Deliverance

The face she made as she got into the man's truck terrified me. It was the urgent face of a captive with something to tell. She said nothing. Her eyes begged. I said nothing.

She closed the door and the pickup pulled back onto the road to disappear slowly around the next bend.

I walked back to our car. It was mired in the soft shoulder of the road and slanting precariously toward the deep ditch.

I had just pulled off the road to check the map and had misjudged the shoulder, foolishly cut too far right and sank the tires into the sand, unforgiving after the recent rain. It was these things, it was me, that sent her off with a stranger in search of a truck that might give our stuck car a tug.

The stranger seemed nice enough. I would not have been so worried if it weren't for the scar he had — side to side, straight across his neck.

Someone, somewhere in that man's life someone had taken a knife across a healthy, breathing throat. The fact that someone seemed to have wanted the guy dead did not sit well with me.

I noticed the scar straight off the bat. There's no hiding something that size. After the initial, momentary shock, I explained the problem with our car. He said, yes he was from around here, and suggested he give one of us a lift into town to see if he could scare up some help. He was very nice and at any rate, he was the first person who stopped to help us. He had said his name, and Tina and I introduced ourselves. She wanted to be the one to hitch the ride into town, and since the car was mine, I felt I should be the one left stranded with it in the middle of the Adirondacks. My thinking was also that it might be safer for her to go with someone we had already met and gotten a feeling for rather than to wait by the side of the road alone.

I had indeed gotten a feeling about the man. I had seen his face, his eyes. He seemed genuinely glad to help out. I have great confidence in my ability to judge people on a first meeting, so I thought it fine when Tina volunteered to go with him. But the turn of her head and that asking look as she got in the car had given me real pause.

How often are our "feelings" about a person wrong? Maybe only two or three percent of the time. How often can you trust people in a situation like this? Maybe ninety-five percent of the time. Generally, these are numbers I can live with.

But when given the time to walk up and down a desolate patch of rural highway trying to flag down help while one's potential new girlfriend is off in a car with a stranger who has a vicious scar across his throat, one does get to second-guessing. How does the scar affect the odds? Does it? Should it? And what the hell was Tina desperately trying to tell me in that last-second look before she took off in the truck?

I paced back and forth on the side of the road. And thought of Deliverance.

After thirty minutes or so, as it happened, they returned with a tow-truck with a winch on it. The car came free from the soft shoulder, and we were soon on our way again.

So what was the look, I asked Tina later. She said, "I wanted you to get his license plate number. Just in case."

I, of course, had not. Normally so good about things like that — so over-prepared — yet this time it hadn't even occurred to me. We drove on in silence. I wondered what that small failing said about me, and my preparedness for a relationship. She opened her window, and the space between us widened.