The Medicine Show (pt 1).

The car that nearly ends him is a Pinto, of all things, a maroon Ford that looks about as cherry as a car from that many decades ago and with that kind of a reputation can look, especially in these parts where the roads are salted from October to April. Kyle is half over the Criss Cross Bridge; it’s illegal to walk it and risky besides because there’s no sidewalk and the cars come over so fast, but the other option when you’re hoofing on your own two Nikes is the Darling Bridge miles away. Everybody in town’s jumped over the side at least once when a car was coming, and there’s nothing down there but boulders to catch you – some time it wrong and go splat; some time it right and go splash; some others just vanish into thin air, but nobody ever talks about them.

Kyle is thinking about all of this when the Pinto comes into view, and he puts his hands on the metal sidewalls, getting ready to fly – but the driver panics and yanks the wheel, spinning the toy car in circles; it flips as if by magic, sailing right up the guardrails and disappearing over the side in a spray of sparks like a shooting star.

Kyle stands still for a long time; he leans over the side of the bridge and sees the Pinto crashed down on the rocks. For a moment he considers that he might have made the whole thing up, because he is prone to lies and because it is so far outside the realm of possibility that such a thing could happen that it just can’t be true: but there it is, twenty-five feet below him and half-in and half-out of the Smoke River, its hood submerged and the waves on the windshield; he sees the driver moving behind the wheel but he isn’t getting out; the Pinto is slipping further into the water, waves licking high on the glass.

Hey! Kyle cups his hands around his mouth and shouts but the driver does not answer; he waits, looking both ways on the bridge and up and down river, but there are no drivers, no boaters, no fisherman, no one at all. This is crazy nuts, he says, pacing; the morning is clear and beautiful and full of birds and there is no one but him.

He waits. Someone is going to come. Someone.

But nobody does, and the Pinto slides another foot. It would take him just as long to run one way or the other for help, and by then it would be too late – so he grips the rusted edge of the bridge with his hands, and thinks Would have had to sooner or later, and then he throws himself into space.