First-person America

ANY TIME, ANY PLACE

By Ray Wisher

GULF COAST, FLORIDA—It was no big deal, just another night on patrol. My partner and I were in an unmarked car driving in a residential area late at night when we saw a Bronco-type truck go by in a hurry. It ran a stop sign and took off into the neighborhood. The back window was open as if somebody had just stuffed something into it. So we began to follow the truck. We passed by as it turned down a dead end street and pulled into a driveway a few blocks down. To make sure things were O.K., we drove down to the cul-de-sac to make sure the owner belonged there.

As we slowly cruised by, I looked to my right and to my horror saw a young white male with long hair running toward me out of the shadows. He had a small semi-automatic handgun in his right hand. The look on his face was wide-eyed rage. I watched as he approached my side of the car at a dead run, reaching over with his left hand to pull back the slide on a gun.

"The guy has a gun!" I yelled. I couldn’t do anything but watch as the man ran within 20 feet and pointed the weapon at my head. I told myself there is no way this guy has a real gun. Nobody is that stupid; it must be some kind of pellet gun or something. I watched as the man, still running, stuck the gun at me and pulled the trigger three times. I heard "click, click, click."

Thinking he must be trying to scare us, I said, "it must be a pellet gun." Luckily my partner just slammed the
accelerator to the floor and skidded into the cul-del-sac so we could end up facing the assailant. He hit the blue lights as we bailed out of the car, guns pulled. We yelled for the man to drop his weapon. As soon as he saw the lights he dropped the gun and threw up his hands: "I didn’t know you were cops! I’m sorry."

Still thinking it had to be some kind of pellet pistol, I walked up and asked why he was trying to scare us like that. He said he thought he was being followed, but he couldn’t tell us why someone would be following him.

I picked up the pistol and looked at it. To my surprise it was a .38. Then I pulled the slide back, half expecting to find it empty. Nobody would actually try to shoot someone they didn’t know just because they were driving down the road in a car. But the gun wasn’t empty; it was fully loaded. Seeing that the first round had jammed down, I ran the slide back twice. A round ejected nicely from the port. My blood ran cold.

That the gun hadn’t gone off was sheer luck—or God’s hand. Because the man hadn’t pulled the slide back far enough to feed the bullet into the chamber, the round had stuck. Before the bullet I ejected hit the ground I looked at my partner and said, "cuff him."

The man had no real criminal history, wasn’t insane, wasn’t on drugs, wasn’t drunk. He had no reason for what he did. "I didn’t know you were cops," he repeated. I told him that wasn’t a good excuse. "What if we had been just some old lady, or a couple of people lost and trying to find an address. You can’t just run out and start waving guns around."

"What an idiot," I thought as I hefted the blue steel pistol in one hand and the hollowpoint bullets in the other. Then the reality of what almost happened settled in—what a pair of lucky cops.

Police detective Ray Wisher is a frequent contributor to The American Enterprise.

 

EIGHTEEN WHEELS FROM HELL

By Blake Hurst

Westboro, Missouri—Prejudice is the worst sin that late-90’s man can commit. Well, maybe not quite as bad as smoking, but definitely one of the two deadly sins of the age. But I truly cannot control my prejudice toward truckdrivers. I try to be civil, and not prejudge, and some of my best friends are truckdrivers. I even spend a great deal of my own time driving a truck. But I still detest the incompetent road warriors who regularly attempt to deliver supplies to our greenhouse business.

This cancer on my otherwise easygoing and tolerant personality is reinforced every spring when the latest outrage is committed by some nincompoop behind the wheel of 80,000 pounds of steel, rubber, and greenhouse supplies, propelled by cigarettes, amphetamines, and total blind stupidity.

Several years ago a trucker called with a delivery. The gravel road I live on was icy, so I asked him to meet me in the nearest small town. The next thing I knew, he was parked in front of my house. He hadn’t tied down the load, so I had several thousand small pots scattered across the back of a 50-foot trailer. We picked them up, unloaded the truck, and then the fun began. He couldn’t climb the half-mile hill to the blacktop. No big surprise, that’s why I wanted to meet him in town. He said, "have you got a spade? I was a combat engineer in the army, and I think I can dig my way to the top." And he could have, but I didn’t want him around for the month it would have taken. I asked him to hold the excavating until I returned with a tractor and tow chain.

When we were hooked together, I told him to put the truck in low, let it idle, keep the chain tight, and let the tractor do the pulling. (I’ve been here before. In fact, some of the tensest moments in my normally tranquil marriage have been caused by the failure of my nearly perfect wife to understand the ballet that goes on between tower and towee.) I climbed into the tractor, engaged the clutch, and turned around. His wheels were spinning, black smoke was rolling out of both stacks, and I was in imminent danger of having a Peterbilt in my lap. I popped the clutch and headed up the hill in self-defense. He kept going faster. I kept going faster. We were in a race to the top, or a very expensive collision. Then he hit an icy spot and lost traction. I hit the end of the chain at 20 miles an hour with three-hundred horsepower. His bumper was the only casualty, besides my patience.

This spring has been no better. Julie (my wife, who lives for the days when I get stuck and she pulls me out) had ordered a new seeder for our greenhouse, along with some seed trays and potting soil. The trucker got stuck down the hill from our place. I went to get a tractor, but before I could return, he’d backed the trailer into the ditch and turned it over. We called two wreckers, one to set the trailer upright, and one to pull the truck up the hill. While we were waiting, I had a long conversation with the trucker. He was quitting his job the next day, and was fairly calm about how his supervisor would react when it came time to pay the wrecker bill. He showed me a picture of his girlfriend. She was smoking a very big cigar, and looked like she had had more than her share of life’s troubles. But he was obviously crazy about her, and looked forward to getting off the road, and, as he said, "having a normal life." I encouraged him in his decision to look for other employment.

When we finally got him out of the ditch and opened up the trailer, my seeder wasn’t there. Seems it had been shipped to California by mistake.

Truckers are personally responsible for much of the rise in the divorce rate. It’s not uncommon to have a trucker show up here who decided to hit the road after his marriage had failed. One of the more competent drivers to arrive here was an Arkansas real estate developer in his former life. The savings and loan debacle had cost him his business and his marriage, and he lived in his truck.

Some of my deliveries are made by "no touch" drivers. That means they climb up in the cab and go to sleep while Julie and I unload the truck. Last year, I had two loads come in from one of those "no touch" companies. The first guy was young, and couldn’t back into our driveway. We unloaded him in the middle of the road while he snoozed in the sleeper cab. The second driver was in his 60’s, backed into our driveway on the first try, and helped wrestle the load to the back of the truck, despite the fact that he had recently had a hip replaced.

But he was the exception. And as the economy has improved, the quality of people who are willing to be away from home for weeks at a time driving a truck has dropped. Which leads me to postulate my own theory of the business cycle. Many economists use the money supply, inventory levels, and other leading economic indicators to make forecasts of the direction of the economy. But all they really have to do is check with businesses that depend on truck delivery. If present trends continue, the economy will grind to a halt because thousands of trucks will be lost, stuck in ditches, or jackknifed in the middle of huge, level parking lots.

Blake Hurst is a regular tae contributor who wishes his house was located on a rail spur.

THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE, MAY/JUNE 1998