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A Fair Distance:Running on Empty

“Blair Sandburg, I’m arresting you on charges of grand theft auto and contributing to the delinquency of minors. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney…” I heard - but didn’t really listen - to the rest of the standard lines from the cop with the glad hands who was acquainting himself with various body parts of mine. ‘And on with our program for tonight,’ skittered through my brain as he bent me over the hood of the car and snapped the cuffs on my wrists, all the while droning on and on…

The other officer who had earlier requested, oh, so politely, that I “Step out of the car, sir, and keep your hands away from your sides, where I can see them” was manhandling the three drunk boys one at a time into the back of the cop car.

 ‘Arrested, Arrested, Arrested,’ kept squirreling through my brain; and Man, I wished I could’ve left my body here to deal with my new legal troubles and that Me, I, Myself, could’ve headed to the nearest bar and ordered a cold beer. Not capable of disassociating yet, though, so I kept company with myself, and reflected on how I’d ended up stepping into this pile of shit…

I had been hitchhiking tonight, trying to get through Tennessee to North Carolina, where I had a lead on another trucking job.  My old buddy Mickey, who I’d crashed with this last week, had a buddy who had a buddy who owned a small trucking operation.  Zain told the owner of the company the basics about me and as a favor for a friend of a friend, he was able to get me in the door.  At least my new potential employer was willing to talk to me and take a chance on hiring a guy with no recent creditable references and a pretty unstable work history for the last year.  I ruthlessly kept squashing any smidgen of hope for some stability to return to my life. It was better to have low expectations; the crash wasn’t as hard then when they took a nosedive.

A nice old geezer, tooling along in his old junker with a big wrench substituting for a steering wheel, had given me my last ride. The car was warm, I was tired, and I faded out from the conversation. I guess he thought he was doing me a favor by letting me sleep till he got to his town. Trouble was, it was out of the way by fourty-five miles from Interstate 40, but I thanked him, and as soon as he drove off, stuck my thumb out to go back the way we’d come. I trudged along the county highway in the twilight, getting no takers; and to top it off, a storm was coming up. Yep, this was pretty much par for the course for the last year of my life… 

I was wet from the storm that had come and gone, leaving the road slick and shiny, when my luck changed. A car, nice one, pulled up and the back-seat door was pushed open for me to get in. I took a look inside to make sure there wasn’t going to be trouble waiting for me.

What I saw were kids… three teenage boys, to be exact.

Well, fuck…this was the only offer I’d had in two hours and I needed to get out of this state soon. ‘So okay, Blair, you’d better go for it.’ So I slid inside, starting my thanks-for-the ride-I-really-appreciate-it spiel, as the car peeled off and blew down the road. I was tired, and I’m blaming my slow reactions on that fact; but it took about five minutes for the smell of alcohol to penetrate my beat-up brain and for me to realize that all these boys were drunk. The one next to me began acting like a bobble-head doll and the one riding shotgun gave a snort or two and began snoring. I checked out the driver and he was getting to that edge of really, really needing to concentrate to keep between the lines.

‘Well, fuck. Fuck- Fuck- Fuckity- Fuck.’  I sighed and told the kid driving to pull over because I needed to get out. He did, finally, after I asked him three more times. I politely ordered him to shut off the car so we could talk. He was an agreeable drunk and he did it, which left me with a dilemma. I couldn’t let these boys drive around and kill themselves or anybody else, but I sure didn’t see who I could pass this responsibility off to so I could be on my merry way. A question and answer session later, we had a plan to let me drive them to Josh’s house to spend the rest of the night. It was the best I could get them to agree with, since nobody had a cell phone and they were dead set against stopping and calling their parents.  Things were a little vague about what I would do at that point, but I figured at the worst, I’d just be thumbing it again.

Twenty minutes later down the highway, things got worse. Turned out, “This here is a stolen car, sir, and I believe ya’ll got no business being in it.”  I was real nice and slow with the cops who wanted to see my ID and who ordered me out of the car.  Kept my hands where they could see them and didn’t argue with them. They were taking a chance on their lives every time they pulled somebody over; I worked long enough with cops to know that fact. To them, I was a scruffy guy they didn’t know in a stolen car, so I wasn’t going to give them any trigger-happy reasons to shoot me.

After I was arrested, I had to sit down on the pavement, waiting for another patrol car to arrive. I didn’t try and talk to the officers; I knew they wouldn’t be responsive to my explanation until they were back in their own territory and I was secured.

I thought about how Jim wouldn’t have been able to believe I could keep quiet like this. But I’d learned to do a lot of things differently since I’d last seen Jim.

Finally another car arrived and my arresting officer turned me over to the new guys. I overheard them talking, so I knew the boys were going to be taken home and told to be at the station by 9:00 in the morning to give their statements.

One of the new cops, a big guy, told me to get up - which is hard to do when you’re sitting, freezing your ass off on the ground, with your hands cuffed behind your back. He watched me struggle for a moment, then reached down and hauled me up like I didn’t weigh anything and put me in the back of his car. He was careful with me; and it was a measure of how low I was feeling that I actually felt grateful to him.

We stopped at the local hospital where a tox screen was done, both urine and blood. At least they recuffed my hands in front of me so I could pee in the cup without help, although having an audience wasn’t any fun. When the big cop recuffed my hands in back of me, he apologized, saying it was a new regulation because a cop had cuffed a local jerk with his hands in front of him during a routine arrest for public intoxication. The guy had managed to grab the cop’s gun and killed him. “S’okay” I muttered to him, because I knew better than most how cops take risks with their lives. I wasn’t going to gripe about the cuffs.

At the station, cuffed to the interview room table, I repeated my statement three times, and then answered the barrage of questions designed to trip me up. I was so tired that my words were slurring, but my tox screen had come back, so they knew I was clean. They made me pull up my sleeves, pants legs, and shirt as they checked my inner arms, ankles, and belly for track marks. I guess they wanted to pin me down as a junkie, maybe see if I could be sweated for drug information; but even if I looked the part, I’d never done drugs like that and I told them so, too. They went out and left me alone for a while in the interview room; I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore, so I laid my head down on the table and went to sleep.

They woke me up and had me repeat my statement for the fourth time, then finished processing me into their holding cell. This county wasn’t really equipped for a full time jail and sent most arrested prisoners up to the next county to be housed there. Dave, the big cop who had taken me to the hospital, explained all that while supervising me getting a shower and changing into too big, orange-striped prisoner-scrubs. I could have kept my own clothes on, but they were wet still; and my backpack was locked up for evidence; so I didn’t care about wearing jail scrubs. I didn’t care about much at all; I just wanted to sleep and try to forget my crummy life.

I skipped breakfast the next morning and waited for the boys to come in for their statements. I could hear them down the hall when they did come in, with parental voices demanding that I be arrested for kidnapping and forcing their boys to get drunk.

‘Great.’  It looked like the boys were going to lie and say that I had stolen the car, forced them along for the ride, and made them drink themselves stupid. Sounds like they had conned their parents into believing that line of bullshit; I hoped Dave wouldn’t buy it, though.

After a while, I was taken out of the cell and brought into a larger room, where Josh and the other two boys were sitting with assorted parents. Dave sounded like a teacher explaining a lesson to the slow group. First, the boys’ statements were summarized; and yes, I had correctly figured what they would claim, because they’d hung me out to dry. He then summarized my statement.

Next, he told the three boys to stand up against the wall, telling me their names and giving all their ages as seventeen years old. I was startled when he asked me to stand in front of them, facing their parents. After I was in position, his manner changed; and he started to bellow that what the boys had said was the biggest pile of bullcrap he’d ever had the misfortune to hear in his entire time as a cop. He asked the parents to take a good look at me and then at their sons; then asked did they really think that a guy my size could make three star linebackers do anything at all. I shot him a quick look; but I could see where he was going with this approach and I tried to look harmless.

Pointing at me, he said that they each outweighed me by seventy to ninety pounds and topped me by six to eight inches. He informed them and me that a receipt in my pocket from a Taco Bell, placed me about 200 miles away from where the car was stolen; and the time stamped on it gave me an alibi. He stared at the parents as he told them that everybody in the county knew old JD, knew how he drove his old wreck of a car with a pipe wrench instead of a steering wheel; and that an officer had gone out to see him that morning, and JD had confirmed giving me a ride into town.

The parents were all talking at once and Dave bellowed for quiet. He had me taken back to the holding cell and he and two other officers took the boys’ statements again. I really hoped that they would come clean this time and clear me. It was pretty evident I wouldn’t be charged, but their true statements would make things go a lot faster.

Despite a stern lecture to myself, I felt hope rising up in me that this would all be salvaged, that I’d be on my way in an hour or so, and I could still get to North Carolina in time to take that job.

Kind of annoyed me that Dave had made me out to be a wimp; but, truth be told, I am short; and they were a lot bigger than me. I hadn’t really focused on that in the car; their ages were what I was concerned with at the time.

Dave came back in the hoped for hour and took me back to the interview room. “Mr. Sandburg,” he began, but I interrupted him.

“Call me Blair, okay?” 

He looked at me intently, and said again, “Mr. Sandburg, what were you doing here in Tennessee?”

I shrugged and answered him.  “I was just traveling through, met up with an old friend who pointed me towards a trucking job in North Carolina.” 

“You travel around much, Mr. Sandburg?” he inquired.

“For the last year I have. Why do you want to know where I’ve been?” I was starting to get a bad feeling about this line of questioning.

“Where did you live before you became such a wanderer, Mr. Sandburg?” Dave was looking at me with mild curiosity painted on his face, but I used to work with cops and I knew when a question was important. I couldn’t see any point in not telling him, though, no reason to obfuscate. He could find out if he wanted to without me saying a word.

“I lived for fourteen years, off and on, in Cascade, Washington,” I said slowly, waiting for it.

“That’s a fair distance from here, isn’t it, Mr. Sandburg?” Dave must have been a cat in a former life, the way he was toying and drawing this out.

“Yeah,” I said softly. “It’s a fair distance and I’m never going back there.”

Then Dave surprised me. “Blair, you’re cleared of all the charges from last night. We know you didn’t steal that car; those idiot boys did, and got themselves drunk. We thank you for getting their young asses off of the highway. That’s the good news…”

I sighed.  “Just tell me Dave, okay? What’s the new problem?”

“The bad news is that you’re wanted for questioning about a crime that was committed in Cascade. We’ve been asked by the Cascade cops to keep you available while they send a detective here to take you back to Cascade for their investigation.”

‘Man, I wasn’t expecting that.’ 

 “What crime? Maybe I can get this cleared up from here. I really need to get to North Carolina. That job I’m going there for won’t be waiting for me if I keep getting delayed!”  I wasn’t going to ask which detective was coming for me. ‘Nope, not asking, not thinking about any ex-partners/ex-lovers at all. Nope, and this problem needs to go away before he gets here, ‘cause I don’t want to see him – it’s bad enough the things he’s done to disrupt any jobs I’ve scored this last year - but to have to go back to Cascade, with him as my jailer, wearing shackles…  no, no-way, not going to happen…’

Dave was talking, but I didn’t understand what he was saying; then he grabbed my head and pushed it down towards my lap. After a time, the blurred sounds started making sense again.  He was shouting for somebody to get in here while he kept his hand on my neck. He was talking to me, telling me to calm down, take deep slow breaths.  He raised my head and held a paper bag in front of my mouth. I breathed in and out and tried to stop the panic attack from continuing, my heart pounding like an overzealous grunge band drummer. Months or maybe minutes rolled by, till I was finally able to put down the bag and not feel my heart trying to jump right out of my chest.

“Sorry,” I gasped out.  Boy, if Dave thought I was a wimp before, because of my size, he probably was sure of it now.

“It’s okay, Blair; you’ll be all right now,” he said back to me, slightly sing-songy. His hand was still on the back of my neck and I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him to move it.  It felt good.

“Tell me again what’s the crime they want to talk to me about?” I sort of wheezed out.

“A woman named Marie Edwards, worked at Rainier University, was killed last year.” Dave replied. I knew he was assessing me. It was a cop thing. They all did it.

“I know her; I mean, I did know her but I haven’t seen her since I left town.  And I know she was alive then. How did she die?” I was kind of sick at the thought. I didn’t like her, especially not after the whole dissertation mess, but I never wished her any harm.

“Don’t know. And Blair, the instructions from Cascade say not to interrogate you, to just hold you here on the current charges until their detective can get here to handle you.”

Dave sounded a little ticked off about that. ‘ God, It’s going to be Jim. Jim, who hates my guts. Jim, who I loved like I’ve never loved anybody before. Jim, who was the reason I ran away from Cascade, just so we wouldn’t ever have to meet up with each other again.

‘God, my karma sucks!’

Continued in A Fair Distance: Running on Empty. Chapter Two