T. Boyle: Wild Child and Other Stories

The truckers know that. But just about everybody else — Honda drivers, especially, and I’m sorry — don’t even know they’re behind the wheel and conscious half the time. I’ve tried to analyze it, I have.

They want value, the Honda drivers, value and reliability, but they don’t want to pay for the real deal — German engineering is what I’m talking about here — and yet they still seem to think they’re part of some secret society that allows them to cut people off at will, to take advantage because they’re so in the know. So hip. So Honda. And yes, I carry a gun, a Glock 9 I keep in a special compartment I had built into the leather panel of the driver’s side door, but that doesn’t mean I want to use it. Or would use it again. Except in extremis.

The only time I did fire it, in fact, was during that rash of freeway shootings a few months back — a statistical bubble, the police called it — when people were getting popped at the rate of two a week in the greater L.A. area. I could never figure it, really. You see some jerk swerving in and out of traffic, tailgating, and maybe you give him the finger and maybe he comes up on you, but you’re awake, aren’t you? You’ve got an accelerator and a brake pedal, right?

But most people, I guess, don’t even know they’re alive in the world or that they’ve just made the driver charging up alongside them homicidal or that their engine is on fire or the road is dropping off into a crater the size of the Sea of Tranquility because they’ve got the cell clamped to the side of their head and they’re doing their nails or reading the paper. Don’t laugh. I’ve seen them watching TV, gobbling kung pao out of the carton, doing crossword puzzles and talking on two cells at once — and all at eighty miles an hour.

Anyway, I just fired two slugs — blip blip. Didn’t even know my finger was on the trigger. Plus, of course, I was aiming low — just trying to perforate his rocker panels or the idiotic big-dick off-road Super Avenger tires that had him sitting about twelve feet up off the ground. I’m not proud of it. And I probably shouldn’t have gone that far. But he cut me off — twice — and if he’d given me the finger it would have been one thing, but he didn’t even know it, didn’t even know he’d nearly run me into the median two times in the space of a minute.

On this particular day, though, everybody seemed to keep their distance. It was just past noon and raining, the ocean stretching out on my left like a big seething cauldron, the surface of the roadway slick beneath the wheels — so slick and soft and ill-defined I had to slow to seventy in places to keep from hydroplaning. But this wasn’t just rain. This was one cell in a string of storms that had stalled over the coast for the past week, sucking load after load of moisture up out of the sea and dropping it on the hills that had burned clear of vegetation the winter before. I was already running late because of a slide at Topanga Canyon, boulders the size of SUVs in the middle of the road, cops in slickers waving their flashlights, down to two lanes, then one, and finally — I heard this on the radio after I got through, feeling stressed for time, but lucky I guess — down to none. Road closed. All she wrote.

I didn’t like driving in the rain — it was just asking for disaster.

My fellow drivers, riding their brakes and clinging to the wheel as if it were some kind of voodoo fetish that would protect them against drunks, curves, potholes, errant coyotes and sheet metal carved into knives, went to pieces the minute the first drop hit the windshield.

As you might expect, the accident rate shot up something like three hundred percent every time it rained, and as I say, this wasn’t just rain in the ordinary sense. But I had a delivery to make in Santa Barbara, an urgent delivery, and if I couldn’t guarantee door-to-door faster than FedEx or Freddie Altamirano (my major competitor, who rode a ProStreet FXR and moved like a spirit raptured to heaven), then I was out of business. Plus, this wasn’t just the usual packet of bonds or stock certificates or the blockbuster screenplay passing from writer to director and back again, this was the kind of thing I handled maybe two or three times a month at most — and it never failed to give me a thrill. In the trunk, anchored firmly between two big blocks of Styrofoam, was a human liver packed in a bag of ice slurry inside a Bud Light Fun-in-the-Sun cooler, and if that sounds ridiculous, I’m sorry. That’s how it’s done. Simple fact. Ninety minutes earlier I’d picked it up at LAX because the S.B. airport was closed due to flooding, and if you want a definition of time sensitive, this was it. The recipient, a twenty-seven-year-old mother of three, was on life support at University Hospital, and I was running late and there wasn’t much I could do about it.

At any rate, I was coming up on La Conchita, a little town no bigger than a trailer court carved out of the hill where the freeway dips down to the ocean, rounding the big curve at Mussel Shoals and dropping down to fourth to blow past a U-Haul truck (the worst, the very worst, but that’s another story), when the hillside gave way.

There was a series of sharp cracks I at first took to be lightning hitting the hill, and then a deep reverberant concussion, as if all the air had been knocked out of the day. By this point I was shifting down, hyper-aware of the chain of brake lights flung up across the road in front of me and the U-Haul, piloted by a zombie on his way to Goleta or Lompoc with his zombie girlfriend at his side and their little white dog in her lap, bearing down on me from behind. I was able to stop. They weren’t. They barely had time to flash their brake lights before skidding past me and hammering the back end of a Mercedes with its panic lights on, lifting the whole shimmering orange-and-white truck up on two wheels before it crashed down on its side.

I’ll say right up front I’ve never been much in an emergency

— and when you’re behind the wheel as often as I am, you see plenty of emergencies, believe me. I don’t know CPR, don’t know how to stay calm or counsel anybody else to stay calm either and I’ve been lucky because it’s never been me wrapped around the telephone pole or nodding over the windshield and nobody I know has ever choked at the dinner table or clutched their heart or started hemorrhaging from the mouth and ears. I saw the dog lying there in the road like a heap of rags, saw the driver of the moving truck haul himself up out of the driver’s side window like a pearl diver coming up for air, saw the rain eclipse him. And the first thing I did — for my own sake and for the sake of whoever else might be tooling up behind me — was pull the car off the road, as far up on the shoulder as I could take it without fear of getting stuck. I was just reaching for my cell to dial 911, the road blocked, the day shot, my mind churning and the donor organ sitting there undelivered and unincorporated and getting staler by the minute, when things got worse, a whole lot worse.

I don’t know if the average person really has much of an idea of what a mudslide involves. I certainly didn’t — not before I started driving for a living, anyway. You’d see footage on the six o’clock news, telephone poles down, trees knocked askew, a car or two flattened and a garage staved in, but it didn’t seem like much. It wasn’t hot lava, wasn’t an earthquake or one of the firestorms that burned through this or that subdivision and incinerated a couple hundred homes every fall. Maybe it was the fault of the term itself — mudslide.

It sounded innocuous, almost cozy, as if it might be one of the new attractions at Magic Mountain, or vaguely sexy, like the mud-wrestling that was all the rage when I was in high school and too young to get in the door. But that was the thinking of a limited imagination. A mudslide, as I now know, is nothing short of an avalanche, but instead of snow you’ve got 400,000 tons of liquefied dirt bristling with rock and tree trunks coming at you with the force of a tsunami. And it moves fast, faster than you would think.