On the Road to Woodstock -part two

It was a long, slow march towards our destination once we started to walk again, part of the river of people who moved together on the road to Woodstock. I studied the other trekkers. It was a varied bunch, but they all had a common thread of appearance that ran through them that would’ve set them apart from the everyday world. The guys all had hair that was at least a little scruffy and, in some instances, quite long. Many had moustaches, and a few sported beards that ranged from wispy to bushy. The women’s blouses were flowery and frilly and often skimpy. Long, waist-length hair was the norm, and some had braids done up in intricate buns. A few had long skirts but most wore bell-bottoms, as did the men. We walked into a setting sun and by eight it had slipped below the horizon. A gentle orange along the treetops signaled the coming of nightfall.

John broke a long period of silence. “The nails are starting to come through the inside of the heels of my boots.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah, and they’re starting to hurt.” We walked for another minute. “How are your boots?”

I bounced a little on my heels to test them. “Fine,” I said.

“Hmmph.” He sounded irritated, but he said no more. We walked for a while longer, long enough for the sunset to turn a dark purple.

“Goddamnit,” John said. There was pain in his voice. “My heels are hurting like a bitch.”

“Really?” I tried to sound more concerned, but with three hours of walking behind me I had started wear down. How much farther could it be to the concert?

“I need to stop for a minute,” John said. He walked over sat down on a piece of grass that separated the shoulder of the road from the woods beyond. I followed him over, and sat down beside him. He pulled off one boot and then the other. “Oh man, that feels good.” He reached a hand down into one of his boots and then offered it to me. “Here, feel.”

I took the boot, and though I didn’t want to stick my hand down into his hot, stinky boot, I did. Sure enough, I could feel the nails coming through the heel area. “Damn,” I said and handed him the boot back.

“Your boots are okay?” he asked. He couldn’t seem to believe it.

“Yeah, fine.” I felt a sense of pride somehow at having a better pair of boots than John. He was better than me in every way, I felt, and while I idolized him, I was envious of him as well.

We rested, and it felt good, but in some way I felt we were losing ground to all the people that were passing us by. I wanted to get going, but I didn’t say anything. I stood up and walked to the shoulder of the road and watched the people. They walked by in groups of twos and fours. The cars that filled the road had been abandoned, and I wondered what would become of them. I looked back down the road from where we had come. The land sloped down for about a quarter of a mile and then sloped slowly back up again. I could see pretty far, and the stream of trekkers that flooded both sides of the road stretched back as far as I could see. The sky had turned a dark blue, and the first stars were visible. A sliver of a crescent moon hung like scythe above the horizon.

Suddenly, I felt such an ominous foreboding that I looked back to John and tried to cry out, but no sound would come from my throat. Then, as quickly as it had come over me, the feeling was gone. I shook my head as if to clear it from a fog. I wasn’t sure what had just happened, but it seemed distant now and unimportant.

“Johnny lee,” John called to me.

“Yeah?”

“You ready to go?” He stood up. He had put his boots back on. He leaned over and picked his sleeping bag and mattress.

“Yeah, I’m ready.” I walked back and picked up my stuff, and we started to walk again.

By nine it was completely dark, and I’d never seen a sky so full of stars, but still we were walking with no end in sight. The long string of hikers still stretched out far ahead. By nine-thirty we reached a dirt road that stretched off to our right and into the woods. A large sign read, Woodstock Music and Arts Fair. Thank God, we were there.

John and I turned with the rest of the crowd, and we all headed down the dirt road. Tall pines lined both sides, and it was damn near pitch black, and all I could see were dark shapes of the people around me, but after a few minutes my eyes adjusted to where some detail was visible. I looked ahead, but in the gloom I couldn’t see far.

We’d walked about fifteen minutes along the dirt road when an unseen person said, “Oh man.” Whoever he was, he sounded like he was having a good time. ‘Oh man,” he said again. “It’s beautiful.” Then I saw him. He rolled back and forth on the ground on the left side of the road, but it was too dark to make out his features.

“He’s tripping,” John said. He was probably right.

Then, far down the road from the direction we were heading, headlights became visible. Gradually, the low drone of a truck engine drew closer. Some seconds passed, and then the truck itself became visible. It was a medium sized moving truck like a large U-Haul. It was moving rather quickly, just a little too fast for a road full of people in the dark of night. Still, the crowd had kept to right side of the road, and the truck had space to pass on the left. All seemed well as the truck passed us, but then there was a bump-bump, bump-bump as the truck tires hit something. A shriek of agony pierced the night.

“Oh God, Jesus,” a voice screamed in terror. It was the guy in the road. Then many voices yelled out at once.

“That truck ran this guy over,” a man shouted.

“Somebody help him,” a woman cried.

“Stop that truck,” a man yelled. Several figures in the dark night took chase after the red taillights of the truck.

“Keep going,” a voice came from the truck. The truck accelerated, and soon it was lost in the distance.

The guy on the road let out screams of agony mingled with shrieks of terror. “Oh God, please help me,” he kept crying.

I was at a loss at what to do. I looked to John, but he seemed as shocked as I was. “We can’t do anything,” he finally said. “Come on.” He joined ranks with the others who were moving. I ran to join him, but first I took one final look at the scene of the crime.

Though there was little to see, in the instant I turned away, an image left itself imprinted in my mind. It was an image I tried to chalk up to imagination, to being tired, to anything but reality. That last moment as I looked into the crowd around the victim, I had seen a dark figure. He was set slightly apart from the crowd, and he had looked straight at me. Though the faces in the crowd had been featureless, this person had had a distinct grin on his face as if he were taking delight in this other man’s misery. But it was his eyes that left me shaken. It had been a trick of the light, surely, but in that fraction of a second that his eyes had met mine, in that brief moment before I turned away, his eyes had glowed a beastly red.

I walked for a few minutes with John. I tried every way I could conceive of to explain what I had seen, but nothing made sense. I even contemplated the possibility of an acid flashback, but that didn’t seem to help any either.

“John?” I asked. I look over to him.

“What?” He looked at me.

“Never mind.” What would he think if I told him what I’d just seen? I didn’t know, but I didn’t really want to find out. I’d heard about shit like this, demons and devils and the like, but I’d never believed any of the stories. “I’d have to see it for myself”, I’d always said. Now, maybe I had. Maybe I had, I kept telling myself, “maybe” being the operative word. By the time we reached the gates to the concert, I’d convinced myself that maybe I hadn’t seen anything at all.