by Nick Arvin
‘I’m not going to take your job, Boggs. I don’t want your job -’ Ellis stopped. Having said this, he regretted how it implied the truth of the rest. He said, ‘That guy I hit isn’t doing well.’
‘I’m surprised he’s alive.’
And again neither spoke. It seemed a mutual feeling might begin to seep into these intervals, but Ellis detected none. ‘I talked to this couple tonight,’ he said. ‘They met in a car accident.’
‘That’s lovely. You ever talk to Heather about your brother’s accident?’
‘Not really. Why?’
‘That’s what I thought. I thought it was a little curious.’
The comment made Ellis wary. He said, ‘That accident with the driver who was possessed by demons – what was he driving?’
‘Something big. I don’t remember.’
‘Come on.’
‘Really, I don’t,’ Boggs said. ‘Why?’
‘Tell me where you are.’
‘No.’
‘I know that you drove to the lake. Then you turned south. Didn’t you?’
Boggs said nothing.
‘Possessed by demons?’ Ellis asked.
‘Righto,’ Boggs said. ‘They’re everywhere.’
And the line died. Ellis looked at the phone until the screen’s backlight went dark. He reclined in the seat. Heather had interpreted the comment about the lake through her frame of reference, but if Boggs’s interest was actually the accident site, then the correct frame of reference was the one Ellis knew.
The feeling of sleep never came, but suddenly he woke to a sky stained crimson.
He unfolded his map again and contemplated it. He recalled an accident that they had worked on a couple hundred miles or so to the south of here. Another somewhat to the east of that. Another south of that. Touring accident sites. Over the years, once or twice, Boggs had mentioned the idea.
Waterfront cottages. A solitary and vast weeping willow. The cars on the road had their lights on, then one by one they switched off as the sky’s first dark blush retreated before a more forceful blue. Ellis pulled over for gasoline, a bottle of orange soda and a package of Pop Tarts. The stop, although short, sparked an anxious guilt – if Boggs was on the road, he was gaining distance.
He skirted the lake southward, along a two-lane highway through dull, weathered towns like wrack along the shore. Marinas full of idle white boats. A gift shop advertising seashells far from the sea. Outspread water the colour of rolled iron. In the distance dark clouds dangled wraiths of rainfall. Moving away from the lake he crossed a terrain of flat reedy marshes where only the road seemed solid. At a light he waited behind an SUV and watched through its rear window a small screen that played a cartoon that involved many computer-animated insects. He merged onto an interstate and passed between broad ditches and lines of wire fencing while further out stretched cornfields and here and there a house and sometimes a road running parallel to the interstate, a car there moving in near synchronisation with himself. The mile markers fled by. A white pickup tailed him for thirty miles, then he glanced in the mirror, and it was gone. He watched for Boggs’s car, not only among the vehicles around himself but also in the traffic across the median. But traffic went by constantly and fast, his thoughts wandered, and he caught himself staring at the lane ahead. A black tyre mark arced toward the median. Another extended straight ahead, stuttered, then stopped. Another showed the doubled wheels of a semi.
When the phone rang it startled him, and the body of James Dell leapt onto the windshield – he answered breathlessly.
‘Where are you?’ Heather asked. ‘Are you coming back?’
Ellis told her about his conversation with Boggs the night before. He told her that he was going to look at a couple of accident sites. ‘I think I can find him.’
‘I don’t know,’ Heather said. Her breath caught. He said her name softly a few times.
After hanging up he drove on.
When calls came from the office, he ignored them.
He exited the interstate and came to an empty road between flat fields of low soybean plants. He stood out of the minivan and walked the road’s edge. He knew the place he wanted by the bent lip of a steel culvert that spanned under the road. A Thunderbird had veered off and hit the culvert, tearing open the gas tank. The occupants lived, but in the fire one boy lost thirty per cent of his skin, lost his eyelids, lost his ears. His deposition had been an interminable accounting of medical conditions and complications – a vision of the life that might have been Christopher’s if he had lived. Or, at least, that had been the thought that had edged into Ellis’s mind before he forced it away.
The state highway department had been sued for leaving the sharp edge of the culvert exposed, but the case had settled out of court, and it appeared the state hadn’t bothered to make any changes. Ellis stooped to peer inside: darkness, a trickle of water moving through. He walked the road shoulders looking for a sign that a car – Boggs’s car – had stopped. Cumulus cluttered the sky. Sweat traced slow paths down his skin. When he’d begun working for Boggs he hadn’t anticipated how very many of their cases would involve fires. But burn victims made juries sympathetic, so car fires attracted lawsuits.
It had been autumn when he and Boggs had inspected and documented the accident scene here. A lean mutt, white in the muzzle, had trotted across the harvested fields and stopped to watch. Then it wandered over to the hard-sided case in which they carried their equipment – camera, measuring tapes and rods, plumb bob, rolls of tape, orange safety vests – and lifted a leg. Boggs had shouted and sprinted toward the dog. When it ran, Boggs went after it, grabbing clods of dirt off the fields and throwing them while the dog trotted ahead. The chase was hopeless, but Boggs ran until he became a small figure far across the dark earth of the fields. He returned slowly, laughing, and asked Ellis if he knew the joke about the guy who took his dog to the vet. ‘“My dog is cross-eyed,” the guy says. “Can you do anything?” The vet looks at the dog’s eyes, then at the dog’s ears, and then its teeth. After a minute the doctor says, “We’re going to have to put him down.” “My God, because he’s cross-eyed?” “No,” says the doctor. “Because he has cancer.”’ When the dog circled around a few minutes later, Boggs tossed it a granola bar. Ellis had loved the joke, but when he repeated it a few days later to a woman beside him at the bar – he and Boggs were out for a drink after work – she only granted it a frown, and Boggs, shaking his head solemnly, said, ‘I think that’s maybe the worst joke I’ve ever heard.’
Ellis moved slowly, peering at the ground. Looking for what? He was unsure, but he had some experience in looking without knowing exactly what he was looking for. The knack for it lay in guessing where to look for what you didn’t know. Was this, then, where to look? But it was impossible to say. A solitary vehicle, a large old Lincoln, passed by, rattling, the driver’s grey sexless head hardly higher than the steering wheel, wavering in the lane. It startled a few sparrows from the weeds at the edge of the road, and then the car was gone, and Ellis stood alone again. Nothing here, but a culvert and a memory of a dog joke. Nothing. Nothing, and what had he really expected? There were a lot of places like this. He decided to go on, but he felt as a chill the notion that he might now be compounding any number of mistakes.
A strange insect of stunning size met its end on his windshield, and over the miles its parts lifted away. He entered again the hurly-burly of the interstate. A little Toyota with glistening rims flashed by in the left lane – it had to be moving at near 100 mph, and Ellis expected to watch it oversteer and begin barrel-rolling down the lanes, bodies flying out the windows. Energy increased with the square of velocity. But the Toyota only dwindled into the distance and vanished.
That afternoon he walked back and forth over an intersection of two gravel roads. This was the place where he had found an unopened package of lime-green boxers abandoned in the weeds, and he and Boggs had spent a few minutes prancing around with underwear on their heads. It
was also the place where a Honda had propelled itself deep into the side of a Jeep Wrangler and fractured the spine of the Jeep’s driver. Now there were traces here of any number of vehicles, but the tyre patterns were disorganised by the gravel, and Ellis couldn’t see a means of connecting any of it to Boggs. When he sat again in the minivan, he discovered that most of the day’s hours had already been destroyed. He thought, Should I give this up? Was it absurd to be doing this? Why would Boggs be doing this? He thought, I need to give this up. But the idea of sitting still somewhere – his duplex, an office – seemed horrible, a hell. Driving again, he phoned Heather and talked once more about the idea that Boggs was driving between accident sites, as if to keep the idea warm by the chafing of repetition.
She was quiet. He heard a TV in the background. ‘I keep thinking that this is my fault,’ she said. ‘I’m going to go to work tomorrow. I think it would be good to see the kids. What are you going to do about your work?’ she asked. ‘Your job?’
‘I don’t think I’m going back.’
‘Oh.’
‘If Boggs were there or if he weren’t, either way, I would feel like shit.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I know you liked it.’ A couple of seconds passed. ‘I’ve been looking at his things,’ she said. ‘I can’t bear to touch them. These folders he set out. His shoes. His magazines. His skim milk in the fridge. His mug that says, “You’re OLD when gettin’ lucky means finding your keys.” I hate that one. I’ve been trying his phone number every few hours. Since you got him at three in the morning, I’ll be up all night trying him.’
‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea. You’ll drive him crazy.’
‘Crazier?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, he always wanted some magical life, not this one,’ she said, ‘like a child.’
Ellis said nothing. He passed a semi pulling a long tank with a polished surface that drew the world into shining horizontal lines. ‘Enough about him,’ Ellis said. ‘Tell me how you feel.’
‘I’ll tell you what I feel.’ Then she was silent for a long while before she said, in a rush of exasperation, ‘I’m sad.’
He laughed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. But she laughed, too. ‘We’re a couple of clowns,’ he said, ‘crying on the inside.’
‘I hate self-pity,’ she said. ‘I hate it. It’s useless.’
‘Go on.’
‘But it’s a cruel, cruel world. It’s a darkness.’
‘Last one out turned off the lights.’
‘I was once in a bathroom stall,’ she said, ‘and someone turned out the lights as they left.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing happened. I calmed down and felt around to find the wall and I followed it out. But it was terrifying! A dark restroom is the archetypal darkness.’
‘Life is a dark restroom full of blind clowns crying on the inside.’
‘Is it a crime if a blind clown shouts fire in dark restroom?’
‘If a clown falls in a forest of deaf clowns in a dark restroom, does he cry on the inside?’ He was laughing. ‘What are we talking about?’ he said. He tried to stop his laughing, but it only grew worse.
‘Send in the clowns,’ she said.
His diaphragm hurt.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’
‘The crying leading the crying,’ he said.
They were silent a minute.
‘It’s going to be hard for us,’ she said. ‘To explain to friends. And, to live together, to be a couple together, when all that we’ve had until now were snatches of moments.’
‘I’ve thought about that, too.’
‘Is that why you’ve gone off?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, no, of course not.’
‘Listen, I need to be angry, and you won’t give me any room to do it. I’m losing my mind. And you’re out there. Why are you out there, when I’m so furious?’
He was silent.
‘Say something.’
‘Do you want me to say I’m sorry?’
‘No, no. I don’t know. Maybe, I want you to say you’re angry, too.’
‘I am. I’m very angry.’
‘You don’t sound like it.’
‘I’m angry!’ he shouted.
‘I’m angry!’
‘I’m fucking pissed!’
Heather laughed, chokingly. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘We’re both losing our minds. You will come back?’ she said. ‘I feel like everyone has left me.’
‘Of course I’ll come back.’
‘I’ll hold you to that. I can be ruthless.’
‘You know,’ he said, stopped, debated, went on, ‘Boggs mentioned Christopher, and it made me wonder what you remember about when he died.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What do you remember?’
‘Let’s not talk about that now, for God’s sake.’
‘We should’ve talked about it a long time ago.’
‘Maybe, but we didn’t. Now John says something, suddenly it’s urgent?’
‘You were at the Exxon station when it happened, right?’
‘A Mobil station, or whatever it was. I don’t want to get into this.’
‘Exxon, I think.’
‘I remember a Mobil,’ she said.
‘A red sign. I remember it was red.’
‘Yes, Mobil.’
‘Exxon is the red one,’ Ellis said.
‘Really?’
‘I drove past one a few miles ago.’
‘I guess I could be mixed up.’
‘But you were there, right? Were you actually looking directly at the intersection when the collision occurred?’
‘Stop it,’ she said.
‘I’m wondering, what’s Boggs getting at?’
‘Nothing?’ she said. ‘You know him. We can talk about this, but I want to see your face.’
‘You’re putting me off.’
‘I am.’
‘Please, just talk.’
‘Not about this.’
They said a few empty things. Gaps opened between phrases. She said goodbye.
He phoned the hospital and asked about James Dell. Dell was still in 312, the receptionist said, but no one answered the phone there.
He put the phone in his pocket and bit down on his tongue until it bled.
Later he caught the minivan drifting over the white line and into the rumble strip. He startled awake, but soon he was struggling again with his eyelids, and he had to defer to a staggering exhaustion. He took the next exit and followed a two-lane road until he came to an abandoned Gulf station, graffiti-tagged, windows boarded, pumps gone. He parked behind the building and reclined the seat to sleep.
His watch marked creeping minutes. A haze softened the moon. His back ached. He called Boggs a couple of times, without success.
Screaming, he woke from a dream that he could not remember. Nor did he want to; to prevent its return he kept his eyes open and sat feeling stunned and wishing the night over. But accidentally he slept again, this time in a deep oblivion.
He bought breakfast bars and orange juice and ate in the minivan, watching vehicles move between gas pumps, watching drivers talk on their cellphones with mirthless expressions. James Dell’s pallid, desiccated skin suddenly hung before him, as if in a curtain, and with it the choking antiseptic odour of the hospital – he remembered that these had been elements of the dream that woke him the night before. He started the minivan and began to drive.
He drove another hour, road to interstate to exit, parked, stood out of the minivan on a gravel shoulder, walked the acceleration lane to the point where it tapered out, then turned and strode into fallow land.
Milkweed, tall grasses and clusters of sumac patched the ground. In the middle distance stood a few maples, and past those the land rolled with hill-backs bristling with serried corn. The interstate exit provided access on and off a two-lane that extended straight out of sight to either
direction. Beside it, near the interstate, stood a lonely rectangular brick structure covered with extravagantly flaking white paint. On one wall were three large blue block letters: VFW. A red Chevy pickup, at least twenty years old, rested beside the building. In front stood a vintage howitzer, also painted white, weeds brushing the bottom of its barrel.
Ellis moved slowly in the grasses and weeds, some of which offered clusters of small white flowers. When he turned, he could see the trail he had cut, pressing down the plants as he walked. He looked for a similar trail that Boggs might have left if he had been here, and studied for several minutes a couple of weeds he found broken, but he had no experience in this kind of tracking and could make no conclusions. An hour passed. He stopped after each step, examined the ground and its objects. The delicate pale bones of a bird. A pizza box collapsing into the earth. An oval sink basin. Then, half buried in the dirt, he discovered a wooden shingle.
It was from a Toyota Tacoma pickup that had carried on its bed a home-made camper sided with wooden shingles. In the midst of a snowstorm it had slid off the roadway and mired here in snow. A tow truck had come out to help. And the tow-truck driver was killed when a semi came off the roadway, slid through the snow and pulverised his upper torso against the back of the Toyota – like fingers in a stamping press. In the police photos that Ellis had studied, nothing could be seen of the man except for the blood smeared over the two surfaces that had killed him and a single booted foot extended from beneath the semi. When Boggs saw it he said, ‘Like the witch in Oz.’ Using photogrammetric techniques, Ellis had analysed a stack of police Polaroids of tyre marks in the snow to prove that the tow truck had been parked fully on the shoulder and not in the highway’s right lane, as the semi driver claimed.
After the shingle, finding nothing more, Ellis drifted into abstraction, staring at a runnel-fed low place a short distance away, full of cattails and redwing blackbirds that moved in bursts and called in trills. The humid atmosphere resonated with the yellow-white hammering of the sun.
Finally he walked up the acceleration ramp and down the road to the building with the howitzer.
It had a concrete parking lot with crabgrass flaring from the cracks. Here and there lay a few scattered cinder blocks. A plastic lawn chair tilted on a broken leg. The building’s windows were glass block, and Ellis could see nothing in them. He knocked, and a stout, blue-eyed man of seventy or so opened the door immediately – as if he had been waiting – and said hello.