Detroit

I left in the middle of the night, 2 a.m., just threw some shit in the Mercury and drove away. I hadn’t thought about where I might go until I got close to the Mississippi River and then decided I’d drive all the way to my brother’s place in Detroit. He’d be surprised to see me, but glad. We always got along in reserved kinda way, neither one of us says a whole lot. Anyway, when I got near the Mississippi River bridge in the Quad Cities, the traffic went down to one lane, and there was a lot of flashing red and blue lights and one big flood light shining on a smashed up car.

As I got closer I could see it was a woman trapped in a mangle of jagged and twisted steel. She had a neck brace on and bloody bandages on her head and looked dead or passed or maybe they drugged her, I don’t know. Some rescue workers were prying at the steel and some man was carrying what looked like a chain saw. Off to the side a bit was a big diesel Ford pickup and I noticed a man sitting in the backseat of a cop car holding a bandage to his head. God damn drunk driver, I figured. The whole scene made me sick and I had to pull off at a truck stop and get some water and coffee, then a slice of apple pie.

After daybreak I blew a tire and swerved over to the side of the road. An International Harvester was churning through a field of corn in a cloud of dust, leaving in its wake a growing distance of stubble. I opened the trunk and got out the spare tire and set it against the bumper. The smell from the trunk was musty, but the air outside was cool and dry. As I reached in to get the jack and tire iron, I noticed in the corner near a dead battery a pair of white panties, all dirty now. I knew they were hers, but didn’t know how they had gotten there. I could suddenly see her in her white panties: the hard light from the bathroom spreading into the small dark bedroom where I lay on the small bed watching her bend over the sink in the cramped bathroom, washing her face before she got into bed with me. I grabbed the dirty white panties and put them to my face, but they didn’t smell like her panties smelled; they smelled of oil and exhaust. I balled them up and threw them in the ditch and put on the spare tire. Inside the car I wiped my blackened hands on an old road map. The harvester was still churning, leaving less and less corn behind. There was nothing in the rearview mirror and nothing ahead in the distance, so I started up the engine. Detroit was three hours away, and I was in Indiana.

Contributor: Thomas Christopher