When Corbin came through the swinging gate, Jim stepped back from the door. The porch light revealed a sweaty, nervous face. “There’s a car accident. It’s real bad. I think it’s Danny Metzger.”
“You think?” Corbin stepped into the doorway and pushed open the screen door with his elbow. He looked beyond Jim at the idling truck in front of the station. A pretty candy-faced girl turned and peered out the window. Corbin stared at her. She smiled half-heartedly, then started chewing the side of her cheek and looked away.
“Yeah. It’s hard to tell,” Jim said. “He must’ve been going real fast.”
“You got company, do ya?”
“Yeah… yeah, she was there with me. She’ll tell you about it, too.” Jim glanced at his truck. He dipped his hands into his pockets nervously, then brought them out and folded his arms across his chest. “I’m tellin you. The car’s over on its roof down in a ditch. There’s lots of blood. I ain’t never seen so much before.”
Only half listening, Corbin glanced down at Jim’s knee. “Blood like that?” he pointed at the dark red circle on the kid’s pants.
Jim looked down. “Aww, Jesus, that’s what it was. I was kneelin next to him, seein if he was alive.”
“Is he?”
“Well, I didn’t take a pulse or nothin, but he didn’t look alive.”
Corbin leaned in closer and sniffed. “You been drinking tonight?”
“No.” Jim wiped a hand across his mouth. “Maybe a little. But I’m okay to drive.”
“Looks a little young for you, Jim. What’re you… must be almost thirty now, that right? You’re a little old for high school girls, don’t you think?” Corbin moved out onto the porch and let the door slam behind him. He was a tall, slightly overweight man in his mid-forties, with a full head of sandy hair that showed no traces of gray.
Jim backed up, giving Corbin his space. “What? No. She ain’t no high school broad. She’s nineteen.” He scratched his head. Then, with a confused lilt in his voice, he tried again: “Say’d you hear me, Chief? I said there’s been an accident… I mean it. You should get out there. I think the Metzger kid is… well, I think he’s dead.”
“Who is she, then? She don’t look familiar.”
“I don’t know. Just some girl I picked up at Dale’s. Her and a couple of her friends… from Sawyer Falls, I think.” Jim paused, and there was an atmosphere of silence between the two men. Then, cautiously, he said, “Listen, if you want, you can follow me and I’ll show you where I come up on the wreck. You’ll see what I mean. It’s just a ways up Waldingfield, before Elhouse Mayer’s place.”
Corbin looked at Jim, a steady gaze that could cut. “Sounds like I should probably go have a look, then, don’t you think?”
Jim’s face went stupefied. “Yeah… yessir. That’s what I been tryin to say. You need to come have a look.”
“All right, let’s go have us a look.”
3
Corbin knelt beside the overturned car, looking in through the shattered windshield. He stood, moving his flashlight over the body lying in the dirt. He sighed and ran the tip of his tongue across the back of his front teeth. It was bad.
“Shit,” he said under his breath. He’d harbored hopes Dick Krantz’s boy was exaggerating, but if anything, Jim had undersold it.
“See, it’s just like I said. Bad, ain’t it?” Jim stood at the edge of the embankment, smoking a cigarette. “I ran a piece of the car over about twenty feet that way.” He pointed up the road in the direction from which they’d come. “It looked like a bumper. I threw it off the road near where your cruiser’s parked now. Didn’t want no one else to run it over. If you look, you’ll see where it landed. It’s there.”
Corbin pointed his flashlight in that direction. “That way?”
“Yeah,” Jim said, flicking his cigarette to the ground and stepping on it.
“And it was just sitting there in the road?”
“Yessir.”
“You find anything else?”
“Not a thing. That was it. Well, there was little bits of glass maybe, but nothing big,” Jim said. “Must’ve hit something in the road.”
“All right, get back in your truck,” Corbin said. “You and the girl go on now. I’ll take it from here. In fact, maybe you should bring her home. It’s probably past her bedtime, street lights being on and all.”
Jim scowled, eyebrows pushing together. “Well, hold on a sec. Am I gonna get any sort of recognition for this? Name in the paper? I mean, I am the one who found it.”
Corbin flashed his light in Jim’s face.
Jim put his hand up and shied away. “I’m only wonderin.”
Corbin said nothing and didn’t lower the flashlight.
“That a no?”
The silence grew thick.
“Okay, then. Never mind, Chief. No harm in askin,” Jim said. “You know where to find me if you need me.” He walked back to his truck and drove off, the candy-faced girl looking out the back window as the taillights disappeared down the road.
Corbin walked up the hill to his cruiser. He grabbed the radio through the window. “Randy, it’s Corb. You in yet?”
There was a pause.
“Just walked in, Chief. What can I do you for?”
“Better get the whole thing going. We got a situation out here on Waldingfield. A bad one. Got a body. Better call Buck Ryerson at the funeral home, and Doc Barrett, too.”
“What should I tell those fellas?”
“Tell em to head out this way and bring the cadaver wagon. They won’t miss me. Car’s in the middle of the road.” Corbin paused. “See if you can’t get a hold of a photographer… Virgil Gillespie’s always up for it. He works nights at the newspaper. Tell him I need a scene photographed.”
“What type of situation we talking, Corb?”
“Car accident, looks like.” Corbin glanced back at the kid laid out in the dirt, a sinking feeling of dread starting to fill his stomach. “Maybe try to get a hold of Billy and tell him to meet me here if he ain’t busy. He was looking for overtime anyhow.”
The radio crackled. “Car accident?”
“Yeah.” He surveyed the scene again. “It’s a mess. And Randy?”
“Yeah?”
Corbin sighed. “It’s Danny Metzger, so keep that under your hat for now. I don’t want the whole town to find out before I have a chance to contact his family.”
“The drugstore kid?”
“Uh-huh.”
“He’s dead?”
“Barring some sort of miracle, I’d say so. I’ll wait for Hank to pronounce it, though.”
“Oh man. Okay.”
“Jim Krantz found the wreck, so I’m sure it won’t be long before he tells anyone who’ll listen, but I don’t want it coming from our station.”
“I understand.”
“Also, can you do me a favor and call Meryl at the house? She’ll be expecting me home any time now. She’ll worry if I don’t show.”
“Sure thing.”
Corbin dropped the radio back on the seat and scratched deep in the curves of his neck. The humidity made his skin itch, especially on days he shaved too quickly. Today was one of them. He looked side to side, from one dark end of the road to the other. Both directions were pathways to the abyss. Corbin wiped the back of his hand over his mouth. Susan Denberg was a thought in his mind. Sweet, but far away.
He went down the hill to the body and washed his light over the stillness of it. Kneeling, he patted it down. Then he searched for a pulse, just to be thorough, but found none, as he had expected. The doctor would confirm it.
There was a wallet in the pocket of the kid’s jacket. He took it out, opened it, and slid out a driver’s license: Daniel Metzger, Gilchrist, Massachusetts, Born 7/9/1945.
Poor kid was dead at twenty-one, his whole life ahead of him.
He shut the wallet and tucked it into his breast pocket. Pushing up into a squat, he flashed his light into the overturned car again. It was f
ull of bits of glass and debris.
Corbin stood, then went and sat on the grade of the hill. He found the handkerchief in his pocket and wiped it across his forehead and over the back of his neck. He cleaned his hands with it, removing the sticky smears of blood that had gotten on him when he patted down the body.
The night was calm, fully in the shadow of the day. A chorus of insects serenaded the woods with alien sounds. Corbin’s breaths slowed and became deeper, each one breathing life into the moment. The atmosphere grew electric. The hairs on the crown of his head itched and felt as though they were standing on end. Corbin stared into the darkness of the woods. And for a moment, he was sure something was staring back.
4
Jim took Sandy to the boat launch at Big Bath after he left the scene of the car wreck. He wanted to finish what they’d started in his truck. At this time of night, the place would be empty, tourists nestled in the beds of their lake-house rentals, slumbering away on cheap beer and too much grill food. It was a good place to park and fool around with a date when he wanted a little privacy and didn’t have anywhere better to go. He had done it all through high school, and not much had changed for him since then. He still lived at home.
“Where the hell’re you taking me?” Sandy asked. She no longer looked like the girl who’d had a few too many beers at the bar and was looking for a good time. “I think I’ve had enough excitement for one night. Can you just take me home?”
Jim pulled up to the boat ramp and shut off his truck. The lights went out, but he left the radio on at a low volume. Mood music.
“Home? You want to go home? You kidding me? Look at this damn view, girl.” He slid across the bench seat, sidling up next to Sandy. Her arms were folded tightly across her chest, and she was tucked in the corner of the cab, looking disinterested in anything Jim had to say or offer. “You want to spoil a thing like that? When was the last time you seen something this pretty? Not as pretty as you, though.”
The moon was rising over the lake. The water was a plate of glass, and the moon was a crisp picture reflected in it. In the surrounding woods, the peepers were peeping and the crickets were thrumming at full throttle.
Jim tried to brush aside a curl of hair that had fallen across Sandy’s face. She pulled away. “Take me home, please. I’m not in the mood anymore. The dead guy on the side of the road kind of killed it for me. And it’s late now. My parents are gonna kill me.”
“I don’t even know where the hell you live,” Jim said.
“I told you earlier. Sawyer Falls.”
“That’s two towns over. I ain’t drivin that far.”
She turned to him, her face clouding over with a mix of confusion and outrage. “What the hell were you planning on doing, then? Were you just gonna leave me on the side of the road after I’d sucked you off?” She laughed without humor. “What a true gentleman you are.”
“If I ain’t no gentleman, you sure as hell ain’t no lady. That’s for damn sure.” He leaned away from her and stared out the window at the lake, working the inside of his cheek with his tongue.
There was a moment of hostile silence in the truck, where neither Jim nor Sandy knew what move to make next. Jim finally couldn’t stand the tension and went first.
“Look, I’m sorry. I’ll take you home.” He slid a little closer and licked his lips, his tone dropping to a man trying to sweet-talk his way back into a failing deal. “But maybe you just make it worth my while first. Then I’ll take you anywhere you want to go. Hell, I’ll drive you to the damn moon, girl. Just don’t leave me hangin, that’s all.” He reached over, put his hand on her thigh, and slid it up her skirt toward her warmth.
“I said no! Get off me, jerk!” She slapped him and tried to push him away. His fingers grasped for her underwear and tried to pull them down. “Stop it!”
“Just real quick. C’mon, girl.” He fell on top of her with the full weight of his body and pressed his mouth against hers. Their teeth met in an awkward, grinding kiss. She bit down on his bottom lip. Hard. He pulled back and clapped a hand over his mouth. There was already blood running down his chin. “You bit me. What the hell? I wasn’t tryin to… I wouldn’t… You bit me. Fuckin Christ, girl. You’re a damn lunatic.”
Sandy didn’t say anything. She opened the door, got out, and started walking back the way they had driven in.
Jim got out of the truck and spat blood in the dirt, carefully touching his lip with the tips of his fingers. It stung and throbbed at the same time. “Where the hell’re you going? You plannin on walkin outta here?” he yelled after her. “Look, I’m sorry. I’ll give you a ride.”
“Don’t follow me,” she said, and just kept on walking.
“Yeah, don’t worry. I won’t.” Jim stood there a moment, listening to the frogs and the insects, gently running his tongue over the bleeding tear on his lip. “Fuckin crazy bitch,” he muttered to himself between thin winces of pain.
He didn’t follow her. The crunch of her footfalls in the gravel and the pale glow of her moonlit silhouette slowly faded, then vanished into the night. He never saw her again.
He reached into his truck and found the bottle of whiskey he had stashed under the seat before. He uncapped it and took a sip, trying to avoid his lip. He failed. The alcohol lit it on fire. It was a glassy burn.
“Shit.” He sighed. “So much for a good night.”
He shut the door, took the bottle around to the front of his truck, and leaned up against the warm grill. The radio was a soft murmur in the background. The Moody Blues were playing “Go Now.” Between sips of whiskey and glances at the moon, he listened to the music play against the sounds of the lake and the woods. By the time the song was over, the bottle was empty and he was seeing double.
He threw the bottle against one of the big slabs of granite that lined the boat ramp, stumbling to the side when he lost his balance. Glass smashed, and the sound echoed across the water.
“Gotta go see a man about a mule,” he slurred, turning and walking to the tree line beside his truck. There was a dumpster with tall grass and weeds growing up around it. He went behind it, unzipped his fly, steadied himself, and started to urinate. “Yup, that’s a good mule you got there, sir. I surely would like to take er off your hands.” He laughed at his own joke.
Then something happened. He had finished and was zipping up when someone began calling to him softly, almost a whisper. “James… Jaaames. What’s wrong, James? Are the girls teasing you again, darling?”
It was coming from the woods beyond. It was too dark and the woods too thickly settled to see anything beyond a few feet. He squinted, but the moonlight revealed little besides the vague bark detail of a few close trees.
“Who’s there?” he said. “Sandy? That you, girl? Look, I’m sorry about… well, if I…” He didn’t finish the thought because he knew in a scared part of himself, where the dread was starting to knot and grow, that Sandy was long gone.
“James,” the voice said again. And it was a gentle voice. A woman’s voice. But there was a strange quality to it, as if she were speaking through a long metal corridor from some faraway place.
“Come on out!” Jim shouted. His hand reached around to the back of his belt, where he kept a five-inch Buck knife in a leather sheath. He slid it out, the blade winking in the moonlight. “Either you come on out, or I’m gonna come in there and drag you out. You hear me?”
“You’re bleeding, James. Who hurt you?” The voice sounded a little closer.
He took a step forward into the tree line, fighting the instinct to turn around, get in his truck, and rip ass out of there. No one else was around. The girl with the sharp teeth had left him, but still, he felt as if he had something to prove, someone to impress. Then something hit him, an association so long-buried and clouded over by booze that he realized with startling clarity how long it had been since he’d thought of her. James. Only his mother had ever called him that. To everyone else, he was Jim, or occasionally Jimmy. Even his fathe
r didn’t call him James. In his old man’s opinion, it was the sissy version of his name.
His mother had died five years ago, though. Brain aneurysm. One minute, all three of the Krantzes were eating chicken-fried steak at the dinner table and talking about how Jim needed to clean out the basement to help out around the house more if he was going to live there rent free. The next, Lori Krantz went facedown into her mashed potatoes and never said another word to anyone again. That was the day James learned just how fast and fragile life could be, how it could turn on a dime before you even had a chance to say goodbye, or even finish your thought—or mashed potatoes.
“I mean it. You don’t want to test me.” He took another step into the woods, the sweat from his palm starting to make the knife handle slick.
Behind him, the radio in his truck squelched a burst of static. He turned around, startled. His headlights flickered. On. Off. On. Off. Dim. Off. The radio let out another loud metallic squink! His heart was racing, and a panicky sort of innate survival instinct was starting to reach through his haze of drunkenness and tell him to go.
Go now.
When he turned back around, his mother was standing right in front of him. She was hovering a few inches off the ground in the middle of some giant dark cloud. And around the edges it shimmered like a million tiny diamonds. But the cloud wasn’t a cloud. It was an opening, a parting of some cosmic curtain.
“I’m here now, Pickle,” she said sweetly. That was what she used to call him. One day when he was a child, he had eaten roughly three dozen and gotten sick all over the living room carpet.
She reached out and brushed his cheek with her hand. Her skin was cold and rough. It smelled smoky and rotten. But it didn’t matter.
James was frozen in disbelief. “Mom? What’re you… how… I…” So many questions, but none of the answers seemed to matter. She had all the answers to everything. She was the answer. Looking into her deep-green eyes, which had been brown when she was alive, he felt an overwhelming sense that everything would be all right. If he just went to her, Mommy would make it all better. So he went to her. He dropped the knife and stepped forward into her open arms, tears brimming his eyes. He loved her. He missed her so much.
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