Jackson Bell - Trigger Finger

We found her wandering on Sigmon Dairy Road outside of Maiden. Not on it, not exactly; she actually sat on the shoulder, legs crossed Indian-style. Bobby fiddling with the tape deck, we almost hit her. Earlier in the week, he had picked up a tape by this new band called “Pearl Jam.” He was half-driving, half-rewinding to listen to the first song again, when Kate suddenly screamed, “STOP!”

He slammed his foot to the floor. A machine-gun opened fire somewhere as the antilock brakes deployed, snatching the Mercedes to a chattering and shuddering halt as inertia threw me forward and then jerked me violently backwards just as fast. Had we not just stopped at a gas station ten minutes before, I may have wet myself. Instead, I just said with my eighth-grade eloquence, “What the fuck?”

“You almost hit her,” said Kate.

“Almost hit who? ” I demanded.

“Her,” said Bobby.

I followed the invisible beam shining from Bobby’s extended index finger. When he’d slammed on the brakes, he guided the Mercedes partially onto the shoulder and now the headlamps shone in a crazy oblique direction across the pavement and into the barely restrained wilderness that abutted the shoulder. There, on the outskirts of the light, sat the woman.

Long brown hair hung in strings over the shoulders of a pink bathrobe. She sat hunched forward, eyes open but seemingly unaware of our presence. She didn’t move, not even when Bobby moved the car fully onto the shoulder and brought the front bumper to within mere feet of where she sat. In the electric glow of the headlamps, her eyes looked solid black.

“What’s wrong with her?” Kate asked.

“I don’t know,” Bobby said, “but I’m about to find out.”

He unbuckled his safety belt, opened the driver’s door and got out. I swallowed then, my pulse quickening just a little because the woman not only didn’t look at us, but she didn’t even blink , and I thought, who doesn’t blink ? My gut flooded with something cold and black, and I wanted to reach forward and grab Bobby back into the car. Leave her alone, I wanted to say. Something’s wrong with her. Something is very, very, very wrong.

“Be careful,” Kate cautioned. It came out as a whisper.

Bobby didn’t hear her. By the time she said it, he’d already made it out of the car and around the front bumper. He knelt beside the woman, said something we couldn’t hear. When they both stood, her bathrobe fell open to reveal a pair of pink sweatpants and a matching T-shirt that read, What Would Jesus Do ?

Bobby walked her to the other side of the car and put her in the back with me. She moved under her own power, compliantly obeying his instructions as he told her to get in and watch your head and buckle your safety belt. But she didn’t look at me.

Kate turned and stared from me to the woman, from the woman to me.

“Uh… hi,” Kate said.

The woman didn’t answer. Bobby closed the door and made his way back around to the driver’s side, where he got in and buckled up again. He placed both hands on the wheel and looked in the rearview mirror.

“This is Angela,” he said. “And she needs a ride to the hospital.”

Angela spoke.

“There’s been an accident,” she said in a monotone. “With David. And Johnny.”

“Who are David and Johnny?” I asked.

“Husband and son,” Bobby replied, shifting into drive and pulling back onto the road. He found a driveway and used it to reverse directions, taking us back towards Hickory. “Car wreck.”

“Are they okay?” Kate asked.

“I need to go to the hospital right away,” Angela repeated. “Because there’s been an accident.”

They probably weren’t okay. You didn’t wander out onto the highway when the hospital called to say your husband and your kid have a nasty case of whiplash. Her shuffling walk, her catatonia, that could only follow an earthquake or the detonation of a nuclear bomb inside the brain case.

“Oh. Oh my God.” Kate turned around in her seat to face us. “It’s going to be okay,” she said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

“There’s been an accident,” Angela repeated.

“Pray,” Kate urged. “That’s what you need to do right now. You pray, and we’ll get you to your family.”

“I’m needed at the hospital right away,” Angela said.

“And we’ll get you there. Bobby, can you move it little faster?”

“Christ on a stick, what do you think I’m doing?”

“I don’t know, Bobby, what are you doing, move it!”

When we reached the emergency room at Catawba Memorial, Kate hopped out to open the door for her. I hopped out, too, because if I remained in the backseat Kate would ask me to reach over and unbuckle the woman and if I did that our skin might touch. I hung back, not touching, not helping, remaining as far away from her as I could. Bobby and Kate each took a side and guided her into the building, but I hung back. I didn’t want to touch her, because bad luck—really bad luck, like this kind—is contagious. I could smell it on her. She was cursed.

And I was right. Inside, we learned that David and Johnny had lost their lives to a drunk driver on Highway 321 two hours ago. The year before, the nurse said, she’d been in here another time. When her daughter and her other son had died in the same kind of accident.

One husband, three kids, two car wrecks. Everybody dead.

Up at the admissions desk, both of Kate’s hands flew up to her mouth. Bobby just stared at the nurse—he didn’t say anything. I turned to look at Angela, whom they’d planted in a seat beneath a television bolted to the ceiling. Above her head, a rerun of Growing Pains did its best to ease the suffering of the patients waiting in slumped agony for a chance to see a doctor. She stared at the black windows until she noticed me looking at her, and we locked eyes.

“I need you to fill out some paperwork,” the nurse said.

“But we don’t know her,” Bobby protested. “I just found her sitting on her behind out in the middle of nowhere…”

“We’re a little shorthanded tonight, do you think you could help us out a little?”

“I don’t mind helping you out, I’m just saying that I just turned eighteen, like, last week and I don’t even know who this lady is …”

I walked over to Angela, leaving the conversation behind me. She didn’t look away as I approached and sat down in a chair just outside of touching distance.

“God hates me,” she said. “He wants to see me burn.”

How do you argue with that? I didn’t want to get too close to her, but I did want to comfort her, ease her suffering if at all possible. But what do you say? Cheer up ? Uh, no. Everything’s going to be okay? Bullshit. Everything would not be okay. Not for her.

“It’s not true what they say,” she told me. She leaned forward and spoke in an almost conspiratorial tone, like she wanted no one but me to hear her. “They tell you He loves everybody, but he doesn’t. They say He punishes the sinners, but that’s not true either.”

“Don’t say that.”

“There’s no one protecting you,” she said. Now she was smiling—or grinning, or grimacing, something that involved an upturn of the corners of the mouth but played something black and out of tune on my ribs because why would anybody do anything but scream at a time like this? “There’s not. You can pray to the empty heavens all day long, but there’s no one listening. You can be a good boy, but that won’t protect you because He doesn’t care. He’ll let your guts spill out all over this floor. He’ll cut you. And when you think you can’t bleed anymore?”