Educated

The groaning stopped when the bin was level with the trailer. Dad was giving
me time to climb onto the trailer wall but I was pinned. “I’m stuck!” I
shouted, only the growl of the loader’s engine was too loud. I wondered if
Dad would wait to dump the bin until he saw me sitting safely on the semi’s
cab, but even as I wondered I knew he wouldn’t. Time was still stalking.
The hydraulics groaned and the bin raised another eight feet. Dumping
position. I shouted again, higher this time, then lower, trying to find a pitch
that would pierce through the drone of the engine. The bin began its tilt,
slowly at first, then quickly. I was pinned near the back. I wrapped my hands
around the bin’s top wall, knowing this would give me a ledge to grasp when
the bin was vertical. As the bin continued to pitch, the scrap at the front
began to slide forward, bit by bit, a great iron glacier breaking apart. The
spike was still embedded in my leg, dragging me downward. My grip had
slipped and I’d begun to slide when the spike finally ripped from me and fell
away, smashing into the trailer with a tremendous crash. I was now free, but
falling. I flailed my arms, willing them to seize something that wasn’t
plunging downward. My palm caught hold of the bin’s side wall, which was
now nearly vertical. I pulled myself toward it and hoisted my body over its
edge, then continued my fall. Because I was now falling from the side of the
bin and not the front, I hoped—I prayed—that I was falling toward the
ground and not toward the trailer, which was at that moment a fury of
grinding metal. I sank, seeing only blue sky, waiting to feel either the stab of
sharp iron or the jolt of solid earth.
My back struck iron: the trailer’s wall. My feet snapped over my head and
I continued my graceless plunge to the ground. The first fall was seven or
eight feet, the second perhaps ten. I was relieved to taste dirt.
I lay on my back for perhaps fifteen seconds before the engine growled to
silence and I heard Dad’s heavy step.
“What happened?” he said, kneeling next to me.
“I fell out,” I wheezed. The wind had been knocked out of me, and there
was a powerful throbbing in my back, as if I’d been cut in two.
“How’d you manage that?” Dad said. His tone was sympathetic but
disappointed. I felt stupid. I should have been able to do it, I thought. It’s a
simple thing.
Dad examined the gash in my leg, which had been ripped wide as the spike
had fallen away. It looked like a pothole; the tissue had simply sunk out of