Teddy Angages

                       inspired by Lord Huron’s “Dead Man’s Hand”

The empty, straight road was the only thing splitting the infinite expanse of trees at either side of me. I drove endlessly and aimlessly under the pale moon that shone bright enough to light the dead of night. 

Far in the distance, my headlights caught something in the road. A deer carcass, I thought, but it only took a couple of yards before I understood what I saw. 

I stomped on my brakes to a full stop and stepped out of the car. There in the light of my high beams was the body of a man, face-down in the road. 

He was wearing a brown, leather jacket and ripped jeans. His black hair was unusually well-combed. It was just him out there. No car, no bike, no backpack, no blood. Nothing. 

I dug my arms under the body and rolled him over. He was just a kid, couldn’t have been any older than twenty-five. The right side of his face was torn away as if someone held it to a belt grinder. His eyes were closed. At least he had been granted that peace. The skin he still had was pale as chiseled marble. He’d been dead for some time. 

I sighed and weighed my options, and considered my destination: Nowhere. Hooking beneath his arms, I dragged the frigid body out of the road to the tree line. I returned to my car and pulled a shovel from the trunk. Might as well attempt to bury the poor kid, I thought. 

There in the dirt at the edge of the wilderness, I sat as I lit up a cigarette to calm the nerves I should have been having. At least it warmed my chest. Simply recalling the macabre scene convinces me now that this was the lowest moment of my life. 

I could not recount what sat in my head at that moment, lost in nowhere with a dead body and a cigarette. That might be just it, though; there was nothing left to go through inside there, having run so many fruitless circles. 

As I carelessly cycled the smoke like a machine, staring off ahead at nothing in particular, I felt a cold hand grip my jacket. I jolted away as the body of the young man groaned, coughed, and lifted itself up as though awakening from a groggy sleep. His resting lids opened to reveal eyes glazed over in a milky white color. 

“Who’re you?” The kid asked in a tone entirely unphased by his situation. 

I hadn’t the wherewithal to respond. Whether I was dreaming, dead, or experiencing some horrible miracle, I could not begin to narrow down. “Were you going to bury me?” he asked, seeing the shovel beside him. 

“You were lying dead in the road,” I managed. “You were dead!” The kid looked at his hands, as if checking to see if they were naught but bones.
“I guess not,” he said. Slapping dirt from his jeans, he stood up, so I followed suit on shaking knees. His eyes reflected like a dog’s in my car’s headlights as he looked my way. “You got a smoke to spare, man? I’m freezing.” 

With trembling hands I pulled a pack from my jacket and handed over a cigarette to him. He leaned close to me as I flicked my lighter and met it to the cigarette in the side of his mouth that still had skin. The flame showed me in harrowing detail the dry tendons and taut muscles, and what hid within the nose whose right nostril was absent. 

He closed his eyes in bliss as he inhaled deep. As he blew out, smoke billowed through his exposed teeth and out his open cheek, the light of the smouldering ash illuminating his glassy white eyes. 

  “Thanks, man,” he said with a solidarity only two men in a strange situation could have. “What brings you so far out here at an hour like this?”

“Travelling,” I said. “How did you get here? Some thugs dump you in the road?” 

“I…don’t know.” His marble eyes turned downwards with a melancholy. “I don’t remember…anything of what happened. It’s like a dream.” 

“You want a ride?” 

“Where are you heading?” 

“I don’t know.” 

The boy stared off to the woods in silence, ashes drifting off of his cig. Coyotes howled from the deep of the trees, and a single crow called a single caw. 

“I think…I think I need to be out there,” he said. “I think they’re calling me.” 

How might one even respond to that? What was I to say? How were I to protest? “Answer it,” I said. 

The kid took his cigarette and gestured with it. “One more for the road?” 

I nodded. I once again took the pack from my jacket but offered him the whole thing, along with my lighter. Silently he took it, then touched his fist to my shoulder as thanks. 

Then off he went. Not another word exchanged. And not a word of this story have I spoken until now. 

He looked back to me over his shoulder, providing one last look at that mangled face, and he lifted his hand with a peace sign, then continued on his way into the deep of the woods. 

I watched that figure disappear slowly into the night until the light of the cigarette was swallowed up by the endless trees.