At the End of the Road (2 page)

The boy stood, unmoving. His mind could not yet fully process how his environment—an environment that seemed to never change—was, in a matter of seconds, changed with a ferocity that defied comprehension.

The woman stumbled toward the boy, her hands held out stiffly before her like a zombie, like Frankenstein’s monster, and the boy could see that blood also dripped from her fingertips, and he could see through the dirt and the blood that her fingernails had been torn away in the accident, ripped out from their beds, leaving an exposed jangle of nerves and meat.

more appropriate to a mountain pass than this flat stretch of North Georgia houses and small farm plots. But it was the boy’s road. Kyle Edwards rode his bicycle on it daily. It was only about two miles long. On one end was the Sweetwater Reservoir where Kyle bought fifteen-cent candy at the dank bait shop that smelled of earthworms, crickets, and minnows; the other end intersected Lee Road, the two-lane blacktop.

It was a safe world—more or less. There were only three things in Kyle’s world that he considered dangerous and that he feared. One was the territorial bull that roamed the cow pasture that bordered the cornfield. The pasture held the green pond where Kyle liked to spend a great deal of his time, so whenever he went there, he had to be vigilant of the bull that had already crippled one boy from the area.

His other fear was of Patrick Sewell and his little brother Joel and their friend Scotty Clonts. They were teenagers. Long hair and dirty Levis. Scotty Clonts seemed to wear the same shirt every day—a T-shirt with cut-off sleeves that had the words
Judas Priest—Sad Wings of Destiny
printed on it in gothic script. Kyle didn’t know what a Judas Priest was, but it struck him as menacing—as did Scotty himself. Patrick Sewell was the oldest son of Nathan Sewell, the chairman of the Douglas County Board of Commissioners. Nathan Sewell somehow managed to get himself reelected every four years despite the fact that his son Patrick was an unemployed high school dropout (hell, they kicked him out, most folks would say) who sported frizzy red hippie hair, seldom bathed, and was suspected to be involved with drugs.

Patrick had once thrown a brick at Kyle, unprovoked, while he was riding his bike. The brick had hit him in the chest and knocked him off his bicycle into a ditch. The blow had knocked the breath out of Kyle’s lungs, and he had lain in the ditch, momentarily unable to breathe and certain he was going to die, Patrick standing over him, laughing.

Patrick’s younger brother, Joel, was the same age as Kyle, but he was scared of Joel most of all. Joel was disfigured. The lower half of his face was a twisted raw mess. Kyle’s oldest brother, Jason, said that Joel Sewell had drunk a bottle of Drano, and the acid had eaten away his lower jaw and throat. Supposedly, Joel thought it was Coca-Cola he was drinking, but that didn’t make any sense to Kyle. How could you confuse Drano with Coca-Cola?

Kyle rode his bike (a hand-me-down Schwinn Stingray complete with gold glitter banana seat and ape hanger handlebars) as fast and as hard as he could up and down Eden Road, delighting in the plumes of red dust he kicked up behind him. He rode straight down the center, never giving the remotest thought to his safety. He was just a boy.

He was scared of only one other thing in his environment—and that was blasting caps. Public safety commercials about blasting caps seemed to interrupt every cartoon he ever watched, typically depicting a boy about Kyle’s age, walking through dirt and debris—as he himself often did—and spying a benign and compact bundle of wires half obscured on the ground. The boy in the commercial always did exactly what Kyle would have done lucking up on such a fascinating treasure: He picked it up and began fidgeting with it. The commercial ended with a look of surprised horror in the commercial boy’s eyes, the screen going to white, and the echoing thunder of an explosion fading out.

The commercials worked on Kyle’s mother as well, creeping into her mind, so that she regularly admonished him that if he ever came across anything that looked like a blasting cap, he should not touch it, but come straight home and tell her.

So Kyle was haunted by the remote chance of being blown to bits, but he exercised zero caution playing in the road. No one had ever warned him. Certainly not his parents. There’d been no commercials.

going for maximum speed, maximum dust trails, heading straight into a blind curve, when the blue car materialized in front of him. There was time for him to note that the car was kicking up its own massive trail of dust, denoting high speed. There was also time for Kyle to note that he was dead. Even in his limited understanding of the world, he could see that the coming collision was neither avoidable nor survivable. The car was going to hit him—that seemed a given. And it would kill him. Another given. At ten years old, he understood that tons of hurtling metal versus a boy on a bicycle equaled death.

He watched, as though a bystander, the scene of his own demise.

The last thing he saw before he hit the dirt was the woman behind the wheel of the powder blue Chevelle Super Sport, her face dumb, not yet comprehending. Kyle laid down his bike, skidding toward the car’s bumper. And the woman must have done something, because when Kyle finally opened his eyes, he was completely unharmed. Fresh skid marks ended two feet away from where he sat in the road. He inspected his body, making sure that it was true, that he was unhurt; then he picked up his bike, which was a little dusty but also unharmed. When he tried to mount the bicycle, he fell over it, his legs refusing to work properly. When he was able to get back up, he started pushing his bicycle back toward his driveway.

Up ahead, he saw the Chevelle SS, resting on its side, the undercarriage exposed, the top two wheels spinning. He heard glass breaking and cascading down the side of the car. The woman had somehow popped out the passenger side window (which would have been above her head from inside the car). Kyle watched her mount the steering column and crawl out of the window, emerging bloody and disheveled like a violent birth. She slid down over the hood and dropped to her feet. They stood facing each other, neither of them able to move. The woman broke her inertia and lurched toward Kyle. Kyle took a step forward.

The driveway leading back to the safety of Kyle’s home lay between him and the woman. She was much closer to it than Kyle, but she was moving slow, stumbling, dazed. Their eyes were locked as they moved toward each other.

“Help me turn my car over. Help me turn my car over. Help me turn my car over.”

She said it like a record stuck in a groove. No emotion, just quiet, flawed logic. But Kyle knew there was no way that even together they could budge the automobile. A grown man might could rock it back over to its wheels, but not a boy and an injured woman. And even if they could, this bleeding shambling woman was not going to be able to get in and drive away as if nothing had happened. He instinctively knew that more than just her body had been damaged, that something was wrong with her mind.

He beat her to the driveway and started walking down it backward, rolling his bicycle and keeping the reticulated woman in his vision. He did not know what she was going to do, but she was still asking him to help her turn over the car. And Kyle wished he could. He wished that they could flip it back onto its wheels and the bleeding woman could just drive away and that this truly terrible thing had not ever happened.

to the house was a good eighth of a mile long. Houses in this pocket of the barely rural South were built with little concern of land usage, because land was plentiful and mostly cheap. The Edwards house was built amongst a dying breed—the local small farmer. Instead of a yard, the house had actively growing fields all around it. Facing the house, on the left side of the driveway, was dense corn that held the driveway like a painted green retaining wall, and to the right was a field of low-growing sweet potatoes edged with sickly looking peanut plants. In the late summer, Daddy-Bob, the farmer who owned most all the land on Eden Road, would pay Kyle and his brothers a quarter per bushel basket to harvest the peanuts, and the same again in the fall to harvest the sweet potatoes. Often, his mama and daddy would join in the work as well, and Kyle liked it when they did. There was just something that satisfied him when the whole family worked as a single unit. It was at those times that they seemed closest. And he somehow understood that his parents joined in not for the money, but because they too enjoyed the work.

This was food planted not in quantities to fill cargo trucks and be shipped to grocery stores, but for Daddy-Bob’s produce stand that stood at the top of the dirt road—with the excess going to the local farmer’s market.

Kyle much preferred working the potatoes and peanuts to picking the corn. The corn was planted in staggered fashion, and started coming in during midsummer when it was still hot as fire, the air wet and adhesive like syrup. The thick frond-like leaves of the corn plants would roughly grab hold of Kyle’s exposed skin, rubbing it raw, sometimes cutting. And the plants seemed to hold on to their treasured ears of corn, giving them up only grudgingly, making him fight for each one, so that he was covered in sweat and sap, forearms already raw, before he could fill even a single bushel. And the corn seemed to emit a kind of sticky secretion that slowly covered you and attracted dirt and insects. It was hard, sweaty, sometimes ugly work.

But the sweet potatoes and the peanuts were a joy. It was usually cooler when they were ready to be harvested. And the fashion of the harvesting was a constant delight to Kyle’s senses. He was given a pitchfork that was easily a foot longer than he was. The tines of the instrument were wickedly long, clotted with red dirt and orange rust from the long years of their useful life. The wood handles were blanched gray from weathering, and worn smooth as river stone from generations of workers’ hands. The handles were also worn skinny about six inches from the top where a callused hand would naturally hold it during work.

Just like Daddy-Bob had taught him, Kyle would pick a spot about a foot-and-a-half beyond the farthest reach of the plant’s leaves. The fork had to be angled so that once it penetrated the earth, the tines would extend under the plant, about center. Kyle, who was small for his age, and pale even in summertime, would stand up on the pitchfork, both feet resting atop, behind the tines, and once stable, he would grab hold of the handle and jump up, both feet coming back down squarely, setting the tines in the earth. It took three or four good jumps. And once the fork was buried, Kyle would throw his entire body weight against the handle, to loosen the sun-hardened earth. Then he would get behind and pull back on the pitchfork.

At that time of year, the outer showing of the potato plant was puny, even dead looking, so it was always a wonder for Kyle to watch the fork lift the plant out of the ground from the bottom up, and see the unimaginable profundity of sweet potatoes cradled in the fork. The dirt would fall away through the wide tines, leaving the fat bulbous potatoes resting pretty. A single plant could sometimes fill half a bushel basket. Some of the potatoes would be as big and long as a loaf of bread, some as small as marbles. At first, Kyle would often drive a tine of the pitchfork through a potato, splitting it or scarring it, but soon he developed a sense for how they lay and never even nicked one.

The peanuts were harvested the same way, with the pitchfork lifting them from the earth, hard shells clotted with dirt, later to be washed and sold boiled at Daddy-Bob’s stand.

stretched, her pace as slow as Boris Karloff. In his line of sight, as though staged for a photograph that would capture the essential details of the scene, Kyle could see the woman’s blue car, on its side in the ditch, the wheels no longer spinning, the windshield white and opaque like a caterpillar’s cocoon, and as still as death. It was with the potatoes and peanuts to his right, and the vastness of the corn to his left, that Kyle finally found the courage to hop on his bicycle and turn his back on the broken woman.

His bike kicked up a modest dust trail (white, from the crushed gravel surface) as he pedaled at high speed back to his house. He propped his bike against the brick wall in the shadowy carport, and walked into the house. The door from the carport opened into the laundry room, and both the washer and dryer were humming and the good scents of detergent and fabric softener hung humidly in the air. The laundry room led directly into the kitchen, and in the kitchen Kyle found his mother standing over the counter making pineapple sandwiches. His little sister, Grace, sat at the redwood picnic bench that served as the family’s dining table. Grace held her Wonder Woman doll in one hand and sucked the thumb of the other while she watched their mother work.

“Hungry?” his mother asked.

Kyle watched her slather mayonnaise over a row of Sunbeam bread slices laid out on the counter like a hand of solitaire. She dipped a single extended finger into an open can of cored pineapple, bringing out the entire contents, her index finger and knuckles supporting the pineapple slices at their hollow core. She shook off the juice and placed a round wedge on each piece of bread.

Kyle nodded and sat down across from his sister at the picnic table.

“You okay?”

Kyle looked away from his mother and said, “It’s hot is all.”

His mother nodded, told Grace to stop sucking her thumb before it fell off, and reached to one of the high cabinets and brought down a can of Charles Chips. They were potato chips that were delivered twice a month. They came in a tin the size of a hatbox, and the Charles Chips deliveryman would always stop and talk to Kyle in a way that made Kyle feel good.

Right now Kyle just didn’t know what to do or say. How could he tell his mother what had happened? It had been his fault. The whole thing had been his fault. He’d been riding in the middle of the road, on a blind curve. And now a broken bleeding woman was on her way to the front door, to lay the blame squarely at Kyle’s feet. Kyle couldn’t imagine what words existed to be able to tell his mother this. This was the most real thing that had ever happened to him.