The Last Face
When fate chooses your vehicle as its instrument, the road ahead gets mighty hard to travel.
When Joe saw the Camry turn from the median crossover and inch out into his lane, the first thing he thought was: I hope that looney-tune don’t turn left in front of me because I’m going to smash right-damn into him if he does.
Then the white four-door did just that. The Camry edged slowly into Joe’s lane and didn’t even gun it. Christ Almighty, he was just parking it in the intersection waiting to be hit head-on by Joe’s eighteen-wheeler bearing down on him at sixty miles an hour.
Joe had driven for Tar Heel Trucking for fourteen years and had never had an accident, but he was as cool as if he had one every morning. He had time in the split seconds before and during the crash to think three precise, complete thoughts:
I can’t stop my rig in time and
I’ll be lucky to keep the trailer attached to the cab when I jacknife and
This jag-off is about to be dead, and I’m the one who’s going to kill him.
Joe stood on the brakes and felt the trailer fishtail toward the median. And in the final half-second or so, his mind told him:
Maybe I’m about to die, too. We’ll see.
At the very last, just before the car disappeared beneath the custom hood ornament of his Peterbilt, Joe looked down into the Camry to see a teenage boy look up apologetically. And then so many awful sounds, metal colliding with metal, the spray of glass, then his own windshield ejecting, then a nanosecond glance to the right side-mirror to see the Camry pirouette and flip like a NASCAR wreck and then, before the cab turned on its side, Joe had time to think:
All right, I’m not gonna die, but it’s gonna hurt like hell when this comes to a stop.
His driver’s side window gave way, and the cab filled with dirt as his window became a high-speed bulldozer, scraping the earth. Smelled like lawn clippings. He got knocked around pretty bad but stayed conscious. Conscious enough to undo his seatbelt and struggle to climb out the passenger-side window facing straight up to the sun. His forehead was bleeding from banging the wheel, and his arm had a wicked gash from a crushed Coke can that got scooped into his cab at high speed.
Through all the police reports and insurance claims and attention in the Durham media (there’d been a half-day-long backup on U.S. 15-501), Joe felt all the right things. Lucky to be alive, lucky not to be injured any worse, lucky that he was running deadhead and didn’t lose a load of goods for a client, and lucky, with his high blood pressure, that he didn’t stroke out or have a coronary, though at forty-six he was a little young for that.
But the accident did have an effect. He kept dreaming of the young man. Sometimes the boy was looking up and crying, sometimes he was looking up and laughing. Sometimes the boy would look up in the dream and Joe would see his own face. And sometimes during a dream going good, a dream of his childhood home with him sitting at his late mother’s kitchen table, there’d be that sound of a car being run over by a truck, darkly musical with the high tire-squeal harmonizing with the bass thuds and clunks of metal collapsing, the spray of glass like cymbals, over and over.
After many nights of bad sleep, he started suffering from road-weariness, which had never been a problem before.
“You look like hell, Joe,” said Tom the dispatcher.
Joe, clutching a thermos of coffee, said he hadn’t been sleeping well.
“You need to talk to somebody before you wreck another one of my trucks.” Meaning some kind of trucker-shrink. Since Bunny, Tom’s girlfriend, had taken over as office manager, there’d been a lot of New Age touchy-feely in Tom’s operation.
Joe declined. And he felt he was getting by until he read a long and mawkish article in which the mother of the young man claimed her boy had been a saint, that her angel would never commit suicide. She vowed “that trucker” must have been to blame and she was looking into getting a lawyer and suing him and Tar Heel Trucking, though the article also made it scrupulously clear the police felt the incident was an obvious suicide and Joe had been cleared of any wrongdoing.
Channeling the rants of the talk-radio personalities he listened to, he told her she was the embodiment of everything that was wrong in this over-lawyered country.
Joe was not an intemperate man, but he dug out his copy of the police report, which had the kid’s address, then he scratched off a letter telling his mother that her money-making shakedown wasn’t going to work. Sheoughttobeashamedofherself.
Channeling the rants of the talk-radio personalities he listened to, he told her she was the embodiment of everything that was wrong in this over-lawyered country. Her little angel had parked in front of his truck in the oncoming lane of traffic without any thought of Joe, the damage to his truck, or his life. Some people use a gun or jump off a bridge, lady, but no, your boy must have felt I was born to perform this service, to ram my truck into suicidal jag-offs at high speed! And I saw his face just looking up at me like my fourteen-ton truck was no more interesting than a billboard, so your son can go to hell.
He’s probably in hell, Joe concluded. And he mailed the letter. Felt awful the next day about sending it, but by then there was nothing to be done.
Joe was fine on the interstates, where there were no roads feeding in at right angles. But once he got on the two-lanes, he was a basket case. Every intersection offered another opportunity for those sounds, those sights, more dreams. Every car revving for a chance to gun it across the intersection in front of his rig became another potential suicide. And he sure felt bad about that letter. So Joe told Tom he’d check out this therapy thing, just to see. He had Tom make the phone call.
It wasn’t a one-on-one psychiatrist; it was a group of men who had survived people killing themselves by using their vehicles as a method of obliteration.
There was Darnell who drove a bus. “People are always saying, they’ll be somewhere on time unless ‘I’m hit by a bus,’” he complained. “People’ve got to stop saying that, man. I want to say, hey, I’m a bus driver and I’ve hit people with a bus, and it wasn’t my fault, but I have to live with it. Aw, you never forget that sound when they bump.”
All the men concurred. The sounds, recorded permanently in some lapidary circuit of the brain, were maybe the worst of it. Charlie drove a truck, too. Some girl jumped off an interstate bridge as he was passing under. There he was just cruising along, listening to his tapes, and smack, like a bug on the windshield, is this teenage girl in a halter top, pinned by the force of impact to his broken windshield.
“They had to peel her off the glass,” Charlie said, breathing out heavily. “Lord. She climbed over the railing of the bridge and pushed herself off...” He was having trouble bringing it out.
“Jerry, I think,” Charlie went on discreetly, “has it the worst of any of us. Amtrak. People are always using trains to kill themselves.”
Frank, the group leader, helped him finish: “She hit your glass facing you, didn’t she, Charlie?”
Charlie’s composure crumbled, and he hid his face in his hand, stifling a single sob. Everyone said, “It’s all right, Charlie.”
Joe noticed one man, about sixty, who had the most mournfully still eyes, eyes too dark and deep-set for a normal head, that seemed always open anticipation of some dreadful sight. When Joe got up during the break, he asked Charlie about the guy who never blinked.
“Oh, that’s Jerry,” sighed Charlie, refilling a Styrofoam coffee cup. “This sure is good coffee. Wish our dispatcher could get this brand. Was that it for the Oreos?” The men had polished off most of the one pack of Oreos someone had brought in. It was a smoking crowd, and even though Joe quit last year, he felt like smoking again. “Jerry, I think,” Charlie went on discreetly, “has it the worst of any of us. Amtrak. People are always using trains to kill themselves. Guess it’s foolproof. Every few months, it seems. You don’t wanna hear some of his stories. He doesn’t work now. Disability.”
Charlie pointed to his head, to suggest Jerry wasn’t quite right anymore.
Joe left before the meeting was over. Some of those fellows were much worse off than he was. You sit around and dwell on this stuff and you’ll go crazy, too, permanent-like. That’s all it proved, Joe figured. But then something happened on his regular Friday run down U.S. 29 from Danville, a four-lane, limited-access highway posted at sixty-five, with everyone doing seventy-five or more. A white car was inching forward from the right at an intersection, some woman with groceries, and Joe just knew, KNEW, she was going to pull out and wreck him. A double-trailered Dick Simon truck was about to pass Joe on his left, and there was barely time—a few inches—for Joe to swerve over in that lane, all in a panic, unbalancing his full load. He felt the contents of his trailer shift and tumble over—and for a good half mile he didn’t have control of his vehicle. Almost took out the poor Dick Simon driver behind him. If that driver had had a gun, he’d have killed Joe, and Joe wouldn’t have blamed him.
Joe was furious with himself. If he had a second accident, no matter who was at fault, he might as well hang up his driving career. He was seething and angry as he passed the exit for Jordan Lake on I-85, when he was nearly home. He would pay the mother of that boy a call, yes, he would. He reached into the back of his cab for his Raleigh-Durham A-to-Z and looked up her street address, which he remembered from the letter, the letter he regretted sending. Now, he was going to follow it up by parking right in front of her house until she lifted a curtain and looked out. And there Joe would be, idling, in a truck like the one that plowed into her little angel. She might think twice about her lawsuit, about who could hurt who. As he left the state highway and turned down a shabby urban avenue, he came to his senses. Good God, what trouble he would get into. He stopped and looked at the neighborhood street with cars parked on both sides. He would have to reverse out. But by then a car was behind him. And then a cop, eventually, wondering what in hell he was doing on a residential street. A ticket, a summons, and a call to his company. Tom had to put him on suspension.
Next week he was back in the group.
“Would you like to speak, Joe?” Frank asked. Joe shook his head, begging off a little longer.
Then Jerry, the Amtrak engineer, spoke. His voice sounded high and hollow, no emotion, just reporting the facts, fellas. Why, there’d been that kid who just lay down on the railroad tracks. Fifteen or sixteen, and just waited. Holding a picture of someone. Jerry saw it was a photo but not who of.
“Often times—most times—we can’t no ways stop the train,” Jerry said, staring at the far wall of the church activity center. “We just call the authorities and keep right on our schedule. Then the next day, you’re on the return run and you go back over that section of track. You can see the stain. Shouldn’t look for it, but I do.”
Jerry mentioned the man with a gin bottle who had parked his car on the track and sat there staring at the train headlight. The ones who did it by car were truly unforgivable. Kill yourself if you want to, but a car under an engine could derail the whole train. Who knows how many could die?
“It’s always nighttime,” said Jerry, barely audible now but still speaking evenly. “Never in the daylight hours. I guess they like staring into the headlight—can’t really know when the impact is coming, it’s so bright. I know they can’t see me, but I try to give ’em a look of pity. Sometimes I think they understand.”
“You connect. When the mind gets going that fast, right when it’s the end of things, right at the edge of death, you have this split-second connection. Don’t you, fellas?”
Frank cleared his throat. “Um, you can’t really see their faces, can you, Jerry? Going that fast?”
“Oh, I do see ’em. Most time they stand on the tracks, and give me that last face, not a care in the world. But that woman who doubled back…”
“We don’t need to talk about her every time, Jerry.”
“She had her baby in her arms. Poor thing, I guess she was at the end of her rope. Couldn’t feed her little young’un, or some man done her wrong. She looked right into the light while her baby was just a-squirming...”
Jerry’s sleepless, immobile eyes now fixed now on Joe, the newcomer who hadn’t heard it all yet.
“Then about a second before I ran them down, you could tell—you could tell she’d done changed her mind. You could also tell she knew she couldn’t make it out of the way, so she would save her baby.”
Frank put a hand on Jerry’s shoulder. “You can’t know what she was thinking, Jerry. Some of this is your imagination…”
“No, but you do connect,” Jerry said. "You connect. When the mind gets going that fast, right when it's the end of things, right at the edge of death, you have this split-second connection. Don’t you, fellas?”
Some nodded. Some didn’t reveal what they thought.
“So she tried to toss her baby out of the side, but I hit it anyway, going about ninety-five on the Orange Blossom, making up time between Richmond and D.C. And like some football, that poor little baby spirals out into the woods, beyond my headlight. I can still see it spiral out, like a rag doll...”
Frank cleared his throat again. “You know you have to stay with your safe thoughts, Jerry, and not dwell on the bad things.”
“I saw the baby’s face as it rose up...”
“I think that’s impossible, Jerry.”
That night Joe dreamed not only of the boy in the Camry but of the baby, thudding off his own truck’s hood and spiraling out into the darkening woods, an impossible, twisted arc over the moonlit fields, coming to land…in his lap.
Joe jerked himself awake abruptly and put his head in his hands. Frank wasn’t going to help any of them. Who can help you once you are a member of this club? It was Jerry who had it right: you did have a connection with those who chose you. Joe groped for his bathrobe and wrapped it around him in his under-heated trailer. He went into the kitchen nook and took out pen and paper and wrote the boy’s mother again:
Ma’am, I’m sorry about my letter. I apologize to you about what I wrote. I’m sure you were upset from the grief. I was very upset and still hurting from my injuries when I wrote you. I was mad at your boy for choosing my truck to be the one, but I suppose I have to live with that. I can’t sleep anymore nowadays. I see your boy all the time in my mind, in my dreams. Here’s my phone number… Joe wrote it out. Do you want to meet up sometime? I am the last person who saw your boy alive, after all, and maybe it would help us both to know a little more than we do. Maybe I would feel better about him picking my truck if I thought I could have been his friend, or there was some meaning maybe to why we came together at all.
Joe looked over his letter and just about balled it up to toss toward the overflowing trashcan under the kitchen sink. But he didn’t. He’d mail it in the morning.
About the author
Wilton Barnhardt is the author of five novels, including the recent Western Alliances and a contemporary Southern novel, Lookaway, Lookaway, a New York Times best-seller. He is associated with the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and the North Carolina State University's MFA in Creative Writing, which he helped found. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.
oh!
perfect.