LATELY THESE IMAGES (As Told to Me by My Father)

“He said he came upon a traffic accident to find a young woman, a girl really, seventeen years old, thrown face down in the middle of the street.”

My father has held many jobs in his life, he trained police dogs in the Air Force, broke wild horses in Texas, and was a carpenter, police officer, teacher, labor commissioner, school board member, police chaplain, and Deacon in the Catholic Church (to name a few). But for as long as I can remember, he has always been a writer. Some of my earliest memories are of him sitting alone at the dining room table tapping away on his little white and brown typewriter. Amazing, when I think about it now, that he could actually get his thoughts onto paper that way, surrounded by a house full of noisy children (my parents raised nine of us, four girls and five boys). Maybe it was the constant clackity-clack-clack-clackity-clack of that tenacious little typewriter with its intermittent ding-and-zipp of the carriage sliding home again that helped to drown us out.

His first creations were shorts, ghost stories mainly, then he began his first novel, a historical romance set during the American Revolution that probably took ten years to finish. Now he has well over a dozen novels published, most of them romances taking place during the 1700’s, but also several westerns, and one set in the 1920’s. He’s not one for self-promotion (he really needs an author page), but he does have a large and loyal group of readers that grab up his titles as soon as they become available.

Many people have asked my father, myself included, why none of his stories are about his experiences as a police officer, but he just smiles and shrugs away the suggestion. My guess is that most of those stories, even after all these years, may still be too difficult to share. He did share one of them with us one evening last summer. Before going to bed, I wrote it down.

Lately These Images (As told to me by Wayne M. Hoy)

Tonight, Dad described a memory from when he was a policeman. He said he came upon a traffic accident to find a young woman, a girl really, seventeen years old, thrown face down in the middle of the street. She was wearing a metallic green pants suit, something fashionable at the time. He remembers her hair, long, red, spread out against the asphalt as if someone had neatly brushed it that way. Not until he drew closer and viewed her from the other side did he see that part of her head was torn open, half missing.

“She was a beautiful girl,” he said. Then maybe considering what he’d just described, added, “I could see from the photo on her driver’s license.”

She had veered into the other lane and was struck by an oncoming semi, the trailer tearing through the side of her car.

Why had she gone over into the other lane at that deadly moment. “You ask yourself, you know, the who, what, when, where, why, and how … I could see how it happened, but why?”

“It was a narrow, two lane road. Avenue 54 where it began to curve as it came around the base of the mountain coming from La Quinta. I could see that she had veered to the right and her front tire had gone off the road, had hit the dirt, and then she must have overcorrected and thrown herself back into the oncoming lane and the path of the semi. But why? What had caused her to suddenly veer like that?”

“I had to know. I even drove it myself, matching her speed. I remember nearing the spot of the collision, with the curve just up ahead, seeing a truck suddenly coming toward me in what for just a moment appeared to be my lane. I tensed, ready to swerve to the right, then realized that the truck was not in my lane, but that the curve of the road had only made it appear that way. The same thing must have happened to the young woman, only she had swerved.”

“Lately, memories like these have been coming to me, vividly, these kinds of images, just as I’m falling to sleep. I thought I’d put them away, left them in their box, but now, after so many years, they’ve returned.”

June 26, 2019

Find most of my Dad’s books here: Books by Wayne M. Hoy.

Oh, and by the way… while my father may not have written about his law enforcement career, his wife certainly has. My mother, a dedicated diarist and letter writer pulled from her daily journals to publish this a few years ago: A Good and Faithful Servant by Judy Hoy. Where she found the time and space to write on a daily basis while raising all of us is the true mystery and miracle of our family.