Dead Reckoning for The Blind

I don’t know what’s gonna happen man, but I wanna have my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames…
– Jim Morrison

Post-Super Bowl daze. Backroads and moonlit silence. A clear night for fast driving down twisty gravel byways, kicking dark clouds of rocky dust into a sky waxing gibbous. But in the forest through which I drove the rutted road was hardly visible and darkended by the layered shadows of trees; the old LTD shook violently on shocks hardly able to withstand the tumult of soft grass, yet majestically keeping control at fifty mile an hour while hanging branches of rhododhendron slapped the windows around the tightest hairpin turns I’ve ever encountered.

Ten minutes later this jagged tour ended in the flat bottomlands of Shuckstack Hollow (or “Holler” as we say in the East TN backwoods) where I immediately found a roadside pull-off that seemed suitable for masking The Beast in furtive thickets of leafless undergrowth. With telekinetic timing the small Motorola Walkabout Supra two-way radio I had buried in my pocket crackled an obscene litany of garbled communique full of Breaker, Breaker repeated 10-4s, and Talk to Teddy Bear, Over…All obvious reminders that dealing with lunatics must bespeak an undiagnosed aspect of idiocy brought about by repeated bottles of Dos Equis and quarts of rum. I gripped the two-way and droned a reply, Kimble you better have something here and it needs to pique my interest a helluva lot more than Janet Jackson’s tasseled boob tried to three hours ago… Static, Crackle, Beep You know it man, keep quiet and slink down the road to where that huge sycamore tree fell over. I’ll be there. This is Kimble and I approve this message, over and OUT…

I crept from the car doing zig zags patterns down the road, crouching low by the roadside every twenty feet or so and pausing to look about while taking quick sips from a small flask. This was no stealth mission in Tikrit but something about the deep woods on a frigid February night at three in the morning hit the fire alarm of paranoia, Good God, what am I DOING here?!?. The rendezvous point was near and I could see the dark mass of the tree if I strained my eyes open as wide as possible without them freezing in the sockets – a method far too unreliable. Instead I plopped on all fours and made the blind death crawl along a course that I dead reckoned should smack my forehead right into the treetrunk.

Within thirty three seconds or so I was enveloped in a thatch of branches, and rocked with a gripping fear that some vagrant moonshiner was close, deadly close, obscured in darkness, pointing the rusted barrel of a sawed-off twelve gage tenderly at my forehead – close enough to spit a rancid plug of Redman all over the side of my face, close enough to…. I couldn’t complete the thought – the two-way in my pocket snapped a ferociously loud CRACK of static through the chilly air; apparently I had notched the volume level up to full while crawling around like a fool. Cause and effect: I launched vertical with the ferocity of an exploding toilet, smashing ye olde cranium into a limb with the circumference of a telephone pole, and then PLOP… dizzyingly into the void.

Some time later I awoke in the backseat of the Ford wrapped in my goosedown jacket, face rigid with cold, racked with a skullsplitingly dense headache and the driest mouth I’d ever known. I could tell it was barely dawn, far lighter than the arctic dark I’d just survived, and there was Kimble in the front seat, bent low, eyes peering out the driverside window. He moved cautiously to look me over when he heard my movements; belying a smirk of concern he started shaking his head.

Jesus man that was nuts…. I must have looked dim What the hell? I glotted out What was nuts? I had no clues, some craggy, partial amnesia and now I wake up to some lost chapter of Finnegan’s Wake. Listen man, best I can tell is I scared you shitless when I tried to call you on the radio. I was sitt’in up on the tree and I hit the button to find out where you were and then the whole gawddam tree shakes like a bolt of lightn’in hit it. I continued to listen, completely immobile. Then I find you down on the ground and you was out cold, but you had a flask of ‘skey in your pocket so I poured some down your throat – to try and revive ye and all.

My eyes widened, Fool I croaked That was a hundred and eight proof whiskey man. ONE HUNDRED and EIGHT. Kimble appeared contemplative yet wholly unconcerned, Well, after ’bout five minutes you jumped up and started screaming like a damn banshee, bust’in outta those branches, runn’in up the road, and echoing all down that holler. Took me twenty minutes to round you up, scream’in about vultures and Republicans and gawddim cinnamon Altoids…

At this point I felt ready to lapse into a coma, but managed to get out: So this suffering was all so you could show me….. Kimble breaks in quickly, Oh hell, nothing really I just wanted to drive into the valley and set those John Kerry For President signs on fire in people’s yards is all….

I stare at car roof with the twisted agony of The Living Dead. Kimble’s scrupulous silence confirms his growing embarassment. Well…. he said Hell…let’s hit the Sonic fer some Breakfist Burritas!!!!

My eyes roll………merciful….darkness.