Grey Areas

by Brad Carl

  The next several hours were uneventful. The sun began to go down and Gable became rather quiet. Henry assumed it was because many people went to Adler for dinner and entertainment. He had also heard about another town north of Gable on Highway 57, called Merchant. It was bigger than Gable, but not nearly as large as Adler.

  At eight fifteen, Henry was passing the time listening to the radio when he heard a loud crash outside. He sprinted to the door and opened it, attempting to look up and down the highway. He couldn't see much of anything that way due to the location of the Corner Store building. It seemed no one else had heard the noise, which surprised Henry. If anybody else had heard, they didn't find it urgent enough to investigate. But Henry did.

  He reached into his pocket, grabbed his keys, and locked the door to the store. He jogged to the edge of the property and scanned north then south, up and down the highway. When he looked south he noticed something white sticking out of the ditch on the west side. Henry's instinct kicked in and he began a brisk jog down the shoulder of the highway, toward the white object. Had there been a car accident? He couldn't see far enough to tell for certain. The sun had gone down just enough that details from a distance were impossible to see. Henry kept jogging for what seemed like an eternity.

  I should've driven my car, he thought to himself.

  Finally, Henry reached the scene of what appeared to be a one-car accident. He saw a white sedan planted upside down and nose-first in the ditch. There were other cars pulled over on both sides of the highway, and a few of the drivers were beginning to get out.

  "Did you see anything?" Henry called out to them. "Is the driver still in the car?" No one answered but he could tell they were speaking among themselves up on the highway. He stumbled down into the ditch towards the overturned car. There was no fire that he could see, only smoke mixed with clouds of dust and dirt floating through the air from the impact. Henry approached the driver's side door and knelt down. He looked through the empty upside down frame, where there’d once been a window.

  "Hello!" Henry yelled into the car. "Anybody in there?" No one answered; the car was empty. The driver and any passengers must have been thrown from the vehicle. Henry stood up and spun around. He began searching for signs of life...or death.

  "Anybody out here?" he yelled. "Hello!" Henry could feel his heart racing. His breaths were short and quick. He tried to take a couple of deep ones to prepare himself for what he might see next. The grass was long enough that any person thrown from the car would be hidden. Henry kept moving and yelling in an attempt to find the driver or a passenger. A couple of other men from the cars that had pulled over on the shoulder began coming down to help.

  Approximately sixty feet from the car Henry finally spotted something red amidst the tall ditch weeds. He ran over to the area, about ten feet from a barbed-wire fence. The red he had noticed was a man's shirt. The man wearing the shirt was lying on his back, attempting to sit up. As Henry reached him, he called out to the other two men who were searching the area.

  "Over here!" he shouted, waving his arms and beginning to help the man in the red shirt sit up. "Was anybody else in the car?" Henry asked. The man seemed more in a daze than in pain.

  "No," the man replied. He looked Henry in the eyes as he was finally able to sit straight up. "My arm..."

  It was at that exact moment Henry realized the man's left arm was missing. His shoulder was a mass of blood and wreckage. The arm was nowhere in sight. Henry tried to think of a reassuring statement but came up with nothing.

  Just then the other men ran up behind Henry and the victim.

  "Holy shit!" the heavyset one exclaimed, out of breath from the ninety-foot jog. He stared at the man's bloody socket.

  "Is there anyone else?" the second man asked.

  "No, just him," Henry answered.

  "I've got some towels in my truck. I'll go get them!" The chubby guy hustled back up to the shoulder.

  "We've got to get him out of here," the other man said. "I'll go call 911. My phone's in the car."

  Something told Henry neither of the men wanted to stick around and look at the victim's injury. He tried not think about it or look at it as he spoke to him.

  "What's your name?"

  "Alan...Alan Walker," the man answered.

  "Do you think you can walk if I help you, Alan?" Henry asked. He wasn't sure if moving him was a good idea. At this point he was working on adrenaline and instinct, not experience. After all, this kind of thing didn't happen to a convenience store clerk every day.

  "I think...yes," Alan responded. His black hair was matted down with a combination of blood, sweat, and dirt. He had a deep cut on his forehead that was still bleeding. His eyes were as big as saucers as he continued to stare at Henry for answers.

  It surprised Henry that Alan hadn't passed out yet. He must have lost large amounts of blood when his arm was severed. As Henry helped Alan stand, he saw a pool of blood where Alan had been lying. He reached around Alan’s waist and let the injured man balance his weight against him. Fifteen seconds felt like fifteen minutes to Henry as they crept to the highway. When they passed the wreckage of the car, Alan turned and looked at it. The look on his face made Henry wonder if the man even understood what had happened. As they reached the edge of the highway, Alan began to lose his balance.

  "I can't..." he said as he fell from Henry's grip and to his knees.

  He's going to pass out soon, Henry thought.

  "An ambulance is on the way," the chubby man said as he hustled to Henry and handed him some towels, as if he were a paramedic. Henry took the towels and looked down at Alan, who was balancing on his knees, swaying from side to side. He was beginning to shake.

  "I don't think there's enough time," said Henry. "The ambulance has to be a good twenty minutes away."

  "I can drive him there," a female voice piped up. "I was heading to Adler, anyway."

  "I'll ride with you," Henry said, completely forgetting he was supposed to be working. "What color is your car?" he asked her.

  "Silver," the woman replied. She looked to be in her mid-fifties. "It's a Murano."

  The man who called the ambulance had also made his way over. Henry turned to him and asked, "Can you call 911 again? Ask them to tell the ambulance to be on the lookout for a silver Murano heading south, flashing its brights."

  The man nodded, pulled his phone from his pocket, and walked back to the shoulder to make the call. Alan was lying down on the ground again, this time on his side—the side that still had an arm. He was conscious, but his breathing was labored and he was beginning to shut his eyes for brief periods. Henry enlisted two more men who had pulled their cars over to carry Alan to the backseat of the woman's car. He gave them two towels and kept one for himself.

  "I'll be right back," he told them. "Just give me sixty seconds." Henry ran down the ditch in the direction of the overturned car. He tried looking inside through the glassless, passenger-side window but couldn't see much of anything. Nightfall was continuing to creep down on the countryside.

  Wrong side, anyway, Henry thought to himself. He darted to the driver's side, where he had first looked for victims. He reached inside and felt along the roof that was now on the ground. He reached up to the floor. Nothing. As Henry pulled his arm out of the car, it brushed against the seatbelt. He could immediately tell it wasn't just an empty harness. He looked up and saw Alan's arm in a bloody, tangled mess of nylon mesh.

  Henry didn't have time to think about how nauseating and surreal this was going to be. He reached up and began untangling the arm. The skin was cool. As he worked at twisting it out of the seatbelt, Henry could feel the flesh and bone protruding from the severed limb, but at least it didn't take long to free it. Henry wrapped the arm in the towel and sprinted back up to the highway. The lady in the silver Murano had pulled up to the shoulder and was waiting for Henry.

  "Could you pop the hatch, please?" he called out to her. Henry figured it might not be a good idea to make Alan
ride shotgun with his arm. He placed it in the back, still swaddled in the towel, and closed the hatch door. He scurried into the backseat and squeezed in next to where Alan was stretched out.

  "Let's go!" Henry exclaimed. The woman pulled onto the highway and began to pick up speed. Alan had passed out. There were two towels near his wound. It looked to Henry as though Alan had been trying to apply pressure to it. Henry pressed his own hand hard against the bloody towels.

  "What's your name?" the woman asked.

  "My name's Henry. His name is Alan," he answered.

  "I'm Rose," she offered. "You do this often?" She caught Henry off guard with her sense of humor, but he managed a soft chuckle when he replied.

  "I can't say that I do," he said. "First time, actually."

  "Me, too," Rose said. "So I assume your plan is to shorten the ambulance's drive time and get Alan to some EMTs faster?"

  "It might not be standard operating procedure in an emergency situation, but it made sense to me at the time," Henry explained.

  "Makes perfect sense to me," Rose agreed. "How's he doing back there?"

  "I'm no doctor, but I'd say he needs professional medical attention soon."

  "Then it's a good thing we're doing this," Rose replied. A few seconds of silence passed, then she spoke again. "Did you put what I think you put back there, in the towel?"

  Henry looked down at Alan. He was still passed out.

  "Yeah," he answered. "I figured if there was any hope..."

  "You did the right thing," Rose told him. "A good thing."

  Up ahead and off in the distance, a vehicle was approaching. Rose and Henry noticed it through the twilight at the same time.

  "There's the ambulance!" Henry exclaimed.

  "Flashing my brights!" Rose reported.

  Within seconds, the ambulance and the Murano met nose to nose on the right shoulder of Highway 57. Henry jumped out immediately and stood by the door. He hadn't let up the pressure on Alan's wound until now.

  "He's in the backseat here!" he shouted to the paramedics. One of them came over immediately and stood face to face with Henry. He was an African-American of average height and build, and he was all business.

  "What do we have here?" he asked.

  "He was in a car accident about seven or eight miles north of here. Looks like he was thrown from the vehicle. When I found him his arm was missing. I think it got caught in the seatbelt. The accident happened roughly thirty minutes ago. His name is Alan Walker."

  Henry stepped aside and let the paramedic look in on the injured man.

  "I've been trying to keep pressure on it," Henry explained. He's been passed out for maybe ten to twelve minutes."

  The paramedic pulled his head out from the vehicle and waved to the other two paramedics, who were bringing the gurney. He turned to Henry again.

  "Only ten minutes or so?"

  "Give or take, I'd say. Is that bad?" Henry had no idea. All this stuff he had been doing was guesswork. He had never broken a bone, never had surgery, and never spent any time in a hospital other than to visit someone.

  "No, I wouldn't say so. But it's not necessarily good either. Just a bit unusual," the EMT explained. He pulled Henry aside a few more feet as the other paramedics began to move Alan out from the backseat and onto the stretcher.

  "Hey, uh...you wouldn't happen to have recovered the severed limb, would you?" he asked.

  Henry had almost forgotten.

  "Yes, yes I did." he replied, moving to the back of the vehicle. The hatch was still unlocked and Henry raised the door. Not requiring a cue, the paramedic immediately leaned in and pulled back the bloody towel to confirm it was, indeed, a human arm.

  "We'll take this with us," he explained, folding the towel back around Alan's arm and picking it up.

  "Of course," Henry said. The paramedic took the towel-wrapped appendage to the back of the ambulance, where the other two EMTs had just transferred Alan. Henry stood by the driver's side door of the Murano and waited to see if they needed anything else. Rose rolled down the window.

  "Looks like it's out of our control now," she said.

  "I guess so," Henry sighed. "I hope he's okay."

  "You did your part," Rose assured him. Just then the African-American paramedic jumped into the driver's seat of the ambulance. As he did, he gave Henry a quick wave of the hand as if to say "thanks." Henry waved back.

  "Did you want to follow them to the hospital and find out how things turn out?" Rose asked Henry as the ambulance U-turned onto the highway and sped away with the lights flashing and siren blaring.

  All of a sudden, Henry remembered what he had been doing less than forty-five minutes earlier.

  "I can't," he said. "I need to get back to work. Can I talk you into driving back to Gable?"

  Henry was grateful when Rose didn't hesitate to accommodate him. On the way he explained everything to her. He told her how he had been working at the store when he heard the accident and instinctively ran up the highway to investigate.

  Rose was a saleswoman who lived in Adler and had been on her way home from a business dinner in Merchant. When she noticed several cars pulled over on the highway she only slowed down to be safe, at first. But when she discovered what had happened, she elected to pull over and see if she could help.

  When they drove past the accident scene again, there were two Gable Police cars on the shoulder, lights flashing. Henry thought one of the policeman might be Sergeant Jackson, though he couldn't tell for sure in the darkness.

  When they pulled up to the Corner Store, all looked the same to Henry as when he had left it a little more than an hour ago. He turned to Rose and thanked her for helping and for bringing him back.

  "Don't mention it," she said. "You would've done the same for me or anyone else."

  Henry wasn't quite sure how Rose knew this, but he felt certain she was right.

  "By the way," he remembered, "you're gonna have some blood on the seat back there." Henry looked down at his shirt; it had several spots on it, too.

  "That's not a problem either," Rose replied. "It's a company car, and I'm due for a detail cleaning from top to bottom. Company dime!"

  Henry thanked her again and got out of the car. He unlocked the door to the Corner Store as she drove away. There was no telling how many customers he had missed while he had been gone, if any. He would have to come clean with Bruce, but it could wait until tomorrow afternoon. Henry only hoped it wouldn't cost him his job. Bruce seemed like a reasonable guy, but you never can be too certain about people. This much Henry knew from experience. A lot of experience.

  He saw three customers before closing. Only two came inside the store, both to buy beer. It was dumb luck neither of them noticed the bloodstains on his shirt because Henry didn't have the energy to explain himself. When Rose dropped him off he realized just how worn out he was from the experience he had just had. His body wasn't tired, but he was feeling emotionally drained. Henry had turned off every other thought or feeling he had in his mind to concentrate on the situation at hand. Now that the ordeal was over and he had time to process what had happened, it was overwhelming.

  At eleven o'clock sharp Henry set the store alarm, locked the door, and fell into his car. The drive to his house was relaxing. So relaxing, in fact, that he had to struggle to stay awake. When he walked through the front door of the house, Wilson immediately greeted him with four meows. Henry replied with a couple meows of his own and filled his cat's food bowl. Then he poured some cornflakes in a cereal bowl for himself and took it with him to his bedroom while he changed clothes. He peeled off the bloody shirt and threw it in a corner. Henry knew he would more than likely end up throwing it away, but he didn't want to think about it at the moment.

  After putting on a pair of shorts and finishing his cereal, he crawled into bed. On cue, Wilson jumped on the comforter and curled up behind Henry's knees. They were both happy to be in bed. All was quiet.

  And then there was a knock at the do
or. Henry had already dozed off and wasn't sure if he was having a dream. He waited and listened. Another knock. It was real.

  Henry rolled out of bed; Wilson followed behind. There was another knock before he got to the door.

  "I'm coming," he growled. He thought for a minute how if he still lived in a city he wouldn't even be answering it.

  When Henry opened the door he was surprised to see Claire, standing on the top step, holding a bottle of white wine and two glasses.

  "Howdy stranger," she said.

  IV

  "I kind of feel like I owe you an apology," Claire explained. She batted her eyelashes just a bit and flashed Henry a smile. "Can I come in?" she asked.

  "Well, I guess," he said. "I had a long day, but..."

  Claire walked into the living room, not giving him a chance to finish his sentence. She stood behind Henry while he closed the door.

  "The place looks good," she commented. "Similar to how Chum had it. Want some wine?" She walked to the kitchen bar and set the bottle and glasses down. Then she reached into the back pocket of her jeans.

  "I even brought a corkscrew."

  "I'm not much of a drinker," Henry confessed as he followed her to the kitchen.

  "More for me then, I guess," Claire replied, wrestling the cork from the bottle. Henry watched as she poured a large glass. She then took the second glass and poured a small amount, handing it to Henry.

  "Just in case," she said with a smile and took the large glass for herself, strolling back to the living room. She pounced on the couch and took a drink as Henry sat down next to her.

  "Forgive me for slowing things down here, but...you've been in here before?" Henry asked. Claire nodded.

  "Several times," she said. "Chum throws a party every few months and invites the entire town. I mean, not everyone shows up, but it's always a good time. Lots of booze and food. Usually roasts a pig. It's pretty freaky to pull the meat for your sandwich from something that's staring at the guests."