Black

We were driving south on the 101 somewhere an hour or so north of San Francisco.  I was with Jeff, a friend so close I often wondered if he wasn’t really part of me.   My sometime girlfriend Deborah was in the front seat with us. The car had a back seat but we always seemed to ride three in the front. In those days we just needed each other that much.  It was after midnight and we had come down out of the mountains and were driving through a faceless stretch of road, one valley after another filled with tall brown grass and the occasional oak tree.  I knew if we just kept driving, eventually we would see the Golden Gate Bridge.

The night was warm and the air smelled sweet, like the sun had had been melting fields of cotton candy all day, and the smell still lingered into the night.   Years later, when I was a junkie, a woman who wanted to save me would ask, “Where can we go baby?  Let’s get out of here.  Let’s move somewhere. Anywhere you want”

I answered, “Lets move to that valley that smells like cotton candy.” And we did.

That night we were alone on the road. It was a moonless night and the headlights of my rusty old Datsun didn’t do much to interrupt the darkness. I could see the headlights of another car up ahead coming north.  Staring at those lights, I could tell something wasn’t right, but at that time in my life there was plenty that didn’t seem right, and I was pretty used to letting those things just pass me by.  
Jeff was sitting in the passenger seat. I heard him say “Paul.” 

I shifted my gaze from the odd lights over to him and waited for him to say something else. 

“Paul, Stop!”  He raised his hand as if to point, or perhaps more to shield his face from some danger in front of him.

I looked back at the road and saw a man in shorts and a t-shirt standing on the center line, waving his arms.   I stomped the brakes and the car skid to a stop. The smoke from the tires continued forward, wafting into the headlight beams and surrounding the man. He lowered his arms.  Behind him on the road was an orange blanket laid out in a long pile. I suppose I knew there was a person under the blanket, but that thought hadn’t fully formed yet.  There were large black grease smudges on the blanket, making the whole package look like a giant orange banana slug stopped in its slow quest to cross the highway.

Our headlights illuminated only the man and the giant slug. Way off to the left, out in the field I could see those headlights that still were not quite right. I wondered how it came to be that these people were in the middle of my lane, several hundred feet away. As I got out and approached, the man in the shorts knelt down and put his hand on the orange blanket. I saw a head partially uncovered at one end of the blanket.  I could see hair and blood and mixed up in that something shiny and white, maybe bone or a piece of painted metal.  I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. “I don’t think we can help him,” the man in the shorts said to me.

He must be in shock, I thought about the man in the shorts.  That’s why he isn’t trying to help. I’m going to have to take over. I was angry with this man and his shorts. I wanted to shove him out of the way and get in there and get to work.  But then the blanket shuddered and a sound came from it that later Jeff and I would debate on just what it was like.  I said it was a Tom turkey gobbling. He felt very strongly that it was more like the last sound a toilet makes at the end of a flush.


With the sound came a small wave of blood that washed out from under the blanket. I hadn’t noticed the blood before because it flowed from the far side of the body, staying in the shadow.  And because it was in the shadow it was black.  I followed the small wave with my eyes and watched it flow the entire width of the roadway disappearing into the gravel and weeds at the edge.


Toilet or turkey, that sound triggered a deep instinctive fear in me. I took a step back and my hands went straight to the back of my neck.  I told this story later to a hippy girl I was screwing in Arcata and she told me that was my kundalini I was protecting.  She said the spot at the top of my spine was where my life force emanated.  It made sense I suppose. I was watching this man’s life force seep and gurgle its way out of his ripped open kundalini.


Looking past the pool of blood I could see other figures now, farther down the highway.  I decided to investigate. Perhaps there I’d find some easier application for my type of half-hearted heroism. I walked past a twisted white pick-up, its doors open, windows busted. Scattered glass crunched under my feet.  Beyond the truck another man in shorts, uninjured, was kneeling next to a woman. She had long black hair.  It stuck to her face in clumps matted by the blood flowing from seemingly everywhere I could see.  She had her arms under her and was crawling with her bare elbows on the pavement, dragging her motionless legs behind her. I said to the man. “Try not to let her move.”  He looked at me and said nothing.


The woman cried out “Where’s my husband? Find my husband. Is he alright?” I thought about this for a moment and said, “He’s ok. He’s fine. Try not to move.” She stopped trying to crawl, let her body slump sideways against the man in the shorts.  He put his hands on her, stroking lightly as if he were petting a scared animal.


I stood up, hands back in my hair, walked back toward my car. Jeff was standing next the orange banana slug man.  The sound came again. Another wave of blood washed across the road. Jeff and I looked at each other.  Other traffic was approaching by this time and among them a highway patrol. He pulled his cruiser into the grass of the center divider so that his lights were shining on the man, his mutilated head, and the now very large pool of blood.  When he stepped out of his car he had in his hand a first aid kit about the size of a lunch box. We watched as he set the kit on the hood of his car and opened it. He looked at the man. Looked into his kit. Looked back at the man. Looked at us. There seemed to be no answers for him.  


Jeff and I walked back to our car; got in, shut the doors.  Deb was still there, fuming.  Apparently I had told her to “stay in the car.”  The three of us debated the sexism in that comment for a while as we watched the scene in front of us, as if at a drive in movie.  More police arrived. A female officer came and asked us some questions through the open window of the Datsun.  At some point in this conversation she realized our car was not part of the accident. She closed her notebook and asked us to continue on our way. I started the car and we drove in silence around the man, across his pool of blood and continued down the highway.