Off the Highway in Georgia

Danny Hoover pulled off the highway at exit two hundred forty-one. He turned left when the exit ended in a fork. It didn’t really matter which way he turned, both ways looked like nothing for miles. He got about half a mile down the road, looking for a place to pull over, when he saw a gas station. It was made of big bricks, and it had a green awning over the front. There was an old pickup truck by a gas pump that might have been from the seventies, and a man standing next to it while the gas pumped, who might have been in his seventies.

Danny parked his car and got out. The old man nodded and smiled at him as he walked to the door. Danny didn’t respond. He walked in and scanned the place. It was small, with aisles of snacks and oil and playing cards and gum and booze. Its back wall was all a refrigerator with soda and bottled water and beer. There was a man at the counter who was as old as the man outside, and had some teeth missing. Danny asked the man at the counter if there was a bathroom. The man told him the whole place was surrounded by perfectly good trees. So Danny bought a pack of cigarettes and left.

The first old man was gone when he went back out. He went around back and pissed on a tree. He came back around to the front and saw his ‘99 Jeep parked next to the old man’s ancient Buick. He looked around, down the road in all three directions, and there wasn’t another car in sight. Not another living soul as far as the eye could see. The intersection was T shaped and on the split side was the gas station, and across the street from it was a little cemetery with little tombstones. It had a little fence around it that needed a little paint. Danny Hoover saw a few picnic tables near the corner. He wanted a break from his nine-hour drive and sat down at a picnic table and lit a cigarette. The old man came outside and bit off a chunk of his chewing tobacco.

“Where ya headed fer?”
“Savannah.”
“What fer?”
“My sister lives there.”

Danny was lying. He was headed to Savannah for vacation, to stay with his old college friend and to drink too much on St. Patrick’s Day. But he wasn’t one for making conversation with strangers. Besides, hard-working folk had little use for kids Danny’s age travelling around for a party. Danny was twenty-three. The old man nodded and stood there for a moment, spit on the ground, and then went back into the gas station.

Danny smoked three cigarettes while he sat there. Another car came and filled up during his third cigarette, and the driver, this time a young girl in a Ford car, went in and Danny could see her chatting with the old man inside. She was pretty, with golden hair in pigtails and nice legs with daisy-dukes. She came out and smiled at him, and the sunlight reflected off her hair, and he smiled back, and then blew out a cloud of smoke. Danny hated the smell of cigarettes. The girl got into her car and drove off, away from the exit.

She made Danny curious. He got into his Jeep and went off in the same direction as the girl. He came to a small town. There he saw a little diner, a hardware store, a post-office, a church, another gas station, and a little bar. There wasn’t really much else. He went down a few other streets and there were some houses, mostly at the end of short or long gravel drives, and there were trailers, and there was a little motel, but there wasn’t really much else.

He didn’t know what the town was called, and he probably wouldn’t be able to find it on a map. The town looked like it hadn’t changed much since whoever founded it however long ago. Most of the vehicles were older than he was. Most of the houses were run down and ugly, with overgrown lawns and junk in the yard. Some Confederate Flags fluttered around, and some American Flags too, but the most common was the big black G on a white oval in the center of a red banner that represented the University of Georgia. Danny doubted if anyone in this town had ever been there. It was all about college football.

He tried to imagine what it would be like to live in a town like this, hundreds of miles from any real cities, knowing every one of the three or four hundred people in town. He tried to imagine how few girls like the pretty girl from the gas station. He didn’t know a damn thing about a town like that. He didn’t know what being a kid was like there, and he didn’t know what being in school was like there, and he didn’t know what kind of jobs the people had or if they smoked pot or how much they drank or what they even thought of people like him, who were just passing through. All he knew about that little town was that it was off the highway, in Georgia.

He drove back to the main road that led back to the highway. There were a lot of stop signs, but not a single stoplight. Most of the signs in front of the buildings weren’t even electric. Some of the places had screens instead of glass windows that were tearing off their frames. Nothing looked new. Nothing looked modern. A few people were moving about the town. Not many, but a few. Danny saw the pretty girl from the gas station park her Ford at one of the little restaurants and wrap an apron around her waist, and pick something up from her car and she walk in. He decided to stop for a bite to eat.

When he went inside there were two people sitting at a table and one old man sitting at the bar. The pretty girl smiled at him again when she saw him.

“Well, hi there stranger,” she said, “you can go ahead and take a seat anywhere.”
“Thanks.”

Danny decided he liked her thick southern accent as he walked over to a table and sat down. He saw the two other people at the table smoking cigarettes, which was strange to his eyes. Nobody smoked inside where he was from. Danny didn’t light a cigarette.

“Can I get y’all somethin’ to drink?” she asked sweetly when she came back.
“Yeah, how bout a Coke?”
“What kind?”
“What?”
“What kind of Coke?”
“Just regular Coke.”

He ordered a cheeseburger and fries when she came back with the Coke, and she asked him where he was from. Maybe it was because she was pretty, or maybe it was because he had tried to imagine life in that town, or maybe it was because he just liked her sweet voice with the southern accent, but Danny didn’t mind talking now, in that little diner off the highway in Georgia.

Danny talked with the pretty girl for a long time. Long after he finished his cheeseburger. He found out her name was Trisha, and he found out that she loved her tiny town in the middle of nowhere off the highway in Georgia. He found out she was saving money to move to Atlanta, so she could go to college. He found out she didn’t know what she would do with a degree, but she wanted to go because people who went to college were respected and smart. She found out that he was in college, and he was on spring break. She found out that college was a different place than she had imagined.

Danny Hoover and Trisha both found out a lot of things that afternoon. One thing Danny Hoover found out that he was right, and everyone knew everyone else in that little town off the highway in Georgia. He also found out that very few people ever visited the little town. If they did, it was because they were relatives who had moved to Atlanta or Savannah, at the ends of the highway. Most people in town knew them, too.

But then Danny Hoover had to leave, because he was due to meet his friends in Savannah that night. Danny Hoover got into his Jeep and put the keys into the ignition. He was thinking about the little town off the highway in Georgia, and how he would never be back there, and wondered if he would think about it ever again. Danny lit a cigarette and pulled out of the parking lot. He took another look at the little old buildings of the little old town, and drove in the direction of the highway. He tried to commit the buildings to memory, and even tried to take a mental picture of the little cemetery, which was across from the little gas station, which was right off the highway in Georgia. Danny Hoover should have been paying more attention to the road.

When Danny Hoover returned his attention to the road, away from the little cemetery, Danny Hoover’s heart jumped in his chest. He saw a deer in the middle of the road, right in front of his Jeep. He swerved into the left lane to avoid hitting the animal, and his tires started to squeal. Danny Hoover’s heart was pounding so fast and so loud that he didn’t hear the squeal, just his heart, which sounded like a bass drum playing way too fast. Danny pulled the wheel clock-wise again to keep his Jeep from going off the road to the left. Unfortunately for Danny Hoover, he pulled it way too far, and instead he went off the road to the right.

To the right of the road was a ditch that went down into more trees. Unfortunately for Danny Hoover, he was going even faster than the posted speed limit for that road off the highway in Georgia, and the speed limit was fifty miles-per-hour. Danny’s car was airborne for just over one full second before it smashed into the trunk of a huge sycamore tree that was about seventeen feet from the edge of the highway. That one second seemed much longer to Danny Hoover, whose brain packed a lot of thoughts into that one second. If he had time to think about it later, he would have been surprised about the thoughts he did have.

He thought about how he wasn’t going to see his friends in Savannah that night, and he thought that he wished he was wearing a seatbelt, and he wondered if he would live. He thought about how this was bad luck, and how he should have paid more attention to the road and not so much to the cemetery off the highway in Georgia.

Danny Hoover’s body was found within twenty minutes. This was because his Jeep caught fire after hitting the trunk of the Sycamore Tree. The old man from the gas station recognized his Jeep, and later it was discovered that his name was Danny, and he was from Indiana, because the pretty girl named Trisha, who lived her whole life in a small town off the highway in Georgia, heard a stranger was killed in a car accident, and figured that it must be the boy she had spoken to for a long time in the diner where she worked.

Danny Hoover’s cellular phone was destroyed in the car accident, and his wallet burned up in the fire, and his identification melted. It was about over four days before any of his friends figured out that Danny Hoover never made it to Savannah, and even longer until anyone figured out that he had been killed. Danny Hoover had already been given a funeral in the small church that he had seen when he passed through the small town. Trisha gave a short eulogy at his funeral, because she was the only one who had known him in any way. Danny Hoover was buried before his friends or relatives found out what had happened to him. He was the first person to die in that town that wasn’t born there. He was the very first out-of-towner who was given a small gravestone in the little cemetery off the highway in Georgia.

The End