Roadside Attraction

This story appeared  in 2018 in Flash Fiction, Flash Memory
Published by Anchala Studios. 

Breau rolled in after midnight, stinking under the arms and covered in clay. He’d capsized the four-wheeler in a ditch to avoid hitting a deer, he said. More likely he’d fallen asleep drunk and woke up in six inches of filthy water. I told him to whoa right there in the laundry room and strip. He showered with his ball cap still on, gripping the shower nozzle with one hand and soaping his body with the other.

Breau liked the red wine, creature comforts, boiled shrimp and moonlight on the bayou, in that order. He loved his babies and me, and he always came home, no matter how late or how flavored his blood was with alcohol. When the circuit judge of Feliciana Parish took away his driver’s license for the final time, Breau just bought a Yamaha 4-wheeler and drove off-road between home and Ti-Louis’ roadhouse and the lumber yard left to him by his drunk of a Daddy.
When he flipped the Yamaha the first time, I took the key away until he had roll bars installed.
The second time, I rounded up the children and had them beg Breau to wear a helmet. He started to cry midway through the intervention. But he never did trade his ball cap for protection.

The women in my family have a talent for marrying mannish boys. We like them tall and strong, but we never check under the hood to see if they’re fully grown. You can love a man till death do you part, but never marry a shrimper, a drunk, or a preacher.  You don’t want to be the wife of anyone who wears white boots or kills himself young or tells other people they’re going to hell. No good can come of it.

So Breau had flipped the quad for the third time. The next morning while he was sleeping it off, I borrowed a truck with a winch to find the crash site. I took our eldest, Jorge, along in case there was a chance we could right the vehicle and ride it home. What we found was a flattened mess of metal and ABS plastic, its roll bar reduced to tinsel by the force of the impact when the quad landed, top down. Me, I’m no believer, but the fact that Breau was alive is theological proof of the miraculous. Jorge stared at the tangled remains in the ditch for several long minutes, his hands thrust into his jeans back pockets, his thin young face a question mark.

“We gonna leave this here?” he asked.

“Best to. We gonna let your Daddy come look at it.”

“What if someone takes it away? For scrap?” Jorge asked.

“Let’s put a note on it,” I said. “Write, ‘EVIDENCE. DO NOT TOUCH.’“

That evening, at sunset, I drove Breau down to see the 4-wheeler. He was clear-headed after a long sleep and a meal. There is a certain stage of sobriety among men who drink every night when they are their best selves: reasonable and generous with affection. During these few hours, they can accomplish great things. They write chapters of their novels, fix cars, raise their young ones. They also make promises. Oh, how they make promises.

Breau approached the remains of his off-road sport utility vehicle. He stood some distance away, at first, edgy as if it was a sow who might charge him for approaching her shoats. Then he took slow, careful steps, stopping again 10 feet from the ditch.

“It ain’t a snake, Breau,” I said. “It won’t rear up and bite you.”

His legs were shaking. He brought his hands up to his face and sank down on his knees in the damp red clay.

“Oh God, Oh SHIT!” he wailed. “How did this happen? Why don’t I remember this happenin?”

“You were drunk, plain and simple,” I said. 

There’s no point in beating a man when he’s down, and there’s no point in acting the wine sheriff. All those women in my family who married callow men, they sure did try, though. But none of their nagging made a whit of difference. You can’t save someone from himself.

But a man who sees the miraculous in his own life and who sees his mortality cartwheeling away at the side of a two-lane blacktop road, that’s a man who just might stand a chance. Not of being saved, but of saving himself.  It could happen.