CHAPTER 7
Hydroplaning

A novella by Lynn Hamilton

When Edwina called to say their car had broken down on the west side of Savannah, Veronica said, "Well, what do you expect me to do, Edwina? That /'s our only car you have driven to destruction, and I have problems of my own."

"Veronica, did you hear me say west side Savannah?" Edwina said with a tremor in her voice. "Don't you know what it's like down here?"

"You know what I've always said, Edwina. If you're ever in trouble, think of me and call 911."

"You can't seriously leave me down here in front of Project E. These people are just waiting for sun down to flay me with tire irons. They're gonna be stripping souvenirs off more than my car."

Veronica slammed down the phone.

"Fuck," she said. At times like these, it might have paid to have a few friends.

Edwina had driven their long, crimson Ford away from the sunrise that morning. The reflected rays had been almost unbearable in her rear view mirror. Sam, known locally as "the German Shepherd" because he represented law and order so zealously, stopped her before she crossed Lazaretto Creek Bridge.

"Oh, Sam, turn your lights off, for God's sake," she said as he leaned into her window. "I pulled over, didn't I?"

"Edwina, do you even have any idea why you're here at the side of the road instead of on your way to town?"

"I could probably apply my mind to it, if I weren't so distracted by my reflection in your sunglasses."

Sam lowered his glasses on his nose and looked over them.

"Your rear turn signals aren't working, Edwina."

"Sam, my turn signals haven't worked for two years. You know that."

"Get them fixed, Edwina. That's a cold, cruel world over that bridge." He pointed in the direction of the mainland. "They don't know you. They don't care about you. They won't give you the benefit. What /'s all the junk, Edwina?"

"Recyclables."

"Jesus, Edwina, you look like a rag picker."

"Useful contribution to society, rag pickers. We need to bring them back. Arabbers would be a good idea, too. When was the last time you ate some fresh fruit, Sam? You look constipated."

"Well, why don't you just buy a horse and wagon and do it yourself? You couldn't be more of a traffic hazard than you are now."

"I'm rolling up my window, now, Sam."

"I'm going to ticket you some day, Edwina," he yelled as she raised a shield of plexiglass between them.

When she saw the Hoyden Sign Company, Edwina was stricken by the malaise that always settled on her when she entered civilization. It wouldn't be so bad if civilization, as you entered it, consisted of gentlemanly banks with Doric pillars and roofs modelled on Roman temples, art museums with stone lions standing guard on either side of the sweeping granite staircase, and elegant residences, two-stories high with individual touches of creeping ivy and fresh flowers set in the windows in crystal vases. No, civilization, here, consisted of a wood frame housing complex, once painted white with green trim and now in its late middle stages of disintegration, a tire manufacturer sending up bursts of black, foul, smelling smoke, the factor most often brought up in discussions of what makes Savannah unlivable, and the Hoyden Sign Company, staffed, evidently, by people who had no sense of how ugly their world was. You could tell this, because original deep thoughts of the most fulsome self- righteousness appeared daily on a an electric sign that would have done credit to any major league stadium. From a mile and a half away, Edwina could read the last part of the message which seemed to absorb all the surrounding environment in its bright insistency. "But you can't put it back," it lectured. Edwina braced herself for the pursed lippedness of the first part of this aphorism. Her stomach clenched itself for a knot the way it had fifty years ago, when her second grade teacher had gone on a campaign to improve Edwina's work habits. A few more seconds were allowed for slow processing of this segment. When the second slap finally came, it was almost like a relief. "You can take the day off," it nagged. She would have preferred a ticket from Sam. She exhaled some air that had accumulated in her lungs the way she had when Miss Heath finally turned on another student. She wondered if owning your own home in the most beautiful neighborhood in the world could possibly compensate you for driving to this stretch of the county and going to work for someone like Hoyden.

The mottled, fast-paced sky of the islands gave way to a monotonous gray horizon crowded with electrical towers and power lines, ugly high rises and an occasional church steeple.

Even the cigarette companies somehow knew not to try romantic illusion on this stretch of road. No one would buy it. Billboards sold smoking, instead, with a kind of industrial ennui that said, "Why not? What do you have to live for?" Cigarettes appeared as what they were, only enlarged to twenty feet long and arranged against a nauseatingly bright yellow background that picked up the hue of the "uneven pavement" and "Stay off the shoulder" signs.

These elements of existence at its most minimal gave way to the east side projects, their military nature lovingly dressed over with ferns and kites and ceramic lawn ornaments, which quickly gave way to antebellum manors and townhouses on quiet streets that spoke oblivion to change and surrounding squalor. It always amazed Edwina that, for instance, a three story Victorian mansion with stained glass nooks and enormous porches covering the entire eastern wall could exist, as if with blinders on, next to a tenement clinging to its last boards, in which drug deals were done nightly.

This shimmering stretch of Southern elegance gave way to the west side projects-unrelieved by personal touches-indeed, they seemed frighteningly unlived in.

Happy's Paper Mongers was far from easy to locate. Edwina tried not to swerve from the narrow winding lane as she consulted the map on the seat next to her, but the vicious honks and murderous screams of passing cars indicated that she posed, as Sam all too prophetically had promised, a hazard.

According to the map, she had probably passed it. There was no likely place for making a U-turn, so she turned right, assuming she could go around the block.

She passed a boarded up house and a meadow. The road swung to the left and led to an intersection where there stood three cape cods, also boarded and deserted. She missed something on the horizon. Before making a left-hand turn, she realized it was telephone poles. There were no telephone poles, and no wires. She began listening to her transmission to make sure it was in good health. The road looped around in an arc to the right, passing several more broadly spaced houses, boarded and empty. She had seen no other cars since turning off the highway. There were none in any of the driveways. She slowed down to avoid a puncture by the broken glass covering the road just next to a group of men in their late teens. Their eyes stuck to her as she wended slowly past to the next intersection, made a slow circle and drove back the way she had come. Her transmission coughed. She neither raised her foot off the accelerator nor lowered it. The car roared back into service as she passed again the broken glass and the teenagers who made no move toward or away from her, but watched, as if she were a rare African gazelle escaped from the zoo. On the way back, she looked to see if one or two houses might be occupied. None were. She saw a 20-foot branch lying by the side of the road and some more glass that she had missed before.

By the time she got back to the main road, tears of worry had filled her eyes. Without thinking, she reached for the bag of truffles on the seat next to her and grabbed one for comfort. She had brought them along, thinking to enjoy them in peace, away from Veronica who tended to ask, "Are you going to eat that?" every time she had one raised to her mouth.

Happy's Paper Mongers, as it turned out, was set far back from the road and nearly invisible. Nor was it at the intersection specified in the yellow pages. Happy operated out of a spotless trailer that stood out front, hiding the Dantesque chaos in back where Edwina slowly drove, trying not to run over any stray beer cans, nervous lest a number of the great winding sheets of paper blowing freely over the lot should enfold and entangle her car. Under instructions from Happy, she drove over a shaky metallic bridge which he was pleased to call "the scales." A green traffic light looming at the end of the bridge, and suggesting system in the midst of disorder, let her proceed to a sub-station where the garbage was, if possible, even thicker. The sole two employees she saw in the square mile wasteland looked, she worried, technically insufficient to cope with such piles and layers of raw material. They needed a team of a hundred able-bodied men here, at least, fellows used to heavy-former furniture movers, preferably. Bales of confetti-colored paper were corded together like grain, their edges flapping in the breeze. They looked to have weathered several rainstorms out here, and no one was making any move to use them, shovel them anywhere, compact them or any of the industrious activities Edwina associated with the concept of recycling. One of the two workers was talking on a cellular phone. How could she afford the time? thought Edwina. Why wasn't she busy melting plastic? Look at this place! It needed the tidying of the century. She felt a creeping reluctance to entrust her garbage to them-her carefully scrubbed and sorted garbage that she had fretted over. The lean, defeated looking man to whom she opened the doors and trunk of her Ford made short work of her styrofoam, plastic, and cardboard; in seconds, it was absorbed into the unmoving maelstrom. She could see no trace of its individual existence anywhere. She tried to hand him the box of empty soup cans.

"We don't take no steel," he said.

She looked at him in stunned silence, still holding the box of cans which she couldn't keep from rattling."Where am I supposed to take them then?"

"Throw them out, lady. That's what we do."

"I will pretend you didn't say that," Edwina said with dignity. She loaded the box back into her trunk and drove back over the shaky metal bridge.

"Ten pounds, three ounces," said Happy. He hit his cash register and the drawer popped open with a jeering ring. "That's $1.25."

"A dollar, twenty-five for all that?" Edwina couldn't believe it.

"I don't know why you bother, love. The only ones who make any money are corporations that bring it in by the truckload."

"I'm doing it for the environment, not for cash," she said, drawing herself up with all her lumberjack hauteur.

"In that case, you want to skip the dollar and a quarter?"

"Certainly not. I can use it for coffee."

Back on the main road, she ate another truffle, the amaretto one, for comfort, thinking as she munched, that it had cost more than the combined value of all her garbage obsession.

She was driving past project E when the Ford died altogether. The sun of a short day was already starting to set. She took deep breaths and ate another truffle. Then she tried to start the car. A short, sharp electrical grunt of indignation was all she got. She waited a few minutes and tried again. The automotive equivalent of an obscenity was all that rewarded her for her patience. It occurred to her that she was going to have to unlock her doors and walk through this neighborhood. To confirm this impression, a police car idling slowly by and visible in her rear view mirror sped up and shot past when she rolled down her window and made desperate imploring hand signals and mouthed the word "help."

She walked rapidly and purposefully. She thought hard about whether it were more effective to make eye contact or not and decided against it. She passed a group of high school age girls, clustered on the porch of a run down bungalow.

"Hello, officer," one of them called out, cheerily. The others giggled.

The nearest phone was two miles down the road at Otto's tires and batteries. Otto didn't deign to speak, he just pointed at the phone booth she had walked right past, moments before.

On the walk back to her car, Edwina regretted that she had now finished the truffles. If she was going to die, she would prefer to do so with the taste of chocolate in her mouth. From somewhere, she heard the sound of glass hitting a sidewalk from a considerable height. The last waning light glinted off the fortress-like windows of the projects. She tried to hold on to her fear, thinking it a survival implement, but it slipped from her and in its place grew a creeping lethargy that took an interest in saying the alphabet, slowly, as she past project complexes A through D. Fear didn't even return to her when she saw that the left rear tire of her car had been removed and one of the doors pried open with a crowbar.

Chapter 8