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This writing was accepted for publication in the 84 page perfect-bound issue... Down in the Dirt magazine (v078) (the January 2010 Issue) This is also available from our printer as a a $7.47 paperback book (5.5" x 8.5") perfect-bound w/ b&w pages

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Driven

Don Kunz

    Erin Sampson felt slammed. Stalled in traffic in her low-slung electric-yellow Camaro, she shifted her cell phone to her left hand so she could tilt her rearview down with her right. Now all she could see was her own face. The Wet n’ Wild Conceal Corrector had reduced her black eye from wounded vanity to dirty smudge. Still, she didn’t feel beautiful enough to be out. She could use a little blush. Erin flipped the mirror back up and glared at the traffic signal on Mass Ave. at Clearway, as she explained over the cell to her live-in boyfriend Duane how it had refused to turn green for at least two minutes just to drive her crazy. It wasn’t only Boston heavy traffic, the same old same old. This was like the big guy at the D.O.T. had a grudge against her personally. And she knew there wasn’t time for getting hung up. Duane was holding two ringside seats at the Worcester Centrum for the WWE Smackdown Slam of the Week at eight PM sharp. Then the light changed, and Erin was smoking the rubber off her high-performance American-Eagles. She felt driven by impulse to ignore any other red lights standing between her and Duane watching Stone Cold Steve Austin strutting around the ring with his big gold title belt draped over his left shoulder while Hulk Hogan in his yellow and red cape raced up and down the center aisle taunting the rabid fans screaming over the heavy metal on the public address. She became blind to everything but the Hulk’s act filling her head, his fists pummeling the air, his blonde Fu Man Chu mustache quivering with rage, his face contorting into an angry red mask pulsing under the strobe lights. Then Erin started from her reverie, feeling the real impact of her heavy metal on flesh: The old man shuffling too slowly to beat the light at the crosswalk on Boylston came crashing onto the hood and through the windshield of her boss ride.
    Suddenly Erin was looking through a spider web of glass, which both fragmented and connected everything in front of her with crazed lines. Her first words screamed into the cell phone—“Holy shit!”—were torn from her by a hellish August wind. It poured through a jagged hole where only a second before the passenger side of her windshield had been like an unblemished shield protecting her from all the nastiness of every road she traveled. Now she was staring at a disgusting stranger who had punched his way head and shoulders through the glass into her Camaro, her private space, like he owned it. The man looked vaguely familiar, but then didn’t they all? Another geezer like the ones haunting her nightmares left over from work. But this one was in worse shape than usual—a twitching ancient from a freak show, a toothless mouth breather with a quarter inch of gray stubble climbing the valleys of his pock-marked face. For a moment it drove all thoughts of the WWE Smackdown from Erin’s head.
    “Say again,” Duane said on the other end. “You’re breaking up, Erin.”
    “Damnit, Duane! You won’t believe this!” Erin shouted above the road noise. “Some old man jumped up on my hood and stuck his head through my windshield. You believe that? Can you believe that?” Erin stole a quick look at her uninvited passenger. His bloody head, tattered shoulders, and outstretched arms converged toward a fatal point. He looked like a human spear, just thrown, and still quivering above the pebbly black dashboard of her Camaro next to the lapsed state inspection sticker. Through her crazed windshield Erin saw his scrawny, ghost-white legs tangled up in a crumpled aluminum walker splayed across the hood. The jagged metal edges were scratching deep grooves into the embossed red flames accenting her electric-yellow turbo-charger air intake. Then the tangle of metal tumbled over the side, and Erin felt a jolt as it passed under her rear wheels. It had been a Healthpro 1200 series with easy-roll ball bearings, seven-inch multidirectional wheels, and soft-side neoprene grips. Erin Sampson knew walkers. She was a nurse’s aid coming off second shift at the Goodfellas Retirement Center in the south end, where it seemed like she had worked forever. It had been a very bad day. Just like all the others.
    Duane’s voice was coming in angry now, loud and clear over the wind whipping Erin’s big hair around her face like a shroud. “You gotta be shittin me, Erin! People don’t do that, specially old people. They aren’t that, you know, quick.”
    It seemed to Erin that Duane was like her boss at Goodfellas, always trying to set her straight. She reckoned because Duane did skip traces for Bulldog Bail Bonds in Roxbury, he figured he knew how the world ran and knew she didn’t because she was stuck out at Goodfellas with nothing but geezers and someone to tell her what to do every minute of her life. But Erin had learned one thing for sure from watching WWE’s Survivor Series on TV: When the big guy comes at you in a rage, you get right up in his face or you get run over. Since she started facing off that way against Duane, he almost never hit her, yesterday being an exception. Tonight he was making it up to her with ringside seats. So, now Erin came right back at him. “Yeah? Like now you’re you’re the expert on old folks? You don’t know nuthin. I keep tellin you they’re like little kids. They see something they want, they go for it. And they just keep pushin till they get what they’re after. This one must have wanted somebody to drive him somewhere real bad. If you’d been here, you’d see, Duane. Anyway you look at it, it’s not my fault.”
    Duane sighed deeply into the phone. “How many times I tell you? You can’t smoke shit while you’re at work. Hell, this guy probably ain’t even real, just one a them hallucin a whatchmacallits you get sometimes.”
    Erin brought her knees up hard beneath the steering wheel and tried to stay straight, then she reached out and poked the old man’s ribs with an index finger. “Oh, he’s real, Duane! Real as anything you’d see hanging on the ropes lookin for a way outta the ring. And about me smokin rock? If I want a toke or two in the changing room after work cause it relaxes me, I can deal with it. Whadda yuh gettin all bent out a shape about?”
    “Erin, we gotta leave in fifteen. You gonna be home or am I goin to the Centrum alone?”
    Erin reached down, and turned up the air conditioner to max recirculate then resumed steering with her right hand. “Don’t you even think about that, Duane,” she shouted. “It’s my night out. You owe me! Remember? This is the big one. Start of The Survivor Series. So, I’m gonna be there. Day like I’ve had, I need it, keep me from killin somebody on purpose.”
    “Well, say this was an accident. Say it ain’t your fault, Erin. . . . I don’t care. We got no time to deal with cops! Can’t you dump this guy somewhere? You know, street rules.”
    “Well, duh! Hello? Duane, I’m in the middle of traffic here. Just gettin on the Mass Pike from Newbury, I’m doin the double nickle on the ramp, and I already got five cars drivin up my ass. So, how am I gonna dump him? Awww, man! He’s decided to bleed all over my dash. His head’s a mess. And he’s moanin and shit.”
    “Well, ain’t you the bitch? Don’t know good news when it smacks you in the chops! Listen, all that m e a n s is he survived gettin knocked around. So, he’s okay. Plus like you was tellin me the other day, not a geezer in America hasn’t got govermint insurance up the wazoo.”
    “Yeah, but, Duane, why was he on the street anyways? Over at Goodfellas, we keep ‘em locked. They stay put. . . . So, what’s the deal here?”
    “Forgetaboutit. How many times I tell you? Stop wastin time! Just drive on home.”
    “Duane, like I’m tellin the boss, ain’t never enough time. All day I’m runnin. Now you’re given me more beat the clock. Don’t get worked up, man. It’s my ride’s all messed up!”
    “I copy you, Erin. We’ll take mine. C’mon, get that beautiful butt home.”
    “Okay, I’m there in ten, providin I don’t get hung up payin the toll. Mr. Fast Track’s cranky. You got to hit him just right. And me I can’t see for shit through this busted windshield. I’m a hang up now and drive.”
    Erin shoved her cell phone back into its retrofit black plastic holder on the dashboard just below her CD changer. She thought the Nokia was deadly—voice mail, call forwarding, auto redial, caller ID, alpha numeric messaging, coast-to-coast unlimited minutes nights and weekends, no roaming charges. She could reach out and touch anybody 24/7. And do it to bad background music. She loved her JBL changer loaded with Nine Inch Nails, Scarface, Trick Daddy, Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes, Styx. Great sounds to drive to, ‘specially with the bass cranked up to major throb. She had a Jones for tunes with hard edges. Last week she and Duane had fought over top song of the year. His was “It Ain’t Safe No More.” She thought there should be a tie between “Paid Da Cost To Be The Boss” and “Does This Look Infected?”
    Erin accelerated sharply, swerving into the third passing lane, grinding her teeth at the angry horns. She noticed a few startled glances from other drivers, but the heavy freeway traffic immediately demanded their attention. Erin figured most of them had seen more interesting stunts on television shows like “Jackass.” She forced herself in a few feet behind a black Lexus SUV and drafted just like she’d seen Dale Earnhardt do at Daytona. Blasting along at eighty five, she rooted in her purse, brought out a hard-sided flip-top box, shook out an unfiltered Marlboro, lipped and lit it. Squinting against the smoke, she glanced at the old man. He had collapsed in on himself and was hanging limply over her dash board. The wind whipped his polyester red and blue striped shirt against the back of his head like it was trying to refill a busted balloon. “Look at you! Look at you!” She shouted. “What is it? You think you’re one of the beautiful people or somethin? I’m here to tell you, you oughta be ashamed tryin to hitch a ride, you bein messed up and all. Why don’t you clean up before you go out in public? Huh?” You think decent folks gonna give you a ride lookin like that? No, sir! So, whadda you do? Just push your way in! Don’t care what you break! What kind a mess you make! You think Erin’s gonna pick up after you. Looks to me like this is more a that tryin to make Erin look bad on purpose. Well, I played that game before. They do it out at Goodfellas. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Some geezer blows lunch and tells the boss it was caus I whacked ‘em. I’m onto all them dirty tricks.”
    Erin swiveled her head around loosening the kinks in her neck. In front of her, behind her, beside her, other drivers talked on cell phones, drank coffee, ate cheeseburgers, sang along with their radios, applied cosmetics, brushed their hair, fumbled for tollbooth tokens, glanced at maps, jockeyed for position. Erin took a long drag and inhaled deeply. Smoke dribbled out as she spoke. “Guess you think it’s my lucky day, huh? Don’t you think I got anything better to do than drive you around?” Erin slapped both hands down on her steering wheel. Ashes blew into the backseat. “Here’s the deal, see. My man Duane scored a couple WWE tickets tonight. I’m talkin’ Smackdown here, Slam of the Week. Know what I mean, ole timer? You ever heard a The Rock? No? The Big Show? No? Well, hell! He’s only seven foot tall and 500 pounds. He ain’t easy to miss if you’re payin attention. How about The Undertaker? You heard a him?”
    The old man groaned and raised up off the dashboard. His face was a patchwork of cuts like a map to nowhere, nothing but intersections. Fine shards of glass littered his hair with bright dust. His shirt was more tattered than the Star Spangled Banner. He squinted, paddling his hands feebly as if trying to find something solid to grasp. “Help me,” he croaked.
    “Now you just settle down. Bad enough you jump into my ride bleedin like that. Don’t go squirmin around on me. Not unless you’re plannin on gettin out, which I don’t recommend. Number one, I’m not slowin down for no dismount. Number two, they don’t allow hitchin on the pike. Don’t you know it’s rush hour?” Erin stared hard at the old man’s face dripping blood. She grabbed a wad of Kleenex from her map pocket and dabbed at the carnage puddled on her passenger seat. “Say, you aren’t HIV are you? Should I be thinkin latex here?”
    The man gasped, struggling to turn his head toward Erin. “Help me. Help me.”
    His voice was a phlegmy wheeze, reminding her of all the other old ones waiting to die at Goodfellas. Erin heard it as a chorus of needs from all the crippled bodies and blown minds that she never had enough time to satisfy. Bitching she thought. She thought weaklings. I’m cold. My bed pan’s full. Where’s my pills? Is my daughter coming today? Would you rub my back? Where am I? I want a bath. This room stinks. Why doesn’t anybody listen around here? But I don’t like meatloaf. I can’t button this. Wheel me over by the window. Where have you been? I need a shot. I need it right now! Why’s everybody mean to me? It was like they followed her everywhere now, dreaming or waking—used up cases, no light in their rheumy eyes, dopes on the ropes. Erin knew Hulk Hogan wouldn’t put up with this, this negativity. That man was a survivor.
    Her exit coming up fast now just before the Weston Reservoir, Erin tapped the brakes, slowed to seventy, and lurched into the far right lane. She still couldn’t believe this was happening to her. When she thought about what she might lose, her anger soared like a meth rush. Slam of the Week. The Rock against The Hulk. The Big Show and The Rabid Wolverine going tag team against Andre The Giant and The Undertaker. She stared ahead at the green light above the Fast Track lane of the toll booth. “Help you, huh? What do you think I’m doin’? You tear up my wheels, but I’m givin you a ride anyways! You without the courtesy to even put out your thumb. Not you. You just bang your way in, so I have to take care of you.” Cigarette smoke curled around Erin’s head like steam around a kettle. “Well, I’m here to tell ya, you’re not getting much more outta me! No sir, I’m off duty.” She slid the driver’s side window down, flipped her lighted cigarette out. “Know what I think? You old guys are all alike. It’s all about you!” Erin hit her brakes again hard, slowing to forty five through the Fast Track lane. Instantly she heard a clanging of bells behind her and saw the lights cycling yellow and red in her rearview. She figured the geezer had bled on her Fast-Track Tag, the electric eye unable to get her number.
    They were in the country now. The dark hardwood forest with its thick tangle of brambles loomed on either side of the Mass Pike. Ahead, partially blocking her exit, brake lights gleamed like a long wet trail of blood into the dusk of late August. She could almost smell it. The slow lane of traffic was stuck behind a white Dodge Caravan with a flat rear tire. It sagged to the right, its hazard lights flashing. The driver and passenger, two clueless teenage girls, stood in the breakdown lane as if they owned it, the taller one talking on a cell phone, the shorter one holding a tire iron with both hands like it was a puzzle she couldn’t put together. Erin disliked young people almost as much as old people. They weren’t like her. They weren’t in the driver’s seat.
    “Hold on,” Erin growled. “Might get bumpy.” She smacked her horn down, held it there, and jerked the Camaro into the breakdown lane. She watched the girls’ eyes widen as she roared down on them. Stupid broads! The short one was much too fat to be wearing a red tank top cut off at the midriff. And where did that tall goony one get off standing in the road like that yakyakyaking? She needed to pay attention. Erin wanted to get them into the ring one at a time, grab them by the hair and the crotch, lift them over her head, do the airplane, then slam them to the canvas just to see how high they’d bounce. Do it to heavy metal.
    The girls watched her, first paralyzed with disbelief, then shrieking and dancing like their feet were on fire, and finally jumping back, flattening themselves against the side of the Caravan like dark bruises. Erin clipped an orange construction barrel on the shoulder of her exit. It careened against the New Jersey Barrier then bounced back against the Caravan in the slow travel lane. She glanced quickly in her rearview. “Well, isn’t this a regular demolition derby? Who the hell entered me, I wanna know? Lemme tell ya, Buster, this is one night I can’t get home soon enough.” Erin accelerated through the off-ramp curve, her radials screaming.
    They were on a gravel side road now leading to a new development. Erin’s Camaro blasted past the real estate billboard for Stony Fort Hills—”A Planned Community.” Carved into the woods near the reservoir, it looked like a long painful gash across the face of earth, something like botched surgery to airline pilots headed west out of Logan. Erin rocketed over the first hill at fifty, spewing gravel like shrapnel. At the bottom she saw her first sign of the law all day, a State Police cruiser, its lights pulsing a ruddy glow against the dense undergrowth of the dark forest. The Statie had his feet in the ditch and his head and shoulders in the passenger side door of a green Toyota 4-Runner. Head down, he fumbled with a child’s car seat while a blonde toddler screeched hysterically into his ear. Erin remembered her least favorite bumper sticker, “State Troopers. Always There When You Need Them.” She always told Duane, there was a lot to be learned from bumper stickers if you were willing to pay attention. Her dead solid all time favorite was “Nuke the Gay Whales for Jesus.” Erin slowed to thirty five, breezing by in a cloud of dust that settled like face powder in her wake. She didn’t want to get stopped for speeding, not now, not after all she’d been through.
    On the right three identical ranch houses with red brick facades squatted in a cul de sac jammed with greasy yellow backhoes, scarred bulldozers, trench cutters. Mounds of black loam had been dumped across the front yards as if waiting beside graves to be filled. The first two homes were empty, their dark windows like vacant eye sockets. Erin braked hard at the third, did a four-wheel drift around the corner, then roared up the driveway.
    Duane was leaning up against his signal-red Dodge Avenger. He wore engineer boots, black jeans, and a sleeveless black wife beater. Look at this Erin thought. Duane holding his ground. Her man a piece of work. Wrapped in his ringside attitude like body armor. He had his arms crossed to show the tats like fresh welts on his biceps, something oriental neither of them could translate. Duane looked pissed, one eyebrow raised just like The Rock. Erin slid down the passenger window, pushed the old man’s head down so she could see over him, and crowed to Duane, “told you I’d get here!”
    Duane uncrossed his arms, braced both hands on his knees, and leaned through the window, punching his words out. “Well, shit! Twelve minutes, Erin. Twelve! Not ten! We’re gonna have to haul ass.”
    The old man pushed up against Erin’s hand, squinted, and turned toward Duane. “Help me,” he rasped. His breath was like a gust from carrion.
    Duane took in the old man now, and recoiled from the white hair and bloody face. He gave it his hard stare, jawing at Erin. “Goddam! Whadda ya doin’ still screwin’ around with this thing here?” Duane stood up, slammed his fists down on the Camaro’s T-Top. The reverberation hung in the air promising something like a rim shot in a strip joint. Slowly he bent down to window level again. “It don’t even look human! Ask me, it looks like a used Q Tip!”
    “Christ, Duane, if I’d a stopped to push him out the car, it woulda taken me forever!” Erin jutting out her jaw now and pushing the geezer’s head down again to confront Duane directly. “Say, you wanna talk or drive? Cause it ain’t gettin any earlier here.”
    Duane gave Erin a murderous glance. He spread his hands out like he was holding something down, something inside that wanted out. “Okay, Erin” he growled. “You’re right. You always gotta be the one that’s right, don’tcha? Always. But let me say this. Don’t even think about takin him along!”
    Erin primped a little for Duane, fluffed her big hair, and grinned for the first time all day. “Course not. We ain’t got but two tickets.”
    Duane kicked his right boot into the loose dirt of the driveway. Erin could see he was venting a little, letting her know he was holding back for now. She thought he’d probably let it out ringside, make himself part of the show. He didn’t look at her. He just kept staring at the dirt in the driveway like it was the most important thing in his life. He spit his words at her. “Damnit, Erin, let’s go, then! Put that wreck in the garage! And leave the door open! Maybe what’s left of him will crawl off on its own.”
    Erin punched her accelerator. Tires spinning in the loose soil, her Camaro leaped into the garage. Its brake lights cast a red glow that bounced off the walls. Over the roar of her engine she heard Duane shout, “don’t look like he’s too crazy about the suburbs!”
    As she set her emergency brake, Erin watched Duane in her rearview. He was shaking his head over the dirt she had kicked up with the Camaro. He tamped it down beneath his boots. She remembered the driveway was supposed to have been paved last week, but the contractor was late as usual. Duane was probably figuring he would have to get in his face again to get it done at all. Now she caught him looking over at the demolition equipment cluttering up their cul de sac like it was something he held the mortgage on and was thinking about how he was going to get out of paying. Erin saw Duane’s shoulders drop as if he had been startled from a dream and realized he didn’t have time for this now. She saw him turn and jerk open the door to his Avenger. He climbed in, turned the key, and revved the big V8, grinning at the baritone throb of his custom exhaust.
    Erin rooted in her purse, pulled out her last wad of Kleenex and held it out toward the old man. He seemed to be sleeping. She closed her purse, tucked it under her arm, slammed the driver’s side door, sashayed to Duane’s ride, and hopped in. Immediately he was on her ass about the seat belt. As she fastened it, something shifted behind her eyes. Now that she wasn’t trying to see through cobwebs of shattered glass chattering in the wind of the highway, now that she was in the passenger seat, now that she was being driven, something had changed. She struggled to face it. Now that they were backing away, Erin found herself letting go of her day; she was looking through a double layer of clear glass, Duane’s windshield and beyond that her rear window still intact. She saw the old man paddling his arms slowly as if part of another world barely resembling her own, television maybe. The sharply raked rear window of her Camaro fractured his image like a stick in water. It reminded her of dark rainy days when she was hung over, looking into the women’s-room mirror at Goodfellas under the pitiless gaze of the fluorescent lights and trying to freshen her makeup. Erin had trouble recognizing that what was staring back had anything to do with her. But she had the same vague feeling now, a feeling that something needed to be covered up. Something ugly.

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