My Heart Is a Drunken Compass

by Domingo Martinez

  I was trying to imagine dating someone, even getting across the idea of a date, with someone who not only ran over your dog—hey, that’s a rom-com waiting to happen—but also can’t speak your language, when we rounded a wide, cliffside corner of a deep, dark mountain road with no lights whatsoever and turned directly into a four-vehicle traffic jam, about ten thousand feet into mountain air and an accident just waiting to happen, and I once again had to slam on the brakes and bring the Jeep to a measured halt.

  Sonofabitch.

  What now?

  The darkness of the mountain night was ignited with the amber hue of hazard lights and brakes, and periodic, careening vehicles streaming past—at first slowing, then understanding the curiosity of spectacle, then deciding it wasn’t their affair and moving on, headed off into the prolonged darkness down the mountain range, back onto their own business. But we—Steph and Cleo and me—we decided to make that little cluster of crazy ours, as I pulled over and set my own lights to signal “hazard.”

  “Are you sure you want to get into this?” I asked Steph.

  We had driven around that long mountain curve and came up scared when we saw the cars, four of them: three lined against the shoulder and the fourth, the one causing trouble, tipped into the embankment, the front two wheels off into the dtch and the back two tires raised in the air. This was all happening in the blind corner of a curve, so that any cars coming fast around the corner had just a second to see the car and make an adjustment. It was going to be a fatality any second now, especially since it was on a cliffside.

  This was nightmarish, especially for me.

  And I recognized the Volkswagen Passat from earlier, parked alongside.

  They’d apparently passed us, after Steph and I had stopped at a convenience store and let Cleo pee, and were now trying to make up for their vehicular dogslaughter, presumably.

  Steph was in the passenger seat and looked over at me, and I could see that she’d already come under her moral authority code: We do what’s right. And right now, that meant we had to help. She didn’t even have to say it; I saw it all in her face.

  “We have to help this,” she said.

  I did the shortcut myself, and I knew I couldn’t leave without doing what was needed. I don’t feel that way anymore.

  I said, “All right. Stay here for a moment. Keep her down.” I meant the dog.

  Steph’s door was nearly flat against the mountainside, and Cleo was animated to annoyance with anxiety, so Steph grabbed her collar and pinned the dog down to keep her from leaping out of the Jeep and becoming another casualty that night.

  I caught my breath, timed the cars whipping around the corner, and then left the Jeep.

  It was dangerous, but not exactly “combat-dangerous.” But almost. It was “danger-close” combat.

  The car in trouble was a late-model Pontiac driven by a younger woman in Ugg boots, who may or may not have been inebriated, and who had lost control of the vehicle and miraculously survived a spin on the road but ended up teeter-tottering on the embankment, with another Mexican woman as a passenger.

  Two of the boys from the Passat had the bright idea of hopping on the back of the car, pressing it down to get traction, while the driver was gunning it in reverse. It was a front-wheel-drive vehicle. Had their plan worked, the two boys would have been run over. The car was adjacent to the highway, and, after backing over the two hipsters, the car would have then been traversed into the highway, into oncoming traffic. Everything about this plan was a complete catastrophe about to happen.

  Somehow, I think because I was older than everyone else, I automatically slipped into sergeant major status and began barking orders as soon as I emerged from the Jeep. And cars continued whipping around that corner with no warning, the acoustics on that mountaintop that night giving no indication of the danger coming at us at seventy-five miles an hour.

  They just appeared ... and then they were gone—showing up with nothing nearing the indication that they’d even noticed the clusterfuck of cars on the blind side of that corner before they raced off into the dark of the night.

  Even eighteen-wheeled rigs came out of nowhere: The Doppler effect was on their side, not ours. It was just a matter of time before someone was going to die.

  “You two! Get the fuck off the back of that car!”

  Voooooooooooooofff!

  “What?” they yelled back.

  “Off the fucking car! Get this one out of the way; the Jeep has a tow hitch. Does anyone have a chain or towrope?”

  “We ... we have some hiking rope!” I heard someone else yell, from the other side of the Pontiac.

  Inside the vehicle, the girl was still roaring her engine, and her front tires spun without purchase in the ditch, which was well lit with her headlights.

  Then another trailer came around with a horrifying noise.

  “Goddammit!” I yelled, because I was looking the other way. Even out here, you couldn’t hear if someone was coming around that corner, and thus you had no chance to react.

  “You!” I yelled to some bearded guy standing across the road with his hands in his pockets, trying to keep warm, and then I noticed he’d been talking to the kid who had been holding the dying dog.

  “Get across the road and tell us when there’s another car coming! You hear me?! Warn us when there’s someone coming!” I pointed to a triangulated place where he’d be able to see down the road and still be able to yell at us, where he’d have a line of sight to an oncoming car. He nodded with exaggeration and gave me the thumbs-up signal. Fine.

  I banged on the top of the car and told the girl to stop with the roaring and then directed the owner of the Hyundai that was parked between the Pontiac and the Jeep to get it out of the way; the Jeep had the hitch and the power to pull this car out of the ditch.

  “Move it over to the side of the—”

  “CAR!” the kid over on the side of the road yelled, and sure enough, ZZOOOM!!

  This car seemed to slow down, and I saw brake lights over my shoulder, but I ignored them and focused on what was in front of me.

  “Fuck,” I said. “All right, get your—”

  And here I was handed the hiking rope, which looked like threaded plastic, and the guy who owned it was now under the elevated back of the car—

  “CAR!”

  And there was nothing I could do but hope that—

  ZZZOOOOM!

  FUCK.

  “Get out from under there!” I yelled at the kid, who was heroically looping the thin cord around a brake line. Jesus Christ.

  “Come on, man, get out. This isn’t going to work. Who owns the Passat?”

  “Trevor,” said the kid standing next to me. I can’t even describe him now. I don’t remember his face. Just his fear.

  “Where’s Trevor?”

  “Trevor!” two of the kids began yelling.

  Trevor was the kid who had hit the dog.

  But never mind that now.

  Trevor ran up, his hoodie still bloodied from the dog.

  “In your trunk, under the cover, in the spare tire, you have a towrope. It’s nylon and flat and rolled up with two hooks at either end. Find it and bring it here,” I yelled.

  Then I turned to the two kids standing next to me, who had been trying to pin the Pontiac to the ground.

  “Don’t let her out of the driver’s seat. You two stay—”

  “CAR!”

  ZZZOOOOOOOMMM!

  “Stay out of the road, and stay right here! I’m going to back the Jeep to this po—”

  “I can’t find it! There’s nothing here!” from Trevor, at the Passat.

  “Look in the side! In the side compartment!” I yelled back.

  “OH, I found it!!” he yelled back.

  “Then bring it here!” I think, Jesus; that was lucky.

  “CAR!”

  VARRROOOOMMMM!

  Fuck.

  I thrust myself into the driver’s side of the Jeep and took a deep breath. I
t was suddenly quiet, in the Jeep.

  Steph and I didn’t look at each other.

  “Are you all right?” she asked. She was still holding Cleo, who was trying her best to get out from under her grasp. There was just too much happening for her to be calm. She was shifting, struggling, but silent. A dog muted from electroshock therapy.

  “I think I have this solved. I’m good. How are you? You’re safe here, you know.”

  “There was a man who came by,” she said.

  I had turned on the Jeep and I was backing up carefully as she said this.

  “What?”

  “A man, with a beard, he came to see what was happening and stuck his head in your window, while you were back there.”

  “A man? With a beard? What ... ? Were you ... Did he ...” I wasn’t sure what she was saying. Was she threatened? I didn’t see anyone stop or ... wait—

  “The old station wagon?” I thought I had seen an old station wagon slow down, the first car, earlier.

  “Look, we stumbled into this, and I have to fix this. Nothing’s going to happen to you; stay here,” I said and extracted myself and leaned against the side of the Jeep all the way to the back, where it was now just a few feet from the Pontiac.

  Trevor was standing there behind the Pontiac with the other two kids.

  He handed me the nylon towrope with the hooks on either side as I disentangled the mess of the cord, from earlier.

  “Get out from behind this car. Get to the other side of the road or across the ditch, now.”

  This is bad, I thought. A car or truck careening around that corner hitting the Pontiac would kill five people.

  I looked at the guy across the road to measure his responses and he looked as if he saw nothing, which was a gamble. These kids were idiots. Affable, but idiots.

  I took a deep breath and scrambled under the Pontiac and found a structural support, looped the nylon tow cable and squirmed back out, quick.

  As I stood up, I saw Trevor, the only one left, standing there and waiting to help, awaiting my next bark.

  I looked him square in the eye, and he looked at me, wanting to know what to do.

  I said, “It wasn’t your fault about the dog. He was loose, he had no collar. That happens, in the world. Dogs get killed by cars. It was good you stopped.”

  Maybe that was true about the collar. I don’t remember seeing one. But it made Trevor move.

  VARRRROOOOOMMMMMM!!!! went another car behind us.

  Catching my breath, I told the woman in the car that I was about to get in the Jeep and pull her out: She had to put her car in reverse and I would pull her out. We would travel a little way down the road so that she wasn’t so close to the blind corner—Do you understand what I’m saying here?

  She looked back at me, scared, but understanding.

  All right, then.

  In a second, I scrambled along the side of the Jeep and made it into the driver’s side and buckled in.

  I stepped on the brake and, for a moment, everyone behind me was illuminated: the foolish, out-of-season snowboarders, the guy who stopped by to help but couldn’t do anything, and the two tipsy hot chicks in the Pontiac. I put the Jeep in drive and let the towrope engage, slowly, and the car began to shift, badly, on the embankment, and then VARROOMMM!! another truck whipped by us when the goddamned Pontiac caught front-wheel purchase and they were on the road and began traveling with the Jeep. I dragged the car about thirty feet from the site of the accident, and I set the Jeep to park and I stepped out, undid the hitch, and Trevor was there, running up with his two pals who asked, “How did you know that the towrope was in Trevor’s car?” and I said, “I have a Jetta at home; those Germans prepare for everything,” and the girls were suddenly jumping up and clapping and I said, “Look, I don’t know if you’re drinking or what, but it’s not my responsibility from here, so just ... I don’t know; it’s your choice ... from here,” and I shook someone’s hand who tried to pat me on the back and I left when VARROOOOOMM!!! once again an SUV zoomed past and I just wanted to get the fuck out of there.

  I stepped back into the cab of the Jeep and Steph released Cleo, who put her cold nose in my ear and began smelling all over me. I signaled and entered back onto the highway, and I was feeling like ... All right ... I did something. I helped these helpless kids. Maybe they’ll make an app to stop breast cancer or something, and Steph said, “I was really scared by that man.”

  “Which man?” I asked, not tracking.

  “The man with the beard, who stopped and put his head in your window, while you were gone.”

  “My window is up. My window has been up all this time.”

  “Still,” she said. “He was there.”

  CHAPTER 20 What the Morning Brings

  There was a sense of relief in the darkened cab of the Jeep, after we put some distance between it and the scene of the earlier accident, and I drove us farther into the mountains and into the primordial darkness. We were quiet for some time as we drove on, and the cars that were in front of us or behind us may or may not have been the other participants of that entanglement, may or may not have been the station wagon that had frightened Steph, and as the possibilities grew thinner, she became more open, and talkative, as eventually did I, until we were positively garrulous from nervous energy, and we recounted the experience of those ten dangerous minutes to one another from our different points of view until we agreed on a convergence of narrative, and were able to understand, individually and together, what the hell had just happened back there.

  Eventually our ascending and winding path brought us to the strangest, most unsettling manufactured village in the mountain range, this incredible verdant and brightly lit town that felt half like a military base and half like a set from an apocalyptic film, after the town has been abandoned. It was the control area for a huge dam, right in the middle of nowhere, lit up like an airstrip, and I had just about hit my limit of things that were unnatural and abnormal for the evening. I was actually frightened at this point, because things had become foreign and nonsensical, a lot like what I imagine my being in Belgium would be like. Except with the precision of 1950s American engineering. Like Boeing, with waffles, and Jean-Claude Van Damme.

  After the eventful four-hour drive that we’d had to this point, I was flooded with anxiety and at full emotional capacity with the sense of imminent . . . weirdness. Doom. Change. Religious iconography. I don’t know what it was, but my Catholic sensibilities were just humming by this point, and if I was a smaller sort of mammal, I’d have bolted for the nearest burrow and hunkered down for a day. Maybe nibbled on a carrot, for comfort. As a thirty-nine-year-old human male in an urban environment, I would have normally replaced that burrow with a bar, but here I was, a Gulf Coast flatlander in a mountain land, a foreigner in a foreign land, and in a car with a woman who disapproved of my drinking, so that idea was out.

  Three ominous car wrecks in two hours, and now this creepy isolated town lit up like a militarized installation, and if I had been thinking more clearly, I would have rented a hotel room, said good-bye to Steph, rented a car in the morning, and made it the hell back home.

  But instead I had to pull over and have Steph drive the rest of the way, which was inexplicably just around a corner and then down a steep descent to the valley floor on the other side of the Cascade Mountains. Twisp, Washington: a land devoid of cell phone towers, but with more than a few illuminated crosses on surrounding hilltops. Oh, yeah.

  We followed the instructions in the hiking book, which had now become an invaluable guide through the old, retired logging concern, and it directed us basically into people’s farms and driveways, navigating around goats and annoyed cows, standing and chewing in the middle of unlit dirt roads in the deep darkness. These weren’t mentioned in the guidebook, but we did the best we could in driving around them, and eventually found the trailhead we sought, designated by someone’s hand-painted sign, then rolled up the Jeep to a stop, an elevated bivouac that would k
eep us from being cold, we thought, as we created a nest for the night in the back of the Jeep, for three. Or two and a half. Two legs good, four legs bad.

  The Jeep, after two hours sitting in that mountain valley in darkest October, was like a refrigeration unit set to “Viking.”

  It was a miserable night, made more so by the mania of the dog, who was now smelling deer and bear all around her and demanded a pee every two hours.

  The next morning could not arrive soon enough, and when it finally dawned, I was packed and loaded and ready to head on our further misadventure into the Cascade trail by 6:00 a.m., with only minimal kvetching and a good bit of huffing, and some puffing: I was the load-bearing wall on the hike, the pack animal, because, well, that’s what we do, where I come from. Here was an expression of my Gramma’s people: You need something carried? I can carry anything—bring it on.

  So I had this fantastic rig complete with aluminum infrastructure and multiple holds, compartments, and lofts—all reinforced with zippers and sexiness—and I was John Marion Wayne, baby: Let’s conquer this land, for Texas.

  I looked like a tortoise, and I had about seventy pounds of extraneous gear on my back—multiple tins of soup, dry foods, dog food, ground coffee, a camping coffee-making kit, a BB gun with accessories, pots and pans, silverware, socks, extra clothes, the tent, sleeping bag, foam mats, full water bottles, paperbacks in case we became bored—it was like a ten-year-old had packed it, because that’s kind of what I was: a kid living out what he thought was the fantasy of camping. I even had a utility belt, where I had a machete in a scabbard (in case of jungle vines, duh) and one of those retractable police truncheons—in case of bears: I wasn’t going against a bear with just a machete.

  And we might have even made it to the hidden lake and the raw, natural camping ground we were attempting to reach, if we hadn’t taken a wrong turn within the first fifty feet of the trailhead.

  That was my fault. I forget what confused me, but I led us east on a horse trail, when we should have just trudged up.