She Threw Me From a Moving Car When I was 5

Now I'm Driving

The Story

The road was caliche – -- white, dusty and it had a unique crunching sound as the car drove over it.

Caliche, for the uninitiated, is basically super fine ground up limestone and “grows” naturally all over Texas. It makes a super cheap and efficient road material.

In more citified places, it might be used as a bed for paved roads or driveways. In the Texas, however, it’s used for all manor of back roads and pathways. It was used for horse trails in the old days. Nowadays, it sees mainly cars and trucks and cuts through everywhere through agricultural lands, small towns and villages.

Our story today takes place in Hansford County, population 5,000 or thereabouts, all fitting within 920 whole square miles, located at the very top of Texas in what’s known as the panhandle, on a dirt road. It is May 1982. I am 5 years old.

For those of you not familiar with the Texas Panhandle, this map gives a pretty good explanation:

Bernie, 2011

This is from the 2011 movie Bernie -- one of my favorite Texas movies. It gets the local small-town vibe perfectly, mainly because it features some real life residents of Carthage. Bernie was written and directed by Richard Linklater, who also directed School of Rock -- again staring Jack Black. I like School of Rock -- it’s a nice movie.

OK, back to the story:

The road was caliche -- white, dusty and it had a unique crunching sound as the car drove over it -- -- ta-pocket-pocket-pocketa (couldn’t resist the Walter Mitty reference).

It was May 1982, late morning, in the flat expanse of the Texas panhandle. I was in the back of a four door sedan, on the driver’s side, listening to the sound of the tires ironing over the caliche, surrounded by an ocean of dry grass fields, some with barbed wire, others left open. A meadowlark or two quietly watched from the distance. A pair of Swallows soared above, darting and twisting as they chased their insect prey.

It was hot, of course, like a dry sauna, bright blue skies, the sun watching over us like God in the sky. In other words, a normal regular old day in the panhandle.

We were on the way to my Aunt’s house. As mentioned, I was 5 years old.

This is me back then:

Don’t you just love 5 year old me. I know I do!

My mom was driving. She had her right hand on the wheel, and was holding my younger sister -- who was born in April and therefore only a month old -- in her lap. I was sitting in the back seat on the driver’s side. That in itself was odd, as I would normally sit on the passenger’s side -- either in the back or front, depending on who was driving. For some reason, my mom instructed me to sit on her side that day.

We were close to my Aunt’s house now, and I knew in a few minutes we would take a sharp right turn, drive up a hill and soon be there.

What happened next took maybe a second or so, and less time than it takes to read about.

As we approached the sharp corner to my Aunt’s -- a familiar corner, a safe corner, which we had turned into hundreds of times before . . .

We enter the sharp turn. I see my mom’s left hand reach back and grab the door handle. I hear the sound of the latch while my mom says, in a voice as flat as the horizon, “We’re here -- Jump out.”

I knew we were not there. And before I could even think “what the heck”, then she hit the gas through the curve, popped open the door, reached back and gripped my arm, and, as the car whipped around the curve, threw me out of the car.

I remember the sensation of the air and hitting the ground. I had the wind knocked out of me -- grasping for air, as I rolled through the ditch, a tangle of limbs and a five-year-old in terror, as the car kept driving.

She stopped halfway up the hill.

By the time my Aunt ran outside, alerted by the kind of screaming that comes from a child rolling through stickers, my mother was standing by the car. Hands on her hips (”akimbo”?).

She was not panicked, not holding her infant child and not running toward her bleeding daughter. Instead she was staring daggers at me. I was used to that, of course.

She looked miffed. Like I had disappointed her or ruined her plan.

Interior of my Aunt’s house. I am sitting on her long wooden dining room table -- tangled blonde hair, covered in stickers, blood and caliche dust – I heard the lie take it’s first flight.

“Well, I just don’t know what to do”, my mom said. “She thought we were in the driveway and just jumped out I guess.”

That is totally not what happened. However, for weeks afterwards, she repeated the story to anyone who would listen. Older folks were telling me not to jump out of cars until your mother says so. That made me, as the English might say, rather non-plussed, as she had told me to jump out.

Anyway, I stopped hyperventilating for a second and looked at her standing in the corner of the dining room. We locked eyes. My arms crossed, staring daggers right back at her. There was no mother there. There was a seething, incandescent fury behind her stare. It was a glare that demanded my silence -- or else! It was the first time I stared down evil.

Why I think this happened