Blue Stew (Second Edition) Read Free

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    Poor Nigel, reminisced Walter spontaneously. Nigel had suffered through most of junior high being addressed by his classmates, in haughty British accents, as “Sir Nigel Kensington, Esquire .” However, that petered out early on in high school when a certain boy-wizard invaded America’s pop-culture, and the unluckily-surnamed Henry Potter took up the totem as the school’s favorite British-accented name. Of course, “sir” was dropped and “esquire” was replaced with an overdramatic “The Boy Who Lived.”
    Over a protracted string of years, the people Henry associated with finally became bored of the practice. Recently, it had seemed as good as dead. That was, until a memorable party just one month ago. Walter didn’t remember the party, blacked-out drunk as he was, but the story as he heard it—and he would always listen to its retelling with a sick grin on his face—was that he had done multiple lines of coke in the bathroom, and then, for the rest of the night, whenever he saw Henry, he would shout at the top of his lungs with his eyes bulging crazily, “ The Boy Who Lived! ”
    Another, brighter flicker of light from his overhead mirror had Walter look up again. The driver behind him evidently hadn’t learned any lesson from their previous scare, as they had more than halved the distance to Walter’s slow-going green van, and had just straightened out another treacherous side-skid.
    “Fucking moron,” muttered Walter as he slipped his phone back into his pocket. Nigel’s house marked the point on the far side of the valley where cell-phone service returned, so there’d be no worthwhile opportunity to return the call.
    A sudden wall of wind again buffeted his automobile, carrying in its wake another concerted torrent of rainfall.
    In Walter’s twenty-five years living in that unremarkable southern-Vermont town of Sutherland, he could only recall a handful of rainstorms this severe. It was exciting. As he continued down the hill, he was eager to see how high the river would be running when he crossed the bridge at the bottom. He willed the rain to come down even harder, maybe wash out some of the roads he took to work, and a power line or two.
    “Are you for- fucking -real, man?” exclaimed Walter as his attention was again stolen by the light bouncing off of his rearview mirror. The driver behind him was now only three car lengths back, and the gap was still shrinking.
    His eyes jumped back and forth from the road ahead to the reflection of the car behind—its narrow, round headlights fit the profile of a Jeep, he observed uncaringly.
    He said aloud when the headlights were less than a single car length behind, “Pass me if you want, you stupid fuck. It’s your funeral.”
    Walter maintained his speed and held stubbornly to the center of the lane.
    He couldn’t believe it when he saw it, and his eyes became glued to the mirror as it happened: The car behind him didn’t slow, and, stunningly, didn’t attempt to enter the oncoming lane to pass. Walter was forced to believe it, however, when he heard the smashing of metal and glass, and felt his body yanked back into his seat.
    Everything that followed happened just as fast as every crash victim says it does: really fast.
    The rear of his car was knocked out of line with the front, and in an instant Walter was angled in a direction that would lead him off the right side of the road . . . and there was the bridge and the river, straight ahead.
    In a state of shock, Walter cut the wheel to the left, but the combination of the wet leaves and the momentum of the heavy Jeep barreling into his rear negated all traction.
    His head flung around like a ragdoll’s and his seatbelt bit into his chest as his van plowed into a muddy stream of runoff water paralleling the road. A blinding wave of water and wet earth was thrown up onto his windshield. Somehow this wasn’t enough to stop the joined automobiles, or even slow them significantly. Walter had