Antenna

By Jessica Wedge

 

 

The din awakened and heightened senses, brightening colors and sharpening the lines separating things from one another.  The sudden stillness of the car after so much motion radiated through the broken windshield and lit up the road with blinding limpidity.  Flattened flowers lay beneath blown out tires, brilliant rainbow petals of pansies and peonies splayed on heated earth.  Displaced dust floated in clouds, frozen like tiny ballerinas on cue in the air that still echoed with the shrieking screams of brakes and deadening crunch of crumpling steel.  Chalk-winged moths floated from metal to rubber, their solitary flights the only movement on the silver-flecked road.  The scene was almost lovely, and the vehicle’s passengers, glassy-eyed and rigid, were quite easily overlooked. 

 

         Still, the little blond boy in the striped red shorts with glasses banded to his head set down the oversized blue rubber ball on which he had been bouncing and walked across the newly lain tracts of overly green grass that made up his front yard, right to the half-open driver’s side window. He placed one small, dirty-nailed hand and then the other over the window’s lip and rested his cleft chin between them.  Inches away from the slack-jawed driver, a youngish man slumped and hanging on the intact seatbelt, the little boy stared at the bright line of blood running from the limp corner of his mouth to the bottom of his chin.  He noticed the path it had taken, not straight, but winding through and between the light brown hairs poking out from the man’s face.   He touched his own smooth cheek and thought about getting bigger. 

 

          A song he recognized from the radio rang through the speakers and he sang along a little, eyes moving from the man to the woman and the open window on which her head hung at an odd angle.  They were going real fast, he thought.  He loved going fast on his bicycle, feeling the wind ripping through his hair and pulling the skin on his cheeks back toward his ears.  Sometimes he would lift his arms and hold them straight out.  Sometimes he even closed his eyes, and it was like he was flying, high above the road. His belly would do little tickling flips and sometimes he’d swear he’d been upside down.  He smiled at the thought of those people feeling the same thing; he’d never thought of grown-ups liking the same things as little boys.  He could see them, playing the day away, wind storming in through those windows and spinning their hair around.  He could hear them singing, closing their eyes and almost soaring, tummies tumbling.  He had crashed before, too, but had decided that the magical, free feeling was worth it. “You are just like me,” he said to the man’s blue-veined eyelids and reached through the window to touch his cheek. 

 

         The plump-bottomed woman in the plush green bathrobe had barreled across the bright green grass, flailing her arms and wailing through a shining lipsticked mouth, and she snatched the little boy around his waist and spun around, sending one small untied shoe flying and finally dropping him to the ground behind her.  She shrieked and tumbled backward, landing in the grass herself.  “What the hell were you thinking?”  She screamed inches from his face, then hugged him tight and kissed his little face, ran her fingers through his hair, over his tiny ears.  “When I didn’t see you in the yard I thought…”  She kissed him again.  “Go to the house.  Go inside and do not come out until Mama comes to get you.  Do you understand me?  There are fresh chocolate cookies and you can have as many as you want.”    

 

          She watched him go, and when he was over the grass and up the porch steps, safely beyond the heavy white door and inside the tiny but well-kept ranch house still mostly owned by the Savings and Loan, she stepped to the matte blue hatchback, carefully maneuvering her slippers to avoid the shards of glass sprinkled over the ground.  She bent and peered into the car, locking her red-painted nails behind her back, gave the driver a sideways glance, then settled her gaze on the girl whose neck was bent in such a way that she no longer feared the ambulance she’d called would be too late.  The girl’s sandy hair, tousled and sweeping down her cheek, was long and thick, with just the tiniest bit of curl.  The woman brought her hand to her own hair, nestled above her shoulders, curled under and heavily hairsprayed, and she thought about how much fun that kind of hair had been, braiding and knotting and pinning it with tiny jeweled barrettes, then letting it loose and wild to drive the boys mad.     

 

         She wanted to get a better look at the poor girl and carefully stepped over scraps of tire and metal until she had reached the far side of the car.  Shielding her eyes from the sun, she tilted her head and leaned her face almost through the passenger’s window, scanning the girl’s thin but well-built body.  She had almost started to think what a bittersweet thing it is to die before your body begins to slip to mud when, just under where the ends of the long curls laid, directly above the slope of a girlish, pale green cotton t-shirt, the woman’s eye caught the deep purple shadow of a new bruise settled into the girl’s clavicle.  She quickly brought the hand that was not on her brow to her mouth and a tiny “oh” seeped through her fingers.  Looking more closely and with a hunting eye, she found a similar smear of violet darkening the girl’s left wrist, and yet another stain of black-and-blue halfway up her arm.  Judging from the placement of the bruises in relation to the gearshift, the center console, and the door, the woman concluded that the abrasions were certainly not a result of the accident and turned a glaring gaze toward the young man in the driver’s seat.  “Animal,” she hissed.   

 

          The scene came alive for her then, the two of them shooting down the road, his hands on the wheel, his foot on the gas, his music filling the air.  She could see his face, red and strained, trails of spit flying from his mouth as he pressed the pedal harder and harder and his rage grew hotter.  She could hear the angry screaming, his deep booming bass pummeling through the girl’s pretty head, splitting her nerves right down the center with ugly, hateful words.  The woman’s hand went instinctively to her own knobby elbow, her fingers running over the old break, never quite completely healed.   “You hit back this time, didn’t you?  Good for you, Sweetheart.” She reached her smooth, manicured hand though the window and brushed her fingertips gently across the top of the girl’s head.  

 

          The EMT with the best save-record in the town and a ten-tequila hangover had sped the ambulance over the country roads to the address from 911 as quickly as safety would allow, blaring the shrill whistle despite the pain slicing behind his eyes.  As he slid to a stop, sweeping gravel up into dust, he called out the window to the fat little woman standing next to the car, “You can step away now Ma’am, thank you for your assistance.  Please stay close by; the police will want to talk to any witnesses.” 

 

          He slid from the ambulance’s high driver’s seat, a practiced roll that got him to the ground and on the move in one swift motion.  He rounded the front of the transport vehicle, bent slightly and squinting to get a better look at the scene, and even at a distance of five feet his experienced eyes could see that he wouldn’t be taking anyone away alive.  Still, his training and duty pushed him on and he opened first the driver’s side door, on the other side of which he pressed his fingers to a warm but lifeless neck, and then the passenger’s side, carefully supporting the obviously broken neck of the girl as he did so.  

 

         The police would need pictures before he moved the bodies and the police, as usual, had not shown up yet, so the EMT took a moment to walk diagonally away from the car, over a little ditch and into the high grass beyond it, and to violently heave the remainder of his 3a.m. hotdog binge into a steaming streak across the ground.  I’m a fucking mess he thought.  He wiped his mouth and headed back toward the car, actually feeling a bit better despite the bitter smudge that now soured the back of his tongue. 

 

          He liked to have a story for the police when they showed up, a reasoned scenario at fatal scenes, explaining how and why whole and living people were now broken and dead.  He knelt to the girl and checked off in his head everything she was wearing, his first step in assessing where the victim had been and what he or she might have been doing.  Flat whitish sneakers, white shorts, green t-shirt, no bra beneath, class ring hung with a thin gold chain. He peered closely at the ring, a leaping bulldog in relief on one side, and concluded that she was not from the area.  Summer joyride, off to a picnic maybe, or someone’s pool somewhere.  He began his examination of the man, running quickly through a list of similarly casual clothes, but at the man’s left hand his eyes settled on a smooth gold band, a detail the girl did not share. The EMT rose from his squatting position and looked at the man from above.  He figured the driver was nearing thirty and thought that was just about right for this kind of thing.  He twirled his own wedding band, loose from frequent movement and always sort of itchy, and noticed he no longer had a tan line from it.   

 

         He had his story.  The two of them, fired up with love and lust and that giddiness that only comes at the beginning, out for a long secret day of easy laughing and sweet words and making love under wide oak trees in the state park.  Something happened, like something always happens, something to set one of them off, and they’d started talking the heavy drama-filled talk that ruins everything.  Tension grew, a bubble filling the car, and the man sped up, hurrying to wherever they were going so he could get out of the choking air and into the open where he could kiss her and touch her and make everything simple again.  “Poor bastard,” the EMT said in the direction of the car, then turned away and lit himself a cigarette. 

 

         The local newspaper reporter, who had been interviewing the ninety-year-old winner of that year’s VFW cook-off, had heard word of the accident through the police scanner that was always inexplicably on in the older woman’s kitchen.  She had politely postponed the interview, shoved the last bite of prize-winning sweet potato soufflé into her mouth, and rushed to the scene, arriving at nearly the same time as the two town police cars.  She parked the leased Saab she could barely afford behind the cruisers and gently pressed the door shut, then walked a wide loop around the commotion and stopped almost ten feet from the passenger’s side door, having learned over the years that the police were likely to leave her to her business if she wasn’t an immediate pain. 

 

         She pulled her camera from the pack slung over her shoulder and began snapping photos, moving a few feet to the right each time to get every angle.  Drugs, she thought, they’ll find drugs.  Quiet country road, no need to go so fast.  Drugs. And so she focused on taking wide shots, figuring her readers would identify much more with the neighbors with full heads of curlers and the hardworking emergency workers than with the bleeding junkies.  Sort of a shame, she thought, but she wasn’t in charge of running the entire local section at The Chronicler for lack of knowing the people.  As she moved around toward the driver’s side of the car, making sure to zoom in on the handsome EMT and the ancient police chief who the townspeople would recognize, shooting several photos of the distraught little woman in the green bathrobe whose pinched face clearly said “oh my”, she slowly brought the camera down from her face and squinted into the morning sun to be sure she’d seen what she thought she’d seen. 

 

         The next morning’s papers, all across the tri-state area, would headline some version of “Barbie Doll Bandit Brought to Final Justice in Billford, Illinois” and would go on to report how local camerawoman Dot Noxley’s keen eye and amazing memory for news details had identified the thief and her ill-starred hijacked hostage by the novelty double-cherry car identifier affixed to the antenna of the vehicle that the hostage’s wife had reported missing, along with her husband, two days earlier.  Lexie Lawson, twenty-year-old former Miss Fresh Dairy of Hilden, Iowa, after frustration at a poor performance review at the family restaurant from which she’d been lifting money for nearly four years, had stolen a car two weeks before as its unsuspecting owner refueled at the gas pump, and had set off eastbound, holding up diners all along Interstate 74.   

 

Her unfortunate companion, Mark Otis, had simply been driving home from his job at a bookstore when the girl had jumped into his passenger’s seat, pointed in his face what would upon investigation turn out to be an unloaded .22 handgun she’d taken from her father’s collection, and demanded that he take her to the drive-through window at Burger King for the Double Whopper with cheese she’d been craving and then to head east toward Indiana. The wreck, only two miles from Ruby’s Rib Joint, Lawson’s next intended target chosen out of the Diners of the Midwest book she’d picked up on her way out of Hilden, was in fact the result of a rusted lug nut, a tiny flaw that Otis had noticed the morning he’d been hijacked and had planned to fix the coming weekend.

 

Marcia, the woman in front of whose house the two met their fate, preferred to keep her last name out of the papers but was quoted as saying, “My son and I live way out here because it’s so safe.  I can’t believe a criminal could find their way here.”  Her six-year-old son, identified as Randy with an asterisk for “name changed”, had actually seen the accident but had only, “They were going real fast,” to say to reporters.  Lincoln McClure, the EMT first on the scene, was very busy and doesn’t much care for the press, but was heard mumbling, “I feel bad for the guy’s wife,” as he loaded the bodies into an ambulance. 

 

Author’s Bio: Jessica Wedge is an educator and a fiction writer.  She is an avid reader and a holistic health counselor, and she enjoys discussing literature and philosophy over really, really good food.  Her fiction has been published in Pequin, and a recent piece was a finalist in The Smoking Poet 2008 Short Story Contest.   Jessica can usually be found in Brooklyn, but live music, new restaurants, and literary readings have been known to lure her to that other borough.