,’ I said through the closed doors. Then I touched the gas and shot back into the thumping rain. A mile up Monument Road, I passed another car on the roadside, its hazards blinking. I turned on the radio. The Foo Fighters were playing ‘All My Life.’ More ripping guitar. More pounding drums.
I never did ask the little one’s name.
‘It was Steven,’ the prosecutor would say. ‘He was thirteen years old.’
I never did look the big one in the eyes.
They were blue. The jurors would hand his picture down the line. ‘Fifteen,’ the prosecutor would say. ‘An innocent child.’
I never touched either of them, aside from the big one’s T-shirt.
Steven wore flip-flops, orange shorts that looked brown in the dark and rain, and a gray T-shirt. His big brother, Duane, wore the red T-shirt, camouflage pants, and Nike tennis shoes. They both wore white jockey underwear – Steven’s threadbare, as if they were hand-me-downs. The jurors would finger each piece of clothing, dry now and packaged in a plastic exhibit bag.