A Road To Cross Over

I was driving down the mountain when I saw a frail-looking woman on the side of the highway, waving her arms over her head. It was a bright blue summer morning. The sun was warm and the air was cool and I drove with the window down. In the turnout next to this woman was a square car with the rear passenger-side door flung open to a rocky drop-off, which angled to the lake some sixty feet below. It was early and the highway was quiet. This happened right next to the Shaver Lake Dam, a concrete monolith over still, black water. On the lake, fishermen in tin boats with tiny outboards crept slyly over the flat water below the dam. They trailed nylon fishing lines that threw back glimmers of morning sunlight.

“Should I pull over?” I was talking to this guy I was taking to the airport. He had a plane to catch and we were behind schedule.

“It’s going to slow us down some,” he said. He didn’t want to stop for the woman. He was already nervous about missing his flight, and that was before we saw this woman stranded on the side of the highway. It went through my mind to leave this woman for the next passerby. But how could I just pretend she wasn’t there? She was waving her arms, after all, the universal signal for “I need help.”

“I’ll make it up,” I said, and I pulled over. The guy let out a little sigh.

We were on opposite sides of the highway, me and this frail woman. I parked and rolled down the window. I could see just how willowy she was now. She was on the short side as well, a woman with some years on her occupying the body of a child.

“Need help?” I hollered across the highway and the woman put her arms down. This was a narrow two-lane highway, more like a road than an actual highway. When I hollered, the woman didn’t answer. For a second, she stood by the front of her car and stared at me, stiff and ghost-like. Her face was stony and featureless, except for her gray eyes, which were wide open, but there was no light coming from them. There was no recognition in them at all, no expression of gratitude or relief at my having pulled over to help her. It was as though they were focused on something far away. This wasn’t what you might expect in a situation like this, but you could tell right away that the woman wasn’t altogether. There was something off about her. She looked locked within some secret place. There was a blankness. She looked at me in a quiet, slow way, like I was a person she was trying to remember. She cocked her head a little to one side.

The guy I was with said, “Weird.”

“Spooky,” I said.

“We should go.” He rapped me on the shoulder with the back of his hand. I don’t know what he thought might happen. He was a bit world-weary, this guy. He was cautious. And then there was the thing with his flight.

The woman started walking across the road then, heading straight to me. She walked slowly and straight-shouldered, shuffling as though in bedroom slippers. Her arms were straight down at her sides. She wore light pants, white sneakers, and a yellow nylon jacket. It was a bright yellow, like something a person on a highway crew might wear, a jacket you could see from a distance. Her graying hair hung straight to her jawline and curled under at the ends. It was cut in a neat line over her brow so that it squared her face. Her eyes seemed to take in nothing around her, and in her face there was a look of unsettled wonder as though she were watching strange lights in the sky. She wasn’t smiling, though, like you might imagine with wonderment and newness. Instead, her mouth made a straight line under her small nose. It was a stick figure mouth. There was no upper lip or lower lip: just that thin, straight line. And her face began to furrow. There seemed to be something slowly blooming in her mind. 

The guy I was with said, “I got a funny feeling.” And that was before the woman put her hands behind her back.

I was driving a large, long van with a high profile. It was a summer camp van with windows, as opposed to a cargo van that moves furniture or pianos or things of that nature. This strange, silent woman shuffled right up to the driver’s side door of that camp van. She got right up next to me. Her chin was no higher than the bottom of the window, and she looked up at me, her head canting side-to-side, almost puppy-like, but real slow. I could see by now that she was older, and if I had to guess, I’d place her in her mid- to late-sixties. She had translucent, waxy skin. Bluish. Very small, as I said, but I had decided despite her size that if she made one quick movement, I was going to throw open the van door and send her tumbling backward into the highway. She would blow away like a leaf. That sounds awful of me, I know, but this whole thing was taking on a creepy air. You don’t know what people are capable of these days, even frail old women wandering quiet mountain highways in the early morning. It’s the old wolf in sheep’s clothing story. She could have been a tough little snake wrestler for all I knew. At any rate, I had it in my mind that if she pulled from behind her back a weapon–a revolver or a Bowie knife or something–I was going to throw the door open, knock her off her feet, and peel away, just like in the movies. My fingers were right there on the door handle.

“You in some kind of trouble, ma’am?” I asked. “You need help?”

She was peering over my shoulder into the cab of the van. Her lips started to move and she spoke in a low voice from one side of her mouth. It was like she was having a private conversation with someone beside her. Then her lips stopped and started again. She was looking down, then to the side. Her wide gray eyes were moving eerily in their sockets. The guy I was with whispered, “Drugs.”

The woman stiffened. Her eyes settled on mine and as they did, I shivered. She spoke. “They’re tricking me,” she said. “Every one of them. They’re tricking me.” Her voice was clear and soft and slow. It was whispery, too, like something you might hear coming from a ghost child visiting from the Other Side. As she spoke, she brought her empty hands from behind her back. She placed them against the side of the van. The guy I was taking to the airport and I were really freaked out now. This woman seemed to be making her way inside the van. She held the door with her small blue hands. That was when I unbuckled my seatbelt and eased open the van door. This forced the woman to backpedal a little. I told the guy riding with me to call the sheriff. He rifled through his bag and found his phone and dialed. He fumbled his phone a little.  

“Ma’am,” I said. “Who’s tricking you?” I slipped myself from the van and let the door close behind me. I put my hand on this woman’s small shoulder, acting real gentle and calm, like she was a time bomb I was holding.

Then she said something even stranger, real out-of-the-blue. She said, “I’m questioning my value right now.” 

I wanted to make sure I heard her right. “You’re questioning your value right now?” I repeated.

She said it again, this thing about questioning her value. An idea formed in my brain then. The parked car, the rocky, sixty-foot drop to the lake: this woman had been meaning to kill herself. That was it. Had to be. She had been looking for a way to end it all, had a second thought, and heard my van approaching. Instead of jumping, she turned and waved me down. Right time, right place, and all that. I imagined myself saving this poor woman’s life. If you hadn’t come along when you did… That kind of thing. I was God’s instrument. I imagined a grateful family and my chest swelled a little. I don’t know; I was filled with a sense of nobility. It was an uncomfortable feeling, now that I think back on it. 

“Are you thinking of killing yourself?” I asked. “Is that why you’re here?”

I turned the woman like a chess piece, back toward her car, and we walked slowly across the road. Her feet shuffled some more. Behind me, I heard my companion’s voice on the phone with a dispatcher. “We found this woman, wandering the side of the highway.” He was standing outside the van with the rocky hillside behind him. There were small pine trees–they may have been Jeffrey pines–growing right out of the rocks. He was reading the number off the highway marker. Fuzzy little bees buzzed around the purple wildflowers at his ankles.

“They’re tricking me,” she said again, though this time when she spoke it was more of a murmur. 

“Who’s tricking you?” Under my hand, I could feel the woman’s quaking bones. Something was stirring her. She stopped walking. We were in the middle of the road, on the dashed yellow lines that divide one direction from the other. She had just stopped right there in the middle and began to mumble words that seemed to fade and lose their strength. They rolled off her lips and out of her mouth and swirled in a garbled mass without shape or meaning. I could make no sense of her. It was like she was speaking in tongues at this point. A pickup truck loaded with buckets and shovels came up on us. I put my hand up like a little stop sign for the truck. The driver gave me a nod. “Let’s keep walking,” I said to the woman. “There are cars coming,” I nudged the small of the woman’s back with my hand, steering her off the road and into the turnout where she had left her car. I wondered how it was that she could have possibly made it here, miles from the city, along a twisting mountain highway, to the edge of a quiet lake. There had to have been clarity at some point. Then I wondered why there was an empty car seat in the back of the square car, straps dangling, next to that flung-open door and the rocky drop-off. It was a setup for a toddler, one of those seats meant for kids who can manage their own sippy cups and buckle themselves in. My thoughts raced.

“Ma’am,” I said. “Was there a child in that car seat?”

She peered into the back seat of the car. It was not a clean or well-cared-for car. The windows were smudged with what looked like dog slobber. There were empty Styrofoam bait cups and crumpled papers and a jug of antifreeze. It was a cluttered nest back there, a space for a hoarder. I asked again about the car seat and whether or not a child had been in it. “I didn’t think about a child being in that seat,” she mumbled. “I didn’t think about that, hmm.” 

A whole different set of possibilities flew into my head then, different from the idea that the woman had meant to kill herself. My mind got the best of me. I went to the edge of the road, to the gravelly drop-off, and looked over, thinking I was going to see a small child dashed upon the sharp rocks or floating in the water on the shore. These were the images that popped into my mind. It’s a terrible thing to think, but that morning it seemed entirely possible that a mad woman could have pushed a squalling child over a ledge. You hear about that type of tragedy sometimes. You hear about people who buckle their kids into seats and drive them into lagoons or straight off bridges into flowing rivers. 

I looked over the ledge. 

I did not see a small child floating in the water. I did not see a child sprawled over the rocks. What I saw instead was a man in a white shirt and blue jeans, standing on a strip of sand. I saw a gray-muzzled hound sniffing the sand. The man stood with his hands on his hips, gazing over the water. He seemed to be caught up in a moment of reflection, thinking back to how things once were. A peaceful mountain lake, a warm sun, and singing birds can do that to a person. So, too, will a cool morning breeze that carries the sharp smell of pine trees in the air. This man was taking it all in. He was balding with sunspots on his pink scalp. Next to him there were two chairs set up in the shade of a beach umbrella. They were those old-style aluminum chairs with fabric straps. There were two fishing poles lying side-by-side on a rock next to a blue tackle box, a Styrofoam cooler, and a Thermos with a stainless steel cap, the kind that doubled as a coffee cup. There was a khaki sunhat on the seat of an open chair.

I called down to the man. “Excuse me, sir?” I said. The man looked over his shoulder and saw me standing with the frail woman. I had disrupted his reverie. The moment he saw us, he looked to the sky and mouthed something, maybe a mild curse, maybe a petition. I said, “Does she belong to you?” It was an unfortunate choice of words, looking back on it. Does she belong to you, like she was a lost dog and not a person. 

The man nodded. “Yes,” he sighed. “What did she do?” There was exasperation in the question. 

I called back. “She waved me down,” I said. “I found her on the edge of the highway.”

Now, a whole new set of thoughts danced into my mind.

The man began to clamber up the sharp rocks to the side of the road, mumbling to himself. He used both hands to pick his way up, slowly. “I’m coming, honey,” he said. He made it to the top of the road and into the turnout next to the square car. He stopped and brushed bits of dirt and gravel from his hands and knees. He was a stout man, bent-over, one who looked like he had spent his life pushing a broom. He seemed very old, and it was like something was heavy inside him. “On the edge of the highway, huh?” he said. His white shirt was stained and yellowed and tight over his stomach. 

“Yeah,” I said. “She waved me down.” 

The man thanked me and I put out my hand, which he took for a moment, then let go. I looked at his face. His eyes were wet and blue and scowling. His cheeks were pink and vesseled. He didn’t smile or seem real grateful like you might think. I thought he might be shy and self-effacing, maybe say something like, I only left her for a minute. But he didn’t say anything to me. He just seemed tired, was all. I stood there with the two of them and the man waited for me to leave. I don’t know what I expected, standing there like that. “Thank you,” he said again, though it came out like a question, one meant to drive me away. I sensed a small measure of contempt. The man had no more use for me. His lips quivered. His voice was rough and low. I said, “No problem” and jogged back across the road. 

When I got to the van, I looked at them again. This man and this woman. I didn’t want to chase them from my head just yet. There was a story there. I wanted to watch them for a long time and not say anything to anybody. The thing is, I didn’t have a long time. The guy I was with had climbed back into the van. He said, “Tick, tock.” But I took in as much as I could. I stood and watched before I got back into the van.

Alone now with the frail woman, the old, bent-over man had taken her into his arms and he was rocking her. Her head was turned to one side, her cheek pressed against his broad chest. Her gray eyes were still wide open, still looking toward me blankly. Her eyes held me. She gazed across the highway, as though there was something she still meant to say. I couldn’t help feeling like I had released her back to a place she didn’t want to be–They’re tricking me–back into the arms of this man in a white shirt and blue jeans, this man with a pink, flaking scalp, this man with hair sprouting from his ears and a gin blossom for a nose. This man who sang one word as he swayed on the roadside with this tiny woman wrapped in his thick arms. “Honey,” he sang. “Honey, honey, honey.”

I stood there, watching. The sky was a deep, hard blue. The sides of the hills were covered in fire-blackened trees. I felt uneasy and alone. 

Chuck Radke's memoir, Stuccoville: Life Without a Net (WiDo), came out in January, 2021. His creative nonfiction has appeared in Stoneboat Literary Journal, Sierra Nevada Review, Palante, Showbear Family Circus, HASH, and others. His short fiction has appeared in The Dillydoun Review, Cold Lake Anthology, Mud Season Review, The San Joaquin Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Gulf Stream Magazine, and The South Dakota Review. He is the recipient of an AWP Intro Award for fiction and the Estelle Campbell Prize for literature from the National Society of Arts and Letters.