by Gil Meynier
And the storm was getting worse. And every time he hit one of those dips with the water in them it was as if he was being hit with a sledgehammer; the water splashed on either side, higher than the car, and a ton of it would fold back and hit the windshield. But he kept on going. He never slowed down. They weren’t going to catch him anywhere near the place. There was plenty of gas. But he was cold and wet and this was no place to be. They forced him to be there. He groaned at the thought of the racket. It was probably gone forever. He couldn’t say that he hadn’t tried to hit Mac, just a little. No. But he could say that he had tried to avoid him. It was an accident.
And the lightning, why did it have to do that? He seemed to have been climbing on this road for a long time, and the higher he got the more frightening the lightning was. After lightning you can’t see the road and you’re pushing through black. And the wind. You bounce on the road and rocks are hammering under the car. If it will only stand up until you get away from here! There can’t be much more to this climbing. And to this cold, this chill. Legs are aching. Back is aching.
The deputy sat in front of the nickel-plated microphone-
“Take your time, Will,” he said.
Car 12 had reported a rockslide across the Redington road, near the foot of the mountain. Not a big slide. They were shoving the rocks out of the way. Old Will would be doing the driving from here on out. Made him nervous when somebody else did the driving on mountain roads.
“Will!...” The deputy waited. “Calling Car 12. Will, the San Pedro is running pretty full. Just found out. He may turn back.”
Will said something unofficial about hot coffee.
Another member of the force came back from looking at the scene and interviewing the Italians.
“Some punk kid, driving Mac’s car,” he reported.
“Was supposed to leave the car in town,” he continued. “They don’t know what he was doing down there.”
The deputy stared straight ahead of him.
“The dealer’s dead. Died in the ambulance,” the other continued.
Now it was different again. The deputy chewed on his lip. Then he talked into the microphone.
Manslaughter anyway. If it turned out that he had no business down there, it might be premeditated. There’s no such thing as premeditated manslaughter, so...
The deputy leaned back in his chair, still staring straight ahead. He was wondering what would happen if the fellow ran out of gas. Might sit in the car like a frightened kid and go quietly when they got him. Or he might take to the rocks and they’d have to rabbit-hunt for him. Running out of gas, hell; he’d run out of road, with the Pedro running.
Then you have to think of those isolated ranchers up on the other slope with a kid like that running loose.
He bent over the microphone again. Both 5 and 12 were to go over the mountain. Let Will and the new man check the ranches.
It was five o’clock now and if the storm let up there would be some kind of dawn.
Back is aching. Throat is aching, full of sobs that want to come out. Why, why, why do they do this to me? thought Joe. The only thing to do is go faster. To get away. To be somewhere else. To be somewhere where people wouldn’t treat him that way. Settled, quiet, respectable, like everybody else. Being alone like this, on a mountain, cold, running away, aching, was miserable. Not what he wanted. Mac would be all right. He had not meant to hit him. They can’t die if you don’t mean to hit them. Everything would be all right. Maybe things were all right now. Maybe he should turn back and they would all get together again. He would never tell them how bad it had been, driving on that mountain. Nobody would ever know about that.
The road is so narrow you can’t turn around. And suddenly you realize that you are breathing hard, as if you felt that turning back was full of danger. Instinctively. So, you’ve got to keep on going, faster, if you can.
And the rain suddenly stopped but you hear water running everywhere. You hear it because you have had to open the windows because the windshield was getting all steamed up with the windows closed. And on a turn you look back and down at the foot of the mountain, way down there, you see car lights. Then you don’t see them any more because you’re gone around a curve. You slow down and look again. Even if they are farmers, or ranchers, you are afraid of them. And you start going faster again. And there’s more water coming across the road than when it was raining, and you think that the next rise is going to be the last, the top of the mountain, then you’ll be going down, but it never is. So you keep on.
A quick inspiration makes you think of the little farm. That would be a place. Throwing things at you didn’t mean anything. That old woman used to like you, like a son.
Then you realize that you’ve been going down for a while. Still up and down, but mostly down and you see tree-tops below you on the side of the road. And there’s a faint light in the sky, big clouds are still rolling, but every now and then you see a faint light in the sky. The lightning is less frequent, more distant, and it is not raining where you are. It’s dark in the canyon below, where the tree-tops are showing. The road is winding downward along the side of the canyon. You bump over cattle-guards and rocks and holes in the road and you’re tired of staring at the white, full of shadows, dancing light of your car on the road. Every corner you turn is dark unknownness because your lights don’t bend. Dangerous. Dangerous, but you can handle it. You are doing fine. Nobody else drives like this. Look, you skid around a turn, like this, pour it on when the road straightens a little bit, listen to the mud rattling against the fenders, go on, laugh.
Hell, there’s nothing to it. Nobody knows you. You’re free as the breeze. You’re a great guy. But nobody knows it. All you have to do is not think about what happened. Look at the water splashing as you swoosh through the dips. Look at nature; it’s beginning to light up. You can see the fences, here and there, along the road, and you’re alone up here. This is where you are safe, away from people. But get away from those cars behind you. They’re the people who make trouble for you. They’re all those unconnected, unrelated people who, somehow, are connected, hooked up together, in a way nobody understands, like Dorry and the taxi driver, the man in the shack, the junk dealer and his mirrors, like Mac and Mayh...Look out, now, don’t think about that.
Well, okay, think about it. Like Mac and May hew. What did they have in common? Or that guy at the golf course? Nothing. What did people have in common? Nothing. Nothing but that loose, unconnected hook-up, that loose, vague connection that makes bunches of two, three, four people look up and stare at you and keep you from doing things. Or make you do things, for no reason.
For no reason, the way I’m driving this road, thought Joe. Am I beginning to understand something? Am I beginning to understand that you can’t do things unless you do what other people want you to do? Hell. Hell! I knew that a long time ago. I knew it and I said to hell with it. To hell with it is what I said that time. Nothing ever happened except that the kid almost died. But even before he got well is when I said to hell with it. They said I’d cut a hole in his stomach. That’s what he got for picking on me. So I left town. To hell with it! Nobody can make me do anything.
Ain’t it quiet up here!
That’s the life. No people. Just nature, if you know how to handle it. Just rocks and trees and water. But there’s getting to be too much water. I’d better get the hell out of here. Come on, car.
The stream of water that Joe hit eventually ran into the San Pedro. The wide, bottom ends of canyons point toward rivers. The narrow top ends of canyons are little gutters for the loose water on the mountainside to drain into. Every crack and wrinkle on the side of the gorge pours loose water onto the sloping floor of the canyon. It starts with a trickle that barely crawls, then it swells and rolls and gushes and splatters. Then it becomes a torrent that rushes and roars and foams, gathering speed, grinding boulders and tree trunks. It may have rained miles away and be perfectly dry where you are, but pretty soon the gathered t
orrent comes rushing down the canyon, a wall of water four feet high, a vicious, liquid, darting ram with the speed of a galloping bull. It swerves around the rock-strewn curves of the tortuous torrent bed. It comes roaring. Mountain roads have cautious concrete crossings over the torrent beds but you stay off them when the water is loose.
Joe! You stay off them when the water is coming!
But Joe didn’t stay off them. He was crossing a dry concrete apron over the sloping floor of the canyon when the torrent swooped around the canyon wall and hit him. The car stopped going forward. It started going sideways. It made a horrible grinding noise but nobody heard it, not even Joe. It went sideways on its side, then on its top, the four wheels up in the air. Then it was on its side again, not on the road but down the canyon a ways, and Joe was in it, drowning.
Joe was in the car. Suddenly, sickeningly he was rolling over, gasping, water rushing all around him. A couple of times his mouth was not under water, but he couldn’t even shout, because he was drowning. He couldn’t move because there was nothing solid under him; everything was moving and he couldn’t do anything about it. He did slip out from under the wheel. In fact, he ended up under the steering wheel, on the floor of the car, jammed between the seat and the steering post. There had always been a little air in the car that he could have breathed as it turned over and over before it stopped. But he didn’t know that. He was always where the water was deep.
When they found him the car was only half full of water. Joe was where the water was deep.
It was hot, and dry again. For two days, now, the sun, appearing over the Rincon in an empty sky, had scoured the land for dampness, remnants of rain and dark stains of moisture on the ground. It swept the plain, from the east with increasing light and warmth, from the high point of noon with shadowless waves of searing light, and with an insistent, heavy, backward sweep in the long hours of the afternoon.
Mud-banks, graying, broke into small, curling flakes as moisture rose in the hot, dry air, or sank in the deep, unlighted layers of the earth.
Small puffs of warm breeze sent spinning twisters of dust to skip and swirl among the bushes on the open range.
The view, clear and unlimited in the blue of the sky, rested on distant mountains, sixty miles to the south, past the edge of the Catalinas, fifty miles to the north.
Coming out of her room—all her things unpacked and put away in the closets of the brightly curtained room on the farm—Dorry looked along the mountainside, toward the corner of rocks where Joe had died.
She kept on looking at the impassive cliffs as a halting flow of thoughts—strange, untried, new thoughts—crowded in her mind.
Later, she would try to sort out all those new thoughts. Right now, all she could think was: Poor guy. Which wasn’t enough.
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