Luckily for us, the truck was going too fast and the driver hit a snow bank, which caused the shots to go high. The big diesel nearly spun out of control, before the driver managed to correct his steering. They were behind us again and preparing for another pass. Aadesh, to his credit, had his rifle up and ready to fire, and I was preparing to shoot mine as well. I kept my foot on the gas, while I let the loader go wherever its misaligned steering led us, leaving my hands free to fire the weapon.
The truck caught up to us again. Aadesh held the rifle close to his face, trying to line a shot up with the scope. He fired once and fell back into what I hoped was the bucket. I didn’t see him fall to the ground and I didn’t think he was shot, I just knew I didn’t see him. The guy in the truck fired several shots, most of which looked to be in Aadesh’s direction.
In that same time, I had my gun aimed at the door of the man firing at Aadesh. They didn’t seem to think I was a threat, or maybe they didn’t see that I had a weapon. I pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. “What the shit,” I yelled, panicking. I couldn’t figure out how to make the damn thing work, and the darkness of the cab made it nearly impossible to see. I cried out in anger. The gunman was now firing unchallenged. The cab erupted. The glass in the cab was shattered. Some of the shards stuck my in the neck.
The only thing that kept me alive was the rough ice on which the big truck traveled. It had to make shooting difficult at best. With enough shots, though, he was going to kill me or disable the front loader. It was just a matter of when.
Something caught my eye in the bucket. The rifle was resting on the top edge of the bucket, and it looked like Aadesh was trying to shoot at the truck. I saw a flash of the muzzle and then another. I thought to myself, he has about six or seven shots before we die. More shots were fired in our direction, one of which hit the steering wheel. Another nicked my chin. A searing pain engulfed me, and I felt something wet flowing down my neck and chest. I veered the loader to the right, trying to get out of the line of fire. Apparently, me swerving like I did gave Aadesh a perfect shot. Or a lucky one, depending on how you choose to look at it. He shot at least five shots in its direction. The truck veered hard to the left and disappeared into the night. “Holy shit!”
Aadesh stood up in the bucket, firing at least two more shots in the direction of the speeding truck. He pointed in the direction of where the truck last was and mimed that it had crashed through the ice, which made me veer even further to the right, while also decreasing my speed by half. We were lucky we didn’t suffer that same fate.
I needed to wrap my chin up, so I brought the loader to a stop. I cut the main lights and turned on the lamp I had brought with me. I then lowered the bucket to the ground so I could check on Aadesh. He was quickly around the cab and looking up at me.
“Are you sure it is being safe to stop here?”
He must’ve seen the blood on my face because he ran quickly to the bucket and retrieved some bandages we had managed to requisition from the first aid room. I took the bandages and applied one of the medium sized ones to my chin. I’d live, but I was going to have a nice scar once it healed. Assuming I lived long enough, that was.
After applying the bandage, I ventured a look at Aadesh standing just below the cab. He was violently shaking. “Are you alright, bro?” I asked.
“Yes. I believe I just killed at least two people.”
“You saved us. Hell of a shot.”
“I stopped using the scope.” He pulled his hood away from his head.
I smiled. “Good call.” He had a perfect, bloody ring the exact size of the diameter of the scope around his left eye.
“Upon my initial shod, da bidch nearly knocked me oud. I believed I was going to fall out of de bucked.”
“I saw you fall. I hoped for the best, though.” I patted him on the shoulder. “Wait until I tell Sam what you did. He’s going to shit his pants.”
“I’m not sure I feel comfortable dalking about killing humans, bud Sam will wery much be shidding.”
“Until we can reach the authorities, we have to do what we have to do… ya know?”
“Yes, that seems to be de case.”
I heard a groaning coming from just behind the front wheels. The less smart of the two Sniffers, the one who had climbed on the right fender, had gotten caught in the tight space where the front half and the back half of the loader pivots. His left arm was gone and it looked like he had been sucked into the space just below the axle that connects the transmission and the front transfer case. He was in agony. Aadesh walked close to him, put the barrel of his rifle close to his head, and pulled the trigger. The Sniffer was out of his agony.
I looked at Aadesh. He looked at me. “Id’s eider us or dem. I choose us, bro,” he said.
Not sure what to say, I said, “Let’s go find our friends.”
Aadesh nodded.
Chapter 8
Growing up, there was no time for make-believe. There was reality, and then there was Mom’s version of hard reality. There was nothing in between at my house. “Wait until you grow up, you little sonofabitch. You’re going to be on welfare and have a bunch of snot-nosed kids running around.”
That was mom’s go-to saying when she thought I was questioning her lack of success in life. How dare I wonder why we didn’t have food on Friday? Was it such a bad thing, wondering why I had two shirts and one pair of jeans to last most of the school year? Little Jimmy had a sleeping bag and curtains in his room, not to mention fucking Legos. Actually, more Legos than a kid could put together in a lifetime. “I guess his mom is better than me, ain’t she? You can’t go back over there. They’re putting crazy shit in your head.”
God forbid I wanted Legos. I can remember my friend brought his laser tag setup to my house one day. “Mom, see what Bobby has. Can I have one?”
“You’re too damn old for stupid toys, you little bastard. You can’t be a kid all your life.” Hell, I would’ve been happy being a kid until I was nine, but I guess that was too much to ask.
When I started hanging out with Avery in the sixth grade, he offered a refuge, or, well, his parents did. We were the odd couple. His parents were well off, and my parents, well, weren’t. Most parents who lived in a neighborhood like theirs would’ve been leery about their son hanging out with someone from the trailer park. Maybe what made the difference was that our trailer park was called Palm Villa? That sounds like a nice place, right? It wasn’t. They never judged me for living there. They treated me, to my mom’s dismay, just like one of their own.
I was introduced to Star Wars, Star Trek, and all kinds of shows with the word Star in them. I wasn’t entirely receptive to begin with. “What the fuck is the hairy dude, and how the hell do they understand what he’s saying?” I’d ask. Besides having a dirty mouth, I didn’t have much of an imagination about things, that was for sure, but I loved it there. I even came to appreciate science fiction, even if I didn’t always understand it or relate to it in some apparent way.
Looking back at it now, there was this odd duality that existed at the time: Mom’s notion of reality, what life was going to be no matter how hard you tried or strived; and the world of make-believe, the world that mom couldn’t ever imagine for herself, much less for her children. Even with Avery’s disability, his parents never told him what he couldn’t do. They focused instead on what he could do, which was anything he wanted, even following the trailer park kid around the world drilling for oil.
Some of that optimism rubbed off on me. I suppose that’s some of why I left Indiana to begin with. I wanted to find the world I could create, not the world that was predetermined for me. Sure, I struggled with old ghosts, had bouts of being a terrible person, and sometimes just plain sucking at life, but I finally found who I wanted to become once I settled into a normal life in East Texas.