Last Sunday morning, right after settling down to write after a late breakfast, I heard a tremendous WHOMP! I hustled outside in bare feet, ratty pants and a t-shirt. I found two cars resting side by side on my front lawn. Tire tracks tore across the lawn from the curb to where the vehicles rested. Broken glass and shattered bits of bumper littered road and grass. My neighbor, a young man named David, hovered nearby talking on his cell. I noticed that the car nearest to the road had antler Christmas decorations attached to its roof.
A middle-aged woman exited her silver car and cried, “You hit me!” Another woman said something unintelligible from inside her red car, and the first woman responded, “You didn’t stop!” Red car woman said, “I stopped at the stop sign!” Silver car said, “But then you pulled out in front of me!”
I went back inside to get car keys and sandals. I needed the keys to retrieve a mask from my car. I told Judy what had happened as I scurried around the house. She asked, “Was anyone hurt?” I told her that I heard two women arguing and that David had already stepped in to help.
We heard sirens in the distance. A fire truck and ambulance arrived shortly after. I returned to the scene and saw two EMTs unloading a gurney from an ambulance. A woman still sat in the red car. I finally saw that her air bag had fired. Two young men, silver car lady’s sons, stood by and retrieved possessions from her car as she sat at the curb. A sheriff’s deputy pulled up. No one, except for David and me, wore masks. Even the EMTs went about their business bare-faced.
Judy joined me and asked Silver if she needed anything, a drink of water? The woman looked grateful for the offer but declined. She said, “I’m okay. My shoulder just hurts.”
Red car woman turned out to be a bird-legged oldster pushing eighty. She refused the ambulance ride. She appeared emotionally shaken but spoke clearly and stood steadily without swaying or showing weakness in the knees. The deputy interviewed her first, then let her toddle home on her own power up Chilean Drive. Silver car lady explained to the officer that she had been travelling down Bougainvillea Drive when the red car pulled out in front of her. Silver said, “I tried to swerve, but it happened so fast I couldn’t do anything.”
Silver car lady eventually left with her sons in their vehicle. I began to wonder about the removal of the two cars still resting side by side on my lawn. Two wreckers eventually showed up. Men attached chains to the undercarriages of the cars and pulled them, one at a time, onto flatbed tow trucks. They had to stop to adjust the steering wheels on the cars, and I marveled that the front tires on either vehicle could turn at all. The red car’s engine compartment had been bashed in completely, The right half of the silver car’s engine compartment had been crushed.
Another sheriff’s deputy parked near the stop sign on Chilean. He watched the first car’s removal, then sauntered up to me. He asked, “What’s under the silver car?” I said, “A little palmetto and some bricks I put around it. It’s smashed all the way over.” “What’s it worth?” he asked. “About $80,” I replied.
The officer copied my license information to identify me as the property owner. He printed out a damage report and explained how to call the red car woman’s insurance company for compensation. He did me a favor by rounding up the replacement cost to $100.
After the cars had been cleared and the deputy left, I surveyed the damage. A tow truck man had picked up bigger pieces of debris and used a push broom to sweep glass and bits of plastic to the curb. Shards of glass, chrome, and plastic still littered the road and my lawn. I got a trash can from the studio and began to sweep and pick up the sharp, shiny remnants. I kept a wary eye out for passing cars as I now considered the intersection dangerous. Sudden accidents could easily kill even a cautious pedestrian or an old fart scrabbling around his yard on hands and knees.
I examined the palmetto, discovered that the taproot hadn’t been sheared, and propped it upright with some of the scattered bricks. I mounded loose earth over the exposed roots and poured a gallon of water around its base. Against all odds, it just might make it.
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