A Crooked Face
G.D. BROWN
I never thought it right to blame the man on the bicycle, likely heading home to see his family, his pregnant wife, or his little girl with wildflowers in her hair. Perhaps the sun was in his eyes, or he worried that he’d fly over the handlebars when he slammed on his brakes, the way I did when I was fourteen and covered in road rash scabs like globs of dry paint. He had the right of way, according to the law. The blame would have been misplaced, and it wouldn’t have done me any good, like drinking poison et cetera. I never blamed the other driver either. Sure, she was drunk, but she was dying, leaving the earth while bubbly and red-faced and warm, never again subject to crusty panic or headaches, to apologies for blank spaces. I’d stopped drinking the month before.
I remember the sun was so bright that evening that it shone off the sidewalks. Neighborhood joggers looked like the resurrected souls said to dance on streets of gold. The trees seemed to glow from where they piled over one another along the roadway. I kept a pint of cheap gin in the flap behind my seat. I half-promised myself I’d keep it there forever, a reminder of how far I’d come. Angelina said I’d never make it thirty days. I was on day thirty-one. The image of the gin splashed about my head as I hit the blinker and spied the parking lot and the apartment building where we lived, a Bavarian-style building with wide, American rooms. It was too bright out to tell if the lights were on, to tell if anyone was home. I could not yet see whether Angelina’s little hatchback was in its numbered space outside our door. And then there was the cyclist.
The cyclist’s story, as far as I’m concerned, was contained in a few strides, the pressing of clipped shoes against pedals and of autumn wind against a pair of sports sunglasses. He was dressed for his part, tight-bodied beneath his cycling kit. The names of bars and area bike shops pitched their wares from his chest, his back, his concave stomach. His dark hair nearly glistened where it poked out from beneath his helmet. He no doubt would have caught my eye even if he hadn’t glided in front of my heaving Jeep. I liked how the bike hardly wobbled. I imagined its clicking chain as I rolled ahead, crossed over the then-empty lane that ran perpendicular to the parking entrance where he was riding. And I waited there, just like that.
I was coming home from work, where I sold advertising time for a local news station. I was in my threadbare oxford shirt and a pair of khakis I’d found for a good price when the mall closed down. I’d first worn the khakis to my interview at the station. The interviewer said that I would determine my own salary with the quality of my work, the volume of my sales. I accepted, if only for the sense of control. Already, though, people (and advertisers) were moving towards cable programs, and before long, they had given up television news entirely for headlines on their social media sites, those public confirmations in single lines, scarlet letters marking the enemies of both democracy and the suppertime newscast. Still, my nickels and dimes were becoming a new desk and awkward nights out with Angeline, dry celebrations. That’s why I was thinking about my plastic bottle of gin while the cyclist moved across the lane in front of me. I had good reason to cut loose.
I rested there in my powerlessness. I admit it now. I was powerless. I’ve always been powerless. I’m still thinking about the splashing gin. My taste buds often remember how to take on the sour formations of juniper berries and distilled grains. My lips pucker for sipping at the sight of a tumbler, my throat open and prepared for that sharp, dry cold. I could always stand a swig, just a mouthful, which must be why Angeline didn’t believe I’d ever get better.
“You’re liars,” she’d said. “All you drunks are liars.”
She was wrong. I’d gone to a few meetings, enough to learn that the drunks weren’t much for lying. Their acetone voices flowed over their stains and left them clean and bare and without shame, even in front of strangers. They complained of sharing too much truth during their benders, feared that they would not remember their most honest, vulnerable moments, or that a Mr. Hyde would steal those moments away from them. These were not lying people. These were people who faced more truth than they could bear, who feared that they would be overcome by their truths and then fail to use them responsibly.
Perhaps the other driver had been in those meetings, all testamental and honest. Her obituary in the paper didn’t say, just listed her age and her parents’ names. No kids, I guess. No brother or sister either. We were the same that way. Her picture was in the paper. She had a crooked nose and thin, arching eyebrows, curled bangs, and a tired smile. There was no mention of her cause of death, no liquor or traffic accident, just a notice that she was no longer among us and a photograph in black and white.
I’d stopped going to AA meetings because Angeline said I was too smart for them. She drew the words out like it was a bad thing, like I was supposed to be insulted, like I hadn’t spent countless afternoons sneaking gin by the apartment dumpster while the chubby neighbor kid peeked at me through his blinds. Our couples counselor said I needed to listen more. I learned to listen ‘round and ‘round until Angeline’s spit made angry circles on the tile floor. Then I quit going to the meetings. I spent the saved time on more listening, mopped up the anger and slept on the couch. Those were the days when I most wanted, maybe needed, something to warm the hole in my stomach, but my spite made a web there instead and kept me dry for those first long weeks—again, something to celebrate.
I watched the cyclist creep across the entrance to the parking lot, his leg nearest me straight, calf strong and bulging and golden. And the woman in the other car made her way around the bend, swung like ice. She sped forward in the middle of her lane, slicing open the sky that lay between us, not yet drunk enough to simply swerve into the ditch. Her car was silver and like the edge of a sharp breeze before the trees. I thought that she would stop when she saw my Jeep across the lane, and still, the cyclist was crossing the entrance to the parking lot. So, the three of us shared a moment there, locked together and necessary in the quiet seconds that are only remembered for their contrast with the coming, loud ones. I wish I had stepped out of the car and stood for them, offered up a Boy Scout salute. I never stood again.
Then the woman turned the law on its head and, by choosing death, cheated the very alcoholism that plagued me. She drove into my car at twenty-five miles above the speed limit and moved straight on through to her Higher Power and turned her will and her life over to that Higher Power without so much as a workbook to prompt her to do so. I thought I saw her crooked face as our fenders met in the outside lane and sent the gin out of the seat pocket and onto the floorboard. I will always envy her that way, the way she was before the start of the aluminum crunch and all the blood, just a drunk, crooked face over a steering wheel. I may someday forget my legs, but I will never forget her last butterscotch smile or the way the cyclist pedaled straight-backed into the setting sun while I lay sober on the asphalt.
