by Nick Arvin
Ellis said hello and the man nodded and shook hands earnestly and said hello again. ‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ Ellis said.
‘So you know,’ the man said, ‘this hadn’t been a VFW post for the fifteen years since I bought it from the VFW. I never have gotten around to painting.’ He scuffed a head of crabgrass with his foot. He wore a brown T-shirt marked with Harvey Mudd College and a pendant oblong of sweat. He said, ‘My wife, now in heaven, always said a man living alone would forget how to live in the world. But I don’t give a damn, I don’t have anyone to impress.’ He had his hands in the pockets of his jeans and held his elbows flared out.
‘A while back,’ Ellis said, ‘I did some engineering work on an accident that occurred down there by the ramp. Do you know the one I mean?’
‘You’re an engineer? I used to design ball-peening systems. I designed ball-peening machines for GM and ball-peening machines for Ford and ball-peening machines for Boeing and ball-peening machines for the National Mint. Do you know about the famous eleventh-century swords of Toledo – not Ohio! – Spain? They could be bent almost double and they would spring right back, good as new. Guess how they did it?’ The old man stood happy and flexing his hands.
‘Ball-peening?’
‘Ball-peening!’ the old man exclaimed. ‘The guys who knew how to do it took the secret of it to their graves and the idea was lost for a thousand years, until GM tried blasting their springs clean with steel shot instead of sand. They lasted longer! Ball-peening!’ He bounced on his feet and leered. ‘I saved the Feds millions of dollars when I showed them how to peen the money-printing dies. I told them that they could take it out of my taxes. Guess what happened to my taxes.’
Ellis felt his feet sweating in his shoes. ‘What?’
‘Nothing!’
‘I’m looking for a friend of mine,’ Ellis said.
‘The gentleman in the green convertible?’
Ellis lifted his hands but stopped short of grabbing the man. ‘When was he here?’
‘Yesterday afternoon, stereo blasting some book at top volume.’
‘Did you recognise the book? What did the driver look like?’
‘Never took to books. Driver seemed like, I’d say, a man in a convertible – sunburned, wind-blown. He asked about this accident, the one that you mentioned. The guy, Chuck, who died there, was someone I’d seen a couple of times. At the Cracker Barrel at breakfast. He was a grits-and-gravy guy. Personally, I hate grits.’ He sucked his lips and looked around as if he regretted this last comment. A single haggard willow stood behind the VFW building, its branches low and trailing in circles under the pawing of a breeze. Traffic ran steady and fast on the interstate lanes. ‘I didn’t know what had happened at first. From here all you could see was the flashing lights, the red and the blue, bouncing off the falling snow, colouring that part of the sky. The snow had been coming and going all morning. So I walked a little closer. It was a horrible mess. I stood above it, and I didn’t know exactly what had happened, but an ambulance came, and I could see it was bad. I remember thinking it seemed strange, that mess, someone dead maybe, I didn’t know yet, and all around it was a really beautiful morning. The air had that edge in it, that cleanness, like you should bottle some for later. A clear blue sky coming out of the clouds, sky the colour of those original powder-blue Ford T-birds, the ones with the porthole side windows. And these hills are pretty in winter, white, rolling. I never get tired of them. My footprints in the snow looked like the footprints of the last man on earth. I remember I thought, it’s bad down there, but it’s nothing to do with me. Nothing to do with me and I feel fine, just fine, I thought, by God, I’m happy. I hadn’t had a clear feeling like that in a long time. Course it turned out it did have something to do with me, as I knew Chuck a little, and I felt pretty bad about it then.’
They stood looking at the traffic. A convoy of five semis. A Prius.
‘Funny how you think things like that,’ he added.
Ellis made himself speak and asked a few more questions about Boggs – had he seen which way Boggs had gone, or paid any attention to the condition of the convertible? – but learned nothing. ‘I explained to your friend that ball-peening is badly neglected at most of the major engineering schools.’
Ellis excused himself and returned to the accident site. He’d not noticed anything beautiful about it, which made him think he might have missed something. He scuffed around until a thought came, and he went back up the ramp and knocked and asked where Boggs had parked the convertible.
‘About there,’ he said, pointing.
One tyre had made a light impression in the soil. With a pen, on the back of a receipt, Ellis sketched the pattern of the tyre print. He stared at it to try to brand it into his mind. Then he took out his map again, thinking, I’ll never catch up by following him. I need to jump ahead.
PART THREE: THE PAST
6.
IN FRANCE, LATE in the reign of Louis XV, a man named Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot devised the world’s first automobile, a steam-powered wagon. Cugnot called it a fardier à vapeur. Equipped with wagon wheels, a kettle-shaped steam generator and a tiller – the driver steered as if piloting a boat – it could accelerate to speeds as high as 2.5 mph. Perhaps inevitably, having invented the fardier à vapeur, Cugnot also invented the car crash, when he drove the fardier à vapeur into a wall. Although no one was hurt, Cugnot lost his research funding.
So Ellis reported to Boggs during a plane flight. ‘Thank God,’ Boggs said, ‘fardier à vapeur isn’t a term that’s stuck.’
Ellis had started the research out of simple curiosity, but Boggs had encouraged him – a good anecdote might be useful in court some day. Ellis went on: more than one hundred years elapsed before the first fatal automotive accident occurred. In 1896 a woman named Bridget Driscoll was strolling with her daughter on the grounds of London’s Crystal Palace when she was struck and killed by an Anglo-French Motor Car Company vehicle. Witnesses reported the Anglo-French vehicle was travelling at a ‘tremendous speed’, later estimated to be 4 mph.
‘No way,’ Boggs said. ‘Is that even possible? Four miles an hour is barely a fast walk.’
‘It’s a bit like letting yourself be trampled to death by a marching band.’
‘I don’t know if I can even use that in court. It might kill my credibility.’
Prosecutors alleged, Ellis went on, that the automobile had attained such an impressive velocity only because the driver had secretly modified the engine to provide more power. Nonetheless, a jury determined that the death of Mrs Driscoll was not the fault of the driver. Instead, the jury called the death accidental – the first application of that term to an automotive collision. Ellis quoted from the coroner who examined Mrs Driscoll: ‘This must never happen again.’
Boggs chortled. ‘And here we are.’
They had spent the morning inspecting the collision damage to a Mitsubishi SUV that had crashed into the back end of a trailered yacht at a closing speed of 75 mph. Stored in a field behind a gas station, the Mitsubishi was filled with rainwater, its contents were rotted, and a family of rats were living in the dashboard. Boggs cursed spectacularly while they worked, and Ellis held his breath until he nearly passed out.
Boggs bought two mini-bottles of Scotch from the flight attendant and drank the first neat from a transparent plastic cup, a dainty object in his large hand. They flew above a smooth white cloud surface like a perfected landscape.
‘Christopher was your half-brother on which side?’ Boggs asked. The question startled Ellis; it was the first time Boggs had ever asked about his brother. But, of course, Heather must have told him about Christopher.
‘My father’s,’ Ellis said.
‘What was his mother like?’
‘Skinny, tight pants, too much make-up. Smoker. I never saw much of her. Whenever I heard about her, it seemed she was moving into a new place with a new guy in a new town. I couldn’t figure out the understanding she had with my dad. But
every so often he told Christopher to get ready to leave. Then she turned up and took Christopher away for a night, or a week, or whole summers. The longest was nearly two years. When Christopher came back from that one, he was fifteen. He had become much more withdrawn. He couldn’t bear to look at us, to speak with us. It was as if our family made him physically ill. He literally refused to speak to me.’
The plane banked. The clouds had broken, and in the window lay the miniature streets and buildings of an industrial city absent industry – houses lay gutted with constituent elements strewn into overgrown lawns, factories crouched amid empty parking lots. ‘I was excited when Dad said Christopher was coming back. But then it might as well have been a stranger who moved into the house -’ Ellis lifted his hands. ‘It was confusing.’
‘Sounds like adolescence.’
‘Actually, I think, fundamentally, he was just a jerk.’
Boggs looked over. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the dynamics of a family are pretty much the most inexplicable, anti-analytic thing on earth.’
As they descended, the city’s empty apartment towers presented faces of glassless window openings, black voids repeated in ranks. Few cars moved on the street grid; traffic surged in large numbers only on the interstate, en route to other places.
7.
ELLIS DID LATER observe that the big streets – Mill Street and Main Street – were really not very big. But they were the only through streets in Coil, a town stuck out among corn and sugar-beet fields, a town with a one-block brick-fronted downtown, several bars and churches, and one supermarket, one movie theatre, one pharmacy, one bowling alley, and more or less one of everything else people really needed. It served as a bedroom community for men and women who worked in automotive factories twenty miles away.
Although Ellis’s father rarely held a job for long, he had for a few years managed to keep a position in sales for a concrete contractor. When business was slow, he drove around looking for gravel driveways and cold-calling at front doors, hoping to talk a homeowner into a beautiful, solid, maintenance-free concrete drive. Eventually he was fired, but at their own house the job had already been immortalised – the summer that Ellis turned eleven, the entire lawn had been laid with concrete. For the rest of his childhood, the house stood on a small hard plain of grey, graded for run-off, gridded by expansion joints, the driveway marked by two shallow gutters on either side. Sometimes his mother put a few flowerpots along there for colour.
To Ellis, the main consequence of the concrete was that in the summer the lawn grew so hot that he could hardly bear to be outside. The house itself was built sometime in the seventies and looked much like all the neighbouring houses – two storeys of white aluminum siding with faux shutters bracketing the windows, a TV antenna stuck up over the roof, every room carpeted, cottage-cheese texture on the ceilings, pink tile in the bathroom, green appliances in the kitchen, and an unfinished basement that was his father’s refuge and hiding place. He liked it for the isolation, but probably also because it stayed cool in the summer. Upstairs, as the concrete gathered the sun’s heat, they put box fans in the doorways and windows and ran them on high, so that loose papers and magazines lifted and fluttered and everyone yelled to be heard.
Ellis and Christopher had always been separated by a certain incomprehension, and Christopher had often treated Ellis with disdain, but he also usually showed enough blithe kindness to pull Ellis’s guard down before eventually hitting him with something from his arsenal of understatement – the stare, the sneer, the too-childish compliment, the glance away, the unanswered question, the joke not laughed at. Even this treatment, at least, represented a kind of attention.
What changed in the two years that Christopher was away never became clear to Ellis, and he could hardly even mount a reasonable theory of an answer. His only evidence was a series of very long low-voiced telephone conversations that his father had held during that period, slumped, staring down at the kitchen table, careful of being overheard. Years later Ellis asked his mother, and she claimed to be unaware of any change in Christopher’s manner. It surprised Ellis, and it took him some time to realise that her sense of permissible gossip was limited to the living.
When Christopher returned, he couldn’t bear, it seemed, to talk to Ellis or his parents or even to look at them, as if to see their faces would give him hives. He made concessions for his father and, to a lesser degree, his stepmother, but he literally refused to speak to Ellis. Days passed before Christopher allowed Ellis so much as a chance meeting of eye contact. Ellis would have liked to return the disregard, but he wasn’t as good at it, he couldn’t entirely avoid, dismiss or forget his half-brother who, after all, lived under the same roof and ate at the same dinner table. He didn’t know what to do about it, and so he lived with it, like a needle in his skin. It pained and pained.
One day he heard over the fans a lifted voice, his mother’s, outside. From the window he saw his father, his mother and Christopher standing around a large black coupé. When he stepped outside his mother was yelling, ‘- buy this?’
‘For Christopher, darling.’
‘You didn’t buy Christopher a car!’
Dad’s gaze didn’t quite meet Mom’s. He turned and paced back and forward along the length of the car. Tall and thin except for a bulge at the belly, he walked with an up-and-down bob, like a towering bird. He looked bewildered and said over and over, ‘It’s only an old Fairlane,’ as if an old Fairlane weren’t a car, exactly.
Then he added, excitedly, ‘And the radio only gets AM.’ Mom stared, then set her head back, held her arms straight and fisted at her sides, and made a long, thin wailing noise. Ellis and Christopher and Dad watched her, Dad grimacing. When she breathed he said, ‘Gosh, Denise.’
She did it again.
Dad slouched, and when she stopped he said, ‘Christopher’s sixteen.’
She took a breath, but then Christopher opened the car door and slid into the driver’s seat. Mom said, ‘You’re not driving that.’
Christopher closed the door and stared at her. After a second Dad said quietly, ‘Sure, you can go for a drive.’
Mom shook her head, but hopelessly. Then she moved, at a run, around the car to the passenger door and opened it, as if to get inside. But she turned to Ellis. ‘Go with him.’ She leaned to peer at Christopher. ‘Take him.’
While Ellis climbed in Christopher started the car and adjusted the rear-view mirror. Cigarette burns scarred the dash and from somewhere flowed a nauseating odour of turned milk. Mom closed the passenger door, and Christopher glanced at Ellis, in the thinnest possible acknowledgement, then put the car into reverse and backed into the street, and they went away into the big streets.
They bore west. ‘Where are we going?’ Ellis asked. Christopher already had his left arm in the open window and his right hand draped at the bottom of the steering wheel, as if he has been driving this car for years. He said nothing.
‘Do you like it?’ Ellis asked.
Christopher frowned.
Ellis put a hand out the window to cup the invisible torrents of air, and after some minutes he reclined his seat a little. He said, ‘Even with the windows open, it stinks.’
Christopher’s eyes never left the road. His hair licked around in the wind. They travelled over two-lane roads past open fields, past barns and silos, past houses with lawns polka-dotted by dandelions. For miles they moved among trees, then broke suddenly into expanses of empty furrowed fields wafting the odour of manure. Christopher slowed entering the towns and accelerated out of them. Some of these towns had names that Ellis recognised although he was certain that he had never driven through them before. Then, eventually, they began to encounter towns with names that he had never even heard of. They only drove, not speaking, but Ellis felt happy. They spanned distance without any intention that Ellis could discern, and to drive without purpose struck him as original and exciting.
When they arrived home hours later the sky was a lavender field spr
ead with small rough tatters of shining gold, as if some thing had been broken across the firmament and set afire. Christopher took the keys from the ignition and went into the house without looking back. Ellis stood a minute looking the car over. It was big for a two-door, painted black with pits of rust on the doors and fenders and a broken nameplate on the right side that said airlane. Soon everyone called it the airlane. Ellis never again rode in it.
* * *
During the course of their affair Ellis had agonised over it, had strained his memory, had lain sleepless, but he could not recall when he had first met her. Instead it seemed as if she had appeared among Christopher’s vague and various friends from nowhere, had come into Ellis’s life without entering and instead, like a ghost, had been revealed by slow degrees, in an accumulation of signs. Perhaps, inasmuch as he had initially seen her at all, he had only seen her through the distortions of his own relationship with Christopher.
He did recall one late evening when he had drifted downstairs to the living room where the television emitted the only light, a flickering greenish ambiance, and in this gloom he slowly discerned that Christopher was sitting on the sofa, that beside him an additional pair of eyes glinted, and that those eyes were female.
‘Hey,’ she said.
‘Hi,’ Ellis said. She gazed at him for a second before turning again to the television. She sat a small distance from Christopher, one hand interlinked with his. Ellis recognised her but didn’t know her anymore than he knew any of Christopher’s friends. Christopher had obtained a job that summer mowing lawns at the golf course just outside of town, so his arms were tanned brown and covered with fine shining brass hairs, and he exuded odours of cut grass and gasoline. Turning his attention just far enough to include Ellis, he puffed his lips – perhaps in a sort of snicker, perhaps as if to blow him away. For a minute no one said anything. But Ellis was excruciatingly aware that he was wearing his pyjamas. He made himself stand for a few seconds longer, as if casually, just checking out the TV show, then returned to his bedroom. His pyjamas were three years old, or more, and he had never really spent much thought on them, but he noticed now their deficiencies – too short for his arms and legs, and printed with cartoon cowboys wrangling cartoon giraffes. He didn’t know why these facts had not struck him before. Giraffes!