Frederick Zackel
When You Least Expect It, A Jackrabbit Pops Up
Por donde
menos se piensa, salta la liebre
My grandfather came up from Chiapas first, and then he sent for
his family. When my grandmother, my aunts and my father got here in
Matamoros, my grandfather still didn’t speak the locals’ Spanish,
but he got a job as a trucker. My grandfather was a lonely man, a
melancholic man who had a family to support and nowhere else to
turn. He had hair on his balls, his buddies said, and a short life
facing him. His days were shortened because he could tell no one all
the shit he faced because he would lose his job if he told. He
stabbed his cigarette out in his food because he lost his appetite
too often and because his future sickened him. Sudden death on the
road scared him the most. He would come home with pains in his
forearms from another white-knuckle ride. The stiffness in the
ankles twisted him, and he'd twist back as hard, as if opening a
rusted jar lid, to get the circulation back. He had strain in his
calves from his legs being so stiff with fear for so long, and the
small of his back was a knot no sword could cut. He was almost
paralyzed by fear after work and dreaded the next day and its
monsters. His hands wouldn't stop trembling. He drank because the
bottle felt like part of his hand. He drank because he had phantom
pains -- real phantoms that haunted him in the night and brought him
grievous pain. No one knows how it started. No one ever came
forward. But on a warm Sunday after midnight, he was on his own,
alone outside Piedras Negras, coming home, as sheets of white rain
plummet to earth. Then: somehow the steering wheel ripped loose from
his hand. The tractor flinched, the back lurched and straightened
and then fishtailed, the tractor now at a right angle to the
trailer. The tractor tried a one-eighty, twisted itself, and landed
on its side. The trailer hurtled past the tractor, then jerked the
tractor, pulled it along. The tractor slid down the highway, on its
side, the driver's side. Foot-long sparks shot out bright flashes.
The sound was shrill and loud, like peacocks being tortured. The
tractor was sandpapered by the surface of the road. On its belly
sliding into third, sparks the size of our hands flying out,
sparklers in the night under the stars, skittered down the grade,
sometimes gravel and sometimes asphalt, the steel rail snapping like
a long bone, then the rig snapped, and the cargo shifted. The cab
became a tip of a whip getting snapped. A helpless man became
shrapnel. Flesh got shredded and then got skinned by pavement. He
kissed the rocks on a summer night. He died because of the whiskey
and the cigarettes and the other poisons he put in his body to keep
going. He died because of what he ate day in and day out because he
had no real choice or opportunity to eat any better. He died because
he was too scared to see a doctor because the doctor might say he
couldn't go to work. He died because his equipment wasn't as good as
he wished it was. He died because he worked surrounded by lunatics
and outlaws, and he always swore up and down that they were going to
get him killed, by the god above us all. He died because his bosses
don't care and he was invisible. He died because his body ached and
he was too tired to move out of pain's way, because he made an
honest mistake and he let down his guard, and he couldn't react fast
enough, and because his momentum scraped his flesh off his bones,
and his face off his skull. When the eighteen-wheeler slowed, the
noises faded. No one saw him. He lay silent, bleeding, a smear of
blood on the highway. No one stopped. No one ever came forward.
Eight hours to bleed out, said the coroner. Driver's error, said the
trucking company. Operator's error, said the insurance company. He
died because he thought he could do it one more time, and this time
was his turn.
Frederick Zackel teaches literature & the humanities at
Bowling Green State University in Ohio. |