Take It Easy

Tall, 23-year-old William L. Cox is a cocky, capable truckman and he drives a big rig--a tractor and a double-tank trailer. Some of his admiring fellow truckers would say that sharp-eyed Billy could roll his rig through an oven door without jarring the roast.

Billy's trailers were laden with explosive isobutane, as he barreled along on Franklin Canyon Highway one day last week. On a curve outside Pinole, Calif., he swung around a car. Another car was coming toward him. A woman was driving, and there were three kids in the back seat. Billy saw the car waver, then veer to the wrong side of the road. Billy wrenched at the big wheel, sent the rig thundering off the pavement, across a shallow ditch, through a barbed-wire fence.

The tanks skidded and rolled over, wheels up and spinning. In the cab, still upright beneath a snapped power-line pole, Billy Cox was pinned in his seat.

The isobutane had not exploded. Billy lay there, like a man listening to the tick of a time bomb, as passersby, police and firemen pried, pushed and wrenched at the stubborn steel. Then suddenly, with a great, soft whoosh, flames burst from the tanks, lashed fiercely at the faces of four rescuers.

For the next hour, firemen poured water on the tractor and Billy from relays of tank trucks. They laid an asbestos blanket over Billy who crouched down on the seat, told his rescuers nonchalantly: "Take it easy." Then a water truck ran dry, and firemen watched helplessly as flames licked at Billy. The steel cab began to glow dull red, and Billy began to scream. He writhed under the scorching heat, begged someone to shoot him. "I don't want to go out this way," he cried. The skin on Billy's back was raw and burned dead-white.

At last a bulldozer appeared, rescuers ran cables to the cab, and the dozer dragged it clear of the flames. In a Martinez hospital last week, Billy Cox grinned weakly and without his usual cockiness. Said Billy: "I lay there and all I could think was, 'What a way to die.'"

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