It happened early on a June evening in the summer I turned sixteen. I may have heard the impact and may even have felt it. The speeding vehicle was a Pontiac GTO that weighed over 3,000 pounds and was carrying four people. It was traveling westbound when it ran the stop sign at Manila and McCombs and broadsided a northbound Volkswagen Beetle carrying three people. The intersection was approximately 500 feet straight-line distance from my house in El Paso, Texas, and we would have had the swamp cooler running and a few windows partially opened. I’m almost certain the horn of one of the vehicles, possibly the Pontiac, was stuck and sounded continuously for a few minutes. I went to see what had happened.
It wouldn’t be till I got to college that I would learn about Aristotle and the case he made for the nonexistence of time. Time is such an odd duck in the flock of measurable entities that as it flies by, it could be said to be an illusion and nothing more, as no one portion of it ever seems fixedly to exist. It is common knowledge that at times it seems to pass more slowly or more quickly than at other times. From the time I arrived at the end of my street and looked to where the accident had occurred about 250 feet north of where I stood, until the time I returned home, the clock in my bedroom would have measured the elapsed time as being approximately thirty minutes. But I would have told you hours had gone by.
I walked toward the intersection of Manila and McCombs. Other people were arriving at the scene. I do not now remember hearing, at that point, anything other than the stuck horn. I do not remember when it stopped sounding. I must have heard voices and calls and even cries and shouts, but I do not remember. I also do not remember seeing the Pontiac. I saw the Volkswagen. Beyond it I saw, up on the shoulder of the street, a girl lying face-down on the ground. She was partially covered with an olive-drab woolen army blanket that she was lying on and was folded haphazardly over her, but she was still alive and she was conscious. A man with a walkie-talkie and a flashlight was kneeling next to her. He was talking to her. I went to them.
The half-mile stretch of Manila from McCombs to Dyer had been paved that spring as part of the construction of a low-income housing development no one in our neighborhood wanted and no one in our neighborhood had the political connections or economic power to block. Sidewalks had not yet been poured. At the northwest corner of the intersection, the packed desert dirt rose two or three feet above the level of the street and was punctuated by an old yellow fire hydrant, its paint fading and chipped. Just west of this hydrant was where the girl lay. She had blonde hair and a cut on the right side of her head, near her eye, and there was blood smeared around it. I heard someone say they had just gotten her from the Volkswagen. Later I heard someone say she had been wandering in a daze in the intersection before they got her lying down and covered her with a blanket. The man with the walkie-talkie and the flashlight was asking her how she felt when I leaned over and said, “Is there anything I can do to help?”
The man didn’t answer. I knelt in the dirt beside him and the girl. The man looked at me as if startled or attempting to see into something and said, “Do you have a pencil?”
“I have a pen,” I said and pulled a pen out of my pocket and gave it to him.
“And something to write on?”
I also had my high school journalism student press card, and offered it to him. He took it and asked the girl her name and phone number and wrote them down. She told him her name was Sherry Michaels. Her voice was weak. She told him her phone number. The exchange was out-of-town but the man didn’t know that. It took him a few minutes to discover that and once he did, he asked her where she was from. She said, “Corpus Christi, down on the coast.”
The man told me, “You stay with her, keep her talking,” and he got up and went to wherever it was he went to. I had already taken Sherry’s hand. I stayed with her, holding her hand and talking with her, for about twenty minutes until she was loaded onto the ambulance, and I stayed with her and another of the victims in the ambulance for a minute or two or I don’t know how many but it wasn’t very many.
I talked to Sherry and tried to get her to respond. She was groggy and sometimes incoherent. She asked me for my phone number, which I didn’t give her. She didn’t ask me my name. She asked me if everyone was all right. She was lying such that she was facing away from the Volkswagen. The impact had knocked it out of the intersection and onto Manila, where it was pointing westbound. It was about twenty-five feet from where Sherry and I were. I told her everyone was all right. I don’t know what she may have seen in the short time between the accident and when the first civilian responders got her to lie down. I asked her where she had been in the Volkswagen but she couldn’t remember. I found out the following morning from the story in the city paper that she had been the driver and had been thrown through the driver’s side window due to the force of the impact. The driver’s side window of a Volkswagen Beetle measured approximately twenty inches in height and twenty-five inches in width. Sherry probably measured about sixteen inches across the shoulders and ten inches through back-to-front, maybe more. She was about five-and-a-half feet tall.
Twice I have heard young women scream when they have seen someone they love torn open or crushed and bleeding and dying in front of them. This night was the first time. There is no other scream like it that I have heard. Many things I don’t remember clearly about this night. A few things I do. One of these is the look on the screaming young woman’s face when she turned away from the Volkswagen, her eyes and mouth wide open and her hands coming up to her face.
Bright lights from police cars and a fire truck were soon shining on the Volkswagen. I could see that the front passenger’s side was stove in. The front passenger’s window was completely gone. Hanging out of it was a bloody arm that did not move. Just over the edge of the window frame I could see the dark hair on the top of the head of someone who was slumped over and also not moving. I found out later that this person was the younger brother of the screaming young woman. They lived a few blocks away. He wasn’t dead, but he was trapped in the car. The firemen couldn’t get him out until they had a set of the Jaws of Life. I remember them calling for the Jaws of Life and I think I remember them saying that they were on the way but hadn’t arrived yet. Then they arrived and were put to use. I remember they were powered by a gasoline engine that was loud. I remember I could smell blood and gasoline.
Sherry repeatedly asked me, “Is Carlos all right? Is everyone all right?” I repeatedly told her, “Yes, they’re fine,” and, “Everyone is fine,” and, “You’ll be okay.” She had a cut on her right leg in addition to the cut on her head, and she said she felt like some of her ribs were broken. Sometimes she winced or gasped and squeezed my hand.
Scores of spectators gathered around. One of them stood for a few moments over Sherry and me and asked whose fault the accident was. I looked up at him and asked him if it really mattered. He went away. An ambulance arrived on Manila Street, coming from Dyer. It sounded its siren and honked its horn to get the spectators to move out of the way but they wouldn’t until a police officer charged into them, waving his flashlight at them like a nightstick and screaming at them to get out of the way. They did and the ambulance turned around so that its rear doors would open closer to the accident.
Ambulance attendants and other people, maybe a police officer and a fireman, came with a stretcher and lay it down next to Sherry. One of the attendants directed us as we crouched alongside Sherry and slid our arms underneath her, between the blanket and the dirt, and lifted her and the blanket as evenly, carefully, and quickly as we could onto the stretcher and slipped our arms back out again. I remember there were four of us—eight arms—and we were to lift her as levelly as we could. She cried out in pain. Two attendants lifted the stretcher and carried her to the ambulance. I followed.
They loaded her stretcher onto a rack on the left side of the ambulance box. They turned around to go back out and get more of the injured. It seems almost barbaric now, but there were no civilian paramedics in El Paso then. In the entire United States there were not more than a handful of civilian paramedic units. Such outfits were just beginning to be organized, inspired by the television program, Emergency!, and the exploits of its two young paramedics in Los Angeles. In a few years, every city would have paramedics.
I climbed into the ambulance to stay with Sherry as long as I could. The cut on her head opened and blood was trickling down toward her eye. My mother had taught me to always carry a kleenex folded in my pocket. I pulled my kleenex out and dabbed away some of the blood. Later that night, I sat in my bedroom and looked at the blood-spotted kleenex to reassure myself that it hadn’t been a nightmare, all that I had seen and heard. If I were ever again to need such reassurance, I still have that kleenex, tucked away with other things I’ve kept from those years.
The ambulance had a side door, on the right side of the box, close behind the cab. The door was open and on its sill sat a dark-haired boy who looked to be about eight years old. He wore no shirt. He sat still and faced out the doorway. He didn’t appear to be injured.
I dabbed the blood away from Sherry’s eye and said, “They’re getting more of the injured” and “They’ll be taking you to the hospital soon and “You’ll be okay” when the attendants brought in a stretcher holding a girl who was screaming and sobbing. They loaded her in her stretcher onto a rack on the right side of the ambulance box and turned and left again. She was so frantic and wailing so loudly and she was so drenched with blood that for a moment I almost didn’t know what to do. Her eyes were filled with blood and she could not see. I don’t know how I calmed her, I don’t remember, but it’s likely I told her I was with her and everything was going to be all right and they would be taking her to the hospital soon. She stopped wailing but she was still frantic and she said, “It’s all a nightmare, isn’t it? Tell me it’s not real!”
“I wish it was a nightmare, but you’ll be okay,” I said. The ambulance attendants returned with a third stretcher, this one bearing the boy who had been trapped in the Volkswagen. “Make way!” they called out. I scurried out the right-side door behind the cab, past the boy sitting there.
After this I don’t remember what happened except that I soon left the scene. I went home and I sat in my room on my bed and I didn’t sleep that night and near dawn I went on my bike to the 7-11 on McCombs and bought a morning paper after I checked and saw it had a report on the accident. I read the report right away and saw that there had been two girls in the Pontiac. They were both students at my school and I knew them in passing. One was named Julie. She was the blood-soaked girl in the ambulance. I had not recognized her.
I went back home. My mother was up and was in the kitchen, making coffee. I don’t know what news she may have heard. She said to me, “You didn’t see too much of that wreck, did you?”
“No,” I said. There was no way to tell her what I had seen. I didn’t know how to tell anyone what I had seen.
“Good,” my mother said. Her tone was calm and it was clear she cared, hoped I was telling the truth, suspected I was lying, and did not intend to confront me about it.
“You knew some of those kids, didn’t you?”
“Yep.” I returned to my bedroom. In those days radio stations were required by law to broadcast a few minutes of news every hour, on the hour. I turned on my radio to hear the news and heard that the boy who had been trapped in the Volkswagen had died at the hospital around daybreak. I had already learned from the newspaper that he was fifteen years old, and I had also learned that the driver of the Pontiac had died at the scene and that none of the people involved had been wearing their seat belts.
Over the next couple of days, I repeatedly called William Beaumont Army Medical Center, where the victims had been taken, to try to find out how they were. I prayed as hard as I could to a God I still believed in that Sherry be all right. As soon as she had been moved out of intensive care and into a regular room, I went to see her. I told her who I was and sat with her for a couple hours. We talked about the accident. I didn’t tell her everything I had seen. Her parents and her sister had come to town and they came to the hospital while I was there and Sherry told them who I was. I came back a couple more times over the next couple days. I brought Sherry some newspaper clippings about the accident that she said she wanted, and I brought her some Andy Capp and Peanuts books. She was asleep once when I came and I sat and watched her for an hour while she slept. She had a black eye and I thought that was kind of sexy but I didn’t tell her that. I made enough of a nuisance of myself that I realized I was making a nuisance of myself. I gave her my address and asked her to write and she never did and I don’t think I really expected her to.
For a few days, I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t sleep. Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw what I had seen. When I drove down the street, I saw what I had seen. I took a long walk around the neighborhood one evening and thought about God and death and life and why and what to do and how to be and what to care about and who to love and what to hold on to and how, and how to let go and what to let go of, and got very little of all that sorted out. But I was still young. Have I got any of it sorted out in the lifetime since? Some of it, maybe. Things happen. We do what we must and we do what we can. Then it’s over.
