[The following is another in a series of online stories I have come to call "Tales of the City" since, at the time of its creation in 1995, I was first moving into Spokane to take up residence in the city. It is a series about strange, heart-warming, embittering, angry and sometimes humorous people whose lives I have crossed in living in Spokane. ] Charlie's Gift by Dave Laird Copyright 1997 D.Laird The lazy summer sunshine lay snuggled against the wheat fields like some indolent lover as Charlie M._ roared down the highway in his souped-up cross-breed Chevrolet sedan with a brand-new high-performance engine roaring beneath the hood. Oh God, but that motor sounds good, he thought to himself, as he goosed it once, just to hear the tailpipes blare their twin challenges off the hilltops. With three hundred sixty five horses strong, there weren't many cars on the highway that could offer him any serious challenge when it came to an impromptu drag race, but perhaps that is why Charlie never turned down any reasonable offers to race his beloved car. He had assembled his Chevy in a wooden garage on the east side of Spokane taking all winter last year assembling the motor by hand, even on those days when the bitter cold wind whipped through the holes and spaces of the old garage until it hurt his hands just to touch the cold steel, but he had persevered, given his all, so that he could relish this moment in time. When the white car first appeared in his rear view mirror, Charlie immediately took his foot off the gas as, at first glance, he thought it might be the cops, although few cops normally ever patrolled this isolated stretch of highway. Just to be on the safe side, he casually let his speed drop back to the legal limit, and waited for the car to get closer. If it wasn't a cop, he simply would put his foot back in the pair of four barrel carburetors and leave the poor slob behind. The car kept coming, and less than two miles later, Charlie could see clearly, to his relief, that it wasn't a State Cop. However, when Charlie put his foot back on the accelerator, this time the car behind him sped up to where the gap between both cars was even less than normal. Charlie grinned, a defiant grim mask of impending victory, but with a nod in his rear view mirror as if to say, 'eat my dust, buddy!', he smashed the gas pedal down to the bottom of its travel, and gasped deep inside himself as the car, the product of his own hands, leapt forward with a squall of his rear tires. 80-90-100... The speedometer climbed rose like an arrow, true and straight to nearly its top. However, when Charlie looked in his rear view mirror, expecting to see a vanquished stranger trailing behind him in the afternoon haze, he was stunned to see the white car almost on his rear bumper, pacing him as he roared past the golden fields of wheat on either side of the road. It was nearly the last thing Charlie ever saw. He only momentarily felt the passenger side front tire slither off the tarmac and onto the gravel, but time was running at over 100 miles per hour, and it was already too late. The white Chevy sedan over which Charlie had labored for nearly an entire year began sliding in the gravel, sluing wildly back and forth, and went airborne in milliseconds after it careened sideways in the gravel, ditch bound. The other driver never slowed, at least not that accident investigators could tell during an investigation done later that afternoon. For nearly an hour the wheat sang in the late afternoon breeze howling up out of the heated surfaces of the Grand Coulee Dam. The sparrow hawks creened overhead, perhaps seeing the mangled remains of the Chevy huddled against a mutilated hillside, among the wild sage and tansy root. The human body is an amazing machine. Although his spine was snapped, several ribs broken by the steering wheel and a host of other lacerations were bleeding his body dry minute by minute, Charlie somehow hung onto the seamless thread of life unconsciously, as a man would hold onto a canteen in the desert. He hung on as the sun continued its languid journey and the wheat field whispered to itself. Beatrice G_, a 65 year old spinster of independent means, often tried to create the image of herself as being far more spry, independent and game for anything in life than she actually felt, or at least that was the way she sometimes felt inside. However, after spending nearly an entire week with her son and daughter-in-law in Coulee City, she felt every single day of her 65 years. It was so tedious, sitting there in their household, with her two bratty grandchildren bounding off the walls of a house that was only designed to hold two or perhaps three adults, and those would have had to be INTIMATE adults at that, she thought primly, as she headed home to Spokane. Three children! She silently shook her head, as if admonishing her son. Far too young to be having so many children. Her thoughts were interrupted by a glimpse, however brief, alongside the roadway ahead of her, of a mangled car laying half on its back against the ditch bank. Carefully slowing the car, she peered about anxiously for signs that someone were around. A lesser woman, perhaps not nearly so independent, might have simply driven on, perhaps even dismissing the sight entirely from their conscious mind. However, Bea was an extraordinary creature, prone to great curiosity and completely afraid of nothing. Carefully looking both ways, she stopped the car, leaving it idle, and hobbled over to where the wreck lay smoldering, weeping its fluids in sorrowfully dismal sadness over the whiskey-red earth. Peering inside the mass of tortured metal, regardless of her independent nature, she gasped, for their was a man, halfway upside down, pinned inside the metal cocoon. She reached inside, her hand shaking a bit, and felt for and found a tiny trace of a pulse in his neck. Patting his hand, unconsciously trying to comfort him, she said, "Now you just hold on in there. I'm going to a farmhouse nearby and get some help." With that, she turned, quickly walking back to her car, all the meanwhile scanning the sun-blasted wheat fields around her for any sign of a residence, a farmhouse-- anything that looked like a place from which to call for help. Five minutes later, she stammered out her location to a police dispatcher, thus saving Charlie's life, of that everyone is certain. Then with help on the way, she returned to that lonely crag overlooking the wheat fields, and sat beside the wrecked car, holding onto Charlie's hand inside, and talking to him until help arrived nearly half an hour later. Eleven years have passed since that fateful day, filled with hours of torture, pain and the drugs which have come to fill most of what normally would be Charlie's memories with blank, empty space, although devoid of the pain. However, he never forgot Beatrice, for she was the first face he saw, as he emerged from consciousness, still pinned inside the remnants of his car. He could feel her hand upon his own, hear her words of encouragement, and thus he fought bravely to hold onto that bit of life until the medics arrived with a syringe of relief. Last month, Beatrice had a stroke. Oh, it wasn't one of those debilitating strokes that leaves a human trapped inside their shell, unable to fend for themselves at any level. However, while she lay in the intensive care unit in one of Spokane's finest hospitals, she remembers Charlie, who came to sit with her every night, holding her hand gently in his, cradling it like a captive bird, and she remembered him from the accident scene long, long ago, and whispered his name out loud when she first regained consciousness. After several weeks of therapy, she was released from the hospital. Charlie mysteriously learned of her impending release, and came to take her home. Beatrice is, in her own words, "fine as a howdy-doo". Beatrice will always walk a little slower now though, and when she is tired after a long day, her smile sags a tiny bit on her left side. Hardly anyone notices these things, even her closest friends don't seem to mind. Still, Charlie checks on her, from time to time, and comes by each week to mow her lawn for her, while she holds forth from the comfort of an old overstuffed chair he placed on her front porch for her to better watch the sunsets of an evening. There is a place by the river, where people pause to celebrate the lives of those who have, for no other reason than decency and human kindness, reached out to them from the fog, to gently hold them and pull them back into life and living. Charlie and Beatrice both are there, in present in each one of our lives, waiting only for the opportunity to give back to that which sustains us all. Dave -- Dave Laird * The Wag of Spokane * Founder of The Phoenix e-mail: dlaird@ieway.com OR dave.laird@phoenix.circuit.com Moderator of The Phoenix Newsgroup and listserv