PSYCHOBILLY CADILLAC

Copyright 2012 Peter N. Dudar

Prologue

Route 302 isn’t safe after dark.

In the daytime Route 302 is just another tired old highway, dozing like a long, crooked snake under the sun along Maine’s landscape.  It’s a ribbon of cracks and frost-heaves that connects Portland (Maine’s largest city), with the surrounding suburbs and townships. If you follow Route 302 west from, say, the old post office on the corner of Forest Avenue and Park Street, it will lead you out of the city, through Westbrook, past the rotary in Hetfield (which intersects with Route 202), and ultimately end in Windham (where the road becomes Roosevelt Trail as 302 blazes on into western Maine and, ultimately, New Hampshire).  Portland to Westbrook is a collection of stores and businesses and car dealerships.  Westbrook to Hetfield is a strip of homes and residences, with big, well-kept manses on the city side and smaller, unkempt ranches and bungalows as you move away.  By the time you reach the Prides Corner Drive-In, the homes have grown a bit further apart and the road becomes dense with pines and spruces and forest growth.

Push ahead further to the rotary, and you begin to notice that the side streets and lanes have become fewer still.  Here is the valley of the trailer parks.  Dirt roads appear like tributaries off the highway, branching and streaming into beds of litter-strewn single and double-wides. Here Maine’s less fortunate and less-desirables huddle and thrive like an infestation.  It is the land of cheap beer and cheap sex and unclean living.  It almost feels dirty just driving through this part of town, but once you’re past the rotary 302 begins to mirror itself.  You slink away just as quickly as you drive on into Windham.

In the daylight Route 302 slowly comes alive with morning traffic, which pushes almost exclusively eastbound into the city.  People in their automobiles, inching and budging their way to work, stopping only to fill up their gas tanks or grab a hot cup of coffee or maybe pick something up from the cleaners.  The children make their way to the bus stops along 302.  The younger ones will play as they wait; carelessly passing a ball around, or pushing each other around if someone forgot to bring the ball.  They hoot and holler up a racket as the passing, nervous motorists brake and swerve and beep their horns at them to remind them that it is, after all, a busy road.  The older kids stand about like zombies with their headphones on and their hands jammed deep into their pockets.  Some gab away or send text messages on cell phones.  Others make small talk with each other.  They stand together, but all of them seem to be aware of their own personal space and try not to violate the space of others too harshly.  It is morning, after all, and the hormones aren’t quite awake yet.

Once the buses come and sweep the kids off to school, and the morning rush hour commute has commenced and passed like a dream, Route 302 slows down again and you really have time to examine its mysteries.  Because Route 302 isn’t safe after dark, and its telltale clues become evident in the daylight.

You can tell by the road kill.

You can tell by the fresh carcasses of the squirrels and the raccoons and the porcupines.  Mounds of blood and fur and ruptured, flattened tissue and organs, leaving big, wet grease spots on the cracked macadam.  The crows and buzzards fly over Route 302 like black angels, waiting for the traffic to die out so they can swoop down and feast and lead the souls of dead animals unto that great big forest in the sky.  The skunks are of particular notoriety on 302.  They sashay their way out into the night road, only to catch a steel-belt sandwich from a logging truck that manages to squish them with not one, not two, but at least three or four tires.  Bone and muscle crunch and dissolve into the world’s smelliest pancake.  And the smell lasts for weeks as a reminder.  Skunks are the scourge of Route 302.

There are bigger animals as well.  The coyotes.  The deer.  The occasional moose.  These animals are part of the forest habitat along 302.  They aren’t like the smaller animals, which disintegrate neatly under the tires.  These are the ones that can actually lift a car off the ground as tire and axle pass over them.  Or go through the windshield.  Or worse yet, cause a motorist to swerve off the road and into the trees.

Which brings us to the roadside memorials.

Route 302 has plenty of them, scattered along both sides of the highway from Portland to Windham, and assuredly far, far beyond that if you keep going.  But our story is here, on this long, sad stretch of road, where the handmade wooden crosses have become part of the landscape.  Wooden crosses painted white, with names neatly stenciled on and photographs tacked into their pulp.  Some crosses are adorned with flowery wreaths.  Others have personal mementos and memorabilia scattered about them; a varsity jacket, a baseball mitt, a favored necklace, a teddy bear.   Each memorial represents a loved one whose life ended on this road.  Each one stands as a shrine to remind people that somebody was once a living, breathing human being that resided here, in this part of the world.  Each memorial reminds us that we should slow down just a tad, because there are unseen dangers around the corner just ahead.

Nobody knows this better than Deputy Sheriff Ron Wulfmeyer.  Sheriff Wulfmeyer has patrolled this stretch of road for the last seventeen years for the town of Hetfield.  Hetfield’s woefully small constabulary (supported by its even more woefully small-town budget), has Wulfmeyer as a subordinate only to Sheriff Morris Dale.  Sheriff Moe Dale (as in, “Hey Moe, Hey Moe” in the voice of Curly of The Three Stooges) has been past retirement age for at least six years now, but he’s living well and sucking up an exorbitant amount of salary, so he’s not about to leave.   Come election time, Sheriff Moe always seems to come out ahead of the game.  Wulfmeyer has thought about running against him, almost did in the last election, but he knows that if he did, he would have lost and then there would be no way to work under Moe without being harassed and given the shit assignments.  Because Sheriff Moe, despite the nickname, is a pretty smart guy with a long memory and a short temper.  With Peggy Wulfmeyer at home caring for their two-year-old son Tyler, and another baby now on the way, Deputy Sheriff Wulfmeyer can’t afford to rock the boat.  The rest of the Hetfield Sheriff’s department consists of two other deputies, Carl Miller and “Skinny Pete” Andrews, both of which alternate between morning and evening shifts, and are both bound by duty to remain “on call” during the overnight, where Wulfmeyer is permanently fixed.

If Sheriff Moe were to retire, things would be different.  Wulfmeyer would run for Sheriff, and would probably be swept in by a landslide.  And then the “Lone Wulf” would be working to better secure and patrol Route 302.  Because, unlike the other citizens that populate the manses and houses and trailer-homes between Portland and Windham, he’s responded to most of the emergency calls on Route 302 after dark.  He’s been the first responder for all those people whose lives are gone and remembered by those lonely roadside memorials along the highway.  Wulfmeyer has already seen more carnage and death than Sheriff Moe, Carl, and “Skinny Pete” all put together.  And he’s lost loved ones on Route 302.

And it isn’t getting any better.  Because now, those same high school kids that stand around like zombies in the morning as they wait for the school bus are learning how to drive.  They’re getting their licenses and grabbing the keys to daddy’s car after he gets home from work for the day and puts down his first three or four beers of the evening.  They wait until after dark, where they meet up and hang out together as they show off their hot rods and muscle cars.  And then they’re auto racing back and forth on Route 302.  The generation that was weaned on Grand Theft Auto and those other car games are discovering the joy of taking that next big step.  Like marijuana is a gateway drug to the bigger, heavier illicit substances, these late teens and twenty-somethings are discovering the addictions of velocity and victory.

Route 302 isn’t safe after dark, when the clear night air fills with the sound of engines revving and roaring as two more street racers fly headlong down the twisting, turning lanes, each trying to outrun and out-maneuver the other.  And there are lots of them.  Even if one loses control and loses his life in a crush of metal and burning rubber, there are two or three learning how to tighten lug nuts and change spark-plugs, ready to take his place.  Wulfmeyer is doing his best to stop them, but he’s a “Lone Wulf”.  If he can make it through the night without pulling some crippled, broken kid out from behind the driver’s seat, if he can go without having to perform CPR on some lifeless, mangled lump of flesh before visiting the victim’s family to inform them that their child has died, then he can go to sleep without gulping down a pint of whiskey and feeling like a failure at his job.

With any luck, the only road kill Route 302 will see tonight will be the kind the crows and buzzards take delight in.

If you look over to the western horizon, you’ll see that the sun is just beginning to set over the pined hills and mountainsides that stretch into New Hampshire.  Night is coming.  And it’s a gorgeous late-Spring sunset.  The air is warm and pleasant.  At the Pride’s Corner Drive-In, the first movie of the season is ready to splash across the old white movie screen.  And the lot is packed, filled with young lovers and moviegoers, and the band of hot rod motorheads who have come to show off their rides and look for a race.

Route 302 isn’t safe after dark.  But we’ll go there anyway.