Holy fuck, I said. We’re fucking stuck good.

Yep, said Doc. We’re fucked.

Doc got out the driver’s side door, and I got out after him. The passenger side was taking on water. I tried to push the truck out, Doc working the gas, but to no avail. We were fucked.

The whole goddamn thing had started when we dropped of Danger at his place. I was only a couple blocks from my place. Doc said, Do you want to go find some mud?

Yep, I said. That was that.

Doc drove on south out of town, passed the park on the perimeter where that dude got raped last year. Now, Doc aint a doctor, he’s just a buddy of mine whose advice and prescriptions I follow when it suits me. This was such a time.

We passed the entrance to the park, and Doc said, There’s a great road just up here for mudding. This’ll be great.

We tore up a dozen roads, a half dozen open fields. Somewhere along the line, we took a wrong turn. I can’t recall what was playing on the radio, but it must have been a country song.

We stood on the road, looking at the truck stuck half way out of a fucking bog of a ditch, knee deep in wet mud between two sodden fields of cow-shit and lentils. Fuck, I said. Fuck, said Doc. It was pitch black, the fields soaked in fog. It was just after five in the morning.

We’d been drinking with Danger all evening, picking tunes and hitting lines. The mud in the road had eaten both of our shoes, and we were both wet up to the knees. Well, Doc said. We better get walking. We pointed ourselves at the closest light in the haze, back up the road we’d come barreling down minutes before, and started walking. This was still September, but it was fucking cold.

Up the road about a mile was a spread with a few cars out front and a garage. Walking there, through the thick, heavy mud, we wondered about coyotes. That’s all we’d fucking need right now, said Doc. Fucking coyotes. But we didn’t hear any.

We stood in the drive way of that first house, under the white light, and we looked around us. There’s no tractor here, Doc said. We need a goddamn tractor to pull that truck out. We turned around, headed back for the road.

There was a light up ahead, about another half a mile. The road was less muddy, but it was getting colder. Shit, one of us would mutter every dozen steps. Shit, shit. We got to the second place. There was a big barn across from a nice house.

There’s a tractor here, Doc said. There was a car out front, new, clean. Look at this place, he said. We looked around, found the front door. We rang the door bell. Once, twice, three times. Someone started moving upstairs. We rang it once more, for good luck.

A man in pajama pants and a beer t-shirt came to the door, wiping his eyes.

We’re really sorry, Doc said right off. But we were wondering if you had a tractor…

Our truck got stuck, I said.

Real stuck, said Doc. We’re really sorry…

The man sighed. I don’t have one.

Shoot, Doc said.

But I can drive you boys to St. Norbert. Just wait around the side.

We started thanking the man up and down, but he closed the door on us, sighing a second time. We went around to the side, stood beside the car. Five minutes later the man came out, shoes on, sighing again. He opened the car, handed us each a plastic shopping bag to put our feet in. We got in.

It was a fifteen-minute drive to St. Norbert through mud and fog. I didn’t know where in hell we were, and the man just chuckled at us, said, Shit boys, good luck getting her out. Five minutes out of the Norb we passed three coyotes lurking in the ditch. Their eyes burnt red in the head-lights.

The man dropped us off outside of the St. Norbert Hotel, where we called CAA. The air was foggy and cold. The cement was, too. The St. Norbert Hotel restaurant opened at eight, on Sundays. It wasn’t yet seven. The lady who was opening the joint up let us in, and poured us coffee while we waited for CAA.

We waited for that CAA truck for an hour and a half, and they sent their biggest asshole. The first thing the driver said was, Don’t spill that coffee in here. Just about the first thing Doc did, was spill his coffee.

On the phone, Doc told CAA we were two kilometres from the highway, an out right lie. We passed what CAA thought was the two klik mark, and he said, This is way farther than two kilometres off the highway.

I’m covered, said Doc.

CAA mumbled on, but kept driving. We passed a long, high chicken wire fence. I wonder what that’s for, I said. I hadn’t seen it the night before.

Doc looked at the fence, the ground you could see through the fog behind it. Looks like a tree farm, he said.
It was the county dump.

CAA got us to the road that the truck was stuck off. He stopped the tow-truck, got out. You couldn’t hear him grumbling over the engine, but you could tell he was. He stomped around in the mud for a minute, then came back to the truck.

No way, he said. No fucking way I’m getting stuck in that, too.

He turned around, and drove back to the Norb. We sat there, stewing, hungry, and cold. You’re lucky they didn’t send the rook, the driver said. Then you’d be real stuck. Real. Stuck. Lucky.

Doc shook his head, bit his lip.

CAA dropped us off where he’d picked us up. We closed the door, and he drove off without a word. We walked back into the restaurant, and sat down at a table out of plain view.

Cold as we were, we were both sweating out booze by this point. The waitress, bless her, brought us breakfasts, and more coffee. We read the Sun, put it down more than once in disgust. This fucker can’t even finish a proper sentence, Doc said. I drew speech bubbles on the photos. Clever things like, I shit my gitch, and Puke.

We called everyone we knew in the city that owned a car. There were few of them. Fewer answered. We called 411 and got the numbers to random individuals our relatives knew in the area, but it was the same. Nobody would help us out, not even on God’s day. Fuck, Doc kept muttering, thinking about work on Monday morning, out of town. Jesus fuck. The regulars eyed us incessantly.

Finally we got a hold of Danger. We’d dropped him off at home about five hours after earlier. He sounded haggard on the phone, confused as to what we were even talking about.

I’ll come get you, he said, after a pause. Let me get my life together.

After he hung up we drank more coffee, and complained about the CAA driver, about the damn water in the ditch, about the Sun. An hour later, I called Danger back.

Shit, he said. I fell back asleep. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.

An hour later, Danger showed up. We were back, standing in the parking lot beside the highway in our bare, muddy feet. When he rolled up, Danger just laughed. We gave him directions, and he drove out, back down the muddy road for our third time that day.

We got to the road that the truck was off, covering Danger’s car in mud. We all got out, and Danger shook his head, incredulous. Oh my God, was all he said. We turned around, drove up to a couple farms along the road before a third farmer agreed to pull us out, for fifty bucks. We ponied up the cash, and he walked over to the barn. His son, whose eyes seemed to bug out, vacantly, from his forehead followed, to get his quad. We drove back down the road.

With a chain, the farmer got the truck out, no problem. Bug-eyed boy watched, helped with the chain. He war real friendly, but Christ, his eyes.

Water poured from the doors when we opened her up. We all got into the truck, drove out of the mud back to Danger’s car. I jumped in with Danger.

Doc said, Well, thanks Danger.

Everybody gets one, Danger said.

Well, said Doc. I’ll see you boys back in the city?

Yep, I said.

When do we play, again? Doc asked.

I checked my phone for the time. In about two hours, I said.

Shit, said Doc. The sun had burnt away all the fog, and it was clear out, and hot as hell. I’ll see you in two hours.

Next day, Doc locks his keys in his truck cleaning the beast out at work. When he called CAA, guess who shows to open her up? No fucking kidding.