I was walking down Harriet Avenue in Uptown the other day and heard a pigeon in the distance. I didn’t know it was a pigeon at first – it was sort of muffled and hard to tell exactly what direction or where it was coming from. My brain was spinning like a slot machine display trying to identify the noise. Was it a crying kid? Nope. An owl? Nope. Person locked in the trunk of that there car I’m walking past? Nope.
The mental slot machine stopped and all 3 bars contained an image of a pigeon. Oh, it’s just a dang pigeon, says I to myself.
Slight difference from someone locked in a car trunk. I got a good chuckle out of however my imagination drummed up such a strange thought. Maybe I've been watching too much Law and Order.
I began to wonder what I would do if I was walking past a car and someone was actually pounding on the bottom side of the trunk lid and hollering like crazy trying to get out. Think about it. It would be a rather interesting scenario to walk into, don’t you think?
First I would be inclined to stand at the trunk of the car with my hands cupped over my mouth yelling “HELLO? WHY ARE YOU IN THERE?” You never know… maybe the person was a member of some sort of gang or mob and was being really annoying, so the Boss ordered the boys to lock him up in the trunk. In that case, it might be best to keep on walking and whistle a tune to cover up the muffled yelling coming out of the car until you're far enough away to forget about it and get back to wondering what's on television later.
On the other hand, perhaps the person could have been playing hide and seek and found a really good hiding spot..? Or maybe he was getting something out of the trunk and the car ate him, sort of like the cars in the Stephen King story Maximum Overdrive.
It’s hard to say, really. I reckon what you would need to do if you walked past a car with a yelling trunk goes on a case by case basis. It really depends on what the individual did to get locked in the trunk. Perhaps automobile manufacturers should leave a notepad with a tiny flashlight in trunks for when people got locked in them so they could write down 1) that they're in the trunk, and 2) how they got there.
Another factor that might determine whether or not I'd help out sort of depends on the construction of the automobile. If it was the type where the back seats fold down, then the problem could be easily solved. If the person locked in was bright enough to kick out the back seats of the vehicle from inside the trunk, they could crawl through, unlock the back doors of the car and escape with great ease. So.. yeah, if it was one of those kinds of cars, I'd likely keep on a-walkin'. Because quite frankly, if you’re not bright enough to escape like that, maybe you deserve to be locked in the trunk of a car for a while.
