Robert’s right eye was noticeably larger than his left, and he exhibited a polite reserve that was sweet at first but grating over time. He was thirty-seven years old.
“How long have you been driving Uber?” Robert rode through our village in the backseat of a clean-as-new Buick compact SUV that smelled like the coconut air freshener swinging from its rearview mirror. On that foggy, drizzly night the passenger window appeared to Robert like a black canvas dotted by bursts of red, yellow, green.
“A few months.”
“Ah.” Robert nodded.
“But I’m just doing this ‘til my business takes off,” the Uber driver said. “I make lotion for Amazon.”
“Oh.” Robert’s mouth was a faint link between deep frown lines carved into his baby face. His lips barely moved when he spoke in brief, non-committal phrases. “That’s nice.”
“Look us up,” he said. “My company. We’re called Woodchip Lotion, and we use actual wood in our formulas, no toxins, straight from nature. It’s a really good idea. You can also find it searching my name. I’m Aldo Everett.”
“Huh.” Narrow shoulders belied Robert’s weight, which he carried in his gut. A pink button down bunched like an upside-down muffin where his shirt met his belt, which was black, so were his shoes. Going to his cousin’s bachelor party Robert dressed roughly the same way he did to work as a bank teller for our village’s Chase Bank. “I’m Robert.”
“What we do is,” Aldo explained, “is we grind the wood down to these little fibers, and they’re like really good for your pores.” Aldo had active, cavernous eyes big enough to see everything, and yet people who knew Aldo felt there was some darkness behind them (the eyes) that obscured his perspective. He was twenty-six and very skinny. “Check it out.”
Aldo removed his iPhone, then showing Uber’s GPS, from a plastic mechanical arm attached to the AC vents. Trading glances between the road and the screen Aldo navigated to an Amazon page. He held the phone to his right and backward for Robert’s benefit, swiping through product images with the same thumb that balanced the phone like an easel on his palm and pinkie.
“We launched with cedar, and that smells really really good,” he said looking over his shoulder to gauge Robert’s reaction. “But my favorite is oak. It feels rough but in a good way, and it’s good for your pores.”
“Huh.”
“Lately I’ve been experimenting with moth wings.”
“Moth wings?”
“Yeah, they’re really good for your—Jesus Christ!”
Aldo’s dark curly hair formed a widow’s peak sharpened to a point down the center. Along his hairline sweat materialized after a high-visibility orange and yellow jacket crashed onto the hood like a bundle of bone, skin, and muscle. It was sucked under the front right wheel, thump, lifting the carriage for an instant slantwise, and would have gone under the back as well if Aldo didn’t turn hard to the left, launching the Buick back and forth in a tailspin.
“Woah, woah.” Robert held the grab handle with both hands.
They wobbled like a seismograph, hydroplaning on slick asphalt. Only by sheer luck, for it certainly wasn’t skill, did Aldo find his way back to the right lane. Thankfully there was no oncoming traffic. The road was dead quiet.
Robert clenched his chest and caught his breath. He looked behind and saw the hi-vis jacket on the ground growing fainter in the fog. It wasn’t moving.
“I think we hit someone,” he said.
Aldo stared ahead, hands back on the wheel and phone, returned to Uber’s GPS, back in the mechanical arm. Leather sounds squeaked as he tightened his grip. Robert noticed the speedometer increased at a rate commiserate to his heartbeat. They were going seventy on an empty commercial road.
“I think we hit someone,” Robert repeated to no response. “I think we should—”
“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” Aldo cried, smashing the wheel with his palm. “Shut up! I need time to think! Just give me a second.”
They succumbed to silence. A glance at the GPS showed they were still en route to the bar where Robert’s male friends and family had already gathered. At this speed they’d arrive in ten minutes. Every wheel rotation forward, Robert knew, magnified the crime’s severity. And he hoped the driver understood this fact when he said, “We have to go back.”
“Fine, fine!” Aldo shrugged disdainfully. “Whatever you want. We’ll go back. Fine!”
But they didn’t go back. They carried forward, now going seventy-five, eighty, the wheels buzzing like circular saws.
“Aldo,” Robert began, “I’m not sure if—”
“Give me your phone,” he demanded.
“Excuse me.”
“I need to call the police. Give me your phone.”
Robert shook his head slowly. “Couldn’t we use yours?”
“No,” he insisted. “Because if I leave the Uber app Uber will stop recording the ride. It’s a glitch, I can’t fix it. And with everything going on I just want to make sure we’re, you know, going by the book.”
“But earlier you—”
“Someone might be dying!” he yelled. “Give me your phone, now.”
“Ah, ah.” Robert unpocketed his phone nervously and passed it forward.
“Thanks.” Aldo didn’t even pretend to dial, Robert noticed. He just held it to his ear and said, “Yes, officer. Thank you. My name is Aldo Everett, and I’m an Uber driver. I’m calling because a few minutes ago, while I was working, I ran over a man or maybe it was a woman. I’m not sure. It was around the corner of Palisade and—”
“Excuse me,” Robert interrupted, “but I’m not sure if you dialed—”
“Shut up! I’m trying to save his life!” Aldo held the phone to his shoulder and looked at his passenger or hostage with a blank venomous glare familiar to anyone who knew Aldo Everett. He returned to the road and the phone. “Sorry about that, officer, that’s my passenger. He’s just nervous. No, I understand.” He paused. “Great. OK, thank you. Alright. Thank you. Of course.” Then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, Aldo opened the glove box and dropped Robert’s phone in it. The metal clink of the glove box closing was to Robert’s ears the locking of a jail cell. Then there was silence.
“Could I please have my phone back?”
“No can do, comrade,” Aldo said. “The police officer said I should hold onto it. For evidence.”
“Ah.”
Aldo turned left down a dirt road the GPS did not request or understand. “Make a legal U-turn,” its robotic voice instructed. They drove on, going slower now but still fast, about sixty.
“We’re not going back, Aldo,” Robert said softly.
“I know.”
“Where are we going?”
After a moment Aldo said, “We’re going to the Uber dispatch.”
“The Uber dispatch?”
“You ever see that old show with Danny DeVito, Taxi Driver?”
“You mean Taxi?”
“Yeah, the dispatch is like where the guys in Taxi hang out but for Uber,” Aldo explained. “The policeman said that’s where I should go to report the accident. It’s just a little ways down this road.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Yup.”
“Make a legal U—”
Aldo turned off the phone and put it in his pocket.
Robert, in times of distress, was hopeful. Maybe Aldo did speak to the police, he hoped. And maybe there was such a thing as an Uber dispatch, and maybe one existed unknown to Robert just beyond the village where he had lived his entire life. Meek or ashamed people always think others are privy to secret knowledge.
Aldo stopped on a roadside just as tree-lined and empty as any spot forward or back for several miles. He exited the Buick and opened the door opposite Robert, shining the frightened bank teller with a flashlight he must have kept up front.
“Get out,” Aldo said.
“Here?” Robert craned to see over Aldo’s shoulder. He surveyed a wall of trees and, beyond that, darkness. “But we’re not close to anything.”
“The dispatch is a few hundred yards into the woods.” Aldo behind the flashlight was a cold silhouette. “Come on.”
“I don’t have a jacket. I didn’t think I’d be outside—”
“Get out!”
Robert hobbled out of the compact Buick, ducking his head and raising his hands like a prisoner. But I’m not a prisoner, is what he thought, as he lowered his hands, embarrassed.
“I want you to walk ahead of me,” Aldo said, shining the light in Robert’s uneven eyes. “I’ll direct you with my flashlight from behind.”
“OK.”
The bottoms of Robert’s khaki pants clung like surgical masks to his soles. Over logs and around tree trunks he maneuvered as best he could with the small light Aldo provided. Foggy rain didn’t so much fall as it grew on him, so that after a few minutes, without noticing the droplets, Robert was wet and cold.
“You know my friends and family will be so surprised to hear about our adventure in the woods,” Robert said looking forward, walking. “This is quite the situation. An Uber dispatch, who knew. I’m a pretty lowkey guy, you know, people who know me wouldn’t expect something unexpected like this. I’m talking about my parents, both still alive, my older sister and younger brother, not to mention my very large extended family. All of them will say this is so unlike me. Ditto my many coworkers and friends who love and respect me so much, who care for me and want good things for me. All the people who rely on me. They’ll all say this was—”
“Stop walking.”
Robert froze in a glade no larger than six feet in diameter, a circular stage of twigs and grass surrounded by trees large and limbless.
“They’ll say this was a totally different—”
“Stop talking.”
Robert stopped talking. Then he turned around, which Aldo did not want. Because now Robert saw his kidnapper, along with the flashlight, held in his other hand a softball-sized gray rock. Robert looked at the rock, then back at Aldo’s feverish eyes. On the stand Aldo claimed Robert might have smiled in a squeamish sort of way; it was difficult to tell, his lips were small.
Aldo bashed the rock against Robert’s forehead. Robert stumbled in place, dazed, and put a finger on the gush of dark blood rolling down his small nose. “Blood?”
The next blow hit Robert in the jaw, dislodging a few teeth and sending him to the ground on his side. The forest mud coated his pink shirt like a pig in its slop. “Ow, ow.” Panting, Robert searched for his elbows and knees, assembling them into something like a plank when another blow struck his skull. He fell mouth-first back into the mud where he spasmed like a landed fish, convulsing. Aldo’s new goal was to clobber him until the disturbing wiggles ended. An expert testified that Aldo hit Robert more than twenty times. “That can’t be right,” Aldo said on the stand.
. . .
Two days later Aldo welcomed three police officers into his ranch home where evidence of a forty-eight-hour booze, weed, and meth binge lay scattered around unsold boxes of lotion. He told the them about Robert. Where he left the body, how he destroyed the cell phone.
“For the last couple days I’ve been preparing myself for this conversation,” he admitted.
“That’s very good to know,” said the policeman. “But we’re here about a hit and run.”
Aldo forgot about the hi-vis jacket entirely. But the man—he turned out to be a man, a jogger, Fred Oakley—survived the crash with just a broken arm and, by some miracle, read Aldo’s license plate in the fog.
And a second miracle. Robert survived Aldo’s attack as well, for a little while. The police found his body about a mile from the assault. It appeared Robert had crawled searching for help, and may have found it if he weren’t crawling in the direction opposite the road.