by Paul Rogers, Hawthorne Fellow Fall 2012
We barreled around the corner, driving sixty-four miles-an-hour in a posted twenty-five. I could actually smell the singed rubber of the tires. Jim was hanging out the passenger window, screaming into the wind. “Come on ya bastard, catch us! Whooooh Hoooo!” The back of the truck was filled with an eclectic mix of antiques: a grandfather clock, several paintings, ceramic pots, rare blankets, baskets weaved of yucca fiber, and a strange mix of seashells. All of which we had just liberated, moments before the curio store had been overtaken by a wildfire. The fire was moving quicker than we had anticipated in the high winds of the late California afternoon. Although the fire was seconds behind us, I was sweating more from the consistent grinding that happened when I jerked the clutch from third gear to fourth. The gas gauge was broken; at least I hoped it was broken, because it was pegged at empty. But we had more serious obstacles to contemplate at that moment.
Ella had unbuttoned her shirt and was pinching her nipples through her t-shirt. She had recently developed a strange temperament of getting sexually aroused in stressful situations. Jim was oblivious and continued to scream out the window, “Fuck Yeah! Here I am, you son of a bitch’n fire. Come and get us!” In between Jim and Ella was my brother, hands braced against the dashboard and looking straight ahead, alternating stares at Ella’s hard nipples until we swung hard around a corner and the lurch of gravity forced him to look ahead and see if we were going to make the turn. Even I was having difficulty concentrating on the road, as Ella sunk deeper in the seat and her red skirt began to slowly climb up her thighs. “There are three fully functional men in this truck and I am begging just one of you to go down on me.” Every time we were in a pinch, she would try to get one of us to play with her. It was apparently too good of an offer, as my brother released his brace on the dashboard, wrapped his arms around Ella’s shoulders and buried his head between her breasts and said “Oh yeah!” In the next moment they were both leaning against me, clinging together like magnets, as their hands scrambled to undress each other.
The fire was being fanned by an easterly wind coming off the Pacific Ocean, and I could see that the road was about to change to a northerly direction, which meant the fire would no longer be right behind us. “Get the hell off me!” I said, trying to pull my brother up by his collar. The situation deteriorated as their bodies kept constant pressure on my leg, putting more weight on the accelerator and making it difficult to brake. Jim was starting to lose his voice and had begun to bang on the roof of the truck with his hand. Bang, bang, bang… “Whooooh, Hooooo!”
“Oh shit, oh shit! There’s a road-block up ahead. There’s fucking cops…” I said. “Joe, Ella, just fucking chill… everybody be cool.”
Jim slid back inside the truck, put his baseball cap on and yanked Joe off of Ella. I slowed in front of two police officers who were waving their arms as a signal for me to stop. Ella buttoned her shirt and Joe pulled up his pants just as I rolled up next to the cops. The police officer had a puzzled look on his face as he approached the truck.
“We need to go now,” said Jim, his hand resting on the door handle. “This is really bad. If we don’t run now, we’re gonna get busted Paul,” he said to me in a whisper and then, raising his voice more anxiously, “We’re in a stolen truck, loaded with stolen property… that’s a fucking felony!”
I could see that my brother was watching me, waiting for me to make a move or remain calm. I took a deep breath, looked at my reflection in the rear view mirror and said, “Just be cool OJ,” which was Jim’s nickname, “we can get out of this.”
“Boy are you kids lucky, you know you could have died in that fire?” the officer said through the window.
“Well,” I said, “that’s pretty much the reason we’re fleeing.” He was carefully examining our faces. I knew from experience over the last year that as I faced the officer, Jim would be flashing a shit eating grin while my brother would be staring at the floor, smiling like a lunatic while trying to cover his erection, and Ella would be acting perky, shyly giving a sexy smile with a little wave of her hand. The officer was quiet, and began to look at the erratically arranged objects in the back of the truck. I leaned my head out of the window and said, “We sure are lucky, we got my uncle’s heirlooms out just in the nick of time.” I wasn’t sure if he was buying it or not as he reached over the edge of the truck and looked under the baskets.
The officer was silent and I suddenly became nervous. As he picked up a basket I said, “That’s a 900 year-old yucca fiber basket, made by the Anasazi near Yosemite in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.” I bit my lip at my mistake.
“I thought the Anasazi came from Colorado,” he said as he lowered the basket to its original position.
“Uh, yeah, that’s right… The basket was found near Yosemite, but made in Colorado… no one knows how it got there. That’s what makes it so special.” The basket was still dangling the price tag which we hadn’t yet found the time to remove. He nodded his head and turned back to face me.
“Hell, there’s no telling where that fire will end up,” he said as he adjusted the brim on his trooper’s hat. At precisely that moment, I felt Ella’s hand slide across the top of my Levi’s and grab at my crotch. I jerked slightly but remained calm and said, “We need to hurry to the closest phone, so I can call my uncle and make sure that he made it out safe.”
“Okay, let’s get you out of here,” the officer said as he turned to walk back towards the road-block. I carefully reached down and pulled off Ella’s hand. Suddenly, the officer stopped and came back to the truck. “I need to see a driver’s license, registration and proof of insurance.”
“Absolutely,” I said and then leaned over to the glove box. I pulled some papers out and then flipped the visor down to see if anything was behind it. “This is my uncle’s truck,” I said, flipping through the pile on my lap. “Here,” I said, handing him the pile, “I’ll get my license.” Reaching back with my right hand like I was about to pull out my wallet, I looked over at my brother and friends and slightly nodded. With my left hand, I pulled the door handle open and then kicked the door out, catching the police officer by surprise and knocking him over. We knew from experience to scatter in different directions. I headed towards a ravine, which lead down towards the ocean. I could hear commotion behind me, the cop cursing, “You damn punk, get back here!” And off in the distance I could hear Jim screaming “Whooooh Hoooo!”
I sprinted quickly to the edge of the ravine and leaped over the edge. There was silence as I slowly descended from a ridge of grass, through the air for several seconds, onto a gradual incline of exposed sand which extended for several hundred yards. I held my breath as the bank caught me, and barely kept from tumbling over as I slid sideways about sixty feet in the sandy earth before finally slowing enough to regain control. I could hear the officer screaming, “Stop! All of you stop! Come back here…” His voice drifting into oblivion. The sun had already begun to set as I reached the bottom of the incline and stopped. The day had been intolerably hot and it was finally starting to cool. For a moment I looked west out towards the horizon, and I could see the Pacific Ocean. I shuddered to think of all that water and immediately headed south, back towards the fire. I’d take my chances getting burned rather than get close to that much water.
* * *
It all began innocently enough. Nearly ten years ago, the Tatanooski River overflowed its bank and spilled into my hometown of Springfield. There hadn’t been any warning, and there was no sign of resistance to this rare natural disaster. No one was out with sand bags trying to shore-up the levy. No one was going door-to-door to check on people. There was a feeling of panic and chaos that left everyone to fend for themselves. The rain had begun seventeen hours earlier and suddenly, at 1:35 a.m., an air siren woke us from our slumber. The local sheriff was driving by, talking through a loudspeaker about evacuating to higher ground. “Please, please do not worry about your valuables. They will be safe, just get your children and leave as soon as possible!”
It was just me and my younger brother, Joe, in the house. Our mother worked during the week at Castle Gate Mall, some 211 miles north of town and stayed there with her sister during the week. Jim’s dad was supposed to be responsible for watching us, but more often than not, he was at the local Tavern drinking beer, which was still better than our father who we hadn’t seen for nearly seven years. My brother was three years younger than me and we enjoyed the independence of living alone.
I turned the living room lights on and stood transfixed as the reddish brown water flowed across the living room. “Hey Joe,” I said, “Get the hell out here and take a look at this!”
“Holy shit,” he said, as his feet splashed in the water behind me. He walked past me with a perplexed look on his face and opened the front door. The flooding waters forced the door wide open and swooshed into the house, nearly doubling the depth of water up to our shins. An empty Sprite can floated in through the door, swirling crazily in the little eddies next to the kitchen.
“Get dressed,” I told him. I had just gotten my driver’s license but our mom had our only car. Wearing just my boxers, I stood on the couch and looked out the window at our neighbors who were loading up their car to evacuate. I ran back to our bedroom to get dressed, but stopped short when I caught my brother pissing off his bed into the flooding water. I wacked him upside the head, nearly knocking him into the water. “We have to walk in this, you moron.” He flipped me off and finished his business.
I fumbled through my dresser, picking up a shirt, looking at it blankly, and then setting it down. “Joe, grab my backpack and go in the kitchen and grab some food and water. Then go out in the garage and get the inner tubes. I’ll meet you out there.” He nodded, but it didn’t look like what I said had registered. He was standing on one foot trying to get his boots on. “Screw your boots, you idiot, we’re gonna get wet anyway, those are just gonna drag you down.” We both were shaking slightly from the adrenaline. He stopped and looked at me, tossed his boots into the water and grabbed a tennis shoe that was floating nearby.
“Have you seen my other shoe?” he asked.
“Yeah, it’s up your ass,” I said as I buttoned my pants. He forced a chuckle and leaned off the bed to fish for his other shoe in the murky water.
“What about our skate boards?” he asked, pulling mine out of the water.
“Bring ‘em.”
“And our CDs?”
“We’ll take those too,” I said as I finished tying my shoes. I grabbed a duffle bag, opened it and tilted the CDs from the rack so they fell into the bag. My brother vainly tried to find the backpack in the closet, knocking clothes off the shelves. “It’s on my bed, you idiot.” He turned and picked it off the bed. As I looked at him I noticed his shirt was on backwards. It was hard to focus with the nervous energy of not knowing what to do. I grabbed our Sega video game, the stereo and VHS videos. I wondered whether I should try to take some of our mom’s stuff with us. It was hard to fathom the water could get any deeper and it seemed like we should leave as soon as possible. However, there was a gold cross necklace our father had given her when they first met. I pulled it out of her jewelry box and stuck it in my pocket.
We went into the kitchen and I had Joe stand in front of the fridge wearing the backpack and holding our boards as I loaded it up. I started throwing cans of Coke into the pack, then realized we might as well take our mom’s beer. She wasn’t going to be drinking it anytime soon. I opened up a cupboard and grabbed a half-eaten bag of Nacho Doritos, a box of Cheez-Its and some cans of beef ravioli. Joe stood like an obedient dog, smacking his gum, but I could tell that he was getting increasingly nervous. I had no idea what to take, what we would need, or where we were going.
“Hey, are you guys still here?” The voice came from the living room and was accompanied by the sound of feet splashing through the water.
“We’re in the kitchen OJ,” I said and soon saw Jim’s face come around the corner. Jim was in the same grade as me; we had known each other our entire lives. We had given Jim the nickname “OJ” about two years earlier when we asked him to take care of our pet fish while we were out of town visiting family over Christmas. Even though we were only gone five days, all seven fish were dead upon our return. I asked him rather exasperated, “how did you kill all seven fish? Did you even bother to feed them?”
He scowled and said “I did everything you told me to do, but they kept dying one by one.”
Joe said “likely story OJ,” referring to the trial of OJ Simpson. Ever since, then the nickname stuck, which of course annoyed Jim.