He didn’t like hearing that. “It’s business, Russell. Don’t be pretending you wouldn’t do the same fucking thing if you was in my position.”
I didn’t want to get into it with him. It wouldn’t have done any good. Besides, I needed to get some air into my lungs. I needed to get outside and find a private place to sit down for a couple minutes. So that’s what I did.
I know how Gee would have handled that situation. She would have sighed and stopped knitting for a minute or two. Then she would have said, not to me or anybody else but more to herself, and not with any measure of happiness as you might expect from someone counting on an eternity in Paradise, but more like a kind of moan with words added to it, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.”
And for some reason these days, every time I think of what Gee might say in a certain situation, I also think what you might say, Spence. I swear to God I can hear the words coming right out of your mouth. “Life’s a shit pie, soldier. But when that’s all you’re given to eat, you better learn to like the taste of it.”
The thing that sometimes has me thinking our lives might really be controlled by the stars and planets and birthdates and such, or else by malicious gods or spirits, or by anything other than coincidence and chance, and sure as hell not by a god that wishes us well, is the fact that bad things never happen one at a time. And when they do happen, they seem to pick the very worst minute for it.
Take the rain, for example. Even before I left the house that morning, I’d been expecting one of those August cloudbursts that starts with a thunderclap and then keeps on hammering down until there are little rivers and lakes running through the streets and yards. If the rain had hit in the morning, it would have been an inconvenience but not much more. If it had hit during working hours, the rain would have tamed the ferocious heat and kept the dust down. But of course neither of those things happened.
The first thunderclap shook the tiles while I was standing there in the shower, with the cool spray pelting my head while I leaned against the wall and wondered what the hell I was going to do for a job. I knew I had to start looking immediately. In ten days I would be without an income. Cindy was only bringing home a little over a thousand a month, and our mortgage alone would eat up most of that.
In my head I started running through all of our other expenses, and with each one my legs got a little bit weaker, and my chest hurt a little bit more. Pretty soon the water hitting my head and shoulders felt like a thousand little fists pounding me down. There were the utilities, meaning cable and Internet and sewage and water and electricity and gas. Plus insurance on my truck and bike and on the house. The real estate and school taxes. A family of four to feed with a baby on the way. Dani would be starting first grade after Labor Day and needed clothes and school supplies. And Jesus, health insurance. I was carrying everybody on my policy because the one Cindy had at the bank was virtually worthless. How the hell were we going to pay for all that?
In the blink of an eye we’d gone from being secure and hopeful to being one step from homeless. Except that I was the only one who knew it.
And oh yeah, the rain. By the time I dried off and dressed, the rain was coming down in buckets. The gravel parking lot looked like a steaming island about to go under. I had my rain gear in the saddlebags, but by the time I got the cover off the bike I was already soaked to the skin, plus so weak with fear that I figured, what good is rain gear? So I jammed my helmet on and swung my leg over the wet seat and fired up the engine.
Then as I’m pulling around the corner of the building, there’s Jake standing outside his door, holding a magazine over his head against the downpour, and yelling at me to put the bike in his truck, he’d give me a ride home. I just kept on going. The sky was black as pitch except for the occasional lightning. Even my high beam had to struggle to make a difference. The long gravel lane down to the highway already had two little rivers gushing down the ruts the trucks had made, so I was forced to ride the hump down the middle in first gear, tapping the hand and foot brakes all the way and dragging my feet for balance.
The highway wasn’t much better. Two-wheeled vehicles have a tendency to slide on wet pavement. When that wet pavement is also coated with a fine layer of grit from a thousand little streams of runoff, the highway can be deadly for a biker. So, whether I wanted to go slow or not, I was forced to cut my speed to half what it would have been on a dry day. It was cut by half again by the nervous nellies in their cars. Once I hit town, traffic was moving at a crawl. And then it came to a complete halt. I was stopped dead in a downpour, still a mile and a half from the blacktop road that would take me the last few miles home. I just wanted to lay down in the ditch and cry.
I considered riding the shoulder up to my turnoff, but wanted to see what was causing the traffic snarl. If it was something I could drive around, I’d give it a try. So I shut the bike off and parked it right where it sat, then started walking up the side of the road. It wasn’t long before I saw the red and blue lights up ahead, two squad cars parked one behind the other on the shoulder. That was when I also saw the tow truck in the other lane, blocking the oncoming traffic as the driver tried to maneuver close enough to get a hook on an SUV broadside on the road. The SUV driver had apparently attempted a U-turn only to be slammed into by oncoming traffic. I couldn’t make out the kind of vehicle that T-boned the SUV, but I could see a cop with a flashlight waving my lane of traffic back, trying to make room for the tow truck.
By now I’m maybe twenty feet from my bike, and the cars in front of it are slowly inching backward. I turned and sprinted back to my bike and got there just in time to pound a fist on the trunk of the car in front of me. I caught him maybe two seconds from running over the bike—an accident that, in the long run, would have produced a better outcome than the one that lay ahead.