Thirty-Five
THE TEMPERATURE HAS dropped, the way it sometimes does, suddenly and unexpectedly in this part of the state in the summer months, and fog has rolled in over the river.
In the low visibility, I slow my speed to practically nothing. Good thing, too, because if I’d been going any faster down our long driveway than I was when I saw the lights from the house last time, I would have hit Bumper.
Again.
I see her at the very last second and hit the brakes hard, grateful that I am going as slowly as I am. I don’t know how she’s gotten out of the house, but she has.
Again.
“Damn you, Bumper!” I’m yelling as I get out from behind the wheel. “I love you to death, but you really can be dumber than one of your biscuits sometimes.”
That’s when they’re on me.
They’re on me right there in front of the truck, the low headlights still on, coming at me from both sides of the driveway, out of the fog almost like ghosts.
I don’t have much time to do anything except see the ski masks being worn by the three guys directly in front of me. The one in the middle is carrying what looks to be the same kind of .45 Long Colt that my father had owned.
One is carrying a wooden baseball bat.
The third is swinging a chain.
I think: If they were going to shoot me, it would be over already, before it started.
But before they can get any closer to me and before I can charge them, Bumper somewhere off to the side barking her head off, somebody hits me behind my knees with some other kind of club.
Maybe whoever did it thinks it’s enough to put me down.
It’s not.
It has always been hard to put me on the ground, and it still is right here and right now, even ganged upon like this, ambushed in the night from in front and from behind.
The three in front bull-rush me now, the one with the gun raising it up but not to shoot me with it, just swing it at the side of my head, catching me over the ear and ringing my bell good when he connects.
Still, I don’t go down.
The stubborn in me.
When he raises the gun again, and before the other two are on me, I take it away from him, even as dazed as I am, and step inside the reach of the one with the bat and drive the butt end of the Colt into the middle of his face, feeling his nose break even behind the ski mask he’s wearing.
The pain behind my knees is worse now than what I’m feeling from the blow to the side of my head.
Still, I manage to keep moving forward until a couple of them behind me, or all of them behind me, have my arms pinned, and somebody is taking the gun out of my hand and somebody else is kicking my feet out from underneath me.
Then I am on the ground, face down in the gravel and dirt, and then somebody is kicking me in the ribs with what feels like a steel-toed boot, and the pain I feel takes me back to the side of the road next to the wrecked Porsche.
I’m bracing myself to get kicked again when I hear somebody growl, “Enough!”
I would bet my life in that moment that the voice belongs to Roof Crockett.
“The fuck it is,” a voice I don’t recognize says.
“For now, it is,” Roof Crockett says from behind his own mask, his voice muffled but not enough to disguise it, at least not from me.
“Your daddy know you’re here?” I say from the ground, barely able to get the words out with at least two of them sitting on me, one to either side of my rib cage, enough weight to make me stop trying to get out from underneath.
“Whatever you think you know,” he says, “know this, 109. You’re getting off just this one time with a warning.”
“Warning… about… what?” I manage.
“To stay out of everybody’s damn business except your own,” he says.
I take one more kick then, to my other side, and a minute or so later I see them running toward a truck of their own, now visible through the fog.
I roll over, despite the pain that I really am feeling almost everywhere now, trying to get a glimpse of the license plate, just to prove to myself to whom it belongs.
Some of them are trying to climb into the back when I see Bumper jumping up at them, snarling instead of barking, teeth bared, as if she knows what they just did to me.
One of the masked men kicks at her, but somehow she jumps higher as I hear the engine kick over.
I hear one of them yell, “Fuuuuck. The mutt just bit me.”
“Bumper…” I call out. “Noooo.”
The truck pulls off the side of the driveway, spitting gravel.
My dog is running alongside it now, still barking.
I try to call out to her again, but it’s as if my voice is getting weaker.
“Bumper… let them go.”
But then she is sprinting alongside the truck and then, at the last second, cutting in front of it as if she wants to somehow cut them off.
I can see her clearly in the headlights then as the truck runs over her.