OLEANDER / SIGILS
Martin Higgins
Not long after my brother died, I left for the desert. I had been planning the trip for some time, feeling the urge to sleep under the stardome on the still-warm sand, wanting to let the sun pound its potent common sense into my uncertain mind, needing to relearn the miracle of water and life.
When Paddy spilled his Harley and didn't get back up, I was left with a hole in my spirit that cried out for healing. I sought Confession, Absolution, Communion, and Redemption, in the easy Catholic jargon of my disintegrating family - my empty gesture, echo verse, hate-sprung love, ad hominem blood.
I use their words because they once were my words, and my tongue stings from their taste. But Confession is the first station at the beginning of my inbred redemption cycle, so I have nowhere else to begin.
I was an "Altar Boy" until thirteen years old. Altar Boy/class clown - malleable and compliant, the way St. Boniface's nuns loved boys to be. "Surely Martin is meant for the priesthood! He has the Call!" Those tired Dominican women hoped to hand select, groom, and "show the way" to boys who might become the men who would eventually order their nunnery lives.
It took my fiery, red-faced renunciation of the tenets and dogmas of Mother Church to spare me from the horrors of LaSalle Military Academy, the Seminary, and then a life of celibate service. During my repudiation, my mother – the woman who sat at the kitchen table with me and led me through the Baltimore Catechism – finally broke down, teary-eyed, and whispered, "All right. It's okay. I don't believe it all either."
That stopped my young heart cold, but I continued to argue and struggle like a victorious prize fighter, swept up in the heat of the bout, too busy dancing and jabbing, too punch drunk to let the referee lift his arm in triumph.
An uneasy moment blinked by before I realized my hot words were now hollow, my protestations unopposed.
The impact of her words was not a victory for me, not a triumph of honesty over blind faith, or even a moment of shared empty-soul camaraderie between mother and first son. "We believe in nothing" was her message.
"As a family, we have no faith."
The sobering chill of that thought re-wrote volumes of my memories. Mom's simple homilies? Meaningless. Dad's big show of "going to church" and belonging to all the expected religious organizations? A sham.
My time as an Altar boy? Jesus!
I would have better spent those incensed mornings and weekends in the service of a stage magician, some tuxedoed illusionist, running props on and off stage, reacting with innocent-faced surprise when the body is finally beheld, unsawn.
Hoc est corpus.
But the framework of my life had already been Martyr-oriented, sacrifice driven, given to expect the trials of Job when all seems to be good and happy and prosperous.
I want to spit in the face of the person responsible for rigging me this way, for putting my piece of cheese at the end of the electrified maze corridor, for setting up my savings account in the great beyond so, there is no interest, just penalties.
That would require me to wipe my spittle from every mirror.
I can no sooner change my past than grow wings or live underwater. A man is a man built upon other men and their laws. So, to the desert went. To the infernal desert – the wasteland that knows not waste – the barren, fruitful, empty, enriching, desolate, spiritual desert. Where we see our mortality in the evaporation of morning dew and the watchers watch the seekers seek.
As my departure day neared, I felt I was embarking on a pilgrimage, a spiritual journey with a physical destination, under a full moon, with no god or goddess to please. This was to be my sojourn into the cauldron, alive, aware, and open to whatever lies in my path.
Lies in my past.
I wanted to record everything I encountered, fearing that some tiny puzzle piece might slip past me or fall through the net of my senses, mixing with the dust rake of my feet along the way.
I would surely bring video, film, audio recorders, and notepads, but what of the touch, taste, and smell? Could I trust my memory? Would it present itself to me in that way? Would what present itself to me?
My preparations questioned the goal of my search. What imprint on the senses does one's soul make?
Days later, on the highway, each expectant mile brought jagged pieces of an unseen puzzle, casual observations of seemingly unrelated elements that, when held in concert, bore the mounting heart-tremble realization that there was indeed some spiritual connection just beyond the reach of my reason.
Fields dotted with russet automobile skeletons, the breathtaking, tire-dodging scurry of road game, the toneless murmur of my wheels on the highway, and the throbbing whistle of my radio antenna ripping through the pollen-heavy air brought on a warm, sun-dazzled intoxication – I was cast loose from the steering wheel and pedals and instruments of the car that seemed somewhere far below me.
A rush of cool, dark shadow swept in through my window, climbed up the side of my face, and spilled across the windshield so abruptly that I flinched and stiff-armed the steering wheel, pushing back into my seat to avoid the impact of whatever unimaginable object might have caused such sudden darkness.
Above me, up through the car's moon roof, I could see a growling black shape rise, slowing as it wheeled upward, soaring into the brilliant noon; its voluptuous roar swooping into a disappointed groan that sent tremors through my cheekbones, back into my head, and down into my chest.
It fell back on itself, turning end over end as it dropped from the sky; an electric blue plume of smoke left at the vertex of its climb, another throaty growl swelling as it dove back toward my van like a great bird of prey having looped into attack trajectory with an effortless pirouette.
Its wings were trussed top and bottom, strung with long cable sinews that thrummed and sang out a whistle as the weight, wind, and speed turned mounting tension into deadly accurate, rock-steady flight.
Twenty-five, possibly twenty feet above my head, I saw the face of the crop-duster's pilot, calm and indifferent, as he rolled into straight and level flight above the highway, zoomed out over a bean field, and spewed out a white death spoor.
I felt gut-punched, panting, nerves tingling from the unconscious demon fear my mind had thrown into my heart, an unwarranted, self-defeating emotion for a man committed to walk heavy in the heartland of spirits. I slid my foot off the gas pedal and coasted onto the fast lane shoulder of the road, scatter gravel over dusty packed clay. Each passing car created a highway speed slipstream pulled at the van, rocking me, tugging at me to get back out onto the blacktop and continue on my way.
Stop for a minute, drink water, and collect my wits—many miles before the High Desert.
But, by definition, this is all desert.
The plane continued to swoop, roll and loop, plowing its mid-air field deep with insecticide and high-octane exhaust that settled to the ground and wafted steadily back across the highway's center-divide stand of oleander hedge, giving each shrub, in turn, the appearance of smoldering, like the burning bush that was ablaze, and yet not consumed, on Ararat.
I killed the engine and opened my door, letting a blast of dry heat lift the sweat from my face, drops evaporating quickly in the traffic-troubled breeze, cooling me with their sublimation into vapor, their absorption back into the endless cycle that falls from the clouds to be drawn up from the ground and pour from a bottle only to begin the cycle again through my body.
My legs ached, and I needed to stretch-walk, but when I swung my feet out to slide off my seat, I was staggered by a sight that once again brought blood rushing to my head.
A dead hawk was on the litter-strewn shoulder, under my boots, next to a strip of twisted retread. My foot would have stepped directly onto it; the tip of my toe at its beak. When I spread my feet, I saw a gray field mouse struggling to escape the bird's clenched black talons. It bled its life onto the parched clay in trembling death spasms.
So violent were its throes, when I pried open the hawk's fatal grip, the sunk-eyed mouse tumbled aside. I carried it into the oleander shade out of some sense of naked pity and vulnerability that it might grow cold before the earth sent up its relentless scavengers.
I remembered the pet funerals of my childhood when I learned the ritual and respect afforded even the most minor living thing.
My brothers, sister, and I held sacred the miracle dark passage of house cat or yard dog or storm-struck bird or aged hamster with a shoe box and paper shroud, with life-photo, flower or favored chew toy, in a garden grave and twig marker or cobble headstone – consecrated by our tears and prayers. We already feared the inconceivable passage of our own Grandma and Grandpa, maybe even Mom or Dad or a friend in the hospital, car wreck, plane crash, that would bring not a few scant moments but years of tear-stained bereavement.
In our callow rehearsals of inhumation, few of us ever stopped to consider our own frailty and hazard in such a precarious world and our eventual mortal throes. But I did.
And I still do.
So, Mr. Mouse was laid on the shade-cool earth, and as his life drifted off, I remembered that anything more than what he had right there was window-dressing and illusion.
As it was for Paddy. As it will be with me.
When the mouse's final death rigor came and passed, there was no more to do. I turned to the hawk and, using a pocket knife left to me by my brother, cut off the hawk's legs just above the talons and wrapped them in a sheet of wind-torn newspaper. I didn't know what purpose they might serve, but a compelling urge to take them along with me rendered the blood and gore merely color and particles on my hands, not the flesh and blood of a noble bird of prey that probably looped into attack trajectory with an effortless pirouette.
I stepped back into my SUV, wiped the gore onto my pants leg, and remembered the soaring beauty of hawks and their magnificent birdness. I recalled the Cochiti legend of a neglectful mother Crow abandoning her nest and losing her hatchlings to a Hawk who took pity on them. I glanced down at the legless carcass looking for faint signs of that mythic devotion until a blast of highway traffic slipstream rolled it into the oleander shade.
I accelerated along the shoulder of the road and, at fifty, nudged the front tire onto the fast lane. At 60, I turned on the radio.
A loud thump shock wave hit the front of my car and mixed with a blare of Mexican accordion music as a blue pick-up truck exploded through the center divide; a spray of oleander leaves and white flowers blasted high into the air as the truck slammed down onto the roadbed, sliding sideways, headed directly at me.
Roaring, howling, its tires liquefied and burned furiously into white smoke as it cut a path across my lane, out of control and about to roll over. My tires screamed as I stood full weight on the brake pedal. We hurtled toward each other, locked on a course I knew I could not survive. For the briefest split-second, I saw the driver turn his wheels into the slide, aiming the truck toward the cinderblock sound wall at the highway's outer edge.
This panic reaction unbridled the truck's momentum and roared across my lane toward the wall. I couldn't look away as he hit the masonry barrier head-on. The truck's shiny metal fenders and hood crumpled, rammed back into its cab. Glass, chrome trim, and plastic erupted in a shower of fragments that rebounded from the wall, bounced across the cab's roof and bedcover, and then rained down onto the ground.
He's dead. I thought, skidding to a stop just past where our coal-black tire tracks crossed. I'll try to help him, but I'm probably going to watch him die.
Traffic slowed but kept driving by, so I had to dash across the blacktop to avoid a long line of cars. I stopped at the skewed door of the wreck when the driver kicked it open and hopped out.
He hopped out.
Speechless, I watched him with a sinking feeling in my gut as he walked up to me, hand extended as though we had just met at a party. He was short five, five-two, brown with a thatch of hair that stood up as if it had never known a comb. He was forty, maybe fifty. I couldn't tell because he was intact, uninjured, perfect. When he smiled, I saw a gold tooth that shone in the noon sun, matching the sparkling crucifix on a chain bouncing on his coffee-tan chest.
He was happy!
"Milagro!" he shouted, "Viva los Angeles!"
We were a hundred miles from L.A. I assumed he was in shock or disoriented, shaken into delirium by a concussion that should have killed him.
The truck had punched a cavern into the block wall. Steam rose from the hot fluids that splashed onto the asphalt from the crushed engine and ran into the shoulder clay. Hissing and clicking, the vehicle gave up its useful life in a grotto of destruction.
The man's hand was warm and callused, and he pumped it up and down with what must have been pure adrenaline overload. My hand started to hurt, but I was so amazed that I let him continue until I was sure I wasn't missing some tiny, vital observation, some indication of internal injury that might drop him to his knees when his hormonal rush faded.
"Amigo!" he shouted, "Hagame usted el favor de venir!"
He led me back to the wreck, pulled a photo down from the visor, and held it high. It was a stiffly posed portrait of him in a suit standing behind a chair where an angelic Mexican woman clutched a swaddled infant to her breast. In the foreground, a plump girl of eight or nine wearing a lacy white dress knelt on a pillow holding a bouquet of camellias. Her eyes were cast upward to a superimposed cameo of the face of Christ, bleeding from the thorn crown above heavy-lidded eyes that showed the very soul of compassion.
"Mi hija. Se llama Pilar. Tiene nueve anos."
That was when I understood what he meant by"Viva Los Angeles!" His little girls. His angels. He was alive, and he would see his little angels again.
Milagro. Miracle. No shit.
He could not have been sitting up behind the steering wheel on impact. It was buried deep into the seat-back with so much force it had splayed backward around its shaft. And he couldn't have fallen to the floor because the engine, still clicking as the heat ran out of it, filled the entire lower section of the cab.
Scattered around the interior were holy pictures, rosary beads, palm crosses and statues of Jesus and Mary, and a few haloed saints I couldn't identify right off. It was a dashboard altar that had served its purpose before being demolished. On the seat, a Spanish photo pamphlet from the DMV lay open, showing a posed shot of a Hispanic drunk driver being arrested by a Caucasian Highway Patrolman with a streak of gray in his hair where the part might have been.
A Highway Patrol cruiser and a tow truck pulled up behind the wreckage, and their drivers got out in such perfect unison that I almost missed the significance of their arrival.
It hasn't been more than a couple of minutes since the crash. How can this be? Even a cell phone in the hand of the first person to see it would not have reached 911 yet, much less bring them both this fast.
Was there a speed trap? That wouldn't explain the tow truck. On their way to another accident? I can't imagine both traveling together, not to mention the remarkable co-incidence of passing right here, right now.
"Acabo de ver a diablo." the man whispered,staring into my eyes.
I went cold. "Diablo?"
He smiled weakly and straightened up when he saw the Highway Patrolman. I remembered the pamphlet in his truck and leaned closer to him to sniff his breath, but all I could smell was Sage and Manzanita smoke.
His eyes stayed on the cop, and he spoke softly as though describing a dream. "Si, si. La Cabeza de Vaca. Ojos rojo. Diente amarillo. Pene enorme..."
"Where? Dónde?" I asked, trying to catch his attention, but he was preoccupied with the approaching Highway Patrolman.
"Sir! Please get back to your vehicle and be on your way," the cop yelled to me, "we can handle this."
I took the man's arm and asked him again, "Where? Cuando ocurri eso? Donde est Diablo?"
He stood ramrod straight but pointed his index finger toward the cab of his truck. "Alli." he coughed, "Hace un momento."
"Return to your vehicle, sir, and be on your way," the patrolman repeated. I glanced up at his face and smiled as calmly as I could when I saw the streak of gray in his hair where the part might have been. "We can handle this." he said, "Thank you for your concern."
When I got back to my van, I watched the cop lead the man back to his cruiser, and without so much as a question, they drove off. Moments later, the tow truck operator had hitched up the wreck and sped off behind them.
I sat there, lost in a flood of feelings and incongruities, watching the traffic pass as though nothing had happened. My heart was pounding, and I had that singularly uncomfortable feeling that accompanies a brush with death. I had trouble forming a coherent thought, much less a question.
I started the engine, and the radio blared up, continuing the same song playing when the truck flew through my life.
It's been four or five minutes at most, and you wouldn't know anything had happened. Except for the...
I craned my neck, looking up and down that road.
Where the fuck are his skid marks?
I looked in my rearview mirror.
Where the fuck are my skid marks?
The oleander hedge was solid and so unruffled as to give no indication of me where the truck had come through. Only a pale flesh-colored plastic crucifix, shattered, flattened in the fast lane, testified to the location of the truck's touchdown point.
I got back out of my van and took my camera with me as I pushed through the green stick fragrance of the hedge to the other side of the highway. Again I found no skid marks, debris, or evidence that anything had happened in the last five minutes. I reeled under the possibility that I was hallucinating.
Nothing looked out of the ordinary; nothing had changed in the dry heat, pollen-heavy air under the crop-duster sky field next to the mouse-hawk oleander shade death bush. Just the heat-rippled, grease-striped asphalt crown of the highway and miles of tar patch squiggles covering every crack and fissure along the road. Worn wheel tracks in the asphalt with fissure-filling tar wiggles and dripping lines that formed what appeared to be serifs and darts and wingdings following no logical pattern but suggesting the trembling cursive hand of an aged calligrapher… or the squared ideoforms of Thailand… or a bold flowing Arabic script revealing the vile name of some long forgotten demon; a sigil, with an unspeakable name.
"Acabo de ver a diablo." the man had whispered.
I took dozens of photos of the tar squiggles before a mounting fear churned in my stomach. I prayed to los angeles for one more milagro as I climbed back through the hedge and drove away as fast as possible. The photos – the deliberate black filigree scrawls on the stained highway – alerted me that I had passed into the desert, into the war zone... into my cauldron... and there was much to fear.
- end -
copyright (c) 2018
Martin Higgins
all rights reserved
- end -
copyright (c) 2018
Martin Higgins
all rights reserved
When Paddy spilled his Harley and didn't get back up, I was left with a hole in my spirit that cried out for healing. I sought Confession, Absolution, Communion, and Redemption, in the easy Catholic jargon of my disintegrating family - my empty gesture, echo verse, hate-sprung love, ad hominem blood.
I use their words because they once were my words, and my tongue stings from their taste. But Confession is the first station at the beginning of my inbred redemption cycle, so I have nowhere else to begin.
I was an "Altar Boy" until thirteen years old. Altar Boy/class clown - malleable and compliant, the way St. Boniface's nuns loved boys to be. "Surely Martin is meant for the priesthood! He has the Call!" Those tired Dominican women hoped to hand select, groom, and "show the way" to boys who might become the men who would eventually order their nunnery lives.
It took my fiery, red-faced renunciation of the tenets and dogmas of Mother Church to spare me from the horrors of LaSalle Military Academy, the Seminary, and then a life of celibate service. During my repudiation, my mother – the woman who sat at the kitchen table with me and led me through the Baltimore Catechism – finally broke down, teary-eyed, and whispered, "All right. It's okay. I don't believe it all either."
That stopped my young heart cold, but I continued to argue and struggle like a victorious prize fighter, swept up in the heat of the bout, too busy dancing and jabbing, too punch drunk to let the referee lift his arm in triumph.
An uneasy moment blinked by before I realized my hot words were now hollow, my protestations unopposed.
The impact of her words was not a victory for me, not a triumph of honesty over blind faith, or even a moment of shared empty-soul camaraderie between mother and first son. "We believe in nothing" was her message.
"As a family, we have no faith."
The sobering chill of that thought re-wrote volumes of my memories. Mom's simple homilies? Meaningless. Dad's big show of "going to church" and belonging to all the expected religious organizations? A sham.
My time as an Altar boy? Jesus!
I would have better spent those incensed mornings and weekends in the service of a stage magician, some tuxedoed illusionist, running props on and off stage, reacting with innocent-faced surprise when the body is finally beheld, unsawn.
Hoc est corpus.
But the framework of my life had already been Martyr-oriented, sacrifice driven, given to expect the trials of Job when all seems to be good and happy and prosperous.
I want to spit in the face of the person responsible for rigging me this way, for putting my piece of cheese at the end of the electrified maze corridor, for setting up my savings account in the great beyond so, there is no interest, just penalties.
That would require me to wipe my spittle from every mirror.
I can no sooner change my past than grow wings or live underwater. A man is a man built upon other men and their laws. So, to the desert went. To the infernal desert – the wasteland that knows not waste – the barren, fruitful, empty, enriching, desolate, spiritual desert. Where we see our mortality in the evaporation of morning dew and the watchers watch the seekers seek.
As my departure day neared, I felt I was embarking on a pilgrimage, a spiritual journey with a physical destination, under a full moon, with no god or goddess to please. This was to be my sojourn into the cauldron, alive, aware, and open to whatever lies in my path.
Lies in my past.
I wanted to record everything I encountered, fearing that some tiny puzzle piece might slip past me or fall through the net of my senses, mixing with the dust rake of my feet along the way.
I would surely bring video, film, audio recorders, and notepads, but what of the touch, taste, and smell? Could I trust my memory? Would it present itself to me in that way? Would what present itself to me?
My preparations questioned the goal of my search. What imprint on the senses does one's soul make?
Days later, on the highway, each expectant mile brought jagged pieces of an unseen puzzle, casual observations of seemingly unrelated elements that, when held in concert, bore the mounting heart-tremble realization that there was indeed some spiritual connection just beyond the reach of my reason.
Fields dotted with russet automobile skeletons, the breathtaking, tire-dodging scurry of road game, the toneless murmur of my wheels on the highway, and the throbbing whistle of my radio antenna ripping through the pollen-heavy air brought on a warm, sun-dazzled intoxication – I was cast loose from the steering wheel and pedals and instruments of the car that seemed somewhere far below me.
A rush of cool, dark shadow swept in through my window, climbed up the side of my face, and spilled across the windshield so abruptly that I flinched and stiff-armed the steering wheel, pushing back into my seat to avoid the impact of whatever unimaginable object might have caused such sudden darkness.
Above me, up through the car's moon roof, I could see a growling black shape rise, slowing as it wheeled upward, soaring into the brilliant noon; its voluptuous roar swooping into a disappointed groan that sent tremors through my cheekbones, back into my head, and down into my chest.
It fell back on itself, turning end over end as it dropped from the sky; an electric blue plume of smoke left at the vertex of its climb, another throaty growl swelling as it dove back toward my van like a great bird of prey having looped into attack trajectory with an effortless pirouette.
Its wings were trussed top and bottom, strung with long cable sinews that thrummed and sang out a whistle as the weight, wind, and speed turned mounting tension into deadly accurate, rock-steady flight.
Twenty-five, possibly twenty feet above my head, I saw the face of the crop-duster's pilot, calm and indifferent, as he rolled into straight and level flight above the highway, zoomed out over a bean field, and spewed out a white death spoor.
I felt gut-punched, panting, nerves tingling from the unconscious demon fear my mind had thrown into my heart, an unwarranted, self-defeating emotion for a man committed to walk heavy in the heartland of spirits. I slid my foot off the gas pedal and coasted onto the fast lane shoulder of the road, scatter gravel over dusty packed clay. Each passing car created a highway speed slipstream pulled at the van, rocking me, tugging at me to get back out onto the blacktop and continue on my way.
Stop for a minute, drink water, and collect my wits—many miles before the High Desert.
But, by definition, this is all desert.
The plane continued to swoop, roll and loop, plowing its mid-air field deep with insecticide and high-octane exhaust that settled to the ground and wafted steadily back across the highway's center-divide stand of oleander hedge, giving each shrub, in turn, the appearance of smoldering, like the burning bush that was ablaze, and yet not consumed, on Ararat.
I killed the engine and opened my door, letting a blast of dry heat lift the sweat from my face, drops evaporating quickly in the traffic-troubled breeze, cooling me with their sublimation into vapor, their absorption back into the endless cycle that falls from the clouds to be drawn up from the ground and pour from a bottle only to begin the cycle again through my body.
My legs ached, and I needed to stretch-walk, but when I swung my feet out to slide off my seat, I was staggered by a sight that once again brought blood rushing to my head.
A dead hawk was on the litter-strewn shoulder, under my boots, next to a strip of twisted retread. My foot would have stepped directly onto it; the tip of my toe at its beak. When I spread my feet, I saw a gray field mouse struggling to escape the bird's clenched black talons. It bled its life onto the parched clay in trembling death spasms.
So violent were its throes, when I pried open the hawk's fatal grip, the sunk-eyed mouse tumbled aside. I carried it into the oleander shade out of some sense of naked pity and vulnerability that it might grow cold before the earth sent up its relentless scavengers.
I remembered the pet funerals of my childhood when I learned the ritual and respect afforded even the most minor living thing.
My brothers, sister, and I held sacred the miracle dark passage of house cat or yard dog or storm-struck bird or aged hamster with a shoe box and paper shroud, with life-photo, flower or favored chew toy, in a garden grave and twig marker or cobble headstone – consecrated by our tears and prayers. We already feared the inconceivable passage of our own Grandma and Grandpa, maybe even Mom or Dad or a friend in the hospital, car wreck, plane crash, that would bring not a few scant moments but years of tear-stained bereavement.
In our callow rehearsals of inhumation, few of us ever stopped to consider our own frailty and hazard in such a precarious world and our eventual mortal throes. But I did.
And I still do.
So, Mr. Mouse was laid on the shade-cool earth, and as his life drifted off, I remembered that anything more than what he had right there was window-dressing and illusion.
As it was for Paddy. As it will be with me.
When the mouse's final death rigor came and passed, there was no more to do. I turned to the hawk and, using a pocket knife left to me by my brother, cut off the hawk's legs just above the talons and wrapped them in a sheet of wind-torn newspaper. I didn't know what purpose they might serve, but a compelling urge to take them along with me rendered the blood and gore merely color and particles on my hands, not the flesh and blood of a noble bird of prey that probably looped into attack trajectory with an effortless pirouette.
I stepped back into my SUV, wiped the gore onto my pants leg, and remembered the soaring beauty of hawks and their magnificent birdness. I recalled the Cochiti legend of a neglectful mother Crow abandoning her nest and losing her hatchlings to a Hawk who took pity on them. I glanced down at the legless carcass looking for faint signs of that mythic devotion until a blast of highway traffic slipstream rolled it into the oleander shade.
I accelerated along the shoulder of the road and, at fifty, nudged the front tire onto the fast lane. At 60, I turned on the radio.
A loud thump shock wave hit the front of my car and mixed with a blare of Mexican accordion music as a blue pick-up truck exploded through the center divide; a spray of oleander leaves and white flowers blasted high into the air as the truck slammed down onto the roadbed, sliding sideways, headed directly at me.
Roaring, howling, its tires liquefied and burned furiously into white smoke as it cut a path across my lane, out of control and about to roll over. My tires screamed as I stood full weight on the brake pedal. We hurtled toward each other, locked on a course I knew I could not survive. For the briefest split-second, I saw the driver turn his wheels into the slide, aiming the truck toward the cinderblock sound wall at the highway's outer edge.
This panic reaction unbridled the truck's momentum and roared across my lane toward the wall. I couldn't look away as he hit the masonry barrier head-on. The truck's shiny metal fenders and hood crumpled, rammed back into its cab. Glass, chrome trim, and plastic erupted in a shower of fragments that rebounded from the wall, bounced across the cab's roof and bedcover, and then rained down onto the ground.
He's dead. I thought, skidding to a stop just past where our coal-black tire tracks crossed. I'll try to help him, but I'm probably going to watch him die.
Traffic slowed but kept driving by, so I had to dash across the blacktop to avoid a long line of cars. I stopped at the skewed door of the wreck when the driver kicked it open and hopped out.
He hopped out.
Speechless, I watched him with a sinking feeling in my gut as he walked up to me, hand extended as though we had just met at a party. He was short five, five-two, brown with a thatch of hair that stood up as if it had never known a comb. He was forty, maybe fifty. I couldn't tell because he was intact, uninjured, perfect. When he smiled, I saw a gold tooth that shone in the noon sun, matching the sparkling crucifix on a chain bouncing on his coffee-tan chest.
He was happy!
"Milagro!" he shouted, "Viva los Angeles!"
We were a hundred miles from L.A. I assumed he was in shock or disoriented, shaken into delirium by a concussion that should have killed him.
The truck had punched a cavern into the block wall. Steam rose from the hot fluids that splashed onto the asphalt from the crushed engine and ran into the shoulder clay. Hissing and clicking, the vehicle gave up its useful life in a grotto of destruction.
The man's hand was warm and callused, and he pumped it up and down with what must have been pure adrenaline overload. My hand started to hurt, but I was so amazed that I let him continue until I was sure I wasn't missing some tiny, vital observation, some indication of internal injury that might drop him to his knees when his hormonal rush faded.
"Amigo!" he shouted, "Hagame usted el favor de venir!"
He led me back to the wreck, pulled a photo down from the visor, and held it high. It was a stiffly posed portrait of him in a suit standing behind a chair where an angelic Mexican woman clutched a swaddled infant to her breast. In the foreground, a plump girl of eight or nine wearing a lacy white dress knelt on a pillow holding a bouquet of camellias. Her eyes were cast upward to a superimposed cameo of the face of Christ, bleeding from the thorn crown above heavy-lidded eyes that showed the very soul of compassion.
"Mi hija. Se llama Pilar. Tiene nueve anos."
That was when I understood what he meant by"Viva Los Angeles!" His little girls. His angels. He was alive, and he would see his little angels again.
Milagro. Miracle. No shit.
He could not have been sitting up behind the steering wheel on impact. It was buried deep into the seat-back with so much force it had splayed backward around its shaft. And he couldn't have fallen to the floor because the engine, still clicking as the heat ran out of it, filled the entire lower section of the cab.
Scattered around the interior were holy pictures, rosary beads, palm crosses and statues of Jesus and Mary, and a few haloed saints I couldn't identify right off. It was a dashboard altar that had served its purpose before being demolished. On the seat, a Spanish photo pamphlet from the DMV lay open, showing a posed shot of a Hispanic drunk driver being arrested by a Caucasian Highway Patrolman with a streak of gray in his hair where the part might have been.
A Highway Patrol cruiser and a tow truck pulled up behind the wreckage, and their drivers got out in such perfect unison that I almost missed the significance of their arrival.
It hasn't been more than a couple of minutes since the crash. How can this be? Even a cell phone in the hand of the first person to see it would not have reached 911 yet, much less bring them both this fast.
Was there a speed trap? That wouldn't explain the tow truck. On their way to another accident? I can't imagine both traveling together, not to mention the remarkable co-incidence of passing right here, right now.
"Acabo de ver a diablo." the man whispered,staring into my eyes.
I went cold. "Diablo?"
He smiled weakly and straightened up when he saw the Highway Patrolman. I remembered the pamphlet in his truck and leaned closer to him to sniff his breath, but all I could smell was Sage and Manzanita smoke.
His eyes stayed on the cop, and he spoke softly as though describing a dream. "Si, si. La Cabeza de Vaca. Ojos rojo. Diente amarillo. Pene enorme..."
"Where? Dónde?" I asked, trying to catch his attention, but he was preoccupied with the approaching Highway Patrolman.
"Sir! Please get back to your vehicle and be on your way," the cop yelled to me, "we can handle this."
I took the man's arm and asked him again, "Where? Cuando ocurri eso? Donde est Diablo?"
He stood ramrod straight but pointed his index finger toward the cab of his truck. "Alli." he coughed, "Hace un momento."
"Return to your vehicle, sir, and be on your way," the patrolman repeated. I glanced up at his face and smiled as calmly as I could when I saw the streak of gray in his hair where the part might have been. "We can handle this." he said, "Thank you for your concern."
When I got back to my van, I watched the cop lead the man back to his cruiser, and without so much as a question, they drove off. Moments later, the tow truck operator had hitched up the wreck and sped off behind them.
I sat there, lost in a flood of feelings and incongruities, watching the traffic pass as though nothing had happened. My heart was pounding, and I had that singularly uncomfortable feeling that accompanies a brush with death. I had trouble forming a coherent thought, much less a question.
I started the engine, and the radio blared up, continuing the same song playing when the truck flew through my life.
It's been four or five minutes at most, and you wouldn't know anything had happened. Except for the...
I craned my neck, looking up and down that road.
Where the fuck are his skid marks?
I looked in my rearview mirror.
Where the fuck are my skid marks?
The oleander hedge was solid and so unruffled as to give no indication of me where the truck had come through. Only a pale flesh-colored plastic crucifix, shattered, flattened in the fast lane, testified to the location of the truck's touchdown point.
I got back out of my van and took my camera with me as I pushed through the green stick fragrance of the hedge to the other side of the highway. Again I found no skid marks, debris, or evidence that anything had happened in the last five minutes. I reeled under the possibility that I was hallucinating.
Nothing looked out of the ordinary; nothing had changed in the dry heat, pollen-heavy air under the crop-duster sky field next to the mouse-hawk oleander shade death bush. Just the heat-rippled, grease-striped asphalt crown of the highway and miles of tar patch squiggles covering every crack and fissure along the road. Worn wheel tracks in the asphalt with fissure-filling tar wiggles and dripping lines that formed what appeared to be serifs and darts and wingdings following no logical pattern but suggesting the trembling cursive hand of an aged calligrapher… or the squared ideoforms of Thailand… or a bold flowing Arabic script revealing the vile name of some long forgotten demon; a sigil, with an unspeakable name.
"Acabo de ver a diablo." the man had whispered.
I took dozens of photos of the tar squiggles before a mounting fear churned in my stomach. I prayed to los angeles for one more milagro as I climbed back through the hedge and drove away as fast as possible. The photos – the deliberate black filigree scrawls on the stained highway – alerted me that I had passed into the desert, into the war zone... into my cauldron... and there was much to fear.
- end -
copyright (c) 2018
Martin Higgins
all rights reserved
- end -
copyright (c) 2018
Martin Higgins
all rights reserved