Whirl Away

by Russell Wangersky

  In an offhand way, he thought it was like the trees. Other people had trees, big, tall, dignified trees like footnotes to their complete and satisfied lives. It’s what you get when you’re diligent and careful and you plan ahead. Like children—and then grandchildren. Get kids, and then you get grandchildren too. He’d tried to explain that to Mary as if it was all a given, but she didn’t seem to get it at all.

  Sometimes, he imagined himself as an old man, raking up the fallen leaves around maple trunks as thick as a man’s waist. He had planted the trees far enough apart to take that into consideration, and he had researched how much space a mature maple needs, reading up on different tree species before making his final choice. He imagined kids running around too, kids who could safely be packed up at the end of the day and sent home.

  The Suzuki ended any chance of that. Late on a Friday night, the car spent its last few seconds in the air, completing a shallow but complex barrel roll to the right. John found out later it was three clean, tight and acrobatic rotations, while inside the metal box everything flew around along its own personal imperative, physics moving scores of things in hundreds of directions. A dozen beer on the back seat didn’t manage to escape the cardboard confines of their box, but every single bottle broke its neck hitting the roof of the car, a roof that was now sharply lower after the touchdown on the first spin. A carton of paperback books in the back, taped and Magic Markered and designated for a church sale, burst their bounds and the books battered around inside the back of the car, fluttering wildly. All the floor mats leapt up an inch or two and then settled topographically back into ridges and valleys, the dips catching the diamonds of safety glass from the broken side windows.

  John would find the spare tire the next morning, almost up to the side of the house, long after the wrecker had dragged away all the other pieces.

  One of the teens left the car too, winding up spreadeagled on the lawn, but it was the firefighters who found him. John didn’t even realize the teen was there until they’d put the boy on a gurney and brought him down the driveway.

  The crash was, John decided, the most gruesome thing he had ever seen. He and Mary had been in the living room, watching television, when the Suzuki first left the road. For just an instant, Mary had reached across and set her hand on his wrist, but John was up off the couch in a moment, looking out at the black silhouette in the yard, backlit by the street lights, the car’s headlights still pooling on the grass.

  When he was out the door and standing next to the wreck, his pulse hammered quickly in a not unpleasant way, and he could feel it tripping hard in his ears.

  Mary stayed in the house.

  John had approached the car gingerly, as if there were some need to treat the overturned vehicle gently. He could hear the exhaust system ticking as the metal cooled, the pace of the ticks slowing.

  One of the teenagers left inside the car had been thrown upwards in virtually the same arc as the beer case. The stem of the rear-view mirror had taken out his left eye, but it didn’t matter. His neck was broken along the same angle as all the bottles.

  The driver, meanwhile, met the steering wheel with his chest, the roof with his shoulder and the inside of the door with the ribs of his left side—except for his left arm, which flicked out through the broken window as if signalling a turn and then snapped as the car rolled smoothly over it. A Kleenex box and a dozen CDs had flown through the air, striking things and flying again. With the last thump, the glove compartment had burst open, vomiting paper and a windshield scraper and a spare house key that everyone in the owner’s family had been trying to find for months.

  The first thing John noticed as he came down the driveway was how cleanly the tumbling vehicle had sheared off six of his seven maples. The mailbox post was snapped off at ground level. The mailbox itself, crushed, turned up underneath the car once it was finally moved.

  In the minutes before the emergency crews arrived—Mary had called 911, standing in the front window like a black cut-out of herself—John decided both of the teenagers in the car had to be dead. He was wrong. The driver survived, as did the passenger from the back seat, the passenger who had popped out through the back window after the glass burst away and who had flown, wingless, to crumple in the grass.

  John stood rooted in one spot when the fire trucks arrived, stunned by the lights and the noise and the rapid, clipped motion of the firefighters. He was still standing in the same place when the police, finished with their brief investigation, their measurements and photographs, stopped traffic in both directions so the wrecker, parked square across the road, could stand the vehicle back on its wheels, drag it back onto the road and haul the wreck away.

  It seemed like it was over in minutes, but Mary told him he had been outdoors for more than an hour and a half. That was all she said. After that, she didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

  John couldn’t understand why. He tried to talk to Mary about it, about the long gouge in the grass and the way the mailbox was carried along by the car and then pancaked flat, about the teenagers and the way they’d looked and the fact he hadn’t even realized one of them was launched clear and had been lying on the grass of the front yard like he was having a nap.

  Mary listened for a few minutes, but as soon as she heard that one of the teenagers had died, she abruptly told him that she had no interest in hearing any more about it.

  He found that somehow discouraging.

  Mary was a small woman, and the two of them made an incongruous pair. Some couples look like each other, but John and Mary didn’t. He was tall and thin, with dark, straight hair, his face too sharp for his own liking. Once, upon inspection in the mirror, he had decided his eyes were too close together. Mary, on the other hand, was small and doll-like and perfectly balanced, with big eyes that always seemed to be perched on the verge of surprise. The difference between them actually made him uncomfortable. People, he thought, might look at them and find it hard to believe they belonged together, especially when they heard Mary talk, heard the way her words came out tiny and precise and high, like a child’s.

  Although John never told her, he found hearing her thin, small voice when they made love both thrilling and somehow illicit, the same kind of forbidden pleasure, he imagined, as the idea of seducing a teen babysitter.

  Maybe people just get used to looking at their families, he thought, and end up predisposed to liking someone else whose face falls into familiar lines and expressions. It wasn’t that way with Mary, so sometimes he found himself holding her hand desperately, or throwing an arm across her shoulders at a party, just to prove how made for each other they really were. Sometimes he just held her arm, his hand tight, oblivious to the fact that she wanted to shake free and couldn’t.

  He took her out to dinner the night after the accident. And then he found himself talking about it all evening, words spilling out of him all at once. John felt the occasional stab of guilt for keeping her pinned in the chair, unable to just get up and leave because they were in public. But he kept talking anyway, and part of him enjoyed the way he could make her flinch with the more graphic details. Later that night he reached for her in bed, but she rolled away from him, curling in on herself, and before he fell asleep, he thought for a short, distracted moment that she might be crying.

  With the second crash—dry, clear roads, right in the middle of a sunny Sunday afternoon—John felt he’d gotten better at grasping the important details. At cataloguing them more carefully. This time it was a pickup truck with a load of freshly cut fir logs. It didn’t so much leave the road as trundle in a straight line off hard into the ditch, the truck stopping faster than its load of wood did.

  The top layer of logs slid through the window behind the driver, with one log, slightly more than a foot in diameter, striking the driver right at the base of the skull before smashing out through the windshield and coming to a stop on the hood. John stared through the side window at the driver for ages, amazed at the fact that the m
an’s dead hands were still holding on to the wheel, waiting fruitlessly for a signal to let go.

  The passenger, a man in his fifties, was turned in his seat, caught as if looking at the driver, staring across “stone dead,” John would say later, as if killed by the tableau of sheer horror sitting next to him.

  When the ambulance crew arrived a handful of minutes later, they yanked the passenger out of the truck roughly and spread him flat on his back on the ground, surrounded by John’s freshly cut grass, futilely pushing on the man’s chest and pumping air into his lungs with a ribbed plastic bag. John watched across the hood of the truck, smelling both the crisp smell of the fir sap and the brassy sharp tang of the fresh blood. He watched as the fire crew unloaded their gear, cut the roof away with the tools and lifted the log off the mangled driver.

  This time, he had a better idea about everything the firefighters were doing, and when the police arrived, he realized that their investigation was more involved than he had given them credit for the first time. The whole process was quick, sure, but more calculated than he had realized with the Suzuki. They measured the short skid that lipped over the white line at the edge of the road and down into the gravel shoulder, and one policeman took photographs from every conceivable angle, stopping the firefighters at one point so that he could record the pattern left in the glass where the logs had marked and sprung through the back window. They unrolled a long yellow measuring tape and measured from the back wheels of the truck to where the skid started, and one officer climbed the tailgate and photographed the logs, too.

  It wasn’t just the investigation that was more involved. John thought all the colours were brighter too, and the sounds more distinct—the reds and greens, the leaves and the oozing bark, and the way everyone moved quietly, voices low, as if the seriousness demanded silence. There was the way the sun caught at the scattered glass that had burst out onto the hood, the way the spiderweb of cracks in the glass worked their way ever wider apart as they moved from the point where the log had come out through the windshield. John recognized the sharp smell of the diesel exhaust of the fire trucks, and the sound of the grumble of the big engine in the ambulance, idling. He could smell gasoline from somewhere under the truck, and the heavy, more involved scent of motor oil too, and he was still staring when the driver’s son arrived in his own car, leaping out and running to the pickup until the firefighters got in his way and pushed him back to where the police were taking notes.

  John watched as the man sat in the back of the police cruiser, thunking his head rhythmically against the Plexiglas divider between the front and back seats. And all at once John thought he had to start gathering every piece he could, as if there were a great importance hidden in every scrap of it. He was keenly aware how hard it was to catch all the small things; there was just so much going on. There was a green deodorant tree hanging on a thin string from the rear-view mirror of the truck. You couldn’t make that kind of irony up, he thought, the driver obviously trying to import the smell of evergreens right into the cab. And then he’d managed to do exactly that.

  The paramedics had cut the shirt away from the passenger’s stomach and chest, and his arms and legs were stretched out like he was trying to catch something huge falling out of the sky—and the front of the man’s pants were soaking wet.

  Maybe, John thought, it would help if I took my own photographs.

  Whenever they went out socially, the topic of the accidents always seemed to come up. What was it like to have people regularly dying at the end of your driveway?

  John surprised even himself: he started talking about the crashes almost every time he and Mary went out, and he was always amazed by the way strangers would circle tight around him as the stories got more detailed. It brought a sudden importance to the room, an obvious and almost respectful hush. John learned as he went along that it was better if he didn’t tell the whole story in one go, but instead kept things back, parcelling details out piece by piece, always making the careful effort to keep his face earnest, sincere, almost shaken. Better still if he could make it seem as if he didn’t really want to have to talk about it—as if others were dragging the gruesome details out of him against his will. Almost as if he were suggesting throughout that it was their own fault—“You wanted to hear this”—while at the same time the stories were beginning to fall into a carefully practised pattern, a kind of rote. Trying to remember if he was talking to people who’d heard the stories before.

  Working on the highs and the lows, the beginnings, midpoints and ends—the careful pacing.

  The punchlines.

  John learned when to pause seriously and look down, letting the words fall out of his mouth like they were too heavy to hold in—“they were both dead”—and when he should stare intently at one of the listeners and make his eyes as large as he could, as if astounded by the sheer wonders of car-crash physics and geometry.

  “Not a mark on him,” he’d say about the passenger in the pickup. “Not a mark.”

  Then he’d wait, wait and force his audience to make him tell them about the horror of the driver, about what it looked like when the top logs in the pile barrelled into the back of his head and shoulders through the flat glass of the pickup’s back window.

  It was, he thought, a lot like fishing: you could feel the listeners coming closer and closer to the hook, nipping, swirling, and all the time he’d be waiting for his opportunity to strike it home and watch them flinch, watch their eyes dart away because they couldn’t take it after all.

  He’d be discouraged, sometimes, when the listeners suddenly lost interest and turned away, or if they didn’t ask the right question so that he could say something to well and truly crush their curiosity. But he learned more every time, with every telling of the story.

  Once, at an anniversary party for a couple they’d never see socially again, he had been in full flight, describing the familiar flattened mailbox and the way it had been mowed over twice—and then the teenager who had lost both his eye and his life—when he glimpsed Mary, just close enough to hear him at the edge of the circle of listeners, her face mapped hard with disgust. The hosts had already fled into the kitchen, the door swinging shut behind them, looking for more hors d’oeuvres that no one was going to want to eat.

  That night, in their bedroom, she was furious with him. He couldn’t see her, all the lights out and the curtains pulled tight, but her words in the darkness were so sharp that he imagined they had to come from someone else.

  “I hate it,” Mary hissed at him, and John could imagine the words hanging in the air, white block capitals against the dark, disconnected from anything else. “Every time, everywhere we go, it’s the same damn stories. And you always look so smug, like you’re cashing in on someone else’s misfortune. I wish you could see yourself. You’ve turned into a vulture.” Then, in smaller letters that hung in the air for even longer: “Sometimes I don’t even like you anymore, John.”

  He imagined the words fading away in the air, their edges dissolving.

  But he didn’t answer, caught up in just part of what she had said.

  Smug, he thought. Now that stung.

  So when he was shaving, he practised making the right kind of face. It had to be a combination of serious and resigned, he thought, moving his eyebrows up and down but failing to find just the pattern he was looking for. He was reaching for dignified, with a touch of something like respect for the fallen thrown in. As far away from smug as he could make it.

  The third crash was different—not quite in their yard this time, but caused by too much speed on the same familiar straightaway, and by the same sharp curve just before the house. A car had swung its way almost into the ditch, one front wheel over onto the loose stones of the shoulder, but this time the driver had cut the wheel sharply, in time to get his car back onto the road. He was successful in that, but in the process he flung his car across the centre line and straight into the path of a dump truck heading in the opposite direction.
Neither driver had a chance to react after that, and the accident was awesome in its sheer brutality.

  There were no pieces travelling around the car in their delicate prescribed arcs, finding their way to a new position along explainable lines. This was all hard, full, spectacular stop, the car crumpling abruptly underneath the huge engine of the truck, the back of the car accordioning into the front as it kept moving forwards.

  Inside the house, the head-on impact sounded like an explosion. John jumped off the couch, knowing immediately what had happened. As he ran for the door, Mary threw the book she had been reading at him, the pages whiffling and fluttering, but she missed.

  John could see how serious the accident was as soon as he got out the door. It was the way the dump truck was crouched over the crushed car like a cat over a small and absolutely dead mouse. The driver’s door on the truck was open, the driver running around the car from one side to the other, trying to see inside. The roof, what you could see of it, was crushed flat down to the tops of the doors, so the vehicle looked more like a sheet-steel tank than anything else.

  There was an absolute absence of sound, everything startled into silence.

  John could see that other cars were stopping, people piling out in a rush until they got close enough to the car to take a good look. Then they were simply slumping away, leaning on their cars as if they needed the support, as if their bones and muscles had suddenly developed an inexplicable weakness.

  Glass was thrown out and away from the car in all directions, every single mirror and window broken explosively so that the pieces were intermingled in a great wide circle all around the car.

  Then the dump truck driver was sitting on the ground in shock, his face covered with his hands and his back against the front wheel of the truck. He was moaning, his legs thrown out in front of him as if he’d lost the ability to move at all. Something was oozing from the bottom of the crushed car, but John was too far away to tell whether it was blood or transmission fluid. Later, he’d decide it had to be blood. It sounded better that way.