The Book Club

3

Eighteen years behind the wheel of a tractor-trailer and I'd never seen a wreck as massive as this. Literal shards of cars lodged in tree trunks and glass practically atomized on the pavement. They'd covered all the gruesome bits with light blue cloths, but the blood had soaked through the sad covers over so many shredded corpses. Seeing the state of some of the cars, the cabs of two dually pickups rent from the beds and stacked on top of one another as if purposely planned that way, a small sedan rendered even smaller and resembling an accordion, still other vehicles mangled in such ways and burning so fiercely that I could not tell their original colors, let alone their shapes, I couldn't imagine that anyone had walked away from this mess.

And yet, a young girl, no older than ten and still dressed in a pink party gown that glittered and shined menacingly in the glow from a dozen fires, sat, draped in a safety blanket at the base of the snow bank. I could see from my vantage point from across the highway, raised from the seat of my rig, that she seemed to have no mark on her and hardly a hair out of place from a perfectly coiffed bouffant. Some kind of medal dangled from her neck on a thick blue ribbon and peeked out from the folds of the blanket, glinting.

Traffic was backed up behind me for over twelve miles, if the calls over the CB were right, and with no chance of a u-turn or detour, there we all sat while the forest service and other emergency vehicles raced up the mountain to extinguish the flames and count the dead. They'd have their hands full as it were even before they tried to account what happened. As the front of the line, the pack leader who unintentionally kept dozens more from catapulting themselves into the chaos, they'd want to talk to me, of course. But what had I actually seen?

The girl came from the blue sporty SUV. It had a vanity plates on front and back, something clever, for sure, but I had no idea what the plates had read. They were blackened hunks of metal now, so they'd have to retrieve the VIN unless the girl was talking. I'd only seen the plates and their car for a few moments as it zipped past me, the driver, possibly a woman, annoyed with my slow climb on these mountain grades. I only know the girl had come from that car because of the shiny dress she wore—the matching pink accessories flew from the shattered windows as the car flipped, and flipped, and flipped. Had the girl been flipped out, too, into a soft snow bank? Was she a tiny, pink, and glittery miracle?

Their car had taken out the oncoming traffic, colliding first as it careened out of control after it overtook me with a white minibus full of what I could only assume was an elderly church group on a retreat. The amount of white and khaki clothing items strewn over the highway from busted open canvas suitcases seemed to confirm my theory since I abjectly refused to identify the owners of the various human parts that I'd seen before they were covered.

The two previously mentioned pickups had been traveling together and might have even been part of a fleet. The sides of the cherry red cabs were adorned with some kind of A/C company logo and a third truck with matching paint and logo was pulled over to the side a few car lengths behind the crash, its driver hunched over where he stood next to his undamaged door, hands on his knees, arms bent, cockeyed, head drooped. I imagined he was so disfigured so as not to vomit, or at least to prevent anything further from spewing forth.

Not to have been outdone by the speeding SUV with the pink princess passenger, a behemoth that likely destroyed the planet one exhaust cloud at a time—considering that my bio-diesel rig does at least something to help—had flown over the top of a unbelievably unscathed Smart car and had incurred the most damage of any vehicle. But to say that it incurred damage was to imply that there was anything left of the original—truck? SUV? It had been obliterated. If the trees lived to an old age, historians would be taking samples of the metal imbedded in the bark, wondering from what strange contraption it might have come. Most of the flames that had ignited small fires on the tops of trees and set alight multiple cars had originated from the blast made by the apparent rocket-fuel the behemoth used. Its owner had likely become a cloud of toxic pollution upon impact with the camper-trailer and the Jeep that pulled it.

A man with a bulbous belly fitted tightly inside the light brown uniform of the Highway Patrol had taken the black puffy jacket officers tended to wear this time of year and pulled it closed around the pink princess. Despite the large blanket and the stiff folds of her sequined dress, the jacket was big on her and the sleeves drooped carelessly and empty at her sides. A short while later, a woman in a smart, light blue dress shirt and slacks, a dark blue windbreaker too light for the cold weather, and short squared heels came upon the girl with a look of sincere apathy. At least it looked sincere. I couldn't read the acronym on the back of her jacket, but I assumed it was some agency that would whisk the girl away to the assumed safety of another loved one.

Sure enough, by the time the fires were extinguished and the road was beginning to be cleared so that traffic could at least begin moving, the miracle girl was gone and her caring agent had disappeared as well. I'd given my statement by then, having been asked to step down from the cab by the rotund officer who was by then shivering in the cold. I'd offered to house him in the truck while I offered my account of what happened, but he'd proudly declined.

The pink princess had been the second runner-up in a beauty pageant down in the valley and had earned her win no less than two hours before the incident. Officer Cleary was eager to tell me what a miracle she indeed was and most desired to know if I could shed any light on how these events had come to pass. I told him what I'd seen: she was in the car that had impatiently passed me around a curve and over a double-yellow. The huge land-beast of a vehicle had followed, nearly in pursuit of the blue SUV and the two had danced together in a mess of wheels and flying debris once the first hit a patch of ice and the other clipped its spinning back-end. By the time the flipping of the SUV began, I'd already slowed my approach and concentrated my efforts toward preventing the cars behind me from loading themselves into my trailer, which was filled with a shipment. When the officer asked what I was hauling, I had to think for a moment and excuse myself to check the manifest.

Books. Crates and crates of books from a private owner shipping to a warehouse upstate. When the officer questioned the possibility of there being enough books from one owner to fill an entire trailer, I offered to him the opportunity to inspect it himself. He declined, thankfully, and collected the rest of the details I could give.

Another officer had traveled the lane of waiting vehicles behind me and found those that could offer any kind of witness. Officer Cleary invited those other drivers over to speak with him as a group, given that the day was stretching into night and the night was growing too cold for his jacket-less body to handle. A few had seen the blue SUV passing dangerously around other travelers and had noticed another vehicle following closely behind it. One woman, pale-faced either from the cold, the evidence of the horror in front of her on the road, or perhaps naturally porcelain-esque, relayed a curious detail that none of us had seen.

The pink princess, she recalled, had stared at her as the car passed by. But not just a simple stare. Her face pressed close and both of her palms flattened against the glass, the girl had locked eyes on the woman and the large, wide arm belonging to a man slid over the girl's head and pushed her back, out of view. The pale-faced woman only remembered the moment for its strangeness and that she hadn't seen a second person in the front seat when the car had been behind her.

As he dismissed me back into my rig and the others to their vehicles, the officer quickly shook off a wave of chills, cursing under his breath about giving his jacket to the girl. I climbed back up and since the road was beginning to clear, I began prepping the truck to continue the haul. As the engine rumbled and the officer began to step away, the same officer who'd collected the other drivers for their statements came over from the main accident scene with what appeared to be Officer Cleary's coat. I watched as the man almost gleefully wiggled his arms into the sleeves and stiffened the collar straight under his ears after zipping up the front.

After hours of delay, we were all finally permitted passage through the least damaged parts of the roadway and I, the fearless leader, released the brakes and started through. I waved to Officer Cleary as I passed him and the three other officers gathered around him. In one of these officer's hands, I saw that he was holding the wrinkled windbreaker with the acronym on the back which had obviously belonged to the concerned agent. Confusion dotted each of the officer's faces and Officer Cleary appeared most dumbfounded. In his hands, now gloved with latex, the medal the girl had been wearing glinted in the headlights of the cars behind me.

Blood soaked the once blue ribbon.