Robert Lubrican - For Want of a Memory

He started dragging his body upward again.

Lou Anne drove carefully. There were four or five inches of snow on the highway-nobody had come out to clear it yet-and it was still snowing hard enough be called a blizzard. She knew the winding road well, but the blowing snow made it hard to get her bearings as to where, exactly, she was. She slowed some more, but tried to keep the car above thirty, just to keep her forward momentum going. There was a rise up ahead somewhere, and she would need that momentum to get up it.

There it was.

She gunned the engine carefully. Thank goodness she had studded tires on the car. She was only going twenty when she hit the top of the slope, but she relaxed then, because she knew the worst was over. She prepared to negotiate the next curve, which she knew was there, even though her headlights made it appear that the road just stopped.

Halfway into that curve, she blinked. There was something in the road. Her foot flashed toward the brake pedal, and she slid fifteen feet. She was right on top of whatever it was. Her brain told her it was a body, but that was impossible. There was no car, and nobody in his right mind would be out walking on a night like this.

She didn’t know whether to get out of the car or not. What if it was a setup, to jack her car? The part of Connecticut she lived in was safe. That was part of why she’d moved there. But car jackings were on the news every day!

She fumbled under the seat, feeling for the thing Jessica had given her-a telescoping rod, with a knob on the end. Lou Anne had laughed when Jessica, her best friend, had patiently shown her how to use it as a whipping tool of defense. But Jessica had insisted she keep it in the car.

"Someday one of those truckers is going to try to get revenge for getting a lapful of Hank’s cooking!" Jessica had said. "Just you watch. And while you probably deserve it, I don’t want you getting beaten up by one of them. You KEEP that in your car, do you understand me?"

Now Lou Anne backed up, until her headlights shone on the lump in the road. It was definitely a body. She clutched the rod and got out, carefully. Her feet slipped on the snow and she had to hold onto the door to stabilize herself.

"Are you OK?" she yelled.

The lump didn’t move.

She noticed that snow was beginning to cover the man. He’d been lying there for at least a few minutes.

"I’VE GOT A GUN!" she shouted into the darkness. "I KNOW HOW TO USE IT!"

The lump didn’t move.

She edged forward. She snapped the rod downward and heard the swishing thunk as it extended.

"Hey!" she said, standing three feet from the man on the ground.

Nothing.

For the first time she saw the red-stained snowflakes around the man’s head. Her eyes took in the wet look of his sports coat, which was torn in several places. He wasn’t even wearing a parka.

"Hey mister," she tried again.

She edged closer and poked him with the end of the rod.

She looked around. Where had he come from? Had someone thrown him out of a car as it drove along? She couldn’t tell if the tracks in the snow around her were fresh or not.

"Shit!" she barked. "You better not be dead!"

She went closer. She’d never seen a dead body and didn’t want to now. This was already giving her the willies. She tried to remember what fist aid she knew and reached out to touch the man’s cheek.

It was cold, but not the cold of death. There was a hint of warmth in the skin.

The lump groaned, and she fell on her butt trying to skid backwards.

"SHIT!" she yelled.

The lump rolled and landed on its back. The hands didn’t come up to brush the snow away, and Lou Anne suddenly knew this man was in real trouble.

It galvanized her and she scrambled up, going to the man and getting to her knees to lean over him.

"Hey," she said, her voice softer. "It’s OK. I’ll help you, OK?"

The man gurgled, and one hand came feebly up to his face.

"Ow," he croaked.

She almost laughed. This guy was in terrible shape. She could see him bleeding all over his face, now that it was in the lights. He looked like he’d been beaten half to death. And all he had to say was, "Ow."

"You have to get up," she said. "I can’t lift you, and you’ll freeze to death if you stay on the ground. I have a car. I’ll take you to the hospital. You have to get up. Do you hear me?"

She tugged at his sleeve.

Afterwards, when she was asked about it-and she was asked about it a lot over the years-she would not be able to explain how she’d gotten the man into the passenger seat of her car. Even as she put the car in gear, she couldn’t believe she had pulled it off.

The rest was crystal clear in her mind, though. His head flopped back on the headrest. He groaned a few times as she got the car moving. She’d left her door open, when she’d gotten out to investigate, and it was cold inside. The heater had already been on full blast, though, and the car began to warm quickly.

That was when he slumped over, his head hitting her right arm.

"Sit up!" she yelped, but he was beyond hearing her now. "You’d better not die in my car, you son of a bitch!" she growled.

It was the longest four miles she’d ever driven, and she’d never been happier in her life to see the lights of the Emergency Room … not even when she’d been in labor with Ambrose.

She ran into the ER yelling her head off, and people went to remove him from her car. Then came the questions. Who was he? Who had done this to him? Where did she find him? What was his name? What was HER name?

"I have to go to work!" she shouted, finally. "I don’t KNOW who he is. I found him in the middle of the road and I brought him here. That’s all I know!"

They tried to get her to stay, warning her that they were going to call the police.

"Fine! Call them! I work at The Early Girl. That’s where I’ll be!"

Then she’d run to her car. She’d left her door open again, and they had left the other one open too, after they got him out. It was freezing inside again. As she got in, she saw the stains that, in the daylight, she knew would be red. The crapping guy had bled all over her car.

The only reason she didn’t hit twenty cars on her way to work was because no one else was on the roads in town at this time of night.

Mitch Connel put his uniform cap on the visitor’s chair and looked down at the man in the bed. His face was bandaged in more places than it was not. It was impossible to tell whether that face matched the one on the driver’s license that had come out of the wallet in the pants the guy had been wearing. That driver’s license said the man was one Kristoff S. Farmingham, who lived in New York City. The problem was that a rental agreement-wet and bloody, but still legible-along with the key in his pocket, said his name was Larry Phillips, and that he was renting one of Rudy Chastain’s vacation cottages. Mitch knew Rudy, of course. He knew everybody in town. There were only five men on the force in Pembroke, which served a population of some twenty-five hundred. Rudy worked as a fishing guide during the summer, and had seven or eight vacation cottages scattered around that he rented out.

Doctor Massouf fussed with tubes that were attached to the man.

"And you say Lulu brought him in?" Mitch asked. He hated talking to people who couldn’t speak English. Dr. Massouf was Pakistani, and he was a good physician, but he couldn’t speak English worth a damn.

"Eet vas hur, yes I am telling you. Se said se fund heem on zom hifay. You must be talking to hur I tink."

"When are you going to learn English, Doc?" groaned Mitch.

"Zer is nothing being wrong wit my spich, offitzer," said the doctor. "You haff itten ferry much too many donuts, and zay haff plooged oop your ears, I am tinking."