DUI

by

Terry Wright

           Cigarette smoke drifted lazily in the cone of light that beamed down from a Coors lamp hanging above the pool table. Dagger Man belched, rubbed the tattoo on his arm, and took aim on the cue ball. His mother had named him Burt. He didn’t like that name, or his mother, for that matter.

“You’re gonna miss,” said Red Dog, his alcohol-laden words slurring.

Squinting bloodshot eyes, Dagger Man snarled. “Kiss my ass, grunt face.”

A crowd gathered around. Deckers’ redneck bar smelled of sweat and beer and stale pizza, but mostly beer. Here in the armpit of Texas, the lawless riffraff of society hung out, talked of time done in prison and whose old lady gave the best head. Right now their eyes were on the pool table, and a hush fell over them like the plague.

Dagger Man armed sweat from his forehead. So what if the shot looked impossible: a two-bank, three-ball run. With ten beers in his gut, he felt brave, even invincible, although unsteady on his feet. Drunkenly, the stick wobbled in his grasp and just touched the cue ball, which moved ever so slightly.

“That’s a shot,” Red Dog shouted. “Step away, piss ant. It’s my turn.”

“Bullshit!” Dagger Man steadied the stick. What a stupid rule. It was an accident. Anybody could’ve seen that. Screw it. He went ahead and took the shot anyway.

“Hey!”

The cue ball hit the three ball with a crack. Balls started dropping into pockets like ground hogs ducking into their burrows. Onlookers erupted in cheers as the eight ball fell last.

“You lose, Red Dog. Pay up! Fifty bucks.”

Red Dog puffed out his chest. “You son-of-a bitch. The shot don’t count.”

Boos erupted from the crowd.

“You know the rules,” a loudmouth yelled.

          Dagger Man would tolerate none of that. Rules were for pussies. As if by instinct, without even thinking in his drunken state, he landed the cue stick right upside Red Dog’s head.

          Everything after that went by in a drunken blur, fists swinging, boots kicking, men cursing. The next thing he knew, he was sprawled on the sidewalk out front, his face in the gutter.

“And don’t be driving tonight,” the bartender yelled and slammed shut the door.

Bastard! Dagger Man could drive if he damn well wanted. Just because they took his driver’s license away, didn’t mean shit. He’d been hauled in for DUI five times already. He was getting good at it, walking the line, picking up nickels, and babbling out the alphabet. A-B-C-G-S-T-V, screw the rules! They can stick my license up their asses.

Now Burt the Dagger Man wasn’t only drunk, he was pissed off. He fished keys from his pocket and staggered toward his black Chevy dually.

“It’s beautiful, Mommy.”

Michelle smiled at the gleam of delight in her daughter’s blue eyes. “You’ll be the prettiest ballerina there.”

“Oh, Mommy. I can’t wait.”

She laid the pink and white tutu they’d selected on the counter.

“When’s the big day, Mrs. Brown?” the clerk asked as she rung up their purchase.

“Tomorrow night,” Michelle replied. “Shirley’s been working really hard for this recital, isn’t that right, sweetie?”

“Daddy is going to be so proud.”

The clerk leaned over the counter and smiled down at the little girl. “You sure are a cutie pie.”

She twirled her red skirt around, rose up on the tiptoes of her shiny black shoes, and smiled. “I’m six years old.”

“And full of mischief,” her mother added.

“Daddy thinks I’m silly.”

“Ah—to be young again,” the clerk said and fitted the tutu on a hanger for the trip home.

“We are proud of her,” Michelle said.

“Can we get some ice cream?” Shirley asked, skipping toward the door.

“It’ll ruin your supper.”

Outside, day had turned to dusk, but the heat of the desert still hunkered down on Deckers as if the whole town were entombed.

“Is Daddy home yet?” Shirley asked as she hopped on the Ford’s back seat.

“He’s waiting for us.” Michelle carefully hung the prized tutu on the ceiling hook. “Buckle your seat belt, dear.”

“Will Grandma be at the recital?”

“Everyone’s taking pictures.”

“Oh, Mommy. Tomorrow is so far away.”

Michelle chuckled. “When you’re 40, I’ll remind you that you said that.”

Shirley screwed up her face. “Is Daddy forty?”

“No, darling. Twenty-five.”

“That's old.”

“Are you ready?”

“I’m hungry.”

Rush hour traffic whizzed by. Michelle eased on the throttle and merged the Ford into the flow of traffic on Deckers Boulevard. The light up ahead was green.

“I love you, Mommy.”

Michelle glanced to the rear view mirror. “I love you too, sweetheart.”

Suddenly, a black truck came from out of nowhere, so fast it didn’t seem real, careening through the red light at horrendous speed. Michelle slammed on the brakes. She swerved. Tires screamed. Time eroded into slow motion. Crunching metal filled the night, crashing, smashing, ripping, and twisting as if the Ford were but a flimsy pop can.

Spinning, rolling, tumbling.

Grating and screeching.

Then it felt as if the hand of God reached down and set the fury to rest.

Silence was the first thing Michelle noticed. Her heartbeat came next, and then the coppery taste of blood, the smell of gasoline. The steering wheel was twisted, the air bag deployed, the windshield shattered, and the seat askew. A moment later, it couldn’t have been more than a second—she became aware of crackling and popping sounds. Her dazed mind envisioned the campfire at Deckers Pond, the trout in the frying pan, crying out in pain as if it could feel the searing heat, now screaming with the voice of a child. A child? Shirley?

“SHIRLEY!”

Painfully craning her head around, she saw darkness, pavement littered with glass and debris, and people running. The entire back end of the car was gone, ripped away by the force of the collision.

“SHIRLEY!”

Crackling and popping.

Screaming.

Hot adrenaline spilled into her bloodstream. Shaking violently, she tried to unfasten her seatbelt, but a horrendous pain shot up her broken arm. Gritting bloody teeth, she forced her mind to make her hand obey. In another moment, she crawled from the wreckage and clawed her way to her feet, her eyes now able to see over the buckled car roof. Toward the sidewalk, by the bus stop, the most horrible sight she’d ever seen met her gaze.

The back end of the Ford was on fire. Flames licked skyward, popping and snapping. Plumes of smoke curled into the night.

“SHIRLEY!”

Staggering toward the inferno, Michelle cried out, weeping as she moved forward, dragging a broken foot but not caring. A crowd had gathered around but kept their distance from the intense heat of the blaze.

Someone shouted, “Call 911.”

Screams of a child stabbed the desert air like a million knives.

A stranger grabbed Michelle’s arm. “You’re hurt, lady. You shouldn’t be…”

She shoved him away and kept moving, tried to run but stumbled, felt her mind decay into chaos. This couldn’t be happening. It was all a bad dream.

Sirens wailed in the distance.

As she pushed her way through the crowd, she heard snippets of conversation. The onlookers’ voices revealed to each other what they had witnessed.

“Did you see that truck?” one said.

“A Chevy dually.”

“The guy was driving like a maniac,” another added. “He must’ve been drunk.”

“It looked like Burt Danford,” someone added.

“He didn’t stop—kept going like a crazy man.”

Hunched over from a horrible pain in her guts, she finally made her way through to the front of the crowd. There, the inferno that once was her car, sent sparks spinning into the night sky. An awful stench of burning flesh rose with the wind. 

“SHIRLEY!” 

She lunged forward but someone stopped her. In horror, she stood there, totally helpless. All she could see of her daughter were two little legs protruding from the wall of fire, two little feet kicking spastically, two shiny black shoes igniting into flame. The tutu that hung from the crumpled ceiling burst into a pillar of fire and collapsed to the pavement with a whoosh.

Michelle’s knees buckled, and the asphalt rushed up to meet her.

“Mommy!” Shirley saw her mother fall to the ground. She didn’t move. “Mommy!” But something felt so weird about this. Only a moment ago, the fire was burning her up. Now she was floating above the crashed car, like an angel on silken wings. And she wasn’t in pain anymore. Below, people stopped their cars and came running. A black pickup truck sped away, a piece of it scraping the road and sparking like the Fourth of July.

As she rose higher in the night sky, she felt like something was pulling on her, not by the hand like Mommy did through the supermarket, but by some mighty arm that had somehow swooped down, gathered her up, and rushed her away from this horrible place.

“Mommy!”

Though Shirley felt safe in the crook of this arm, she didn’t want to go with it. “What about my recital?” she said to the arm as it took her into a bright light.

“My tutu?” Now she remembered it was ruined, all burned up because of that bad man driving the black truck.

“Mommy, help me!” As soon as she thought the words, she knew her mommy wasn’t coming. She could hear her crying, her sobs echoing from somewhere in the distance. 

Bright light glowed all around her now. Shirley saw her death and understood what had happened. The light made it very clear. A drunk driver had taken away everything she owned, her mommy and daddy, her tutu, her recital, and worse, her future.

Tears began to flow, and in spite of the beauty of this place in the light, she wailed with all her soul. “Mommy!” 

She was bawling so intensely that she hadn’t noticed the man appear. He was just suddenly there, standing in the light, a silver-haired cowboy, clean-shaven and handsome, his soft gray eyes looking on her with deep concern. He smelled like Daddy. Though startled at first, she wasn’t afraid. “I want my mommy.”

“Now there, little lady,” the cowboy said. “What’s all the fuss about?”

She sniffled. “I was on fire and my mommy fell down.” She wiped a tear-stained cheek with the back of her hand. “Who are you?”

He kneeled next to her. “My name is Justin. What’s yours?”

“Shirley Brown. Are you a cowboy?”

Justin removed his hat and smiled. “Sometimes.”

“Can I go home now?”

“But you just got here.”

“Please, mister cowboy Justin. I’ll miss my recital.”

“I'm sorry.”

Somehow Shirley knew there was no going back. “It’s all his fault.”

“Who?”

She pointed to the light so it would show Justin what she had seen there. “That man in the truck.”

The light parted and revealed a black Chevy dually recklessly racing through town, police cars in hot pursuit.

“I’ll be right back,” said Justin. The light swallowed him, and Shirley felt suddenly alone.

          Dagger Man cranked the steering wheel hard and floored the accelerator. Tires screamed as the dually clawed through the curve and spun off smoke as it fishtailed down Highland Park Drive, dragging the front bumper, grating and creaking. Now Dagger Man was really pissed off. The goddamned bitch in the Ford got in the way and busted up his truck.

Glancing in the rearview mirror, he got a quick glimpse of the posse chasing him, sirens wailing. Must’ve been a hundred flashing lights back there. He couldn’t be sure, though. Sometimes there were four yellow lines on the road up ahead. Sometimes there were eight. And he kept running into things, like the trashcans back there in Bender’s alley. He swore he was gonna miss them by a mile.

Now, as if he had all the time in the world, two cars in front of him were going slower than dirt—no—make that four cars. He laid on the horn and the throttle and crashed into all four of them at the same time. They spun off the road and broadsided a telephone pole. That’ll teach the bastards to get in Dagger Man’s way. Give ‘em a little shove, like the bitch in the Ford. He cackled drunkenly, hit the curb, and took out a row of parking meters on the sidewalk.

“Yahoo!”

But something must’ve gone wrong with his truck. It started to smell bad, really bad, bad enough to make him gag and almost lose all the beer he’d been drinking. It didn’t smell like burning oil from a ruptured engine pan. No, this smelled more like burning flesh, or better yet, rotting flesh, like that cat he and Red Dog had gutted, buried, and then dug up a week later to pitch into Mrs. Miller’s mailbox. Man that was nasty, like his truck...

Suddenly, he felt a pressure on his chest, a presence, that feeling of being busted for pissing in the alley. With a start, he looked to the passenger seat and realized he was drunker than he thought. He saw a stinking old man riding shotgun, his long coat clotted with mud and cowboy hat raining down dirt. No way!

Engine roaring, the dually shot across Jackson Feed’s parking lot, bounded over a drainage ditch, and careened through Mrs. Miller’s flower garden. The squad cars still wailed in the rearview mirror. Cops and cowboys—what kind of freakin’ ass night had this turned into?

“Hey, Burt.” 

The voice that came from the passenger seat sounded as grating as the bumper dragging on the pavement. Dagger Man’s throat clutched. Now this drunken hallucination was talking to him. The beer he drank must’ve been some kind of rotgut.

With a bang, the dually sideswiped three cars parked along Lincoln Avenue.

“Why don’t you stop this truck before somebody else gets killed?”

That was it. Dagger Man wasn’t taking any shit from no hallucinogenic cowboy. “Shut up or get the hell out!” he told the aberration. “You’re stinkin’ up my truck.” He sent the dually into a side skid through the intersection and tore off toward midtown.

Shifting in his seat, the old man braced himself with a bony hand on the dashboard. “Name’s Justin Graves,” he rasped. “But you can call me Justice.”

Dagger Man took out a fire hydrant with a bone-jarring bang. JESUS! The son of a bitch was real, no genuine imitation Budweiser frog, but the friggin’ ghost of Justin Graves. “What the hell do you want?”

Skidding into the parking lot of Deckers Market, the dually ripped through a clutch of shopping carts, sending them clattering in every direction.

“Justice for a little girl,” said Justin.

Sirens wailed. Tires screeched. Two police cars coming head on tried to block the road.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dagger Man skidded the dually hard left and took the only way out, a railroad track marked Southern Pacific.

“You killed a child back there.”

“Is it my fault the bitch don't know how to drive?”

Bones rattling, Justin huffed a hollow breath. “Stop the truck, Burt.”

“On your day off!”

A bright light appeared from around a curve down the tracks. The dually was banging over railroad ties so violently, Dagger Man thought it was going to fall apart. And Justin riding shotgun looked like he would be shaken into a pile of dust. 

“This is serious shit,” Justin said, his voice smooth in spite of the rough ride. “You’ll get twenty years behind bars for vehicular homicide. Take the time off to clean up your act. Believe me, the alternative is much worse.”

“Jails have rules. I have no use for rules.”

“An eternity in servitude to the devil is your only other option. From his rules there is no reprieve.”

Getting closer and closer, the bright light kept coming, the horn now blaring louder and louder.

The pursuing police cars bounced off the track and fishtailed down the grade.

“Screw the devil’s rules, too”

“You’re too drunk to be driving, much less to understand.”

Dagger Man had to laugh at that one. They were on a  collision coarse with a friggin’ train. Head-on. What was so hard to understand about that? He could hear the diesel engine drone, feel the dually shudder from the added vibration. But he figured he could make the access road to Deckers Creek, just up ahead. He was sure of it.

“You have to stop drinking,” Justin said. “You have to stop driving.”

With a sneer, Dagger Man turned his attention to the ghoul stinking up his truck. “Justice, you don’t get it, do you? There’s no stoppin’ guys like me. Your rules suck. Take our driver’s licenses, cancel our insurance, make us wear these stupid ankle bracelets, and send us to a million classes. We don’t give a shit. I don’t give a shit. You can’t stop me from drinkin’. You can’t stop me from drivin’.”

“Maybe not,” said Justice. “But that train can.”

Whipping his head around to the front, Dagger Man gasped, the train's bright light now glaring smack-dab in the middle of his windshield.

“JUSTICE!”

With a gust of wind, the ghoul was gone.