Sunday, November 13, 2011
The driver for CV Electric Utility Company tromped on his truck’s brakes as the deer clambered out of the fog and brush and onto the dirt road in front of him.
The fog swam in the headlights.
No. Not a deer. A person.
A woman. Emaciated.
Hunched over and lurching gamely.
A woman who now collapsed in a heap on the road in front of him.
The driver jumped out of his truck and ran to kneel beside the woman.
“You’re all right. You’re going to be all right,” he said, though he did not believe it.
Her face was swollen and bruised, her forehead busted and gashed, cheeks coated in blood. The blood old, crusted black. Like creosote in an old stovepipe.
No, he did not think she’d be all right.
His work cell had no bars. He hated to leave her even for a moment, not wanting her to die alone, but he needed to do it. He hurried back to his truck, got on his radio, and called it into his company dispatch to get on 911 and tell them to bust ass, fog or not.
He went back to the woman in the road. He did not dare move her, so stayed with her as she moaned and sobbed.
It was half an hour before the ambulance reached them.
When the Bloomfield deputy sheriff took over soon after, the driver took out a flashlight from his truck and looked more closely at the woods from which the woman had scrambled. It was hard to see anything, except fog.
It looked as though a car had gone off the road. It had flown over a steep bank, so it left no swath in the trees to see from the roadside, nothing to see from the road. He hiked down the bank, and followed the now visible swath into the woods. About fifty feet in, he spotted it, an old VW Bug, crashed into the trees.
The front end was demolished.
How she had ever survived the wreck was beyond him.
Some people, he thought, are just plain survivors.