VII
Sherriff Stanton eased out onto the highway southbound, craning his neck to see around me, checking for oncoming traffic.
“Thanks for coming along, Jacob. The sooner we can get this vehicle ID’d the sooner we can get this thing done with.”
We were driving to the old mine at the head of Bent Creek, just a couple miles away. Jim said that one of his deputies had received a call that the slurry pond had breached, and when they arrived found the blue roof of an Edsel protruding from the surface.
“It’s a goddamned mess up there, I tell you what. Gonna have crews cleaning that shit up for months. But it leaked out just enough to expose our car.”
“Happy to help, Jim.” I’d had to leave Duncan behind, shut in the house, Stanton refusing my request to bring him along with a guffawed “Hell no!” and a look of disgust so thorough you’d think I asked to take a shit in his boots. Had to leave the pistol, too.
“You know, I haven’t seen you much since that business with your father, when he went missing.”
“When he ran off, Jim.”
“Yeah, ran off. Never heard from him?”
“I guess if he wanted to be heard from he wouldn’ta left. Didn’t say much even when he was around.”
“He did decline pretty quickly after your mother. I know I grilled you pretty hard back then, but you’ve got to understand my position. Man just up and leaves his son alone out there, just don’t make a lot of sense.”
“It didn’t make much sense to me either, Jim.” My head swiveled around as we passed the road to Bent Creek. “Think you missed the turn there.”
Stanton did not slow down. “There’s a couple things never really added up for me when it comes to you, Jake. Now we got this thing here. You see, what I’m finding strange about it is…is how does a girl with no idea in the world where she’s at end up with her car in a slurry pond three miles from the main highway?”
“I don’t know Jim, but if I'm gonna ID that car for you you’d better turn us around up here.”
“We can’t get down to the car to tow it out, not just yet. Be a few days while they clear out the sludge. But you and I are gonna sit tight down at the station until we do.” He kept his eyes forward, his right hand at twelve o’clock on the wheel. “Then we’ll see about your little splice job.”
A curtain descends over my mind at times. A dark wash that pushes the thing that pretends to be me into deep corners, cowed in impotence. I can feel my hand reaching for the wheel independent of my will, jerking down hard, sending the county truck into the ditch and rolling it over onto its roof in the creek alongside the highway. This motion is involuntary and inevitable, like falling once you’ve been pushed from a ledge. I can feel my weight being borne in my shoulder by the safety belt, my fingers working to unclasp the buckle and invert myself. I am merely a passenger looking out through my own eyes as I walk around to the driver’s side and find Sherriff Stanton on his back, bleeding into the clear shallow water half-conscious, hear his ocular orbit collapse and grind under the heel of my boot, his strangulated breath giving way to high pitched gurgles as I force his mouth and nostrils into the flowing current.
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Tune in to Dispatches Every Sunday to Continue Reading “The Kindness of Strangers” by Lou Poster.
Start from the beginning of “The Kindness of Strangers” on SVJ’s Features.
This is Lou’s first published piece.
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Lou Poster is a Native West Virginian, current resident of the poorest county in Ohio. Appalachian songwriter/singer/storyteller. Son of a third-generation coal miner.