makes the idea of something clandestine or illegal harder to swallow.
Leigh suddenly tugged hard on the door, stood up, tugged again, and then came back to the truck. 'I got the key to turn, but I can't get the door up,' she said. 'I think it's frozen to the ground or something.'
Great, I thought. Wonderful. None of this was going to come easily.
'Dennis, I'm sorry,' she said, seeing it on my face.
'No, it's all right,' I said. I opened the driver's door and performed another of my comical sliding exits.
'Be careful,' she said anxiously, walking beside me with her arm around my waist as I crutched carefully through the snow to the door. 'Remember your leg.'
'Yes, Mother,' I said, grinning a little. I stood in profile to the door when I got there so I could bend down to the right and keep my weight off my bad leg. Bent over in the snow, left leg in the air, left hand holding onto my crutches, right hand grasping the roll-up door's handle, I must have looked like a circus contortionist. I pulled and felt the door give a little . . . but not quite enough. She was right; it had iced up pretty good along the bottom. You could hear it crackling.
'Grab on and help me,' I said.
Leigh placed both of her hands over my right hand and we pulled together. That crackling sound became a little louder, but still the ice wouldn't quite give up its grip on the foot of the door.
'We've almost got it,' I said. My right leg was throbbing unpleasantly, and sweat was running down my cheeks. 'I'll count. On three, give it all you've got. Okay?'
'Yes,' she said.
'One . . . two . . . three!'
What happened was the door came free of the ice all at once, with absurd, deadly ease. It flew upwards on its tracks, and I stumbled backward, my crutches flying. My left leg folded underneath me and I landed on it. The deep snow cushioned the fall somewhat, but I still felt the pain as a kind of silver bolt that seemed to ram upward from my thigh all the way to my temples and back down again. I clenched my teeth over a scream, barely keeping it in, and then Leigh was on her knees in the snow beside me, her arm around my shoulders.
'Dennis! Are you all right?'
'Help me up.'
She had to do most of the pulling, and both of us were gasping like winded runners by the time I was on my feet again with my crutches propped under me. Now I really needed them. My left leg was in agony.
'Dennis, you won't be able to work the clutch in that truck now - '
'Yeah, I will. Help me back, Leigh.'
'You're as white as a ghost. I think we ought to get you to a doctor.'
'No. Help me back.'
'Dennis - '
'Leigh, help me back!'
We inched our way back to Petunia through the snow leaving shuffling, troubled tracks in the snow behind us. I reached up, laid hold of the steering wheel, and did a chin-up to get in, scraping feebly at the running board with my right leg . . . and still, in the end, Leigh had to get behind me and put both hands on my kiester and shove. At last I was behind Petunia's wheel, hot and shivering with pain. My shirt was wet with snowmelt and sweat. Until that day in January of 1979, I don't think I knew how much pain can make you sweat.
I tried to jam down the clutch with my left foot and that silver bolt of pain came again, making me throw my head back and grind my teeth until it subsided a little.
'Dennis, I'm going down the street and find a phone and call a doctor.' Her face was white and scared. 'You broke it again, didn't you? When you fell?'
'I don't know,' I said. 'But you can't do that, Leigh. It'll be your folks or mine if we don't end it now. You know that. LeBay won't stop. He has a well-developed sense of vengeance. We can't stop.'
'But you can't drive it!' she wailed. She looked up into the cab at me, crying now. The hood of her parka had fallen back in our mutual struggle to get me up into the driver's seat, where I now sat in magnificent uselessness. I could see a scatter of snowflakes in her dark blond hair.