Indian Hill (8 page)
“Paulie, you all right?”
“Yah, except for the broken ribs and potential barbecuing I’m doing dandy,” he wheezed.
“Paul, I’m going to get Dennis out first.” Paul understood the equation. Dennis wasn’t pinned against anything, so if the car blew at least somebody would survive.
“
J
ust hurry, Barb’s gonna be pissed if I ruin this new shirt she bought me.” He grunted a little with what could have passed for laughter.
“Dude, save your strength, I’m gonna need your help when I get to that steering wheel,” as I showed him my broken wing.
“I didn’t know you were double jointed?” Paul said. I wasn’t sure if it was an attempt at humor or if he had slammed his head too hard on the steering wheel. I was trying my best to stave off shock but Paul was rapidly succumbing, maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad state to be in considering we could be fire fuel real soon. Sirens were wailing in the distance but I knew they were too far off to be of any assistance to us now. It was going to be up to me, but I wasn’t feeling up to the challenge. I reached down thanking all the gods I could think of when I felt a belt around Dennis’ waist; I jerked with all my strength wincing as my broken arm was pushed against my body and the seat. Dennis huffed as I tugged on his belt. Thank you God, I thought to myself, he’s alive, but the blood flowing from his head completely convinced me that he was going to be of no assistance once I released him from our fiery prison. Halfway up the seat and I almost dropped him back down as my protruding bone had now broken skin on my rib cage. The pain was excruciating, my vision began to blur, my peripheral vision shrank to pinpoints. If I blacked out we were all toast, pun intended. So I braced my legs up against the seat and pulled for all I was worth, Dennis rolled over the top of the head rest and square onto my broken arm. I screamed like a girl, a deep throated loud girl, and for a moment I did pass out.
“MIKE! Wake up! MIKE! Help!!” I could hear it in the distance, it sounded vaguely familiar but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why my alarm clock would be saying my name.
Man
it’s hot in here, my parents were too friggen cheap to even get air conditioning. Fans in the summer time don’t do squat except move hot air around.
“TALBOT! Get up!” There it was again. And the heat and the smell, what is that smell? Even after a night of heavy beer drinking my farts never smelled like that. It smells like burnt plastic and rubber and what’s that other smell, oh yeah, hair. Burnt hair? Burnt hair. Burnt hair! I jolted awake, pain flooding my every sense. Confusion was the norm. Dennis was in my lap, Paul was on fire. Huh?! I swept through the cobwebs as quickly as I could, shoving Dennis off of me and turned to look at Paul, his eyes pleading with me to not leave him there.
“Paul, I just want to get him clear.” So I bent down once again, grabbing Dennis’ belt and dragging him about twenty feet from the car. I took off his jacket before I ran back. I hopped back into the car and threw Dennis’ jacket over the flame that had started on Paul’s left sleeve. I braced my back against Paul’s seat and once again thanked anyone that was listening that Paul’s car had a bench seat. With the heels of my feet I pushed for all I was worth on the top part of the steering wheel. At first nothing happened, I began to wonder what burning alive would be like, because I knew in my heart of hearts there was no way I was leaving him
t
here alone.
“Paul, I’m going need your help.”
“Mike, I don’t have much left.”
“Bud, whatever you got, because we either both get out of here or we’re both going to be on the school lunch menu.”
“Fuck that,” he croaked.
“When I say three.” But there was no time for a countdown. “Three!”
Paul gripped the bottom part of the wheel and pushed up while I continued my assault from the top. At first nothing happened, and then above the sizzling of the polyvinyl there was an audible creak, something was giving and hopefully it wasn’t Paul’s ribs. The steering column moved a fraction of an inch at a time at a painstakingly slow pace. To make matters worse, as it moved so did Paul’s semi-collapsed chest, giving the illusion that the damn thing wasn’t going to yield its prize. Like some macabre woman holding onto her dead baby, the Buick did not want to die alone. With a renewed second effort Paul and I pushed with one final exhaustive burst of strength and there it was, daylight, well not quite, more like fire light, but I could see light between Paul and the steering column.
“Dude, this isn’t going to feel good.”
Paul barely had time to mutter “What?” as I grabbed the material on his shoulder and unceremoniously hauled him out of the car. His butt slammed off the ground sending sparks of pain to his neural center, now it was Paul’s turn to scream like a girl. ‘Well, at least now he couldn’t use that against me,’ I thought as I dragged him further away from the wreckage.
The police and the fire rescue squad arrived as Paul’s car popped and shattered through its death throes; there was no
Hollywood
theatrical blasts, just more of a slow melt down. Besides a few broken bones and some burnt up pot we were no less for the wear. Dennis awoke three hours later at
Norwood
Memorial
Hospital
with one hell of a headache, the result of a fairly serious concussion. He missed the entire event, not being able to recall one single detail for the police. They thought he was covering for Paul, but he had been passed out and then knocked out. Waking up in the hospital had been a complete surprise for him, and after he had the tale retold to him, he said he was glad he wasn’t around for it. Paul was a little worse off than my broken arm. The doctors assured me I would only have to wear the constricting itching device for a mere six months. Damn casts. Paul had broken two of his ribs, scraped his lung and bruised his liver. Nothing deadly but extremely painful and with the smoke inhalation he had suffered, the coughing fits were making his life a living hell. Even Barb at her best, or worst, couldn’t touch this pain he was feeling. I ended up receiving an award for my bravery, but I didn’t see it that way. Would I have done it for strangers, I don’t know. I did it for the love of my friends and the cowardice of knowing that had they died it would have been because I didn’t try to do anything. I guess the outcome was the same but I was approaching it from a different angle. The more I look at this story as I write it the more believable the tale of the butterfly in
Japan
setting off a hurricane in
Florida
becomes. Little events seem to ripple out and cause greater change as they go. I will never forget that night, except mainly for the details.
Dennis exited the hospital the very next day, the lucky bastard; we made him swear to us that he’d sneak us up some Chinese food from the Kihei. I stayed in Jell-O hell for another six days, but Paul took the prize at a whopp
ing two weeks. It was during tho
se healing times that we stumbled upon probably one of the greatest board games ever created, Risk, the game of global domination. Some might have thought we were crazy to stay in on a Friday night to play a board game, but Paul couldn’t fart without crying, my arm was locked from the shoulder down and Dennis occasionally suffered from some mind numbing headaches. We could usually rope a couple of our other friends in to join the fray. We spent many a recuperative night learning the ins and out
s
of strategy and tactics and I guess diplomacy. Hell, nobody want
ed
to go out first. I loved th
o
se times, they were the most unhindered aspect of our young lives. We were in the company of great friends and we were alive. You always hear the clichés about people who say they have a renewed sense of what was truly important in life when you come face to face with death, and for the most part they were right. The bond between myself, Paul and Dennis had become rock solid. What I lost that night, though, was the feeling of invincibility, which all teenagers seem to have innately built within them. Maybe that was a good thing, the jury is still out.
Senior year came and
was blurring
by. The Friday night Risk games turned into the Thursday night occasional Risk games so as not to interfere with senior partying times. My love life had taken a twist that not even Paul or Dennis saw coming. For the most part I had flitted from girl to girl without so much as looking over my shoulder. I guess at the time, although the term wasn’t being used yet, I was something of a player. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t any Rico Suave, I just usually let the girls do the work for me. It was so freaken easy. She would just blab away about how this or that friend thought I was sooo cute. And I’d be like ‘Oh Reeally,’ what was her name again? And then I’d just give the friend a call. Women are funny like that, they won’t think twice about stepping over their ‘friend’ to get to a guy. Guys though for the most part have an unwritten rule about seeing a friend’s ex unless it is clearly stated by the ex that he has no problem with that arrangement. Of course there are exceptions to that rule. But even so, guys will beat the
tar
out of each other, pick each other up, buy each other a beer and be done with the whole situation. The girls, well, they’ll pretty much be enemies for life, never going to fisticuffs but at the drop of a pin they will tongue lash each other at every given opportunity. And this is where my so-called player days came to a screeching halt. Her name was Mandy, and she just plain out floored me. The last thing I was looking for my senior year was a steady. But I just couldn’t help myself. She was gorgeous, she could cook, and she had the brains of a turnip, pretty much the three qualities any guy is looking for in a relationship. And she genuinely loved me, and I think that at that time I might have actually had some of those same feelings for her. The prob
lem was that Mandy was
a small town girl, she had no desire to go to college or even the next town over. She probably figured with my advanced degree in partyology I wasn’t going anywhere either. So when I received my acceptances from four different universities I couldn’t find the intestinal fortitude to tell her. I basically just wanted to get up one late August day and be gone. Do you think she’d miss me? I began to let everything slide once I realized that I didn’t have to impress any more acceptance boards. I coasted through the remainder of the year usually in a drug or alcohol induced daze. Two of the acceptances were from the Eastern Seaboard and never saw the light of day. I burned those into ash so my mother or Mandy would never see them. My options, as far as I was concerned, were CU in
Boulder
or UCLA, but I was never a warm weather fan or an earthquake fan for that matter. A lot of crazy things happen in this world. Planes crash, people die, but the Earth, well that’s never supposed to move. So CU it was.
Suffice it to say, the
University
of
Colorado
in
Boulder
was almost too close a distance to my mother. It came as quite a shock to her how I could possibly have been accepted to a
Western State college
when all the applications she gave me were for
Boston
based universities. With tears (of joy) in my eyes, I packed and I left. And I did tell Mandy but not until the first of August. If I had realized what her response was going to be I would have told her months sooner. Mandy tried her damnedest to get pregnant, but I wasn’t having any of that. She told me she was on the pill and that we didn’t need condoms anymore. If I hadn’t seen through that one I guess I would have been the stupider of the two. So for that month we did it like rabbits. I guess she figured that with a one percent chance of getting pregnant using condoms, that eventually she would hit pay dirt just by sheer numbers. It was a great month but I think I aged two years in that span. As the end of the month got closer Mandy became more frantic. I was afraid that she might just do it with somebody that looked like me just to get pregnant and keep me
t
here. Would I have stayed? No, not a chance. I felt like I loved her, but what were we going to do? Live at her folks? Was I an ass? Probably, but I
had just turned 18
, what did I care. She called me on the day I was leaving to tell me how much she hated me. I knew she was lying but it still struck me deep in the chest. It was a long time before I got over that conversation.