True Story
My great friend, I’ll call him ‘Buck’, was seeing a girl who had a boyfriend. Buck went out to the bars with the girl and her friends and offered to drive them home in her car. He gentlemanly took them home and started walking across town to where he lived, with me and my dad. Buck stopped at the 7-11 to pick up a can of Mountain Dew for the hike; he was addicted to the yellow sugar water. My dad would buy it by the big green case at Sam’s Club, along with microwave pizzas, for Buck and me.
Now, the girl-who-Buck-was-seeing’s boyfriends had been very popular in my high school and still had a good collegiate following. He knew what was going on and so did his boys, a truckload of whom rolled into the 7-11 parking lot late that Saturday night. They saw Buck and he saw them and took off into a neighborhood. They hopped back into their classic, giant truck and followed, headlights making way in the darkness.
Buck wasn’t from our town and didn’t know it too well. The town is laid out in square miles, defined my major roads. This particular neighborhood, besides being bordered by the 7-11 and a few other shops on one street, and by my old high school on another, was completely residential, a square of labrynthian suburbia. Buck dropped the can and ran.
The young men following were armed with baseball bats and would hop out and chase Buck through front yards, but would stop when he hopped a fence. Buck jumped the six foot wooden barriers in his Doc Martins landing in grassy darkness, setting off motion detectors and sometimes igniting indoor dogs. He’d arrive out of the yards into unknown streets and jog or walk in the direction he thought felt right, hearing the truck roaring in the distance. And then it would appear, howling round a corner, and there’s Buck in the bushes or behind a tree. The hunters seemed to have a supernatural sense of where to find him. Buck kept running, hands bleeding from fence tops, arms scratchy from thick, manicured shrubbery.
This went on for hours, a real life nightmare. Buck’s only consolation was that surely he was getting close to the next neighborhood, to home. But here came the truck, alerted, no doubt, by the barking dogs Buck was disturbing while trying to stick to the shadows. He’s running, and kicks something on the sidewalk, goes down, sees his Mountain Dew can spinning away in the street. His knee’s bleeding through the new hole in his jeans, he’s up and away, his assailants laughing, throwing beer bottles, curses.
Buck got in around sunrise and woke me up to tell me the story, and I giggled all the way through.
Eventually the girl broke up with her boyfriend and started seeing Buck. It went on for a little while until she broke up with him and quickly became engaged, then married to a man whose physical resemblance to Buck was uncanny.
