Clive chewed his cheek. He turned left. Now they were on a street called Lemon Grove.
CHAPTER 14
The mists that blew in the mind of Pearl Dean swirled and changed. Although she had been absent, in a dream, her ears had recorded well enough what went on about her. Now she heard a playback. It came to her, all that loud voice had been saying. Laila’s name and description. The situation she was in.
She sat, massive, with her fat foot frozen on the accelerator. The car moved on, but now the noble dome of Pearl’s forehead wore a crease of stern reflection. It was nearly five o’clock. She was well out of the city. She wanted to keep the course she was on. Oh, she wanted to. Her dream of herself as the comforter, the guardian, the proxy mother was strong, but Pearl had run into some kinds of trouble before. The way of discretion rose like a rock in her path. She felt briefly resentful. She had been deceived, somehow. But there was no doubt in her mind about what she must do.
Her eyes began to roll and take in the geography. She was on Lemon Grove, which, here, was narrow and ran between fields in open country. The next crossroad was far ahead. She remembered it. A gas station there and a country store, a few dwellings, a cluster of buildings on the four corners. She must turn to her left on the crossroad and go quickly.…
Her head began to ache, jolted by the sharp incursion of reality, calling for such sudden real action. Nervously her foot pressed down. The little car responded. The trailer jerked and followed.
Far behind, the blue convertible rolled over a rise.
“There she is!” cried Dee. “There she is! Oh, Clive! Oh, good for us! Now, catch her!”
Clive felt the perspiration trickle on his back.
“I’ll try,” he said virtuously. He said, “Dee, I wish you were a little more open-minded. You see everything black and white. I mean, people are human. Nobody’s perfect. You’ve got to take that into consideration.… You’ve got a conscience. You think everybody.…”
“Don’t talk now!” cried Dee. “Just hurry!”
“I’ll hurry,” he said viciously. He hated his cousin Dee. Girl scout, he thought. “Don’t worry. I’ll hurry.” He tramped on the gas and the car surged and roared forward.
There were eyewitnesses to what happened at the crossroads at five o’clock that Wednesday afternoon. The police, combining this testimony with a study of the skid marks later, were able to work it out quite clearly.
As far as the blame could be assigned, the coupe did wrong twice over, passing the man with the flag, then turning left against the light. The blue convertible was going too fast and had also failed to see the flag or red light. The red panel truck coming forward at right angles to traffic had been under the flag’s protection. It was not to blame, but it had made the southwest corner a blind one, just the same. Then, the Buick coming south on Neptune Road had not been able to stop. His brakes were questionable.
It all added up to a mess.
The four corners exploded. People seemed to be blasted out of the store and the houses. They came like popcorn out of an empty-looking pan. In minutes, an ambulance screeched up from the south and police cars wailed in from north and west.
A witness who saw it all from the beginning was old Mrs. Gilman. Seated in her wheel chair on the porch of her house on the southeast corner, she had a box seat. Oddly enough, it did not shock her. She saw it happen with a kind savage revengeful satisfaction, although right afterwards, of course, she felt sorry. But it brought to her a vivid remembrance of the last time she had felt alive. Two years ago. Just before her personal crash.
That, too, had been an accident at a crossroads, just such a sudden tangle of metal and flesh. In it she had lost both her feet at the ankles and received a slash across her neck which had done its damage. Ever since, she could neither walk nor speak. She hadn’t been quite alive, since then.
Now her dumb throat ached to scream, but the scream would have been tinged with a triumphant “See! It can happen to you, too! See! That’s how it was! This is what comes of your speed and your carelessness, you silly people!”
It was just as well, she knew a moment later, that she couldn’t scream, for it wouldn’t have been becoming in a gentle old woman to scream in such a manner. She devoted herself to feeling sorry for those injured people, as sorry as only she could be, and to watching everything in sight from her position on the porch. She was glad that she had made her attendant, housekeeper, and practical nurse, Agnes Nilsson, bring her out and settle her here so early. She knew about what was scheduled to happen at seven o’clock across the street, and she had intended to enjoy that spectacle from its slightest beginnings. That was how she came to have a balcony seat for this unscheduled excitement.
Agnes, who fancied herself as a nurse, forgot all about Mrs. Gilman, temporarily, and went right down into it to see what she could do to help. So Mrs. Gilman, rather glad to be forgotten, was able to watch a good deal of what was happening. Not everything. A linen service truck had slewed to an angle and stopped smack in the intersection and it blocked her view of the goriest bits. For this she was not sorry. She was not really a blood-thirsty old lady. Just lonely and unfortunate and not altogether alive, any more.
Mike Torres, the driver of this linen service truck, told his swamper, Frank Turner, to stay with it, and he went to help. A couple of workmen rushed out of the Baxter house on the southwest corner and into the melee. The men at work unloading a truck marked KROV on the margin of the Baxter property stood and exchanged ejaculations. Men from the gas station on the northwest corner jumped to stop traffic before somebody else piled up. The police soon had the four feeding roadways blocked, and things simmered down. Slowly, in jabber and cry, all was disentangled. It became clear what had happened.
The light had been red for those running east and west. The red panel truck needed to be maneuvered into a position close to the front façade of the Baxter house. A man with a red flag had seized this chance when traffic before the house was not flowing, and he had stepped into the road to flag down and stop the east-bound cars before they reached the crossroads. The red truck had been nosing directly across the road; when the old Chewy coupe pulling a house trailer had come speeding and rocking east and missed seeing the flag. It had rocketed around the red truck’s nose and just as it did so, a blue convertible racing as if it meant to overtake and pass had taken the same sudden twist around the outraged red truck on which the driver had slammed the brakes. A Nash, scooting north with the green light and on the proper side of the road had been startled to a fast and clever dodge when the old Chevvy coupe had come fast out from behind the mask of that panel truck.
The Nash, unable to stop, had looped swiftly. But the coupe, intending a left turn against traffic, but finding itself on the wrong side of the road too close to that Nash, had in panic and confusion taken a second wild swerve. So that, although the Nash skinned by safely, the coupe had been yanked around almost into a U turn and the blue convertible had hit the coupe nearly head on. At the same moment, the Buick, coming legally south on Neptune, also hit the coupe which had taken this sudden fish-hook turn into its path.
Besides all this, the quick turns and immediate impact of the coupe with two cars had sent its trailer reeling. Loose of its hitch, it had skidded and gone sailing across the intersection, waltzing in front of the linen service truck, which had been following the Nash, heading north. By a whisker and a lurch, the linen truck had escaped being hit, and the trailer turning a full circle on its own axis had trembled to a stop, upright, close to Mrs. Gilman’s low wire fence on the southeast corner.
At the bottom of the trouble, the red panel truck, which was nevertheless innocent, legal, flag-protected, had suffered a bent bumper and shattered headlights where the convertible’s tail had caught it.
The man with the flag had a terrible blood-chilling suspicion that he had suddenly become invisible and he could not stop stammering out his righteousness and the fact that he had done his full duty.
Now, of course, cars coming east piled up behind the blue convertible. Cars coming north piled up behind the barrier of the stalled linen service truck. Cars coming south were falling in line behind the Buick and cars coming west were blocked by the Nash and the general confusion.
It was a mess.
Only the ambulance could get a clear way in, on the left side of the northbound road, for there were injuries and it was needed. A woman in that coupe. Girl and a man in the convertible. Driver of the Buick wasn’t feeling too well, either.
Mrs. Gilman, chained to her chair, was almost the only one who could clearly see the side door of that aluminum trailer. Miz Paget came and ran her two children away from there in maternal anxiety for their sensibilities, and the attention of everyone else was riveted, of course, on the central drama and the injured people. But Mrs. Gilman saw the door of the trailer quiver. It seemed to have been warped and sprung. She saw it open. It seemed to her that the girl who got out and stepped over the bashed-down wire fence into the margin of her own lawn was an apparition, for she had a great unfashionable mass of dark hair down her back. Her face was small and white and lovely as a wax doll.
Laila was dizzy. She was not hurt at all. The waltz of her little prison had not thrown her anywhere except against the soft upholstery where she had been lying. All that had happened was that the door had sprung. So she got out.
She had kicked off her pumps long ago. She stood in her stocking feet on the good ground with her shoes in her hand. She saw the old lady, up on the porch, straining forward in the chair, but the old lady did not speak or call to her. The bulk of the trailer hid the crossroads from Laila’s sight, but she could hear the talk and noise. There must be a great many people around the other side of the trailer. She heard the sirens swooping in. The mechanical wailing frightened her. She braced herself by her hands on the aluminum side.
What she had better do, she did not know. Finally, she began to stumble slowly to her right and she came slowly around the trailer’s end.
Frank Turner was standing high on a ledge at the back of the linen service truck, so that he could see into the heart of things. He could see Mike Torres helping them get a woman out of that coupe, working right along with the men off the ambulance. He felt proud of his boss. He felt good about it. Mike was kinda strict and grumpy, but when it came to something like this, he was a real good guy.
Frank himself was not long out of Korea and kind of tentative about what he did, because he had a hunch that he’d be going back. His knee didn’t incapacitate him much, that he could see. Anyhow, he’d lost his steam about jumping into a job to get himself on the way to riches. He didn’t care so much any more, about that. He’d come home with the gift of being whole-heartedly where he was, of tasting everything gentle and sunny and peaceful while it touched him, and enduring all that was not, without flinching. He was new on this job and obedient in a soldierly manner. So he stuck to the truck and his young face with the hollowed places at the temples, the thin drawn cheeks, the boy’s mouth and the man’s eyes, was serious but calm.
Something made him turn his head and he looked around and there was an angel.
CHAPTER 15
She was wearing a long blue coat, standing right there below him, and her pale lovely face was tipped up, and that hair! Man, this was something different! This wasn’t any bobby-soxer!
She said, “What is it? What is everyone looking at?” in a sweet clear voice.
He thought she lived around here. He said, “Kind of a bad accident, Ma’am. Some people got hurt, I’m afraid.”
“Is Pearl hurt?”
(Just as if he’d know who Pearl was.) “I don’t know, Ma’am,” Frank said, smiling at her. He jumped down. He said, “You look kinda pale, Ma’am. Some friend of yours was in a car, you think? Is that it? And you’re afraid …?”
“Yes, that’s it,” said Laila gravely. “Yes, I … I am afraid.”
“Well,” Frank said, “what can I do? Look, would you want to climb up and see if you can see? I could open the doors,” Frank said eagerly and he reached up and did so.
Now there was more than a ledge. There was a full step revealed and he helped her up on it. Some of her hair fell across the flesh of his hand. It was soft. It was beautiful, he thought. An angel, in blue. Gee, he liked the way her hair fell. A woman should have long hair, he suddenly decided.
He climbed up himself and he steadied her and she let him. First, she looked right into his eyes and then she let him. Now, they could both see over the heads of people standing around.
He felt the girl shudder. “Is it your friend?” he inquired. “Gee, I’m sorry, if it is. Can I do anything?”
“Oh, poor Pearl. Oh, Dee! Oh, Dee!” She didn’t say it loud or scream or anything but he held onto her because she might fall.
He said, “Look, if you’d want to sit down.…” Behind them were the big soft sacks of soiled linen, filling the rear half of the truck, lying against the partition that guarded the front half where the clean stuff was carried.
She said, “Oh, Clive,” faintly. She said, “I don’t know what to do.”
Frank told her gently that there was nothing to do but try and take it easy. The ambulance men were taking care of it. They were putting the big stout woman on the stretcher now. She was out, all right. Frank didn’t think she looked dead, though. He was rather an authority.
He said, soothingly, “The lady in the black dress is going to be O.K., I should think, Ma’am. They’ll take care of her, you know. Get her to the hospital, right away.”
“To a hospital?”
She was leaning all her weight on him, now … a sweet delicious burden it was. He bore it with steady strength, careful not to let his feeling intrude upon her need. “Sure,” he soothed. “That’s just what they’ll do.”
Now, the white coat working over the redhead looked up at the tallish man who was talking to the cop and mopping his face with a bloody handkerchief. There was some exchange. The man nodded. He went on talking nervously to the cop.
They began to bring the stretchers toward the ambulance.
Frank got a glimpse of the redhead’s face and she was out, and a pretty face it was, too. So young and fair. He thought, Gosh, what do they have to go around smashing up women for?
The girl beside him was pretty shocked and pretty frightened, he could tell. He eased her back against the soft sacks and he said, “Aw, if’s probably not too bad. I mean, gee, they can do miracles, now. I got kinda banged up last spring and you should see how the medics put me back together.”
The girl looked right into his eyes again and he was almost willing to swear she’d never been down here on earth before. She said, “Did they?”
“They sure did. They’re wonderful.”
“Are they?” She trembled. “Was it in a hospital?”
“Sure was.” He was talking to reassure her. “I was in eight weeks. Gee, it was wonderful what they did and good food and everything.”
Her neck bent as if the little head dropped under the weight of that glorious hair. “I’m not … feeling very well.”
He said, “Gee, I’m sorry. Gee, I don’t wonder.” And his arm was all the way around her and she leaned on it and sank with it against the sacks … as if she was pretty beat. Frank didn’t know exactly what he was going to do about her but he wasn’t going to take his arm away. Not yet, anyhow.
The tall man and the cop moved closer to the ambulance. They were set, to Frank’s sight, like a picture in the truck’s door frame. The crowd was not noisy any more but respectful toward pain and possible tragedy. So it became possible for the words between these men to be heard and understood by the young people deep inside the linen service truck.
The cop said, “That’s O.K. then, and I got the names. Another thing, though. I understand from L.A. we are supposed to pick up this Pearl Dean. Supposed to be a Laila Breen with her. You know about that?”
The tall man, whose back was toward the truck, said,
“What?”
“Same name,” said the cop sharply. “You’re Breen.”
“Oh, my cousin, you mean.” The man had a cut on his face. It was patched with adhesive but he kept mopping at it.
“Thought you said this one was your cousin.”
“Yes, Miss Allison. Yes, she is my cousin.”
“Look,” said the cop, “you could be in shock but … uh … be obliged if you’d kinda try and explain about these cousins.”
“You see, we thought Laila might be with Miss Dean. Don’t you see?” said the tall man. “She’s been poisoned. I guess you heard that. So naturally, we were trying to catch her.” He swung his head from side to side. “But she … wasn’t in the car, was she? Excuse me, I’m kind of mixed up myself. I mean, we thought she was.”
The girl in the blue coat began to shudder and Frank let his arm tighten.
“I don’t see her,” Clive said.
“Wearing a pink suit, eh?”
“Yes, she was,” Clive said.
“I don’t understand,” the girl was whimpering. “I don’t understand.”
Frank said, “Come on, lean back. Just fall back, why don’t you? You mustn’t worry. They’re just going to the hospital.”
She said faintly, “They are going to a hospital?”
“Sure. Sure they are.”
The ambulance driver was in his seat, the attendant inside. The cops sprang to clear some bystanders from its path.
“They’re going right now,” Frank said.
“Pearl, and Dee, are going to a hospital? Not me?”
“Sssh,” said Frank, touching her hair with his free hand. “I’ll find out which one for you. The cop will know. You can call up. Or you can go to the hospital. It’ll be all right. Don’t be afraid.”
Her hand went out in a frightened gesture and Frank caught it in his own.
The ambulance started. It purred, it leaped, its siren began softly and swelled and then, in the distance, it fell and rose again. And it was gone.
Catch-As-Catch-Can Page 11
