Interstate Studies
1. Beatitudes
Manny suffers a major heart attack and dies instantly at the wheel of his pickup truck. The pickup ghosts on at 40 mph in the left-hand lane on Cicero Avenue then drifts into oncoming traffic as Manny’s lifeless body slumps over the steering wheel.
The traffic arrow turns green for southbound motorists going east on 95th Street from Cicero Avenue. A motorcyclist in the left-hand turning lane, unaware of the missile in the wrong lane behind him, starts to turn. The pickup barely misses the motorcycle as the cyclist completes the turn and speeds away. The second motorist sees Manny slumped over the steering wheel of his pickup careening toward a group of motorists northbound on Cicero waiting for the light to turn green. More than a dozen vehicles are packed together at the intersection. There is nowhere to turn, nowhere to go.
The first set of motorists sees the pickup heading toward them. They probably gasp for a brief moment, their last. The pickup collides with the first car in the middle lane at 52 mph. Two women are killed instantly. The two women - Jean Holloway, 86, and Nab Nyoung Kim, 28 - are nuns from the Little Company of Mary right down the street. They were heading to a charity event in Oak Lawn.
The sisters don't know each other well. Nab had just joined the group and Jean was telling her about her conversion earlier that week.
I saw an angel when I was little. It was neither man nor woman. Maybe both? He told me to remain steadfast. Not with words, mind you. He was speaking to my heart with his mind. An incredible form of telepathy. I wondered what he meant. Steadfast? For what purpose and to what extent? I didn’t understand. I was so naive.
I didn’t tell anyone about the angel. It could have been a daydream, but everything about it was incredible! I had so many questions afterwards but couldn't comprehend the experience at the time ...
I went through adolescence disinterested. Boys didn’t interest me. School didn’t interest me. It all seemed so pointless. College passed by like a distant train, or better, like the view from a train looking out over great distances. I felt outside the experience. Things happened, but never to me!
I went to church. I read. I volunteered. Steadfast, I imagine, but nothing happened! Finally, I decided on missionary work and spent my twenties abroad in Africa and Asia. I wouldn’t trade those years for the world, trying as they were. I made peace with the angel and his mysterious words at some point but never really understood. Maybe I created him from all my prayers, all my teenage tears? It was better to have known him than not, I suppose.
Funny how that works. I’ve failed at everything except this one thing.
1. Beatitudes
Manny suffers a major heart attack and dies instantly at the wheel of his pickup truck. The pickup ghosts on at 40 mph in the left-hand lane on Cicero Avenue then drifts into oncoming traffic as Manny’s lifeless body slumps over the steering wheel.
The traffic arrow turns green for southbound motorists going east on 95th Street from Cicero Avenue. A motorcyclist in the left-hand turning lane, unaware of the missile in the wrong lane behind him, starts to turn. The pickup barely misses the motorcycle as the cyclist completes the turn and speeds away. The second motorist sees Manny slumped over the steering wheel of his pickup careening toward a group of motorists northbound on Cicero waiting for the light to turn green. More than a dozen vehicles are packed together at the intersection. There is nowhere to turn, nowhere to go.
The first set of motorists sees the pickup heading toward them. They probably gasp for a brief moment, their last. The pickup collides with the first car in the middle lane at 52 mph. Two women are killed instantly. The two women - Jean Holloway, 86, and Nab Nyoung Kim, 28 - are nuns from the Little Company of Mary right down the street. They were heading to a charity event in Oak Lawn.
The sisters don't know each other well. Nab had just joined the group and Jean was telling her about her conversion earlier that week.
I saw an angel when I was little. It was neither man nor woman. Maybe both? He told me to remain steadfast. Not with words, mind you. He was speaking to my heart with his mind. An incredible form of telepathy. I wondered what he meant. Steadfast? For what purpose and to what extent? I didn’t understand. I was so naive.
I didn’t tell anyone about the angel. It could have been a daydream, but everything about it was incredible! I had so many questions afterwards but couldn't comprehend the experience at the time ...
I went through adolescence disinterested. Boys didn’t interest me. School didn’t interest me. It all seemed so pointless. College passed by like a distant train, or better, like the view from a train looking out over great distances. I felt outside the experience. Things happened, but never to me!
I went to church. I read. I volunteered. Steadfast, I imagine, but nothing happened! Finally, I decided on missionary work and spent my twenties abroad in Africa and Asia. I wouldn’t trade those years for the world, trying as they were. I made peace with the angel and his mysterious words at some point but never really understood. Maybe I created him from all my prayers, all my teenage tears? It was better to have known him than not, I suppose.
Funny how that works. I’ve failed at everything except this one thing.
2. The Dispossessed
From the corner of her eye the mother sees in a flash a truck tire rocket straight up into the air then disappear above the windshield of her giant SUV. She calculates correctly in an instant that the tire will clear 100 feet before it descends. She also calculates correctly the tire will land directly on the hood of her SUV.
There are three children in car seats in the back and she is traveling at 67 mph on the interstate with four lanes of light traffic. The Kids Bop station plays loudly from the speakers.
The two cars in front of her slam on their brakes. She slams on hers and veers to the left shoulder to avoid a rear-end collision. The huge truck tire lands on the hood of a truck next to her. The truck loses control and smashes into a concrete divider a few hundred feet down the road. Other vehicles swerve and run into each other.
The mother is surrounded by disabled vehicles, smoke and others speeding by.
She turns the radio off and asks if everyone is okay. Her children, owl-eyed in the backseat, shake their heads collectively. Yes. She quickly speeds away from the wreckage and gets off at the next exit. She pulls into a Denny’s parking lot and calls 911.
Do you know what happened? Is anybody injured? the dispatcher asks.
The mother is distraught and thinks of her father who was killed in the line of duty when a passing vehicle struck him during a routine traffic stop. They never caught the driver, and it always bothered her. She is perpetually haunted by the fact that there’s an anonymous murderer on the road at all times. A madman with no conscience. A ruthless, mindless murderer with no regard for anything.
3. Suicide Watch
Elwood was the most interesting man in the world. He was a Marine and had seen combat at the tail end of Vietnam. He had a thick Chicago accent and could speak broken Polish and Italian. He owned part of a coffee plantation in South America and was a silent partner in a restaurant downtown. He loved food and always knew the best places to eat. He had the best stories.
He drove a truck for me, for the health insurance we provided mostly, and joked that the job kept him out of the doghouse where the wife tried to keep him locked up.
One night, Elwood drove through an intersection at night coming off a delivery in Hodgkins, Illinois. He was hit on his passenger side, right at the fuel tank, by an oncoming passenger vehicle running 90 mph through a red light. The impact turned the tractor-trailer around 540 degrees and Elwood slid into a deep drainage ditch on the side of the road.
It was two o’clock in the morning on a Thursday. Elwood was shaken but okay. Diesel fumes filled the fresh night air. Fearing an explosion, he immediately exited the vehicle. He checked on the vehicle that hit him, laying on its side three hundred yards away with the wheels still spinning. Elwood called 911. Then he called me.
The other driver was still alive somehow. Elwood stayed with him until emergency personnel arrived.
I read from a police report that the driver was on a suicide mission. He’d driven through the intersection at high speeds a dozen times with his lights off trying to find the one.
4. Horses
A horse trailer flipped over at an exit ramp spilling horses all over the road. Linda, who we called Henry, pulled up to the wreck in the middle of the night. Horses were in the middle of the road, some of them standing in the deep pit beneath the cloverleaf ramp. Some were lying on their sides with their heads and sides split open. Another one was flopping like a fish on the shoulder, banging its head against the pavement.
It was bad, Henry told me. You ain’t never seen nothing like it, she said. Blood all over the goddamn road like a nightmare. The insides and the brains and everything. See, man, I grew up with horses. You never seen a more beautiful animal. Nothing more beautiful. Never seen nothing more beautiful.
5. The Worst One
The assignment was to stack two flatbed trailers on top of a flatbed trailer and run them out to Ottawa from Gary, Indiana. He hadn’t stacked before and went out to the yard to identify the three trailers. He pretripped each one, selecting the best one to pull.
He positioned the trailers in the back of the yard where there was plenty of space to maneuver and went to maintenance to get the forklift. He drove the forklift at 3 mph all the way to the back of the yard. It took forever.
He stacked one 48-footer on top of the flatbed he was going to pull and the second on top of it. He then returned the forklift to maintenance (at 3 mph) and went back to the rig. He still had to secure the trailers.
Once complete, he hooked to the trailer and headed to Ottawa. It was dark out. Right at the state line he heard a bang and felt a slight jolt. He saw in the sideview mirror four gigantic aluminum A-frames, each one about the size of a football player, flying in the air behind him. It instantly occurred to him that he’d failed to strap the A-frames to the deck of the top trailer. They were secure at the bulkhead but 4 inches too high for 13-foot, 6-inch clearance.
He felt sickened.
He watched two cars spin out and another hit the Jersey wall at the median. He pulled over about a mile down the road and reported the incident to dispatch then called emergency response. He ran back to the scene as fast as he could, sprinting with all his might.
END 2.2.20