style="font-size:15px;"> “What are you looking at?” he cried, his eyes squinting and wild. “Like fingers squeezing my head . . . What are you looking at, you dirty son of a bitch?” He got to his feet and floundered around the car and jerked open the front door, half-fell into the front seat, reached out a hand to open the glove compartment. He groped inside. Rain hit against the roof and made a loose wet curtain covering the door space. His feet scrambled a little on the ground. He took out a small bottle, uncapped it, and white pills gleamed in his muddy palm. He swallowed them, put his face against the seat in a vise formed by his arms. He stayed that way for about a minute, then slipped out of the car, turned his head and vomited. It lasted a long time, or maybe it just seemed long, standing in the rain. Finally he crawled away from his regurgitation and lay down in a cradle of wet weeds. I went over to him and took him by the shoulder. His face was composed. The vomiting seemed to have done him some good. One of his eyes, the one I could see, opened a little.
“Take me home,” he said.
So I went out of the ditch again. The truckman stood in the road, his flashlight pointed at the blacktop.
“Wasn’t nobody hurt much, was they?” he said.
“No,” I said. “I need some help now. I have to haul out a man. I don’t think I can manage by myself.”
He came with me, walking behind me. “I should have gone down in the ditch, I know it,” he said apologetically. “Everybody’s afraid of something. I guess I’m just most afraid of seein’ hurt people.”
“You think I’m afraid of something?” I said.
“Why,” he said surprised, “why, I don’t know.”
The hell he didn’t. He could smell it on me, like a dog can. But he couldn’t know why, and I didn’t know, myself.
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