Our neighbor Crazy George was along the road with his thumb up. I pulled over and ran the far window down.

“Where you going?” I asked him.

His large head and beard filled my window. “Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh” he stuttered and strained to say he needed a ride to town.

He carried a Stanley thermos and a blue bag. He opened the door and fumbled the thermos and bag to his other hand. He found the handle over the door and slowly got inside.

“You do any good?’ His voice was loud and old. “You fish or something?”

I said I wasn’t fishing, but where was his car? 

He was wearing tattered overalls and a mass of other clothes. His smell filled the cab. From somewhere in his clothes, faint music played. His fingers were stained dark with misshapen yellow nails. He leaned across the console into my face.

His car was wrecked, he said. I knew about this. One of the church boys had given him and his dogs a ride home.

I asked what happened, about the wreck.

George began about the car and being cold and the ER, on and on he went, shifting in his seat, the music playing as he stammered and halted. 

John died, he said.

John died? I asked. What about John dying?

This summer we noticed another man with George. Wherever George went this man was with him. In his Suzuki, in the doorway of his house, under a vehicle. Middle-aged, dark-haired. Who is this other guy with George, we asked each other. No one knew.

What happened with John? I asked.

“We were coming down from Moscow,” he said. “It was so cold and we were wet. It took us five hours ‘cause the Suzuki only goes 40. I was so cold and my hands were…” He hunched forward and made his hands in claws that convulsed and shook.

It took George a long time to tell what happened. He spoke loudly in his gravely voice. His right hand kept reaching under his legs. The story would go, stop, double back, leap forward.

They, him and John, made their way slowly from Moscow to Lewiston in the cold spell of weather we had this winter. They drove to “the boat ramp” and spent the night with the Suzuki running, to keep warm. They were wet, he said, and it was so cold. It was 10 below zero, he kept saying. In the morning his boots were frozen to the floorboards and he couldn’t hardly wake up John because of the carbon monoxide. George couldn’t open his door from the inside and he couldn’t crawl across John to get out. Finally he was able to awaken John. 

George was so cold he drove to the ER to warm up. Because of the cold and carbon monoxide he couldn’t think where the hospital was and they drove around and around trying to find it. Which they finally did and he went inside and a lady got him blankets for his feet. He stayed there for five hours.

When George got back to the Suzuki John had drank his entire jar of “homemade hooch” and was drunk. George was very angry at him. That night they went back to the boat ramp. (I couldn’t tell where this boat ramp was. Were they there for the restrooms?) This night they got cardboard and made themselves a “little cockpit” inside the Suzuki, around them and the heater and spent the night less cold than before.

After this I couldn’t follow the sequence of events. John left with “Kevin” and they tried going to Winchester over the Magruder Road. (The Magruder Road is far east of Lewiston and nowhere near Winchester, I couldn’t make sense of this) John and Kevin got into deep snow that was around the car and spent the night in the car. The next day someone found the car, and Kevin was unconscious and John was dead from carbon monoxide.

George was somewhere at a round-about in Lewiston and a woman came running across from somewhere and said John’s dead. 

“I cried so hard blood came out of my nose. And my eyes,” he said. He showed with his old yellowed hands how blood ran down his face. 

John worked right over there running the fryer, he said. He motioned toward the grocery store. He got out of my truck, and I left him. 

I got home that evening and googled man dead in car in Winchester. A single brief report came up. Stranded Vehicle Found on Rural Road with One Person Dead Inside, Another Unconscious. At 1:49 on McCormack Road someone called them in. It was true. John was dead.

Deep in my memory slowly an image rose into sight. I had been in Eastern Washington and coming home on 95 had passed a small, slow moving, dark green SUV. I remember, as in a dream so faint is the memory, looking in my mirror and recognizing the ram’s skull strapped to the front bumper and inside the white beard and hair of Crazy George and the other man. I blew on by, in my truck, earbuds in my ears, a drink I’m sure in the cupholder, the temperature exactly where I needed it. By the time George and his cold wet feet and convulsing hands had got to the boat ramp I was halfway to Grangeville.

What good is a Christian neighbor when you wake at the boat ramp with your feet frozen to the floorboards with your friend who will die in the snow along the road? 

But we didn’t know. I would have helped if I knew.

George