I can’t remember why we went to Opp, Alabama that day in my mom’s 1969 Impala. There wasn’t much in Opp back then and there’s even less there now. I do remember this: Mom’s Impala didn’t come back.
I’m sure girls were at the heart of the trip, as that was the usual excuse for a journey. Lewis, my best friend, and I spared no gas driving all over Alabama and Florida for reasons that seemed much more important in at the time than any plausible reality can explain now. It was a Saturday. Lewis and I were listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd when the truck came out of the wicked humidity of the blind intersection and was on us as fast as the peach truck jumped on Duane Allman.
I saw the flash out of the corner of my right eye just as the grille of the angry truck buried its chrome muzzle deep into the passenger door of our car with a gunshot thud. Lewis was gone instantly as the entire car shuddered and bent like a bruised banana, the seat buckling in jagged naugahyde rage from the explosion and the grinding metal of two vehicles becoming one in the worst way. Chunks of safety glass danced and levitated through the automobile interior like pieces of a clear puzzle that had been slapped to bits by the force shock of the impact.
I looked for Lewis but all I could see was the bench seat between us bowing into the roof and a belching, steaming truck radiator pushing into the car toward me, filling the car with raw, boiling antifreeze. I looked to my left and saw the driver’s door dislodge and slip under the car as everything began to tilt to my side and earth began to plow into the gaping hole next to my left arm where the door used to be.
Why I hadn’t noticed before that our car was flying through the air seemed ridiculous. When the smoking wreck landed 100 feet away from the highway in a soybean field, the reality of the moment became vivid. Sitting in the creaking debris, my mind chewed through the memory of a friend who had been killed a few months earlier after flipping his Mustang eight times,end-over-end. I remembered the kid in Montgomery as his bike darted into the highway and the car caught him broadside and rag-dolled him across four lanes of traffic, turning his head into something that looked like a watermelon tossed into traffic. The violence hung around the wreckage smelling as real as the gasoline and oil and coolant vaporized seconds before.
Transmission fluid looks a lot like blood when you’re not thinking straight. And when you take a big truck in the ribs at 50 mph, you won’t be thinking straight.
Even though Lewis was crunched into a ball in the floor, we walked away. Miracles happen. The police said we should have been killed. We were scratched and bruised and instantly sore. It wasn’t different than how I felt after a Friday night football game. The truck driver’s face was disfigured like raw hamburger shoved through an air conditioning vent. But he was alive. Our car was beyond totaled. We were all fortunate. Dozens of people have died at that intersection over the years. We survived.
I still can’t remember why Lewis and I drove to Opp. Maybe it was to learn what so many people don’t seem to know still: Seat belts will save your life. They saved ours. Please wear yours.
