A Sunday afternoon in late summer, circa 1966, west of Houston (unincorporated farming area)
The summer sun bore down on the cotton fields and the one lane country road with a fierce intensity, unimpeded by cloud cover. Cicadas droned their lonely summer songs from the trees, pitch rising and falling with a familiar south Texas summer rhythm. A lone car is speeding down the road towards the intersection of another dusty road, bisecting more fields of cotton. At the intersection sits a gas station, garage and general store housed in an old, paint-bare wooden structure. A rusty, beaten up wrecker sits in front, hood up, the lone attendant visible only as a pair of legs protruding from its engine bay.
The car, filled with teenagers out for a Sunday afternoon joyride, slows and pulls into the yard in front of the store. As the dust ebbs a door opens on the passenger side and a young woman of perhaps 17 unfolds herself from the back seat and climbs out into the afternoon heat. She is short, 5’3″ at most. Like most of the residents of the area farms she is Hispanic, with beautiful light brown skin, long black hair, and eyes that flash like distant lightning on a hot summer night. Achingly beautiful, some would say of her years later.
She is unconsciously smiling, thinking of her visit with the handsome young man from the local high school football team who had recently taken an interest in her. While her friends drove on, she would walk the half mile down the side road to his family’s house for Sunday dinner. Afterward she was looking forward to the ride home with him in his car, just the two of them, close against one another. The attendant, hearing the car’s arrival, popped out from under the wrecker’s hood just in time to catch her smile, directed at him with what seemed like a blinding intensity. The young attendant, not much older than the girl, is drunk like he is most days when he’s the only one on duty. He is bewitched by her looks and thinks the smile directed at him. Finally noticing him, the girl turns away shyly and starts walking down the road. She is lost in dreams of the young man she is going to see, and is blissfully unaware that she will never make it or that these will be her last minutes of life.
The attendant, watching her go, pauses briefly, then slams the hood of the wrecker closed. He moves unsteadily to the cab of the wrecker, clambers inside and gooses the old engine to life with a cloud of smoke. Clashing gears he roars off down the road after her. Catching up to her, he pulls alongside and asks, “Hey beautiful, can I give you a ride somewhere?”
“No, thanks. My boyfriend’s house is just up the road.”
She revels briefly in saying the word, one she hadn’t really said to herself before. But she decides she likes it. In doing so she does not see the darkness comes across the young man’s features. He jumps out of the truck and runs across the road grabbing her by the arm after closing the distance between them.
“What are you doing? You’re hurting me,” she yells, starting to feel the first stages of panic setting in. She can smell the liquor on his breath now, see the raw lust in his bloodshot eyes.
“Let me go,” she screams.
“You ain’t goin’ nowhere, you teasin’ bitch!”
He drags her across the road and into the wrecker. The wrecker tears off, twin rooster-tails of dirt shooting up behind it.
The girl will never be seen alive again. Her family will maintain a sad and lonely vigil over the years, always hoping that someday she will return. But it will be to no avail.
Present day
Her bones lie not far from where she was taken, in an area that is being slowly swallowed up by Houston and its suburbs as they expand inexorably outward.
She waits for the day of her discovery. A long gone cold case. Her bones occasionally thrumming in tune with the bulldozers that grow ever closer. Her day is coming. Soon.
This story line came to me in a dream, first revealed to me by the girl herself. The whole episode was odd and strangely real when I saw it. Not like my usual dreams. If I were more mystical, I’d be inclined to say it was real and the girl wants to be found. But that’s pushing things. I’ve been known to be just a little psychic, but always concerning the living. Never the dead.
I continue to wonder just what brought this to me, and whether someone, somewhere, down around Houston is now getting very, very nervous. And with good reason.