The haunting sound

I started the slide down into unconscionable behavior in my late teens that began with an unholy friendship with the neighborhood bad boy, who incidentally used to beat me up in elementary school. We would go on to do drugs, steal, destroy public and private property, and pick up teenage girls. Basically we just faded into a grey mess. My friend was already heading there, just waiting for company to follow.

The day we are going to talk about he and I were on our daily constitutional of stealing money from his parents and walking the dirt road up to the back of a Wal-mart to buy something stupid...or steal it. As we made our way down creek beds and dirt roads we came to the road headed to the store when we saw this pickup truck hauling ass down the road. I mean really flying.
As we crested the top of the hill and began walking down a short valley towards the oncoming truck I told my friend "Hey, when he gets close push me out in front and we'll scare the hell out of him.". It wasn't that I thought about doing something like that before, or since. It's not that I even had time to think about what I said, but in the few short seconds between saying it and the truck reaching striking distance, my friend did as I asked.
The moment came and the truck was twenty feet away asmy friend pushed me into the road. The guy looked stunned through the windshield and swerved to avoid my stupid ass. Still moving at the speed of light he crested the hill just left of the center line behind us and then...silence for less then a second.

Then the sound glass makes when smashed under foot.

Loud.

Followed by the sound of metal being ground into sparks...for seconds after moments after years. An age of dinosaurs had came and went. The Earth had cooled, warmed, and cooled again by the time the screeching had stopped. So had my heart.

We turned around and ran the few feet back to the top of the hill. As we crested we could see the truck finally coming to rest about three hundred feet at the bottom of the hill. Then we noticed another car, in the ditch.
We ran to the small, baby blue, compact car smashed and wrapped in barbed wire. I looked inside through the shattered driver's side window I could see a man curled in a ball upside down in the passenger seat. The impact had lifted him out of the driver's seat tossed him like lettuce in a bowl and left him broken, head first in the floor board.
He didn't move. I looked at my friend with eyes wide and must have said something like "He's dead. Let's go down to the other car.".
We ran down to the truck and right about the time we got there a young guy was getting out and limping toward us. We grabbed him and sat him down on the bed of his truck. My buddy must have dropped the tailgate for this to happen because I don't remember seeing in to the bed. The young man's pant legs were ripped off and it looked like he was missing a knee cap. He asked, slurring "What just happened?" and I said "You were in a car wreck man!" and he just hung his head. His eyes were dull and vacant. It was like he was dreaming all of this and knew we were just figments of his imagination. No need to really care about the world because it would fade soon. The blood was coming out of the meaty tears in his knee like honey out of a broken jar. Nothing alarming but nothing to be happy about.
As we stood there holding the guy up in a sitting position a lady pulled up next to us and asked what happened and we said there was an accident. She said she was a nurse and she would race to her trailer (a trailer park was right at the start of the dirt road) and call 911 and come right back.
My friend stayed with the young guy and I started to walk back up to the small car. Before I got there the nurse came back and we ran to the car. She couldn't open the driver's side door so we tried the passenger with no luck. She wouldn't let me stop and told me to keep pulling until the passenger side came open. We pulled the old man out and laid him down in the street behind his car. She propped his head against the rusty bumper.
His head looked like an easter egg that was cracked, all these colors poking through. He moaned and that was the last sound he ever made.
Soon after the ambulance came, then the cops. Shortly after that, a riot. Sounds. People. Yelling and weeping.
I started to get scared and told my friend right in the middle of the crowd "Let's get the fuck out of here man, I don't want to get in trouble!" and cool like a cucumber he said "It's cool, we didn't do anything wrong."
and so, after I stopped shaking, he lied to whoever talked to him, the cops took our names.
The old man in the baby blue wreck was taken away. Pronounced dead on the way to the hospital.
We got a summons to court a few weeks later, my buddy and I. Each day the court was called to session me and my bro got out of school. We'd be driven down to the city to sit in coffeehouses and diners near the courthouse until someone came to get us. We would sit in the dark wooded chambers outside red doors listening to voices. We were never called inside.
The young guy plead guilty to manslaughter. (you see, we didn't know it but he was drinking and driving)
That was the end of life as he knew it. He would be a convicted felon. He didn't remember us or what happened. That was the end of the story.

Almost.

Many months went by and I had pushed those memories to the back of my mind. Besides the occasional fit of backseat driving. Then on a bright summer day as I walked across the street to Mr.Hoynes house to see what he was doing it all came rushing back. Mr. Hoynes was the old guy on the block that took care of us kids; mowing the fields so we could play, clearing out snakes in the woods, and shit like that. As I walked up his driveway he was just sitting there looking bummed. I asked him why he was looking down and he said his daughter just called and she was sad. She had been sad for a little while. He proceeded to tell me me that she had been engaged but a few months ago her fiance was put in prison for drinking and driving. He killed a man after buying beer at a Wal-mart not far from here.

I went cold. I don't think that part of me has thawed yet.

Hearing that haunting sound of glass shattering and metal grinding. The sound of two lives ending.