A Perilous Journey

by Darrell Maloney

  “And that’s my other favorite thing about you, Frank.”

  “What? My devastating good looks?”

  “No. Well, maybe…

  “But how you can go from grouchy old man to sweet romantic in no time at all.

  “And by the way, you’re totally wrong about that other thing.”

  “What other thing? I’m lost in your eyes and completely forgot what we were talking about.”

  “About how you said that people who work for a city don’t care about the job they do. That they won’t go the extra mile. That they just do what they have to do to draw their paychecks and go home and lean back on their recliners and pop open a beer and watch a football game.

  “That’s wrong on so many levels.”

  “Enlighten me then.”

  “Most people are good and want to do good things for other people. That’s number one. And B, when’s the last time you opened a beer? They don’t pop anymore, Frank. They don’t fizz either. They’re all flat, Frank.

  “Number three, there aren’t any more football games. There haven’t been for years. Back before Saris 7 hit. And lastly, D, if everybody who worked for the city of Lubbock was lazy, they wouldn’t have cleared any streets at all. They’d have all leaned back in their recliners and opened up their flat beers and stared at a blank TV, wishing there was a football game to watch.

  “So there.”

  It just so happened they reached the end of the city at that exact time.

  Before them lay two things:

  A sign which said:

  LUBBOCK CITY LIMITS

  Y’all Come Back Now, Hear?

  And a wall of snow four feet high.

  Frank chuckled and said, “Boom. Guess I win.”

  -40-

  Frank confidently drove headlong into the snow, knowing the new plow attachment would do an adequate job of pushing it out of the way.

  And it did, but he had the same problem he had with the wooden blade.

  It was a very slow process.

  Most people don’t view snow as particularly heavy.

  That’s because they typically hold it a handful at a time.

  When’s the last time you held any amount of snow bigger than a snowball? And you likely didn’t hold that very long, for a snowball is worthless as a weapon until it’s thrown.

  People who live in the northern United States, where snow is sometimes measured by the foot, know how heavy snow is. Each time they shovel their walks and driveways they’re reminded.

  They’re reminded because the first shovel full of snow isn’t that bad. The second shovel full isn’t that bad either.

  But by the time they get to the twentieth or thirtieth, they’re breathing pretty hard. Their backs are starting to ache and their arms are starting to feel like wet noodles.

  And they all of a sudden remember why their children all grew up and moved to places like Tampa and Phoenix.

  People who drive pickup trucks in such regions also know how much snow weighs.

  That’s why they don’t sweep it out of their truck beds every winter. And why sometimes they shovel snow off the ground and into the beds of their trucks.

  That’s because, for older trucks with rear-wheel drives, the more weight in the back the better the traction on icy roads.

  Snow is deceptively heavy.

  Frank knew that if he tried to push too hard and too fast against the wall of snow the plow wouldn’t be able to push it out of the way fast enough. It would build up in front of him until it bogged down his vehicle.

  On the other hand, if he drove at a nice, steady pace, at a speed of five miles an hour or so, the plow did a great job of clearing his path.

  It was maddening, driving at five miles an hour.

  And the cruise control didn’t work at low speeds.

  At least not that low.

  That meant Frank’s foot had to be on the pedal constantly, even after it started to fall asleep.

  But it was what it was, and despite their pace there was no reason to believe they wouldn’t make it to their final destination.

  Eventually.

  The highway between Lubbock and Eden is well-maintained and divided most of the way. Two lanes go in each direction, with a wide grassy median dividing the northbound from the southbound lanes.

  The problem is that it’s flat as a pancake, and there’s absolutely nothing to look at.

  Oh, and there’s another problem as well.

  There are precious few landmarks over four feet high.

  Mile markers along Highway 87 are used by motorists to report the locations of accidents or disabled vehicles.

  Before Saris 7 struck, a motorist might call 911 to report that a drunk driver went off the road into the ditch at mile marker 64.

  In a region of flat farmland which seems to go on forever, it gave the sheriff’s deputy a defined destination. They knew exactly where to find the idiot who thought he could drink seven beers and still drive home, and to haul him to jail.

  Such signs come in handy for reporting otherwise indefinable rural locations, and save lives each and every day.

  The problem is that the tops of the green mile markers are exactly thirty inches off the ground.

  There was another problem as well.

  This part of north Texas was subject to bad weather. Anything from driving rains to dust storms as thick as pea soup to… yes, horrific snow storms.

  In 1974 the Texas Highway Department recognized the need to put elevated reflectors along each side of the highway.

  The thinking was sound.

  A driver who was driving through a fierce storm and having trouble seeing the road would be aided by the reflectors. His headlights would catch the yellow reflectors every fifty feet along the side of the road, and they’d tell him he was on the right path.

  As long as he drove slowly, stayed the same distance from the reflectors and resisted the urge to get closer to them he knew he was still on the roadway and could thereby ride out the storm.

  Such reflectors are still in use today.

  Yellow reflectors, placed atop yellow poles, every fifty feet, along the right side of every highway in the state subject to blinding storms of any type.

  The problem, once again, is that the reflectors are all exactly thirty inches off the ground.

  As they headed out of Lubbock and into the great white nothingness that was south of the city, Frank muttered, “Crap!”

  Josie was only half focused on Frank.

  The other half of her attention was focused on using the fingernail of her pinky to try to dislodge a tiny piece of beef jerky from between two of her teeth.

  “What, honey? Crap isn’t a word I want to hear from you when we’re miles from nowhere. What does crap mean, exactly?”

  Eddie, ever the helpful back seat driver, offered up, “I think it means the same thing as poop, Josie. On account of Jason was always telling Aunt Josie she needed to clean up her dog poop in the back of the warehouse. Only sometimes he didn’t say ‘dog poop.’ Sometimes he said ‘dog crap’ instead. I kinda think it means the same thing, on account of what Jason used to say.”

  Josie and Frank said, in perfect harmony with a touch of frustration, “Thank you, Eddie.”

  “Oh, you’re welcome. Hey, can we get a puppy when we get to where we’re going? On account of…”

  At that point the pair chose to ignore Eddie and let him carry on a conversation with himself.

  Frank whispered to her, “I can’t tell where the road is.”

  -41-

  There’s an old saying which says even a broken clock is right twice a day.

  In Eddie’s clouded mind, even simple tasks were sometimes almost insurmountable. Things like tying his own shoelaces and determining which shoe went on which foot boggled his mind.

  He almost always missed the first button when putting on his jacket, resulting in one side of the jacket being lower than the other.

  Josie used to fix it for hi
m every day, until he confessed to her that her doing so embarrassed him in front of the others.

  “If it doesn’t hurt anything, please just let it be.”

  Ah, and there’s the rub. Even a broken clock like Crazy Eddie “gets it” occasionally.

  He tended to try to hide his mistakes for awhile after that. “Just let it be” became his mantra.

  If he lost a pair of gloves in the massive Food World warehouse he didn’t panic.

  He just found a case which held 144 pairs and got another one.

  His new habit took a lot of stress off his shoulders, for he once worried about every little thing.

  He eventually forgot the mantra and went back to his old self. He even asked Josie to start fixing his buttons again, not because it was important to him or necessary for his comfort.

  But because he loved Josie and liked it when she paid any small amount of attention to him.

  Alas, the thing about a broken clock being right twice a day is this: It’s only right for a minute before it goes back to being wrong again.

  It happens only occasionally and doesn’t last for long.

  Eddie’s epiphany about the buttons wasn’t the only jewel he pulled from his troubled mind occasionally.

  Back at the distribution center, it was actually Eddie who suggested they inventory everything on the hundreds of storage shelves.

  “On account of when we need somethin’ we can look on the list and see where it’s at…”

  Frank, needing an excuse to disappear for several hours a day so he could search for shelf-stable meals, took the idea and ran with it.

  But he didn’t steal the idea; he would never do that.

  He praised Eddie at least once a day for the idea; something which was a great source of pride for the younger man.

  A comedian once said that women require three things to stay alive: air, food and compliments.

  The same was true of Eddie. Eddie lived for compliments, and positively glowed each time Frank mentioned it was his idea to inventory the building, even when all the others got tired of hearing it.

  Frank’s comments did one other thing besides boost Eddie’s self-esteem.

  It also made him search his mind constantly for the next great idea, which might in turn win him more praise.

  Frank coasted to a stop.

  The Hummer’s big engine didn’t like that much.

  A Hummer is made to shred the ground beneath it, and to move. It scoffs at mud and rough terrain as it rolls easily over them and gets its humans where they need to go. Same for ice and snow, no matter how slippery or how deep.

  And it doesn’t understand when it comes to a dead stop.

  Frank fumed as he looked out at the great expanse of… pretty much nothing, other than a whole bunch of white.

  About a hundred feet to their right, a sting of wooden power poles grew out of the snow and then disappeared into the distance.

  Snow covered trees appeared here and there on either side of them, but not many. For this was mostly farmland.

  The only other thing was a rather large lump of… something… forty yards to their left. Exactly what it was was impossible to tell, as it was totally covered in snow.

  A tractor perhaps, left forever in a farmer’s field? An abandoned vehicle? It didn’t matter. Whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t going to help Frank out of this mess.

  Other than those few clues, everything else was flat, white and deep.

  Frank had no way of knowing whether he was in a southbound lane of traffic, driving on one of the shoulders, or driving on the median.

  Heck, he could be driving in the wrong direction for all he knew. Driving south in the northbound lanes.

  Not that that mattered much. He certainly didn’t expect to get hit head on by a northbound traveler.

  “How come this never happened before?” Josie asked. “We drove almost a hundred miles between Plainview and Lubbock and didn’t have a problem. Why now?”

  “That was an interstate highway, I-27. Interstates are better maintained. Their markers are higher. I-27 ran out south of Lubbock. Now we’re on State Highway 87. Apparently the markers on state highways in Texas aren’t high enough to stick out of the snow.”

  “So what happens if we keep going? Will we get stuck?”

  “Honey, please. This is a Hummer. It doesn’t get stuck. No, I’m more worried about obstacles or terrain changes that we can’t see.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, we’ll be okay as long as we stay on the roadway. The trouble is, I can’t see the damn roadway so I may wander off of it. If I wander onto the median there will be periodic drops. We may drive into a ditch. Even worse, we might drive into a drainage canal or something.”

  “So what’s the solution?”

  “I don’t know, honey. I just don’t know.”

  In the back seat, Eddie was chomping at the bits.

  He had one.

  -42-

  People like Eddie are used to being ignored.

  They’re also used to not being taken seriously, for even when, in all sincerity, they inject their opinion into a conversation, others frequently speak right over them.

  Their words are trampled on and scattered into a sea of verbiage, without even a hint of consideration.

  It’s very similar to the way small children are treated when they try to inject themselves into a conversation between adults.

  Sometimes people like Eddie, whose ideas are usually bad and/or of limited help, get gun-shy. They assume their inputs will be ignored, so they stop bothering. They just shuffle off to the corner of the room and retire to their own little world where they’re more welcome and where their input has value.

  Even Josie and Frank, as kind as they were to Eddie and as much as they cared for him, were guilty of frequently ignoring him.

  But Eddie was a lot more aware of the world around him than people gave him credit for.

  And he was much brighter than people thought him to be.

  Yes, life in “Eddie World” was difficult.

  Being Eddie was like having the worst hangover in the history of hangovers, only this hangover never went away.

  His every thought had to be dug out of the permanent fog which was his mind.

  But those thoughts were still there.

  And if one seemed to make sense to Eddie, and he thought it might make sense to others, he was usually able to pry it away from the fog and to put it in the form of words.

  This was one such occasion.

  “Um… Mister Frank…”

  Frank was deep in thought, trying to find a solution to his problem.

  And he didn’t want to be distracted by any of Eddie’s nonsensical ramblings.

  “Not now, Eddie. I’m trying to think here.”

  For those who are not disabled but who are dealing with someone who is, it’s easy to cause hurt without intending to. Frank was as kind to Eddie as anyone else Eddie knew.

  But even his carelessness and thoughtlessness could hurt the man.

  For Eddie, this was old hat. Standard procedure. The story of his life. He had trouble counting to twenty now. But even if he could easily count to a thousand it would be difficult to keep track of the number of times he’d been ignored.

  This was the World of Eddie. A place where he was almost never taken seriously. Where he was shot down before he even got started.

  A place where even people who loved him sometimes hurt his feelings.

  He’d been through this so many times his actions were automatic.

  He sat back in his seat and looked out the window.

  He didn’t sulk, for he was used to the drill.

  He didn’t get angry, for that would require animosity. And he didn’t have ill feelings toward Frank or Josie or anyone.

  Ill feelings and anger were simply things that were no longer part of his makeup.

  His standard response in situations like this was to lose himself in his own thoughts.
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  If he thought his input really had value he might try again in a few minutes, when there was a lull in the conversation. Then he could insert himself without trampling on anyone else’s thoughts.

  More likely, though, he’d focus on something else… the ice on the window perhaps, or something out in the snow… and forget about his thought completely.

  Meanwhile, Josie and Frank went on with their conversation.

  “How about if I opened up the passenger door, honey. I could watch the cleared roadway and tell you if the ice changes color. If it changes from gray to green it’ll mean we’re on grass and I can tell you to head back in the other direction.”

  “I don’t think that would work, honey. The grass went brown and dormant when the snow and ice covered it. It’s brown now. And so, by the way, is a lot of the asphalt in Texas now.”

  “What if we follow the power lines, keep them at exactly the same distance from us? They follow the road, don’t they?”

  “We can try it. But they’re a hundred feet away. It’ll be hard maintaining the exact distance. If I deviate just a few feet either way we could be off the roadway and into a ditch or on the median.”

  The pair fell silent again, each one lost in their own thoughts.

  Eddie thought he’d try again.

  “Hey, Josie?”

  “Hold on, Eddie. We’re trying to figure out a major problem here.”

  Josie knew Eddie a lot longer than Frank. She was once married to the man.

  That marriage was over long before. Several years before Eddie suffered the brain damage which left him in his current condition.

  But she still loved him. Not in the way a wife loves a husband, but rather in the way a woman loves a good friend.

  She also considered herself Eddie’s protector. A buffer between Eddie and those in the world who’d do him harm or take advantage of him.

  Yet even Josie sometimes discounted his value.

  Eddie went back to looking out the window.