Think: Why Die?

 

1.

The four-lane pushed down from the hills onto the flood plain.  Twenty-eight miles from the city, construction stalled.  The plain was flat and plowed black with deep fertile soil and land prices were exorbitant.  Acquiring highway rights-of-way proved difficult and eminent domain proceedings advanced slowly through the courts in the two counties traversed by the new road.  Some tribal land intervened between the place where the freeway narrowed to the two-lane county blacktop and the broad controlled access road at the outskirts of town and tribal negotiators asserted sovereignity over their territory, further complicating acquisition of acreage for the roadbed.  Then, the economy went into freefall, not once but twice during the fifteen year hiatus in construction.  Land values were unpredictable and budget estimates had to be revised repeatedly and, for a time, the Department of Transportation engineers supervising the project despaired – the link between the City highway and the freeway in the hills seemed indefinitely delayed.  

But the economy improved and legal obstacles to finishing the 28 mile stretch of freeway still incomplete seemed to dissolve, perhaps because all parties were exhausted, and, one Spring, when ice had melted in the little meandered creeks winding across the river bottom, earthmovers as yellow as the dandelions growing in the easement ditches, rolled into place and began cutting open the fields to lay the new roadbed.  Lebendiger drove out to the hillside where the bulldozers were knocking down trees and gouging out troughs where four-lanes of concrete would be poured.  A survey crew was about a mile away from the construction, shooting gradients along the mapped route.  The old two-lane county state-aid highway curved away from the little knoll where the surveyors were working, trucks and cars passing over that portion of road.  A half-mile distant, the highway’s curve straightened where the black-top went white, a cement overpass arched only slightly over a small stream.  The bridge stood on pale pylons, far longer than the little meander that trickled under it – on this plain, these streams were prone to flooding and so the span stretched across a broad, shallow trench lined with reeds and small willow trees before crossing the braided river bed.  One of the survey transits was aimed at the chalk-colored bridge.  

“Take a look,” the surveyor said.  The sky was bright and the man was sweating in his bright orange safety vest.

Lebendiger put his eye to the transit.  On the far side of the creek bed, three diamond-shaped signs stood atop four-foot iron stakes.  The signs were lettered: Think: Why Die?  

“State fatality markers,” Lebendiger said.

Lebendiger knew that the inverse of the sign was labeled X Marks the Spot.  The top half of the diamond-shaped metal sign-face was treated with a reflective surface intended to capture and reflect beams from headlights.  The bottom part of the sign was funereal black, but, also, shiny.  Lebendiger knew that this part of the sign also reflected light, although as a dark, scarcely perceptible flash when it was night-time.  

“What are we supposed to do with those?” the head surveyor asked.

“I’ll be damned if I know,” Lebendiger replied.  

2.

Back at his office at the DOT, Lebendiger looked up the State’s regulations as to motor vehicle accident fatality markers.  Old-timers swore that the signs had first been placed in the late 1930's as part of a campaign for road safety mounted by Farm State Mutual Insurance.  But this was a myth.  According to the official web site, fatality markers were first installed along highways to identify places were travelers had died in car crashes beginning around 1990.  Although the program was partly subsidized by an insurance company, the markers were owned and managed by the State.  

Signs were supervised by County road officials.  Regulations were simple: markers were installed unless the family of the deceased objected.  When new road was constructed, signs were removed.  There was no other guidance.  The markers were numbered and, somewhere, there was a registry identifying the date of the MVA and the name (or names) of the victims.  Lebendiger located the computer ledger but it was only current for the last decade.  No one knew where earlier records were stored.

The State Patrol maintained records by road and mile-marker.  Lebendiger called his survey team and wrote down the mile-marker closest to the signs.  The accident turned out to be 25 years old, a crash involving some Hispanic migrant workers.  Alcohol was involved and the car had veered from the road to slam head-on against the bridge abutment.  The car rolled into the swamp under the bridge pylons.  Everyone was ejected (speed and seat-belt violations): someone survived but the other three were DOA.  One of the bodies was recovered, a little downstream, washed into a tangle of brush by the river’s current.  The young men were undocumented; the names they had given their employer, a sugar beet refining company near the County Seat, were invalid and their social security numbers registered to dead people in Harlingen, Texas.  Rumor was that two of the bodies were collected by cousins and driven down to Mexico.  The third corpse was cremated at County expense and the ashes delivered to the local Catholic church.   

Lebendiger sent an email to the General Contractor on the road project: he was authorized to remove the accident markers and send them with the State Engineer back to DOT headquarters.  Probably, the signs could be re-purposed.

3.

Lebendiger was on a ZOOM-call when the receptionist handed him a slip of paper.  Someone named Mr. Hernandez was waiting in the lobby.  “Does he have an appointment?” Lebendiger wrote on the note.  “No,” the receptionist scribbled.  Lebendiger muted his microphone and told her that the visitor would have to wait.  “I’ll come out as soon as I’m done with this call,” Lebendiger said.

The ZOOM conference lasted another half-hour.  After he logged-out, Lebendiger went to the lobby.  The waiting room was empty.  “He just left,” the receptionist said.  “Is he planning to come back?” Lebendiger asked.  “I don’t know,” the receptionist said, “I had trouble understanding his English.”  Lebendiger went to the window and gazed out at the parking lot.  He didn’t see anyone outside.  It was hot and the air shimmered over the chrome and metal car bodies and, across the green mall, the State Capitol building, looked wilted and pinkish in the blaze of sun, a great pale blossom turned upside down under the blue sky.  “It’s a scorcher,” Lebendiger said.

But the lobby was cold and the receptionist had put on a sweater.  “Too much air-conditioning?” Lebendiger asked.  “I guess,” the woman said.

The next day, Lebendiger was on the road, meeting with several concrete contractors.  He didn’t return to the DOT until later afternoon.  “That Mr. Hernandez was here again,” the receptionist said.  “Well, I wasn’t here,” Lebendiger said.  “You weren’t here,” she repeated.

“That guy is weird,” the receptionist said.

“What do you mean?”

“He was dirty and wet.  Maybe, he was just sweating,” she said.  “He said he wanted to talk to you about a sign.  I think he waited for a half-hour and kept falling asleep.”  

“Falling asleep?”

“Just closing his eyes and dozing I guess,” the receptionist told him.

“Well, I’m glad I didn’t have to deal with him,” Lebendiger said.

“Thanks a lot,” the receptionist pouted.

Mr. Hernandez appeared again, late the next afternoon.  “He’s here again,” the receptionist said, shuddering a little.  

“I don’t want to see him,” Lebendiger said.  

“What am I supposed to tell him?” 

“That I’m sick.”  Lebendiger added: “It’s not far from true.”

“Okay,” she said.

Lebendiger went out the back door and got into his pickup truck.  It was still hot and, except for heat, the sky was empty.  The legislators weren’t in session and the Capitol grounds were deserted.  

On the way home, Lebendiger felt faint and had to pull to the side of the road.  He got out of his car and vomited into the ditch.

In the morning, he felt better and went to work early.  The waiting room at the DOT building smelled bad and there was a puddle of stagnant water on the carpet in front of the reception desk.  This was inexplicable  – it hadn’t rained for several weeks.  Lebendiger thought that the air conditioning system was leaking.  The muddy puddle on the carpet looked menacing, the kind of water that transmitted Legionnaires Disease.

Over the noon hour, Lebendiger went to DOT garage across town.  A couple of workers were washing down some State dump trucks in the pole-barn bay.  

Lebendiger asked the workers about the MVA victim markers retrieved from the project linking the State freeway to the city boulevard up in the Valley.  “They were here until about a week ago,” one of the workers said, gesturing to the metal wall against which some battered signs were resting.  The other man said: “I don’t know where they’ve gone.”  

Yellow hard hats hung on brackets on the wall and there were yellow vests with outlined with reflective tape.  

“They’re gone now,” the worker holding the hose said.  Water spread across the concrete floor and gurgled down a drain.

4.

The State Highway department partnered with a county far to the north on an overpass project.  Lebendiger attended the bid-letting at the county courthouse.  It was late afternoon when his work was done.  He’d been feeling a bit queasy in recent weeks and considered staying at the motel in town.  But the place looked uninviting and, so, Lebendiger decided to drive home.  

He took the State Highway jogging through the northern forests.  The late afternoon sun raked through the trees and they cast long crooked shadows over the black top.  The little towns in the woods seemed deserted.  It was still light when the highway dropped a ramp down onto the freeway.  The sun set over the rolling prairie.  Lebendiger pulled in to a rest stop.  Under the florescent lights in the toilet, he caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror.  Lebendiger thought that he looked old and harried, his skin pinkish-yellow.

There was very little traffic.  Now and then, he passed a semi-trailer hauling animals to slaughter.  Headlights in the oncoming lanes were few and far between.  After an hour, the divided highway skated down some hills between shadowy, black ravines and, then, the road ran over the flat flood-plain.  Construction signs warned about the place ahead where his south-bound lanes contracted to two-way traffic.  Obediently, he slowed, following a line of orange cones on a temporary slick of asphalt over the median onto the old State-aid highway.  Headlights flared oncoming, dangerously close.  On the side of the old highway, Lebendiger glimpsed some colossal machines hulking in the darkness, earthen ramps, a conical pile of gravel looming over a dump truck.  Someone had hoisted a generator forty feet in the air where it hung from a crane draped with an American flag.

The fatal bridge abutment was ahead.  His tires singing underneath the car changed tone as the road went from asphalt to concrete.  A white skull-like face suddenly loomed out of the shadow on the right side of the highway.  Lebendiger was startled and instinctively veered left, away from the apparition.  A cold chill ran down his spine and he shuddered.  

It wasn’t obvious how he could turn around.  Some headlights glared behind and, far ahead, the front of an oncoming truck sprayed rays ahead of it.  Lebendiger thought that it would be best to just continue on his way, but the pale, bony face hovering in the darkness troubled him and he thought it would be cowardly to proceed without investigating.  A quarter mile beyond the bridge, he found a long gravel driveway running to a palisade of trees where a yard-light glimmered.  Lebendiger turned around and drove back up the road, over the bridge, and, then, turned around in the construction site.  A scatter of stones like pebbles on the moon shone in his headlights.  He looked up and down the highway: nothing.  Then, he drove toward the bridge, rolling forward at about 10 miles an hour.  He lowered his window and could smell the moisture in the air, a heavy warm odor of mud and still water.  Crickets and frogs sang.  

A white plastic bag, a grocery sack, it seemed, was caught on one of the tenth-of-a-mile markers, a stake on the side of the road with a little diamond-shaped reflector.  Although there was no breeze at all, air had inflated the bag and it hung bulbous from the top of the marker.  The sack billowed slightly and, as it moved, Lebendiger saw that it simulated – at least when seen obliquely and glimpsed – a human skull.  Eye sockets were indented in the pale plastic and there was a bald bony brow over them.  Sometimes, a round mouth twitched at the base of the sack blown against the metal stake and trapped there.  

For a few miles, Lebendiger felt relieved.  There was a natural explanation for what he had seen.  But, by the time, he reached the city, he was troubled once more.

5.

The new four-lane reached the stream.  The old cement bridge was jack-hammered into rubble and buried in the median under a mound of dirt.  

Winter was coming.  Soon most of the work would have to be suspended.  

Lebendiger’s engineer at the construction site sent him an email with a photograph attached.  Someone had jabbed a MVA victim marker into the wet concrete on the new overpass above the stream.  The steel stanchion and the metal lozenge of the marker hung from the side of the bridge like a hatchet.  Graffiti was scribbled on the new abutment: KILLER.

“Already defaced,” the email message said.

“Probably several felonies here,” Lebendiger replied.  “Better set up a surveillance camera.”

“Just kids,” the site engineer wrote back.

A small camera was set inside a pickup truck parked near the new bridge.  Several times, the camera showed shadowy figures on the bridge deck, but it was agreed that these were probably deer crossing the river on the concrete span.  After the MVA marker was retrieved and the graffiti sandblasted from the abutment, there were no further incidents.  The MVA marker was indexed as one of the three that had previously been planted near the old bridge.

6.

The cancer seemed to advance from place to place.  It was building bridges across his body.  Lebendiger was unwell.  He thought of his body as comprised of nodes of sickness that were slowly constructing connections over spans of glistening tissue.

7.

A couple days before the stem-cell transplant, Lebendiger went to the DOT garage and asked the supervisor to tell him the truth about the three MVA markers.  The man was suspicious and asked if he were in some kind of trouble.  “No,” Lebendiger said, “but I just need to know.”

The garage manager said that the markers were unstable and kept falling over with a loud crash that startled the men.  Finally, one of the workers said that he was just going to get rid of the signs.  The manager didn’t know where they had been taken.

Lebendiger had the employee brought to the shop office.  The man looked uneasy and asked if he needed to call his union steward.  Lebendiger assured him that all was well.

“I know I shouldn’t have done it,” the man said.  “But I took them over to a lake out in the country and dumped them off the fishing pier.”

The man named the lake.

Lebendiger and the worker drove out to the lake.  It was a perfectly round body of water, shallow and surrounded by reeds.  Some clumps of brownish algae were floating as islands near the center of the lake.  Big dragonflies darted between the cattails and, across the lake, four steel grain bins were reflected in the still surface.

At the end of a couple hundred yards of gravel lane, a sandy spit extended into the water.  To the side, some planks had been hammered together to make a rickety wooden pier.  A big dead carp, eviscerated, lay on the wood planks.  In the center of the lake, a rowboat drifted, apparently empty.  The rowboat was cream-colored with oars in their locks and bright with a single red safety vest.

“I pitched the markers off the dock,” the man said.  Lebendiger walked to the end of the dock, careful to not slip on the entrails of the carp smeared on the planks.  The water at the end of the dock was muddy and he couldn’t see any trace of the signs.  The row boat slowly rotated in the middle of the lake and a cloud dragged shadow over the water.

“I wonder where the man has gone,” the worker said, gesturing at the little boat.

“He’s probably fallen asleep and we just can’t see him,” Lebendiger said.

“I suppose,” the highway worker replied.