The Long Drive Home

The roadworker appeared out of the night like an apparition, one foot planted on each side of the centerline, and Pete Davidson immediatly realized he would kill him.

He stomped the brake pedal and choked the steering wheel as momentum flung him into the seatbelt. The polyester fabric bit into his skin and profanities leaped into his mouth, though even now, in the maw of a life-ending collision, decades of restraint enabled Pete to kennel the curses behind clenched teeth. The vehicle skidded towards the man in the safety vest. Pete released one terrible shout and shut his eyes as the vehicle screeched to a halt.

In the back seat, his daughter was panting. “Dad! Did you fall asleep?”

His mouth felt as dry as cotton. He opened his eyes, saw the roadworker standing between the headlights near enough to slap the Chevy’s hood, and sighed in exhausted relief.

“Sorry to wake you,” Pete said.

“Should I drive?” Melanie said.

Pete wiped his face and glanced again at the roadworker from whom God withheld common sense. A righteous anger built inside him, a scathing steam screaming for release. He raised his hand to punch the horn but, looking more closely at the roadworker, Pete hand’s hovered instinctively limp above the steering wheel.

An icy spear of trepidation sank into his chest.

The man stood alone in the middle of the mountain road. The whites of his eyes popped large and luminescent in his dirt-streaked, sun-beaten face. His face appeared bleached from a summer’s worth of strenuous outdoor labor. Pete winced; the roadworker would need to scrub with steel wool and acetone to remove the copious layers of filth darkening his body. He would appear miserable compared to even the most rugged of manual laborers. And his blue jeans were tattered, blistered as if dragged through hot coals before being strapped around his legs.

Then the roadworker held out a flat hand to Pete, and Pete’s breath gave out. At first, Pete thought the man held some sort of red safety reflector; instead, Pete realized the man’s palm was painted a sticky red. And he realized the roadworker’s ring finger was severed at the first digit. The red paint oozing from the wound and trickling in dark rivulets down his forearm was nothing besides blood.

“Melanie, look away.”

“Who is that?” his daughter said.

Pete stiffened in his seat. Melanie had chosen to sit in the back after her track meet, so she would have more room to stretch, and Pete was glad for it; anything to put more distance between her and the roadworker.

Yet Pete remained frozen in his seat. What should he do? Offer to help the wounded man? Bring him to a hospital? What if the roadworker was crazy and would harm him or his daughter?

“Oh my…” Melanie said. “He’s bleeding.”

“In the middle of this mountain road?”

The roadworker stumbled towards the passenger door, stooped with aching ribs. He fell once to his knees, then staggered upwards. He crashed into the passenger door and used the vehicle to prop himself; Pete, of course, had already locked the doors.

“He needs help,” Melanie said.

“Not from us,” Pete said.

The man rapped on the window. He pulled off his hard hat, which clattered to the road, and his round, shaved head revealed him to be perhaps only a little older than his teenage daughter. His lips squirmed like thick roundworms as he mouthed something inaudible. 

Was the man drunk? Delusional? 

Desperate? 

“We should see what he wants,” Melanie said.

“Bet he’s insane. Homeless.”

“He needs a hospital, Dad!”

The man again rapped on the window, which spattered flecks of blood across the glass. He mumbled another string of indiscernible sounds.

“Crack the window so we can hear him,” Melanie said. 

Pete felt two internal desires twisting and squirming; the desire to help an injured stranger, and the desire to protect his daughter from potential danger. What was the right thing to do in this situation? If only the world were more black and white!

Pete lowered the passenger window just an inch. 

“What you want?” he shouted.

The man strung together more syllables, but his speech sounded incoherent. Then Pete realized he was not speaking English, but rather a slurred sort of Spanish. The man winced with each uttered syllable.

“What’s he saying?” Melanie said. Pete wished she would remain quiet. Not bring attention to herself.

The man’s voice rose in pitch and strained with urgency. He continued tapping the window again and again.

“What’s he saying?” Melanie asked.

“Not English.”

By now, Pete recognized several repetitive sounds. The man seemed not to be threatening but rather pleading.

From the back, he heard Melanie shuffling in her chair. The glow of her phone reflected in the window, and she leaned forward and held the phone close to the crack.

“Don’t open the door,” Pete said.

“I’m translating,” she said. “It’s Spanish. He’s saying—”

The man slapped the glass, his palm slamming into the window with desperate force. Blood spattered the glass like red-ink splotches; still, the man’s voice held not anger, but urgency, helplessness.

The roadworker kept glancing over his shoulder as if afraid of something lurking in the night.

“Melanie, what’s he saying?”

“I have to try again. It didn’t record right—”

Why was he doing this? Pete thought. Better to just leave the man be; drive ahead and call the police. But if the man was hurt—if the man truly needed help—would an ambulance arrive in time to prevent him from bleeding out? 

Then again, say he allowed the man into his car…what if he was indeed insane and attempted to harm Melanie?

The man’s fingers (minus the severed ring finger) squeezed through the crack between the window and the door frame. The man applied downward force in an attempt to forcefully open the window.

“Melanie…” Pete said. Then the window budged an inch. Pete broke. The defensive urge he felt for his daughter overcame his desire to help his common man.

He tapped the gas pedal (his foolish conscience forbid him from pushing it through the floor). The traverse surged ahead; and with the man’s hands wedged in the window frame, his body slammed into the vehicle, his feet skidding across the asphalt.

“Dad, stop!” Melanie said.

Pete stopped the vehicle. He felt his entire insides boiling, his stomach alive and popping; his heart swirled around his spine; his mind fizzled as if it basked in carbonated fluids. The man lay limp against the vehicles, dangling from his pinched fingers. Had Pete killed him? Broken his bones to bits? God forgive him! Had Pete become a killer?

The man stirred, somehow summoning strength in his legs to stand. Pete lowered the window until his hands dropped, then closed the window fully. 

The man repeated his nonsensical chant.

“Dad…” Melanie said. “It translated. He’s saying, Help me. He says…oh, dad…”

“Says what?”

“They’re hunting him.”

Pete sat stunned. “Who?”

“It just translates them. They’re hunting him. Maybe it translated wrong…”

Pete looked at the man again; weak, wounded, desperate, broken. Glancing over his shoulder at the limitless unknowns in the dark. Was this man s victim of some criminal’s malicious intent? Who was hunting him? Why? 

More importantly, the real question resurfaced in his mind; was a stranger’s well-being worth sacrificing his daughter’s safety?

“What do we do?” Melanie asked. “Leave him to die in the dark?”

“He could be insane.”

“He could be anything, Dad!”

Pete studied the man’s frail and stooped posture. He felt himself softening, then cursed himself for it. Kindness was Pete’s fatal flaw. Perhaps not kindness, but a cowardly inability to fight. How often was cowardice mislabeled as kindness! Last summer, while celebrating his 19th anniversary with his wife over a simple candlelit dinner around their kitchen table, a pest-control salesman knocked on the door. Pete had been too kind-hearted to ignore it; too kind-hearted to slam the door on the salesman’s face. The salesman burned an hour of Pete’s time, and although Pete never intended to buy any pest-control products, the salesman somehow managed to wring six hundred dollars out of Pete’s wallet, and Pete had somehow subscribed to hourly marketing emails.

Who was Pete to let the man die over concern for Pete’s safety? Was this man’s life less important than his own? Would his daughter admire him more for helping the man, or for leaving him to bleed in the dark?

An idea bloomed in his mind, and Pete thumbed the button for the emergency flashers. “Melanie, call the police and tell them there’s an injured man on the road. We’ll wait here with him until they arrive; that’s what we’ll do.”

She had dialed 911 and placed the phone to her ear before Pete had finished speaking. 

Pete leaned towards the blood-smeared window and raised his voice. “We’re calling the police, sir,” he said. “We’re getting you help.”

The man moaned, cheeks smushed against the pane. Then his head exploded in an enormous pop and glass raptured and shards of it sliced through the air and cut Pete’s face. Another gunshot clapped the night and the window behind him—Melanie’s window—fractured as a bullet punched through it.

Pain blinded Pete but he nonetheless slapped the gas pedal, the Traverse vaulting forward to the crack of gunshots. Warm blood slipped down his face; and only through one eye could he see the winding mountain road, headlights guiding him along the bends and turns, the gunshots fading behind him.

“Melanie, are you alright?” he said.

Silence answered him. A hundred fears blitzed Pete's mind. Was Melanie okay? Had someone truly been hunting the roadworker? Why? Why had he been shot? Who would do such a wicked thing?

“Melanie!” he said again. Here Pete was; his inaction, his hesitation, and uncertainty while trying to protect his daughter, now caused the exact opposite to occur. Was she injured? Had she seen the man's head explode? Pete strained to see the approaching twists in the road, squinting and blinking as drops of blood filtered through his eyelashes. He yearned to look back and evaluate his daughter’s condition but feared careening off the twisting road and plowing into a pine tree.

“Please, Melanie!”

He drove for another quarter mile, uttering desperate prayers for his daughter’s health, wheels skidding around the mountain bends. Melanie began whimpering; another half mile and he stopped the vehicle, spun in his seat, and stared at her.

No blood marred her. Physical pain had not wrenched away her breath. But she covered her head with her hands and shook.

“Melanie, I’m sorry, Melanie! We’re going to the hospital. You’re alright, aren’t you?”

He drove further through the winding mountain roads; they passed roadwork signs riddled with bullet holes; further, he discovered several abandoned vehicles parked along the road with windows shot out and side mirrors exploded. What was happening in these terrible mountains? 

It was half an hour’s drive to the hospital, during which over the phone he informed the police station of everything that occurred.

“We've heard about those killers,” the dispatch lady said, and that was all Pete was told.

As he pulled into the hospital parking lot, Pete’s considered how the roadworker had leaned against his car, seconds before the gunshot. Pete had never seen a man killed. And now his daughter had seen it, too. All his fault, Pete thought. Because he couldn’t make a damn decision!

Pete eased the Traverse into a stall and placed the vehicle in park. Without further hesitation, Pete bent his head, and wept.