Chapter 10 - The Accident

This chapter is later in life. Now 40, Marietta nearly runs over her dog and other campers at a camp site when she tries to drive after taking mushrooms and fighting with her boyfriend.

Chapter 3 - The accident - 2010

Marietta and Taylor perched around a fire in a campground muddled with Winnebago’s and VW buses. It was past midnight and pitch black with only a single lantern visible in the campsite.

Taylor’s four friends passed around a crinkled bag of magic mushrooms. Marietta grabbed a handful and laid them in one of the folds of her skirt then reached a stick into the flame until the end caught fire.

“Your friends aren’t nice to me,” Marietta whispered in Taylor’s ear.

“Yes, they are. You are being paranoid.”

“No, I’m not. Tina completely ignores me.”

“I ain’t going to have this discussion right before we take mushrooms. Ok?” He said loudly breaking the intimate whisper.   

Marietta let the stick burn until the flame was high enough then lit her cigarette off the end and rubbed it out in the dirt.

“Do you have to use the word ain’t?” Marietta said. “It’s so trashy.”

“You pretend to be this mellow hippy chick but really you are a snob,” Taylor said.

Marietta stood up quickly and narrowed her eyes at Taylor. She wrapped her hair in a knot and swept past the fire. The fringe of her skirt brushed the edge of the fire and started to smolder.

“Marietta!” someone gasped.

She looked down and patted out the glow at the hem and kept walking into the darkness as her dog trailed behind.

“C’mon Gunner, git over here,” Taylor whistled and patted the log beside him. “I don’t know what’s up her a*s,” Taylor shrugged to his friends. The husky trotted back and curled up in a ball by the fire.

“I heard that,” Marietta said as she marched toward the only other light in the campsite. Her swishing silhouette stood out against the lanky pine trees surrounding the camp.

Taylor had grown up in a small town in Pennsylvania with five brothers and sisters. He and his siblings shared the same rite of passage - laboring every weekend and after school to keep his family’s restaurant running. By the time he was 20, Taylor had bussed tables, washed dishes and run the cash register for nearly a decade. College wasn’t part of his history, a fact that embarrassed Marietta so much that she cut off contact with most of her former friends after they started dating.

All of her friends except me - I stayed in touch with her - even in the years when she didn’t return my calls, remember my birthday or respond to my emails, I kept calling and emailing. Truth was, I needed Marietta. Now at 40, she was my only link to my former self - the carefree one who never worried, who took drugs and took chances and loved life and procrastinated and slacked off. I clung to our friendship.

Marietta and I had chosen wildly different paths but I was envious of hers. She was free. I had a husband, a baby, a proper job and a mortgage. I was overwhelmed with the responsibility of it. Having a child had added a weight heavier than all the other responsibilities combined. Who you were mattered now because someone else was going to see you as an example - the indulgence, the selfishness, the never quite good enough, the temper, the discontent, the desires. Other than a strong work ethic, I wasn’t sure if there was anything good I could exemplify for my daughter.

Marietta lived like a gypsy and although I viewed her choices with condescension, I understood them. I could have easily taken the same path. I always felt just a few feet away from that kind of life. Even though outwardly, we appeared to have nothing in common.

With the highway humming in the background, Taylor could overhear Marietta chatting and laughing with some other campers.

“You’re from Georgia? I grew up in Peachtree City,” she said in an exaggerated southern accent.

“The golf cart community?” asked the guy in a Grateful Dead T-shirt.

“Yes, we all drove golf carts around because it was safer.” She rolled her eyes.   

“I had a girlfriend from there. They had a ginormous house,” he held out his arms above his massive beer belly to demonstrate.

“We just took a bunch of mushrooms. You want some? We have a some beers,” Marietta raised her eyebrows and laughed. The younger of the two men twisted the lantern slightly so the light shone on Marietta. He leaned back in his plastic lawn chair and seemed to approve.

“Sure, we’ll come over. Ya’ll aren’t going to go crazy are you?”

“I’ve already gone crazy.” Marietta waved her arms alongside her head and laughed.

The two men looked her up and down. Even at 40, she was rail thin and could still pull off her waist-length hair without looking silly. Her macrame halter top tied at her neck and around her back. Her stomach showed slightly above the band of the batik skirt that swept the tops of her feet. She was tan with her shoulders just beginning to show the spotty damage from too many years in the sun. She took a drag on her cigarette and her face glowed. The creases around her mouth from 25 years of smoking were starting to deepen but she was attractive, more sexy than pretty now.

“Where’s the dog,” Marietta asked as the three of them sat down by the fire.

“He’s in the tent asleep,” Taylor answered.

Someone turned up the music. “String Cheese” played in the background and everyone shook hands.

“Well I found some people who do want to talk to me,” Marietta glared at Taylor and handed the two men a beer. They laughed nervously.

“Marietta, please stop.” Everyone around the fire got quiet. A few feet away, Tina was swaying from side to side, waving a branch smoldering at one end. The others watched the orange light as it danced.The mushrooms had kicked in.

“Stop what? I am serious, at least I found two people who are interested in talking to me.” The two men looked at the ground and one of them twisted the point of his beard.

“Can we please just enjoy this?” Taylor said.

“Well, I’m not enjoying this. I don’t feel welcome,” she said as she opened another Heineken.

“You do this every time you drink. You’ve had seven beers Marietta.”

“And how many have you had?” Marietta grabbed the backpack next to Taylor and started rifling through it. The group fell silent.

“What are you doing?” Taylor asked.

“I am leaving.”

“You are not leaving. Just stop.”

“Taylor, we are going for a walk. Y’all are such a buzz kill,” Tina said.

Marietta stood up and stumbled a bit as she pulled out the keys to the truck. Taylor grabbed her wrist.

“Stop,” he said. The visitors stood up.

“Hey I think we are going head back over to our camper but thanks for the beer.” The two men backed away gingerly and turned into the darkness.

Taylor waved them off and let go of Marietta’s wrist. As soon as he let go, she darted toward the truck and slammed the creaky door shut.  

“You are not driving,” Taylor banged his fist on the window.

“Yes, I am.”

“Marietta get out of the truck. Can you stop with the drama please?” The fire was fading.   

“I don’t know why I even hang out with your loser friends.”  She turned on the ignition. “Do they even have jobs?”

“Do you?” Taylor asked.

Marietta revved the engine as she tried to shift the truck in gear.

“I swear to God if you try to drive off, I am going to break this window.”

Marietta pressed the gas and the truck lurched forward and then died. Marietta was startled. Even with the headlights, she could barely see 10 feet in front of her.  Her dilated pupils made her vision even fuzzier.

She dropped her hands from the steering wheel and Taylor let out a sigh.

“Thank you, can you get out of the truck now please?”

She looked Taylor right in the eye, put it in gear and lurched forward again.

This time, there was a crunch.

“Marietta stop, there’s a tent!”  

Part of their green tent collapsed in front of the grill of the truck.

“Marietta, the dog!” They could see the dog darting from wall to wall inside the tent unable to find the flap to get out. He was like a pinball inside the fabric walls. As Taylor ran toward the tent, the dog darted out and leapt at the driver side door.  

“You nearly killed the dog!” Taylor screamed. The lanterns at the other camp sites were starting to appear.  

“Stop. Marietta Stop.” Marietta was panicking and couldn’t shift the truck into gear.

She turned her head and saw Taylor at the passenger’s side window. The next moment,  glass flooded the cab as Taylor’s smashed the window and shredded his hand.

“Oh my god, oh my god,” Marietta began to scream. “There’s something in my eye.There’s something in my eye!”

Taylor opened the passenger door, took off his shirt and wrapped it around his hand so he could brush the glass off the seat.

“I can’t open it. I can’t open my eye.”

“Jesus. F**k. I can’t drive,” Taylor said.

“I can’t see!”

“Move over.” Taylor raced around to the driver’s side. Marietta slid across the seat ripping the upholstery and her skin against some of the remaining shards.

Taylor backed up the truck and pulled onto the road.

 

The hospital was only a few miles away. Taylor drove and Marietta rocked back and forth, whimpering.

“Marietta, I need you to listen. When we get to the hospital you have to get out and go inside by yourself.”

“What the f**k are you talking about!”

“Marietta, I’ll go to jail if I get another DUI and we have all the stuff in the back of the truck!”

Her shoulders collapsed, her body deflated. She nodded covering her eye with her hand.

Within minutes, they were at the ER. Taylor screeched into the driveway and Marietta opened the door with her free hand. She began to sob as the shock lifted and the pain descended.

“I’ll check on you,” Taylor said as he gunned it out of the parking lot in his truck carrying over 100 pounds of marijuana.

Author's Note

Most interested in knowing if this is something you'd keep reading. Is it completely boring? Is the structure too much telling and not enough showing? Do you get a feel of who the characters are?