Thu, 19 May 2005

little girls
This was a number of years ago; I was in high school, wasting a Thursday night with a couple friends driving around pretending enough roaming would unearth adolescent treasure. It was winter, and the streets were frozen, sheets of ice from drift to drift, and up ahead of us we saw headlights arc left and right across the road and spin out to blackness. We slowed, searched for tracks off the road. This was out by North Cedar Elementary (I think it’s elementary), where there’s a road that cuts out toward the highway, out by the airport, so that if you keep going you come up behind the crash embankments at the end of the runway, set on this flat plain where flood runoff from the Cedar comes right up to the dirt road in the spring, curbless, so that in the frozen-over winter one could drive right out onto the river and not even know it. This is what had happened to the other car, slammed through a truck-mounted plowed bank (the city trucks never came out this far into the sticks) and slid out onto the Cedar. It occured to us that the car could go through the ice, and we were too far from a phone (we’d have to go back to the gas station back on old 218, maybe even across the river to old downtown; I don’t remember if any of the convenience stores in North Cedar were 24-hour at the time, and it must have been at least one in the morning), so we stopped, got out, and called out to the other car. There was no reply. The headlights went out over the river, but the engine had killed in the spin. It was very quiet. We talked about whether it would be better to stay on the road or to go out, to add to the weight, but isn’t the shore further out, and not this far at this time of year, and even so isn’t it not all that deep for quite a ways out, being a floodplain and all, and though we couldn’t see any trees to server as bank and depth markers we weren’t sure of any of this, this wasn’t our neighborhood (which was the reason we were out here, promised some sort of backwoods promise, of the place off the edge of the map), and there was no way to know. We called out again, got out the flashlight and knocked it against my thigh to get the batteries to connect, let the thin light dribble out, short of the car. We were young, and not very smart, so we went out, one by one, to the car.

Inside we found two young children, both girls, who were working together in order to drive the car, one steering while the other worked the pedals. There were suitcases in the back seat, which had opened in the crash; a half-dozen shirts and personal effects and nothing else. The girls were conscious, breathing, but refused to acknowledge us, to reply to our arguments, sprawled out in overly dramatic poses, one on the seats and the other on the floor, tongues sticking out of their mouths. We knocked on the windows. The children ignored us. The heat of the car seeped away, and the chill caused the to shiver, but still they would not get up, would not unlock the door, would not pay any heed to our crazy talk of rivers and ice and death.

We decided the best thing to do was to go back across the river and make a call from Happy Chef, or ask one of the everpresent overnight cops hanging out there to go out and bring the children in. There were no police there, but there was a large man with a truck and tow chains, caught up in the drama, and after we called the police we had him follow us back out there, only to find nothing. The car had been brought back onto the road and driven back to where it came from, assumedly. The truck-man pointed out the second tracks out off the road, another truck which had pulled in the car. I noticed the cloud of footprints out in the snow near the site where the car was. There was a chase. That’s all we could tell. The truck-man shrugged, asked us if we wanted a beer, and that’s how we met Trenchcoat Larry.

I never heard of the two little girls again.
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #