Luke Whisnant

Mexican Carwreck

A Ditch

Here is where: the slick wet curve off-camber, the blacktop pitted with patches and ruts, the yellow double line faded almost invisible. A ditch along either side; standing water stinking of rot and hot rubber and hogshit; dockweed, mullein, wild onion, a spray of tiny yellow flowers with faces turned up to the rain. Blue styrofoam Fillet-O-Fish. Rusted barbed wire. Skidmarks like screaming. A body face down in the ditch. Turn him over.

Bodies

Six bodies. One in the ditch. Two in the tobacco past the ditch. One on the blacktop, one across the curve with his head crushed against a fence post, one so far flung that he isn’t found for a quarter-hour, and then only because a small brown dog circles him, whimpering. Six bodies. Every single one of them thrown from the vehicle. It’s a cultural thing, the sheriff says for TV; they won’t wear their seatbelts. Seatbelts are not macho. And of course there’s never no kind of excuse for riding in the back like that.

State troopers with a yellow measuring tape, marking points of impact. The wump-skreet, wump-skreet of windshield wipers on an idle ambulance. An EMT strapping up a sheet-wrapped stretcher, weeping.

A Witness

Name’s Herbert Joslyn. I live up here about a quarter mile. I was the first on the scene. Just awful. I was in Korea, and saw nothing worst. A head-on Mexican carwreck. These fellas lived right up the road and was good neighbors, even if they couldn’t speak much English. It’s their families I feel sorry for.

The state has turned its back on this road. This curve was never engineered right from Day One, nor maintained either. Five times now I’ve complained, and twice they’ve had their engineers out here, but you see what-all good that done. Hell, yes, you can quote me, but no photographs. I got a microchip in me that breaks cameras. You think I’m foolin’ but I’m not.

Clothing

Goodwill bluejeans a size too big or too small. Used T-shirts, discolored under the arms, or frayed doubleknits in lurid colors. Greasy adjust-a-band baseball caps: grinning Indians, leaping Marlins. Holes in old gray socks. But the shoes are new, new Nikes, all six pairs, black or blue uppers with neon green trim, see-through soles with magic air pockets. So you can fly.

Not Mexico

It’s just such a damn stereotype, you know? one of the cops says: Mexicans crammed into the back of a pickup truck. You just cringe when you see it. It’s like white people wearing Bermuda shorts and penny loafers, or black people eating watermelon.

Watermelon, cucumbers, strawberries. Tobacco here, peaches in South Carolina. Tomatoes in Georgia. Back here late summer for the tobacco harvest. In-between times, roofing or landscaping. Living in a 30-year-old mobile home up on cinder blocks, three to a room. Sending what they can back home to Guatemala and Honduras. Not Mexico.

The Other Driver

None of the dead has ID. That’s one rumor. All of the dead have ID, but names won’t be released until next of kin are notified. That’s another rumor. The cops run a license check on the red truck and find the plate was stolen. They check the VIN. Nobody seems to know anything. The TV camera guys are sweating under clear plastic ponchos. The reporters touch up their lipstick, then do their standups. Someone says on camera that this is the worst wreck in county history. Someone else says that’s bull. The cops tell the media people to take a hike, to clear out and let them do their jobs. The media people say they have a job to do too, give them a break, they’re on deadline. One or another of them shake their heads, disgusted. Cops vs. reporters: it’s a little dance they could do in their sleep.

The other driver sits in the rain on the running board of his dump truck, head in hands. The raindrops on his face make it hard to tell if he’s crying. They slid into my lane, he says over and over. I stood on the brakes but couldn’t get it stopped. I wasn’t going any faster than 50, I swear to God. The TV people, shooed away by sheriff’s deputies, scatter and stand aside a moment, then nonchalantly regroup around the dump truck, shooting surreptitiously from the hip.

Thrown Clear

In their pockets: a CP&L electric bill for $58.73 stamped “paid.” Cheap Food Lion sunglasses. Camels in crushproof packs, crushed. Twenty-dollar bills, five-dollar bills, wads of ones, loose change, two Mexican pesos, a Honduran 50-centavo. A plastic toothpick dispenser. A roll of breath mints. A silver-and-turquoise ring. A three-pack of condoms, ribbed, and another three-pack, lubricated. A pocket watch with the crystal smashed.

Thrown clear: an English-Spanish phrasebook. A requinto, a four-string guitar shaped from an armadillo shell. Five loads of dirty laundry in black milk crates. A black tarp the size of a pickup bed. The limping brown dog scuffling and whimpering around the ambulances.

Reverse

The moment of death hovers over the dead: weightless, a song no one hears, the moment of death and the moment before. It doesn’t matter who believes this. It’s true. Here, at the edge of a field a thousand miles from home, their moment is hovering. If you could put the truck in reverse, if driving backward were like rewinding a tape, you could enter the moment before: the moment of bliss, absolute and immutable. You could know what it meant to huddle with your compadres under a flapping tarp, tasting the summer drizzle on your face, glad that the rain had given you a day off so you could ride into town and do laundry. You could sing with your best friend the happy words about the banker’s dark-haired daughter and the poor country boy, harmonizing over the high thrum of the requinto. You could roar with laughter, helpless, hugging the neck of the man next to you, gasping and weeping tears of joy at the dog—the dog singing along in his mournful howls and yelps, this pathetic wonderful North American singing dog.

And then the moment gone in an instant, the panicked creature sliding and scrambling, skittering with his long toenails across the metal bed of the truck, and everyone shouting as you head into the curve.

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From Long Story Short: Flash Fiction by Sixty-Five of North Carolina’s Finest Writers.