Picking the Bones

by Brian Hodge

  "Is it hit-and-run if you take him with you?" Ansel asked. "That's a legitimate question, isn't it?"

  You see things, except you've come along too late, so you attempt to reconstruct them. Forget where it happened, and why—that would come later. Pick it up with the moment of impact. The grill had caught him square-on, just left of center. The dent was plain. He'd slid up the hood, or maybe he'd flipped, cartwheeling into the glass with momentum of his own.

  Looking at him, the sight reminded me of summer drives when I was a boy, and how I would stare at all the insects that had met their ends against the windshield. Moths were the worst, I always thought, with soft plump bodies and wings that remained intact in the mess.

  His right leg had punched through clear up to his hip. The left was twisted oddly and resting along the front of the roof. His left elbow was inside the glass, but his arm was folded, so his shoulder and wrist were outside. His right arm was free, extended limply across the hood. So much for the extremities. The rest of him? It was as though he'd died while climbing halfway into or out of his grave. Safety glass doesn't shatter, it crumbles, reluctantly, and a million fragments made up his earth. The left side of his face was buried into glittering white dust, glued there with a crust of blood. The right side retained a look of benign surprise. I had no idea how old he was.

  "She said it wasn't her fault," Ansel told me.

  "Then why didn't she stop?"

  "I don't know, you'll have to ask her. But right now…what should we do?"

  The first thing I wondered was how many people he meant by we. Two? Three? I told Ansel that Jaycee should clear everybody from her house and call a lawyer.

  Ansel's face went squirmy. "I don't know if that's such a good idea."

  So there was something he wasn't telling me. He, or Jaycee, would get around to it before long. That it really was her fault. That, to celebrate her first year in business for herself, she'd started drinking early. Something like that. All the more reason to pick up the phone. You have a problem, you reach for a lawyer.

  Although inside I was already working on some way around it for her.

  "How far did she drive like this?"

  "A few blocks, I think. I'm not sure."

  "How long ago?"

  Ansel checked his watch. "Hour and a half? No, not even."

  I was wondering if Jaycee couldn't get back in her car and take the darkest possible route back to the vicinity where she'd hit him. Stop the car, pretend the last ninety minutes had never happened, give herself a second chance to do things right this time and reach for her cell phone instead of panicking.

  And if Jaycee had been drinking, she probably knew as well as I did that Ansel, still sober, would get in the driver's seat for her, and handle it from there.

  I stepped closer to the car. Because I was curious. Because I'd never seen a thing like this in real life and you don't waste opportunities. Because glass and metal and velocity do awful things to bodies and it's expected of you to look.

  Have you ever heard a dog cough? Got something in its throat? It's a wrenching sound, a hacking sound. A grotesque sound. Dogs don't care, they just want relief.

  So you know exactly the kind of sound I mean when I say it was right about then that the man in the windshield coughed. Only once, and weakly…

  And it only changed everything.

  I turned on Ansel. "You already knew, didn't you? Fucker, brought me out here and you already knew."

  "She said it wasn't her fault," he pleaded again, and I had no doubt that he honestly believed it.

  *

  Homes, carriage houses, garages…I don't know when they become sentient things. I don't know when it is that they shed their blank newness like baby fat and start to notice the goings-on around them. They just do. They awaken from the nothingness and there they are.

  There were some people, they shot a horse here once, the garage told me. It broke its leg in a gopher hole. Or maybe it was from prairie dogs.

  To the horse, I'm sure it was all the same.

  The little girl cried and cried. She wasn't supposed to watch, but she came back out.

  Not trying to put ideas in my head, are you?

  As if an edifice of any kind would ever admit to such a thing.

  Well…are you?

  But they possess an uncanny knack for knowing precisely when to withdraw their counsel, leaving only swollen silence, like the aftermath of the ringing of an enormous, funereal bell.

  *

  She came down from her bedroom before Ansel and I had decided anything, except Jaycee refused to talk in the garage. I followed her out the door and we milled about on the back lawn near a row of bushes that screened us from the neighboring lawn. I'd trimmed these bushes once, when they were green. Now they were wildly overgrown, with branches turned spiny, and the whole riot was starting to go crackly and dry with October.

  Stone cold sober, Jaycee was, even if she carried a full bottle in her hand.

  "I waited upstairs for somebody to knock on the door and tell me it was the police," she said. "I decided at least I wasn't going to give them a blood alcohol level to use against me."

  I hadn't touched her for a year and a half. Her shoulder, maybe, in passing. We had remained friends. Her shoulder…not the same.

  Jaycee tipped the bottle of champagne and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "If they were going to come, because somebody got my license plate or whatever, they would've been here by now."

  "Maybe," I said, "somebody still should. You know he's still alive, right?"

  She stole a look toward the garage, where we'd left Ansel babysitting what he'd already taken to calling "the party crasher."

  "Did you notice his clothes?" she asked me. "They weren't good."

  "How could you even tell, after that?"

  "Come on, are you blind?" Jaycee said. "I don't mean not good as in clean-out-the-attic-on-Saturday kind of clothes. I mean live-in-them-piss-in-them-twenty-four-seven kind of clothes. You only wear clothes like that when…"

  When what? Even the bushes were listening now.

  "When nobody's going to miss you anymore anyway," she whispered.

  There. It was out in the open now, even if we were still skirting the basest implications: that she'd rank-ordered the worth of his life and found that it did not measure up. And I knew what whispers meant. Always, whispers mean conspiracy.

  "Will you help me?" she asked.

  "With what, exactly?" And because she just stood there I thought I'd better clear up one thing right away. "I'm not putting him out of his misery for you. Like some horse with a broken leg. I'm not."

  You didn't have to watch Jaycee for long to realize that she still didn't have a clue what to do at this point.

  "I drove in the garage and locked it up as fast as I could," she said. "When I went up to the house, Ansel was already waiting on the porch. I'd had him leave work early so he could pick up some stuff for the party. And there he was with it all already. And I was glad to see him, I had to talk to somebody and hear them tell me everything was going to be all right, but still…I was wishing it was you."

  "Ansel's definitely your advocate," I said, "kept telling me how it wasn't your fault." Then I had to ask: "He did know what he was talking about, didn't he?"

  "Close enough," Jaycee shrugged.

  "Meaning?"

  "Meaning it was dark, and it all happened so fast I just don't remember, and if you've got a problem with that, either get a hypnotist over here, or get beyond it."

  The thing was, I could never tell when she was lying to me. I know she had to have done so, at one time or another, because I'd lied to her plenty of times. If she was a liar, maybe she was so good at it because she made certain to convince herself first. I was pretty sure that I wasn't willing to believe something for no better reason than a shallow thing like her looks. Often, I'd thought of Jaycee as this bedraggled beauty queen, someone with looks enough to win, but she never would because you coul
d see how the stress of competition was eating her alive. It was the first thing you noticed about her.

  We'd never been enemies, even in the middle of the break-up, but even if we had been, I would never have wanted to see her go to jail. And for this, she probably would, with every minute she stood there making the prosecution's case that much stronger—Jacyee's life, or the next few years of it, given up to a moment's panic.

  I turned to head back into the garage, ignoring Ansel and his wobbly little beta-dog grin. I slipped behind the wheel of Jaycee's car, looking at the powdery safety glass showered onto the dashboard, the jagged milky topographical map of the inside of the windshield that spanned the passenger side. The raw knob of exposed elbow poking through. The leg, dangling with the knee and the foot aimed in divergent directions.

  I flicked at it with my finger, watched it sway with no resistance. I focused on the filthy pants-cuff and its unraveling hem. On the eroded sneaker with the broken laces knotted back together. In between, the pale calf and ankle had seeped blood into a sock that soaked it up like a crusty bandage.

  Outside the car again, Ansel watched me go through pockets, hunting for an ID, anything. There wasn't much to go on. Coins, wadded dollar bills. Matches and half-smoked cigarettes that smeared ash on my fingers. A meal voucher from a homeless shelter. A picture of a woman, so faded and creased it could've come from anytime in the last thirty or forty years.

  The man in the windshield began to stir then, his trapped elbow grating inside its clamp of shattered glass, his jaw working but putting together nothing that made any sense. He pulled his face from the form-fitting glass. In what may have been muddled frustration, he breathed an explosive gust of rank air and craned his head toward me and snapped his teeth together, twice, then groaned and settled back.

  "Okay, I know what you can do," Jaycee said behind me. She had come inside the garage when I wasn't looking. "Loan me a car. You've got two, still, right? You can only drive one at a time."

  "What about yours?"

  "I'll get it fixed. Eventually."

  "And until then?"

  "We'll just," and she looked at the concrete floor, "see what happens."

  I spared a glance for the man in the windshield. "What do you think is going to happen?"

  "You never know," she said. "Maybe it looks worse than it really is. He'll get his wits about him, he'll tug himself out of there, and go on his way and that'll be that."

  Jaycee stepped over with the champagne bottle and tipped it to the man's lips. The way he gulped at it, you've never heard a greedier sound, without once opening his eyes. A bit seeped from one corner of his mouth, streaming freshly pink down his neck and into his clothing.

  "We can give him water. Feed him, even. We just won't take drastic measures."

  "Like Seventh Day Adventists," Ansel said.

  "Exactly," Jaycee nodded. "One of them gets sick, they don't allow transfusions or antibiotics or chemo. They just wait to see what happens."

  "A lot of them die," I said.

  Jaycee met my eyes a moment, then averted. "God's will, that's how they see it."

  Couldn't pass that up: "You believe in God now?"

  "I believe in luck," she said. "Good luck got me more than prayers ever did."

  At first I thought that her collision with a homeless man of indeterminate age and a frightfully resilient constitution was the unluckiest thing I'd heard of in years.

  But between the two of them, all things considered, you had to admit that she'd still gotten the better end of the encounter.

  *

  Before long the whole neighborhood must've known—not the people who lived there, but the houses, staring out from the windows beneath their frowning, shadowed eaves. They passed it along in the subterranean groans of their cellars, or overheard it whispered from tree to gustblown tree. The news spread from block to block mingled with the bone-dry tides of windtossed leaves.

  Do you really think you can get away with this? one of them asked as Ansel and I passed by on the sidewalk, on the way to my car.

  What are you talking about? I fired right back. I'm only helping out a friend with car trouble.

  What if he wakes up screaming? We may be solid, confessed another, but we can't bottle up everything that goes on inside us. Sometimes it leaks.

  I heard him cough. You didn't.

  You're probably right, and they let it go at that. Because they don't judge. They do not grieve death because they've watched it all around them, and it changes little. We amuse them, I think, with our pettiness and bustle. We built them as our havens and yet become their slaves, just to pay for them, and then they outlive us to await the next generation, and the next.

  Besides, they understand scales of size and time. South of Colfax, these are just the flatlands, after all. They only have to look to the northwest to see the glass and steel towers that dwarf them, and beyond those to see the mountains that dwarf the towers.

  One more thing, said the first. Rumor has it that she had time to stop. She just decided not to.

  Why would she do a thing like that?

  Oh, piffle. Have you never felt the urge yourself, when they come at you with their hands out, or lifting rags to smear across your windshield? The house then seemed to exhibit an uncharacteristic pity. But we could be wrong.

  *

  I would have preferred Jaycee riding with me instead of Ansel, as we went to get my other car, but that's the way it had to be. She'd already missed enough of her own one-year anniversary party. Any more and it really would start to look weird. In case anybody among her crew of increasingly intoxicated miscreants was even noticing.

  It was a silly business anyway, but by god if Jaycee hadn't found a niche. She operated a lunchtime delivery service to the downtown offices, for all of us who were too busy to procure our own food. She'd made arrangements with two-dozen non-delivery restaurants, coordinating phone and Internet orders for them during each weekday morning, and made her profits through a price markup on the menus she distributed to the offices. Any tips went to guys like Ansel, who did the legwork.

  I tipped too, but often wondered how a custom like that got started in the first place. How a guy like Ansel—essentially devoid of ambition but with a spectacular set of calf muscles from pedaling his bike—could step out of an elevator toting a bagful of gyros and lo mein, and regard it as an act of such skill it merited compensation from both sides of the exchange.

  "How come you've got two cars?" he asked.

  "I don't know," I said. "Probably the same reason you've got more than one pair of shoes."

  "Dude, a pair of Tevas is not the same as a Saturn."

  It was if you could afford it, something I didn't tell him, didn't have to, because I think he realized it the same time it crossed my mind. He burrowed down lower into the seat and turned to stare out the window. Plenty to see, although Colfax on a Friday night is not a pretty sight. I imagined recruitment flyers distributed in a thousand shitty little towns across the plains states, and more down in Mexico: Come to Denver, be a crack-whore…or look just like one. Where there were whores, there were johns. And for every john, there were a few more skulking along who looked as though they'd be doing swell just to scrape up the ten dollars.

  It seemed to cheer him, put some bounce back in Ansel's hyperactive leg. See, he wasn't doing so badly after all.

  "I'll bet it was rough growing up with a name like Ansel," I said. I don't know why. Because I could, probably. Because, to his way of thinking, he couldn't get mad and piss me off if it meant his unattainable Jaycee might not get her loaner. "I can just hear what the other kids must've turned it into."

  He sat a moment, utterly still, as if weighing his position and realizing he didn't have one.

  "Yeah," was all he said, the bounce gone from his leg again. "Sometimes I think it cursed me for life."

  *

  Office towers…they're no different from the old Victorians and Georgians and all the rest. What the
y lack in decades and slowly accrued consciousness they make up for in loft. They've been jolted into life by the shock-paddles of the tiered frenzy they harbor, of the fortunes won and lost.

  Well done, well done, they said as we passed below, with none of the ambivalent reproach of the houses we'd left behind.

  I didn't even have to ask if they had witnessed us tonight. Their gaze is far, and they have so many eyes.

  You're doing the right thing. She has a future. You have to take such matters into account.

  Of course they would say this. In one small but vital way, Jaycee served their interests five days a week.

  *

  Ansel and I drove back separately, each in a different car, although there was no real need for me to return. Mostly I wanted to see Jaycee for myself again, make sure there had been no later-than-expected arrivals of anyone to haul her away in cuffs.

  I turned over the keys in the kitchen where, two years earlier, I'd made walnut pancakes every autumn Sunday morning. I could tell she'd been crying recently, although nobody else seemed to have noticed. The place thudded with music, clinked with bottles. Echoed with stomping footsteps and stank of sweat. She was besieged by the rabble of her employees and their uninvited friends, nearly all of them a variation of Ansel, and I doubt she could've gotten rid of them if she tried. For tonight, she owed them. Never could've delivered all those lunches herself.

  Soon we went out back again, Ansel tagging along, all three of us returning to the garage. She'd brought a paper-wrapped chunk of sub sandwich in case the man in the windshield was conscious and hungry, although we found he was neither. I noticed that earlier, with all the flowers outside having died their autumn deaths, she'd brought in a small plastic watering can. Its long, thin spout would reach his mouth better than any bottle, and your hand would remain out of biting range.

  We made places to sit. Although it seems strange to say so, in comparison with the poor beleaguered house, the garage felt wholly peaceful.