1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE/SLICK GRAVEL

After Nilene's heroic driving skills taking Neila to the hospital, I didn't worry too much about the way she handled a car.  For sure,  we were all far too young to be driving at 14, but it was the law.  We could, so of course we would. 

Several of us had been involved in a wreck the year before in her convertible.  The top was up.  It was an old off-white  1953 Nash Rambler.  We weren't really going fast, but we were talking, and I believe the other car ran a stop sign.  Or maybe we did.  My dad seemed very interested in the details which were of no significance to me.

Just after earning my license, I had been an involuntary participant in two other fender benders that summer, one in which I was driving and an elderly woman ran a yield sign and hit my car.  It didn't do any damage to the car, and she didn't want to call the insurance, so I didn't bother to tell my parents.  A year or so later, when I slipped up and told them, they were appalled.

 I told them I was afraid they wouldn't let me drive any more and  said reasonably "I've been driving another year without an accident, so it would have punished me for something I didn't need to be punished for."  I gave them so little trouble as a teenager, they simply looked at each other and by tacit agreement didn't challenge my assertion, even though their looks told me they didn't agree my handling of the incident.

The other wreck had happened much the same way, only my friend Nancy was driving, and again an elderly woman ran a yield sign and hit us.  We 9th graders were like magnets for white haired females driving big lumbering cars. 

We had to call the police because of the damage to the car, but we weren't hurt.  My father got a little more upset each wreck I was in, but even though our family had suffered the ultimate tragedy a year earlier when Susan died as a result of a car wreck, I guess I still felt invincible.  I tried to reassure him that everything was all right, and would have again protected him from the knowledge, but the police insisted on notifying him.

But on that bright spring day of the wreck with Nilene, a day so pretty it'd make you cry, Nilene slammed on the brakes, and we skidded on the gravel street right into the passenger side of a car containing a schoolmate, a boy we all liked.  None of us were hurt seriously, but images of  the look of surprise and dread on his face haunted me for weeks after the wreck.  His older sister, the driver, calmed us all down and called the police.  Miraculously, no one was hurt.  Our friendship continued unabated and we still spent lots of time together.

Nilene came to visit one clear April day in her car,  fairly flying over the cattle guard,  hitting the first pothole  in the driveway with a loud bump; the second pothole bouncing her car up like a bucking bull.  As she neared the house, I walked out on the porch to meet her and saw her face, grinning crazily,  through the windshield.

 Jumping from her car and assuming a roping stance,  she yelled, "Ride 'em cowboy!", swinging an imaginary lasso in a circle with her right hand.  "Woohoo!" 

I laughed appreciatively.  "You could hit those holes a little slower, cowgirl," I said, teasing her.

"No, I enjoy the ride," she returned, her good humor apparent.  "Course my daddy's gonna have to buy me some new shocks pretty soon if we stay friends."

We spent the rest of the day talking, calling people on the phone, making plans for the summer and cooking fudge,  a favorite thing we did with friends. 

"I want to go to a lot of baseball games this summer," Nilene said, licking a spoon of dark chocolate.  "All the cute boys play baseball, so we can see a lot of them at one place."

"Sounds like fun to me," I said.  "We need to spend a lot of time at the pool, too.  Not as many there because a lot of them will be working, but still some."

Jan came in with the guitar and wanted to play a folk song for us she'd been practicing.  It had 3 or 4 chords and she'd mastered them pretty well.  She sang along with the song, but faltering for the words, had to run back to her room to retrieve the lyrics which were printed out on a piece of typing paper.  There were seven or eight verses, all with  repeating chorus and melody. 

"I've got to go," Nilene said all of a sudden, glancing outside.  "It's starting to get dark.  I told my Daddy I'd leave before dark.  I need to call him.  He's going to meet me on Highway 31 at the drive-in."

She left hurriedly after calling her dad, waving cheerily as she left.  She had put the top down a little earlier in the afternoon, so her blonde curls were blown about by the wind as she drove down the long drive toward the gravel road.

Jan and I were in the living room, doors and windows open wide to take advantage of the cool spring weather, about to practice some harmony on the folk song, when we heard an odd sound.  It sounded far away, but not too far.  I described it as sounding like the release of a giant spring.  Kind of a "sproing" sound.  We discussed it, but couldn't come to any conclusion what it was.  It was only about 10 minutes, though, till we knew exactly.

During the fourth stanza of  our best harmony blending rendition of Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley, we were startled to see someone coming up the dark walk.  Night had consumed the front yard.  We rose almost reflexively to close the door, fear crossing our faces briefly until we realized  it was Nilene,  holding her left arm like it was a baby, limping, and crying.

 "I ran off the bridge," she wailed.  Her demeanor, so changed and uncharacteristic, ignited terror in my heart,  my breath seeming to stop momentarily.

There were two bridges between our house and the farm to market road.  A small bridge, formed by a culvert placed under the road, and a big bridge that crossed a creek that ran about eighteen feet below the road.

"You ran off the little bridge?" we asked in unison, unable to comprehend anything worse.

"No, no.  The big bridge," she whined.  "My daddy will be waiting for me.  He'll be worried.  I think my brakes locked , and I skidded down the bank.  I had to climb up to the road.  I think my wrist is broken."

I could think of nothing but the terror of the inky darkness and the added terror of snakes of all kinds that I knew lived in that creek, water mocassins and copperheads at the very least. 

Mother arrived home about that time, and we quickly loaded Nilene in the car, she the patient this time rather than the driver, and took her to meet her dad at the drive-in.  He in turn headed to the hospital where they found out her wrist was indeed broken, and she was given a clean white cast.

 Within a few days, she realized she had climbed through poison ivy on her trek out of the creek, and the vicious rash tortured her beneath the cast.  She made her own "scratcher" out of a coat hangar, which she carried to school in her notebook.  We laughed watching her frantically scratching under the cast, often ending the frenzied activity with a long, loud "ahhhh", a look of satisfaction coming across her face, irregular red marks showing through the thick freckles on the ivory skin of her arm.

Later that spring, in May, she introduced me to the boy I would marry, though neither she, he, nor I would have guessed it at the time.  I was nearly fifteen, and just able to begin car dates.  Her date was a boy named Roy and mine had the unusual name of Coy. 

Though Coy and I dated all summer, we only shared that one date with the other couple, our ways diverging sharply as we entered high school.  I still spent summers at Camp Wanica with Nilene, but she married at the end of our senior year, and though I visited her in her cute little house, I left for college and we drifted apart.  Roy moved to the Houston area with his family,  and we heard through the grapevine that near the end of his high school career, he killed his father in order to protect his mother.

Things just happened to people.  Coy and I talked about it a few times; I wondered privately about it; we went on with our lives.  But it was odd how you could be close to people, then their lives turn so abruptly in a different direction.  You'd wonder if you could have stopped it if you'd stayed close to them, but it didn't really make any difference.  What happened, had happened, and you couldn't change it. 

I always kept a soft place in my heart for Nilene, though, because she made me laugh, and years later she'd enter my life again, but an underlying sadness would replace the joy we had known in our relationship when we were younger.

"Au reservoir," I'd call to her some days when we parted,  waving goodbye, poking fun at my study of French.

"Well Boulder Dam to you ,too!" she'd laugh, hopping in her car in that jerky way she had, spinning out slightly, throwing up just the tiniest bit of gravel.

I wanted to anchor her, keep her safe, but she was like a brightly colored hot-air balloon untethered from its moorings.  The flight looked deceptively harmless and calm, but as she floated higher and farther from base,  all I could do was watch until she drifted out of sight.