Interstate

by Stephen Dixon

  INTERSTATE 6

  Guy pulls out a gun. What do you do when someone does that? You can’t duck; you’re driving in the center lane of a huge highway and there’s nobody in the front seat with you to grab the wheel. You’ve kids in back. They’re the first things you think of, right?—first ones, but you think of yourself too almost at the same time because of whatever’s self-preserving in you or something but more important that if he gets you he gets the kids. He shoots at you and hits, car could go off the road left or right and at the speed you’re going and if he hits you good, there’d be a terrific crash. Car could go across the median strip and into traffic coming the other way, if it first didn’t hit the guy’s car or another one in that lane, or go across both roads, if it missed all the cars on them, and hit some trees in the woods on the other side. Or it could turn over on the strip because there’s a little dip in it, or on the right side past the shoulder because there seems to be a trench there, or just turn over without any trench or dip because of your car’s speed and that you lost all control of the wheel. One way or the other, if you get shot so bad where you immediately lose control of the car, kids won’t have a chance, and guy’s so close, his arm straight out and gun maybe three feet from your face, there’s almost no chance he’ll miss. So what do you do, for christsake, what do you? You yell, your first reaction, at the man “What the hell you doing, please don’t, put it back, the gun,” and to the kids right after that “Duck, kids, duck, guy in the next car’s got a live gun on us.” They scream, you’re screaming, guy’s laughing, driver’s laughing so hard he’s choking, and slapping the dashboard with his hand and steering with the other and gun’s pointed at you and then slowly back to the kids and their car’s still beside yours and keeping up with anything you’re doing to get away from it, dashing forward, braking and fading back, and you’re yelling “Don’t, you can’t shoot,” your window’s open, sonofabitch tricked you into it, signaled something amiss with your car and wanted to tell you what, “please get away, there are kids there, don’t aim that at them, have a heart, oh my God,” and then you think, what do you think? “Think, think,” you think, “think quick,” and you think “Off the road fast as you can, off, off, don’t cut across to the strip as you can get killed doing it, get on the right shoulder right now,” and quickly check the rearview and right side mirrors, no cars anywhere near but theirs, swerve into the slow lane and they get in the lane you just left, onto the shoulder and they get in the slow lane and stay close beside you, gun still held straight out but now back at your head, and you’re screaming and kids are screaming and their car keeps going when you start stopping and just when you think they’re gone for good and you’ve come to a complete sudden stop and say “Kids, stay down,” gunman starts shooting. Youngest kid’s dead, that’s it. You know right away when you hear no sounds from her but plenty from the oldest. All your shouts for her to say something don’t produce anything but more screaming from your other girl. Know when you then jump around and look back and down and see her on the floor in her blood, looking as if she were playing dead. Whatever you might have done it could have ended up same way or worse, right? What could you have done, and what could have been worse? You know what. Not you getting killed. Your own life for years has been just so much shit and will be infinitely worse after this. Nah it hasn’t been that bad but for years you have been feeling frazzled and short of breath, there’s been just brief stretches of pleasure and leisure and fun every now and then and some every-now-and-then semiserious satisfying rumination and work but for the most part it’s been pressures and stresses and a lot of disjointed to coordinated running around at your job and for your wife but mostly for your kids, and now there’s this, essentially ending it. What would have been worse is if both kids had been shot dead instead of one. Better than that but much worse than what happened, one dead and the other maimed for life. Both maimed like that? Better than one dead and the other maimed or okay, so better than the rest. Easy to say what would have been the best. You’ve thought lots of times before this about both kids dying at the same time, usually after you went through a new near disaster with them. Most of it regarding cars: couple of near collisions; also the time your car spun around on an oil slick on a narrow bridge and wound up facing a car bearing down on it. Driving them down the hill to school just after starting out but with the antitheft steering-wheel bar still locked to the brake pedal and you thought you were all going to die and screamed it out before you came to your senses in about five seconds and switched the ignition off and stepped on the emergency brake and turned the wheel to the right far as it would go and guided the car as best you could to a stop against the curb. Street corner where a truck climbed onto the sidewalk where the three of you were and came within inches of clipping them. When the three of you were on a plane to Europe to hook up with your wife—not a near disaster but a thought as the plane took off. In a rowboat when it capsized about a hundred feet out in a sound and for a while when it was getting dark you didn’t know how you were going to get to shore without dragging them there. Opened windows in your in-laws’ apartment—again, just a thought till you closed or lowered them all. Times you pulled out of a parking spot without first checking the left side mirror or turning around and looking at the street and though no cars had ever shot past at that moment, at least when the kids were with you, you wondered what if one had and crashed into you? Better, with those men, to have rammed their car with yours—this is what you could have done—and then veered right into the slow lane or, if that was the lane you were already in, onto the shoulder, but what good would that have done? Maybe sent their car out of control and where it might have gone into a ditch and rolled over or just scared the shit out of them, making them think “This prick means business, let’s get the fuck away,” or maybe it only would have knocked the gun from the guy’s hand when the two cars suddenly hit. Or maybe you could have slammed their car exactly where the gunman was, one sharp left into it that smashed the guy’s hand, and then sped right to get off the road, or dropped back and, after checking your mirrors, cut across the road to the median strip and over it to the part of the highway going north or just stayed on the strip honking and your emergency lights flashing and you outside the car shouting for passing cars and trucks or a state trooper to stop and your free hand flagging them down, and if the men came back for you on the road going north or just across the strip, you could have got off it one road or the other and tried to do something else to escape them—made straight for a state police station if there was a road sign saying one was coming up. You don’t remember seeing one when you drove south but maybe you missed it or there’s one further on or is north on the highway a few miles or so but on the other side of it, like the station. But it could have ended up worse than what happened or you imagined so far. The guy could have shot you in the eye when he saw you making a sharp left at their car and yours could have gone off the road with you already dead and it could have been hit by their car or another one coming from behind or just crashed on its own because you were no longer controlling it, rolled over and exploded or caught fire, kids dead before the car stopped rolling or before it exploded, or dead in the explosion, or worse, trapped in the car and burned alive.