Flash and Filigree

by Terry Southern

  Dr. Eichner came down the steps slowly. “This is interesting,” he said, “my experience had given me to believe that the majority didn’t care for foreign cars.”

  The attendant scratched his head confusedly. “Well, Doctor, I been a mechanic for twelve years. Before that I was a trucker. I ought to know a good motor and body when I see it.” He gave the nearest tire a proving kick with his toe.

  “Yes, it’s a fine car,” said Dr. Eichner getting into it. The door shut with a quiet expensive click, and the attendant stepped back, as though now it were he who held a signal to send the car and driver shooting away.

  “Well, so long, Doc,” he said, saluting.

  “Yes, so long,” said Dr. Eichner with a little smile for him.

  Going down the drive, the Delahaye slid through the gravel like a speedboat over a slow swell. The Doctor drove extremely fast.

  At the bottom, where the drive poured into Wilshire Boulevard, the car slowed, perceptibly nosing down, and in a sudden squelch-sounding lurch, swerved up and out toward Santa Monica. As the car steadied and settled in the far lane, picking up speed the while, Dr. Eichner leaned forward and switched on the radio. It was the hourly news. He pushed the buttons, seven in all, then toyed with the dial-knob, allowing the indicator to rest on a serialized drama as he, sounding the air-horns, took the wheel in both hands and pulled to the left, even into the oncoming speed-lane, to pass a fast moving convertible. Slowing at the intersection, the Doctor turned left into Highlord’s Canyon Drive. Ahead, the six-lane stretch tipped and fell in straight and desolate long-graded runs as far as the eye could see. From his breast coat pocket the Doctor drew out a thin silver cigarette case, steadily lowering the throttle while the countryside fled past like a film that has slipped the reel, and the saccharine tedium of the radio announcer’s voice was strangely muted under the climbing roar of the engine, “. . . just as we left him yesterday, still sulking down by the black ships. Meanwhile, old Nestor . . .” Dr. Eichner twisted the dial-knob abruptly to a static blank, lit his cigarette and adjusted the rear view mirror. There behind, a black sedan closed fast on the right.

  These canyon roads toward noon are blazed with heat, and now the sun lay afire on the mountain land, striking every light surface with wild refraction. Dr. Eichner turned down the green glass visor and floored the throttle, racing up a long slow rise in the highway road. The Delahaye touched the crest of the hill with a whirlwind drone and plunged into the descent as for an instant the black sedan was lost behind.

  At the far bottom of the hill below was a crossroads with traffic signal, and at quarter way on the descent, a white stone marker showed the distance from there to the intersection as one-eighth mile. It was Dr. Eichner’s habit to time his descent on leaving the crest so as not to pass this stone marker until the warning amber had shown on the traffic light below; and then to race down the hill at full throttle and beat the red. The duration of the amber was five seconds, so that to clear the intersection ahead of the red fight, he must do the eighth-mile in an average of ninety.

  Now, as the light was green, he slowed the car leaving the crest approaching the stone marker, and the black sedan swung again into the rear view mirror just clearing the rise behind, very fast. The front wheels of the Delahaye were squarely aline the stone marker, the speedometer at sixty-five, when the amber went on the light below. Flat-mashing the pedal into the foam rubber mat, the Doctor peered keenly ahead, where for the eighth-mile the road fell like an unwound ribbon only rising briefly again past the exact bisection of the crossroad, and the whole, in this perspective, resembled nothing so much as a giant flat cross of the Greek Orthodox Church. The intersection was deserted but for a truck that stood on the right waiting against the light.

  In a high, singing speed, the Delahaye lay close to the earth, the tires sucked and clawed the concrete surface as the car dropped across the hill like a whining shell.

  Behind the wheel, slumped British racing style, the Doctor’s eyes were just at the level of the top of the steering wheel when his wrists went suddenly stiff and he raised himself looking intently ahead as the large truck below appeared to have made an almost indistinct motion forward. He sounded the horns in two long blasts and at the same moment glanced into the rear view mirror. The left half mirror showed the Doctor’s own brow go darkly knit while the other half held the black sedan, moving like a locomotive, apparently intending to pass on the right. In less than a second the two cars were plummeting abreast, and ahead the giant truck began to pull slowly out into the intersection. Dr. Eichner exchanged a quick, incredulous look with the two occupants of the other car, a man in front, one in back. The eyes of the driver were fast on the right fender of the Delahaye as he seemed deliberately to edge the black sedan closer alongside with a lead of one or two feet. The man in the rear seat began gesticulating wildly, looking from Eichner to the driver and back again, shaking his head and raising his shoulders as in exaggeration of anxiety or doubt. Dr. Eichner made an angry motion with his hand, as if to sweep them past, at the same time letting up on the accelerator. Across the face of the sedan’s driver appeared an instant’s consternation, turning his head to frown grotesquely at the man in the back and at Eichner, and then to glare down the road ahead. But instead of passing, the black sedan maintained the narrow lead, while now, dead ahead of Dr. Eichner, loomed the mammoth ten-wheel truck. Between the Doctor’s lips, the cigarette butt went suddenly sodden and leached. And as he floored the accelerator, breaking the lead of the sedan, and twisted the wheel convulsedly to the right, the Delahaye slammed twice into the black sedan with a savage ripping noise and the man in the rear was thrown back from the window toward the floor of the car. As he wrenched the wheel to the right again with all his strength, the two cars smashed together, but the Delahaye held its swerve to the right, and before the Doctor the windshield was a shattered haze of gray metal and high wheels where the amber light danced crazily above the scream of burning rubber and a sharp, double-crack as the left fender of the Doctor’s car clipped in clearing the great truck just below the tail-gate. Now wide to his right, as Dr. Eichner fought the wheel, the black sedan careened out insanely, almost turning over in midair until it leveled straight for an instant at blinding speed on the shoulder of the road, and twenty yards past the amber light, with a wild exploding sound, plowed squarely into a steel telegraph pole.

  The Doctor slowed the Delahaye as straight and cautiously reining a mad horse, he brought the car to a stop far down the road. But behind him, fused into the terrible pole, the pinioned twist of sedan belched one oily billow of smoke and burst into fire.

  The truck still sat in the intersection, while out halfway between the truck and the wreck, face down in the middle of the highway, was the dark clothed body of a man. Turned in his seat, the Doctor’s eye cut a line from the pivotal truck to the burning sedan, traced straight through the outstretched man, cutting dead from the center of the cross-road—yet at an angle, as the isolate instance, the stunned pendulum swing, never caught at keel but on the rise or fall—for the black burning wreck had torn half its own length up the pole, and the front wheels jutted starkly from either side the vertically split chassis: so thus the wreck itself cast against the sun a smoky crucifixion.

  Dr. Eichner tried to turn the car around but could get no more than quarter-wheel steering. He began to back up toward the intersection. Behind him then the cab doors of the truck sprang open and a man and woman were down, running toward the body in the highway. They lifted him, as Dr. Eichner sounded his horn. “STOP!” he shouted. And while the two carried the loose figure toward the truck, the Doctor tried to increase his speed in reverse but the wheels so rasped against the bent fenders that the car could not be steered. Stopping the car, he jumped out and began to run. Yet, even before he was abreast the burning wreck, a crackling inferno of upholstery and Bakelite, impossible to approach, even then the truck beyond was pulling away.

  The Doctor stood at the pivotal point and look
ed up and down the glaring roads, glaring without the green glass visor, and desolate.

  He reached into his pocket and drew out a small leather memo-book. Moistening the detached pencil, he noted:

  Truck: 10 wheel, gray, van type with high short cab. No rear license or markings otherwise.

  He touched the pencil to his nose, staring in the direction of the departed truck, then he added:

  CM.? Mack?

  and continuing:

  Man: stocky build; florid; sandy hair. Brown leather jacket over dark, heavy (possibly corduroy) trousers. Woman: medium dark, straight short hair . . . nondescript dress.

  Dr. Eichner looked at his wrist watch and, at the top of the page, he wrote:

  Drexel and Lord’s Canyon Drive. 11:20—11:25.

  Then he turned, quickly putting away his book, toward the sedan, that blazing wreck, fiery-moated now, where for several feet on either side, the earth itself leapt alight with gas and oil. There was a certain defiance in the way this car burned, and a threat. It was an amalgam of separate parts, no longer distinct, impaled, a fusion. An inviolate pyre.

  The sides of the highway were shouldered with fine, loose gravel, and from a distance behind, Dr. Eichner scooped handfuls at the flames. After a futile moment of this he took off his coat and stepped down the rocky culvert aside the road, and up again over a barbed wire fence into the adjacent field. Here, under his knees he spread the coat, forcing it flat against all stick-shoots of weed and nettle, kneeling, as with his hands he began to dig into the dry clay ground, piling what he could onto the coat.

  In this attitude, the Doctor started up at the sound of a plane passing far overhead. And caught like this, having only begun to dig, his head cocked to a new, breaking sound, the high distant shrill of an approaching police car: and without standing, as if at last really somehow caught between the siren and the plane, the Doctor knelt, and kneeling, cocked his head from side to side to determine the direction of the sound, the siren.

  Then it appeared, the dark patrol car, frozen for an instant at the far top of the hill where last the truck was seen, and it dropped toward the Doctor, the siren suddenly a wailing shriek. Dr. Eichner picked up the coat, waved it, running toward the fence and the wreck, as the patrol car hit the intersection in a screaming two-wheel turn and plunged sideways to a sliding stop a few yards behind the burning sedan. Before the dust had cleared, one of the men was out of the car plying the spray of a hand-extinguisher over the wreck. As he stooped through the fence. Dr. Eichner shouted to make himself heard above the unchecked siren.

  “Did you pass a gray truck?” he cried.

  He bounded down the culvert, clutching the coat close, his head straight, as his eyes cast about at the rocky footing. He reached the car while the other patrolman was still behind the wheel.

  “Does this car have a two-way radio?” The Doctor had to shout, leaning his head in at the patrolman, against the wild agony of the dying siren.

  “Call the station,” he said, “have them intercept a large gray van, going east on Drexel.” He nodded as to give it emphasis, and then with a heavy breath, stepped back and loosened his collar, drew out a great white handkerchief and mopped his face and neck.

  The patrolman opened the door of the car and slowly got out, all the while eyeing the burning wreck, where the other officer raced to and fro, pumping the extinguisher viciously. The thin spray of the hand-extinguisher hardly reached the front part of the upright sedan where the flames burned brightest on the blackened pole. Then he turned to the Doctor.

  “You see the accident, Mac?”

  The Doctor breathed with difficulty from his run back to the road and the shouting against the siren. But at the question he had to smile, rocked forward slightly, his hands clasped over the coat folded against him.

  “Yes indeed,” he said, “I might even say . . .”

  “What’s your name?” asked the other, already writing.

  “Eichner,” said the Doctor shortly. “There was another vehicle involved in this, a truck. You may have passed it on Drexel, a large gray van.” He intoned the last as a question while the patrolman waited, poised above the pad.

  Then, “STOCK!” They both looked up, surprised almost to anger, as the one with the extinguisher appeared beyond the hood, shouting: “STOCK! HEY, STOCK!” He was smudged and disheveled.

  “Get emergency,” he said. He spoke with a slight lisp. “They’ve got to get a foam-pump out here. Did you see this thing?” He gestured impatiently toward the burning wreck. Patrolman Stockton and the Doctor considered him mutely for a moment, as if the lisp must dry away from the words one by one and let them drop in the dust at his feet all raw and revealed.

  “Okay,” muttered Stockton, finally turning away. “Okay, don’t get your crap hot.” He got back into the front seat, lying half across it, to flip one or two switches and speak a hoarse whisper into a microphone attached to the far side of the dash.

  Dr. Eichner had his memo-book out, open to the page where he had written about the accident, himself leaning through the open door.

  “About the truck,” he said softly, nudging Stockton’s leg.

  The message to the station was incredibly brief, composed of numbers, location, and time. The patrolman flipped the switch again, and sitting up, looked curiously at the Doctor. Then he raised a forefinger near to his right eye and worked it as if calling a small child for a secret. Dr. Eichner leaned closer. The patrolman tapped his finger very lightly on the Doctor’s shirt front.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said, “you just let us take care of this in our own little way. Okay, fellah?” And giving the Doctor a wink that made him slowly back away, he got out of the car, took the report pad from where he had hooked it onto his belt, and began writing. “How about that name again?” he said.

  “Eichner,” said the Doctor. From his wallet he drew out a card and handed it over, and for a long moment after, stared sullenly at his own dust covered shoes, though, gradually, his drawn mouth, taking a twitch at the corners, became again something engaged, and his eyes sought Stockton’s with light and perhaps a renewed allegiance.

  “I think I begin to understand,” he said. “You already have the truck. Of course. Who else could have reported the accident?” The Doctor spoke the last word on the verge of delight. He pointed a finger at Patrolman Stockton, accusing without malice, but on the contrary, admiringly, as had the officer really been guilty of some laudable mischief.

  Officer Stockton read aloud, “DOCTOR FREDERICK L. EICHNER,” and copied it onto his pad.

  The Doctor had been holding his coat. Now he slipped it on and adjusted his tie. “I’m at Hauptman Clinic,” he said.

  The other nodded, turning the card several times in his hand. Then, he looked up, and quite suddenly was staring past the Doctor, down the highway where the Delahaye sat off the road. Though the two men were standing half faced away from the damaged side of the car, it could be seen that the car’s wheel alignment was out badly, the body leaning slightly to the left.

  “That your car?” The patrolman squinted and stepped off at once in the direction of the Delahaye. Dr. Eichner immediately fell in closing step behind, but halfway to the Delahaye, Stockton began to trot, so that when the Doctor reached the car, the patrolman had surveyed it once around and was now down, bent over low, looking at the underside. He rose dusting his hands and rested them against his hips. Facing the Doctor before speaking, he jerked his head solemnly at the damaged side of the Delahaye.

  “Your car?”

  Dr. Eichner was slow to reply.

  “Took quite a beating, didn’t it?” he said finally, pretending to examine the damage anew.

  The other eyed him shrewdly, then without moving his body, turned his head and called over his shoulder to the one at the wreck, he having exhausted the extinguisher, simply standing aside now, watching it burn.

  “EDDY! HEY, EDDY!” called Stockton. Eddy came at a brisk gait, his head high in ready interest.r />
  “Take a look at this,” said Stockton jerking again toward the Delahaye.

  Slowly walking the length of the car, Eddy gave a long low whistle, at the same time scratching his head.

  “You involved in the accident, fellah?” he spoke to Eichner with almost no trace of his former lisp.

  The Doctor regarded him incredulously. “Certainly,” he snapped, “just as I’ve been trying to tell this young man,” looking at Stockton who was busy at the pad. “Now what I want to know,” he went on to Eddy, “is: who reported the accident? Do you have the truck or not?”

  “Yes or no will do it, Jack,” Stockton said in an off-hand threat from the pad.

  Dr. Eichner wheeled on him. “You listen to me, Officer,” he pointed to the burning sedan, “one man is dead in that sedan, and another in the truck possibly dying, certainly in need of medical attention, the truck I say, which could have been intercepted on Drexel. Now, it seems to me that you two are forgetting just what the nature of your job is: to service and facilitate in these matters—not to impede—and certainly not to play the grand seigneur, nor the dolt. You are public servants, maintained by the public and responsible to the public. And I advise you to keep this in mind.” He ended with a sweep of a shaking finger to include them both, but only Eddy stood impressed, wide-eyed now, while Stockton went on writing and looking up and down the ripped half of the Delahaye.

  “Take it easy, fellah,” said Eddy in real concern. And standing close, he actually stroked the Doctor’s shoulder. “We’re on the job, you don’t have to worry about that, huh, Stock, you tell him.” He smiled a little embarrassedly at his colleague who, whether in feint or truth, was too occupied to take a part. On the pad, Stockton’s pencil made a flourish suggesting that a certain phase of the report was at that point definitely complete.

  “All right, Doctor,” he said to show his readiness, “you just tell us now in your own words how the accident happened.”

  While the two officers leaned against the side of the Delahaye, the one writing and examining the car continuously, the other following the narrative with open wonder, Dr. Eichner stood before them and told exactly what had happened, only omitting the fact of having raced against the red light.