This started in the early afternoon of Christmas Eve with a car traveling northbound along Highway 77 from the area of Charlotte, North Carolina. Snow was not in the forecast but the roads were still thick with last-minute shoppers and travelers. The car’s occupant was chain-smoking cigarillos and doing all he could to remove the weight from his chest. His body was shaking but he did not know why. He had slipped from his familial home and driven, his direction aimed at the mountains past the horizon he could not help but seek out. He had seen the ocean and that was fine, and the Plains States were too flat. He rode the Blue Ridge and the curves, the elevation, the world cracked and angular as if the anger of a quiet god had smashed the landscape into great asymmetrical debris.
As the boy from Charlotte was heading north, the occupant of another car who lived in the general vicinity of the boy’s destination had stopped for a celebratory glass of bourbon at the bar he was known to frequent, the holiday all but forgotten as more bourbon and then beer were added to the collection. The man’s children had left his home, as had his wife, and the man chose to celebrate every moment he could manage in the manner he found himself. With each drink gone, the boy got closer.
It was after fifty miles spent doing all he could to choke his mind into silence that the boy came to a decision as to what it was he would do. His face grew hot in the bitter wind that dried his tears as he decided he would drive the Blue Ridge Parkway until he found a sufficient overlook, one with a view impossible to replicate and absent of other spectators, and he would stand there for several long minutes with the winter sun falling in the sky and a world of families locked in the illusion of happiness, he would jump from that overlook and it would be over.
As the boy from Charlotte had made his decision and he crossed over the border from North Carolina to Virginia, the man finished his last shot of bourbon, having moved from a respectable drink to the cheapest the bar had, and he was in the process of paying when the boy took the exit to Fancy Gap, Virginia. From there, the boy would go a few more miles and he would be on the Parkway. When the man stumbled from the bar, the boy was flipping a coin to decide if he were going to continue his momentum north or travel south, back into North Carolina. The coin decided he would be finishing his time in the state he called home. The man turned the ignition and aimed his car in the general direction of his bed, his tires crossing the medium and his foot heavy on the gas pedal.
The boy turned into the first overlook he came across but he did not even park, having noticed a large van, coming from the opposite direction as he had been, turn into the second entrance. It had seemed the perfect location. The overlook had a ninety foot drop and was on the inside of a curve on the Parkway, isolated but with an unparalleled view of the mountains further to the south, the valley below. He decided to continue the direction he had been heading, and if a suitable location was not found within a few miles, he would double back and wait until he could follow-through with his plan.
As the boy turned back onto the Parkway, the man took the curve far too fast, and in an obscene concussion of shattered glass, buckling metal, shattered bones, profuse bleeding, a rolling impact that came to a sudden, catastrophic silence, the boy’s life was saved by the drunken man.
Chris Deal writes from Huntersville, North Carolina. His debut collection of short fiction, Cienfuegos, was published by Brown Paper Publishing. He enjoys frying plantains but since the fire isn’t allowed to. Court order. Find him at www.Chris-Deal.com.
“…the sky is silent, hard as granite and as fixed as fate…” – Philip Larkin
the ubiquitous Mr. Deal.
nice to read another one of your stories.
Thanks DB. I’m always on a Larkin kick, too.