I ALMOST MADE THE bank. My right foot actually reached firmer ground, but my left leg plunged into mud up to my thigh. For three to four minutes, I couldn’t move at all. But when I resigned myself to the fact that I was going to lose my left shoe and probably my right, I grabbed at the exposed root of the tree I’d crashed through and hauled myself out and up, left shoe gone, but right still in
place.
Panting, I again listened for sirens but still heard none. I found the ground like a saturated sponge that demanded the gingerly placement of my bare left foot. Twice in the ten feet or so to the stanchion, I broke through the spongy earth into the mud. The second time, my right shoe disappeared.
I didn’t bother trying to dig in the muck; I crept to the side of the cement upright. Shining my flashlight, I saw that the lower flank of the stanchion was smooth and uninterrupted cement. But ten feet up, a rung of bent steel rebar stuck out. I’d seen it from the car.
There were other rungs above it every two feet or so, climbing toward the underside of the highway and the guardrail. When road crews put up these kinds of giant engineered supports, they need a way up and down them during the installation process. The rungs are set in the cement to form a ladder.
When the work is done, however, they cut off the first four or so rungs to make it impossible for kids or thrill seekers to climb them. The rest are left in place in case the stanchion ever needs to be inspected from above.
Now, I’m six foot two and have a thirty-inch reach, but I’d known just looking at it from the car that I had no chance of snagging the lowest rung on my own. I untied the strap I’d made with the pieces of the seat belts and held it with the buckle and loose strap away from me. Then I began to spin it slowly, checking for any give in the knots and testing the weight of the buckle.
When I thought I had it right, I sort of underhand-lobbed the buckle up there. It clanged off the rung and rebounded back to me so hard, I had to duck. The second time and the third time were not much better. On my fourth attempt, however, I changed tactics, going back to basics, taking the buckle in my right hand and holding the end of the strap in my left.
I crouched, leaped up, and released the buckle as if I were making an outside jump shot. It went over the rung and swung there. I undid my leather belt and used the knife to slice a hole about three inches from the end of the strap. I fitted my belt buckle through the hole and then passed the leather through the buckle and drew it all tight.
My belt added thirty-six inches to the overall length of the strap, and I was able to jiggle and then snag the loose piece hanging off the seat-belt buckle. I tied a loop in that part of the webbing and passed my belt and the rest of the improvised rope through it. When I pulled on the slack, my lifeline was anchored tight to the rung.
I tested it, holding tight to the webbing and lifting my feet off the ground. There were tut-tut-tut noises as the knots tightened, but they held.
Understanding that in my weakened, exhausted condition, I was probably going to have one shot at this, I stood there for several moments listening to the swamp waking up from the storm, the thumping of frogs, and the first whine of insects.
I figured the slime on my socks would work against me, so I stripped them off and stood more firmly on the ground. Then I put the Maglite back in my pocket. There was no way I could hold it in my mouth during a climb. I was going to have to do this by Braille. Not necessarily a bad thing. The darkness would make me concentrate all the more.
I held the strap with my right hand, lowered my head, thought of my family, and then got the bottom of my left foot against the stanchion and reached high overhead, finding the strap again with my left hand. It was going to tear up my hands. I could already feel it.
But I grabbed hold as tight as I could and then exploded into a blind, frenzied scramble of bare feet up the wall, hand over hand up the rope, past my belt buckle and on. My left hand slipped on the fourth grab. The seat-belt webbing ripped a bloody groove, and I almost let go.
But Mulch’s face appeared in my mind and triggered a rampage within me. My right hand stabbed up, slapped steel, but I couldn’t hold on. I grabbed the strap again, took one breath, and then furiously threw my bloody left hand up and caught the rung.
Once upon a time, I might have had the upper-body strength to crawl up the ladder from there with little or no problem. But now it took a rage-fueled, all-out effort to get to the second and then the third rung before my right knee found the bottom one. I hung there like a two-hundred-and-fifteen-pound moth, panting and doing my best to forget the popping sound my shoulder had made and ignore the pain as the rebar dug into my patella.
When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I reached up, wincing at a crunching noise in my right shoulder, and got my bare feet onto the lower rung. The adrenaline rush left me weaker than I could have imagined, and I spent several more minutes clinging to the side of the stanchion, waiting until my strength returned.
A truck passed on the highway above me. I felt the vibration of it ripple down through the cement and that was enough to get me climbing again. When I reached the guardrail and got over it, I almost cried.
Another truck was coming from the west, and a car behind it. I grabbed the Maglite, turned it on, and began waving it at the approaching headlights.
I must have been a sight. My clothes were torn and muddy. My hair was muddy. So was my face. And I was barefoot, wild-eyed, and bleeding from my hands. So in retrospect, it doesn’t surprise me that the truck didn’t stop.
The car that followed didn’t stop either.
Nor did the next three vehicles that passed me.
I stood there dazed and frustrated as all those taillights receded east. I’d lost nearly forty minutes to the crash.
Overhead, the clouds broke and scudded across the sky, revealing the moon and stars. I stared up into them, my bloody hands hanging, and begged God for help, for someone to stop before it was too late.
For ten, maybe fifteen minutes, there was only the darkness. No trucks and no cars passed on either side of the interstate. Then a set of headlights appeared, low and wide, from the west, back toward Lafayette.
A few seconds later, the roar of the big block engine came to me and I realized the car wasn’t just speeding. It was hurtling toward me, going a hundred miles an hour, maybe more.
CHAPTER
84
I STOOD IN THE near lane and slashed my light twice but then thought it unlikely the driver was going to slow, let alone stop, for some swamp creature, so I retreated to the guardrail and stood there. The headlights swept over me, and the car, an old Pontiac GTO with a chrome blower sticking out of the hood, roared past me. I didn’t bother to look after it until I heard the engine die off into a fluttering chug.