Until the Going Down of the River
Sheldon Lee Compton
The talk was about to drive Hamilton out of his mind.
The constant talk about the weather everywhere these days. Rain. Flood. At the grocery store, the gas station, in church, everywhere for those who still left the house. How much longer could the Big Sandy stay inside its banks? How long before it would crest and decide that all the land it could touch belonged to the river?
Cami said it couldn’t be more than another three days.
The new boy at work, Carter, said the weatherman lost count after it rained two weeks straight, and that felt like two months ago.
And then the Big Sandy left its banks.
Hamilton wanted to feel concern for other people, people in the hundred year flood plain, people who had lost their power, families who had lost their property, even their homes in some cases. He wanted to, but he couldn’t. Talk of the flooding had put him out of his mind with this truth.
And the talk wasn’t much different with Hamilton’s family. The visit to his mom’s had been a mad rush of sentences pushing against each other. Eight or so people in the tiny living room of her trailer trying to tell their stories, stories saved up for such times.
“Patty Murphy lost her tool shed.” His mom talked in a hush. “Well, Barry used it, but Patty lost it. Swept right up and gone. Which now they are in the floodplain over there.”
“Somebody said it was supposed to start raining hard again tomorrow.” His sister.
His uncle even seemed to be worrying about people. “What people don’t understand is groundwater,” he said. “These hills just soak all that up like a sponge and when it can’t hold it no more it just starts rolling downhill in these slides onto people’s houses and washing out whole sections of road and stuff.”
“Well it can’t rain forever.” This was all Hamilton had to share. He felt nothing else other than aggravated at all the talk.
When he left, he left quickly. He drove at a steady clip, grateful to be taking curves across Alley Mountain with the glow from the radio face like a digital green fireplace. A mountaintop wind pushed the curtain of rain left and then right. By the time he made it home the storm had died down to a sprinkle, but he figured it wouldn’t stay that way for long.
“You stop by Venture’s?” Cami asked first thing.
“Closed.”
“Lord I hope it ain’t flooded already. You have cigarettes left?”
“I got enough to do us til tomorrow.”
He settled in and took off his boots, pushed them under the coffee table. He was glad to be home at such a basic level that nothing else mattered. It didn’t matter what was on television or how late it was or if Cami was still mad about the night before. All that mattered was the couch, and resting on the couch until he felt like moving to the bed.
“Goldie needs food and water,” Cami said. “He’s been barking nonstop.”
Should’ve never settled in, Hamilton thought. “I’ll get him before I go to bed. Right now I have to just sit here for a minute.”
The idea was for him to try to start thinking about other people, their well-being, what they want, need, and so on. Empathy, Cami called it. Apparently he was low on it. But sitting up in his recliner, readying himself to push up and through his back pain to get stood up straight, he couldn’t help but think, who was thinking of him if he didn’t? Whatever time he spent thinking about himself was meant to be times of mindfulness and work. There was also apparently a lot of work he needed to do on himself. He was starting to feel like the front differential on a Ford Ranger.
“They’ve not had anything since early, early this morning,” Cami said.
“I’m going out there right now. Don’t keep prodding me.”
And so began the long wait for the tension to ease up. He was always so grateful when this happened that he would forget everything else. Tension broke his heart and just kept breaking until it was gone.
Hamilton first talked to Carter the morning he showed up for transport. He expected it to be an actual bus but instead it was a couple of white vans with the windows blacked out. That first day Hamilton was the only senior Turk employee on the transport. The others were all young boys taking old men’s jobs without really understanding how that kind of thing could get you killed dead as a hammer.
Truth was, and Hamilton told Carter the same, he shouldn't have been crossing the line at all. With fifteen years in at Turk, he could have stayed home. But staying home and not coming out with the others on the line was worse than crossing it.
“I don't care either way,” Carter said. “I just want a job where I can zone out.”
“Zone out? Like just float and not do much?”
“Absotootly. I’ve had it with thinking all day at work. Did all that and don’t want to get back to it any time soon.”
“You mean like a desk job?”
“I mean like a desk job. Had my fill of that particular nine to five. Abso-tootly”
“Stop saying absotootly.”
Hamilton normally ran the cherry picker and had done so for the past twelve years. His focus was next level, as the supervisors said. The section where he parked it each evening had a brass metal plate fixed to the wall with his name on it. All the other full-time employees had the same plates, such as Dennis with the forklift for what was known as yard duty, orders that came in on slips of paper with a large, bold Y at the top. These plates were a union thing. All the scabs working the different positions in the warehouse couldn’t help but see the plates and the names etched there and know exactly whose job they were taking.
Hamilton was in Dennis’s spot because Dennis wouldn’t cross the picket line. The yard orders meant a trip on the forklift to get one of the heavy pieces of equipment and parts that were kept just outside the main building in a large field.
It was unusually cold at daybreak. The sun wouldn’t come over the hill until much later. It somehow brought Hamilton peace to stop and just exist for a minute apart from the constant activity in the warehouse. He was doing this when a crack of gunfire rang out. He turned and saw a mushroom of smoke rise from the hillside. Then there was another round fired and Hamilton knew what was happening. Kentucky union strikes sent workers scrambling for gun cabinets if they had to watch a scab crawl in on what was their rightful job. Somewhere in the hills was an armed man with his name on a plate in the warehouse.
“We got gunfire out here,” Hamilton said as soon as he was inside. No one seemed in earshot. “We got gunfire out here! Somebody’s shooting off the hillside down into the yard and wherever else I don’t know!”
Max Blanton was the first to reach Hamilton. “What in the holy hell are you yelling about?”
“They’re out there on the hillside shooting down here on us,” Hamilton repeated.
“Do we have anybody out there right now who might be in danger?” Blanton asked.
That hadn’t occurred to Hamilton. “I don’t think so,” he said.
“Well go find out, motherfucker!”
Hamilton snapped to and walked fast and around a corner shelf until he was out of sight. He pushed the side door open but did not stick so much as a pinky finger into the open air beyond. He had no idea if one of his coworkers lay out there in the frosted yard half-dead and bleeding out from one or more gunshot wounds. After a couple beats, during which Hamilton did nothing more than stand in the doorway, breath clouding the air, he looked behind him. No one there. Quickly, he pulled the door closed. If there’d been anybody out there shot he would have seen them when he was out there earlier. No way he would overlook something like that.
Besides, Hamilton thought, there’d be screaming, lots of screaming.
“We clear out there, Ham?” Blanton yelled from the front of the warehouse.
“All clear,” Hamilton said when he made it back to the front with the others.
Blanton turned on his heels and stood with his hands on his hips for a beat or two then raised and cupped them around his mouth.
"Okay guys shift done!”
There was still overnight frost in the front yard when Hamilton got home. The sun had started working on it, though, and it was warming and rising away like battlefield smoke. For the first time that morning Hamilton noticed it was still raining. A drizzle. But a drizzle right now would be enough for mudslides at the least.
He needed Cami. He could watch her through the kitchen window, hair still up in a bun, one of his t-shirts on, making coffee. But she took a part time job two months ago at a Double Kwik by Marrowbone. She wouldn’t be home for another three hours. So instead he watched the frost burning off the grass until most of it was gone.
He made coffee and took a seat at the kitchen table. A police detective who came out in response to the gunshots had talked to Hamilton for about ten minutes, going through the motions. Now Hamilton felt the outline of the card in his left shirt pocket. He could shed some light on some of what happened today. Three last gulps of coffee and he was back outside with his truck keys.
It wasn’t the only incident since it started raining that Hamilton experienced missing time. It first happened two days after the storm came in. He had been out behind the house watching from the top of the long slope leading to the river. One second he was watching the river roaring along and the next he was in the bedroom, Cami asleep like a question mark in the early morning light. He had always been confused why people who had strange things happen to them seemed to never mention it to anyone. Wouldn’t telling someone make sense? But he didn’t say a word that morning. There had been a jump in time, and that could have been caused by a lot of things. His memory wasn’t as dependable in his late forties.
Hamilton thought about running out to the Double Kwik and seeing Cami but decided against it. She always became tense and nervous when he did that, and he always got a little jealous when he saw the older coal miners hitting on her. Something ticked away at him, though, and so he gave into it and left to see his Cami.
An old man sat outside the Double Kwik smoking and talking to himself. He had squatted and had a seat just to the left of the front entrance. He wore a thin jacket that was at least two sizes too big for him. Thick nests twirled in large circles throughout his hair and seemed knotted beyond help. His face was heavily tanned with wrinkles forming mountainous fissures across his cheekbones and forehead. Hamilton had seen him before but never spoken to him. So when he stepped to the doors he paused, fished a cigarette from his pack, and handed it to the old man. In a quick slip, the old man pocketed the cigarette into his oversized coat.
“Can I have two?”
“Sure,” Hamilton pulled another from his pack. When he held it out for him, the man raised off the ground and snatched it from his hand.
“Ain’t nothing gonna change til this water goes down,” the old man muttered.
He didn’t see Cami at the counter, which meant she was making pizza rolls in the back. He had time to listen to this old man ramble. He had time to try and connect, to feel something for the less fortunate. He stepped away from the door and leaned into the building.
“You got a place around here or anything?”
The old man didn’t answer right away. He craned his head around and stared at Hamilton with total concentration, allowing that awkward moment to stretch into strangeness.
“I live over yonder across the road,” he said, pointing to the spread of buildings just beside the Ramada Inn. “Venture Homes over there.”
Hamilton knew Venture Homes. It was an assisted living facility, a place where mentally challenged people were either placed or signed into for structure and staff attention. Apparently, they were given time to roam the downtown area, to post up outside gas stations, take in some crisp fall air.
“Where you from!” The old man bounced off the ground, his neck twisting like a snapping turtle going for a finger. “You work? You work here?” He pointed at the Double Kwik. “Here?”
It was a lot, Hamilton thought. He’d been polite and engaged and given the old man a cigarette, two cigarettes. There had been a kind of connection. With a nod Hamilton turned and went inside.
“And the vessel shall find us spared who are worthy!” the old man said as he scampered across the parking lot with his coat pulled over his head. “The ungodly will be flooded and perish where they stand!”
At the counter Hamilton could still hear the old man yelling. When Cami twirled up beside him he put his arm around her waist before thinking about it. She pushed him away in one swift motion.
“God almighty, Hamilton. How many times do I have to tell you not to do that kind of stuff in here.”
Before Hamilton could respond, a Pepsi guy appeared from the back cooler area. The man nodded and smiled at Cami, then left. All of about six seconds, and it stabbed Hamilton directly in the middle of his gut. He glared at Cami.
“Don’t give me that thousand-yard stare, big boy.”
Hamilton didn’t smile.
Cami looked outside at the pumps where the Pepsi guy was getting into his truck and starting to leave.
“You have got to be kidding me,” she said incredulously “That guy right there?” She had her hands on her hips, full fighting form.
Hamilton didn’t push it. He wanted the drop-in to be a small, special thing that just happened. Now she had shattered that with her far too emotive denial. It wasn’t lost on Hamilton that she didn’t answer the implied question. Did she? Does she? How long? He could get her going if he really wanted to, if he could do it and not feel the twisting in his stomach.
“Well if you’re going to leave me for the Pepsi guy, I’ll take a couple cases of Mountain Dew.”
He hated that he’d said it as soon as he’d said it. The look on her face told him enough. He left the gas station and roared off onto 461.
Hamilton hadn’t taken a good drive in a long time. The best part was not planning it, just striking out, picking a direction. But it soon became clear that he wouldn’t be taking a long drive, at least not quickly. The Big Sandy had finally left its banks alongside the four-lane. U.S. 23 from the Walmart lights to where the old Reno’s used to be was one giant rushing brown force. Ahead of the floor of muddy water, Hamilton saw a Little Debbie truck stranded just beneath a cut section of the mountain base. There was someone still inside.
Where was the fire department, the rescue squad, the police? For fuck’s sake why were none of those here? Probably stranded in hollers under slides or something. When these folks were scarce, it meant somewhere else was in trouble. But this truck and that driver were having all the trouble they could handle.
Gradually he steered his way to the truck. When Hamilton was about twenty feet away, the driver started waving his arms, a genuine, wide smile across his face. As he got closer, Hamilton saw the man was actually cheering. When Hamilton noticed this, he stepped on the brakes. The water current pushed in big surges against the side of his car. What did this guy think was going to happen? Did he have some idea in his head that a grand rescue was about to happen? Hamilton hoped not. He wasn’t even sure why he was here drifting in the floodwaters. He should have been home by now.
He was about to work a u-turn and get back to dry land when the driver actually got out of the truck and managed to get himself pinned against the front grill. Not sure what else to do, Hamilton motioned for the driver to get back in the truck.
“GODDAAAAAAMN!”
“Get back in the truck buddy!”
“GODDAAAAAAMN!”
The driver screamed into the sky with such a powerful fear Hamilton thought he might cause the rain itself to just stop. The rain didn’t stop, though, and in a matter of one or two seconds the driver slid from the front grill down the side of the truck and caught himself in the cavity of the open side door.
“Christ almighty man!” Hamilton felt blood rush to his face, felt his heart slamming. “Christ almighty man. Christ almighty!”
Without noticing his steady and ongoing movement, Hamilton had made a floating line in the driver’s direction. He was now less than five feet from the truck. The driver, taking whipsnap advantage of Hamilton being so close, pulled away from the open side door, lurched with one wild arm, and took hold of Hamilton’s front bumper, his lower half still wedged into the flooded side door. Hamilton kept expecting the driver to make one big jump and hook onto the car enough that he could back out of the floodwaters and make it back to the four-lane. When it was clear that wasn’t going to happen, it became just as clear that the entire matter was about to go south and fast.
Hamilton saw a point of no return just beyond the man’s grasp. Any closer and everything would sweep away into the rush, any further away and the driver was lost. He hovered and veered and wheeled around as best as he could to keep at a good distance, but he could see there was no use. The driver was going into the floodwaters. There was no way out of it.
Just as Hamilton came to terms with what was about to happen, it seemed the driver did, too. He looked up at Hamilton in silence and mouthed three or four words. The crashing of the waters wiping out all other sound. And it was the look on the driver’s face that most alarmed Hamilton. It was resignation. A purely calm acceptance of the worst. And Hamilton felt it in the center of his chest. So when he realized his car was beginning to drift upward and away from the road and that both he and the driver were equally in the middle of a disaster, he too sought and found, if not peace, an answer.
What he wanted to do was climb out of his car and over to the driver and take him under his arm and swim them to safety.
What he wanted to do was throw jumper cables to the driver and pull him to safety.
What he wanted to do was reach the driver, climb with him to the top of the Little Debbie truck and float their way to higher ground.
What he wanted to do was, instead of panicking, have the sense of mind to dial three numbers.
He would have given anything for people to know what he had wanted to do, instead of what he deliberately and without hesitation for certain did.
Sheldon Lee Compton
The talk was about to drive Hamilton out of his mind.
The constant talk about the weather everywhere these days. Rain. Flood. At the grocery store, the gas station, in church, everywhere for those who still left the house. How much longer could the Big Sandy stay inside its banks? How long before it would crest and decide that all the land it could touch belonged to the river?
Cami said it couldn’t be more than another three days.
The new boy at work, Carter, said the weatherman lost count after it rained two weeks straight, and that felt like two months ago.
And then the Big Sandy left its banks.
Hamilton wanted to feel concern for other people, people in the hundred year flood plain, people who had lost their power, families who had lost their property, even their homes in some cases. He wanted to, but he couldn’t. Talk of the flooding had put him out of his mind with this truth.
And the talk wasn’t much different with Hamilton’s family. The visit to his mom’s had been a mad rush of sentences pushing against each other. Eight or so people in the tiny living room of her trailer trying to tell their stories, stories saved up for such times.
“Patty Murphy lost her tool shed.” His mom talked in a hush. “Well, Barry used it, but Patty lost it. Swept right up and gone. Which now they are in the floodplain over there.”
“Somebody said it was supposed to start raining hard again tomorrow.” His sister.
His uncle even seemed to be worrying about people. “What people don’t understand is groundwater,” he said. “These hills just soak all that up like a sponge and when it can’t hold it no more it just starts rolling downhill in these slides onto people’s houses and washing out whole sections of road and stuff.”
“Well it can’t rain forever.” This was all Hamilton had to share. He felt nothing else other than aggravated at all the talk.
When he left, he left quickly. He drove at a steady clip, grateful to be taking curves across Alley Mountain with the glow from the radio face like a digital green fireplace. A mountaintop wind pushed the curtain of rain left and then right. By the time he made it home the storm had died down to a sprinkle, but he figured it wouldn’t stay that way for long.
“You stop by Venture’s?” Cami asked first thing.
“Closed.”
“Lord I hope it ain’t flooded already. You have cigarettes left?”
“I got enough to do us til tomorrow.”
He settled in and took off his boots, pushed them under the coffee table. He was glad to be home at such a basic level that nothing else mattered. It didn’t matter what was on television or how late it was or if Cami was still mad about the night before. All that mattered was the couch, and resting on the couch until he felt like moving to the bed.
“Goldie needs food and water,” Cami said. “He’s been barking nonstop.”
Should’ve never settled in, Hamilton thought. “I’ll get him before I go to bed. Right now I have to just sit here for a minute.”
The idea was for him to try to start thinking about other people, their well-being, what they want, need, and so on. Empathy, Cami called it. Apparently he was low on it. But sitting up in his recliner, readying himself to push up and through his back pain to get stood up straight, he couldn’t help but think, who was thinking of him if he didn’t? Whatever time he spent thinking about himself was meant to be times of mindfulness and work. There was also apparently a lot of work he needed to do on himself. He was starting to feel like the front differential on a Ford Ranger.
“They’ve not had anything since early, early this morning,” Cami said.
“I’m going out there right now. Don’t keep prodding me.”
And so began the long wait for the tension to ease up. He was always so grateful when this happened that he would forget everything else. Tension broke his heart and just kept breaking until it was gone.
Hamilton first talked to Carter the morning he showed up for transport. He expected it to be an actual bus but instead it was a couple of white vans with the windows blacked out. That first day Hamilton was the only senior Turk employee on the transport. The others were all young boys taking old men’s jobs without really understanding how that kind of thing could get you killed dead as a hammer.
Truth was, and Hamilton told Carter the same, he shouldn't have been crossing the line at all. With fifteen years in at Turk, he could have stayed home. But staying home and not coming out with the others on the line was worse than crossing it.
“I don't care either way,” Carter said. “I just want a job where I can zone out.”
“Zone out? Like just float and not do much?”
“Absotootly. I’ve had it with thinking all day at work. Did all that and don’t want to get back to it any time soon.”
“You mean like a desk job?”
“I mean like a desk job. Had my fill of that particular nine to five. Abso-tootly”
“Stop saying absotootly.”
Hamilton normally ran the cherry picker and had done so for the past twelve years. His focus was next level, as the supervisors said. The section where he parked it each evening had a brass metal plate fixed to the wall with his name on it. All the other full-time employees had the same plates, such as Dennis with the forklift for what was known as yard duty, orders that came in on slips of paper with a large, bold Y at the top. These plates were a union thing. All the scabs working the different positions in the warehouse couldn’t help but see the plates and the names etched there and know exactly whose job they were taking.
Hamilton was in Dennis’s spot because Dennis wouldn’t cross the picket line. The yard orders meant a trip on the forklift to get one of the heavy pieces of equipment and parts that were kept just outside the main building in a large field.
It was unusually cold at daybreak. The sun wouldn’t come over the hill until much later. It somehow brought Hamilton peace to stop and just exist for a minute apart from the constant activity in the warehouse. He was doing this when a crack of gunfire rang out. He turned and saw a mushroom of smoke rise from the hillside. Then there was another round fired and Hamilton knew what was happening. Kentucky union strikes sent workers scrambling for gun cabinets if they had to watch a scab crawl in on what was their rightful job. Somewhere in the hills was an armed man with his name on a plate in the warehouse.
“We got gunfire out here,” Hamilton said as soon as he was inside. No one seemed in earshot. “We got gunfire out here! Somebody’s shooting off the hillside down into the yard and wherever else I don’t know!”
Max Blanton was the first to reach Hamilton. “What in the holy hell are you yelling about?”
“They’re out there on the hillside shooting down here on us,” Hamilton repeated.
“Do we have anybody out there right now who might be in danger?” Blanton asked.
That hadn’t occurred to Hamilton. “I don’t think so,” he said.
“Well go find out, motherfucker!”
Hamilton snapped to and walked fast and around a corner shelf until he was out of sight. He pushed the side door open but did not stick so much as a pinky finger into the open air beyond. He had no idea if one of his coworkers lay out there in the frosted yard half-dead and bleeding out from one or more gunshot wounds. After a couple beats, during which Hamilton did nothing more than stand in the doorway, breath clouding the air, he looked behind him. No one there. Quickly, he pulled the door closed. If there’d been anybody out there shot he would have seen them when he was out there earlier. No way he would overlook something like that.
Besides, Hamilton thought, there’d be screaming, lots of screaming.
“We clear out there, Ham?” Blanton yelled from the front of the warehouse.
“All clear,” Hamilton said when he made it back to the front with the others.
Blanton turned on his heels and stood with his hands on his hips for a beat or two then raised and cupped them around his mouth.
"Okay guys shift done!”
There was still overnight frost in the front yard when Hamilton got home. The sun had started working on it, though, and it was warming and rising away like battlefield smoke. For the first time that morning Hamilton noticed it was still raining. A drizzle. But a drizzle right now would be enough for mudslides at the least.
He needed Cami. He could watch her through the kitchen window, hair still up in a bun, one of his t-shirts on, making coffee. But she took a part time job two months ago at a Double Kwik by Marrowbone. She wouldn’t be home for another three hours. So instead he watched the frost burning off the grass until most of it was gone.
He made coffee and took a seat at the kitchen table. A police detective who came out in response to the gunshots had talked to Hamilton for about ten minutes, going through the motions. Now Hamilton felt the outline of the card in his left shirt pocket. He could shed some light on some of what happened today. Three last gulps of coffee and he was back outside with his truck keys.
It wasn’t the only incident since it started raining that Hamilton experienced missing time. It first happened two days after the storm came in. He had been out behind the house watching from the top of the long slope leading to the river. One second he was watching the river roaring along and the next he was in the bedroom, Cami asleep like a question mark in the early morning light. He had always been confused why people who had strange things happen to them seemed to never mention it to anyone. Wouldn’t telling someone make sense? But he didn’t say a word that morning. There had been a jump in time, and that could have been caused by a lot of things. His memory wasn’t as dependable in his late forties.
Hamilton thought about running out to the Double Kwik and seeing Cami but decided against it. She always became tense and nervous when he did that, and he always got a little jealous when he saw the older coal miners hitting on her. Something ticked away at him, though, and so he gave into it and left to see his Cami.
An old man sat outside the Double Kwik smoking and talking to himself. He had squatted and had a seat just to the left of the front entrance. He wore a thin jacket that was at least two sizes too big for him. Thick nests twirled in large circles throughout his hair and seemed knotted beyond help. His face was heavily tanned with wrinkles forming mountainous fissures across his cheekbones and forehead. Hamilton had seen him before but never spoken to him. So when he stepped to the doors he paused, fished a cigarette from his pack, and handed it to the old man. In a quick slip, the old man pocketed the cigarette into his oversized coat.
“Can I have two?”
“Sure,” Hamilton pulled another from his pack. When he held it out for him, the man raised off the ground and snatched it from his hand.
“Ain’t nothing gonna change til this water goes down,” the old man muttered.
He didn’t see Cami at the counter, which meant she was making pizza rolls in the back. He had time to listen to this old man ramble. He had time to try and connect, to feel something for the less fortunate. He stepped away from the door and leaned into the building.
“You got a place around here or anything?”
The old man didn’t answer right away. He craned his head around and stared at Hamilton with total concentration, allowing that awkward moment to stretch into strangeness.
“I live over yonder across the road,” he said, pointing to the spread of buildings just beside the Ramada Inn. “Venture Homes over there.”
Hamilton knew Venture Homes. It was an assisted living facility, a place where mentally challenged people were either placed or signed into for structure and staff attention. Apparently, they were given time to roam the downtown area, to post up outside gas stations, take in some crisp fall air.
“Where you from!” The old man bounced off the ground, his neck twisting like a snapping turtle going for a finger. “You work? You work here?” He pointed at the Double Kwik. “Here?”
It was a lot, Hamilton thought. He’d been polite and engaged and given the old man a cigarette, two cigarettes. There had been a kind of connection. With a nod Hamilton turned and went inside.
“And the vessel shall find us spared who are worthy!” the old man said as he scampered across the parking lot with his coat pulled over his head. “The ungodly will be flooded and perish where they stand!”
At the counter Hamilton could still hear the old man yelling. When Cami twirled up beside him he put his arm around her waist before thinking about it. She pushed him away in one swift motion.
“God almighty, Hamilton. How many times do I have to tell you not to do that kind of stuff in here.”
Before Hamilton could respond, a Pepsi guy appeared from the back cooler area. The man nodded and smiled at Cami, then left. All of about six seconds, and it stabbed Hamilton directly in the middle of his gut. He glared at Cami.
“Don’t give me that thousand-yard stare, big boy.”
Hamilton didn’t smile.
Cami looked outside at the pumps where the Pepsi guy was getting into his truck and starting to leave.
“You have got to be kidding me,” she said incredulously “That guy right there?” She had her hands on her hips, full fighting form.
Hamilton didn’t push it. He wanted the drop-in to be a small, special thing that just happened. Now she had shattered that with her far too emotive denial. It wasn’t lost on Hamilton that she didn’t answer the implied question. Did she? Does she? How long? He could get her going if he really wanted to, if he could do it and not feel the twisting in his stomach.
“Well if you’re going to leave me for the Pepsi guy, I’ll take a couple cases of Mountain Dew.”
He hated that he’d said it as soon as he’d said it. The look on her face told him enough. He left the gas station and roared off onto 461.
Hamilton hadn’t taken a good drive in a long time. The best part was not planning it, just striking out, picking a direction. But it soon became clear that he wouldn’t be taking a long drive, at least not quickly. The Big Sandy had finally left its banks alongside the four-lane. U.S. 23 from the Walmart lights to where the old Reno’s used to be was one giant rushing brown force. Ahead of the floor of muddy water, Hamilton saw a Little Debbie truck stranded just beneath a cut section of the mountain base. There was someone still inside.
Where was the fire department, the rescue squad, the police? For fuck’s sake why were none of those here? Probably stranded in hollers under slides or something. When these folks were scarce, it meant somewhere else was in trouble. But this truck and that driver were having all the trouble they could handle.
Gradually he steered his way to the truck. When Hamilton was about twenty feet away, the driver started waving his arms, a genuine, wide smile across his face. As he got closer, Hamilton saw the man was actually cheering. When Hamilton noticed this, he stepped on the brakes. The water current pushed in big surges against the side of his car. What did this guy think was going to happen? Did he have some idea in his head that a grand rescue was about to happen? Hamilton hoped not. He wasn’t even sure why he was here drifting in the floodwaters. He should have been home by now.
He was about to work a u-turn and get back to dry land when the driver actually got out of the truck and managed to get himself pinned against the front grill. Not sure what else to do, Hamilton motioned for the driver to get back in the truck.
“GODDAAAAAAMN!”
“Get back in the truck buddy!”
“GODDAAAAAAMN!”
The driver screamed into the sky with such a powerful fear Hamilton thought he might cause the rain itself to just stop. The rain didn’t stop, though, and in a matter of one or two seconds the driver slid from the front grill down the side of the truck and caught himself in the cavity of the open side door.
“Christ almighty man!” Hamilton felt blood rush to his face, felt his heart slamming. “Christ almighty man. Christ almighty!”
Without noticing his steady and ongoing movement, Hamilton had made a floating line in the driver’s direction. He was now less than five feet from the truck. The driver, taking whipsnap advantage of Hamilton being so close, pulled away from the open side door, lurched with one wild arm, and took hold of Hamilton’s front bumper, his lower half still wedged into the flooded side door. Hamilton kept expecting the driver to make one big jump and hook onto the car enough that he could back out of the floodwaters and make it back to the four-lane. When it was clear that wasn’t going to happen, it became just as clear that the entire matter was about to go south and fast.
Hamilton saw a point of no return just beyond the man’s grasp. Any closer and everything would sweep away into the rush, any further away and the driver was lost. He hovered and veered and wheeled around as best as he could to keep at a good distance, but he could see there was no use. The driver was going into the floodwaters. There was no way out of it.
Just as Hamilton came to terms with what was about to happen, it seemed the driver did, too. He looked up at Hamilton in silence and mouthed three or four words. The crashing of the waters wiping out all other sound. And it was the look on the driver’s face that most alarmed Hamilton. It was resignation. A purely calm acceptance of the worst. And Hamilton felt it in the center of his chest. So when he realized his car was beginning to drift upward and away from the road and that both he and the driver were equally in the middle of a disaster, he too sought and found, if not peace, an answer.
What he wanted to do was climb out of his car and over to the driver and take him under his arm and swim them to safety.
What he wanted to do was throw jumper cables to the driver and pull him to safety.
What he wanted to do was reach the driver, climb with him to the top of the Little Debbie truck and float their way to higher ground.
What he wanted to do was, instead of panicking, have the sense of mind to dial three numbers.
He would have given anything for people to know what he had wanted to do, instead of what he deliberately and without hesitation for certain did.