Meeting Evil: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  “Just an idea,” Richie said.

  John saw something that brought him back to the moment. A quarter mile ahead, the truck that had tailgated him was parked on the shoulder, which had widened with the broadening of the highway. Instantly chilled, he would have turned and run if he could, but the road was one-way and at this point on the median the simple grass had given way to bushes, so it was not physically possible to perform an illegal U-turn and head back where they had come from—for such he might well have done, in a sudden and unprecedented access of mortal fear.

  In another moment, however, he again was in command of himself. The truckdriver was surely not waiting for him but rather immobilized by mechanical trouble. John was in fact instantly ashamed of himself and grateful that he had said or done nothing that could have revealed his fright to Richie, whom he glanced at now.

  Richie, too, had already seen the truck. “Hey, look!”

  “I guess he’s broken down,” John said hopefully.

  Richie eyed him. “Maybe we just ought to stop and ask. Maybe he’s in real trouble.”

  John took refuge in a sardonic tone. “I doubt it’s life or death.” They were not far from the truck now, but he had yet to see the driver.

  “Pull in,” Richie said abruptly. “You can stay in the car if you want. I’ll see what’s what.”

  Insulted by the implied slur on his courage, John accelerated onto the shoulder and then had to brake hard, skidding on the loose dirt and gravel, to stop the car before it collided with the rear of the truck.

  He jumped out, in a certain disorder. He disliked hearing the sound his old sneakers, normally quiet, made on the gritty shoulder. Before he reached the truck, the driver’s door was hurled open. A burly figure emerged and did not jump but rather descended to the ground with the deliberation of the overweight.

  So that his intentions could not be misinterpreted, John quickly said, “Hi. Anything we can help you out with?”

  The driver wore a dirty plaid shirt but was clean-shaven and pinkly scrubbed of skin. He spoke in some kind of hick accent. “You mess around with me, and I’ll make you cry.” He was taller than John and wider, but much of his poundage consisted, visibly, of lard, and he looked to be about forty. He held a metal bar.

  John had not been in a fight since childhood, and in fact had not been offered one since then. But now that he was out of the car and actually in this situation, he was not unduly apprehensive. He was a salesman, and knew how to talk to people.

  “Hey, I just stopped to see if I could help out.” He smiled. “Really. We thought you just might be in some trouble.”

  “I ain’t,” said the truckdriver.” You are.” He lowered his heavy head, on which the thick hair looked freshly combed.

  “Now take it easy,” John said, suppressing his annoyance. “I mean it. If your radio’s out, I’ll be glad to make a call for you at the next phone. How about it?”

  “I could of squashed you like a stinkbug,” the trucker said, “in your little gook automobile.” He tapped the iron bar against the palm of his left hand.

  John decided it would be cowardly to disclaim ownership of the car at this point, though he had begun to take the weapon seriously. “I didn’t do anything to you,” he said firmly. “You tailgated me and wouldn’t pass when you had the chance.”

  The truckdriver said, “And now I’m going to take you apart, smartmouth.”

  John did not give ground. “I’ll say it again: I don’t have anything against you. But if you threaten me with that, you’re breaking the law.”

  The fat man laughed sourly, showing lots of pink mouth. His stomach hung over the waist of his pants, obscuring most of the oversized belt buckle, but that also could be said of the world’s strongest men, the weightlifters of the superheavyweight class.

  “This here’s the law of the road, you skunk.” The trucker continued to slap the bar against his other palm as he advanced. “Should of wrote your will before comin’ out today.”

  Hands in the air, John began to backstep. “What have I done to you? Take it easy.” He despised himself for the beseeching note that had entered his voice.

  “You just think what I’m going to do to you,” the man cried with a rage so venomous that John could not stand against it: he broke and ran to the car.

  Richie was at the wheel, and the engine was running. “He’s got a tire iron!”

  “Look out,” Richie said, leering ahead. The door handle was torn from John’s grasp as the car shot forward, striking the truckdriver, lifting his heavy body as though it were stuffed with straw. It struck the hood and bounced away.

  Richie braked. For an instant John tried to believe it was a mishap of the sort that was common enough, though usually with older drivers: the car is accidentally in gear, the foot by chance comes down on the gas and stays there in momentary panic. But when the vehicle reached him in its reverse travel and he saw Richie’s triumphant face, John recognized that the trucker had been intentionally run down.

  Richie was shouting at him to jump in on the passenger’s side. In confusion, he obeyed the order. He knew he was not acting well, but he had to collect himself. He needed a moment or two, but there was none to spare. Richie pulled onto the road and stepped on the gas.

  “He was going to kill you, no doubt about it, but we nailed him instead! The fat hog.” Richie was crowing: it had been no accident.

  John now hoped that this self-serving version was true, though even in his distress he thought it depraved to wish that someone killed in your interest had brought disaster on himself by trying first to be himself a killer. What kind of world had replaced the one he knew?

  He finally had the strength to say, “We better go back and see about him. We can’t just let him lay there.”

  “This is one-way. Anyway, go back to what? He’s not gonna do us any good, dead or alive.”

  To his horror John found himself wanting to agree, but what kind of person had he become to accept such reasoning? “He didn’t actually touch me. Maybe it just would have stayed a bluff.”

  “I saw him coming at you with murder in his eye and a tire iron in his fist. One swipe would have opened up your skull. I sure couldn’t wait and see.”

  “Why did he do that?” John asked in anger and guilt.

  “I say he was going to kill you. I’ll stick to that.”

  “Why. Why?” John looked back at the road through the rear window, but they were already too far away to see more than a kind of blur that must be the truck. Richie was apparently traveling flat out, but John had no sensation of speed or even of movement.

  “Some people,” Richie said, “just go around looking for trouble. I don’t even ask why. If they meet up with me, they get it: that’s all I know.” He gave John a quick wink. “That’s all I need to know.”

  John had never seen anyone be struck head-on by an automobile. He had no idea what could be done for such victims, were they still alive. He prayed that the truckdriver, however evil, still was, and could be healed, though of course if that proved to be the case, he himself might be in trouble, however guiltless. The victim had never seen Richie. John could hardly breathe. His heart was in more turmoil than when he had merely feared being brained by a tire iron.

  “Take that exit there,” he told Richie, and was desperate enough to have hurled himself at the man had his command been defied, but as always the other acquiesced. What was especially terrible about the running-down of the truckdriver was that Richie assumed he did it in John’s interest. There was something very wrong with him.

  Within three hundred yards of where the exit ramp joined a state road was a dirty-white little house with a screened-in porch.

  “Pull in there!” said John, and Richie drove into the unpaved driveway that led to a garage out back.

  John left the car. The screen door was latched. He pounded on the desiccated wood of its frame. There was no visible doorbell. Repeated blows of his fist on the flaking green paint brought no r
esponse. He came down from the step and half circled the house. It was hard to tell from the windows whether anyone might be home, but on a warm day all of them were closed.

  He went to the car, where Richie, the source of all his troubles, had remained. “We’ve got to get to a phone.”

  With a genial shrug, Richie stepped from the car and walked jauntily to the house, punched a hole in the screen, and opened the door. He forthrightly broke the glass of the inner door with one kick of his formidable running shoes, reached within, and disengaged the bolt.

  John had not meant to break in, but it was small damage compared to running a man down by car. He pushed Richie aside and shouted through the open doorway.

  “We don’t mean any harm! It’s an emergency. A man’s dying, and we need your phone.”

  There was no answer. He saw a telephone on a little table within a few feet of the entrance. He picked up the handpiece.

  The line was in use. “Lock yourself in the room,” said an authoritative voice. “We’re on our way.… Who picked up that extension?“

  “Excuse me,” John said. “I have to get through. There’s an emer—”

  “Who are you?” The voice was threatening.

  “A man might be dying on the highway!”

  “Did you kill him?“

  “No. He was hit by a car.”

  “Your car?“

  “Will you get off the line?” John shouted. “He needs an ambulance.”

  “You just stay on the phone, sir,” said the voice, less threatening and with a new note of sympathy, which was suspiciously fake because it took no account of what John had said. “Don’t move from the phone. Are you by yourself in the house, or is somebody else with you?”

  In the house. How did this man know where he was calling from? Suddenly he understood. Someone was at home, in another room, and from there had called the police!

  “Are you a cop?” John asked, and though he received no answer, continued as if he had. “Then send an ambulance out to Forty-five A northbound, somewhere not too far south of Hillsdale: a man is lying on the shoulder, next to a tractor trailer.”

  “Listen,” the policeman said, “you just keep talking to me. I want to get everything straight. Give me your name, if you don’t mind, and—”

  “You heard me,” said John. “I’m not a criminal. I’m a passerby, and I had to get to a phone. I’m leaving money for new glass and screening.” He was saying this as much for the resident of the house as for the cop. “I’m sorry the damage had to be done, but this guy’s life might be saved.”

  A woman was on the line, moaning. “He’s going to kill me.”

  “No, he is not, ma’am. He’s got too much sense for that.”

  John hung up in desperation. He had not noticed what became of Richie, and now assumed the man returned to the car. But crossing the porch, he could see no one in the front seat of the automobile. He had a wild impulse to leap into the car and drive himself as far from this mess as he could get, leaving Richie to pay the piper—for was not that bastard single-handedly responsible for all of it?

  But whether he would have proceeded further with his impracticable scheme, he had not quite reached the vehicle when he heard the screen door bang behind him. At least he regained the driver’s seat.

  Richie leaped into the passenger’s side. He was carrying a pint bottle of vodka.

  John pulled out to the road in high-speed reverse. No doubt the woman was watching from an upstairs window and would write down the license number and a description of the car. Perhaps she had even seen him and Richie. And only now did it occur to him that there must have been some drivers in the southbound lane of the highway who saw the running-down of the truckdriver. The police were probably already looking for them. By now it had become a virtual crime spree.

  He decided that the cops would expect someone fleeing to use the fastest road at hand—namely, the highway from which they had recently exited. Therefore it made most sense to continue on the county road and, if possible, find an even more modest thoroughfare, and there to slow to a speed that would attract no undue attention. He was amazed, and given the situation, as pleased as he could be, with his ability to think clearly and effectively, he who had no experience of crime. He did not even care for the fictional cop shows on TV (to which for some reason Joanie was addicted), with their excessive discharge of ammunition that never found its mark if directed at the good guys but was unerring with the bad.

  Richie was sucking at the mouth of the vodka bottle.

  “Why’d you have to steal that?” John asked him angrily. “Can’t you see it hurts our argument that we broke into the place only to call for an ambulance?”

  “Who would begrudge us a drink?” Richie asked. “I’d of just had one there if you hadn’t run out so fast. I’m all shaken up. I need something.”

  John might have welcomed this expression of human vulnerability had he believed it genuine. “You’ve really got me into something now. I should have stayed back there with the truckdriver and flagged down a car. I should have stayed at the house till the police came. But I panicked. I’ve never been in trouble before in my entire life. I’m panicking now, and I can’t help it. I don’t know why I’m driving away like this.” Nevertheless, he saw a quiet road of the kind he was looking for and turned onto it. After a stretch of field on either side, woodland took over. Nobody else was on the road, but in the left-hand field a distant figure was riding a piece of farming equipment.

  “I’ll tell you why,” said Richie. “It’s self-preservation. We didn’t do anything wrong, but you realize the cops would throw the book at us, for something we didn’t do.”

  “Didn’t do?“

  “You know what I’m talking about. We didn’t do anything wrong. That guy was going to beat your brains out with the tire iron: we only did what we had to do in self-defense.”

  “It wasn’t we,” John said vehemently. “It was you.“

  Richie lowered the bottle. “Tell me I’m in error, John,” he asked quietly, “but what did I personally get out of it?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Then what is, for heaven’s sake? You’re not making any sense. I don’t want to make a lot of myself, but some would say I saved your life back there on the road. Then going to that house: whose idea was that? Who had to get to a phone? Why you cared whether that big fat sack of shit was dead or dying, I don’t understand: he was going to kill you. Think he would care if the situation was reversed?”

  John realized he was trying to reason with someone whose principles were different from his own, and he understood why he himself was endeavoring to keep away from the police: because of an instinctive conviction (shocking in a member of a civilized society) that the cops would listen to him with no more comprehension than Richie displayed now. Whatever his own motives, he had served as an accomplice in an intentional hit and subsequent run, and then a breaking and entering of a private dwelling place, which was furthermore occupied at the time, and by a woman who sounded as though she might be aged or ill or both. But theft of a pint of vodka was hardly serious burglary. Perhaps foolishly, should the truckdriver die, John sought mitigation.

  “Did you take anything else?”

  But Richie had turned and was leering into the rear. “Hey, you! Want a drink?”

  John had momentarily forgotten about Sharon. He tilted the mirror to see her. She rose slowly from the supine, looking the worse for wear. There seemed to be a question as to whether she was aware of what had happened during the last half hour.

  Richie snorted. “You look like a pig.”

  “Cut that out,” John said. “We’re all in this together.” He was immediately sorry he had put it that way, which served to confirm Richie’s position. To Sharon he said, “Anything we can do for you?” The question was hypocritical, of course, for he would hardly have stopped the car at this point.

  Sharon gave the impression of trying to smile. “God,” she said. �
�I’ve felt better.”

  Richie sat back in his seat and drank more vodka. “We ought to get rid of her,” he said.

  What John found especially disturbing about this statement was that it did not appall him—as, in all decency, it should have. He would very much have liked to see the last of Sharon. He resented her: as if dealing with Richie were not already too much to handle.

  Nevertheless, he again reminded Richie whose car it was, little as that fact might mean to someone who had responded to the theft of his own car with indifference.

  The road had now reached the woods and taken a turn that would have concealed them from the sight of any pursuers on the main road, though frequent checks of the rearview mirror had revealed none thus far. There would be little reason to suppose they had taken this obscure route when wider thoroughfares, leading to municipalities into the traffic of which they could merge, were available—but even while making this argument to himself, John was aware of its possible weakness. With no precedent by which to judge, he might well be doing exactly what the police would expect, and could encounter a roadblock around the next bend.

  He appealed to Richie. “You have any idea where we are? I’ve lost all sense of direction. The sun was over there, wasn’t it?” It had disappeared behind the clouds some time earlier, and the nearby trees were very tall. “Are we anywhere near Hillsdale?”

  “Damned if I know.” Richie had almost emptied the bottle by now.

  John exploded. “Have you ever even seen Hillsdale? You don’t live there, do you? This whole trip has been a wild-goose chase! Goddamn you, what’s your game?”

  “Is this the time to fight with me?“

  John gave in to an impulse. He slammed the brake pedal down, causing the car to skid to a stop, diagonaled across the roadway. Richie was hurled toward the dashboard. But his manual reflexes were quick, and he caught himself without damage.