Some day I am going to finish this - Its gonna be called the tomahawk bandit
Walter Coleman Williams was conceived against the chain link fence that ran behind The Liberty Lanes in Barneveld , on a chilly, spring evening in 1959. It was the last few months of the Eisenhower administration and price of a six pack of Utica Club Beer was 79 cents.
His parents, Walter Coleman Williams and mother, Mary Kate Vloman, had been celebrating the perfect 300 game the father-to-be had bowled during the Friday night leagues. They were both very drunk at the time yet they seemed to remember every excruciating detail of the evening's events or, at least every frame of the perfect game. Young Walter came to know the story in full by his fourth birthday.
As Mary Kate got closer to her due date, she began to refer to the unborn Walter as the "the perfect baby."
"You are the perfect baby child, conceived on a perfect night, the night your daddy bowled a perfect game." Whenever she said it, she would place her hand on her growing belly.
It was a perfect time to start a family too. Daddy Walter had just started his job as toll collector on recently opened New York State Thruway in Utica
On the night he was born, Mary Kate had taken the time to prepare a fine dish of Poison Noodles; egg noodles bathed in a perfectly blended mixture of Campbell
"Walter…" she announced The perfect baby is coming."
Walter, who was feeling rather famished and fully aware he wouldn't have a chance to eat, began to shovel his plate of noodles into his mouth at a ferocious pace. After five or six huge bites Mary Kate screamed.
"Walter! We have to go!"
They had both forgotten that it had been snowing hard since dark. Even though it was mid- January, the distant Lake Ontario
Walter got up from his chair, walked over to her with a panicked look, hugged her, and returned to his bowl to gulp down his last bite of noodles. Then, he began to pace around the house looking for something. Her contractions started almost immediately.
"What are you doing" asked Mary Kate.
"What should I do"? He asked her.
"Go out and start the truck and then get my bag out of the bedroom." She snapped.
He looked out the window and saw the snow. That is all he could see. At least six inches had fallen since he got home from work and it was blowing. He couldn't even see the street light at the end of their road and the trailer across the drive was barely visible.
"Honey,..... its snowing" he said.
Walter threw on his boots and coat and made his way out to the truck. Just as he reached for the car door, he swore at himself. "Son-of-Bittch."
He realized that he had forgot to grab the keys and headed back to the trailer. When he opened the door, Mary Kate was standing in the kitchen talking on the phone with the doctor. Walter stopped to listen.
"Yes they have started." She said calmly and listened. "About six minutes (pause)………Pretty hard……….Yes we are leaving right now."
She looked up at Walter as he grabbed the keys of the counter. He walked over to her while she listened to the doctor on the phone. Walter placed a hand on each of her shoulders, kissed her on the forehead, smiled and whispered, " I love you." Mary Kate smirked and shooed him away while mouthing the words "hurry up".
Walter headed outside with conviction and the truck keys. The blizzard was finding its way down the back of his neck as it blew off the roof of the trailer. It was so windy that little wells had formed in the snow around each of the truck's tires and the windshield was buried in a drift that formed a perfectly straight line from the top of the cab to the wings on the hood ornament.
He glanced in the bed of the old pick up and mumbled something about being a lazy man. As he opened the truck door, he placed one foot up into the cab while he braced himself on the open door and looked straight up into the millions of whirling snowflakes. At the top of his lungs he shouted. "Thank you god, Thank you!"
If someone had heard Walter that night, they might have thought that he was thanking god in jest for the blizzard. He wasn't. Walter was sincerely thankful. It was, however, impossible to know if he was he was shouting out his thanks to the good lord for the impending birth of his child or, for the extra weight in the bed of the pickup from the firewood he was too lazy to unload all week. He was certainly thankful enough to overlook the fact that it was the worst possible night of the entire winter to drive to the hospital in Utica
He got in the truck and started it without incident. While it warmed up, he cleared away the perfect snow drift from the windshield with the sleeve of his winter coat.
Walter made his way back into the trailer, shoveling a narrow path as he went. When he came back inside, Mary Kate had an old towel under her foot and she was cleaning the puddle on the floor.
"What the hell are ya doin' there, pumpkin. I would have taken care of that"
Walter called her pumpkin whenever he was vulnerable or felt bad for her. Mary Kate usually liked it.
"Were YOU gonna clean this up? Its not like you were standing around not doin anything yourself, I heard you shoveling out there." She looked over at him and winced as another contraction kicked in. He saw the pain in her face and pulled one of the kitchen chairs over to where she was standing and made her sit down. She hummed a little while she held her belly. She glanced over at the clock and waited for the contraction stop. Walter was silent.
"Ohhhhh, That's the third one, still about six minutes, maybe less." Mary Kate looked at Walter with a hint of fear in her eyes.
"The Doctor said we should head right in. He said he will meet us at the hospital. He said its bad out, it might take us an hour to get there."
"We'll be fine." He said.
He grabbed the red and black wool hunting jacket that she made for him on the first Christmas they were going steady. Mary Kate hadn't been able to fit into her own coat since early December so she had been wearing his. She had never bothered to take off the hunting license tag was still pinned the back of the coat from deer season,. She wore it proudly, like it was the varsity letter jacket of her high school sweetheart.
As Mary Kate struggled to her feet, Walter got behind her and put the coat on her. She turned to face him
and without a word, he squatted down on one knee and began to button it from the bottom up. Now she put her hands on his shoulders."
"Grab the bag." She spoke calmly now.
"I got it pumpkin, C'mon, we are gonna be fine"
He held her hand as he led her out the door and down the path he had just shoveled for her. The snow was still falling, maybe even a little harder now.
Their trailer park sat down in an old pasture off of the state highway, (Route 12) about a mile north of town. In the spring, kids would play with homemade boats in the huge puddles that surrounded the trailers. During the heat of the summer, the odor of septic would waft through the windows passing cars when a breeze blew from the west. In the fall, drivers would slow down to inspect the bucks that hunters hung in the few trees that stood around the trailers. Now, in winter, the little hamlet looked cozy buried in snow. Its narrow dirt roads hadn’t been plowed.
It took them a full 20 minutes to reach route 12 from the trailer, a distance of only 100 yards. Walter kept getting trying to get up the small rise that brought the dirt road out o the trailer park and onto the highway. When he finally made it to the top, they were greeted by a four-foot snow bank left by the state plow at the end of their road. They were stuck again and Walter couldn’t even back the truck up.
He told Mary Kate his plan to roll back down the hill. There, he would be able to ride his own tire tracks over a couple hundred feet of flat ground and build up enough speed to make up the hill and smash through the snow bank onto the highway. She listened and nodded.
The problem was that they were still stuck in the snow bank. Mary Kate sat silently next to him. The high beams from the truck were muted from falling snow that was blowing parallel to the ground.
Walter spoke softly, "We’re gonna be fine pumpkin."
Walter jumped out of the truck, grabbed the shovel he had tossed into the bed and cleared just enough snow away from the back tires so he start backing down the hill. He got back into the truck without a word and began his descent in reverse until he was far enough back to execute his plan.
He stopped the truck, looked straight ahead, nodded. After revving the engine a little, he threw it into drive and accelerated. Mary Kate began to hum again as another contraction started, her third since getting into the truck. Walter built his speed slowly at first being careful not fish tail.
Mary Kate hummed louder as the contraction built and gritted her teeth loud enough be heard over the roar of the engine. When they reached the bottom of the small hill they were going 15 miles an hour. As they started up it, the back tires spun and they lost speed. Mary Kate let out a moan as her contraction peaked. Walter did all he could to keep the back end in check and they smashed the snow bank with just enough momentum to break through. Walter noticed his shovel that he sticking out of the snow bank on the side of the road and, even though she didn’t see it, Mary Kate began to cry.
He skidded onto the highway and headed towards town without stopping.
She sobbed. "It really hurts."
Walter seemed a little triumphant for his feat and didn’t really seem to fully acknowledge her pain. "We’re gonna be fine pumpi-."
"Stop saying that! We’re not gonna be fine Walter and stop calling me pumpkin!! We’re never gonna make it Walter!! I can’t believe this fucking snow! Why tonight? She screamed and continued to sob.
Walter had never heard Mary Kate use the F-word in all the years he had known her and looked he shocked. Mary Kate was just warming up to her use of it for the evening.
He was quiet, focussed on the road and he made good time on the first mile.
After a few moments, she stopped crying and a couple of minutes after that, Mary Kate broke the silence.
"I’m sorry Walter….. I’m really sorry."
Walter paused this time before speaking, "Its Ok baby, its ok. We’re getting somewhere now."
She reached for his hand
They reached Barneveld without seeing another car along the way. When they drove past Liberty Lanes, the parking lot was packed in spite of the blizzard. Walter couldn’t help himself.
"Hey, baby wanna stop for a beer and bowl a couple of games?" He laughed at his joke.
Mary Kate laughed too and quipped back, "Sure baby, let me just freshen up a little so you can bowl the last game of your life while I’m having our kid on the pool table!" she smiled after she said it.
In the silence that followed, Walter reached for the radio and tuned in Mystery Theatre on the station out of Schenectady
As soon as they hit the outskirts of town, the land around the highway flattened out into wide-open fields and the wind jolted the truck a little. The snow that was whipping across the fields came off the top of the snow banks to their right and swirled before it settled onto the road in front of them. There were other spots where the wind had kept the roadway practically bare and the snow swept across like sand in the dessert.
There was no way to tell if had picked up or the wind was kicking up what had already fallen.
The headlights of the truck did little to show Walter where the road went next and he slowed to crawl. There were no tail lights or tire tracks to follow. It was a white out.
Mary Kate hummed her way into another contraction but walter didn’t even look over. He couldn’t take his eyes away from what little of the road he could see. He was guessing where he was and where the next gentle bend in the road was.
2 comments:
Keep going!
Great story. Keep going!
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