Onion Street

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I got about an hour outside of town before stopping to fill up. When I pulled out of the station, the flurries began to fall. At first they fell in big, lazy flakes. They would stop for a while and then start up again, but after another half hour, stopping wasn’t on the storm’s agenda. The snow grew steadier and heavier as the sky darkened. At least I knew how not to get lost on my way home, though the snow and dark made it unlikely that the return trip would take any less time. What I hoped for was that I would eventually get ahead of the weather, because the storm was predicted to stay north and miss New York City altogether.

The roads were getting pretty slick and tricky, the snow accumulating so quickly that I could barely make out the black of the pavement beneath. Look, I’d had my license for less than two years and it wasn’t like I was Richard Petty or A. J. Foyt. I was good at city driving, real good. I was never scared of driving into Manhattan, but I knew adults who would break out in hives at the thought of driving over the Brooklyn Bridge and dealing with yellow cabs and crowded streets. This was something else, though. I didn’t have much experience with rolling hills and snowy country roads. The pressure of driving in my brother’s car wasn’t helping any either. I was several miles away from Route 80 when I felt the Tempest’s snow tires occasionally losing traction. That always made me nervous, the sense of impending loss of control. Maybe that’s why I didn’t dig drugs that much.

Each time I felt the tires spin, lose their grip, I slowed down a few miles an hour. Up to that point I’d been lucky in that I seemed to be one of the few idiots out on the road. So when I slowed, I wasn’t pissing anyone off. In city driving, that was always part of the equation: Am I pissing off the guy behind me? Is he going to get out of his car at the next red light and beat the shit out of me? Thinking about that made me smile and relax a little bit. Then when I looked in my rearview mirror, I noticed headlights that hadn’t been there before. They were back a ways, but the hills made it impossible for me to know how far back. I didn’t think anything of it at first. So what if there were two idiots driving around on these roads? But the next time I checked my mirror, I noticed that those headlights had made up a lot of the distance between us. The next time I looked, the headlights were gone. Well, at least one of us idiots made it home safe.

Thirty seconds later, I felt my body tense, my hands tightening their grip on the wheel, my eyes wide and alert, my heart pounding. I wasn’t consciously aware of the thing that had caused me to react. It was as if my body, independent of my mind, had seen something or heard a sound above the road noise and radio. I clicked the radio off, and just as I did I was blinded by an explosion of light in my rearview mirror. Those headlights hadn’t disappeared at all. The driver of the car on my tail had simply shut off his lights in order to sneak up on me without me knowing, and when he was close enough, he hit his lights and brights at once. The shock of it almost sent me off the road. I shielded my eyes with my hand, turning away from the harsh light. I flicked the button on the bottom of the rearview that darkened the light reflected in the mirror. I sped up to try and give myself time to think, but the guy behind me just raced right up to the rear end of the Tempest, blaring his horn, flashing his lights. For about a mile we repeated this pattern, me racing ahead and him charging right up behind me. The last time I thought there was no way he wasn’t going to slam into me. I sped up at the last second, and there was no contact.

As I drove, my eyes darted left and right, looking for someplace to turn off or turn around, or for a neon sign from an open store or gas station, but the two-lane road wasn’t lit and there was nothing on the roadsides except stone walls, hills, and drop-offs. There wasn’t even much of a shoulder to speak of. Basically, I was fucked. So I just floored my brother’s Pontiac, wishing it had been a GTO and not just a Tempest. Now I was getting bounced around as I came over the crests of the hills, and getting slammed when the car landed back on the road. Whatever the guy behind me was driving, it was having no trouble keeping pace. Realizing I was never going to outrun him, I lifted my foot completely off the gas pedal. If the pavement had been dry, I might’ve slammed on the brakes, but in snowy, slick conditions that wasn’t an option. Unfortunately, I’d chosen to make the move after coming over the top of a steep hill and the car didn’t slow as quickly as I’d hoped.

At the bottom of the hill, the guy behind me let me have the brights again. He blared his horn as the nose of his car came close enough to my rear bumper to give it a kiss. Instead of ramming me, he took the opportunity to pull to my left and try and overtake me. When he did that, I floored the gas and got thrown back in my seat. We climbed the next hill nearly side by side, and that’s when I saw a flicker of light ahead of me coming over the crest of the hill in the other direction. I felt the sweat pouring out of me, gluing my shirt to the skin of my back. This was it. I slowed down as we got to the top of the hill to prevent the guy next to me from sliding in behind me. An air horn split open the night as the cab of a semi appeared. Now it was time for someone else to panic. I steered right to give the semi as much room as possible if he swerved to avoid the other car. The guy menacing me tugged his wheel hard left to avoid the cab of the semi. As I came over the top of the hill, I didn’t so much see what happened as hear it. There was a bang as the car smacked into the stone wall that bordered the road, and then there was another sharp bang as the semi clipped the car’s rear end. Air brakes chuffed and tires screeched, and a cloud of tire smoke and radiator steam filled up the air behind me.

If I was smart or brave, I’d have gone back to look, to see who it was who’d tried to get me killed, if not kill me himself. But at that moment I wasn’t feeling terribly smart or brave. Mostly, I just felt lucky, and kept on going. I don’t think I breathed again until hours later when I saw the lights atop the George Washington Bridge come into view.