Chapter 1, The Amazing Adventures of Ralph Kroder, a work in progress

A View from Below

       The last thing Ralph Kroder saw was the underside of a Toyota Tacoma hurtling at him. He had heard the BANG! and SMASH! and other sounds associated with a crack up, his head jerking to his left and at the intersection, where a driver ran a red light and smashed his or her vehicle into another car, or pickup, and the collision sent the Tacoma airborne.

       Two simultaneous thoughts filled Ralph’s mind as another part of his consciousness noted the dirt-brown underside, mud-spattered exhaust pipes, drive shaft, and the tires still spinning. He remembered six years back when he and Cassandra were driving on I-30W out of Little Rock, when a movement across the grassy median caught his eye and Cassandra’s. Both saw a cloud of dust, and coming out of the dust, the upper side of a blue-green Ford pickup, hood, cab and cargo bed, “Just like in a movie,” his mind said at the time. Then the Ford spun one hundred eighty degrees in two axes and landed on its tires, facing the opposite direction.

       Traffic in both directions stopped as startled drivers viewed a once-in-a-lifetime incident. Cassandra pulled her Ford Flex onto the paved shoulder and stopped. Ralph opened his door and stepped out as Cassandra said, “Where are you going?” Ralph knew the inadvisability of walking across two lanes of interstate traffic. Indeed, only two months before, the father of a friend of Cassandra’s had been hit by an eighteen-wheeler while attempting to walk across I-30 near Gurdon. Ralph had figured that was as near an instantaneous death as could be, a human smacked by the blunt nose of an eighteen-wheeler doing seventy miles an hour. Cassandra had said, “Where are you going?” and, “Don’t you walk across the interstate!” Ralph had replied, “I know how this will sound, but somebody has to.” He closed the door and walked around the front of the Flex, holding out his left hand as he crossed the two lanes of stopped traffic, stepped over the low cable barrier and strode to the pickup.

       Three other people were at the truck when Ralph arrived, another man and two women. Ralph thought, “Damn! Out of all those people on this side of the highway, and only three come out here to see what they can do.” The driver’s door was open. The driver was slumped over the steering wheel. He was belted in, which was a good thing, because going airborne at whatever high speed he had achieved would surely have thrown him through one of the pickup's windows. The pickup air bag had not deployed. Ralph said, “Anybody call nine-one-one?” The other man raised a hand. “I did.” One of the women said, “I knew something was gonna happen. He went around me going more than a hundred miles an hour.” The other woman said, “I’m a nurse.” She wore jeans and a checkered shirt. She took off her shirt and rolled it up, in so doing showing her gray sports bra. She said, “I’m gonna put this behind his back as a brace.” Ralph said, “Looks like y’all got this under control.” He walked back to Cassandra and the Flex, again using his hand to let people now he was crossing the highway. He got in the car, buckled up and briefed Cassandra. “They did what they could, and they’re waiting for an ambulance.” Cassandra put the Flex in gear and drove on west, toward Texarkana. Other traffic had not yet moved. Ralph said, “That was just like a movie. A cloud of dust and the pickup perpendicular in the dust.” He shook his head. “We probably won’t see that again in our lifetimes.”

       That was one thought that finger-snapped through Ralph’s mind as he watched the Tacoma underside fill all of his vision. The concomitant thought, before the pickup slammed into Ralph and the golf cart he drove was, “Fuckin’ Florida drivers.”