joey

It’s pouring and dark; I’ve just dropped Esmeralda and her baby off at the YWCA shelter for women. I’d picked them and their luggage up at the bus station. They’d planned to go to Boston, but the bus never came, so she’s headed back to the shelter. Esmeralda has described, with a fascination bordering on glee, the apparently random beating death of a friend of hers at the hands of some teens back home in the Dominican Republic. 

“It’s on video,” she tells me. “You have to see it to believe it.” She begins to pull her phone out, extending it through the seats.

“I’m sorry. I can’t look at that.”

“Ah. Of course. We can wait ’til we stop. You have to see it.”

“No, I’m sorry. I mean, I don’t want to see something like that. I’m so sorry that it happened. It sounds awful, but I just can’t watch it.” She is disappointed but polite about it.

“I understand.”

After I’ve helped carry her bags up the steps to the shelter’s front door, I return to Milo in the parking lot. I click “drop” on the Lyft app and glance at the pickup location for the next ride, which I’d already accepted: Annie at the Motel 6 in Chicopee. I take a deep breath and start pulling out when I get a text message from Annie.

“Hi Santiago!” it begins cheerfully, “Just wondering if Lyft has round trip availability?” I pull over to the side of the shelter driveway to text her back. The Lyft app allows me to see texts passengers send en route; it will not allow me to type a reply while driving.

“It should,” I write. “But at this point, you’ll need to edit your ride to reflect the round trip.”

“Okay! Great! Thank you!”

I text a thumbs up, pull out of the parking lot, and make my way to Annie. Two minutes later, another text. The app reads it to me as I drive through the downpour.

“It’s not letting me change the ride.” I pull over to the side of the road and put on my hazards.

“Okay. Don’t worry about it. I’ll do the round trip, and we’ll figure out the fare when I pick you up.”

“Amazing!” I change the setting on the app so I won’t get another ride request while I’m doing Annie’s ride and then pull back out into the street.

Fifteen minutes later, I pull into the parking lot of Motel 6 and roll toward the doorway closest to the yellow passenger avatar on my GPS. A man stands before the door, raising his hand to hail me. At first glance, through the rain, he looks to be in his late 60s. I think he wants directions or has a question, so I pull towards him. When I’ve stopped, he opens the back door and begins to get in the car.

“Hi! Thanks so much.”

“Sorry, are you Annie? I mean, is this for Annie?”

“Yeah, that’s my girlfriend.” I see now that he is in his early 40s but has long, shaggy gray hair and a scruffy salt-and-pepper beard that makes him look older. He looks tired.

“Oh, okay, right on. I texted your girlfriend that I’d do the round trip, and we can figure out the charge once we see how long it takes.”

“Sure. We’re just going down to the package store. It’s like five minutes away.”

 “Great. How about we just add $5 for the ride back, and y’all don’t need to tip me.”

“Sounds good.” We start out of the parking lot back onto the main drag toward the store.

“So where are y’all visiting from?”

“Oh, we’re not.”

“You mean you’re staying at the motel?”

“Yeah. You know the fire at the house in Chicopee last year?”

“No, I don’t know about that.”

“Yeah. It was on the news and everything. Four kids in a car were trying to get away from some cops who were chasing them, and they plowed into the living room of this house. It caused a big fire, house burned down.”

“Wow. I didn’t know anything about that.”

“Yeah, it was my brother’s house, where me and my girlfriend were staying when it happened.” 

“No shit! That’s sounds terrifying.”

“It was, you know what I mean? My brother was in the living room on the couch and my girl and I were in the bedroom asleep. It was like a freight train. I jump out of bed, confused as hell, you know what I mean? And in the living room is this car, with all this debris on the hood. I see my brother’s arm kind of dangling out. He’s on the hood under all this wood and drywall and glass. So I just start clearing stuff away. I sort of smell gas, so I’m thinking I gotta hurry. I see the kids get out of their car and run through the hole in the living room wall. Blue and red lights spinning outside. My brother’s not doing good. I can’t tell if he’s even breathing, you know what I mean? I think he might be dead. So I just grab him and drag him off the hood and along the floor to the yard. When I turn around—you know what I mean?—to get a better hold on him, I see a kid still in the backseat of the car. Maybe unconscious, maybe dead. But not moving, you know what I mean? My girlfriend is already outside, crying and screaming for me to hurry. I finally get my brother out there, and she sits with him. And I’m thinking, I gotta get that kid. There are flames now, near the car and on the curtains, going up around what’s left of the wall. I grab a garden hose and turn it on, but the water in the hose is frozen. So a cop slashes it with his knife, and I grab the cut end and run into the house. But the flames are too big. Even with the hose and some fire extinguishers, the other cops had, we couldn’t do anything. I started choking on the smoke, so the cops pulled me out. The boy died.”

“Oh my god. That’s unbelievable.”

We are in the parking lot of the package store by now.

“You can look it up. ‘Chicopee man tried to save 13-year old after car crashed.’” He opens the door and goes into the liquor store.

There it is. All described exactly as he said. I learn that his name is Joey. I learn the car was going 86 miles per hour when it slammed into the house. I learn that the 19 year-old driver, who was drunk and high at the time, was the older brother of the 13 year-old child who died. I learn that Joey’s brother was in the intensive care unit.

The door to the car opens again. I turn as Joey gets in.

“Joey,” I say.

“Yeah?” I pause, waiting for him to realize I hadn’t known his name because his girlfriend had booked the ride.

“Oh! You looked it up.”

“I did. I don’t know what to say. You are very courageous. You are a hero.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t think. You know what I mean?”

“I guess, yeah. I mean, I can’t imagine, and I’m not sure I’d have done the same thing. How’s your brother now?”

“He’s getting better, small steps, you know what I mean. But the thing I can’t understand is that he’s mad at me. It’s like he won’t talk to me. I think, like, ‘Man, you got another chance at life. Shouldn’t that make you happy?’”

“Hmm. That’s confusing and must be really hard. I mean, you saved his life. I don’t know anything about this kind of thing, but do you think the brain trauma he suffered affected his emotional reaction?”

“Maybe, yeah. Someone else told me that was possible. But I’m wondering too maybe he’d rather be dead than how he is now, needing all this help, you know what I mean?”

“I do. That could be, too. And it’s understandable. But still, it seems unfair to you. I mean, man, Joey, you’ve also been through a huge trauma.” Joey’s looking at me in the rearview mirror, big blue eyes droopy but round like twin full moons, open like a window straight into his heart. He seems completely undefended. “I’m so sorry,” I conclude.

I’m so absorbed in Joey’s story that five minutes pass before I realize we’re headed in the wrong direction. I point this out, apologizing. 

“No worries,” Joey says, “I hadn’t noticed. It’s nice to talk to you.” It doesn’t take long to get ourselves headed in the right direction, and it’s not a long ride, even with the detour. As the rain slams in sheets against the windshield, Joey tells me how he and Annie have spent the last year living in his van part of the time, couch surfing with friends, and now the Motel 6. He tells me he used to have a construction and lawn care business, but it’s been hard to concentrate. 

“Basically, I could fix anything,” Joey says. He’s not bragging. Just stating a fact. “You know what I mean? But…” His voice now trails off. “It’s just really hard. I mean, I didn’t hear any screams. So, I wanna think he was already unconscious when the car went up… I still wake up a lot in the middle of the night.” 

“Have you gotten any professional help?” I ask.

“Yeah, a bit, at first, but shouldn’t I be over it by now, you know what I mean?” 

I tell him I don’t know how it’s supposed to work and that I’m just a driver. But I do say it sounds harsh to expect someone to get over something like what he’s been through. As we pull to a stop in front of the blue door at the Motel 6, I ask, “Would you expect that of Annie? Or your brother?”  

“No, no. Yeah. I see what you mean. Maybe I’m expecting too much of myself, you know what I mean?” 

“I do.” I turn and see that he’s holding a five-dollar bill to give me. “No, Joey, thank you for respecting my time. But I can’t accept that money. I wouldn’t feel right.”

“You sure? It’s fine, really.”

“Yes, I’m sure. Thanks. But if it is okay with you, I’ll feel better about this if you keep it.” His eyes brighten just a bit, and his innocent face lifts into a slight smile.

“Okay. Thanks, man. And thanks for the talk. It helps.”

“Of course. I wish you and Annie and your brother all the best!”

When Joey gets out, I think of one of the poems sitting in the box in the backseat, just inches from where he was, the old Japanese haiku about seeing the moon now that the barn has burned down. I’m so glad the pick-up was so confusing and chaotic that I neglected to tell him about the poems and candy. 

I love that poem and it has helped me and even other passengers. But in light of Joey’s story, I feel foolish for viewing it as some kind of infallible guidance in the face of adversity. 

What if the barn just burns and burns?

---