24 November 2015
I-40 Westbound Mile Marker 11, west of Seligman, Arizona. Numerologists say ones are the numbers that belong to the angels. Had a pretty cool drive to Barstow this afternoon. Ran into an old friend I had not seen in 25 years at the Pilot Truck Stop at the I-40/93 junction. She was headed east for Thanksgiving and I was headed west. We ended up two white pickup trucks parked next to each other on the fuel island and recognized each other. Pretty funny after all these years. As I drove west, I got to watch the sun set orange and pink through my windshield over the mountains that surround the hot deep heart of the Mojave Desert, and the white moon rise simultaneously in my rearview mirror. Pretty amazing day. Now it’s time to see what the lights of Barstow have to offer for tonight.
18 September 2017
Tonalea, Arizona. Navajo Nation US 160. This shrine for Sam and Linda sits in front of the barbed wire and my white truck, beside the busy Tonalea Store where the Rez dogs wait like refugees for a ride into town and the hope of a better life of canned Alpo. Along with the flowers and the solar lights, it’s made of Ford truck emblems, a motorcycle tire and wheel, and two connecting rods with pistons attached. Their photo has been all but taken by the sun. It’s pretty unique – inside that white ammo can is the remembrance from their funeral, pens, and a book to leave notes in. The most recent is just a few weeks old from kids with grandkids. It begins, “Well it’s been six years now…”
Jesse Sensibar
Sometimes Nothing Will Save You
We pull up on the wreck in the red medium duty Chevy Kodiak I drive for AM/PM Towing just as the Monsoon clouds dissipate and moments after the rains stop. We are on the steep two lane of 89 North where it climbs it’s way out of the bean fields of Timberline and Fernwood up the south side of the summit of the ancient lava flow out of the east side of the San Francisco Peaks. The smell of the fresh wet rain mixes with the scent of hot automatic transmission fluid and something else. The road in this area has so many small white crosses dotting its shoulders and ditches that some people complain that it is like driving through a cemetery.
The accident scene is extremely treacherous. A green Lincoln Continental 2 door from the late 1970s and a newish blue Ford Probe have hit head on at greater than full speed. It is not hard to see what happened. The Probe hydroplaned coming downhill in the monsoon rains, picked up speed, crossed the center line, and went head-on into the Lincoln coming uphill. The Lincoln I will later learn was driven by a friend of a friend, not so surprising in a town this small. He lived to tell the story. The cars now sit still facing each other at the top of a long slick of engine oil, transmission fluid, and antifreeze mixed with rainwater that has flowed downhill on the steep grade covering the entire roadway.
We have arrived too early. The bodies are still in the Probe . We jump out to help the two EMTs. Everything is slippery, dangerous chaos. We want to work fast, worried that someone else may lose control and plow into all of us coming down that steep winding hill. We jump out of the truck. Me and the new guy, his name is Scott, he is new to tow trucks but not new to this, he drove ambulance down in Phoenix for years.
We move to the Probe. I put on my gloves. “Let us help you with them.” I end up on the drivers side. A big kid, heavy set, young. Just out of high school young. He has red curly hair. He is dead. Wearing his seatbelt, airbag deployed. But he is dead. So is his friend in the passenger seat. Sometimes nothing will save you. Not your youth, not your belief in your own immortality, not your shoulder belt or your airbag. Sometimes nothing will save you.
I’m not sure what happened to his door. Maybe we cut it away, maybe it was obliterated in the crash, maybe we pulled him through it. I just have no memory of it being there. Funny what you don’t remember. But I remember his curly red hair. I remember the bulk of him. High school linebacker bulk. I remember we cut him out of his seatbelt and I remember we grabbed him to pull his body from the wreckage.
I had his left arm. As we moved his body out of the seat and lifted him clear of the car I felt him give, I had a tight grip on his arm and I felt it start to separate and pull away from his body at the shoulder just above where I held him. I yelled, “I’m loosing him! His fucking arm is coming off..wait, wait!” I catch him just in time, my left hand in his still warm armpit and my right wrapped tight in his hair. Greasy tow truck driver’s leather glove wrapped tight in deep red pepperoni colored curls. His arm flops limply against my leg. I’ll remember the tearing feel of his arm coming loose in my grasp and the touch of his hand against my leg forever. It will haunt me night after night until I learn to escape sleep.
Jesse Sensibar's work has appeared in The Tishman Review, Stoneboat Journal, Waxwing, and others. His short fiction was shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award and the Wilda Hearne Flash Fiction Prize. His writing and photos in this issue of The Wax Paper is from his first book, Blood in the Asphalt: Prayers from the Highway, was published in 2018 by Tolsun Press and shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. You can find him at jessesensibar.com.