by Nick Arvin
Ellis started that way. The sun balanced on the horizon and cast a street of dazzle over the water, and the distant figure resolved into a woman in a bikini top stooping to collect stones. Past her the beach lay empty. Ellis turned back and a wind gusted from the lake and pulled his clothes out against his body. Inland, campfires glowed amid the trees, faint and skittish.
At the boat ramp he stood looking at the water, indigo under a cavernous twilight, listening as the waves moved and ticked stones against one another, thinking of what he had done to the stranger, James Dell, and to his friend, Boggs, and he felt that the condition of his soul, if he granted that such a thing existed, was wretched and very possibly beyond repair. That he would have been glad to trade places with James Dell in his hospital bed.
He drove away from the lake, out of the park, through the murk of the forest, between the open dark fields. At the intersection where the earth movers had rid the world of the motel that he remembered, a startled rabbit bolted and raced toward the piles of dirt.
He turned, but stopped on the shoulder. The night had absorbed the twilight and stars glowed. He attempted to phone Boggs, but there was no answer. He sat with a gnawing in his chest, and when he could not bear to be still any longer, he stood out of the minivan. A single overhead street light cast a thin, pinkish illumination on the intersection. He studied the asphalt, the painted lane lines, the timing of the stop light suspended overhead. Little traffic moved through. A black pickup. A silver SUV. The drivers glanced at him and went on.
The accident that had occurred here, three years ago or more, involved a Mercury Grand Marquis – a chromed, civilian version of the big Crown Vics that the police liked. The Mercury had crashed into a tiny Ford Fiesta. The Ford was stopped, waiting for the light, when the Mercury impacted it from behind and sent it careering diagonally through the intersection, hitting two other cars along the way, then sliding off the roadway where it stopped with a telephone pole enfolded in its driver’s side and the driver – a young woman, a cosmetology student – dead in her seat.
Witnesses reported that the Ford had been waiting at a red light. The timing of the stop light relative to the collision was impossible to verify, but even if the light had been green, the driver of the Mercury had an obligation to attempt to slow and stop, and there was no physical indication that the driver had touched his brakes. Also, the driver admitted fault. In fact, he told police that he had accelerated into the impact. He said that he had been possessed by demons – an assertion that the police recorded without comment in their report alongside licence numbers, scene information and vehicle descriptions.
At issue had been whether the Ford should have protected its occupant better, but through an evaluation of crush damage Ellis and Boggs had calculated that, at impact, the Mercury was travelling at about 70 mph, far exceeding any governmental test standard. The Ford had also deposited a set of tyre marks that swooped across the intersection and which he and Boggs had carefully documented, but were now long erased from the asphalt by weather and passing traffic. Ellis crossed the road to the telephone pole. At about waist height he found an impression of crushed and splintered wood where the Ford had struck. He remembered photographing it years before.
Scuffing at the base of the pole he found bits of glass – maybe from the Ford, maybe from some other collision. He watched several cars move by. None were Boggs’s. Although the case had never gone very far, he and Boggs had referred to it often. The notion of demon possession came in handy when faced with inexplicable driver actions.
He drove up the road to the Cloverleaf Lounge. Inside, the dimness made it impossible to discern the colour of the walls or the tables or even the tie of the short, broad bartender who stood projecting an attitude of everlasting patience. Ellis ordered a beer. When it was set before him he asked if there had been anyone here who looked like Boggs – tall, big, with bright blue eyes and a brownish beard. The bartender, studying a point behind Ellis, shook his head.
Ellis hunched at the bar, sipping his beer, looking around whenever the door opened. He wished he had brought a photograph of Boggs. He felt tense with futility. He drank up and ordered another. The space was filling, mostly with men in blue jeans, boots and bas-relief belt buckles, slouching, laughing, turning from time to time to stare at the TV in the corner where a baseball game played.
‘You lose something?’
Ellis discovered at his side a man with a circular face and quarter-circle shoulders from which hung a sack-like T-shirt.
‘Me?’
‘Saw you standing around on the corner like you’d lost something.’
Ellis hesitated.
‘Maybe you found it,’ the circle-faced man offered. He smelled of armpit and deodorant.
‘There was a bad accident there,’ Ellis said. ‘Years ago.’
‘Sure, there’s been plenty of accidents there.’ The circle-faced man grinned – tiny, even teeth with gaps between. ‘My girlfriend and I met in an accident there.’
Ellis stared.
‘Love works in mysterious ways.’
‘I guess so,’ Ellis said.
The man introduced himself: Mike. He said he knew a guy who was deer hunting and accidentally shot some woman’s dog, and that was how he met her and fell in love. He knew another guy who broke into an apartment to steal a stereo and was surprised by a woman coming out of the bath, so he ran his mouth like crazy to keep her calm, ended up marrying her.
Mike talked on like this and led Ellis to a table under the little TV, where a woman with heavy shoulders and breasts and gleaming wide eyes sat over a glass of cola. Mike said her name was Lucy, and she said hello. When Ellis glanced around everyone in the bar seemed to be watching him – but it was the TV overhead. He searched the faces, and when he began listening again Mike was saying that after four years he and Lucy still had not married, which was his own fault. ‘I just can’t seem to settle into the idea of being a claimed man.’ Lucy sat sipping her cola. She peered at Ellis as if he were a figure atop a far hill and she was trying to decide whether she had anything worth saying considering the distance to be crossed.
A sheen of sweat flashed on Mike’s forehead in time with the TV. He asked Ellis what he did, and Ellis explained – reciting his usual answer – that he analysed things like tyre marks and crush depth to determine the movements and velocities of vehicles involved in crashes, and that his analyses supported the work of his boss who testified as an expert witness in civil litigation. He described, for an example, the accident that had occurred just down the road, and as he spoke of it he recalled a police photo of the Ford at its point of rest, with the cosmetology student slouched over the steering wheel, eyes closed, skin pallid, blood seeping from her mouth and ears.
‘Sure,’ Mike said. ‘That’s the same one. That’s the crash where I met Lucy.’
Ellis looked at Mike, then Lucy, and she did an odd thing, curling herself, as if she hoped to fit into a crate.
‘I was turning left,’ Mike said, ‘and Lucy was turning right and that first car was hit by a truck and came spinning through and whacked Lucy then me and she spun and I spun and we came together -’ He clapped his hands and held them. ‘My door against hers. Our windows were broken, and I looked over and said, “Are you all right?” and she said, “I think so. Are you?” and I said, “Except for my heart. My heart! I’m in love!”’ He grinned at Lucy. ‘Anyway, the truck turned turtle in the ditch. I knew the guy that was driving the truck, too, by the way, my step-uncle. When I was a kid he carried worms in his pockets to scare me.’ Mike giggled and showed his teeth.
‘It didn’t roll into the ditch,’ Ellis said. ‘And the driver was demon-possessed.’
‘What?’
‘And it was a Mercury Grand Marquis, not a truck. I think we’re talking about different accidents.’
‘No, no,’ Mike said, with the enunciation and patience of a gentle man speaking to a moron, ‘the first car was stopped and hit from behind and came ba
ng into her and me and then the first car went flying off the road. Killed a girl.’
‘Well, that is similar.’
‘Sure it is. What did you figure out about it?’
‘We had the Mercury going seventy.’
‘A truck all right, a GMC. I know that because it was my step-uncle’s. Seventy? No. I don’t believe that.’
Ellis shrugged. He wasn’t sure if they were talking about the same accident or not, but it didn’t seem to matter. ‘Step-uncle?’ he said.
‘Banged the jeebus out of my old Monte Carlo. Never aligned right again. And my uncle’s still getting his tighty-whities sued off by that dead girl’s family. Some good came of it, though, since we met.’ He flickered a smile toward Lucy.
Ellis shook his head. He said that he was looking for someone that might have been through that intersection recently, and he described Boggs and Boggs’s convertible.
‘Going to be tough to find the guy,’ Mike said, ‘if that’s all you’ve got to go on.’
Which was right, Ellis knew. He wished everyone in the bar weren’t looking toward him. He felt small and suspect, and the image of James Dell kept coming up before him. The air here smelled like urine. He had not eaten all day, and the beers were moving in him.
‘Could be I saw him,’ Lucy said.
‘You did not,’ Mike said.
‘It was a blue convertible.’
‘It’s green,’ Ellis said.
Mike laughed. But Lucy said, ‘Sure. Green. He had the top down, and he was playing the radio loud.’
‘Did you hear it?’ Ellis asked.
‘Someone talking,’ she said. In the crowd noise and the noise of the television and the thud of a jukebox, they were now leaning close over the table, and Mike’s little, bright teeth stood only inches from Ellis’s face. ‘I saw him pulling away from the corner there,’ Lucy said. ‘Went south.’
‘Did you notice the licence-plate number?’
She only stared.
‘Anyway,’ Mike said. ‘Another drink?’ Ellis shook his head. Mike pressed his fat hands on the table so that they flattened and the table rocked as he stood and walked away.
Ellis, avoiding Lucy’s saucer eyes, looked again through the crowd. ‘What did you mean when you said he was pulling away?’
‘He was pulling onto the road there.’
‘From off the road shoulder? He had stopped? What was he doing on the shoulder?’
She shrugged.
‘Went south?’ Ellis said. She nodded, but her gaze was fixed over Ellis’s shoulder. ‘How did he look?’ he asked. ‘Happy? Sad?’
‘When he hit my car, Mike didn’t ask if I was all right,’ she said. ‘He just sat. He was crying pretty hard. The airbag broke his nose.’ She aimed her glare at Ellis from atop her distant hill. She was drunk, he realised; her drink wasn’t just Coke.
‘That green convertible, was it dusty? Clean?’
‘You worked for that awful attorney.’
‘My boss and I worked for an attorney, but it wasn’t the accident that you’re talking about.’
‘Mike’s uncle’s been sued broke, so he’s living with Mike now. Mike would’ve married me if it weren’t for what happened.’
‘We just present a side of an argument, that’s all. It’s not personal. We operate in an argumentative, oppositional legal system.’
‘Mike’s said it himself, that he’d have married me by now, except for what’s happened to his uncle and all that that’s put onto him. How can he afford a wife, he says, when he’s paying his uncle’s debts? Since the accident his uncle can’t hold a job, gets really bad headaches. But his uncle’s the one who gets blamed, gets sued. It was an accident. He didn’t want anything like that to happen. But you people come after him, and you take his guts out and throw them around the room while he watches.’
‘I never worked a case like that.’
‘It must be the same. How could it be so much the same but different? It was this kind of car or that, whatever. You weren’t there. I was there.’
He had been certain, but now he admitted to himself that it had been years, and this would not have been the first time that he had misremembered or transposed details between cases. Yet, he kept referencing his memory, and the only vehicle he found there that had been driven in a demon-possessed state was a Mercury. ‘You don’t remember anything else?’ Ellis asked. ‘At all? About the convertible?’
‘You can’t help,’ she said.
‘No.’
‘You could get them to drop it all. You could talk to the family.’
‘With due respect, you ever wonder if Mike’s just feeding you a line?’
She opened her eyes and gazed at him with liquid, hopeless hate. And then Ellis felt a meaty hand on his neck. ‘What’s that?’ Mike said into his ear. ‘Say that again?’ He sounded sad.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ellis said.
‘That’s all right. I heard you.’ Mike pulled out his chair and sat. ‘I’m just doing the best I can, like you, right? Like anyone. Right? That’s OK. It’s all good.’ He peered at Lucy. ‘So you’ll talk to him, but you won’t talk to me?’ He laughed. To Ellis he said, ‘I’m in the doghouse.’
Lucy said, ‘Mike’s a good man.’
‘Really, everything’s beautiful,’ Mike said.
Ellis sensed the edge of a vortex. ‘I have to go,’ he said, standing.
Lucy had her gaze fixed hard on him, but Mike said, ‘See you round,’ and then Lucy’s expression suddenly turned melancholy. ‘Luck finding your friend,’ she said. Looking at Mike she said, ‘If everything were beautiful, then it wouldn’t be so hard, I don’t think.’
Ellis started shouldering by people. In the parking lot he ran, and in the minivan he reversed and turned and accelerated. A mile down the road he stopped on the shoulder and sat in the dark. He watched the mirror as if Mike’s white shirt might reappear.
Eventually he convinced himself that the important thing was that someone had seen Boggs. He switched on the dome light, spread the map over the steering wheel, and looked at the line of the road he was on and its route south, the branchings of that line, the branchings of those branchings. Occasionally a car came up with a whisper and a light that slowly filled the minivan, then flashed past, replaced by dwindling red tail lamps and the yammering of insects.
He felt his eyes with his fingers and weighed his exhaustion and his options. He was very tired and the beer had fogged him. He decided he had to try to sleep a little. He drove back through the intersection and into the park, turned into the boat-ramp area, eased into a swathe of tall grasses at one side. A wind thrashed the tops of the trees, the lake made a great open space where moonlight sparked on the waves. He reclined his seat and crossed his hands over his stomach.
The noises of the insects were apocalyptic. The day had been hot but now a chill settled into him. Despite exhaustion, he slept poorly. The figure in the road – James Dell – approached out of the darkness and made noises of impact as he broke at the knee and then came down on the hood with a leg up in the air, and he thought also of the sheet-obscured figure on the bed, the noise of the breath in the respirator, the wife’s hand that had gripped his own.
He opened his eyes and watched the vague, irresolvable shapes of the trees, then stirred and looked at his watch. 3:11. He groped in his pocket, brought out his phone and called Boggs. Four rings, a click, and the quality of the quiet on the phone changed. Ellis waited.
‘Hello?’
‘Boggs.’
‘Who is this?’
‘You know who this is.’
‘Well, to hell with you, too,’ Boggs said. ‘It is the middle of the night.’
For perhaps an entire minute neither of them said anything. Finally, Ellis said, ‘Boggs, I’m really sorry.’
‘Great apology. Good job.’
‘Whatever you want me to say, I’ll say.’ Another silence, and in the darkness Ellis had a sensation of the minivan floating, as if the lake
had risen to bear him away. ‘Heather says you’re talking about killing yourself.’
‘Do you know,’ Boggs asked, ‘why I answered the phone when I saw that it was you calling?’
‘No.’
‘Me neither.’
‘But here we are,’ Ellis said.
‘Do we have to talk about who is and who is not going to kill themselves?’
‘No, we don’t.’
‘I don’t think I want to talk at all.’
‘But you answered the phone.’
‘I can’t explain it.’
‘Where are you? Let me come see you.’
‘I’ve got hold of some conclusions, Ellis. I won’t say it was a lifting of a darkness, but more like reaching the end of a road and saying, “Now I see, this road doesn’t go through. It ends.”’
‘I don’t know what you mean by that, but I’d like to.’
‘Please, don’t talk that way. Have some dignity. And maybe the road ran off the top of a cliff. Maybe it ran smack into the sea. Maybe it was a road done up in gold brick and candy and banners and whiskey bottles, and when I say it ended, maybe I mean that I woke up.’
Ellis smiled. ‘Maybe you’re talking nonsense.’
‘Maybe. It’s late. I can’t seem to sleep. Here’s what it is. I feel as if I’m trapped by the action of some huge machine, a complicated arrangement of motors, gears, shafts, all turning and grinding, and what’s worse is that the machine is me, and its design is my own, which caused me to give you your job, to give you my wife, and finally to give you even my own job. To give you, basically, my life.’