by Nick Arvin
10.
THE ROAD, THE road: it came at him and spun out behind, varying without changing. Ellis knew – Boggs had taught him – that only four patches of rubber, each the size of the palm of a hand, touched the minivan to the road. They bore up its two tons of metal, glass, plastics and fluids, which in turn bore up himself and contained him and moved him in great comfort: climate-controlled, cushioned, radio and CD player at ready, cellphone charging, cup holders awaiting cups to cradle, visors set to block harsh sun glare, windows and mirrors powered at the touch of a button, cruise control to mind the accelerator.
His headlamps ghosted an interstate with a narrow median; a flavour of metal gathered in his mouth; cars came down the opposite lanes like fists. He drove until late, then slept in the minivan off a side road in a rutted open space. During the night he woke only once, with a raccoon crouched on the hood, staring with bandit eyes. Ellis pressed the horn, and the creature reared, smirked, loped away. Ellis watched a hanging half-moon and slept again until the sky was bluing. He woke cold but sweating. He turned the ignition for heat, but shut it off again and stood out to jog up the road a half-mile or so and back again. Swinging his legs and pushing himself forward without a gas pedal felt strange, and he returned to the minivan trembling and heaving, and rushed onward.
Like anyone, he could drive, he could hate it, and he could do it forever.
Sunflowers glowed in the window, endless bright heads peering upward. Black-and-white cows trundled over rolling terrain, drank at the foot of a madly spinning windmill. A haze filled the sky with the colour of weathered aluminum, and a monstrous Wal-Mart swam up out of the distance and flashed into the rear-view. Anything could be put rapidly behind; nothing could.
He felt very tired.
He spent much of the day at the place where a woman driving her daughter home from choir practice had stopped as a goose and four goslings crossed the road. While she waited on the geese, a pickup hit her from behind, and her daughter in the back seat died. Ellis spent more than two hours scrutinising the ground, moving up and down the road, but he could find nothing, so went on. Boggs wouldn’t answer his phone, and Ellis put off calling Heather. He despised himself a little for this, but he was angry with her, too. She owed an explanation for what had passed between her and Boggs on the golf course.
He drove amid squat glass ten- and twelve-storey office towers. A movie complex the size of a stadium. A row of car dealers, Nissans, Volkswagens, Audis, Fords, Chryslers, Suzukis, Saturns, Saabs, Hummers, closely parked, colourful and shining as jelly beans on a plate. Supermarkets and Starbucks and cheque cashing in little strip malls with names like Silver Water Square, Walden Center, Maple Grove Plaza. His stomach felt walnut-hard. His hands moved restlessly on the steering wheel. He examined the place amid alfalfa fields where two SUVs had met head-on, at a combined speed of 115 mph, and burned. One of the drivers died with his head – per the police photos – resting on the windowsill, his eyes rolled and exposed like a pair of eggs. Ellis stood on the road shoulder and scrutinised its gravel. After a time he moved forward a half-step. He tried to give attention to each individual stone. Moved forward another half-step. For this accident he and Boggs had developed an elaborate analysis involving Conservation of Momentum, Conservation of Energy and Taylor Series expansions, but he could remember none of it, only the photos of the dead. Limbs burned to stumps.
That night clouds on the south horizon shone auburn with the reflected light of a city. Boggs did not answer his phone. He tried Heather, but she didn’t answer. He felt sent away from her. Was that true? Was that why he went on? No. He was Boggs’s friend, so he went on. Was that why he went on? Yes. Yes? Exhaustion came abruptly, like a blow to the head, and sleeping in the minivan now felt habitual and natural, so it seemed foolish to push to look for motels. He stopped in an abandoned construction site – holes had been dug, dirt lay in heaps, but the earth movers had departed and the weeds had grown tall. He was obscured from the road by sections of six-foot-diameter concrete pipe.
Despite his exhaustion he could not sleep, and he listened with eyes closed to the nearby hysterical repetitive call of a cricket until he felt ready to try to find the creature and kill it.
Instead he moved the minivan and turned on the radio and listened to how the love and blessings of the Lord might make one wealthy.
He woke in the dawn light and silence, and when he turned the key the silence remained. He flagged a Chevy Silverado with a bearded young man and jumper cables. The bearded man gave him a look when the minivan came to life with the booming of a preacher’s preaching on St John. Ellis turned it off. He’d had no idea that he’d turned it to such a volume.
The morning grew hot. Heat lightning glinted in the distance, and the road ahead shivered. He traversed rivers and skirted lakes, cut straight through low hills between walls of blasted rock, then stopped outside a Howard Johnson’s, at the site of another Wright job, where a police officer in a trench for laying sewer lines had been killed when a Lexus landed atop him, studied the place for hours, then went on.
He sensed the danger of wafting away on a kind of easier, emptier slant life. When he was out of the minivan and he didn’t have the flow of the road before him, his thoughts seemed especially disorganised. He stood too long staring. He handed the gas station attendant his keys instead of his credit card. He took a bag of mini-pretzels and a bottle of water, and the pretzels became a day’s meal. While he was driving he had little sensation of hunger. He thought of James Dell in the hospital bed, his stomach empty, eating only the fluids dripped into his veins.
When he phoned the hospital Mrs Dell’s voice was hoarse with emotion. ‘He’s worse,’ she said. ‘A lot of – worse. I believe he’s going to die. They won’t say it, won’t tell me, but I can see it. His heart stopped this morning. They used the paddles. He looks bad.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Ellis said. ‘I can’t even begin to say.’
‘Can I tell you something? His heart stopped -’ She clucked her tongue. ‘And something had finally happened. A part of me was glad for the excitement. They had to pay attention again. And it’s been so dull, and I get bored. I don’t know what to do. Sit, wait. Patience. Look at him, don’t look at him. Think about him, then don’t think about him. Talk to him, or don’t talk to him. I don’t know if he can hear me. They say it’s possible he can hear, so I feel that I should talk. But it’s hard. It’s not like talking to him.’
‘Tell me about him.’
‘He’s not well.’
‘I mean, tell me how he was when he was -’ Ellis stuttered; he’d nearly said alive. ‘- he was well. What did he like to do? What kind of person was he?’
‘He loves dogs,’ she said, ‘but he never allowed himself a dog. He isn’t allergic. He just didn’t allow it. He’s that kind of person. He denies himself things. He can be difficult. He never is who he wants to be, I don’t think. None of us are, I guess, but it bothers him especially. He loves sweets and never eats sweets. He hates the theatre, but he went. Maybe I sound bitter.’
‘He loves you, though.’
‘Oh, yes, yes. But, well, we fought terribly.’ She laughed. ‘We’ve never really had the life we should have. He denies that, too. He always thinks things should be finer, or rougher, colder or warmer. More difficult, unless they should be easier.’ She coughed. ‘I don’t mean to talk about this. I don’t want to.’
‘It’s all right,’ Ellis said.
He stopped for lunch in a Subway decorated with a yellow that worked in his eyes like needles and paid for a sandwich served up by smiling young people. He felt like wreckage before them, unshaven and unwashed. He sat at a corner table obscured from sight and only swallowed two bites of sandwich before he left.
For two more days he drove between sites where they had done work for Wright. A Lamborghini that broke in half. A woman run down by a trash truck. A shuttle bus with faulty brakes. At each Ellis examined the ground minutely. If there were houses or busi
nesses nearby, he went to ask questions.
The time in the motel with Heather already seemed a vague dream, one that he suspected he would never recover. When Heather finally called back, he didn’t ask about what passed between herself and Boggs by the side of the highway, and she didn’t raise it. They talked about other things, passionlessly. Maybe, Ellis thought, with the force of need, phone conversations always, by their nature, contain a cold, disembodied feeling.
He could see no sign of Boggs, could not get him on the phone. But he kept driving, even as he feared that he was getting further from Boggs, not closer, and he might be indulging a fantasy or an insanity. He couldn’t think of a thing to do except to continue onward and hope for a stroke of luck, although the course of recent events made him appear to himself entirely luckless.
He was watching for an Outback Steakhouse, but he saw no Outbacks for miles, only T.G.I. Friday’s, Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Lone Star, Black-eyed Pea, Chili’s. Years had passed since he and Boggs were here, nothing on the roadside synced with the images in his mind, and he began to mistrust his memory. He had nearly decided to turn back when he saw the Outback’s red neon.
He pulled up the exit ramp. A few drops of rain marked the windshield, but the wipers chased them off, and no more fell. The interstate beside him cut a trough in the earth, and he drove beside it on a two-lane access road, passing a hot-tub store with a blue hot tub mounted on end on the roof, an upholstery shop with barred windows, an office-furniture supplier in a converted warehouse. Unmarked buildings with rust stains down the walls. Deteriorating parking lots. All of it seemed like he might have seen it before, and he could remember none of it specifically.
In front of the upholstery shop he parked the minivan and crossed the access road to gaze down. The embankment’s slope looked steeper from here than it had seemed from below. At his feet grew dandelions and weeds. A Camel pack. A crushed water bottle. In the south-west stood a swathe of near-black clouds while the traffic below ran bellowing. He took a breath and went down clutching the weeds.
The passing vehicles moved in long streams and flows, sucking a wind that fluttered against him. He studied the shape of the embankment, the location of the acceleration and deceleration lanes, the proximity of the overpasses at the exits ahead and behind. Here, on an early morning in winter, after a night-time snowfall, a Dodge Durango had parked on the shoulder, occupied by a family of five Pakistani immigrants who had abandoned a rental apartment two days earlier and begun driving west. Ten minutes before the accident a police officer drove by and did not note any stopped vehicles – implying that the Dodge had not been here long.
The driver of the semi that destroyed the Dodge and killed everyone inside began to lose control after passing the previous exit. Perhaps he encountered a patch of ice. Perhaps his attention wandered. A standard black box in the semi recorded speeds of a few miles an hour over the speed limit, and conditions were poor – heavy snow and ice on the roadway, more snow sifting down. For a distance of several hundred feet the semi swerved back and forth – a little, then more and more as the driver struggled to regain control of the trailer swinging out behind him. Ellis had modelled the dynamics. When the driver got on the brakes, it caused the trailer to fully jackknife. The entire semi slid broadside. It was travelling at – Ellis had calculated – 46 mph when the rear corner ripped open the Dodge and hurled it down the shoulder, spinning in a complicated trajectory that Ellis laboriously reconstructed by an analysis of a stack of police photos of tyre marks in the snow.
When the Dodge came to a stop it stood empty, and the five occupants lay in little heaps here and there on the road. Scattered around them were suitcases, duffels, Fritos, a pair of flip-flops and a small charcoal grill.
No one alive knew why the family had left their apartment and started west, and the available evidence also didn’t indicate why they had stopped on the shoulder – the same shoulder Ellis now trudged along. The Dodge still had gas in the tank. Maybe it had some mechanical problem. Maybe the driver wanted to look at a map. Maybe there was an argument. Ellis and Boggs had identified the accident location by walking the shoulder with a book of police photos, watching for the shape of the embankment and a bit of fencing that showed at the top. Or had it been a guard rail? Irritated, Ellis returned to the place where he had come down the embankment and continued on in the other direction. Maybe he had the wrong Outback, the wrong exit, the wrong interstate, the wrong city.
When he noticed a sudden quiet he ran across the lanes, to the centre median.
Cars roared into the lanes behind him. The median, about thirty feet wide, shallowed in a grassy ditch. At the bottom a seagull stabbed at a candy bar wrapper.
After throwing the Dodge aside the semi had continued to slide and swing around until its wheels scooped into the earth of the median. Ellis looked for furrows in the grass. He remembered photographing the tracks of still raw earth with Boggs, and it didn’t seem likely that the highway department would have made any attempt to fill them. But he didn’t see them.
He walked with the flow of traffic, then against it. A drop of water struck his face, then another. Soon a drizzle sketched visible lines in the air. The noise of the wheels on the road began to shift tone. He stood watching the moving columns of vehicles while his hair plastered down, his shirt grew soaked, his pants. A plume thrown by a semi landed against his ankles. Eventually the traffic must break. It passed through his mind that if he waited here long enough, inevitably he would see an accident occur.
When next he looked down the median, a figure was coming.
It wobbled a little side to side, stopping now and again to peer at the ground, and eventually emerged from the rain in a baggy yellow-and-black Steelers jacket with the hood up, a girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen. Under one arm she held an object – a headlamp assembly, wires springing from it. She stopped about ten feet away and regarded him with a frown, as if he were a post in the ground in the wrong place. When he said hello, she nodded slightly and asked, ‘What are you doing here?’
He looked at the traffic. His hands trembled in his armpits. The rain ran off the girl’s jacket, the sleeves hung past her hands, the hood shadowed her eyes.
‘I’m trying to get back across,’ Ellis said.
The girl didn’t answer. She turned to face the roadway as if she were at a bus stop and examined the headlamp in her hands. Ellis, confounded, wandered up the median a short distance, then returned and waited. Eventually he bowed his head. Eventually he shut his eyes.
Then the sound of the traffic changed. A course of rear lights brightened, cars slowed. Ellis had lost his expectation that the traffic would ever stop; to see it now seemed a flouting of nature.
They crossed the lanes between stopped cars and climbed the embankment and when he reached the minivan the girl was still with him. The rain had become extraordinary, a collapsing wave. ‘Well, get in,’ he yelled.
They watched the water move on the windshield. Except for the rattling on the roof, the minivan seemed a calm and hushed place. He started the engine to run the heater. ‘That came out of a Ford Probe,’ he said, gesturing at her headlamp.
She glanced at him. ‘I know.’
‘I can drive you home,’ he said. ‘But you have to tell me how to get there. I don’t know this place.’
‘You don’t have to do anything for me,’ she said. But she didn’t move either, just sat in his minivan. She had some pimples around her lips and watched the rain with peculiar intensity.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’m hungry. You hungry?’
He eased down the access road to a Wendy’s. Inside he ordered hamburgers, fries, sodas. They sat in a booth with red seats, and she ate with a slow and precise method, one fry at a time until they were gone, the burger in small bites.
He picked the headlamp off the table and put his eye to the glass. ‘You find this along the road somewhere?’
She said nothing.
‘This was in a collisio
n,’ he said. ‘At night.’
He set it aside, and he watched her look at it, then up at him, then at the headlamp again, her jaw flexing. ‘How do you know that?’
‘Bulb filaments are hot and soft when they’re lit. When a crash suddenly accelerates or decelerates the car, if the filament is on, it’s so soft that it gets thrown out of shape. It’s like cracking a whip.’
She lifted the headlamp and peered at the bulb filament. Then she looked at him, with one eye a little squinted.
‘Are you homeless?’ he asked.
‘No.’
His phone rang. He saw that it was the office and let it ring.
‘Do you spend much time down there along the interstate?’ he asked. ‘Did you happen to see an accident that happened there, a semi hit a Durango, about a year, year and a half ago, in the winter, in the snow?’
She stared at him.
‘I’m looking for a friend of mine,’ Ellis said. ‘He might have been down there recently, looking around. Did you see him?’
‘Did you know people in that accident?’ she asked.
‘I think the people who knew the people in the accident all live in Pakistan.’
She nodded. ‘I think the unknown dead are important.’
‘What?’
‘The unknown dead.’
He watched her. He didn’t know what to do with her. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to go home?’
She folded a napkin edge against edge. ‘OK.’
Under her guidance they crossed the city by side streets. ‘My mom might know that accident,’ she said. ‘She might know about your friend.’
‘Really?’
‘I think so.’ The rain faded. They entered an industrial district. A cement plant fronted by barrel-backed trucks. A rail yard. Rows of grey warehouses. They drove beside a junkyard where piled broken vehicles rose over a fence of corrugated metal. The girl pointed down a run of gravel and said, ‘Here.’ A double-wide trailer stood surrounded by several vehicles in various levels of dismantlement.
