Turning Point
Randall DeVallance
My uncle was always a heavy drinker, but never the type of drunk to drive a Ford Fairlane the wrong way down the interstate, drift into the berm and plow through a guardrail, until August 18, 1995, when he did exactly that. On the other side of the guardrail was a grassy embankment, which my uncle’s Fairlane barrel-rolled down like a child frittering away a summer afternoon. When it reached the drainage ditch at the bottom, it landed on its roof, tires sticking up in the air like the legs of a dog waiting to have its belly scratched.
My mother got the call at three in the morning. My uncle had no emergency contact on file – had nofileat all – but hospital staff had rummaged through his wallet and found a list of phone numbers, former friends and acquaintances who for various reasons had stopped speaking to my uncle long ago. After blowing through a dozen without success, they finally landed on my mother, who possessed that belief common amongst older siblings that the fate of every crisis rested on her shoulders alone. “Mm,” she had grunted into the receiver, then swung her legs out from under the covers and began to get dressed.
Had the phone call woken up my father, he would have barked at my mother to get back in bed. He was long gone, though – dead or alive, who knows, but no longer a part of our world just the same. Mother’s rough hand shook me awake. “C’mon,” she said, and I did, too tired to realize how unusual a request it was until we were halfway to the hospital. By then it was too late to go back. I sat there in my rumpled pajamas feeling the full flush of teenage self-consciousness, calculating the odds that we would finish our business and return home before daybreak and the prying eyes of people whose opinions mattered to me.
My uncle did not trust seatbelts. Whenever the topic arose, he would assert his belief that one day he would find himself trapped inside a burning automobile, unable to crawl to safety because of a seatbelt that refused to unfasten. This was not an unusual fear amongst my uncle’s generation. Most eventually capitulated to the scientific consensus that the benefits of seatbelts outweighed the risks. My uncle took the other tack, denouncing seatbelt mandates as a sure sign that the Founding Fathers had fought for nothing and that communism was on our doorstep.
That explained the smile on his face as we entered his hospital room, which seemed otherwise at odds with the fractured skull, broken ribs, and second-degree burns he had suffered. Despite his injuries, he had managed to maintain consciousness throughout the crash, and with a doggedness he had never displayed in any other aspect of his life had dragged himself, inch by inch, out through the shattered driver’s-side window and across the grass, far enough away that by the time the gas tank caught on fire and exploded he escaped largely unscathed.
When he saw us walk in, his hand darted toward the nightstand beside his bed, groping around until he found a sheet of paper, which he held up for us to inspect. “Right there,” he said, jabbing at it with his finger. My mother and I took a step closer, leaned in and squinted, but my uncle was already reciting the relevant passage from memory.“Suspect was not wearing a safety harness at the time of the accident, allowing him to crawl clear of the vehicle before it was engulfed in flames.”He looked at us triumphantly. “Safety harness means seatbelt. That’s the Holcombe County Sheriff’s Department, now.”
“I thought you said the sheriff’s department wasn’t worth the spit it took to shine their badges,” said my mother.
“This is the official assessment of a crash scene investigator,” he said.“Those boys are scientists,you understand, certified by the state.”
“I know how much state certification means to you.”
“Oh, Debra.” My uncle chuckled. “Debra...Debra...Debra...”
“What is it, Errol?”
“They got me good!”
“Who’s they?”
He gestured skyward. “The vagaries of the universe!”
“Is that what I smell on your breath?” My mother wrinkled her nose. “The ‘vagaries of the universe’?”
“Come on, now.”
“I suppose you expect me to post bail?”
My uncle shook his head.
“So why did you call me down here, then?”
“I wanted to talk to Junior.”
He meant me. Junior was not my name, nor was I a literal “junior”, named after my father. Still, my uncle had called me Junior all my life, no matter how much I encouraged him not to. It was a term of endearment, I suppose, a diminutive like “Shorty” or “Little Man”, and despite the lack of affection we felt for one another it remained the best explanation I could come up with.
“You know how old I am?” he said, once my mother had left the room.
I shrugged. “Not exactly.”
“Forty-six,” he said. “Forty-six years old, and it was only last year that I learned a mule is a cross between a horse and a donkey. I’d always thought that ‘mule’ and ‘donkey’ were just two words for the same animal. Imagine. And here’s the kicker – finding out the truth changed nothing. My life isn’t one iota different after receiving this information than it had been before. It frightens me, that something as fundamental as thetruthcan be so inconsequential.”
I nodded, not knowing what else to do.
“Existence is like a pool table,” he said.
“Ok,” I said.
“Forces act on you. Balls come careening across the playing surface, crash into you, and send you off in directions you couldn’t have anticipated.”
“Life is random,” I said. “Is that what you’re getting at?”
“Ain’t nothing random about pool,” he said, “except for the shooter.”
“Who’s the shooter?”
His lips curled into a smile. “Now you’re getting it.”
I opened the door and asked my mom to come back inside.
“He’s suffered a brain contusion,” the doctor explained to us later, out in the hallway. “It’s like a regular contusion, but worse.” He tapped the clipboard holding my uncle’s charts and looked at us gravely. “Due to the placement.”
He asked who would be covering my uncle’s medical expenses. My mother said it wasn’t the appropriate time to discuss such things. To his credit, the doctor looked abashed; he muttered an apology toward his shoes and withdrew. Once he was out of eyeshot, my mother grabbed my arm and we high-tailed it for the parking lot.
On the way home I asked my mother whether she thought life was random or carefully plotted by unseen forces. The groan she let out told me this was not a discussion she relished. “Every man in my life has wanted something from me,” she said. “They all expected me to give and give and give. I need you to be the one exception. Can you do that?”
“Sure,” I said, not really understanding what was being asked of me except that I should keep quiet.
It was just after six o’clock when we got home. I slipped inside unseen – or so I had thought, at the time – and went straight upstairs to bed, falling back asleep so easily it was as if our trip to the hospital were only a dream, had never really happened at all. It was only later that day, at school, that I learned how wrong I had been. The balls had been struck, and my life veered off in a direction from which there was no turning back.
