“Ah you---obscenities-----crazy young------more obscenities!” the old codger screamed back, and then rolled his window back up, swung his car around CC's and continued on in the downpour. CC then ran up to the bridge and looked down over the embankment. He could see, at the bottom, through the pouring rain and darkness and foliage that the tail lights were still glowing.
********
Putatively, there is always more action in the big city, and Buffalo New York was no exception. CC had visited numerous bars there searching for one girl who he thought could be worth his hard earned five hundred dollar bill for one night. He found her at the “WHERE IT'S AT” nightclub. And the “Where It's At” nightclub in Buffalo was where “She” that “One” was going to be at this night, Saturday night, and he had no intentions of wasting time with any formalities or personal persuasions with the lovely. He would let it all up to the buck. Five hundred of them in the frame he had locked in his glove compartment. He did not intend for her to make love to him for what he was, what he looked like. He was not that stupid, and he had no illusions as to what he was, what he looked like, what girls went for in men, especially beautiful ones: personality, money, brains, looks, talent, some a combination, and some want it all. Except for some personality or at least congeniality and a genteel, kindly manner, and a fine head on his shoulders, he had little of the rest of the above.
********
CC now stood in the center of the bridge. As another car came by, he yelled frantically and tried to wave it down. It ignored him and continued on by. It still rained hard, the rain beating on his face like someone constantly dumping buckets of water over him. Then another car came, and he yelled again and tried to flag it down. But it ignored him too, and, almost hitting him, continued on. It occurred to him that he might yell and flag away all night before someone would stop. It made him sick to think that he was standing there like a helpless fool and that someone down in that car might be dying and that no one would stop to help him help them or at least go for help. He was also frightened at what carnage he might see, but conscience and the rain were forcing a decision: Either go down there and see if he could help or get in his car and go for help… at least do some-thing!…..Then he made the decision: “To hell with it,” he said, and he started down over the embankment.
The rain beat on him like oceans of buckshot, smacking his face and blinding his eyes, and he stumbled, rolling in the mud and rocks in his good suit, and got back up and slipped again and rolled again, grabbing at branches or anything he could get hold of. At the scene it was almost pitch dark all around, except for the glow of the tail lights, and he was filthy with mud sticking all over his suit and face. He stumbled around the car. Both doors were sprung wide open by the impact. Then he heard a woman moaning and crying out, “O my God, my God, my baby, my baby, my God Larry, God, someone please help, Oh God, God!”
He could vaguely see the woman sitting outside in the darkness and rain on the right side of the car on the muddy rocks and stones. Then he heard someone gasping and choking. And when he went to the woman he found that she was holding a baby in her arms, and it was the baby that was gasping and choking. He bent down, and though he could not see well he could feel the warmth of blood trickling on the baby's face as he ran his hands over it. He stuck his finger into the baby's mouth and back into its throat to find what it was choking on and felt nothing but more warm blood. Possibly, CC thought, it was choking on its own blood or something further down in its throat.
“God, do something! She's choking! Dying! Do something!” the woman screamed at him. And CC stood up, thinking of what he read somewhere about a doctor performing an emergency tracheotomy with a piece of glass and the tube of a ball point pen. He screamed at the adumbrated figure of the woman in the dark and rain: “ Do you have a pen?” but she was near hysteria and, “Do you have a pen?” in the midst of it all was maddening. And she just moaned and cried on then more pitifully as if all hope now was in vain.
CC obeyed his impulse to do something. Not sure of himself at all he stumbled through the darkness and rain and found his way into the front seat of the car, which was tilted, rear pitched up, nose crushed into the ground, and in a frenzy rummaged through the glove compartment. He found a pen and, getting back out, he fell to his knees on the muddy stones and rocks and got up, and groping in the darkness, went around to the other side of the car and tripped again, falling over something soft and wet and warm: It was the man, Larry, she called out to, unconscious, and CC, running his hand over him, felt his thick warm blood streaming down his cold wet beard and warm wet face, and on his neck and chest. The woman screamed and moaned about the baby again as CC got to his feet again and felt along the fender for a mirror. It was there, still intact, and he cracked it hard with a stone and took out a sharp triangular piece of it and went back around the car to the woman and grabbed the baby out or her arms and laid it down on the wet stones where the tail lights cast some light so he could see, and she screamed again, and he still didn't know exactly what he was doing, but he didn't fight with himself, because anything was worth a try, and he took the guts out of the pen, and the baby was still choking and gasping for air, and he remembered that the doctor cut a slot-like hole below the larynx, almost where the V-like depression was in the throat, and he hunched down over the baby, and it was do something or let the baby die, and the woman stood up then crying even more hysterical and out of her mind , and it was all a nightmare and the rain would not stop, and she would not stop “Sit down and be quiet, I'm trying to give it air!” CC shouted. And she still would not stop, and he knew that there was only one thing to do with her, and, though he had never hit anyone before in his life, he wheeled and slapped her across the side of her head and she slumped down to the stones and, but for whimpering, stayed quiet.
Then, using the fingers on his left hand, he felt along the baby's windpipe, and when he thought he had the right spot he kept a finger on it and his palm on the baby's chin to keep it from turning its head. Then, using his fingers and thumb of his right hand, he began to sink the sharp point of the triangular piece of glass slowly and gingerly, easy, very easy, into the baby's windpipe, and when it cut through he grabbed it with the fingers of his left hand, which was still braced on the baby's chin, and held it there. Then with his right hand he squeezed the hollow pen tube slowly in beside the glass and held it there. Then he slowly withdrew the piece of glass. The baby was still. He leaned over and placed his head on its chest. The heart was hardly stirring. So he put his hand over the baby's mouth and nose and his mouth over the pen tube and breathed into it until the chest swelled, then released, then again and again and again until it filled and fell itself. Then he shouted out at the woman, “Lady, your baby's alright! But you have to hold this pen tube in its throat!” Still whimpering she didn't respond, as if in a stupor. Then he shouted frantically at her: “Lady! Your baby's breathing OK now! Get hold of yourself! Do you want that man over there to die? He's bleeding... bleeding to death!”
And she came more to her senses then, and got up on her knees, and crawled over to the baby. And CC, while still holding the pen tube in its throat with his right hand, cradled his left arm under it, picked it up, and handed it to her and told her to hold its head and the pen tube in its throat tightly and stay there. This she did, sitting on the muddy stones and rocks in the darkness and pouring rain, still sobbing.
Then CC went over to the other side of the car to the injured man now semi-conscious and moaning . Thunder rumbled and lightening revealed the bloody figure of the man, showing his left arm twisted and half buried in thick mud. CC knelt down, and lifting it up out of the mud, and running his hands along it found the forearm severely gashed open, possibly from protecting his face as he smashed through the windshield, and it was a miracle because the thick mud had retarded some of the bleeding, and CC took out his wet handkerchief and tied it around the arm right above the point where it was bleeding, and then he groped around looking for a strong stick, and when he found one he laid it over the knot in the handkerchief and tied another knot around it so to make a double handle to grip with both hands like handle bars on a bike and twisted it tight for a few minutes and then released and then twisted tight again and then released it, as the man in his semi-conscious state moaned and stirred from time to time.
So there was young Cambell Crane, with his five hundred dollars he had put in a little ornate gold frame to buy the love of a beautiful girl, sitting in the pestilential rain and darkness and thunder and lightening, soaking wet, exasperated, nervous, holding a tourniquet on an injured man's arm on one side of a wrecked car at the bottom of an embankment, while on the other side, a mother sat holding the hollow tube of a ball point pen, which he used in performing an apparently successful tracheotomy, in the throat of her injured, but breathing baby. Then minutes passed that seemed hours and the storm died down to the pattering of light rain in the growing darkness of nightfall.
In the quiet rain CC hollered out: “Everything alright over there?”
The woman, more coherent now, answered, “Yes, she is breathing, she is breathing alright…. Larry, God, is Larry….
“He's OK,” CC yelled back, “He's breathing, he'll be alright, don't worry!”
Then they heard the distant lonely wail of an ambulance, the siren crescendoing louder and louder as it came nearer and nearer on the road above till it stopped. Then men came down the embankment with bright lights and stretchers and cases in their hands. Some went to the woman and baby; two came over to CC. “We'll take over now,” one of them said. And CC stood up and said nothing as he let the men take over.
Spotlights from the bridge lit the embankment then, and CC saw two men take the baby from the woman and two other men take the woman and help her onto a stretcher and start to get her up to the ambulance. Then more spotlights lit the whole scene. The rain had nearly stopped now, and he walked over to the other side of the smashed car and asked one of the ambulance attendants if the baby would be alright.
“You can't tell for sure right now,” he said, as he was helping strap the baby down in a stretcher, “but she would probably be dead if that pen tube wasn't sticking in her throat helping her to breathe.” And then they hurriedly began to get her up the embankment.
CC stood by and watched for a few more seconds. Then someone hollered: “Hey mister, that yer little car up there sticking half off the road?”
“I stopped right there when I seen them go over.”
“Yeah well, better get up there now and get 'er off to the side…. police 'il have a ticket on it next thing yuh know.”
“Then CC turned and made his way back up the embankment to the road and walked back to his car. There were flashing lights everywhere and traffic backed up on both sides of the road, but the police were directing the cars through a few at a time on each side. When CC finally got through he took the first turn off he could find to cross over to another road that would lead back home. He felt good about himself, having done all he could do in the situation that confronted him, and at the moment now his idea of making love to a beautiful girl tonight some how seemed so unimportant in the scale of what is and isn't important in this life. He looked at his watch that glowed in the dark and said nine o'clock as he slowly cruised along the near empty roadway back home. And he felt good about himself as he pulled in the driveway of his apartment. And felt good walking in the door, and going to his bedroom, and taking off his wet muddy suit and shirt and shoes and socks and underwear, and climbing into the shower. And when he was done he looked at the clock. It was only nine thirty. The night was still young and CC, though older for what had just happened, was still young. In fact the night, for the young, was just being born. There is still time, he thought, still time he thought, as he put fresh underwear on, still time to go down to the “Where It's At,” still time. Time! My God, how so much can happen in the span of an hour or so, he thought to himself, how a moment can change everything forever. And then he decided to start out all over, to begin afresh. But what will he wear? And, well, is it that important to wear a suit? Why not casual, hell, who wears suits today anyway? And what shall she be wearing but hardly anything? And so he began to dress, to get ready to go out again. And he figured he could be there by ten thirty, eleven at the latest, when things are starting to happen, the drinks flowing then like a fountain, the edge of stony sobriety passed, and the band and the Go Go girls alive with the abandonment of the sexy night.
CC dressed and put on his best cologne again. Cologne, yes, how important, how it can put a mystique around one in the sexy night. Smell, how important it is to smell good, especially to a stranger, and she would be a stranger to him too. But he knew she would smell good, she would smell good even if she had never taken a bath in her whole life.
********
When he got to the “WHERE IT'S AT” nightclub, he took the framed five hundred dollar bill out of the glove compartment and put it in the inside breast pocket of his sport blazer. He could hear the band: the rocking ruckus of the drums and guitars, the hot wild wailing sax and the big booming of the electric bass shaking the night air in the parking lot as he got out of his car and proceeded to go inside. It was crowded, so he had to elbow his way to the bar for a drink. The “GoGo” cages, six in all, were all spread out in various locations throughout the club, and there were, as always, the guys surrounding them, oggling the hot, slithering, near naked flesh pots inside them. CC got his drink, and began maneuvering through the crowd to find her, just to see her, that she was there as she was supposed to be this night, but not to make his move yet, no, for that he would wait until near closing time, but, as he shouldered his way through the crowd from cage to cage looking for her, he found she was not in any of them, and thinking that there must be some mistake, he revisited each again. No, she was not there tonight as he thought she would be, as she was scheduled to be. Then he made his way back to the bar, found a seat, sat down, became involved in conversation with other searching souls of the night there, and ordered another drink, but this time a double Manhattan, as opposed to the single that he ordinarily drinks.
When the bartender brought him his double Manhattan, CC asked him where the girl was he was looking for, and he described her to him. And he said he did not know, she did not show up, so he called another “GoGo” dancer to replace her.
And then he broke away from CC to serve another patron, and while he was in the process, CC seen him answering a phone at the far end of the bar.
Then the bartender came back to CC.
“That girl you were asking about?”
“Yeah?” said CC.
“Someone just called and said she was in a bad car accident, the car went over an embankment by the side of a bridge, she's OK, and her baby is going to be OK too, but her boy friend or husband, I don't know whether they're married or not, they said, didn't make it.”
