Joppa Road

Joppa Road

By

Eric Stuteville

I come up on a hurt man fallen to the side of Old Joppa road.  I craned my neck over the passenger side as I passed his body to see. All he was wearing was blue jeans cinched by a black belt.  No shirt, no shoes.  He was sprawled belly flat with his eyes closed.

I pulled over a few yards in front of the man and stopped.  I got out of the security truck and shown my flashlight down the road.  I was way the hell there out in Airport country.  I hadn’t seen anyone else in an hour.  I zipped up my parka and hollered to the man.

“Hey there, buddy.  Can you get up?  Can you hear me?” 

I assumed he’d been hit by a car, victim of kids racing the lengthy roads adjacent to the corn fields that used to be kept around here.  Since all the homes had been bought up, there wasn’t any need for traffic.  The flatlands were a haven for wasted time.

I gritted my teeth as I neared him, anticipating his injuries. 

He wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t good, either   I knelt down and looked him over andI saw scratches and blood around the crown of his head, like he went down head first on the pavement. 

I jostled his shoulder.  My breaths were coming out of my mouth in heavy clouds of steam.  When he exhaled, it was in shallow rasps through his nose.  I thought it was his lung.

“Alright.  I’m gonna try and flip you over.  It’s gonna help you breathe easy.”

I reached down to him and when I pulled him back I saw the blood on the rocks even before I got him totally turned around.  I flinched.  I couldn’t help it.

“Aw, what in the hell happened to you?”

His chest was sliced  up like ribbons.  If the cuts didn’t run deep it mattered little but there were so many slashed into him, hundreds.  Down around his stomach, there looked to be circles or maybe even letters carved along his belly.  I couldn’t discern what may have been etched into him.  The meaning was lost on me as if the artist, frustrated, had scrapped the entire red canvas.

Though, he was untouched above the neck, aside from the injuries likely sustained in his fall.  I noticed his protruding adams apple bob in his throat. His lips parted and blood drooled out the corner of his mouth.

“I think you’re coming around.  Look, I gonna call us an ambulance out here.  You just, ah, just take it easy.  We got people coming for you.”

I slid my flashlight back into my belt and jogged back over to the truck.  I sat inside the cab and bent over to the CB console.  I untangled the radio’s cord.

I said into it, “Dispatch, this is Indy 6. Do you copy?”

Hissing feedback shot back at me.  I frowned at the Tandy CB unit that didn’t really work at all.  I blew into the receiver.

“I’m out here by 650 East and Old Joppa road.  I’ve got a downed male needing emergency assistance.  We need an ambulance and police.  Real police.”

The radio issued no reply.  I gazed out the windshield to the eastern horizon and watched the landing beacons blink dumbly back at me.

I jiggled the squawk button on the receiver.  Nothing.

“Radio Shack crap,” I said to no one else.

Rarely did I even need to use the radio, these parts were so deserted. I had no incidents and I was seldom needed.  My job consisted of patrolling these back roads to run off kids smoking dope.  After an Air Force jet crashed into the Ramada Inn last year, the airport snatched up all the western territory, looking now to expand into the rural outskirts and away from the sprawl of the suburbs.  Airport Security had me working overnight, third shift as custodian to a vast vacant lot.

I didn’t carry a sidearm. I wished I had one. I wasn’t issued a weapon by the Airport as protocol dictated that in the event of a “situation” I was to relay the description of events to the appropriate authorities.  I could pull a speeder over and issue him a citation to be filed with the police at a later date.  If I spotted a drunken hot rodder, I was to try to obtain his tag numbers and call someone with a V6.

Still, I didn’t know if that man was bleeding to death or not.  I couldn’t leave him by the side of the road.  It was the middle of the night and freezing.  I backed up a little closer to where he was splayed.  I intended to lower the bed’s gate and lug his limp body up and into the back of my truck.

I got out and walked back to him.

“Okay, buddy, I’m try gonna get you out of here and to a hospital. If you could find it in you to wake up so we can get you up in this cab, I’d surely appreciate it.”

It was then his eyes fluttered open.  He blinked a few times and his pupils shot back and forth in his eye sockets.  He inhaled and coughed wetly.  He rolled to his side and spat out a gob of blood phlegm.

“Oh hell.  There here is.  Oh boy. Can you get up?”

He attempted to lean forward. I grabbed his arm and pulled him upright and sitting.

“I thought you’d been done in by a car, but then I seen all those cuts on your chest,” I said.

He lowered his chin.  His hands trembled inches above his mutilated chest.

 “It was hell.  Oh Joppa, we brought Hell to Earth.”

Overhead, the sky screamed the scouring thrust of a DC-9.  I looked up at the plane making its descent.  Far in the distance, I marked the floating headlights of vehicle rolling down 600 West, a mile away.

He saw my eyes avert his and he twisted himself to see what I could see.

He muttered something.

“What’d you say?” I shouted over the noise of the plane.

“It’s them,” he said, louder.   “Help me up.” 

He clasped my forearm with his other hand and I helped him get to his feet. He separated himself from my aid and shuffled toward the truck.

“Ok, yeah.  Um.  Great. Let’s go,” I said.

I got in my driver’s side and leaning over, popped open his door.  He slunk around and slithered himself in the seat.

“You want me to turn up the heat in here?” I asked him as I put the car in gear.  “Or will that exacerbate your cuts?  Aw Jesus, but it is cold out here.”

He hitched his shoulders up.  I looked at his face.  His eyes were beady and furtive.  His lips were curled into a sneer of pain.  His nose and chin were pointy.  His face looked liked the knife he likely used on his red, raw throat stubble.

“You are the good Samaritan,” he croaked.

“Remains to be seen.  What I was wondering was how in the hell you ended up out here?”

In my mirror, I could see the car turn onto Joppa Road behind us.  The vehicle’s headlights pulse flared as the driver switched on the high beams.

“You needn’t worry about them.  They’ve got nothing to do with us.  What’s your name?

“Which one?”

The man grimaced and looked back every so many seconds.

“I’m Chuck,” I said.  “I’m just gonna go ahead and take you on back to the airport now.”

The approaching car slowed as they neared us but made no obvious attempt to stop as they passed by.  Eyeing a busted tail light on the black Caddie, I put the truck in gear and started to drive. 

The man cocked his eye at me.  His agony was replaced with something like amusement.

 “Chuck?  As in Charles?” He asked.

I took his question to be a good sign.  “That’s what my license says.” 

“Did you know that Charlie Manson was born and raised not five miles from here?”  He asked.

“As a matter of fact, I do.  Everybody around here knows that.”

 “The Reverend Jim Jones came up around here, too.  There’s something evil about these fields. ”

 “You saying that those are like who done you like this?  Some kind of cultists get you all cut up and dump you in the middle of nowhere?  Is that what happened to you?”

“Not cultists.  It was the Quakers.”

I took a second to glance away from the road and at him.

“The oatmeal guys?”

“Forget it.”

“What? You mean to tell me you were attacked at knifepoint by those peaceful folks with that Friends church over there in Valley Mills?  For Christ’s sake, they were conscientious objectors.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you.  They’re more powerful than anyone knows.  These are their lands.”

“No.  This is Airport property.”

“Haven’t you seen the church with no door?”  He pointed his finger.

“See, there it is.”

I looked through the windshield at the landscape in his view.  He was correct.  Standing in the deserted field next to the ruin of a flattened homestead was a four walled cabin with no apparent means of entry.

“Don’t take me back there,” he said.

I sped up the truck as we passed by.  He was right.  I hadn’t ever seen this structure.  Then, the black Cadillac emerged from the side.  It angled toward us and charged across the open terrain.  The man yelped as I pressed harder on the accelerator. 

We were approaching a crossroads, a stark ninety degree turn that was characteristic of the rural grid.  I turned off Joppa Road because I could cut over to 1400 North and still get back to the airport. 

“It’s too late.  They’ve got us.”

The Caddie barreled onto the road and chased after us.  The road ahead was straight and clear of obstacle.  He would over take us.

Instead, he pulled up on the tail and rammed the truck.  The high steel fender obliterated my tail lights and flung us forwards.  My passenger smacked his face onto the dashboard from the impact.

I swerved the steering wheel.  I found it incredibly hard to try to maneuver at the speed we were racing at.  My knuckles popped as I held steady to prevent the truck from toppling over.

“I have to stop.  He’s gonna run me right off the road.”

“Don’t do it.”

I slowed my truck and lifted the right turn signal.  I braked and the car behind rolled in front of us and stopped.

The doors Cadillac opened.  Three ski masked men stepped out into the road. They were wearing button down white dress shirts and black pants.  Two figures dashed toward the passenger side of my truck, immediately making for my passenger.  They flung the door opened and he cried out.

“No.  He’s hurt so bad, don’t take him.”

They wrestled his body from seat and slung his flailing body between.  His struck out in defense but his blows landed like ineffectual flies on the wrapped thickness of his assailants coats.  They jerked him along, his feet dragging on the rocks on the side of the road.  They opened the trunk of the caddy and stuffed the man inside even as he whimpered.

The third figure approached my window. He was a big guy.  I was frozen.  He carried was holding a hunting knife. 

“Go ahead and roll down your window,” he said.

I put my hands up into his view.  Then, I reached and eased the window crank down.

“You ain’t a cop, are you?”

“No, sir.  Airport Security.  I completely unarmed.”

Silence between us.

“Alright, what’s your name?”

“Uh.  Charlie.”

He stood like a stone before me. All I could see were his eyes and the breath from his facemask.  He was deciding something.

“Then you go on get the hell out of here.  You saw nothing.”

When the car had travelled far enough into the distance that I could no longer see the glow of lights, I drove out of the desolate land, a place only fit for runways and renegade Quakers.  I made my way to the airport to pass on what had transpired.