The oncoming truck swerved violently to the right as we charged past. I was still in first gear, but the little car’s speed lifted it off the roadway for a few feet after passing the top of the rise, and that kept me too busy to see what was happening behind us. But I could hear.
There is a special sound made by a motor vehicle coming to grief at high speed. It has been compared to everything from a bomb to the slamming of a great door, but none of these similes does justice to its peculiar resonance. Not a thing to be forgotten. It was this sound I heard as I regained control of the car—and kept on hearing in ever-decreasing installments as I headed for the main highway.
Checking the rearview mirror, I could see that things had worked out even better than I had expected.
Greenteeth must have been going at least seventy miles an hour when he lost our game of chicken and swerved to miss me. That would have thrown his pickup into a classic Hollywood-stunt roll. But it couldn’t have lasted more than half a turn; the drainage ditch at the side of the road would have seen to that. Hitting it with all the unexpended energy of its unbraked speed, the truck’s engine compartment must have been partially collapsed into the cab. Then the elasticity of the steel would be asserted, changing the simple roll into a twisting end-over-end cartwheel as the truck shed its doors, wheels, and anything else not too firmly attached to the chassis.
I saw the last dying bounce as we sped away.
And the sudden plume of flame as the fuel exploded.
I turned my attention back to the road.
“You’re not going to stop, are you?” Dana said.
“No.”
“He…might be alive.”
“Good for him.”
“And hurt.”
“Lord, I do hope so!”
We rattled along the gravel in silence for a minute or two, and I could almost hear the thoughts forming and dissolving. Finally she turned one of them into words.
“Pull over,” she said.
“I’m not going back,” I told her. “And you’re not, either. Maybe if I was alone. And armed. Maybe. But I’m not alone and I’m not armed, and we are going to treat that thing back there exactly as we would a wounded bear.”
She wasn’t listening.
“Just…pull over!” she insisted.
I applied the brakes with ill grace and brought the little red skate to a stop at the side of the road, ready to use argument or physical force if necessary to keep her from doing something I knew was both dangerous and stupid. But there was no need.
Dana’s face was colorless and stricken as she opened the passenger door, but she made no move to get out. Unsnapping the chest strap that held her upright, she let the seat belt remain fastened as she leaned far to her right and made restrained but unmistakable sounds of distress.
Well, Jesus out of the boat…
Some kind soul had left a roll of paper towels in the glove compartment, and I grabbed it as I cut the engine, opened my own door, and hustled around to Dana’s side. She had lost most of the lunch and was thinking about getting rid of the rest. It seemed a pity.
“Relax,” I told her, bracing her shoulders and putting a hand under her forehead. “Let it happen.”
There was a moment of resistance, but it didn’t last. Then the tension went out of the shoulders, and I could feel a change in her breathing. The trouble wasn’t over, but the crisis had passed.
We stayed that way for a minute or two, and I had my first undistracted opportunity to listen to the world around us. It was quiet, but filled with sound. Mountain silence is a little like that. But different, because wind and echo and tree grumblings are a constant, so much a part of the world that they no longer make any conscious impression except on those rare occasions when they stop.
The silence-sounds of this place were flatter, more personal, and I found myself responding to them in an unaccustomed way. Mountain background sounds can be a shield against loneliness. The components make positive contact with the world, connecting the gaps and affirming the eternal rightness. But sounds and voices in this place had no echoes; they came unseconded to the ear, offering only the cold comfort of singularity, and I wondered, irrelevantly, if this might be the real difference between Jake and me. New Mexico was no place for a man who sometimes needed refuge from his own thoughts.
Dana stirred and took a deep breath.
I waited a moment to see how it was going to come out, but the body slowly firmed and took on its own weight. She sat up. Wordlessly I offered the paper towels, and wordlessly she used one to touch up her forehead and her lips. Nothing to say. I closed the door as she struggled with the chest strap, and a moment later we were turning onto the interstate, headed for Farewell.
The drive back to the motel passed in silence, and I thought Dana was using the time to deal with a sense of mortal frangibility that can accompany a close look at skull-face, the Great Death.
But I had underestimated the lady. Whatever problems she might have had with that had evidently been left by the roadside along with the remains of the garbanzos encurtidos. This was something else, as I discovered when I stopped the car in front of her room before pulling into my own parking stall.
The safety belts gave her a minor argument, and she kept her mouth shut while dealing with them and unlocking the car door. But she turned to look directly at me before getting out.
Suddenly I could sense the cold anger of her wa.
“Goddamn you!” she said in a tone of rising fury. “You can fool Father Jake and you can even fool Helen. But I saw your face back there when you went at the truck. Anyone in his right mind would have been scared—I was ready to pee in my pants. But you were laughing it up and having a ball. You ought to be locked up! You enjoyed it, you crazy son of a bitch! You enjoyed it!”
An hour later I was still staring at the ceiling in the drape-darkened motel room and waiting for sleep that always seemed just a yawn away.
But some thoughts are circular.
Dana was right, of course. That was the hell of it. She had called the turn on me, and I hadn’t replied, because there wasn’t anything to say. Nolo contendere, Your Honor. No defense. Something wrong inside here, sir, some kind of short in the wiring. Be so good as to fix it, please. And make it snappy. I’ve been waiting all my life.
She was wrong about the Spences, though. I had never been able to fool them—especially Helen, with her cool appraisals and inescapable arithmetic. Or Sara.
Sara…
I tried to force my mind away from the picture of her face, appalled but fascinated, watching from the ground after I won $400 from four other divinity students who had bet me that I couldn’t walk blindfolded around the crenellated battlements of Gailor Hall at Sewanee. Sara and I had used the money for a weekend in Nashville, and there was a soft spring rainstorm that kept us in the room…
Stop that!
Where had the craziness started? For the ten thousand and first time, I remembered the tree in my grandfather’s backyard, the one with the tangle-foot band intended to protect it from bugs, small boys, and other pests. I had figured a way around the problem, and by the time the ladder was discovered, I was out of sight in the branches above, too far out on a top limb for my uncle Hammond to reach when he climbed up to get me.
My mother was having hysterics down below, and the look on my uncle’s face said I was doomed the moment he got his hands on me, but I had climbed up there for a purpose.
“Look, Unca Ham,” I said. “Tarzan!”
I let go of the branch above me and hung for a moment by my legs as I had practiced over and over on the jungle gym. And then I straightened my knees.
The screams that rose around me as I fell were counterpoint to a swelling sensation in my chest, a lunatic-happy laugh that would not be suppressed. It kept boiling out, hot and maniacal, even after the branch that was supposed to have saved me at the end of the fall turned traitor and tore itself from my grasp, leaving me scraped and arm-broken on the ground.
My mother and my grandparents dismissed the incident—after the obligatory threats and the noises of protest—as the normal act of a five-year-old boy with an overactive imagination and time to watch too much television.
But not my uncle Ham.
He had been there, had seen the look on my face as I let go and started to fall, had heard the laughter that continued even after the “oof!” interruption of ground contact. And besides, as I discovered after he was reported killed while flying refugee children out of Biafra, there was a lot of that derangement inside him, too. All he said about it at the time, though, was to caution me against any further open demonstrations.
“Save it, boy,” he advised. “Save it until you’re ready to get full value.”
I didn’t understand, and said so.
“You’re too young yet,” he said. “Keep this stuff up now and they’ll be dragging you around to headshrinkers, trying to find out what’s the matter with you. A real pain in the ass…”
“Headshrinkers?”
“Brain mechanics, kid. People who work your head over until you’re talking and acting—and thinking—just like everybody else. They call that optimum adjustment. Sanity. You wouldn’t like it.
“So save the crazy stuff until you’re grown. Or anyway, till you’re bigger.”
We never discussed the subject again, and later a lot of people told me I was too young to have remembered either the fall from the tree or the conversation with Uncle Ham. Which just proved how right he had been.
Random thoughts drifted insensibly into the landscape of dream: I was back in the tree at my grandfather’s house, but the man climbing toward me wasn’t Uncle Ham. It was night, and he was wearing black pajamas and there were traces of mud blacking on his cheeks and he hadn’t come up there to help me. My hands were empty and I had somehow lost the M16 and the frag grenades. I climbed higher, but the branch bent under my weight and I had turned my leg around it, leaning forward to reach another when a sudden metallic-sounding snap sent me into space, ripping and scraping through the foliage below. I laughed, the same locked-ward sound as ever. It was so funny! Charlie had missed. I was home free, and all I had to do was keep from hitting the ground. Simple. No sweat…just a matter of timing: My clawing fingers found something solid, scrabbled, bent, almost tore free…and suddenly I was awake, all systems at full alert in a half-darkened room, my left hand closed and locked around a curved double bar of cold metal.
“Good,” a voice beside the bed said. “Very good, amigo mío. But not nearly good enough! You are getting old and slow and you forget to bar the door, and one day the cats will be looking down at you.”
I fumbled for the lamp switch beside the bed, releasing the metal hook to improve my reach.
“Hi, Robbie,” I said, when light finally filled the room. “When did you get into town?”
In Farewell, no one ever seemed to knock…
A SERMON
(CONTINUED)
The perception of personal mortality can open the door of insight.
It can also close the window of introspection.
These reactions are individual; they depend upon us, personally…
NINETEEN
Roberto Vincente de Bonzo y Obregon—Robbie—was probably born to be a movie star. Or a gigolo.
He is almost too handsome.
Clear black eyes radiate warmth and luster from the ascetic face of an Andalusian holy man—an angelic impression only slightly marred by the dazzling and slightly feral intensity of a smile that would confound a whole convention of orthodontists. Not a face to sell oil stocks with, perhaps. Too many oil men with smiles just as sharklike. But their wives might have found it irresistible. If the army hadn’t found him first.
Service instructors had made Robbie a first-rate helicopter pilot, and natural inclination had placed him at the controls of a gunship. During the twenty-two months he spent in ’Nam, he had won three combat citations, two Silver Stars…a single Purple Heart to cover the loss of his hands, both burned beyond reconstruction when he tried to save his door gunner after a stray bullet brought their chopper down during the evacuation of Saigon.
I hadn’t known him there, however.
Robbie and I had met during the final days of his sixth stay at a charity alcoholic ward in Los Angeles, about the time they had decided they were running a medical-psychiatric facility, not a rooming house for strays like the silver-tongued crazy who had talked the attendants into forming a wine-smuggling syndicate for him.
Discussing his situation, we had agreed that a few months in the mountains, among people who didn’t pity him and couldn’t be bullshitted with the maimed-hero routine, might be an interesting vacation from skid row.
For the past three years now he had been flying water drops and fire-rescue missions on contract for the Forest Service. We both knew it was getting on toward time for him to leave, but the world down-the-hill was full of highly qualified helicopter jockeys, not many of whom were able to make a full-time career of their trade. And the stainless-steel prehensiles were still the first thing prospective employers seemed to notice.
“Old…and careless,” he repeated now, enjoying his temporary ascendancy in the running game of stealth we had started playing about a year ago when he began studies with our mahayana master.
Robbie loomed over me, grinning with at least sixty-four teeth. One of the hook-hands was raised to tease me with my own key ring, held just out of reach.
“One day,” he prodded, “I will be called to pick up whatever is left when the cats are through.”
He was probably right.
“You didn’t waste any time getting here,” I said, deciding to change the subject. “What time is it?”
“Four o’clock.”
“A.m. or p.m.?”
“Sixteen hundred hours. Give or take a few minutes.” His eyes narrowed, and the blinding smile diminished by several thousand lumens. “Christ, Preacher, you look like hell!”
“Thanks,” I said. “I needed that.”
Heaving the body erect and tottering it into the bathroom, I gave myself the standard water-in-the-face treatment and a forgettable lecture on the virtues of clean living and regular habits. When both were done, I removed the eye and gave it a bath.
“That damn thing,” Robbie said from the doorway, “leads a life of its own. You know? Lying there in the water, it still stares right through you. Weird bastard.”
“Not if you don’t stare back.”
He grinned and thumbed his nose—no small accomplishment for a man with neither thumb nor fingers, but possible to one with the imagination of a mime and plenty of time to practice.
The shirt I had worn that morning was strictly for the laundry. No matter what Dana might think, it still held the adrenal fear-stench of a wearer who had measured the tide of the Styx, so I broke out another and elbowed my way into it while blinking the right eyelid to let it finish the nonemotional weeping that always goes with reinsertion of the prosthesis.
“Between the two of us,” Robbie said cheerfully, “we are one hell of an assembly job, Preacher.”
“But crafted,” I said, “to a gnat’s ass.”
“Fuckin’ A!”
The helicopter hangar was considerably more depressing than I had expected. Experts from the National Transportation and Safety Board had used half its space to lay out the forlorn remnants of the wrecked LongRanger, retrieved from the field where Prescott had crashed. Assembled under shelter and arranged to simulate their original interrelationship, the component parts took on the accusative air of a canine traffic victim: How could you do this to me?
Robbie circled the ordered mess with blank-faced concentration and then stepped warily through the litter, avoiding physical contact with the debris while making his way to the flattened remains of the cockpit and craning his neck to examine the inside.
“Avionics all screwed up,” he said. “Too bad. Sometimes you can get an idea of what went wrong by seeing where
the needles were pointing when the dial cracked.”
What was left of the controls bore heavy brown stains. Robbie’s nose wrinkled reflexively, but it was his only concession to normal squeamishness as he poked an exploratory hook into the tortured metal, scraping the dual tip of the prosthesis against various impediments until he seemed to find what he wanted. Kneeling carefully and supporting himself on one elbow, he bent his head to peer inside.
“We got a flashlight?”
I started to shake my head, then noticed a clublike five-cell model standing nose down on the mechanic’s workbench.
“Maybe,” I said, picking up the long-handled monster and checking the switch to see if it was working. It was.
Watching Robbie use his hooks could be fascinating, but it was a sometime thing, because everybody had a mother who said it wasn’t polite to stare. Actually, he had told me that he didn’t mind normal interest or even questions, so long as the interest was open and friendly. But I never could get used to it, and the opportunity to spy from behind while he was fully occupied was just too good to miss.
Clamping the flashlight in the left prosthesis, he leaned on an elbow and pushed the right hook back into the smashed cavity of the cockpit, squinting and maneuvering the light beam to examine something just outside the line of my sight. His movements were precise, controlled…altogether natural, and therefore a kind of miracle. Years of practice had done their work. An observer who didn’t know better would have sworn Robbie was exploring the wreckage by sense of touch.
“Collective,” he said finally, snapping off the big flashlight and standing up. “It’s jammed wide open. Not set. Jammed.”
I looked at him, waiting for more.
“Could mean nothing,” he went on. “Crash impact could have done that, or it could even have happened while they were loading the scraps onto the truck to bring them here.”
The Preacher Page 15
