We stand beside the road looking at the flat tire as cars and 18-wheelers fly by so fast the wind shoves us away from the road. We see the man in the Volvo 100 yards back hit the same piece of wood, blowing out two of his tires. He gets out and walks around his car, flailing his arms in frustration. He walks up to where we are.
“You hit that piece of wood too?” Ben asks.
“Yep. I called the police,” he says. “Said they’d send Motorist Assistance.” We all look around helplessly.
“First time I’ve let my wife drive in 15 years, and this happens,” he says half laughing. “Was on my way to get a colonoscopy, too.”
Will says, “What’s worse, this or the colonoscopy?”
“Guess your day won’t be getting any better, huh?” says Fred.
Alyssa and Robin look in the glove box for the manual. Ben is on the phone as the man walks back to his crippled car.
Ben calls AAA. They say it will be about 75 minutes. So he unloads the back of the van and we discover that the spare is directly under the middle of the vehicle. He roots around inside looking for a handle as Alyssa reads the manual. Ben gets the jack and the lug nut wrench out and, after much searching and much advice from us standing around, he finds the hidden square of carpet that must be peeled back to reveal the screw for the tool that we don’t have. Thank you, Enterprise.
Ben and Fred and Will all confer about a plan. I start looking around beside the road. Debris is all over the place. I look at the hole in the floor where the missing tool should fit. Motorist Assistance arrives and everyone gets excited. Until we see the guys in the Motorist Assistance van. One look says they are not going to assist.
Ben talks to them and explains what happened. They say the police called them and told them to come help us. They clearly have no intention of getting out of their van, much less helping us.
“Be careful and watch out for that traffic,” they say and drive away.
Robin, Will, Alyssa and Fred watch this in disbelief. Ben seems amazingly calm as he says, “What part of ‘Motorist Assistance’ am I missing here?”
“The part where they assist you?” laughs Robin.
Meanwhile, I have located a piece of scrap metal beside the interstate and am attempting to fashion it into a crude tool to release the incredibly inconvenient captive tire lurking under the middle of the Mazda.
When the others see my odd, metal-working efforts involving bending and shaping a shard of roadside aluminum, probably blown to this exact spot by hurricane winds last year, they start to laugh. Fred takes some pictures of my obviously insane activity.
“If he somehow manages to get that tire out from under there with a bent chunk of a trailer, we’ll never hear the end of it,” says Robin.
“What are the odds of that?” says Will, looking at the bubbling rumble of thunderheads to the west. “The odds of that storm getting here, however, are much better.”
I have fashioned my homemade tool and it fits the release. I insert the lug nut wrench into a hole in the crude tool and turn the thing and it snaps the release and the tire begins to drop. Silence from the group.
“Unbelievable,” says Alyssa.
“Like a caveman, he created a tool. What are the odds, indeed,” says Robin.
Will says, “I think if we all run, we can get in the cars before that gets here” — “That” being a wall of rain.
He points to the gray, liquid curtain being pulled down the interstate, closing on us fast. We toss the equipment back in, toss in the spare and jump in our cars just as the bottom falls out of the sky and it rains harder than a cow peeing on a flat rock. It blows sideways and lightning strikes all around us. This goes on for an hour, long enough to flood the area around the car.
I look out as a piece of plastic floats by. The very piece of discarded plastic I had kicked away from the bottom of the van as I was looking for metal. Then I see Ben running through the rain to retrieve it in the deluge. It was part of the van that had covered the tire. I thought it was junk like everything else lying around and drop-kicked it into a gutter.
About that time the AAA guy shows up, risking life and limb to change the flat in the frog-strangler as traffic buzzes a foot behind his back, soaking him in road-ooze.
He actually performed Motorist Assistance. Maybe somewhere, Motorist Assistance is having a nice bowl of gumbo.