by
Jay Bush
James held tight onto ropes I’d added
as makeshift Oh Shit! handles while we drifted around a corner in my first car,
a 1980 Honda Civic—which had been dubbed “The Nasty” by friends and family. In desperation
for my first set of wheels, I bought The Nasty from James—who dressed and acted
like a bad hybrid of Hunter Thompson and Neo, from The Matrix—for four hundred dollars and an ounce of weed. The
exterior of the Civic, when I bought it, was rust covered sky-blue with black rims.
I never was one for a sky-blue car and black rims didn’t fit my Toontown-esque idea
of life. I decked out The Nasty with some adornments and new paint. A few cans
of neon blue for the body; blaze orange for the doors; canary yellow for the
tires and rims and, with the addition of a bowling trophy (stolen from the
local high school) as a hood ornament, the outside of the car was as flashy as
a Jr. high girl’s Bedazzled purse. The car was ready to take bored kids from
point A—wherever that may be—to points B, C, D, and back to A where they can
rest quietly after a full day of … yikes, did we actually do that?
The Nasty got its name from the layers
of black mold inside the car. When I bought it, the mold was so thick you could
scrape it off with a putty knife. The car leaked from every possible opening. Rubber
gaskets around the door had dry rotted, the sealant around the windshield was
so deteriorated that my mullet fluttered elegantly even with the windows up. Rain
poured through the windshield like water through a colander. The hatchback let
in water by the gallon. After my exterior modifications, I had to do some
interior work to get rid of the mold—for some reason none of my friends wanted
to ride around in a clown car that smelled like a trashcan.
Under the wet, rotting carpet I
discovered the water had done its damage on The Nasty’s floor pans. The holes
were so big I could put my hand through them. The jagged edges cut me when I
was stupid enough to try. With the addition of a little plywood, I set that
safety concern aside.
|
WARNING: Candles
inside a car may seem like a good idea but if you burn them while driving
on curvy roads, and the wax spills onto the dashboard, it will catch on
fire.
|
“I’m riding in front on the way back!”
James shouted over The Nasty’s brand-new Sony in-dash—the only thing James
spent the money to fix when he owned the car. Four new speakers and a black and
red Sony stereo complete with digital equalizer display turned nightly
excursions into a disco and day rides into melodious mechanical mayhem.
“Not a chance,” Jason, my older
brother, said as he calmly licked the joint he was rolling and pushed in the
car’s cigarette lighter.
The road narrowed from a two-lane with
fresh gravel to a single lane with grass growing so high in the middle I’d have
to mow The Nasty’s grill when I got home.
We were getting close to point B.
The Great Snake Migration in LaRue
Pine Hills is a yearly event that closes Snake Road—yes, that’s what it’s
called—to drivers from March 15th to May 15th. People
come from across the world come to witness something like Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark’s snakes-in-the-tomb scene. They expect the bluffs to be dripping
with snakes. They expect snakes to be hanging from the trees like Spanish moss
from a Georgia oak. They expect to need their knee-high leather boots to
protect them from the vicious bites of angry cottonmouths, copperheads, and
timber rattlers. Instead, for their expensive plane tickets and rental cars,
they typically see a turtle or two, a few bullfrogs, and maybe, if they’re
lucky, the odd snake. But to three stoners with a freshly painted and mold-free
Nasty, two bags of grass, a fifth of rum, a vial of coke, a handful of hot
Coors and nothing else to do, a walk down Snake Road seemed like great idea.
The Nasty rattled to a stop and
wheezed as its four cylinders slowed. I wondered if it would be the last time
my fresh wheels would get me from point A to point B. For luck, I rubbed the
bowling trophy mounted front and center to the hood. My pot-infused mind ran
through a list of possibilities from: stranded on Snake Road on the one day of
the year that it did look like a
scene from Henry Jones Jr’s nightmares to running out of beer before the end of
five-mile hike down the crescendo-less tourist attraction.
Jason passed the glowing joint to
James who passed the bottle of rum to me. I took a quick sip of the Calypso and
nearly spit it back out. “Swill!” I shouted. “Toss me a beer so I can wash this
shit out of my mouth.”
The Coors assaulted my tongue with
hot, frothy vengeance. Too many bumpy back roads in a car with bad shocks and
no back seat. We might as well have put the beer in a paint mixer, then
microwaved it. I threw the nearly full can at The Nasty, leaving a beer splatter
across the driver’s side door, and took a long pull from my water bottle.
The joint made its way around the
circle by the time I tossed the Coors and, needing to taste something other
than hot, cheap liquor and beer, I broke the golden “Puff Puff Give” rule of
pot smoking etiquette and smoked it like Snoop Dogg.
Snake Road lies between the LaRue Pine
Hills bluffs and a swamp often referred to as “the scatters.” Through hundreds
of yards of snake infested, mosquito filled yuck, on the other side of the
scatters, is the Big Muddy river—a tributary to the Mississippi. In most
places, the Big Muddy looks like its name suggests: a big … muddy…river. Local
legend gives the river a bit more personality. Some call it the “Big Muddy
Monster” others call it the “Murphysboro Mud Monster” but what eye witnesses
report is a seven-foot-tall white hair covered, muddy, sasquatch-like monster.
It’s been said to attack people in campgrounds and leave twelve to fifteen-inch
footprints on the river banks.
As the three of us hiked, smoked, and
searched for something interesting, our endeavors turned up empty. Five miles
through sweltering heat and humidity got us a few million mosquito bites, a
couple ticks, sweat soaked t-shirts and forced James to take his leather trench
coat off—something that rarely happened even in the humid, Southern heat.
On our return, parked beside The
Nasty, a Japanese film crew was unloading a rented cargo van and trying to get
directions to the snakes from James who was high and drunk enough by then that
his ability to decipher their broken English was no better than his ability to
dress appropriately for the heat. Between the three of us, we encouraged the
film crew to hike right beside the cliffs where snakes might still be moving.
It was as likely for them to see snakes up there as it had been for us to see them
on the road.
Sending the film crew on their way, we
sat down in The Nasty’s sweltering interior, candles still burning, giving the
car that “Fresh Linen” scent. James mounted the old, worn-out boat seat I used
as a replacement for the original bench. It was a half-torn, camouflage seat
with a raised, swiveling center that rocked and rolled on the uneven steel. He
wasn’t happy about it.
“Where to?” I asked my brother.
Rolling another joint, he said, “Let’s
go check out the bridge.” Jason was conductor of our aimless symphony, director
of our stupid teenage movie. The bridge Jason mentioned was about three miles
from Snake Road. It was a railroad bridge that traversed the Big Muddy at one
of its widest points. Rusty, hot rivets held the ancient bridge together like
the old webs of a dying spider. Under the bridge, the river ran through fields
and swamps, an enormous, spiny sea serpent with no beginning and no end. Trees
that had been uprooted by erosion and engulfed by the river’s ever-growing
boundaries floated downstream like logs from an old lumber town. Garbage and
other drifting monstrosities floated alongside the old logs, turning the river
into a flowing superhighway of debris.
Something about the Big Muddy sent
shivers up my back. Maybe it was the stories of the Mud Monster I’d heard from
the time I was a child. Maybe it was the dying trees that lined the edges of
the filthy water. Maybe it was farming run-off that turned the water a diseased
looking pearlescent-brown. The sickness that seemed to roll from the Big Muddy’s
mouth into the vein of the Mississippi was arsenic coursing through the countryside.
Nothing grew around its edges and dying fish washed ashore, spreading the odor
of death miles around.
Despite my disgust of the Big Muddy, I
wasn’t opposed to checking out the bridge, as Jason suggested, and God knew we
had nothing better to do with our time, so I passed the joint, laughed as the
Japanese film crew slid half-chaps over their boots, and turned The Nasty’s
key. It roared to life—as much as a four-cylinder engine can roar—and I pushed
the clutch. With the high-pitched whizzing old manual transmission cars give
when shifted into reverse, The Nasty took us from the parking lot to the grassy
road. Robert Plant’s subtle warning, “When the levee breaks I’ll have no place
to stay,” blasted from the car’s best feature. James, Jason, and I felt the
music as the rolling joke took us from point B to point C.
I brought The Nasty to a halt in a
small turn-out used by fishermen who were brave enough to eat the mercury and
pesticide laced piscine meat. Shuddering to death along with Robert Plant’s
shouts The Nasty had taken us to a serpentine crossroad. Steel tracks crossed
liquid poison at the bridge where Jason was leading us.
“You been out there before?” James
asked, motioning toward the bridge as Jason mounted the tracks.
“Yeah. Couple times. Never been
across, though. Wanna try?”
I had my hesitations, but James and
Jason were both game. In the way teenagers often are, I was stuck between
common sense and what the group wanted. Of course, being a constant victim of
peer pressure, I agreed to journey across the bridge.
The gravel road we’d arrived on was a
high banked levee made to keep the Big Muddy at bay during floods. Below it, on
both sides, swamps spanned the expanse. The train tracks had also been raised
so goods could be shipped through the swamps even during high water. The two
raised pathways crossed and spread out like arthritic fingers from a giant’s
hand. As we stepped away from the road and onto the tracks, gravel changed from
small broken limestone to larger chunks of jagged granite. The kind of thing
that, if you fell on it, you’d need stitches rather than a Band-Aid.
Chemical-scented wooden ties almost
masked the smell of some decaying animal that had been hit by a rushing train.
The pelt, which lay between the two steel rails, crawled with insects. I wanted
to say, “Think that’s meant to be a warning?” Instead, I kept my mouth shut,
held back the vomit that threatened, and ignored my racing heart.
Tossing rocks and railroad spikes off
the edge of the bridge into the murky waters below, we paid no attention to
anything but our tiny bubble of life. As kids do, especially high and drunk
kids, we missed the very obvious signs of upcoming trouble.
When I was small, growing up in
tornado alley, my parents warned that tornadoes sound like a rushing train. I had
heard trains from our car at railroad crossings, so I knew they were loud. So
loud you couldn’t talk over them, couldn’t even hear the Sony and four new
speakers blasting out music in The Nasty.
Stoned, a bit drunk, a little freaked
by the river, the Mud Monster, the corpse of whatever animal met its fate on
the bridge, I heard a tornado.
“Fuck!” James shouted as he dropped
the rock he was about to toss at a dead fish floating in the water some sixty
feet below us.
“MOVE!” Jason screamed.
Our responses were different. Jason’s
was to get off the track ASAMFP. James looked at the train with a sort of mild
confusion. He knew it wasn’t a good thing that we were standing in the direct
path of a steel dragon but didn’t know what to do. I took a brief moment to
better understand the situation. We were in the middle of the bridge, I knew
this because the highest point of the steel framework was almost directly above
us. We had no time to go back the way we came, the way from which the train was
coming. I looked the other direction, trying to judge the distance, how fast I
could run and how fast the train was coming.
The only thing we could do was try.
Jason and I took off at a full sprint,
James lagged, trying not to trip over his coat and heavy boots while also
trying to keep a good hold on the bottle of rum he’d been nursing.
With my legs moving as fast as they
could carry me, after the first fifty meters, I checked over my shoulder to see
my progress. I had no chance of outrunning the train. James and Jason were left
in a Road Runner-esq dust trail behind me and would be crushed by the train in
fifteen, no, ten seconds.
Jason, I noticed, was waving his arms,
emphatically, toward one side of the bridge. I thought for sure he meant for me
to jump into the chemical stew of the river below. If I had the choice of being
smashed by a train or drowning in a log and trash filled, radioactive
wasteland, I’d take the train. But when I turned back around, I realized Jason
wasn’t waving for me to jump, he was waving for me to scoot to the side of the
narrow train bridge onto a platform that hung off the edge of the rusting
monstrosity. A three-foot by three-foot steel platform had, for whatever reason,
been welded to the bridge’s architecture. It was out of the way of the train
and, I hoped, would hold our weight, if we could squeeze onto it.
I took an ankle twisting, right turn
and nearly fell in the monster’s path. Recovering, I jumped out onto the
rusting platform. It had no handrails and no lip on the edge. The bottom of it
was rusting through, like The Nasty’s floor pans, allowing a clear view of the
river through its holes. The platform gave, just a little, when I stopped on
the outside edge. Rusty flakes fell in slow motion to the river below.
Jason was right behind me, almost to
the platform, by the time I turned around. But James, clown combat boots and
huge leather coat slowing his run, was closer to the train than to the
platform. The conductor had been pulling the airhorn for the last twenty
seconds but never once hit the brakes.
Jason stood at the edge of the
platform, risking his arm as a sacrifice to the dragon as he waved James on
shouting something incoherent.
James never made it to the platform.
He dropped to the gravel, elbows
first, less than a foot away from the train as it flew past us so fast it
pulled my hat from my head. Mullet blowing in the wind, I covered my ears at
the screeching and crying of steel on steel. The bridge swayed—back and forth,
up and down, as heavy train cars raced by.
When the last car passed, James stood,
obviously shaken, but not stirred by what had just happened.
“What the fuck?” Jason asked, glaring
at James.
“What?”
“Dude, you couldn’t run faster than
that?”
“It’s this goddamn gravel!”
“Are you hurt?” Jason asked. James
took off his drug filled coat, laid it carefully on the ground, checked out his
elbows. They were red but had been protected by the thick buffalo leather of
his ridiculous trench coat.
I stepped off the platform, loud
squeals emitted from the steel as my weight shifted from the edge of death’s
diving board to the main bridge. My shaking hands still held the glowing joint
we’d been passing before the tornado came. I took another Snoop Dogg puff and
handed it off to Jason.
We walked back to The Nasty in
silence, each of us ruminating on what happened. James never mentioned it
again, nor did Jason for that matter, but on the way home, as I shifted gears
from first to second, second to third, third to fourth, I began, as much as a
teenager can, to understand the responsibility that came with my choices. Fear,
it seemed, was a factor that had the potential to change a life for the better,
or, if ignored, the worse. Freedom, say the freedom of one’s first car, was
more than just doing whatever we felt like, freedom had consequences. Freedom
required responsibility. Responsibility was an adult’s word—a word that didn’t
fit in my youthful, stoned lexicon.
I looked in the rearview mirror as
James slid from side to side on the uneven boat seat. It occurred to me that if
we had an accident, the ropes his white-knuckled hands gripped would be
worthless. It wasn’t that I started worrying about everything, overanalyzing
everything, it was that I realized, as we drove a rusted-out, mold-filled, shit-box
down a gravel road in the middle of nowhere, pockets full of drugs, high and
drunk, that my car, among other choices, could kill me. We’d always been
careless. We had BB gun fights. When we ran out of BBs, we’d use our wrist
rockets and hickory nuts from the trees that lined our property. We jumped off
cliffs onto nearby trees and shimmied seventy feet down. We swam in rivers with
currents so strong they would overtake fishing boats. We were carless, stupid,
and as The Nasty rumbled down the curvy, gravel road, my pot and rum-infused
mind realized what carelessness could do.
Point C could have been our last stop.
And all the points between C and today could have been lost by a single
careless moment. That car took my friends and I on dozens of trips from points
A through Z and while it was my first experience of real freedom—the kind of
freedom that requires responsibility—it left a nasty taste in my mouth.
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