Cry Hard, Cry Fast

by John D. MacDonald

  When the light changed he got all the mass of the big truck into motion, gaining speed smoothly, taking mild pleasure in his own skill. On the back of every Quin-State truck was the legend, “It’s your road.” He drove that way.

  He was in the far right lane, the orange truck far ahead of him, two other trucks well back of him when he sensed trouble starting.

  His mind quickened and took a picture of the scene almost as detailed and perfect as a camera could take. Straight, six-lane divided highway. On this particular stretch all lanes in fast use. Fairly wide gravel shoulder to the right of him and then a deep dangerous drop beyond it where a concrete wall retained the fill. He saw all that in the instant that a flicker of motion off to his left and well ahead of him told him trouble was coming.

  Cherrik had a box seat for disaster. He saw the Cad leap and roll like a fish and his throat tightened as he saw the inevitable trajectory toward the oncoming cars. He knew then that whatever happened would be fatal for someone. He was pressing on the brake then, shifting down hard, trying to master the momentum of the truck as quickly as possible.

  He saw the maroon car behind the blue convertible seem to hesitate and then dart forward, aiming for the hole between the vaulting tail of the blue car and the oncoming nose of the center lane car he had just passed. Cherrik saw what the maroon car was trying to do and pleaded with the fool in the center lane to drop back or move out to make more room. But the driver was frozen.

  The maroon car hit the tail of the Cad a glancing blow, spinning it more certainly on its way. The maroon car, deflected by the blow, angled across the highway, missing the center lane car by an impossible fraction of an inch. The maroon car angled directly toward the front left wheel of Cherrik’s big rig. He was not slowing fast enough to give it time to go by. If he kept his course he would hit it, roll it, smash it, catch up with it again and grind it into the road. He saw a girl’s face in the right window of the car, looking up at him, her mouth wide.

  Cherrik locked the truck wheels and turned the big wheel hard right. He saw, too late, that the concrete wall ended a few feet further, that he might have tried to hit the wide shoulder in just such a way that he would get past the bitter edge of the concrete into the clear and open field beyond. He thought, as the locked truck slid and hit: Too much time staring at the pretty girl, Cherrik. Too much dreaming. Too old, Cherrik. Too damn old.

  chapter 7

  SOME thoughts on the question of mass and momentum: A body in motion tends to stay in motion. A warm, soft, fragile body encased in sheet metal and traveling at a high rate of speed will continue to travel at that same rate of speed though the metal shell stops abruptly.

  Problem for the class. Place our fragile young lady in the front seat of a car. Said car is traveling at the rate of sixty miles per hour. Place her twin sister, equally winsome, on the edge of the roof of an eleven-story building. See how tiny she looks up there? She smiles and waves at us.

  Now place the dashboard of an automobile on the sidewalk, flat against the sidewalk. We are ready for our experiment.

  At the same moment as we stop all forward motion in the moving vehicle, so that the young lady continues on at a velocity of ninety feet per second, her twin sister leaps from the roof of the building, head first, chin high, arms at her sides, descending with fluttering skirt and admirable accuracy directly onto the prone dashboard, ivory forehead impacting enameled metal.

  Post mortem discloses to us that the young ladies suffered hurt of identical intensity. In both cases mass and momentum were equal, and thus the foot-pounds of force involved were also fearfully equal.

  Hence the time-worn expression of “suicide seat,” as it refers to the seat beside the driver.

  Another example? Take your shiny new child of Detroit to the roof of the same eleven-story building, request that the sidewalk be roped oft, then ease it over the edge and stand clear. Do it cleverly enough so that it lands precisely on its nose. Stenographers in the office windows may say “ah” as it descends. Then request your brother-in-law to drive the same model of car and indulge in a head-on collision with both vehicles traveling at a rate of precisely thirty miles an hour.

  The damage to your car as compared to his? Identical.

  Now imagine yourself to be quick enough and strong enough to walk up to the lady of your choice, put your arms around her and lift her off the floor at a velocity, achieved immediately, of ninety feet per second.

  Her shoes, having mass of their own, would remain right there on the floor where she had been standing.

  State troopers find many empty shoes, still laced, on the floors of twisted cars.

  The tricks of mass and momentum are intriguing.

  Mass and momentum are generous maidens. They always give you a bit more than you expect. Car skins are thin. Were they made to withstand the strain of fast impact—and they could be—engines in use could not move them, nor road beds support them.

  At Mach 1 plus, impact can turn the pilot’s body into a smear on metal one molecule thick. Such equations carry the effect of our two maidens far beyond sanity.

  It is within their more ordinary realm, dealing with a million chromium grills, that we know them best.

  Were they to kill with undeviating certainty, the sport would be taken out of it. If effect should always be equal to cause, all traffic would be decorous—tin snails in cautious file.

  But the maidens are capricious. A car is tumbled in bloody ruin into an arroyo and presently a young man climbs unscratched from the heaped dead. Badly dazed, he wears a vague, apologetic smile, a smile of entreaty, in the same order as the tentative tail-waggings of the apologetic puppy. He fingers torn pants and is confused. A young girl in another place is thrown through a whirling canvas top and into a tall locust tree. After the whoof of flame, pale in the sunlight, the birds scold her and she is afraid to climb down from such a tall tree.

  It is in these ways of caprice that the maidens tell us, clearly, that we have nothing to fear. For it will always happen to others, never to you and to me. Should the equation ever be weighted against us by a power of ten thousand to one, we will be thrown clear.

  And so thirty thousand a year are harvested. (Insurance procedures deal with these dead quite readily, as death has a traditional value. It is the maimed who distress adjusters because judgments are often based on the number of years of life expectancy times the earning power which at one time had been anticipated. Death is neater, cheaper—and the forms are not difficult to fill out.)

  The maidens have little sense of drama. As instruments of fate, they have no knack of selection. They kill indiscriminately the brave, the stupid, the young, the sick, the intelligent, the healthy, the cowardly, the old. The flesh of the careful driver tears as readily as the flesh of the fool, though perhaps not quite as often.

  Of late, despite their clumsiness with plot, the maidens have been given wider stages. In the older, narrower theaters a mass of four or six tons and velocities from thirty to sixty had to satisfy them. Now, on broad sets, unique combinations of mass and momentum can be obtained, dealing with scores of tons and velocities up to a hundred and fifty feet per second.

  On these stages there are no good, no bad—only the lucky.

  At one-nineteen P.M. on Monday, May seventeenth, Trooper Shedd, driving amid the customary clot of tamed traffic, Trooper Christie beside him, eastbound, sat higher on the seat, narrowing his eyes.

  “We got a beaut,” he said to Christie. As he accelerated he snatched the mike from the dashboard rack and called in. He was closer, and he had made estimates before. “Five miles west of Blanchard. Bad. I’m not to it yet. Maybe five cars. Shake everybody loose who’s anywhere near here. Ambulances. Fire.” He touched the siren as he came closer. The sound of a siren seemed to settle them down. Traffic control was going to be the toughest part. He began to plan his campaign before he was out of the car.

  chapter 8

  THERE was the sound of busy traffic. And then th
e sudden hard yell of brakes which came at first from a single car and then was joined by the brake yells of the others. The crash was like a great slow thick-throated coughing sound containing bright sharp fragments in abrupt frequencies. As the initial sound of the crash passed its greatest peak, yet before it had died away, the second crash built it back to a yet higher intensity. Then, in diminuendo came the lesser impacts, descending to the recognizability of clash of fenders, rip of white metal. The quake of the shock quivered the roadside trees. Meadow birds circled wildly, crying out.

  John Backum, factory representative, saw the road turn wild in front of him. He wrenched at the wheel, braked into a dry skid, teetered on the edge of control, touched the accelerator delicately after he had slid onto the gravel shoulder. The car lurched and straightened out and he drove along open pavement, his face suddenly wet, knees hollow, hands cramped with strain. An inch. Maybe less than an inch. The momentum of the car drifted it along. He gave it a little bit of gas. He tried to look back. He could not see anything.

  He kept going. A thought kept nagging at him and he tried to answer it. Finally he answered it aloud. “Nothing I could do. Not a thing.” The distant cry of a siren made him feel better.

  He pulled into a gas station. When the attendant came over he said, “There’s just been a hell of a crash back there a mile or so. I damn near got clobbered.”

  The dull-eyed attendant refused to be impressed. While his tank was being filled Backum went into the men’s room. Before he left he found himself staring intently at his face in the mirror.

  Herbert Merrit, with wife beside him, children and too much luggage in the rear seat, was worrying about the new job, the rented house, the reliability of the moving company, when traffic ahead of him broke up into crazy, hurtling, jagged projectiles. A black Ford spun around directly in his path. Off to his left there was a massive crash and a big blue car rebounded, upside down, angling toward him. His reactions froze and he sped by the spinning Ford, miraculously passing it when the long dimension of it was parallel to his own car. Something thudded the right rear corner of his car solidly as he went through.

  He drove several hundred feet and pulled off on the shoulder. The children were yelping with excitement and staring out the rear window. Bobby rolled the side window down and leaned out so he could see better.

  His wife was trembling. “Drive on, Herb. Please drive on. I don’t want the children to see it.”

  “I’ve got to see what the damage is.”

  He got out and looked at the right rear. The fender was banged in against the wheel and the hub cap was dented and the corner of the bumper was bent out and torn. He looked back. The Ford he had missed had spun all the way across the road and had come to rest against a light pole. The skid had rubbed two tires off the rims. The door had burst open and a woman lay with her feet up among the pedals and her head near the base of the pole. She didn’t look like a woman at all. He thought she looked like a dummy or a rag or something.

  His wife called him and he got back in the car. He wondered about the legal aspects of leaving the scene of an accident. But it certainly wasn’t as though it were a deserted road. He heard the siren and looked back and saw the police car.

  “Please,” his wife said. “Please.” He drove on. The kids kept looking as long as there was anything to see.

  Ben Hester had driven home to lunch in Blanchard and he was on his way back to the lumberyard. He was a hundred yards behind the blue Cad when he saw it leap the curbing, out of control. He glanced behind him as he put on the brakes. The road was clear behind him. As he braked, he saw the inevitable development of catastrophe. The blue car bucked and dug the right corner into the earth in the center strip. Ben saw the maroon Plymouth behind the Cadillac fighting for control and room. The center lane car didn’t see or didn’t understand the emergency. The Plymouth smacked the rear end of the Cadillac a glancing blow as it tried to eel through the gap. He saw it miss the center lane car, passing in front of it, and rocket directly toward a big semi. By then he was close enough to see it too well. The truck driver turned off. The maroon Plymouth went prancing and bouncing out into the wide fields. The truck nose dropped, drove hard into the concrete wall, sledged off a massive piece of it. Cab, trailer and broken wall fell ten feet, trailer telescoping the cab and then settling over onto its side propped up at an angle against the broken wall.

  Ben Hester did not see what happened in the lanes on the far side of the highway. He knew it was bad and at the moment he did not care. He left his car and ran for the cab of the big semi. Any man who did what that driver had done, did it so deliberately, deserved every chance anybody could give him.

  Joanna Bergson, driving her father’s pickup truck, saw what happened in the eastbound lanes. She put on her brakes the moment it began. She saw the catapulting Cadillac nudged by a westbound car behind it. She saw the brown Chrysler, traveling very fast, sideswipe the black Ford and spin it away before smashing head on into the shark lunge of the heavy convertible. She saw the green Oldsmobile, trapped, try to cut left around the brown Chrysler and add its impact to the helpless length of the blue convertible. The blunt smash of the Chrysler had halted the momentum of the convertible. The Olds hit it and the force of impact tripped the Olds over so that it rolled once, end for end and twice on its side, balancing as though by intent on the center strip before coming to rest on the left side. The Cadillac, torn free of the crumpled Chrysler by the impact of the Olds, slid upside down out across the center lane. With wheels locked, the pickup slid forward and gave the upside-down car a final gentle nudge as they both came to rest. She had seen the skitter and twist of the cars which managed to shy away from impact. The brake sounds still continued behind her. There was a gnash of fenders and a banging of bumpers and then the sounds were gone. Cars pulled over onto the shoulder. Flame bloomed along the hood of the green Olds. She backed away from the upside-down car. She stopped and sat there, her face in her hands, motor running.

  Transcription from tape:

  Blue: What is this, anyway? I don’t want to get mixed up in any kind of law stuff. I don’t want to talk into this thing.

  Garrard: This won’t be used in any civil or criminal action. I’m from the State Highway Commission. We want to know how and why this thing happened. I’m interviewing several people. Trooper Shedd told me you saw how it happened. He also said you did a good job, helping.

  Blue: I did what I could.

  Garrard: Could I have your name, occupation, and reason for travel, please.

  Blue: Daniel J. Blue. I’m heading east. I got that big GMC you maybe saw outside the station here. I’m with Felio Brothers Construction Company. We finished a job and we’re moving the equipment to a new job near Providence. I sit high in that thing so I got a pretty good look. But I didn’t see exactly how it happened.

  Garrard: What did you see?

  Blue: Well, the first thing I saw was that blue Caddy convertible jumping across the center strip. I don’t know how he got out of control, and I don’t know how it happened that truck cracked up over there or that Plymouth got the hell and gone out in that field. I just saw this side. The Caddy came over right into a mess of fast traffic. He come right at that Chrysler. The Chrysler tried to dodge and smacked the Ford and then sloughed into the Caddy. The guy behind the Chrysler had no place to go. He tried to cut around to the left and piled right into the same mess and went rolling down the middle. That Ford was spinning and everybody managed to miss it and then it smacked that pole.

  Garrard: Would you say the speed of the cars involved was excessive?

  Blue: I couldn’t say. I think that Chrysler was boiling along pretty good. I think the others were about average. If you fellows want something to blame, how about that curb on the center strip?

  Garrard: What did you do?

  Blue: I stopped my truck and got out and ran toward the green Olds. I ran right by a girl in a pickup who’d come awful close to trouble. I figured the Olds needed h
elp most because the fire started there. I got up on it and got the door open. There was a guy trying to get out. He acted like he didn’t know where he was. I helped him out and he slid down over the curve of the roof and fell, but he got up okay. There were two others in there. One was a girl. Nobody made a damn move to come help me. I got her wrist and pulled until I got a look at her head. Then I let her go because I knew looking at her that there wasn’t any point wasting time on her. It started getting damn hot. I got hold of the guy but he was wedged in. I think he was wiggling a little. I can’t be certain. Then it just got too damn hot. I couldn’t stand it. I had to get off there. That’s when I got burned. A guy came up with a little bit of a fire extinguisher. It did about as much good as if he… (deleted from transcription).

  Canard: What happened then?

  Blue: The troopers come about that time. One of them started getting traffic straightened out so the ambulances and fire wagon could get in. The other one and I started taking the people out of the Chrysler and laying them out on the road. The trooper got sick before we got the last one and then the first ambulance came, and more troopers. I figured everything was under control. I was going to get back in my truck and see if I could get out of there. Then my face started to hurt and after I got a look at it, I went back to see those ambulance guys.

  Recommendations appended to accident report submitted by Trooper Shedd:

  1. It is recommended that heavy duty jacks be carried by all road patrol cars. Such jacks would have been invaluable in conducting rescue operations in regard to the driver of the Quin-State truck.