by Tim Curran
“Too bad you didn’t see the other vehicle.”
Jim looked away. “It happened fast. It’s dark out there, you know. You can’t see anything.”
She looked unconvinced. “Well, that’s all I wanted to ask you, Mr. Duchane. I’ll let you rest now. If you think of anything, give me call,” she said, handing him a business card. She stopped in the doorway. “One thing. I have a funny feeling that over the next few weeks you’re going to start remembering things you didn’t tell me. When that happens, I want you to call me.”
“I will.”
“With anything, Mr. Duchane, okay? No matter how crazy it sounds. Call me.”
When she was gone and the door was closed, he slumped in the bed, not realizing how tense he had been. He wiped sweat from his brow and tried to calm down.
6
Had Deputy Vicki Addis been his only visitor, he might have considered it a good day. But an hour or so before supper—gah, pallid turkey breast, sloppy cream corn, and limp green beans—he received another visitor. This time it was a man, Al Slayton from Western Consolidated Insurance. He introduced himself, shook Jim’s hand, made a few brief—and obligatory—queries concerning his condition and state of mind, then got right into it.
“I had a little chat with Deputy Addis of the sheriff’s office,” he said as he opened his briefcase and removed a file folder and a red pen. “There were just a couple minor details I wanted to clear up.”
Translation: We have to pay out a fucking shitload of money to you, so we have the right to be intrusive.
Jim smiled brightly, or at least as brightly as his condition would allow and said, “Sure, anything you need.”
Slayton was a big guy with a thick neck. He looked athletic like maybe he’d come out of the Army or Marines and had been hitting the gym ever since. Hell, he probably played football with Dr. Panganis. He certainly looked big enough for it. Jim decided he didn’t like him. That here was another prime example of a griddle weasel. It was nothing that Slayton actually said or did up to that point, but just a strong almost psychic sort of odor coming off him that was a little too reminiscent of the reptile house at the zoo.
He sighed. “Jim…is it okay if I call you Jim?”
“Of course.”
“Here’s my problem. The police forensic team that investigated the accident have no doubt that your vehicle was hit by something. You say it was another vehicle. Maybe so. But some of the damage to your SUV just has me scratching my head. And before WesCon pays out what will be a settlement in the range of nearly seven figures, well, I have to ask some questions that you’re not going to like.”
“I figured that. If you’d have come as a friend you’d have brought flowers.”
A bit of color touched Slayton’s cheeks as if they had been pinched by his favorite, or not-so favorite, maiden aunt. He was clearly uncomfortable. “The damage is…well, unusual. I’ve been investigating things like this for fifteen years now and if I had to give my opinion, I’d say it looked as if you’re vehicle had been hit from the back and the front. Now, that’s crazy, right?”
Jim shrugged. “The whole business is crazy.”
“Yes.” Slayton paged through his papers. “Okay. Now when I see this sort of damage, I expect the police to track down another vehicle that was involved. Problem is, you didn’t really see it and it left no paint chips at the impact sites. Weird.”
Jim nodded. Maybe he could have offered a few fabrications that would have explained things, but he saw no reason to make any of this easier on the man.
Slayton sighed again. “Now here I go with the questions you’re not going to like.”
“Shoot.”
“You were driving the vehicle?”
“Yes.”
“I know you came from a party of sorts. I just want you to tell me the truth…nobody else got behind the wheel?”
“No.”
“You’re sure.”
“Yes.”
“Absolutely positive?”
Jim glared at him. “How many ways would you like me to say the same thing?”
“I’m sorry, Jim. But this is procedure.”
“Let’s quit playing games, okay? Let me tell you what you’re up to. In the seamy world of your little brain you’ve cooked up some conspiracy where Dinah Cullis or Rita McDade were driving. No doubt you have the toxicology reports on both and you’re hoping that I’m covering for one of them. That either Dinah or Rita, three sheets to the wind, got behind the wheel and they rammed us into something, maybe a tree on the side of the road, but recovered only to flip us into the ditch a few miles down the road? Am I close on this?”
“Yes.”
“And if you can prove such a wild theory, it’ll be kudos for you because you’ll save WestCon a big payout and probably crawl two or three rungs up the company ladder?”
Slayton’s squared-off jaw looked positively rectangular by that point. “There’s no reason to act like that, Mr. Duchane. I’m paid to do a job. I’m paid to investigate auto accidents and particularly those involving pay-outs. There’s nothing slimy or underhanded about it. The bottom line is the damage to the vehicle, the condition of the remains of your friends, and your story do not exactly add up.”
“How can I make it easier on you?”
“You can tell me the truth.”
Ah, there it was. Mr. Slick Slayton had finally crawled out of his hole and showed his fangs. “I have told you the truth.”
“Mr. Duchane…if you cooperate with me, I can make this process go very fast. If not, it can drag on for months.”
Jim refused to look at him after that. “I’ve just buried two good friends of mine and I don’t have the patience for this bureaucratic Mickey Mouse shit. I answered your questions, you have the police report. If you want to play footsy with the pay-out, do so. That’s a matter for the courts. The door’s over there. Please use it.”
Slayton did without another word and Jim slumped once again in the bed.
That sonofabitch.
Slayton was no more a fool than Vicki Addis. They both knew from the physical evidence and from their own gut feeling that something was wrong with all this, the problem being they just didn’t know what.
Jim wasn’t about to tell them the truth.
Because, really, where would it get him? It wasn’t enough, of course, to land him in the nuthouse. Things like that only happened in old movies. But it was enough to get him some court-sanctioned psychiatry. And more than enough to turn his existence into a nightmare as Vicki Addis and Slayton, the big man on campus, crept through every facet of his life.
Let them guess. Let them speculate. Let them dig and search for clues. If they come upon the truth, they’re going to wish to God they’d kept their noses out of it.
From now on, he supposed, he might want to conduct his life like it was under the microscope because, realistically, it was.
7
Home again.
The day finally came. Nurse Koreshi wheeled him out of the hospital and as they waited for Nina to pull around in her Land Rover, Jim said, “Last chance to take me up on a casserole. You don’t know what heaven is until you’ve had one.”
Nurse Koreshi chuckled. The sunlight brought out the blue, shiny highlights in her dark hair and her olive skin gleamed like the finest bronze. She patted him on the shoulder with her long exquisite fingers. “I’ll definitely keep it in my mind, Mr. Duchane.”
“No, you won’t. But thanks for lying.”
Then he was in Nina’s Land Rover and they made the drive back to the neighborhood which looked remarkably like it had when he’d pulled his SUV out of the driveway a month before to pick up Rita and Dinah for the teacher’s con in Fallon. And that was wrong. Terribly wrong. They were both dead and he was broken up…how could everything else be exactly the same? How could the world keep turning without those two kind, wonderful people in it?
As if sensing his anguish, Nina reached over and put a hand on his arm.
“You’ve been through a lot and you’ve lost a lot,” she said. “Just take it one step at a time. It’s all anyone can do.”
She helped him into the house and told him about the food she’d stocked in the fridge for him. She’d cleaned and scrubbed. Countertops were shining and the tables were polished. Everything had been dusted. Even the windows were washed and the carpets cleaned and there was a casserole ready to go into the oven. It was a Plain Jane sort of casserole, the kind of thing his mother had referred to as a “hot dish,” but there was no doubt it was made with great love.
He settled in.
He sorted through mail and got on the web and paid bills, answered emails and made phone calls and watched sports on TV. When he got bored with that, he watched old movies. At least until they showed one called The Giant Claw, a real Z-grade stinker from the 1950s about a giant monster bird that looked like a plucked turkey. Even so, he couldn’t watch things like that as he once had. It made his skin crawl.
The house was a tomb and he was its lone occupant.
His second day home, Nina drove him out to the cemetery and he paid his respects to his two dear old friends. There would be no more cookouts in Rita’s backyard, no more of Dinah’s blue ribbon steaks or Rita’s crisp salads with vegetables plucked fresh from her own garden. No pitchers of ice-cold gin-and-tonics on the patio as the three of them dissected the Lost Generation, getting steadily drunk and imitating Hemingway’s voice in casual conversation until they were all roaring with laughter.
It was all gone now.
He ate a lot of meals at Nina’s and he walked. Every night after the sun went down, he walked and walked and walked. That’s what they wanted him to do and that’s what he did. At first, he was sore and breathless, but into his second week, he became stronger and less fearful of falling and ending back up in the hands of Dr. Panganis. He enjoyed the walking. It put his body to work and cleared his mind. And God knew how much he needed that because, grief and mourning aside, there was still the question of what had happened out on the highway and that was the very thing he couldn’t seem to come to terms with.
So the walking was good.
His doctor had been after him to get regular exercise for years, but there had never seemed to be time. Now there was time. There was time because he made there be time. If it hadn’t have been for Nina and the night walks, he would have lost his fucking mind. It was strange, but on these nightly strolls his past came back to him with an amazing clarity as if his mind had been closed for years and now had winked open like a clamshell. He didn’t spend much time thinking about his failed marriage to Liz. That had been over for nearly eight years by then and she was now a stranger to him.
What he thought about was his mom and dad and car culture in general. Odd, but true. When he was a kid, his dad was always washing and waxing one of the family rides out in the driveway. Whether that was his old Galaxy 500, his Buick sedan, or mom’s little orange VW bug, he was meticulous that they not only ran perfectly but looked like they’d just pulled out of the showroom. Mom and dad had been married back in the ‘50s and their generation was the first true car culture. To the previous generation, automobiles had been a luxury but hardly a necessity. That changed after World War II. The car became a symbol of success. Along with plenty of red meat and good booze, a fine ride was a gauge of upward mobility and pride. But, of course, there was a dark side to that. His mom took her car wherever she went, even if it was just a block away to the store. And his old man was the same. His brother lived two blocks away and he never once, that Jim could recall, walked over there. Maybe that was why his dad suffered a fatal heart attack two days shy of his 67th birthday and his mom followed him to the grave three years later.
They might not have known better, but Jim did. For years, he realized, he had been falling into the same trap. He never exercised, he ate frozen pizzas and cheeseburgers when he ate at all. He cooked rarely, knocking out a casserole now and then and that was only when somebody was coming for supper. If it hadn’t have been for Rita’s garden, he and his vegetables would have been complete strangers.
Rita and Dinah were dead now and, he figured, so was the old Jim Duchane. If anything good could come out of all that, it would be that he would start living his life differently. He needed to stay healthy. And if for no other reason so he could find out exactly what did happen on Route 50 that night.
It became not only a passion but an obsession.
One way or another, he was planning on getting answers.
8
Trauma changes your perspective. It alters your worldview and perception of reality. Your awareness increases to almost hallucinatory levels and you see things that were invisible before. You sense the shadows hiding in the corners and read the writing on the wall that was once indecipherable. You become feverishly aware that there is indeed a master plan to the universe, but it is controlled by a cold and hateful hand that spins the wheel of chance to bring pain and suffering on luckless individuals chosen completely at random.
This was how it seemed for Jim in those slow weeks after he returned from the hospital. Although the walking cleared his head and Nina’s near-constant presence cemented him to the physical reality of existence, there were still bouts of anxiety and even full-fledged terror that left him tottering on weak legs in the throes of vertigo.
One evening, he went next door to Nina’s and had dinner with her—Shake ‘N Bake chicken and Ore-Ida tater tots, which was about the extent of her culinary expertise. But it was good and it was filling and the conversation—mostly involving Hopi Indians and their traditional Snake Dance—was intriguing…at least until Nina began to digress into paleontology and told him how a Zuni snake clan had once worshipped the fossil of a mythical thunderbird.
“Thunderbird?” he said. “I take it we’re not talking about a Ford here?”
Nina chuckled. “No, Jim, we’re talking about a Native American myth concerning a giant bird that creates thunder and lightning with the flapping of its immense wings.”
He felt uncomfortable, but intrigued. “And the Zuni had the remains of one?”
“They thought so. Upon closer examination, this holy relic were actually the fossilized remains of the giant pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus,” she explained. “The individual, which had died in the Late Cretaceous, was remarkably well-preserved in a wall of sandstone that had once been a mud flat during the creature’s life so many, many millions of years ago.”
“I think I heard of that one.”
“Yes, it had a wingspan of something like fifty feet. Not something you’d like to see swooping over you.”
For a moment or two, he felt paranoia notching up inside him. Did she know? Did she suspect? Was she toying with him? But, of course, that was ridiculous. Nina was probably the only person in the world that he could trust now that Dinah and Rita were gone. He wasn’t married. No children. Parents dead. He had a few cousins in Indiana and Tennessee, but that was about it. She was really the only one who cared and the only person he could turn to…yet, this entire conversation was hatching the most awful images in his head.
He tried to make light of it. “Ah…I think I saw that movie. It was called The Giant Claw.”
“Yes, I’ve seen that one. And I’ve seen the others, too.” She laughed, her face lighting up with delight. Her skin was weathered and burnished from too many years spent hunting the lonely hills of the southwest for snakes and reptile lore. Her eyes were set in narrow draws as if even sitting here in her living room she was squinting into the wind. Maybe, figuratively, she was. “I think Rodan is my personal favorite.”
“Used to watch that when we were kids.”
He was hunting around in his mind for a way to change the subject, but she changed it for him. “Are the police and that insurance agent still bothering you?”
“You know, I haven’t heard from either in like two weeks and I’m keeping my fingers crossed.”
“That’s good. They can be very persistent w
hen they’re after something.”
Oh yes, they certainly can. “I’ve told them all there is to tell…”
“But?”
“But I don’t think they believe me.”
“Something’s not fitting into place for them, eh?”
Dammit. She was fishing and he knew she was fishing. Something wasn’t fitting into place for her either. Only, in her case, it had nothing to do with the physical evidence and everything to do with the fact that she knew him and knowing him, was certain that he was not exactly telling the whole truth. He looked over at her and her gray eyes were studying him intently.
Scrutinizing, was the word that occurred to him.
She knows you’re bullshitting. She knows you’re concealing something. So why not tell her? She’ll never repeat a word of it and you know it. Throw it at her feet and see if she likes the stink of it.
He opened his mouth, then closed it, visibly tensing. Though the night was not particularly warm, he began to sweat.
“Go ahead, Jim,” she said in a tone which managed to be motherly and sisterly at the same time. “I’m listening.”
So he told her. Going through the entire story in some detail was both painful and liberating. The terror of what he remembered and what he saw happen to his friends was almost more than he could bear…yet, getting it out, telling the whole sad/scary tale was like opening a cage inside himself and releasing some howling beast that had been tormenting him for too long.
When he finished, Nina opened her mouth, but he held a hand up. “Before you say anything, let’s get something straight. I know it sounds crazy. I know it couldn’t have happened the way I remembered it. I know that if I tell the police the truth they’re going to label me as a whacko. Surely, I suffered some hallucination or delusion brought about by trauma and fear and maybe even guilt because I was driving. I probably need therapy and anti-depressants and all that.” He paused, realizing that he was practically raving. He sighed and managed a thin smile. “Anyway, if you were going to say any of that nonsense to me, then it’s already been covered.”