by Nick Arvin
June passed into July, and Ellis still didn’t have any opportunities to see her, until the company picnic.
The picnics were an annual, vaguely ritualised event where cold catered food lay on picnic tables and Ellis’s colleagues stood drinking beer from cans or shepherding their smaller children through the adjacent playground equipment and the company CEO stood on a cooler to give a short, vacant speech. Heather generally skipped company events, but this year she made an appearance, and Ellis smiled at her and said, ‘Hello,’ and added, ‘Boggs told me about your father. I was really sorry to hear about it.’
‘Thank you,’ she said.
Then he avoided her. Her presence made him anxious and wretched and a little ecstatic with secret knowledge. There were about thirty people on hand, most of the company staff. He talked and joked with the other engineers and the administrative personnel. He helped set up a volleyball net and hit the ball over a few times. He ate cold barbecued ribs, potato salad, and coleslaw with too much mayonnaise.
Boggs had wandered off and stood at the top of a grassy hill, alone, hands in pockets, looking away. The others had gathered in cliques of three or four, talking for some reason in hushed tones, and a half-dozen played volleyball. One of the newer engineers stood slouching at the edges, as if wishing someone would invite him to dance. Heather had vanished.
Ellis started up the hill, trying to think of something to say that would make Boggs laugh. Boggs seemed to be looking at his feet. ‘Hey,’ Ellis called, and Boggs looked around, with a peculiar twist in his lips. Then he smiled, but too widely. And Ellis saw that Boggs wasn’t alone, that Heather lay in the grass at his feet.
Ellis wanted to veer away, but it didn’t seem plausible that he’d been heading anywhere else. Heather raised herself. ‘Hi, Ellis,’ she said. ‘I was telling John that he should lie down and look at the sky with me.’
‘She claims that I’ve never seen it before,’ Boggs said.
Heather settled back into the grass. ‘I’m just saying.’
‘Come on,’ Boggs said to Ellis, grumbling, lowering himself. ‘Lie down. So I don’t feel like I’m the only idiot.’
Lying side by side on the grass, Heather and Boggs looked as if they’d fallen from the sky. Boggs twitched his legs around. Ellis glanced back toward the picnic site, but then he lay down, beside Heather.
‘I haven’t done this since I was seven,’ Boggs said.
Heather said, ‘Just, quiet. Watch.’
The grass bristled coolly on Ellis’s back, and the air here smelled wormy and sharp. In the south a rough head of cumulus expanded rapidly, changing form with unnerving speed. Below it, and all across the sky, scrims of haze moved from west to east. After a minute the entire sky began to advance and recede slightly before him.
‘You can’t paint it or photograph it,’ Heather said. ‘Canvases aren’t big enough, and it’s all about the third dimension anyway.’ She moved her arm slightly, and the back of her hand came into contact with Ellis’s hand.
After a minute Boggs said, ‘Hey, Ellis, you’ve read Chekhov?’
‘A few of the stories,’ Ellis said.
‘His plays are better,’ Boggs said. ‘Uncle Vanya is on the schedule at the university, in a couple weeks, three weeks, something like that. I’m going to make Heather come with me. You want to see it? For you, it’s optional.’
‘I don’t know -’ Ellis said. Then he began coughing, hard, for time to formulate an excuse.
‘Inhale a grasshopper?’ Boggs asked.
‘It would be great if you’d come,’ Heather said. ‘It’s running for a couple of weeks. I’m sure we can find a day that works.’
Ellis, set aback, said, ‘OK.’ Then he lay transfixed, waiting with shallow breaths for the next thing. Heather’s hand still touched his.
‘Good,’ Boggs said.
A grass blade niggled his ankle, and a breeze shifted over his face, but these were only background to the touch of her hand on his, the point of pressure and warmth.
‘I’m still pissed off about that depo last week,’ Boggs said. ‘Have you read the transcript?’
‘Not yet,’ Ellis said.
‘I’ll let you try to guess the point in there when he threw his pen at me. The fucker.’
Ellis pressed her hand. She, almost imperceptibly, pressed back. The grass clutched at him while the hillside careered.
Boggs said, ‘When the wind shifts, I can smell the stink of that barbecue.’ He sat up. Heather’s hand departed. ‘I need to stop at the office for a file,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you at the airport tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow’s Monday already,’ Ellis said.
From the ground he watched Boggs and Heather rise. Their faces appeared against the sky. He couldn’t read Heather’s expression. ‘I’m going to stay here,’ he said. ‘I like this.’
‘Right on. Sleep here if you want,’ Boggs said. ‘Just be sure to get up in time to get to the airport. We’re only doing inspections. You don’t need to change clothes or anything.’
Heather gestured with one hand. Ellis listened to their steps in the grass until even that faint sound was lost.
His inspections with Boggs the next day went fine. One of the accident’s victims had been killed by a burning semi-trailer loaded with Life Savers candy, which inspired a few jokes. Life Takers. Life Enders. Life Whackers. Boggs claimed that the name and the hole in the candy had been inspired after a candy-maker’s kid choked to death on a mint.
PART TWO: POINT OF INFLECTION
3.
ELLIS PLUNGED DOWN a ramp into interstate traffic, merged left, and was moving with the great flows of red and white lights when his phone rang and Heather asked from it, ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m coming.’
‘Are you going to be late?’
‘I won’t miss the start,’ he said, although, when he glanced at the glowing digits of the clock in the instrument panel, he wondered. ‘I have my ticket. You and Boggs can go in.’
‘John isn’t here either. His plane was delayed.’
‘Then why are you yelling at me?’
‘I’m not yelling. It’s only that I hoped to see you first.’
‘OK. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’
As they hung up, he came off the interstate and when traffic slowed he made himself keep away from the bumper of the car ahead. Over the right side of the road floated an enormous sepia-toned semicircle moon. Chekhov. Ellis didn’t care about the play, and he didn’t like this arrangement – his sense of guilt was curling itself tight at the prospect of seeing Boggs and Heather together. But Heather had re-expressed that she wanted him to come, and when he thought of skipping the event entirely his guilt wrapped around and urged him onward. He approached down into the city on a road with two lanes in either direction, and he drove in the left lane. Passing clusters of houses and apartment buildings made orangey by sodium lamps, his phone rang, and he thought it would be Heather again, but when he looked at the screen he frowned. On the third ring he answered. ‘Boggs, are you with Heather?’
‘She’s already at the theatre,’ Boggs said. ‘We drove separately. My connecting flight was late. Actually, I think she probably could have given me a ride, but she said she wanted to stop at the store.’
‘I could’ve picked you up. I can’t believe we’re all driving to the same place in separate cars.’
‘Welcome to America. Where are you?’
‘I’m just passing University Street.’ He had almost reached the theatre, but he would have to circle past to reach the parking lot. ‘Should I be wearing a tie for this?’
‘I hope not. I’m not wearing one. You’re running a little behind me. Look for us in the lobby.’
‘Sure.’
‘Bye.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Oh, wait, wait, Ellis,’ Boggs said.
The light turned yellow, and in front of Ellis an older model C/K 1500 pickup began braking. Ellis cursed under his breath and glanced to t
he right lane for an opening. Mud was spattered over the rear of the pickup, so that the brake lamps glowed a strange, irregular pattern through clumps of earth. Then the driver changed his mind, and the pickup accelerated. Ellis, muttering again, followed through the intersection as the light went to red.
‘What are you mumbling about?’
‘Traffic,’ Ellis said.
‘On the Matteson job,’ Boggs said, ‘I was asked if we can calculate the Volvo’s speed at the time he passed that thing, the warning sign -’
In later memory the instants now began to stretch apart, as if someone had touched a finger on a turning phonograph. On either side of the street people moved along the sidewalks, and, although Ellis didn’t see Boggs’s tall shape, through the phone he heard vehicles passing near Boggs. The columned face of the theatre imposed itself into view on the right. The mottled brake lamps of the pickup lit again. Ellis grunted, ‘Turn signal, jerk.’ He glanced over his shoulder and swung into the right lane to pass. His car hesitated for a few tenths of a second before it gave a rush of acceleration. In the left lane the pickup continued to slow, and Ellis glimpsed an unusual motion ahead. Unsure of what he had seen, of size or shape or location or direction, he lifted off the gas.
‘- with the flashing -’ Boggs said. Traffic noise cut sharply behind his words.
Ellis still trailed to the right of the pickup when the motion appeared again, ahead and on the left, nearer now, on the edge of the pattern of pale light cast by his headlamps, a moving object, a figure, hunched, walking rapidly into Ellis’s lane. A sudden sensation of hopeless drowning seized Ellis – he fumbled for the brake pedal, turned the wheel to the right, not too hard, aware of people on the sidewalk. He could see that he didn’t have nearly enough distance to stop. But there remained a chance, if the shape in the street stepped back.
But the figure moved, head down, with deliberate speed. A tall, thick male figure in dark clothing.
‘- light -’ Boggs said.
‘Boggs!’ Ellis screamed into his phone, as he at last was able to get his foot down on the brake pedal. The pace of the pedestrian in the street faltered, his head turning, his mouth glinting. ABS kicked the brake pedal up against the pressure of Ellis’s foot. He dropped his phone reaching to put both hands on the steering wheel and fought down against the ABS. The figure in the street leaned back the way he had come, but nothing could be done now. Ellis already could not see the man’s feet, obscured by the hood of the car.
With a crack of breaking bone and plastic and a slight shudder of the car – amid the continuing ABS-driven stutter and squall of the tyres – the pedestrian swung sideways, pivoting unnaturally at knee height, and came down on the hood, striking sheet metal with hip, elbow, shoulder, a calamitous metallic noise, and he balanced there an instant that went long, one leg up in the air, ribs and shoulder on the hood, an arm thrown out, his head approaching the windshield. Then Ellis shut his eyes. He also began to scream. But over his own scream he heard the violent pop of the windshield, chased by the patter of glass on his hands and chest. A shard bounced off the closed lid of one eye. An impact sounded on the roof.
He looked. He could see ahead only through a vertical area of unbroken glass on the left and a small, sagging, jagged hole where the pedestrian’s head had struck, and there the pedestrian pin-wheeled through the space lit by the headlamps, hair on end, pant legs and jacket aflutter, flinging dark blood from a wound in the knee. The legs came down against the road one after the other and crumpled, and then he was out of sight. Cool air streamed through the gap in the windshield, and Ellis felt a painful straining of his leg against the brake pedal and the shape of the pedal underfoot while it jerked with animal movements, then chattered a last time, and the car lurched and halted. Ellis sat gasping, hands still on the steering wheel, foot still hard on the brake pedal. Through the hole in the windshield he saw that he had stopped at an angle, with his right front wheel against the kerb. When he closed his mouth, he gagged. He coughed, worked a chip of glass forward, and spit it. ‘Boggs?’ he said.
He reached into his mouth to drag out another fragment and looked at the shape of it – a tiny shining cube on the end of his finger – with a sense of incomplete comprehension. He thought: Boggs Boggs Boggs.
A horn droned. He unbuckled his seat belt and stood out of the car. An SUV had struck the rear of the muddy pickup, and presumably the interminable horn was the SUV’s. The SUV had begun to turn in an attempt to avoid the pickup, and it sat at perhaps a thirty-five-degree angle to the lane lines. That collision didn’t look very severe. Vehicles were stopping behind the SUV, while in the opposite lanes cars moved by slowly. Ellis saw all of this in a glance, as well as the many stark lights along the roadway, the shining jewels of tempered glass at his feet, and on the sidewalk an elderly man who gazed at him with an expression of curiosity. A stranger, who had just witnessed an accident. Ellis watched the man watch him, until he recalled again what had happened – the figure in the street, the sound of traffic behind Boggs’s voice on the phone. He moved forward. At first he saw nothing, only open lane, and he had a surge of hope, that perhaps he had somehow imagined matters to be much worse than they actually were.
But then he looked further ahead. He hadn’t understood how far the pedestrian had been propelled by the collision. The man lay beside the kerb, on his side, in a shadowy interval between the overhead lights, alone, his legs inhumanly twisted. Centrifugal effects had thrown his shoes from him and pulled his socks halfway off. Ellis approached at a staggering run. Looking now at the man and his clothes, he began for the first time to understand that this might not be Boggs. The dark made it difficult to be certain, but the man’s hair appeared lighter than Boggs’s, he looked thinner through the trunk of the body, and Ellis hoped, Let it not be Boggs. This was the only thing he wanted. The man’s face pressed the street. Ellis fell to his knees. The man had a beard, but more trim and again of lighter colour than Boggs’s. Greyed. This man was probably twenty or thirty years older than Boggs, and Ellis nearly laughed.
A woman crouched beside him. She had round spectacles and small fat hands. Ellis said to her, ‘I think he’s dead.’
‘I’m a nurse,’ she said and edged him aside.
He sat on the grass between the kerb and the sidewalk with his knees to his chest. He rocked forward and back, his sense of relief already gone. A broken body lay on the ground, and it seemed clear to him that in his impatience he had killed a man. He tried to recall the decision to pass the pickup on the right – it had hardly been a decision. He had seen the situation and responded. Watching the nurse as she touched and manipulated the man, he felt a great deal collapse on him until it seemed he should be blinded or deafened, or perhaps the world should cease altogether.
‘He has a heartbeat.’ The nurse glanced over. ‘Can you find a blanket? Something to cover him?’
Ellis stood and took a step backward. He turned to the sidewalk, where a number of people had gathered. One moved toward him, and Ellis looked at the approaching figure with a curious fractional delay between perception and understanding: Boggs, wearing a dark blue jacket and a white shirt open at the collar, reaching toward Ellis. ‘I thought it was you,’ Ellis said. ‘I thought I hit you.’
‘I’m fine.’ Boggs touched him on the shoulder. ‘Although I might be sick. That poor guy’s legs. Are you OK?’
‘I went to pass on the right, and when I got on the brakes it was too late. I hit him pretty hard. Probably thirty-five, forty miles an hour.’
Boggs nodded. ‘I saw your car.’
‘There’s a nurse. She wants something to put over him.’
Boggs pulled off his jacket. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Take it. Excuse me. I’m really sorry, but I’m going to be sick.’
Ellis took the jacket and moved toward the fallen man, but several people now huddled and crouched there. ‘Give us room,’ the nurse said.
Ellis tapped a young man on the shoulder, and the jacket was handed down.
Ellis stood peering, but because of the others he could see little. ‘How is he?’ he called. No one replied. He tried to press in, but an elbow nudged him away, and he lost resolve. Traffic moved in the opposite lanes, people walked by on the sidewalks. The continued progression of time was surreal. Where had Boggs gone to be sick? He looked down at himself, at the clean, unmarked length of his clothes. The muscles of his right leg ached from pressing the brake pedal.
He returned to his car and stood next to it – a hole smashed into the windshield, a shallow dent in the hood. The windshield’s shatterproof glass shaped itself around the hole like a stiff, glittering fabric. It seemed as if a kind of error had been made in putting him into the centre of this accident, if only he could work out the origin of the error and remedy it, he would now be in the theatre, a little anxious, a little bored.
The SUV’s horn – which had continued to drone on and Ellis had forgotten – stopped. A police car sidled up beside the pedestrian, lights orbiting.
Peering into the glare thrown by the headlamps of waiting cars, he could make out small intermittent markings made by the pulsing of his ABS. He moved back along the street, counting paces. He estimated that he had braked for almost thirty feet before the approximate point of impact, and then for another eighty feet prior to coming to a stop. Using these distances and a standard friction factor, he mentally calculated that he had been travelling at about 50 mph when he began braking, and he had been travelling at around 40 mph when he hit the pedestrian, assuming that he had correctly estimated the location where his car met the pedestrian – no physical evidence of that impact showed on the roadway, and he could only make a guess from memory.
The measuring and calculating helped to calm and structure his thoughts. He stood at the open door of his car waiting for the police, examining a shallow dent on the roof, where the man’s leg or arm or hip had struck before he was thrown forward. He heard a short shrill warbling, an alien sound difficult to connect with anything in the field of reality. It frightened him a little, and only after it had sung out several times did he realise: his cellphone. He found it on the floor of the car. ‘Heather?’