My dad was twelve or thirteen, thereabouts, when my grandfather had him drive a car up to Lake Village Arkansas. I don’t remember the reason why; they were selling it, I think. The stretch of road between Tallulah, Louisiana, where the car was, and Lake Village, Arkansas is mostly flat, but there is a sort-of hilly spot about ten miles north of the Louisiana-Arkansas line. “Hills” is probably too strong of a word for it, more like “folds,” or something else designating land that is not hills but not flat either. Regardless, there is a spot in the road that catches you off guard right as it curves up into the un-flatness. Being fourteen or so, my Dad hit that curve doing about eighty-five miles per hour. For about one flat second, as the story has been told to me, he was able to look four deer standing in the middle of the road dead in the eye. They were looking at him the same way as he was looking at them, with shit in their pants. Cars were heavier back then, so the collision sprayed deer-guts farther than most of us can probably visualize. Needless to say, the car was fucked. Once he got over a feeling that must have been close to giving Death a high-five, Dad did some walking to a payphone that was hopefully in the distance. He was fourteen or thereabouts.
Two and a half hours later, my Granddad shows up and spanks Dad to an inch of his life. Gramps wasn’t being cruel; that’s just the way it was in those days, and Dad shouldn’t have been doing eighty-five miles an hour. On the other hand, how the hell could you expect a thirteen year old, or thereabouts, to not do eighty-five miles an hour if you give him a brand new car and tell him to drive it to Lake Village Arkansas? Nowadays they don’t let twelve or fourteen year olds drive cars. Whether or not that is a good and jurisprudential law is beyond me. I do know that my dad had to endure shit that he never made me suffer through. I think the difference is that my dad’s elders expected him to not screw up. My generation seems to have lost that expectation. We’ve been told that we can avoid consequence all we want and the grand cornucopia of modern American life will still brim over with wonderful new toys. Its not my Dad’s fault though; he made me dig tractors out of the mud at four in the morning, even though he did wreck one bitchin’ car.
Moral of the story: if you crash into a bunch of deer on the way to Lake Village Arkansas, make sure to have a quarter for the payphone.
