Blue Stew (Second Edition) (2 page)

This was
never
going to have worked, he realized in that moment of disarray. The Jeep was already pealing through the mud. He would never have been able to get in front of it before it got away, even if he’d been in much better shape.

He dragged himself up into the driver’s seat, let the door flap shut of its own inertia, and took the wheel, straightening the roaring Jeep as it tore up mud and grass.

Maybe the three-scarred-man could’ve helped? He seemed to have
understood
. . . Where had he gone? No matter; too late now.

Frank took in a long breath and switched on the headlights. It was okay, he told himself. There were other satisfactory ways to do this. He had driven up a long, straight hill on his way here, nearby. He could get some
serious
speed going down it.

Idly, he reached for the hunting knife beside him as he directed his Jeep in crazy zigzags across the dark, wet field. He brought the knife to his nose. The crash at the bottom of the hill was the cake, ultimately, but Victim Number One couldn’t resist a small taste of the frosting first.

T
he etiquette was not clear on this one.

Walter Boyd was reasonably certain that he was driving to his own surprise intervention, brought on by a solid year of drug and alcohol misuse.

Walter wondered, was this at all like a surprise birthday party, in that it’d be expected of him to act taken-aback regardless of the transparency of the setup? Following that, could it deflate the whole event if he
didn’t
blink when they laid it on him that that night’s dinner party actually had a greater purpose? Might his friends think him a bit of a jerk for showing no effort to play along?

Walter smiled to himself. Of course he knew that the analogy was broken and that the question of etiquette was a farce. The element of surprise in this kind of thing is only practical—so the target of the well-meaning incursion won’t get scared off. No one cared what he knew as long as he showed up. Nevertheless, the thought amused Walter on a weird level, and weird thoughts were about the only ones that didn’t either bore him or depress him those days.

A strong gust of wind made Walter’s rusty green van wobble, snapping his train of thought. The rain followed, redoubling its onslaught on the windshield. He ticked the wipers up to full speed.

It was nighttime and visibility had now gone from very poor to laughably bad. Thankfully, Walter knew those roads as well as water knows a river, and at any rate, the greatest threat to Walter’s drive remained his van’s regular habit of dying in the rain.

For half a year now, something under the hood would break the whole machine if it got too wet. Once, driving through a large puddle had been enough to short-out the right wire or get water into the wrong mechanism. Waiting hours, sometimes overnight, had always proved to be an effective remedy, and Walter refused to bring the vehicle into the local repair shop. It wasn’t a matter of laziness or money—humanity’s favorite deterrents—no, he enjoyed breaking down. It always provided a fresh escape from his life of apathy and substance abuse, walking long distances in the rain, propositioning help from strangers.

The green van
would
break down that night, but it would have nothing to do with the weather.

Returning to where his head had been before nature’s inconsiderate interruption, Walter decided that, nonexistent etiquette aside, it would just be
boring
to pretend to be surprised when the dinner party was revealed to be a facade. However, he saw some potential in the option of turning the impending guilt-trip upside-down on his unsuspecting friends. Variations of this sort of response worked their way through Walter’s brain, making him chuckle at how cruel it would be: “Christ, it’s about time already, guys. I’ve been killing myself; some friends
you all
are . . .”

Grinning, Walter checked the time: 8:25. He was supposed to have been there at eight, but it’d been a long time since anyone had relied on him to be punctual. He also guessed that Nigel and Henry—both lifelong buddies from childhood to their current state of young adulthood—would not be too disappointed if he didn’t show up altogether. That prospect likely was tied to the reason why Nigel, the host of the gathering, had dropped some clues as to the
true
nature of the dinner party over the phone last night, seemingly tipping him off. Although both cared for him and had already expressed, in their own ways, disapproval at his dark lifestyle shift, the pair weren’t the types to engage in this sort of direct confrontation.

Jamie Astley was Nigel’s recent girlfriend of three months. In the sparse time they’d spent together, Walter had already received an earful from her about how drugs and alcohol had ruined her mom’s life. He was sure that the suspected intervention had been of her design. If he was right, it would make his planned reverse guilt-trip all the more biting for his friends.

A flash of light into his high-peripheral vision had Walter step on the brakes. His eyes darted to his rearview mirror. Relief eased his guilty conscience when he saw that the light hadn’t been from police sirens. A pair of headlights from a car a considerable distance behind him flickered as they slid from left to right and then left again, recovering from a bout of dangerous fishtailing.

Looking back ahead, through the thin, loud waterfall being fended off by rubber sticks on his windshield, over the night- and rain-smothered stretch of road covered by his own headlights, Walter now acknowledged that the black asphalt was coated with wet autumn leaves. Walter had driven this road to work that day, and the recent barrage of rain and wind had more than doubled the ground’s accumulation of leaves.

Walter slowed his car some more.

The theme song to
The Sting
started playing from Walter’s pocket. He struggled to extract his cell-phone from his tight blue jeans, and by the time he got it out the call had been disconnected. He knew why: he had just started down a long straight road, heading into a valley cut out by a winding river, and it was a known dead zone for cell-phones.

Looking at his phone, Walter saw what he expected to see: “
1 Missed Call From: Nigel Kensington
.”

Poor Nigel, reminisced Walter spontaneously. Nigel had suffered through most of junior high being addressed by his classmates, in haughty British accents, as “Sir Nigel Kensington,
Esquire
.” However, that petered out early on in high school when a certain boy-wizard invaded America’s pop-culture, and the unluckily-surnamed Henry Potter took up the totem as the school’s favorite British-accented name. Of course, “sir” was dropped and “esquire” was replaced with an overdramatic “The Boy Who Lived.”

Over a protracted string of years, the people Henry associated with finally became bored of the practice. Recently, it had seemed as good as dead. That was, until a memorable party just one month ago. Walter
didn’t
remember the party, blacked-out drunk as he was, but the story as he heard it—and he would always listen to its retelling with a sick grin on his face—was that he had done multiple lines of coke in the bathroom, and then, for the rest of the night, whenever he saw Henry, he would shout at the top of his lungs with his eyes bulging crazily, “
The Boy Who Lived!
”

Another, brighter flicker of light from his overhead mirror had Walter look up again. The driver behind him evidently hadn’t learned
any
lesson from their previous scare, as they had more than halved the distance to Walter’s slow-going green van, and had just straightened out another treacherous side-skid.

“Fucking moron,” muttered Walter as he slipped his phone back into his pocket. Nigel’s house marked the point on the far side of the valley where cell-phone service returned, so there’d be no worthwhile opportunity to return the call.

A sudden wall of wind again buffeted his automobile, carrying in its wake another concerted torrent of rainfall.

In Walter’s twenty-five years living in that unremarkable southern-Vermont town of Sutherland, he could only recall a handful of rainstorms this severe. It was exciting. As he continued down the hill, he was eager to see how high the river would be running when he crossed the bridge at the bottom. He willed the rain to come down even harder, maybe wash out some of the roads he took to work, and a power line or two.

“Are you for-
fucking
-real, man?” exclaimed Walter as his attention was again stolen by the light bouncing off of his rearview mirror. The driver behind him was now only three car lengths back, and the gap was
still
shrinking.

His eyes jumped back and forth from the road ahead to the reflection of the car behind—its narrow, round headlights fit the profile of a Jeep, he observed uncaringly.

He said aloud when the headlights were less than a single car length behind, “Pass me if you want, you stupid fuck. It’s your funeral.”

Walter maintained his speed and held stubbornly to the center of the lane.

He couldn’t believe it when he saw it, and his eyes became glued to the mirror as it happened: The car behind him didn’t slow, and, stunningly, didn’t attempt to enter the oncoming lane to pass. Walter was forced to believe it, however, when he heard the smashing of metal and glass, and felt his body yanked back into his seat.

Everything that followed happened just as fast as every crash victim says it does:
really
fast.

The rear of his car was knocked out of line with the front, and in an instant Walter was angled in a direction that would lead him off the right side of the road . . . and there was the bridge and the river, straight ahead.

In a state of shock, Walter cut the wheel to the left, but the combination of the wet leaves and the momentum of the heavy Jeep barreling into his rear negated all traction.

His head flung around like a ragdoll’s and his seatbelt bit into his chest as his van plowed into a muddy stream of runoff water paralleling the road. A blinding wave of water and wet earth was thrown up onto his windshield. Somehow this wasn’t enough to stop the joined automobiles, or even slow them significantly. Walter had enough sense to throw a foot onto his brake pedal as the two cars together rampaged all the way off the road, yet this was as ineffective as his previous maneuver, and with his whole front-half layered with mud, he saw nothing more than shapeless black forms flying past as his van bounded wildly into the dark.

A half-formed image of the two cars plunging into the cold, raging river somewhere ahead entered Walter’s mind just before his head was ripped forward with a tremendous noise, dislodging all thought from his brain. At the same instant, an explosion of intense pressure slammed into his body, and then was gone in the next instant, replaced by a wave of delocalized burning all through his upper-torso and midsection.

His reeling head lolled from side to side before he could coordinate the muscles to bring it upright. His neck felt like an old, overused rubber band. His ears rang from the sound of the impact. The first thing Walter became aware of, beyond the pain, was that he was no longer moving. Whatever his van hit had stopped it completely.

Blinking through the stillness and the darkness, his ears still ringing shrilly, Walter saw that the windshield had partly disconnected from his van, and through an opening he could see the frontend bent around a large pine tree. The hood was gone and the engine was shooting up steam where water was falling freely onto its hot metal casings.

Walter groaned as he raised a hand to touch his neck. All the joints connecting his arm to the rest of him protested. He was happy to at least confirm that his head hadn’t been ripped half off.

The ringing in his ears was not fading. If anything, it was getting louder as his senses began to clear. Dazed as he was, pained as he was, this still lifted a red flag.

That’s when it dawned on Walter that the loud noise that was filling his head was not originating from inside his head. The constant, high pitch whining was coming from behind him. Deep unease swelled around his heart as he realized what the sound was.

Walter unlatched his buckle and gingerly turned his body and head to look behind him.

One of the Jeep’s round headlights was still lit and now shone brightly through the hole where his rear window had once been, wedged up against the backside of his van, a backside that now resembled one half of a partially compressed accordion. The Jeep’s driver, nevertheless, seemed bent on turning his green van into a
fully
compressed accordion: The piercing whining sound was a mixture of the Jeep’s engine, revved completely, and the Jeep’s wheels, spinning aggressively—but uselessly—in the mud. The direction and intention of the wheels was obvious, for in the dull refraction of the one headlight Walter could see a spray of muddy water shooting out behind the Jeep, into the dark.