Lighting Candles In The Rain
The clouds overhead darkened and cauliflowered just as the old, beaten car swerved from the road and crashed into a thicket of Oregon evergreens.
The axle, authorities would find, broke, along with most of the car’s undercarriage, and almost every indicator light possible flashed or was otherwise alarming. A menacing rumble lurched from the sky, and soon after that another one followed, louder and closing in on the leeward side of Saddle Mountain.
Joel, 37, pale, blue eyes, slowly awoke and reclaimed his bearings.
He prodded himself in search of anything broken. His fingers came to a conquest of blood trailing down the side of his face. He touched it, sifted it like sand and wiped it against his shirt. With his other hand, he grazed the large, painful lump swelling on his forehead and cursed.
Tree branches had burst through the windshield from the wreck; several other trees piled and crisscrossed over each other where the car had landed, and a few had managed to break into the car like knobby, sappy fingers in search of flesh. And one branch even landed its mark, slicing the side of Joel’s scalp. “Andy?” he said, shifting his weight around the steering wheel and groaning. He balled up the deployed airbag and pushed it to the side. “Where are you, damn it? What the hell was that?”
Please note for the record that Mr. Joel Fuller Jr. confirmed he was driving the vehicle at the time of the incident.
My client’s clarifying testimony should be more than enough for “the record.”
There was no response. Though the tree had split the cabin cleanly in half — a miracle in itself — thoughts, serious thoughts, raced through his mind the more he came to realize where he was and where Andy was not. Joel parted the thicket of pine needles separating his side from the other and peered through. Empty seat. Glove compartment open.
He craned his neck to the rear of the car. Nothing but the exposed-granite mountain side bending around the corner, a rocky horizon. He unbuckled his seat belt and the car horn finally gave way.
“Shit,” he said. “Ray.” He rummaged underneath the pine needles. “Come on…where’s the damn phone…Andy! Kid are you out there? We need to call — ah!” He had not, as he hoped, imagined the pain in his leg. “Come on,” he said, punching the dash and immediately regretting it. He nursed his twisted wrist and dug further under the branches, coming up empty.
Then you left the car to look for Mr. Hassan? You didn’t check the trunk because…that was an afterthought. Not important.
Objection. Leading with assumptive malice.
Joel pushed his door open. Its frame popped against the metal fender in protest, and he climbed out. The wind rushed into his lungs and cooled the injuries pulsing on his head. He yelled again for Andy. The adjacent valley answered with an echo.
Across the road, a deer laid on its side in a pool of its own blood. Its chest rose and shivered; its shallow breaths evaporated into mist, and its nose burgeoned like a steaming lump of black coal against the gray asphalt. Joel walked over to it and glanced back, imagining animal blood on the hood of the totaled vehicle lodged into the ditch, cringing. The handful of seconds before the crash flashed through his mind, and he lifted the carcass with his foot, if only to confirm the obvious.
We don’t need those sorts of details. Please continue your story, Mr. Fuller, mindful of pertinence.
Joel walked toward the ridge where the forest dipped into the valley and leaned in between two trees. Pain cracked through his skull and his vision fishbowled around his peripherals like a dream, bending the trees into each other as traces of his own voice ricocheted inside his head, asking fragments of questions with stunted logic.
He pushed himself back from the edge. The ringing in his ears that felt so familiar to his liquor-binge, bar-fight hangovers in Salem told him everything he needed to know.
Please note in the record that Dr. Janice Holloway corroborated my client’s claim of receiving a concussion in the crash due to the plaintiff’s actions.
We didn’t receive that report in discovery.
It was sent to you along with everything else.
We didn’t receive it.
“Andy, where the hell are you,” Joel said, pushing his palm into his forehead, gritting his teeth and leaning one more time over the ridge. “Andy, where are you!”
“Right here.”
He whirled around. Andy stood leaning against the trunk of the car, flicking the cap of a Zippo lighter and scraping a flame to life.
An old instinct reared its head in Joel. He tensed and checked the road that curled around granite wall, then back to the opposite direction, up the road for as far as he could see. No headlights. No noises but distant thunder.
“You could have gotten us killed,” Joel said. “I fucking hope you’re injured.” He couldn’t see any cuts or bruises on the teenager, just the sparrow tattoo on his right shoulder he had given him.
“Get your cellphone out,” Joel said, his voice faintly cracking. “There’s no telling when someone else will drive around that bend and see the crash that you caused. We’re done when we get out of this mess, you hear that? Done. Now where’s your phone? I’ll call Ray.”
And would Mr. Ray Blackstone have helped you had you made that call?
Objection. That’s clearly speculation.
“Oh, I’m sure Ray will know exactly what to do,” Andy said, staring into the flame. His voice was terse. Clenched. He whipped the lighter shut and turned his head.
“Jesus, kid,” said Joel. “You need to get something on that.”
“Get something on it? Blot it up, yeah? Shake it off?” Andy said, slapping his cheek. “Be a man, Joel? That right?”
A deep cut sliced the corner of his left eye and continued across to his ear, of which a small chunk was missing.
“Maybe we have some bandages in the trunk? Huh? First aid kit to patch things up so I don’t bleed out and die? You wouldn’t want me to die, would you? Ruin your whole day?”
Joel stepped toward the young man, but Andy recoiled.
“So what was it?” Andy asked. “Fifteen grand? 20? Were you going to sell me, too?”
“You’ve lost it, kid,” Joel said, swallowing. “You must have, uh, hit your head. I hit my head. You’re concussed and don’t know what you’re saying. Just give me your phone so I can call Ray.”
Andy reached behind his shirt and pulled out a gun.
He pointed it at Joel’s chest.
“Get back!”
From all we know of Mr. Hassan, this is a bit out of character. I think we need some context for this sort of reaction. Take us back to before the wreck. Why was Andy angry, and what compelled him to threaten you?
Objection, my client can’t possibly know the —
In your own words, then, what events do you believe led to this side of Andy that you, as you previously described, had never seen?
Joel hit the dashboard with his fist, cursing at the radio.
“That won’t do anything,” Andy said.
“Of course it will. You don’t know nothing about cars. They get all jammed up sometimes with the radio receiver, or out of place sometimes.”
“No they don’t.”
“The hell they don’t. What’s with you?”
“Nothing,” Andy mumbled. He crossed his arms and turned to the window. It felt cool against his shoulder. “How long until we get there?”
“Shouldn’t be but 20 more minutes up the mountain,” Joel said. He grabbed a Twizzler from the bag by the gear shifter and bit off a chunk of licorice.
Andy sighed. “Actually, it is something. I don’t think we should do this. I’ve never even met the guy.”
Joel stopped mashing the radio dials and looked at him. “We can’t turn back now, kid.” He slapped Andy’s cheek as a playful reminder that the teenager “was a man now,” and if he “wanted to do some good in the world,” he would have to take some risks, as he had explained over breakfast, with a tap on the cheek, a few hours earlier when they had left Salem that morning.
“Cut it out,” Andy said, swatting away Joel’s hand. “You said Ray didn’t call you back. That you haven’t heard from him in three days. And now, we’re going up to the top of Saddle Mountain, where absolutely nobody is, taking his word at face value that he’ll be there. This whole thing just feels…weird. Something’s off.”
“I told you before,” Joel said, “he’s a friend of a friend, but I know him. He’ll be there. What are you so worried about? This was your idea, you know.” He returned to mashing the radio dials.
Andy turned around and looked in the empty backseat. “How do we know he’ll actually get them across the border? What’s going to happen after we hand him the money and the kids, and he leaves?”
Joel leaned back against the door and thumbed his beard. A moment of silence passed. Andy eyed him.
“Why don’t you just stop with the damn questions, kid. And relax. We’ll be there soon.”
“You know what…turn the car around. I don’t feel good about this.”
“Eat a fucking Twizzler and shut up.” Joel said, tossing a red stem at him.
“Hey, I’m serious. This isn’t the way to do this. Stop the car.”
Joel locked the doors.
“Joel! Stop the car!”
“You know something, kid?” Joel said, as they drove into a long corner overlooked by a flat-faced mountain side to their right and a steep ridge to their left. “You are a fucking handful.” He sped up the car.
Joel’s cellphone, sitting in a cup holder and facing the passenger side, came to life with the alert of a text message.
Andy finished reading the text just as they curved around the bend. His stomach dropped. He turned around again to look at the backseat, his eyes and mouth contorted in devastation. On the other side of the bend, a deer stood motionless in the oncoming lane of traffic. A father deer. Andy looked at Joel. Then at the deer. Then he closed his eyes and thought of the kids in the trunk.
Then he lunged for the wheel and spiked it left.
“Andy! What — “
It was too late. The car slammed into the animal. Joel hurled the steering wheel back the other way but over-corrected and crashed into a pile of pine trees and brush that lined the ditch.
Branches burst through the windshield and the airbags deployed, but not soon enough for the driver. Joel’s head whipped into the steering wheel before the bag blew him back upright.
Despite the car horn and the engine hiss, Andy, holding the side of his face where a branch had gouged him, was surprised most by the sudden silence from the driver’s side. Shaken, he grabbed Joel’s phone beneath a branch, unlocked it and quickly thumbed through the messages.
They spanned months.
He finished, and the pain from his face evaporated. He stared at the glove compartment in a fugue and felt the knot in his stomach grow faster than at any point in their drive from Salem to Saddle Mountain that morning.
He thought back to when he first met Joel in the tattoo parlor six months ago and realized how foolish he was to share his ambitions of rescuing true American refugees. How foolish he was to think he could find them a better life, smuggling them into Canada, for they, unlike himself, had everything to lose yet asked only for the opportunities and rights and respect enjoyed by those native to the country, whatever that meant anymore.
He recalled the conversations they’d had in back booths at the Night Girl, and how Joel would pause and smile (more devilish than ever in his memory) each time they finished talking. Planning. The strange laughs and agreeing a little too quickly. The phone calls each time they parted ways for the evening. Who was he calling? He was calling Ray Blackstone. Where were the kids? Were they safe?
He considered that all his effort and saved money may have been in vain. That his attempt to light a candle as a way of signal in the ever darkening dimension his country had been sliding into, a sign for anyone else that it was possible to do good in the world, if only with just one candle, would never happen, because now, oh now, the sunny skies that he had been sold by the tales of exceptionalism only ever rained, and the rain now, oh now, wouldn’t stop until the flood.
Andy put the phone in his pocket and opened the glove compartment. There was a snub-nosed revolver and Zippo lighter that Joel said always brought him good luck. He took them and stepped out of the car, clambering his way back to the trunk. He opened it. His nostrils flared, and his eyes grew warm and sappy.
And from that point, when you regained consciousness and were confronted by Andy, you then, as we are to understand, manipulated the situation that eventually led to the young man’s death shortly thereafter.
Objection. Argumentative.
In your own words, tell us, how did Andy Hassan come to die?
The clouds cracked with lightening and the rain finally did come down from the sky.
“You’re a vile man. A sick man,” Andy said, walking toward Joel with the revolver shaking in his hand.
“Calm down, Andy,” Joel said, both hands raised. He looked at the empty trunk and glared. “What did you do with the kids?”
“What would you have done with the money?”
“Jesus Christ, what are you talking about?”
“I read the texts, Joel,” he said. “All of them. Between you and Ray. On your phone, right beside me as we sat in the car, as we sat in the booth, as we sat in the tattoo shop.” He took out Joel’s phone and threw it against the ground where it broke apart like cheap Legos.
A thought flashed through Joel’s mind. The kids were gone. His phone was destroyed. Andy had his gun and he’s too mad to think.
“You’ve got this all wrong, kid,” he said, sidestepping as Andy drew nearer. “Ray just…sells them to other smugglers. Like a chain. To, uh, get the kids over the border. He’s just a link. Hell, I’m not even a part of it, really.”
He continued sidestepping and drew Andy out toward him, circling, step by step, counting on the hesitation he saw in the wavering gun.
“How long have you been doing this?” Andy said. “How many people just like me did you trick?”
“I never tricked nobody,” Joel said, who, with a few more steps, would be the one beside the car and Andy the one in the road. “You came to me. You knew the risks. If I didn’t do this, somebody else would. At least I know the guy. Shit, I’m doing these kids a favor, and you should be thanking me. But you let ’em go, Andy! Our ticket to a big fucking pay out, and you let ’em go. What’s wrong with you?”
Andy stood in the center of the road, his trigger finger now in full rebellion against the primal urge that gripped his heart. “I didn’t…they would have been rounded up. They’d have killed…I couldn’t…”
Rain fell like cluster bombs now, exploding buckets in gusts of wind, soaking their clothes like locusts to crops.
Joel was the only one to see it.
The high beams of a green Forest Service truck breaking around the bend, urgently unaware of the pair just on the other side. But as they reared, and his mind flashed to the tattoo shop, and the booths, and the spirit in Andy he had secretly admired but loathed, Joel’s face turned from a look of vengeful sleuth to immediate horror.
“No…Andy, watch out!”
Andy turned to look, and in that second before the truck collided with his body, it transformed. He became the candle he had intended to light.
Joel ran from the accident and continued running up the roadside for 10 minutes until two police cars blocked him and wrestled him down to the ground.
Somewhere down the mountain, taking shelter from the storm in an unlocked park bathroom, the refugee children shivered and huddled for warmth. They would eventually leave, and a woman who lived alone in the rural mountains of northern Oregon would smuggle them across the border. She would be arrested on her journey back, dying shortly thereafter from “complications unknown.”
I think we have everything we need, Mr. Fuller. We aren’t prepared to promise immunity in exchange for Ray Blacks —
This isn’t even a manslaughter charge, and you can’t arrange immunity if he gives you Ray Blackstone?
If you’ll let me finish. We can’t promise immunity for the arrest of Ray Blackstone, but with information that leads to the arrest of several other key players in the Pacific Crest smuggling ring as well, and with full cooperation and testimony in court, we could possibly lower the charge from aggravated kidnapping to accessory to kidnapping.
My client has been…
Joel leaned back in his chair and stared out the window, wondering what happened to the refugees. Water droplets slid down the sides of the window panes like living crystals. He was a vile man, he thought. Andy was absolutely right.
And as he thought this, he noticed the rain had finally stopped. A ray of sunshine broke through the line of the clouds, lighting, if only just a patch of, the building that sat adjacent to Clatsop county jail.
He sighed and looked back at the squabbling attorneys, placing a hand on the shoulder of his own.
“Okay. Let me do a little good. Tell me what you need to know.”
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