Рон Гуларт - Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 13, Mid-December 1994

Well, the fact of the matter is, nobody knew. Least of all Sheriff Duncan, a man going on seventy-four years of age and in dire need of sleep. But in point of fact, that’s exactly what they did. And that’s when things began to get a little out of hand.

Because that transition from deep sleep to wide awake isn’t easy. Not for anybody. Just consider the last time your phone rang in the middle of the night, and how that surge of adrenaline carried you halfway down the hall on the way to answer it before your brain even figured out what it was you’d heard. Well, that’s pretty much how it was for Sheriff Duncan when that old truck went whizzing past and woke him up so unexpectedly. His body more or less just jumped right into action, even though his brain was still asleep and his body was acting pretty much at the complete discretion of adrenaline.

Not that you’d have known it from looking, the way he slammed that new high performance engine into gear and went squalling and slip-sliding out onto the highway. But if the truth were known, he was halfway down to Harvester’s Maw and riding right up on the rear bumper of that truck before his brain even considered switching on.

Well, it goes without saying that when his brain finally did switch on it was only to discover that it was facing a fair-sized dilemma, what with him racing bumper to bumper with that old pickup right into Harvester’s Maw. Which, as it turned out, wasn’t anything compared to the dilemma facing the driver of that pickup truck, who’d not only been more than a little bit spooked at the way that car he was watching in his rear view mirror had raced up and parked right off his rear bumper, but was well on his way to becoming downright terrified from the realization that the car that was tailgating him was a police cruiser.

The thing is, what with him being from out of town and all, the driver of that truck was totally unaware that the Maw had gotten its name from the way local harvesting equipment, when it’s being transported out on the highway, has a tendency to swallow up whole unsuspecting motorists who insist on going too fast around that big curve out on the edge of town. And of course, when he panicked at the thought of being pulled over, at the thought of being caught redhanded with the contraband he was carrying, and he slammed his foot down on the accelerator and began to pull out ahead of the police cruiser, he had absolutely no way at all of knowing that he was already staring down the throat of the Maw. And wouldn’t you just know that, true to form, right when he started banking into that ninety degree turn, that ugly mechanical monster reared its massive body up in the road ahead, blocking out the whole world except for what looked to him like acre after acre of John Deere green.

Now, about the time that old pickup went fishtailing out of sight around the curve of the Maw, the sheriff, who had finally wakened to the point that he was beginning to question the wisdom of stampeding a speeding out-of-towner right into the depths of the Maw without nary a by your leave nor word of warning, was also beginning to more fully appreciate his own predicament. Because, being a local, he understood all too well how few options the Maw leaves.

You see, Highway 17, being an old stretch of road, was built back in the days when roads still followed property lines and went around rather than through hills. This particular stretch of Highway 17 comes down on a pretty straight line from the north until within a mile or so of the outskirts of Crenshaw, at which point it runs up at a forty-five degree angle onto a long narrow hill that locally goes by the name of Beaumont Ridge. To avoid going either all the way over the top or right through Beaumont Ridge, after the highway climbs partway up the side of the ridge it bends through a ninety degree turn to the east, forming the curve known as Harvester’s Maw. From there it runs pretty much in a straight line east, angling away from the crest of the ridge, until it reaches the heart of Crenshaw.

Now, what all that means is that, as you round the Maw, all you’ve got on the right as a buffer between you and the ridge is the shoulder of the road, a ditch, a stretch of ground maybe six feet wide. Off to your left, of course, you’re looking at a pretty sharp dropoff down to the bottom of the ridge. So when you come around the curve too fast and find yourself overtaking one of those big, slow-moving harvesters that take up all of their own lane and the better part of the other lane, you don’t have a lot of choices. What most folks faced with that dilemma choose to do is to panic, which generally means they end up driving right up the tail end of the harvester.

What the driver of that pickup, who in fact was a mighty fine driver in his own right, chose to try to do was to veer sharply off to the right, leap that ditch, and glance off the bluff on the other side before finally straightening back out on that little stretch of ground between the bluff and the ditch. What in fact he did was veer to the right, clip the tail end of that harvester with his front left bumper, slide down one side of the ditch and back up the other, and skid across that short stretch of ground on the other side and into the bluff. Which was pretty close to the outcome he’d been looking for, even if the method was a bit different from what he’d planned. The only problem was, he hadn’t anticipated that there might be a utility pole standing there right in his way, and before he could bring that truck to a stop, he’d slammed into that pole and snapped it right in half.

What the sheriff chose to do, on the other hand, was to bank on the fact that there wasn’t going to be any oncoming traffic getting around that green monster up ahead, and to take the opportunity to move over into the left lane while bleeding off his speed as fast as he could by holding his brakes down just shy of the point of locking up. And in a maneuver the kids around these parts will be talking about and trying to copy for years to come, instead of braking still harder the way every fiber of his being was demanding, he let off the brakes entirely as he entered the curve and let the car coast, allowing his speed to edge him back across the road and into his own lane. Scraping past the back end of the harvester so closely that he could’ve reached out and touched up the paint job that’d been marred when the pickup clipped it, he came out the other side of the Maw and pulled off onto the shoulder of the road. And, breathing a sigh of relief they could’ve heard downtown, he pulled to a stop just a few feet short of where the truck was sitting. Just in time to watch the utility pole fall.

See, what had happened was that the truck had clipped that pole with its right front bumper and then rolled on ahead several feet, penning the lower end of the upper piece between the side of the truck and the bottom of the bluff. Which for a second or two provided enough support to keep the top half of that pole sitting pretty much upright, though it was teetering back and forth a mite, first one way, then the other. Which was just long enough for the sheriff to arrive. At which time the sheriff heard a sharp crack and looked up in time to see the top half of the pole tear loose and fall over against the crest of the ridge.

Which, as it turned out, was not really a good thing. Because it was just at that point along the crest of the ridge that old Joe Walker Senior had chosen to build his house. Not that the pole hit his house, mind you. But one of those wooden crosspieces that they attach power lines to did just barely graze that big commercial dumpster that was sitting at the top of old Joe Senior’s driveway. The very same dumpster that old Joe had put up on a set of wheels so he could wheel it around all over the place, and that he’d been using to hold all the waterlogged carpet and lumber he’d been pulling out of his back bedroom, which had been ruined when the roof sprung a leak back during those awful spring storms. And, well, when it was hit by that crosspiece, that dumpster just sort of was nudged over the tiniest bit. Which started it rolling down the driveway.