Recessional: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  Before he could start crawling up the berm, he was immobilized by what he saw developing to the east where a huge truck hauling two tiers of new cars was approaching at considerable speed. Men who had left their smashed cars ran back along the highway, screaming at the driver: ‘Slow down! Slow down!’ but since he could not see the chaos ahead, he interpreted their frantic signals as those of frightened strangers who did not know how to drive Tennessee highways in bad weather. Instead of slowing down, he accelerated even more in order to maintain control of his gigantic rig. Zorn, seeing him speed up, recalled a term from high school physics: ‘Christ, the kinetic force of that bastard!’ He knew that the total forward thrust of that great monster, its massive gear in back and its full load of new cars, could plow through a stone wall before its force abated, and he screamed ‘No! No!’ as it rammed into the huge trailer whose components now lay on their sides with touring cars crushed beneath them. With a thundering crash the skidding car transport tore through the fallen semi, continued over it and burst into flames, igniting the semi as well. The people trapped in the cars below would be cremated.

  Appalled as he watched from a safe distance of ten yards, the helpless doctor remained immobilized. To rush into that inferno hoping to save lives would result only in the loss of his own. As he climbed up the berm to see what he might still be able to accomplish, he saw a sports car driven by a young woman duplicate his performance by sliding slowly toward the chaos. Unlike him she found no avenue of escape. Crashing with some force into the three late arrivals that had piled up in the wake of the burning truck, she was obviously infuriated by a mishap for which she shared no blame. Climbing out of her damaged sports car, and confused by the mayhem around her, she stumbled forward between her car and the one ahead with which she had collided. Zorn, aware of her perilous position, screamed ‘No! Don’t stand there!’ She heard his anguished cry and turned to see who had shouted, but remained immobile between the two cars. ‘Oh, Christ!’ Zorn screamed as a powerful Lincoln town car came up behind the sports car at almost full speed and slammed into the rear of the girl’s car, shoving it forward so violently that it crushed the girl’s legs between her car and the car in front.

  When Zorn reached her she was still pinned between the cars, aware that she had been hurt but not yet of how badly. He knew it was essential that she be dragged from the wreckage so her legs could be attended to immediately, though he almost feared seeing what the damage was, and he shouted to bystanders, ‘Give a hand!’ Two young men, not aware that they would be in the same danger from the crashing of new arrivals, sprang to his aid, and by brute strength they moved her car enough so that she could be extricated. When she saw that her lower legs, severed by her own car’s steel bumper, were no longer part of her, she fainted.

  Remembering the medical bag he always carried in his sedan, Zorn threw one of the young men his keys: ‘I’m a doctor. Get my kit in the trunk.’ Even before the man was back, Andy had torn strips from the unconscious girl’s dress and shouted: ‘Somebody give me a branch. Two branches.’ And when these were torn from nearby trees, he twisted them in the fabric, circling her legs above the knee and providing pressure to stanch the flow of blood.

  When the young woman, still mercifully unconscious, was left in the care of women from the other wrecks, Zorn went back to the sports car to recover the two legs because he knew that doctors could perform miracles in reattaching limbs. But when he saw that the legs had been mashed flat he knew the veins and arteries and nerve systems had been totally destroyed. There was no possible way of refitting the fragments, so he abandoned them.

  It was twenty minutes before the first helicopter arrived. It belonged to a Nashville television studio and could provide no medical assistance but it signaled for all emergency forces in the area to report. After photographing the wreckage for ten minutes it disappeared, and soon the first medical copter did fly in. Andy was at its door before the rotor had stopped revolving: ‘Medical doctor. Girl here with both legs amputated. She must go first,’ and when the paramedics saw her condition, with the improvised tourniquets, they made space for her and him.

  On the brief flight to a waiting Chattanooga hospital the girl revived and looked pathetically at Andy: ‘My legs? Are they gone?’ Andy knew that in her first moments of consciousness what she needed most from him was comfort and reassurance. Taking her hands in his, he said above the loud humming of the copter: ‘The great news is, you’re going to live. Friends took care of that.’ When terrible fear swept her face, he released one of his hands and placed it under her chin: ‘Sure, there’s trouble. You saw that. But I promise you you’ll have a long and lovely life.’ Aware that she was still trembling, he said: ‘At your wedding, I’ll ask you for a dance. Yes, you will be dancing,’ and he gently brushed back the hair from her forehead.

  This had the effect he wanted, for in a wavering voice she asked: ‘Was it totaled?’ and he realized that in her confusion she was speaking of her car.

  ‘It was, but you were not. You’ll be driving again.’ She tried to acknowledge this vote of confidence but was overwhelmed by a paroxysm of terrible pain and fainted again.

  At the hospital a Dr. Zembright, an elderly orthopedist who had been alerted from the helicopter, rushed the girl into an operating room where he praised Zorn for the precise placement of the two tourniquets: ‘You had first-aid training?’

  ‘Medical doctor. Chicago.’

  When the unconscious young woman had been attended to, the stumps of her legs disinfected and antibiotics applied, Dr. Zembright took Zorn to a private office where a conversation occurred that the younger doctor would never forget. ‘The steps you took at the scene have probably saved her knees.’ The older man recognized that the still-shaken Zorn needed reassurance. ‘She’ll thank you a million times in years to come. Because with knees in place, it’s easier.’

  ‘It was hell out there. I stood eight, ten yards from the highway and watched helplessly as one damned truck after another piled into that mess. Carnage.’

  ‘Would a shot of whiskey help?’

  ‘Seldom touch it, but I’d better have one now. Then I have to look after my car.’

  ‘You left it at the scene?’

  ‘Down a dip to the side. You’d be surprised how helpful everyone was pulling people from the fires. Young fellow who helped me pull the girl free promised he’d watch my car and trailer. He wanted me to stay with her. He has my keys.’

  Zembright, knowing from past experiences with shock that Zorn was teetering on the edge, poured him a stiff shot from his private reserve and the two men relaxed while buzzers echoed throughout the hospital, which was becoming packed with the wounded from the pileup. Andy tossed his shot at one swallow, then coughed from doing so.

  The older man said: ‘Doctor, I judge from what you told me that you played the role of a Good Samaritan.’

  ‘I did what you’d have done.’

  ‘Probably more. But as a wiser man, I’d have done something else you didn’t do.’

  ‘What did I miss? Will it damage her?’

  Zembright leaned back and smiled. ‘Her? No. You? Maybe.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m sure I’d also have tried to help if I were driving past, but because I also know what happens later, as soon as I had helped I’d have hightailed out of there.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’ve learned through sad experience that some months after you’ve saved a victim’s life through your roadside expertise administered in time, the son of a bitch is going to hire a sleazy lawyer and sue you for not having done something else that he thought might have been better. And instead of being a Good Samaritan as in Luke, you find yourself before a judge being condemned for being a busybody intruder who crippled the very person you were trying to help.’

  Zorn, who had ample cause to believe what the Tennessee doctor was saying, asked: ‘What would you have done in my case?’

  ‘Just what you d
id, but then fled. Given my name to nobody. Kept my mouth shut about the entire affair and allowed no one to make me a hero. Did you give your name to our people when the paramedics brought you and the girl here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m going to forget you even gave it to me. How about the young man with your car?’

  ‘I certainly didn’t give it to him.’

  ‘But he could probably find your name among the papers in the car.’

  ‘If he snooped.’

  Dr. Zembright leaned back, studied his whiskey glass, drained it and said: ‘Young fellow, accept a word from an old-timer. To hell with the Good Samaritan stuff. Protect your own ass and hope the patient lives. I’m cleared. If the girl’s family tries to sue me, I can claim “Some horse’s ass screwed her legs up at the site.” I’m home free.’

  Zorn smiled ruefully: ‘I was in obstetrics. Two baseless malpractice suits were brought against me by a lawyer who was splitting jury awards with the family. I gave up my practice because I couldn’t accept the lies and perjury and the persecutions. Now I’m heading for a nonmedical job in—’

  ‘Don’t tell me where!’ Zembright interjected quickly. ‘The less I know about you the better. You never touched the girl. You never brought her here. You never saw me, and I sure as hell never saw you. Another shot?’

  ‘One was too many.’ As Zorn left the office he said to the doctor: ‘Help her. I was standing as far from her as I am from you now when she looked down and saw that she’d lost her legs. Things like that you remember.’

  ‘So long. Good Samaritan.’

  The older doctor’s cynical advice had a powerful effect on Zorn, who said to himself: If a specialist that old and that skilled can be worried about how society treats medical men, maybe I was smarter than I realized in easing myself out of the profession. But he could not accept what he felt to be a cheap rationalization for his impetuous departure from Chicago: ‘No, for better or for worse I chose a noble career and at the first signs of trouble I chickened out.’

  When he returned to the site of the disaster, he stood beside his rig and pondered whether to continue southward to his new job. Suddenly he slapped himself on the forehead: Cut this out, Zorn. Stop your whining and your indecision. I hereby swear that I’m going to make my facility the biggest moneymaker in the Taggart chain. And then, someday, maybe I’ll make myself a full-fledged doctor again.

  Andy, like most northerners driving south into Florida, believed that when he left Valdosta, Georgia, he was practically in the heart of Florida, and that, in his case, Tampa would be only a few miles down the road. But when he checked his map he found that he had well over two hundred miles to go. Consequently, he drove only till nightfall, then edged off the road and slept behind his steering wheel, as in the old days, but the persistent whirring of passing cars made him dream he was back on that fatal highway west of Chattanooga. When, in real time, a brutal semi hauling behind it two immense storage tanks roared past, he woke with a cry of warning, expecting it to slide sideways along ice that wasn’t there and crash into another truck. Frightened by the violence of his reaction he told himself: I’d better get some hot food in me if I’m to drive all night with visions of disaster haunting me. After some pancakes and coffee at an all-night café, he felt better and was soon on the road again.

  When he reached the outskirts of Tampa shortly after eight in the morning of January 2, he stopped for coffee and received directions to the Palms: ‘Keep on Route 41 right through Tampa till you hit open land followed right after by a wonderful cypress swamp—that is, if you like swamps. Cross over a small river and you come to a small town with a big mall. Keep watching for street numbers, and when you reach 117th Street, turn sharp right. Straight ahead’s your target, but take money. It ain’t cheap.’

  With those helpful instructions he remained on the super-highway to the city limits of Tampa, where a welcoming sign reminded him of a joke he had heard in Chicago: ‘Florida is God’s waiting room.’ This sign read: YOU ARE NOW ENTERING GOD’S PARADISE. THE O’NEILL CREMATORIUM, COMPLETE SERVICES $475.

  Slowing down to assure himself that the sign was not a joke, he provoked loud honking by motorists he was blocking on their way into the city. Pulling aside and waving them on with an apologetic smile, he muttered: ‘Welcome indeed. They don’t hide their secrets, do they?’ He was then four miles from his future home; the sky was a scintillating blue; palm trees were blowing in the light breeze; and the blizzard off Lake Michigan was a thousand miles behind him. Saluting the attractive offer from the crematorium, he continued on to his new home.

  Soon after crossing a bridge over the little river, Dr. Zorn spotted 117th Street, and with a sharp turn to the right he was able to follow the river as it wound its way westward. But he soon forgot the attractive waterway, for along the riverbank was a line of immensely tall palm trees unlike any he had seen before, not even in books. More than eighty feet tall, all were completely barren of limbs or even small branches for two thirds of their height; in that lower reach they consisted solely of slight, fragile-looking trunks standing severely erect with not a single deviation left or right. At the very top of each tree, and extending for only a few feet downward, was a green crown of typical palm fronds, but so few that they seemed like accidental dandruff atop a bald head. Below the fronds, eighty feet in the air, they sported a totally bizarre aspect, a thin whorl of jet-black dead fronds that radiated out from the trunk and parallel to the earth, giving the appearance of a ruff at the neck of some Elizabethan lady. Below this dead whorl was the weirdest feature of all, a huge crisscross tangle of weather-beaten dead fronds, gray-brown in color, like a half-oval in shape, wide at the top, narrow at the bottom, as if the tree were wearing an immense bustle built upon brown interwoven wires.

  The damnedest trees I ever saw! Zorn thought as he stopped his rig to inspect them. Look at them! Naked up to the belly-button, then that huge bustle, then the necklace of black pearls, and that preposterous hairdo on top! He looked down the roadway and saw that more than a dozen other towering palms, each a duplication of the first with their crowns high in the air, marched in order, leading the way to the retirement complex in which he would be working.

  ‘Well,’ he said with a shake of his head, ‘with that handsome parade the place is entitled to call itself the Palms.’

  A flash of red off to the left attracted his eye, and when he turned away from the palms to inspect it he saw that it was a row of strange tropical bushes that also lined the road, each about eight to ten feet tall, extremely wide and covered with copious dark green leaves decorated with generous clusters of bright red berries. What handsome bushes! Never heard of them either, he thought.

  As he approached the end of the roadway he was greeted by an imposing structure built of reddish stone, a giant gateway consisting of two turreted towers from which extended a wall made of the same stone. The wall was seven feet high and appeared to encircle a substantial area of manicured lawn, in the center of which stood the single, many-cornered building of the retirement center. With that gateway and those walls it’s really a medieval fortress, Zorn thought. A man could find himself at ease in a retirement place like this. Then he found that he had overlooked a significant feature that tied the place to its home office in Chicago: into the face of the right tower had been inserted a rather small brass plate containing in cast letters almost as small as those on the wall outside Mr. Taggart’s office two austere words: THE PALMS.

  Staring at the modest sign, Zorn said to himself: The chief doesn’t go in for conspicuous display, but then he reflected: Wait! If you consider the whole setup—trees, gate, wall—it adds up to one clear message: class—this place has class. My job will be to keep it that way, but to make it profitable.

  Once through the gate he entered an oval driveway that curved first to the right, then under a porte cochere leading to the main entrance, then on to the left where another porte cochere gave entrance to the health care area, and around
to the exit through the gate. The area inside the oval was meticulously landscaped, with a cluster of varicolored croton bushes near the entrance to the main building. But the effect of elegance was somewhat marred by large macadamized parking lots covering almost every other inch of available space and packed with cars, many of expensive European make.

  As he tried to back his bulky tandem in what he took to be a free area for visitors, an elderly woman of erect posture and blue-white hair, neatly coiffed, exploded from the main entrance, waving her cane and shouting in a voice unexpectedly rough and bold: ‘Wait! Wait! That’s my parking space, young man. Get your contraption out of there!’

  Startled by the fury of her attack, Zorn became confused. Instead of maneuvering his car forward and out of the restricted parking area, he continued backward, which made the infuriated woman think he was ignoring her protest. She started beating on his left front fender with her cane, shouting louder and louder: ‘Get out of there! Right now! Get your pile of junk out of my parking space!’

  Though still disoriented by her attack, Zorn now shifted to go forward but stepped on the gas so firmly that the tandem leaped forward as if he were trying to run the woman down. She screamed: ‘He’s trying to kill me!’ and stepped back but continued to pound on the fender.

  She was so violent that staff from the main building began running out to see what trouble she was in this time, for they had learned that the Duchess, as she was called, lived from one crisis to the next. Her room was on the ground floor overlooking the oval, and from it she could guard the choice parking slot in which she usually kept her highly polished gray Bentley. Let a delivery boy try to park there when her car was in the garage, which it was more than half the time, and she could be relied upon to rush out, beat on the boy’s car with her cane and force him to move. She also kept a sharp eye out for stray dogs that wandered into what she called My Oval, for she was its chief protector.