Now that I think
of it, getting the mail that day was the problem, I should have left it for my wife. The summons from the court in said day's mail
brought it all back, and I very perceptibly began to shudder, an involuntary
kind that ran through my body due to a good portion of the last year having been
spent repressing the memories of that night, if not being able to totally
forget them. Now I was forced to reexamine
those emotions and memories again, and no amount of liquid, over the counter
addictions were going to put them back into a subconscious state.
If you would ask
me about that night, I would tell you it was, well, sticky. June 28, 2012, started out pretty normal, and
was on track to end normal, but most assuredly it did not. There is nothing normal about having to peel
a man’s shattered face off of the downtown pavement.
What they never told me about vehicle
crashes, what they never mention in
the movies is the hyper excited state I entered when the crash happened, or
rather, upon hearing it happen. I was never
told about the scents that come from these crashes. How the sickly sweet scent of motor oil on
pavement; the acidic coppery scent of blood, will hang heavy in midsummer’s moist
air. They
never told me what it would feel like to wash another man’s blood from
underneath my fingernails, watching the lazy red runnels swirl about the white
porcelain sink or having to stow a crimson stained T-shirt at the bottom of the
garbage can, so as not to arouse suspicion from my curious children and inquisitive wife.
I live in a small
house, in a quiet neighborhood, on North Grand Avenue, in an older neighborhood
of Bozeman, with my beautiful wife and six adorable children.
With that many people occupying such a small house, without the convenience
of central air conditioning, windows are seemingly always open, fans seemingly
always stirring swampy stagnant air from the depths of the basement to
circulate some form of cooler air to the sweltering family room, above. These living conditions often lead to bouts
of insomnia. Insomnia and open windows
can be the devil’s playground, or a gateway to someone’s salvation.
My neighborhood
is a quiet one, a historical relic from the original parts of Bozeman. Most of the homes in this area are no less
than 60 years old. Like any residential
street there is traffic, sometimes at various hours of the night, but for the
most part, residents of this neighborhood live in peace. There is a park nearby to our house where my
kids can, and often do run. This park is bordered by a softball diamond where we’ve
taught each other to hit fly balls and overrun first base. It’s all very mundane in a “Leave it to
Beaver” type of way, which is the way I like it. It’s safe.
As far back as I can
remember I have been a movie lover, nay fanatic. There are many movies that stand out in my
life, for whatever reason, and one of those particular movies is Black Hawk Down. There is a historical context that it points
to, a time and place in my life that I cannot get away from.
It’s a beautifully choreographed film detailing what many perceive to be
a failure, but what was in reality, a success by mission standards. Even the mission code name, Gothic Serpent, has a serious and
striking tone, resonating throughout my mind.
In my box of
“stuff” in the garage, I know that there is still a copy of Newsweek, which still bears the image of dead special operations
soldiers being drug through the filthy streets of Mogadishu, Somalia. This particular magazine issue is important
to me, not because of the sadistic horror displayed on its cover, but because
this was the issue that I read, cover to cover, over and over again, that
helped me to decide that I wanted to be a journalist. At the tender age of 14 I knew what I wanted to do with my
life. It was also the first time I
realized the fragile state that is life.
I have watched Black Hawk Down quite literally over one
hundred times and I have a notorious ability for falling asleep during the
movie and then awakening later, still knowing exactly where I am at in the movie,
and what’s going on; this much to my wife’s chagrin. It was on this particular sweltering night, at the end of June, sleep
deprived and insomniatic that I found myself watching said film, volume turned
up so loud that noise from the helicopter’s rotors seemed to pulse and buffet the
very walls of my home. I kept checking
on my wife and children to ensure that I wasn’t waking them, but they slept
right through the movie, and the ensuing drama.
I don’t know if they will ever know what a blessing it would be.
As a general
rule, police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances are designed to attract
attention, and cause people to notice them.
When these vehicles began to congregate on my quiet block in the early
hours of the morning, I was sure there would be no way to escape the blaring
cacophony outside; to have everyone sleep through it, but they did. Everyone, that was, but Annie.
“SON OF A BITCH!” I yelled to the dark
street. There, next to the curb, was my
wife’s vehicle, now with a gigantic gash in the tire, body damage and
destruction scattered across the pavement.
Some ass clown had just hit my wife’s vehicle and driven off, leaving me
to now have to take photos and file a police report. I don’t even remember bringing my flashlight
and cell phone outside with me, but they appear in my hand, as if by their own
volition. A ghastly HISSING spat into the air, blatant evidence of the defiled and
quickly deflating tire. Traces of
shattered plastic litter the pavement from the gaping socket of the gouged out
rear tail light. The white, narrow
focused beam plays down the length of my wife’s vehicle, showing garish
scratches and fresh dents and…
What was
that? A tire spinning… Faint red tail light, blinking
haphazardly… Him…
The bright beam
of my MagLite flashlight played over the body lying in the road, showing the
obscene and copious amount of blood pooled around what I was immediately sure
was a corpse.
I’ve seen dead
bodies before. In the remote town of Havre, Mont., many
years ago, I once saw the aftermath of a man who had fallen between two train
cars and been cut in half as cleanly as if by a butcher’s blade. Through my folding binoculars, atop the steps
of an Amtrak passenger car, he appeared to be so much road kill and the overall
effect of the gruesome terror was lost due to the distance between me and the
poor soul. I can still, though, see the
white picket rails of his ribs as they were newly exposed to chilly evening
air.
Most of the
bodies that I have seen, though, have been made up as mannequins, lying in silken
boxes ready to be inserted back into the earth from which my faith tells me
they originally came.
“Nine-One-One.
What’s your emergency?” The voice on the
phone was far more professional than I was.
I was coming unglued by the second, but this voice was cool and calm,
clear and professional.
What would I
say? That there was a dead guy laying in
the road, that he just happened to hit my wife’s vehicle and skid out of
control? That when his motorcycle
crashed it sent him flying some twenty feet and that he then proceeded to skid
another seven feet or so? How would I
explain that what was once a man was now so much ground meat on the pavement?
A sound like a
vacuum makes when it sucks up water began to emanate from the “corpse.” The previously lifeless body began to writhe
in the pool of blood, further abrading an already shredded face, like soft
cheese on a grater, against the warm pavement.
How has he not
been hit by another vehicle? How had
this man not been run over, causing further destruction? Answers to these questions still evade me,
but again my faith tells me that there was a higher power watching over that
man, and me for that matter, as I knelt in the street next to him.
Words flew out of
my mouth incoherently, “…aspirating on blood…possible head injury…motorcycle
crash…dying in front of me…” I had no
idea if I sounded as lunatic on the phone as I did in my head.
“Hang on sir;
we’re dispatching officers to your location.”
The voice on the other end of the line was still so cool. Professional.
Had I given them
my address? I honestly don’t
remember. I know that they could pull it
off my cell phone through the GPS, but had they done that so quickly? I really wasn’t sure what I was saying,
anymore, because the initial moment of when time stood still, when I first
witnessed the body, had all started to unravel and seemed to be rapidly
spooling out of control.
I don’t know when
Annie showed up but suddenly she was beside me, dressed in a long T-shirt and
not much else. My neighbor grabbed my
flashlight and immediately began signaling the first cruiser to show up on my
quiet little street. And like flies to a
bright light, they came, one by one, soon in droves.
Within a matter
of minutes the entire street was cordoned off to the intersecting roads at each
end. Lights from the cruisers washed
over, and played with the corresponding lights from the fire trucks and the ambulances,
creating a surrealistic light show that lit neighboring houses in a ghastly
glow. Not even the sterile light from
nearby arc sodium lights could penetrate the hues that should have been
comforting but was somehow still creepy.
What I originally
mistook for a corpse was now a groaning, writhing man. Pure survival instinct caused this man's brain to
flood the body with adrenaline, in a mad and desperate effort to extricate itself from the
contorted pose in which he now lay.
The white strappy
tank top shirt, knee length khaki board shorts and flip flops didn’t do much to
protect his body from the impact of the street.
My initial, and cursory, examination of this man’s body was far from
complete. Lying face down I didn’t know
that there was a V-shaped depression where his collar bone used to be. I didn’t know that ribs had been broken, or
knees had been shredded to the bone.
Somehow, the comforting shadows of the night had kept these particular
sights from me, and I wasn’t informed of them until later, when I received the
report from the police detective.
I’m not sure how
it happened that I was kneeling on him, but there I was, when paramedics
arrived, trying to keep this man’s convulsing body under some semblance of
control. The raw energy that was now
coursing through his body was nothing short of an electric current; a pure,
primal rage trying desperately to keep the shattered frame alive. My initial fear was that his brain would
cause further injury to his body, that possible head and spinal injuries would
either cripple or kill him. So I knelt
on his shoulder blades, trying to hold on as a bull rider does, praying to keep
him stable. This ride, though, proved to
be tougher than any eight seconds a rodeo pro had ever endured.
A paramedic
appeared with a straight board and firmly, but gently, removed me from the back
of the pained man. “It’s OK, you can get
off him now; we’ve got him.” The voice
was so soft, so gentle; I wasn’t sure if I was hearing things or if he had
actually spoken to me.
I looked around,
bewildered, not sure of what was going on, but there, on my camo fleece pajama
pants that I wore was a sticky maroon oval from this man’s blood. The policeman who was near me gently escorted
me back to the curb in front of my house as we spoke about what had happened. He was joined, soon thereafter, by another
female officer. Both asked me questions,
intensely interviewing me for what I had seen and and what I had heard. Under other circumstances, it could have
easily been viewed as an interrogation.
“Did you see what happened?”
“Is this your vehicle?”
“Do you live here?”
“Did you call 9-1-1?”
“Do you know this man?”
“Tell me what happened.”
“Were you the first on scene?”
Officers in
uniform surround me with their digital recorders in my face, asking questions
like paparazzi questioning Hollywood’s newest starlet. The questions seem to be coming from every
direction. I know that what they want is
the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but I feel like Tom
Cruise, I CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!
The truth of the
matter is that a bloodied and mangled man has been loaded into the back of a
waiting ambulance. There are probably 30
different men and women, in varying uniforms, milling around snapping photos
and taking various forms of measurement.
Spray paint marks the gashes on the pavement, tape measures run the
length of the street, notes are scratched on yellow legal tablets.
I want to scream
at them, “Why aren’t you doing your job?!
Why are you just standing there?!
Why didn’t that ambulance move a bit faster? Where are the lights, the sirens, and the
flashers…?”
It hits me that
there is no need to rush because the poor mangled body gave up, the fight has
left that poor man and his soul has departed.
After all of that, the battle to keep him safe and still, he died
anyway. There is quite literally another
man’s blood on my hands, and I'm pretty sure that if I look hard enough, I can still see it staining my skin.
The three o’clock
hour has come and gone and I’m still wide awake. Blood that was tacky at the onset of this
little adventure has now dried to a macabre Halloween makeup on my hands, arms,
and knees. A tow truck a few houses
down, operated by a bleary eyed driver, manhandles the wreckage of the crashed
motorcycle onto its flatbed with all the care a butcher shows a particular cut
of meat.
Metal grinds on
metal and the very sound is making my skin crawl because I can see that man’s
broken body, the image burned into my psyche, and even though my mind processes
the image as a motorcycle my imagination cannot help but superimpose the broken
man’s body into the scene.
In the year of
our Lord, One Thousand Nine Hundred and Ninety Nine, I attended a funeral for a
girl, barely a woman, whom I think I was very much in love with. She was killed by a drunk driver who tore
into her car at 85 miles per hour; the force of the impact literally
decapitating her. It was a closed casket
funeral on a cold winter February afternoon.
The sound that the tow truck made hauling that mangled bike onto the
flatbed was damn near the sound the backhoe made carving into the frozen earth
of the windswept prairie. Death, as the
phrase goes, does not become me.
Finally,
finally… The flashing lights go. The tow truck leaves with its not so precious
cargo. Without a further word of contact
police officers mount their vehicles and depart. As quickly as the street became a surreal
nightmare, it is once again quiet. Like
a graveyard, it seems. Fitting, I
suppose.
What they didn’t tell me is that even
adrenaline has a limit to the lengths it can sustain a body. What they
didn’t tell me was that after an event such as this, when I was as unprepared
as I was, I was very likely to be left sobbing on the linoleum floor of my
bathroom, covered in another man’s blood, while tears ran hot and salty down my
cheeks and my chest heaved and hitched. It’s not very manly. It’s not how a hero should react, but then
again, I’m no hero.
What I didn’t
know was that stashing that T-shirt at the bottom of the garbage was harder
than any other act I have ever committed in my life. An act of betrayal so thorough because how do
I tell my wife why I haven’t been in the bed for the last three or so
hours? How do I tell her that, as far as
I know, a man died in my arms tonight?
How do I tell her that I saw our neighbor, a devoted wife and mother, in
her night clothes and that it bothered me more than that man’s blood because I
felt as if I had betrayed a trust with her husband, a man I call a friend.
So, I scrubbed my
fingers raw, and scraped the underside of my fingernails to get the last bits
of flesh and blood out from under them, supporting my body weight on the edge
of my tiny bathroom’s meager counter. I
quietly crept down the creaky wooden stairs and dug through the laundry baskets
to find a clean white undershirt to wear to bed; changed from my pajama pants into
nylon gym shorts praying I would be able to rinse the blood out of the pants
before anyone noticed. Can they smell
the blood in the basement? No matter how
much I scrub myself down, I swear I can feel
the stench on me. I don’t know if it’s
my memory playing tricks on me, but I swear I can still see the faint outlines
of blood on those pajamas. Why I don’t
throw them away, I have no idea…
Crawling into
bed, “Where have you been?” Her sleepy
voice implies that she has no idea what has transpired. Why am I angry with her? For the love of God, she was just spared a
horror that I cannot even begin to at that moment describe to her, but have
taken great care and length to detail, now.
What do I say to
her? Do I lie? Do I tell her that a bout of insomnia has
kept me awake for these last hours? No,
in a moment of weakness I tell her everything.
Her confusion is rational as she tries to wake herself up, to fully
comprehend the details of the story that regurgitate from my mouth in a
torrential flood. I still don’t tell her
about the shirt at the bottom of the garbage can, though. That detail will go with me a bit further,
and until this moment I thought, to the grave.
Old addictions
really do die hard. Nine years of
sobriety were very near at the teetering point, ready to be pushed off the edge. Suddenly things that I was so very close to
being able to put behind me came back, so quick; so damn quick. They
say that nicotine is harder to quit than heroin. I’ll believe that, I’ve been under the heels
of both of those devils. But suddenly cigarette
brands I hadn’t seen in years were now near at hand. I found myself standing in the beer and wine
aisles of grocery stores with no cognitive memory of how I got there. I stared into the eyes of many a cashier girl
as I realized that nine years was too good a track record to break and so I
would walk off, leaving a six pack of imported beer at the register, refusing
to pay or succumb to that malignant evil ever again.
Willpower doesn’t
always win out, though. The occasional
insomnia grew into frequent bouts. The
frequent bouts grew into stretches of a few days where I would sit in front of
the TV, no idea what was going on, what time it was, or really who I was. I was buying two packs of over the counter
sleep aid liquid to the point that I’m sure the people at the store thought I
was starting a meth lab. Discarding
the measuring caps from those bottles and taking long swigs from those bottles
is generally the first sign of trouble, and it was then that I realized I was in deep.
In less than a
month I had gone from a loving father and husband to a husk, devoid of
cognitive thought. I didn’t know what I
was doing. It took a phone call to a friend of mine, who had spent some time in
Iraq, to ask her, basically plead with her, to tell my story to someone who
would listen. Someone who had seen death
and carnage, first hand and up close, she was well aware of the pungent smell
of blood mixed with sweat. She knew what
scorched and torn bodies looked like, felt like and smelled like.
Of all of the
senses, the olfactory sense is the one most haunting; the way that I can walk
past a random person and pick up a random scent of perfume and immediately be
transported to another time with different people. Why does the sense of smell haunt me so? With vision I can fool myself into thinking I
saw something else, and my hearing isn’t all that good, so I can generally
trick myself into thinking that I didn’t heard what I thought I heard.
But the sense of
smell. It’s that powerful. And as long as I live I will always have that
cloying scent hanging heavy in the back of my throat. No matter what medication I spoon into my
throat, no matter what beverage I imbibe, there will always be that thickly heavy
scent of blood and motor oil hanging like a caustic ball of mucus at the back
of my throat.
It’s called
survivor’s guilt, a form of PTSD. My
mind had somehow convinced me that it was me who should have perished. Apparently, it’s more common than the public
is led to believe. The mind can’t
rationalize the death and destruction it sees, so it attempts to associate with
the image. Thus, if the mind sees death,
it wants to become death.
Now, over a year
later, the summons in my hand was being crumpled under the pressure of my fist,
the official and legal blue coversheet drenched in sweat that poured from my
skin, causing it turn from a regal shade of legal blue to a pale shade of dead blue.
What could I tell
a courtroom full of people? What could
they possibly know, or want to know, that wasn’t already known through stacks
of interviews and official police reports?
I was at work,
stumbling through the days when my cell phone rang; not knowing the number I
let it go to voicemail. I gave that
phone call no second thought and went about my day. I would like to be able to say that I was
cruising through my day but the over the counter addiction was fast numbing my
body, and it was no small miracle that I was even able to move at all.
Getting home that
evening I made my way to the back yard and found myself sitting on the lazy
yard swing my wife had purchased for herself.
It’s quiet in the backyard and in that corner, where the lawn always
seems a bit overgrown because the mower won’t fit and the corded trimmer just
won’t reach. I sat in that corner, while
the faded red paint of the wooden fence chipped and flew in the slight breeze
as the swing bumped against the old wood, making a noise that was slightly
comforting and slightly nauseating in the very same motion.
Musing through
voicemails I skipped some, deleted others, saved most as I told myself the lie
that I would come back to them and give them their due diligence but knowing
full well that after about ten days my phone would automatically delete them
because it knew better. It
knew that I wasn’t going to ever think twice about those voicemails and that
for all intents and purposes…
“Patrick this is
Duane, we met a few weeks ago, in front of your house…”
The voice on the
other end of the message. I had heard it
before, although at that particular time it had sounded as if it were a vacuum
trying to work underwater. Or, through a
mouthful of blood.
Without even
being aware, I broke down in tears. All
of the pent up emotions that I had tried to hold back were now flooding out of me. My wife was standing next to me, not knowing
what was going on, only that her husband was staring at the digital screen of
his phone, crying his eyes out; sobbing.
The missed call
was his. I immediately hit REDIAL. I prayed he would pick up before I lost my
nerve and simultaneously prayed he wouldn’t so I wouldn’t have to hear that
voice again.
“Hello…?” The gravel voice trembled. Such a meek voice.
“Duane, we met a
few weeks ago. Do you remember?”
No voice. The horrible wet sucking sound again. He was trying not to cry into the phone, and
failing. So was I. It didn’t matter.
In the next 45
minutes he related to me stories he had been told by his family members. How we had been driven to the hospital with
no sense of urgency because the EMTs weren’t sure he was even technically alive
anymore. How the courageous staff at the
Bozeman hospital had done all they could, short of giving him his last rights before
sending him via air ambulance to Billings.
How the staff at the Billings hospital had done all they could short of
giving him his last rights.
Like Doubting
Thomas of Biblical fame I allowed his voice to let my hands trace his wounds;
the steel bar that was now his rib. The
scars on his head from where his skull had been fractured and repaired. The wiring in his jaw that held it together,
now a permanent addition. I saw all of
this, and none of this, because I had no point of reference as to what kind of
man he was before we met. All I could
conjure now was a stylized movie robot.
A twisted six million dollar man.
A malformed creation of a mad scientist.
A scarred face that still belonged to a loving daughter who wasn’t yet
old enough to know why her daddy had been away for a while.
But when the
conversation ended there was a spark back in my heart. Just a tiny spark. And like the greedy hoarder and poetic
warrior, Reverand, I held that flame close for fear of letting it get blown out...
I wonder how, now
so many months later, will I tell my children about that night. They have seen the scars that the street
still bears, the scars that I still bear.
They have yet to meet Duane.
Would it be easier to show them clips of The Airborne Toxic Event’s
video “Sometime Around Midnight” or Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” and hope
that they catch the inferred meaning?
Bottles of over
the counter elixir are still close at hand, but the desire is not so
strong. I can walk through an aisle of
beer and wine and not be tempted, not as much, now.
The urge to stare into the black abyss of the gun cabinet is gone. It has taken a lot of friends, many whose
privilege I wore out crying on their shoulder, but the demon doesn’t haunt me
anymore, well not that much.
As for the blue
paper? It’s still there. It will always be there, but this time the
story won’t contort me, force me into grotesque shapes of mental
torridness. The courts will have their
address from me and then I will wash my hands of this story, for once and for all. The demon that stares back at me, from the
dimly lit corners of my living room will no longer hold sway. Not anymore.
Was it all worth
it? The pain, the agony, the stress and
suffering, both his and mine? Was it all
worth it? Time will be the judge on that
account.
© 2013 p.hill
