Now they sat and waited to find out how expensive the trouble would be. They had found out about the truck driver. And the other deaths.
Joyce said, “Now you’re frowning.”
“Am I? I was thinking of that man Cherrik.”
“And frowning?”
“It’s a funny situation. I mean, what he did. Present from a stranger. Certainly he had a choice. He would have been shaken up a little and that was all. In a funny way I resent his making that choice so automatically. He gave us life and gave himself death. That simply. He didn’t know us. There was no weighing of pro and con. Maybe it’s the instinctiveness of it I resent. Or maybe I just resent facing the realization that there lived a man who could make that choice.”
“Made that choice right after you said so firmly that people stink.”
“Don’t rub it in, girl. I’m trying to be frank. I’m trying to tell you everything in my head. I sense the presence of an obligation. See what I mean? Gift of life, so the obligation is to use it in a manner worthy of the giving. That’s oppressive, don’t you think? It makes your life something not quite your own. You have to be worthy of a gesture.”
“Isn’t gesture too little a word?”
“Yes. More than that. A choice. A… an instinctive way of thinking and reacting. I don’t know. Maybe I think too much. Now I find myself thinking in terms of some sort of cosmic scales, with his death on one side and our life on the other. So that should we live meanly, do small things, hateful things, the scale will be out of balance. And that, of course, is a ridiculous and quasi-sentimental way to look at it.”
She touched his hand, tilted her head to one side as she looked at him. “Is it? Why not accept it that way, Paul? A second choice. For us. Would it be… wrong or bad to be slightly mystic about it? Is there anything foolish about trying to live up to something?”
“N-no, I wouldn’t say that exactly, but what he did was part of a chain of events that had nothing to do with us. It was the blue car that went out of control. I drove as well as I could.”
“Why didn’t the chain of events have anything to do with us? Remember lunch? It got pretty dreadful, didn’t it?”
“Yes. I’m sorry about that.”
“I don’t mean for you to be sorry. While we were eating I saw a woman have dessert. Ice cream with fudge sauce. It looked heavenly. I decided I wanted some. Then we bickered and I lost my appetite. I decided not to have it. So we were at that precise place on the highway because we quarreled. Otherwise, we would have been about ready to pay the check.”
“Wait a minute! We wouldn’t be on this trip if things hadn’t started to go sour.”
“I know that. And, darling, I know we wouldn’t be together at all if I hadn’t changed jobs and gone to work with the insurance company, or if my father never met my mother, or if, or if, or if. Goodness, there are billions of ifs going all the way back to the dawn of time that put us finally right there, in front of that truck. But can you say there was absolutely no free will involved? Didn’t we make some choices that put us in front of that truck?”
He thought it over. “Yes. Of course.”
“So is it all right if I accept that… oppressive responsibility you mentioned? If I want to accept it?”
He smiled. “But it doesn’t fit you. You would live up to it anyway.”
“Oh, I do lots of hideous little things, and think of awful things.”
“It fits me better than you. Look, be patient with me. I learned something today. There are still a thousand rough edges. But I’m going to try.”
They looked into each other’s eyes. He looked at his watch and saw that it was time and they went over to the garage. The mechanics had left. The service manager was sorting work orders. The garage was silent.
“Yes?”
“My name is Conklin. You told us to come back and…”
“Oh, sure. The Plymouth. Here’s the bad news. You’ll need a new front left fender, new grill and new radiator. And new springs and shocks in the front end, new steering arms, king pin, and a new left front wheel. The frame isn’t sprung, and there’s no rear end damage. It looks like about four hundred bucks. Have you got collision?”
“Hundred dollar deductible.”
“Better wire your insurance company. And I see you got a personal injury, lady. There’ll be death claims and total loss stuff floating around, but don’t let them brush you off. This place will be crawling with adjusters tomorrow.”
“How long will it take for our car?”
“If you want to authorize me to go ahead, I can maybe have it for you by noon Thursday. Will that be okay? I can’t do any better.”
“I guess it will have to be. Can you recommend a place to stay?”
“There’s a lot of good motels. Try the Night Wind. There’s a chance they’re not full up yet. Here’s the phone. It’s in the book. They’re about a half-mile east of here, on the right.”
He handed Joyce the phone book. “You try while I get what we need out of the car.”
The car was in back of the garage. The yard was fenced. The burned car was in a corner of the yard. The blue Cadillac was parked beside their car. The service manager came out back with him. “Isn’t that Cad a mess though? Total loss. We can strip a few hundred bucks off it, but that’s all. Can’t get even that much out of the Olds.”
“What will you do with them?”
“We’ll make a bid. Then it’s up to the insurance adjusters. If they think they can get more, they can move them out. Say, if you folks want a ride to the motel, I’ll be through here in another five minutes.”
“We’d appreciate it,” Paul said.
When he went back in, carrying the two suitcases, Joyce said that the Night Wind was holding a double for them. After a short wait, the service manager dropped them off. Paul explained about the car and about wanting the room for three nights to the woman behind the desk. The room was large and attractive.
Paul sat on the bed and smoked a cigarette while Joyce busied herself with unpacking, hanging their clothes up. He leaned back on one elbow and watched the slim quick body of his wife as she walked quickly back and forth, humming to herself.
“Leg all right?” he asked.
“Doesn’t hurt a bit, dear.”
She had taken off the stained sandal and she looked at it ruefully, and then bent her knee and looked back down over her shoulder at the dark mark of blood caked on the sole of her slim foot. She took off her blouse and went padding into the bathroom in bra and skirt, closing the door behind her. Paul, watching her, had felt the growth of a truly astonishing desire for her, stronger, sharper, deeper than it had ever been before. His hand shook as he lifted the cigarette to his lips for a last drag before putting it out in the glass ashtray on the night stand between the beds.
When she came out of the bathroom she gave him her quick smile and went to the dressing table and sat there, very straight, and began to brush her dark hair, looking at herself gravely. With her arms high, her breasts, shiny in white nylon, stood out sharply, lifting with the stroke of the brush. The bra strap bit lightly into the velvet of her back.
“Joyce.” His voice was rusty, arresting, and the after-tone of it seemed to hang in the air of the quiet room. She turned quickly, brush poised and still in the air, dark hair falling about her face, soft to her bare shoulders. She looked at him for a long moment of awareness, lips parting and face changing. She laid the brush down on the glass top of the dressing table with a tiny click of plastic against glass. She stood up, facing him, her eyes downcast, and walked slowly toward him stopping just out of his reach, as if this were, in a sense, an offering.
She reached back and unhooked the bra, let it slide down her arms and drop to the floor. She did not look directly at him. Her breasts were firm, sharp, tipped with duskiness. Still she did not look at him. She kept her eyes turned shyly away as she stood there before him, offering warmth and richness.
She advanced toward him. He was s
itting on the edge of the bed. He pulled her close, his arms around her. Her body was cool, warming under his hands.
They were there together in the slow dusk, quickly and slowly, strongly and tenderly, with sureness, and awareness and recognition. They were there while the coming of night hushed the fast traffic sounds, and the trucks snored westward, and the lights, coming through the slots of the blinds, tracked across the ceiling and made small sparks in her wide, wide eyes.
Afterward they lay in that special quiet place of the shared cigarette, the slowing heart, the long deep sigh that would catch a bit, as with a memory of tears.
“They say it does this,” he said. “Brush too close to the skirts of death. Then everything has a special high wild flavor, a special spice.”
“Mmm,” she said.
“You know, honey, I keep getting amused at myself. Subjection to pure corn. A moment of realization. Me! A big fat juicy moment of realization—you know—past life spinning before my eyes.”
“Mmm.”
“Now I know what that moment of realization is like. It’s like this. My vision was diffused. Like looking at everything from several different angles at once, with the lenses all out of focus so that things overlapped and I couldn’t see any single thing in clear outline. Then click. Something turned all the knurled knobs and the lenses were in focus and everything was bright and clear the way it should have been all along.”
“Mmmm-hmmm.”
“Like needing a change of glasses and not knowing it. Then getting the new pair and finding that trees are not green blobs, finding they have individual leaves.”
He started to butt the cigarette and she caught his wrist and took a last drag.
“Gosh, I’m so hungry I could bark like a dog,” she said. He laughed softly. They got dressed and went out to eat.
chapter 12
DEVLIN Jamison was awakened in the very early morning by a starched nurse who took the opportunity presented by his first vague word to put the chill thermometer under his tongue. She took his wrist and stood, looking at her watch, moving her lips as she counted. She was a wide swarthy woman with an ugly good-tempered face. She dropped his wrist and walked to the window and looked out at the morning. After a time she returned to the bed, took the thermometer and took it toward the window to read it before shaking it down.
As wakefulness reached down through his body, Jamison became aware of a veritable symphony of aches and stiffnesses. Once upon a time he had fallen, with full pack and carbine, from a landing net into a Higgins boat. The awakening on the subsequent morning had been much like this one.
He looked down through a portal in his mind and saw the crash of the blue car, saw himself sailing through space. He closed the portal quickly. He did not want to think about it yet. The sedative had stuffed his head with cotton waste. It pressed dryly against the backs of his eyes and frayed into his throat.
Through another portal Gina lay waxen, banked with flowers. He closed that opening also.
“How do we feel this morning?” the nurse asked.
“I don’t know about you. I feel like a hammered thumb—all over.”
“The doctor will see you after breakfast,” she said, and rustled out.
When she had gone he looked around at the room. It was a pleasant room. Through the window he could see elm leaves and an edge of morning meadow. He laboriously pushed the covers aside. He was in a short hospital gown. It took cursings and prayers and many low gasps of pain before he had both feet flat on the floor. On one side of his body where he was not bandaged, he was blue. His chest was taped, one finger splinted. He heaved himself to his feet. With each move, abused muscles creaked, rubbed dryly. He went over and looked out the window.
He could see an old house, a brown puppy, and a small girl on a yellow tricycle. A woman came out on the porch and shaded her eyes. The small girl turned the tricycle around and pedaled back around the corner of the house and the woman went inside.
He stood with feet planted, opened the portal in his mind and let the memories flood in. He remembered the thumping of the front end, the blowout and the loss of control. He squeezed his eyes shut and hit his fist lightly against the window frame. He wanted a hole to open and swallow him up without trace. He wanted to hide from the eyes of every man. He felt sick with regret—and shame. People had died because he had been too careless, too distracted to do anything about his car.
He was still at the window when the nurse came with the breakfast cart. She scolded him back into bed, helped him lift his sore legs onto the bed. He barely noticed her, so deep was his depression. He ate little.
Dr. Budischon arrived at nine. He checked Jamison over. “I guess you can get up any time. I understand they brought your luggage over last night. I’ll have someone bring it here. The personal things we took out of your clothing are in the office. Your clothes were ruined.”
“I remember that. Did you contact Mr. Seiver?”
“Yes. He said he’d be here today. He’ll expect to find you here. You’re perfectly welcome to stay, of course, until he arrives.”
“Doctor, I’m… a little fuzzy on what happened to the other people involved. Could you tell me… how bad it was?”
“There were six killed, Mr. Jamison. And two others injured. The two injured are here. One of them is in the next room, in fact.”
“Six,” Jamison said softly. He kept his eyes shut while Budischon explained who they were, and the relationships.
After a while the doctor left. A nurse brought his bags in and told him that the bath was diagonally across the hall. She left him a big towel. It took Jamison a long time to get cleaned up, shaved and dressed. It was not only the difficulty of movement, but also the way he kept getting lost in thought. He caught himself standing with necktie in hand and realized he had been standing there for a long time. The splinted finger made him awkward and slow.
When he was dressed he closed his bags and sat in the armchair by the window and waited.
Roger Seiver came into the room with another man at eleven-thirty. Roger was a big rawboned man with lank blond hair. He had a trick of emphasizing statements with a jerk of his head that threw the blond hair forward. He would immediately smooth it back with both hands. He had a loose mouth, tiny blue eyes, a honking adenoidal laugh. He was a party clown of wide repute, and an exceptionally clever lawyer.
He came right to Jamison’s chair, big hand outstretched. “No, don’t try to get up, fella. They told me out front you took quite a shaking up. Dev, I want you to meet Hal André. He’s with the Claims Department of Fidelity Mutual.”
André was a young-old man with a black brush cut, a hard brown simian face, enormous black eyebrows. He was smallish, and handled himself with the trimness of the ex-athlete. His hand, in Dev’s, was small, hard and dry.
Roger Seiver took the straight chair and André closed the door and sat on the bed. Roger said, “Well, it looks like you had some trouble, fella.”
“More than that.”
“After I got the phone call I phoned the State Police here and got a briefing. Then I got hold of Bill. I remembered he handles your insurance. He phoned the home office and they sent Hal André down and he flew down with me this morning. We both want to get straightened away on how this thing happened.”
André smiled and said, “Mr. Jamison, your liability policy, the personal liability amount is quarter-million, half-million. Bill Howard was quite correct in selling you that quantity. It isn’t much more expensive than fifty, one hundred. You can understand how, in a situation like this, we try to get on the job as quickly as we can. Once you give me the information, I’ll go out and try to obtain releases, offering cash settlements if it turns out that you could be considered in any way to blame. We’ve discovered that if we move fast on these things, we come out better. We don’t like to have anything go to trial if we can help it.”
“I’m to blame for the whole thing,” Jamison said.
André shifted uneasily
and glanced at Seiver. Roger said, “Let’s not jump too fast, Dev.”
“It’s perfectly simple. I had a bad thump in the front end. I stopped but they couldn’t do anything about it. They recommended a place. I thought it was alignment or balance. It must have been a broken casing, a blister on the right front tire. I was negligent. I kept running on it. It blew and I lost control and killed those people.”
“Now wait a minute, Mr. Jamison,” André said sharply. “Were you drinking?”
“No.”
“Were you exceeding the speed limit?”
“Yes. A car was coming up behind me. I swung out and stepped on it to get by and get out of his way.”
“How fast were you going?”
“Seventy, I’d say.”
“Did you look at your speedometer while passing?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You could have been going sixty then.”
“I know I wasn’t.”
“But unless you looked at the speedometer, you can’t be certain. I brought your file along, Mr. Jamison. Our records show that you have been insured with us for eight years. On your original application you stated that you had never had an accident with damages in excess of one hundred dollars. Is that correct?”
“Of course.”
“What is your arrest record for traffic violations?”
“Twice. Once for passing a boulevard stop. The grass was so high I didn’t see the stop sign. I just slowed down and then went on. That was in fifty-nine. I was stopped for speeding in sixty-one. In Colonial Heights, Virginia, outside of Petersburg. I was going thirty-eight in a thirty-five-mile zone.”
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