THE MONITOR COUNTY SAMARITAN

THE MONITOR COUNTY SAMARITAN
by Matthew Roy

He drums a tattoo on the dashboard. He drives.

+++

“Unit Five, possible hit and run near mile marker 184. Victim is male, aged 20s, unconscious, unresponsive. Time is 08:32.”

He looks up. He is passing mile marker 53. He is too far away, and he returns his eyes to the road as he keeps driving.

+++

“Unit Eleven, two car collision at Anderson Turnoff. Female victim trapped in car. Time is 18:44.”

By the time he gets there, paramedics are already loading the woman into an ambulance. He lingers, standing at the back of the crowd for a while. He climbs back into his truck, its rotten suspension creaking under his weight. He drives.

+++

He spends most of the day driving. Work, sleep, drive. Drive, sleep, work. Sleep, drive, work. Drive.

The police scanner warbles. He has duct-taped it to his dashboard. It crackles with static when he passes under heavy power lines. The radio tower used by the dispatch station has a radius of eighty miles or so, which lets it cover all of Monitor County and a bit beyond. The scanner fades out of range, creaking, then screaming with distortion when he passes Allenton Junction, when he passes Grey Creek Bridge on Route 9 East, when he hits mile marker 28 on Route 9 West. When his truck passes those points, he slows until the voices on the scanner fade. He spins the steering wheel hand over hand, his muffler rattling, does a U-turn, a three-point turns, and heads back into Monitor County.

The voices come back into range.

+++

“Where were you headed?” The heavier sheriff shifts his weight against the exam room counter.

“I like to drive around. Just drive sometimes.”

“So, nowheres in particular?”

“Nowheres in particular.”

+++

“Unit Three, car crashed into a telephone pole. Near Main and County Road Six. Time is 01:56.”

He arrives on scene before the police and paramedics. It’s two o’clock in the morning and response time is sluggish. The witnesses are keeping their distance. Usually, they crowd around the scene at first, then gradually back off. He walks to the crumpled SUV. He can smell booze from six feet away. He reaches through a shattered window and touches the slumped driver’s neck. His rough fingers linger a moment. No pulse. No breath. He turns away, climbs back into his truck, drives.

+++

The skinnier sheriff flips through his notepad. “Where do you work?” he asks. His tone is harsher, more interrogating.

“At the Johnson Diner. I do odds and ends. Whatever they need me to do.”

“Do you live around here?”

“I kinda ain’t got a home right now. Been staying at a shelter near Haverton Turnoff.”

“Can anybody at the shelter verify that?”

“Yeah, probably could. I don’t… am I in trouble?”

“Right now, we’re just tryin’ to get a statement.”

+++

He keeps a tennis ball in his truck. It is fraying badly, ragged, its neon yellow color long-faded to something pale and grimy, blackening in places where his fingers have stained it with sweat, the oils from his skin worked deep into the material. He squeezes it, alternates hands. He does a hundred squeezes, making fists as tight as possible, then switches hands. Most days, he can do five or six thousand squeezes with each hand. Tight muscles cord his scrawny arms. He counts absent-mindedly. He leaves the radio off. The police scanner, its static and its silences and its reports of tragedy are pleasant enough background noise.

+++

“… domestic disturbance…”

“… neighbor reports he heard gunshots…”

“… multiple assailants…”

“… fire…”

“… male victim…”

“… time is 15:27…”

“… time is 07:41…”

“… time is 21:03…”

“… time is 05:00…”

Most of the dispatches that crackle out of the scanner are to residences, the trailer parks and low-income housing, motels converted to apartments where so many of the county’s population live. He listens to these reports, but they hold little interest to him; there is nothing he can do with them. The reports from the highways, though, the back roads and rural turnoffs, these are far more interesting. Emergency responders take longer to get to these.

These dispatches give him something he can do.

It’s been raining a lot this spring. Heavy rain is the busiest time. Heavy rain and snow.

+++

“You tried your best,” the lady doctor says. “You tried to save him. Nobody else did that, and you’ve got the battle scars to prove it.”

The two sheriffs have stepped outside the room. They sip their coffee.

The lady doctor finishes stitching, closing the long, straight cut that runs from his elbow to halfway down his forearm. He’d kept his arm wrapped in a towel while the sheriffs questioned him. The hospital is short-staffed, and it took a while for the lady doctor to get to him. While she talks, he looks at the ugly and fat stitches that look like a parade of spiders crawling up his arm. She drops her tools onto the tray beside him. Metal clangs on metal and he looks up at the sound. She tugs off her rubber gloves. They make snapping noises.

“If you talk to Annie at the front desk,” she says, “the girls can get you set up with some of the leftovers from dinner. The food won’t be very good, but you look like you could use a meal.”

He nods. She bandages his arm, wrapping clean, white gauze around grimy skin, loop after loop, covering the black and gnarled stitches. There’s a hospital smell, antiseptic.

“Gotta go,” she says. She is friendly enough, pretty in a plain sort of way. “I’m on ambulance duty tonight,” She shrugs, smiles.

“They makin’ you drive an ambulance too?”

“Small town, so we all do double-duty. It’s the only ambulance in the county tonight, so here’s hoping it’s quiet. I’ll let the sheriffs back in. You take care.” She pats his knee, stands, and leaves.

+++

He’s seen plenty of accidents happen himself. You drive around enough miles and for enough hours, and you’re bound to see other drivers screw up. He’s seen accidents, maybe even helped cause a few, nudge them into existence.

Most are minor, fender-benders, a car braking too quickly and getting rear-ended by the driver behind it. A few are far worse.

One of the worst he saw was in Ichabod County, before.

It was Route 9, much farther west, where the highway winds through forested hills. The two-door in front of him had drifted across the median as they’d rounded a bend in the road. And whether it was because the driver was sleepy or distracted or drunk or had a death wish, it didn’t matter. It was pure dumb chance that at that moment another car rounded the curve, headed their direction.

The crash had been spectacular.

One moment, two intact cars were careening toward each other, and the next was noise and debris and churned up mud and grass. The cars had collided, crumpled, and bounced back, rebounding away from each other. He’d nearly run into the back of the two-door himself. He’d pulled off to the side of the road, his heart hammering a tattoo in his chest.

He’d climbed out of his truck shakily. He’d felt giddy. No one stirred in the wreckage of either car. He’d stepped lightly towards them, and the only sounds had been the bugs and the cooling, tick-tick-ticking of two dead and ruined engines, the clicking of his hazard lights (because he always followed traffic laws), the grit crunching beneath his boots. And of course, the warble and hiss of the police scanner. He barely heard all of this over the sound of his blood in his ears.

The driver of the two-door had been dead, smashed up and bloody and cooling like his engine. The woman in the other car had stirred as he’d approached. She’d been dazed and weak, wedged in the crumpled front section of her car, blood dribbling her nose.

“Shush. There, there,” he’d said to her, leaning toward her and placing his hands, tucked in his shirtsleeves, on her door.

The ebb and flow of traffic on these back roads has never ceased to amaze him. Here, two cars had just plowed into each other, intersecting at the exact moment one had drifted across the median. But no other cars would pass their way for hours.

Later, he’d looked dumbly up and down the empty road, swaying slightly, blood on his arms and hands and shirt. No one had come, no emergency responders, no trucks, no families on vacation. He’d climbed back into his truck, turned the scanner up a bit louder, and driven off.

+++

“Will I… Will I get in trouble for this?”

“Likely not,” the heavier sheriff says, “There’s such a thing as Good Samaritan Laws. You was tryin’ to help. You’re protected by law from arrest and liability. Those laws don’t exist in every county. But we got ‘em here.” The sheriff counts on his fat fingers. “Halloran County’s got ‘em. So do Ichabod County, Grimm County, Hagle…”

He looks down at his own hands while the fat sheriff talks, flexing his fingers as much as he can. White gauze covers most of his arm where the roof of the car had cut him and the doctor stitched him up. He hadn’t realized at first that the car had cut him, hadn’t realized it until after.

He fidgets with the bandage, picks at it. Scratches at it.

“They didn’t tell you about it before?”

“Before?”

“Over in Ralston County. When you pulled that boy outta the storm drain,” he checks his notes. “Last summer. You dislocated both his shoulders.” He looked at his partner.

“I remembered you from the paper. I don’t forget a name,” the skinnier sheriff says.

+++

He drives. All the time he drives. The truck’s muffler rattles and rust creeps across the faded paint job as the years go by. The engine is noisy and needs a tune up. Inside the cab, the sounds of the police scanner are constant, the creak and warble, the spitting static and reports of tragedy.

+++

He doesn’t make it to most of these calls in time. But every now and then he does. Every now and then he finds that perfect window, the one that opens when the dispatcher broadcasts a tragedy across that scanner, and closes when the police or EMTs or firefighters arrive. The window of time when he loses himself, when he finds himself, when he is able to do his work.

+++

He tilts the bottle to his lips, drinks the cheap and warming beer. He sets the bottle down; it clatters against a bar top full of empties. It is long before, and he is younger.

“Lemme ask you something,” slurs the stranger on the bar stool next to him. The stranger has rambled all night, talked about women he’s bedded, rich suckers he’s scammed, liquor stores and gas stations he’s knocked over. As the night has worn on, conversation has turned to darker and darker topics. The stranger has boasted to him of the terrible things he’s done to the women who didn’t want him. Their talk has shifted to the morbid and the brutal. “What’s the perfect murder?” the stranger asks.

He takes another pull off his beer as the stranger talks. He glances down at his hands. Dirty and calloused, but smoother than they will be. He flexes them, wiggles his fingers. The taut muscles in his forearms ripple and warm. He smiles at them. “You cain’t do it with a gun or a knife. You gotta do it with your hands… You gotta make it look like you was tryin’ to help.”

“That’s dark, friend,” the stranger grins through rotten teeth.

Later, the bar closes. The lights go up and the music cuts out. The two of them stagger out to the parking lot. He climbs into his truck, newer now, less broken down than it will be. The stranger takes two tries to climb into his own pickup.

The stranger drives off ahead of him, speeds away. Not long after that, he comes upon a wreck in the road, the stranger’s truck smashed against the median, turn signal still clicking on and off, on and off. He pulls up behind the wreck, climbs out of his truck. He takes his time walking to the stranger’s truck, and smiles when he looks inside.

“See?” he says, leaning closer. He reaches into the truck and gets to work.

+++

“Unit One, we have a one-car accident at mile marker 102. Male driver trapped in the vehicle. Time is 20:31.”

This is it. This is the accident the fat sheriff and skinny sheriff will question him about. The one where he will cut his arm, to have it stitched and bandaged by the lady doctor who will then leave in an ambulance for another call.

A crowd huddles together at a distance, under the trees lining the highway. Presumably, they have tried to help and had no luck. The hammering rain is cold and it is keeping them back and under shelter. He pulls up along the shoulder, his high beams painting the wreck in sharp light and inky shadow.

The sedan is overturned, canted funny just off the road, sinking into the muck. A rushing stream of cold water flows along the roadside, filling the roof of the car. A man struggles weakly inside. The man is hanging upside down, held in place by his seatbelt.

He watches the man struggle a moment, though he can’t see many details in the glare of the headlights and rain. He turns on his hazard lights; they make a tic-tocking sound inside his cab. He looks over to the police scanner. There are no voices now, only the faint hiss of static.

He snaps the scanner off and there is silence.

He climbs out of his truck, paper and food wrappers crinkling as he slides over them and to the door. Rain drums on his truck, rattling on rust. It drenches him as soon as he steps down to the road. He walks slowly towards the overturned sedan. He feels his muscles tighten and bunch in anticipation as he approaches the wreck.

He counts thirteen steps to get to the wreck. Each footfall is heavy with menace and intent. He likes that it takes him thirteen steps. As he gets closer, he can feel heat coming off of the sputtering and dying engine.

He plants his hand on the overturned sedan for just a moment to feel that heat, then he squats beside the car, looking through the busted-open driver’s window at the struggling man. The man is as smashed up as his sedan. He looks ridiculous, trapped there like that by the bashed-in car and his seatbelt, like an insect stuck on a pin, like an animal caught in a trap, dumb and helpless. Dazed and in shock, the man murmurs something. Blood is in man’s thinning hair, which hangs pathetically and dips into the cold water filling the top of the car, the bottom of the wreck.

He watches the man a moment, then steps back. He lowers himself onto his belly and plants his hands on the asphalt. He pushes himself forward, his body moving through the water like something with snake skin, as purposeful and sinister as the sergent in the Garden. He smiles at the thought. Glass and pebbles snag his shirt, already soaked by the rain. He slides forward through the grit to wedge his upper body inside the vehicle with the man. This is when he cuts his arm on the broken glass of the driver’s window, though he won’t notice this for some time.

The inside of the sedan smells like mud and gasoline and copper. He feels weak heat from the trapped man’s hitched breaths, just like the heat he felt bleeding through the skin of the dying car. The warm breath hits him, recedes. Hits him, recedes. The pooling water in the sedan is murky, black under the glare of his truck’s high beams, and it’s even colder than the rain, but he doesn’t feel it. His hands slide through the water like something sinister and primordial. His smile broadens, splits his face in grin. He is hands and arms and a smile hidden in darkness and nothing more.

The man murmurs again. He might be whispering, “Help me.”

Might be whispering, “Please.”

It could be anything, though. He can’t hear the man. He can’t hear a sound through the pounding of blood in his ears.

He lifts his hands out of the black water. His hands pause, tremor.

His hands, claw-like, close around the stranger’s head. The man moans, squirms against the calloused fingertips, the crocodile skin of his hands. He tightens his grip. The muscles in his arms bunch and his fingers dig roughly into skin.

He twists, and pulls.

+++

Afterward, the skinny sheriff and two EMTs will be the first to reach him. They’ll find him sitting, slumped against the side of the overturned sedan, his knees drawn up, his arms resting on his knees, his hands held out in front of him, blood dripping from calloused fingertips.

Then one of the EMTs will shine a penlight in his eyes, shout over the sound of the rain to ask if he is O.K. The sheriff will shine his flashlight into the sedan, finding nothing but the victim of a motor vehicle accident, a dead driver in a car filling with water. He’ll shine his flashlight on the the drenched and silent man huddled in the muck outside the sedan. The man’s arm will be bloody from where he reached through a broken window, apparently trying to save the driver.

+++

It’s been silent for nearly a minute.

“Weren’t nobody else tryin’ to help him,” he says. “I thought I could help.”

“Was he conscious?” the skinny sheriff asks.

“Conscious?”

“Yeah, was he awake when you got to him?”

“I don’t think so. He looked bad. Looked asleep. He was in that water and I was just tryin’ to pull him out.”

“But he wasn’t awake? Because some of the statements from some of the other witnesses say the two of you were talking for a minute. That he was shouting at you.”

“No… no, that ain’t it… I might have been talkin’ to him, tryin’ to calm him dow-”

“What might you have said when you were talking to him and trying to reassure him?” The skinny sheriff asks.

“I don’t know. Somethin’ like ‘shush’ or ‘there, there.’”

+++

The sheriffs are done. They’ve taken their notes, flipped their notepads shut. They tell him not to leave town, ask him if he needs a ride anywhere. He thanks them, tells them he’s O.K. The lady doctor is long gone, dispatched on an ambulance trip to the site of some other tragedy he’s missing.

He walks out of the hospital, walks out into the rain which hasn’t stopped since before the accident. It’s an ugly night, and more accidents are bound to happen. He opens the door to his truck, climbs in. The sheriffs and EMTs had let him drive himself to the hospital, a towel wrapped around his arm. Dried blood, a brown stain, paints the inside of the driver’s door. The seat is damp from rain washing in.

He turns his key in the ignition, and it takes a couple of tries to get the truck started. The engine is noisy and needs a tune up.

+++

He remembers a preacher from his childhood. Some sermon, most of the message forgotten. It is about the Good Samaritan.

“Thing is,” the preacher-man says, “The Samaritans were not known in ancient times as good people. They were the low, the base, the untrustworthy. But that was Christ’s message. There is good in all men. There is evil in all men.”

+++

He won’t return to the shelter where he’s been staying. He will leave his things behind, like a snake shedding its outer skin. He smiles at that sort of image. He always smiles at that image.

Most of his bags and most of what he needs are in the truck anyway. He pulls a crumpled piece of paper out of the trash in his glove box, scans it. It lists twenty-one counties in five states. Sitting in a library years ago, he’d made this list after thumbing through piles of law books. He’s edited the list since then, made a few adjustments. Added a few counties, removed a few as Good Samaritan laws and statutes changed. He has crossed off twelve counties in red ink. He reaches beneath his seat, fumbles around a moment, pulls out his red marker.

He draws a clumsy line through Monitor County. He scans the list. East takes him to Halloran County and then on to Grimm County. Halloran it is.

He flicks on the scanner as his truck rumbles out of the hospital parking lot. The scanner crackles and screams as he passes beneath power lines.

He drives east. The scanner is pleasing background noise, low tones and hissing static. Rain sloshes against his windshield between beats of his wiper blades. He drives. The scanner spits and sputters as he nears the end of the dispatch tower’s range.

“Unit One, we have a high priority. Ambulance overturned north of Route 9 and Hemmingway. They called it in. Both medics badly injured. One unconscious and unresponsive.”

His eyes snap up as he passes a mile marker. He’s just passed the turnoff for Hemmingway. That accident is only minutes from here.

He considers. Keep moving east, or turn around. It’s risky, getting caught again by the sheriffs, but far too good to pass up. He can be the first on scene, the first to get to the ambulance. Emergency response will be slow; after all, there’s only one ambulance responding in Monitor County tonight. The EMTs who found him earlier are off-duty now. The nice lady doctor will be there.

He slows the truck, executes a three-point turn. Calloused hand over calloused hand spins the steering wheel. His muffler rattles. He heads for the Hemmingway turnoff.

His fingers drum a tattoo on the dashboard. He drives.

Fiction © Copyright Matthew Roy
Photo by Artyom Kulakov

Matthew Roy (he/him) recently moved from a small town to a big city, from a rambling farmhouse to a tiny apartment, and from a major corporation to an up-and-comer. He’s writing more. He’s making changes. His work has appeared in Eternal Haunted Summer, The Quarter(ly) Journal, The Sprawl Mag, and So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library.