by Nick Arvin
Sleep was a swift fall through perfect darkness. He woke remembering nothing, under clouds like a flight of giant apricots. The parking lot lay empty.
As he began manoeuvring the minivan it felt and sounded strange, but he gassed it out of the parking lot and into the road before he understood what was wrong. He stopped. The left rear tyre was flat. The right rear tyre was also flat. He studied them and found that both had small punctures in the sidewall. Perhaps from a pocketknife. The entire vehicle slouched back on the flat tyres, and he wondered how he had failed to notice the flats sooner. He stood looking at the tyres as if with sufficient attention he might discern that they were not flat after all. The minivan had a spare tyre, but it was not helpful because he needed two tyres.
He walked over to the Cricket Bar, knocked, and when no one answered, tried to open the door. Locked. He circled to the back and found another door, which gave the same result.
He returned to the minivan, locked it and began walking.
In the night all that he had been able to see from the road were the trees along either side, but now he saw that the trees on his left fronted a vast field of goldenrod, the flowers dim at first but soon blazing as the sun elevated. Then the goldenrod ended at a wood of birch, and the boles made stripes of vertical white that crowded behind one another into an obscure distance while ferns spread underneath. Dust rose from the road as he walked and powdered his pant legs and clung to the sweat on his neck. He’d been walking for perhaps twenty minutes when he heard a vehicle approaching from behind, and he walked on the grassy edge of the road to let it pass, but it slowed and idled at his back. A red Jeep Cherokee. Ellis did not glance at it again. He moved faster, and it stayed with him. He looked over toward the birch wood, and behind him gravel spurted. The Jeep roared up and drew even. A young man in the passenger window – pale hair shaved to stubble, face long and freckled under the eyes, eyes wrinkled with smiling – said, ‘Your minivan back there?’
‘Two flats.’
‘That’s some bad luck. Need a ride?’
‘No, thanks.’
The young man grinned with big white teeth, straight as bricks. ‘It sure looks as if you could use some assistance.’
‘I figure it’s a nice morning.’
‘Just trying to be helpful.’
‘Thanks anyway.’
‘We’re just trying to help a guy out. You don’t have to be an asshole.’
Ellis said nothing.
The Jeep accelerated ahead, then skidded to a stop. The passenger stepped out, then the driver – a heavier young man with a ball cap down almost over his eyes. Ellis looked again at the birch woods, but he felt tired and slow and it seemed likely that they could run him down easily, and then it would only be worse. The young man with the white brick teeth kept smiling – an earnest, likeable smile, a smile difficult to doubt. But the driver scowled with fat arms hanging, and the two arrayed themselves so that Ellis could only face one of them at a time. The licence plate on the Jeep was mudded over. ‘Two flats. That is some bad luck. How does that happen?’ the smiling one asked.
‘A statistical fluke.’ Ellis felt adrenalin and a fearfulness that annoyed him. ‘It could happen to anyone.’ He expected a blow from behind, but expecting it did not help when it came: an exquisite pain at the upper rear of the head. The world chunked with black. He fell to his knees. His vision slowly cleared, and he watched the smiling man shape his lips around incomprehensible syllables. Beside him, the fat one held a short length of pipe. Then a flashing movement, and nothing remained but a monumental pain and darkness and the impossibility of movement.
Shades of white. These gradually tinted blue, then green.
Rough objects pressed – the gravelled earth. Dry, toothy weeds.
A faint shallow rasping noise intruded. He understood this to be his own breath. For minutes he focused on it.
Then, sitting up, he gasped and the black returned, but he strained and kept himself up. He felt a long soft welt near the top of his head and alongside it an open shallow wound, with blood clotting in his hair. His wallet, his watch and his keys were gone. His cellphone was gone. No, he remembered, he had broken that. When he shifted his gaze to the birch woods, the white trees trailed rainbow images. He looked at the road’s narrowing empty distance, and he felt like sitting down and abandoning the difficulties of the world and waiting, waiting a long time, until his body merged into the rough earth, until he was consumed into something larger, something without self-awareness or memory.
Instead he walked, stumbling with confused balance, back toward the Cricket Bar. The minivan stood at the side of the road, doors open. The keys lay on the driver’s seat. A hole gaped in the dash where the radio had been. But in the armrest console between the seats, under a clutter of receipts, he found his credit card where he had left it. He locked the doors, took up the keys and began walking again. He was paced by phantoms at the edge of vision, white things and red things and black things. They scrambled forward only to retreat as he turned to see them better. The sun stood high and felt hot on the wound in his scalp. Its heat there grew as he walked, until it pressed like a blade.
A vehicle approached from behind, and he held himself from turning to look at it. A pickup, it went by scattering gravel from the tyres, not slowing.
He did not see another vehicle until miles later when he staggered into an intersection. More cars went by without stopping, and he kept on beside buzzing high-voltage lines held aloft by enormous steel armatures. He came to a gas station with a garage attached. A mechanic, sitting at a large accounts ledger on a grease-blacked tabletop, looked at him for some seconds before asking, ‘What happened?’
Ellis looked at himself, his clothes soiled and bloody. He said, ‘I’m not sure.’
The mechanic laughed.
11.
HE FOUND -
The rural stretch of interstate alongside a pasture full of roan Arabians where a Nissan Armada swerved into the median, overturned, rolled into a Toyota Corolla in the oncoming lanes and bounced onward, killing three in the Nissan and two in the Toyota, and later a piece of human flesh was discovered in a windshield wiper of the Toyota, torn from one of the occupants as he was flung through the window opening.
The two-lane in front of yellow spiralling water park slides where a semi struck a Honda Pilot, which struck an Oldsmobile, sending it into the opposing lane to meet a Firebird head-on and everyone walked away except the driver of the Firebird, who was dead by the time anyone thought to check on him.
The highway between slouching hills where a Toyota Land Cruiser caught a wheel rim and rolled and the woman driving was decapitated as centrifugal forces pulled her through a window opening. Police photographed her head sitting upright on the earth, as if she had been buried to her neck by children.
And while he stopped at the places of accidents that he knew, he passed others all the time: he saw tyre marks on the asphalt and rutted into roadside gravel and earth, paint transfers on the Jersey barriers, dents in the guard rails, broken glass and plastic glittering.
He spent an hour, two hours, with his map spread on the steering wheel, gazing at the Xs, trying to see a pattern or approach that would bring him to Boggs. He could see no pattern, however, and the way the Wright jobs scattered around left no obvious candidates for a stakeout. Although in his work he often examined a photograph or a scene repeatedly in hope that some new evidence would present itself, here the field was too large, the map gave him nothing, and he couldn’t examine every accident scene repeatedly. He needed an intuition. He needed a way to shift his perceptions and see something new. Perhaps in this sense the girl in the junkyard had been right. But even though his situation appeared strange, even though memories and emotions shook and reeled inside him – still he failed to lose his sanity if that was what it was, failed to lose his mind even though his mind provided only this disorganised and apparently useless search.
He could not find an intuition, and along
the way he also neglected his appearance. He grew embarrassed when he had to face people – gas station attendants, people passing an accident site. The minivan, too, looked bad. He wiped the windshield from time to time with a gas station squeegee, but the bodies of insects lay across the leading edge of the minivan in a continuous crust. He shoved receipts into the toothless mouth where the radio had been.
He slept one night in a field listening to the sound of cicadas like the cutting of a lathe. He slept another night in the open empty parking lot of a half-abandoned mall. The overhead lights pushed a glow that woke him repeatedly, thinking that he saw the sun, so that the night seemed to contain days that did not end, and when the sun did rise it had a taint of falsity. In the morning he circled the parking lot in the minivan and discovered a six-lane interstate below him where a thin mist had settled and commuters moved slowly. He went on, pressed by a logic grown inaccessible. As he fingered the stitches in his scalp, he wondered, how long had they been in? He was aware of losing a grip on time, of losing a grip on what he was doing, as if all that he could do was go on relenting to the movement of the road. Images of James Dell still occasionally startled him. He recalled Heather and a swirl of intense feeling came. ‘Heather,’ he cried aloud. Perhaps he had not even heard his own voice for a couple of days. Here on the road, he thought, it does not matter what I say. ‘Heather Heather Heather,’ he repeated until, over a score of miles, it became gibberish.
He stood before a dusty payphone in a mouldering 7-Eleven parking lot, thinking of her, but then, with shame scrabbling against the walls of his mind, he turned away. He looked at his hand and saw it shaking.
The day was beautiful. For miles uncountable wheat spanned everything not the road, a wind roiling it like water. A flock of starlings dove and wheeled. Then an odd, solitary half-timbered building was set off from the world by a rectangle of picket fence. A man worked over a fallen tree with a chainsaw. A retailer of farm equipment offered machines, green and yellow and shining. On the interstate he had the pleasure of accelerating again and moving among semis like a fish in a pod of whales. Bright billboards hove up out of the distance.
The trembling in his hand had spread – he looked at his legs trembling and felt muscles twitching in his face and in his hard, empty stomach. His grip on the steering wheel seemed to flutter. He set the cruise control so that he wouldn’t have to feel his foot shaking against the pedal.
He passed an enormous truck stop, semis crowding and nuzzling. He turned off the interstate and went through a little clapboard town and then twenty miles later another town that looked so much like the first that he spent a while trying to reason out whether he could have inadvertently circled. He turned onto a side road. One gentle hill after another curved him up and down. In his head his teeth chattered.
A side road teed out on the left, and Ellis stopped with his turn signal flashing, checked his mirror, then turned, in the same place where a Pontiac Grand Am had slowed to do the same thing and was struck from behind by a semi pulling a load of soybeans. An oncoming Chevy Lumina had swerved to avoid the collision, went off-road, and began overturning, killing its occupants, a family of four that had travelled six hundred miles to visit grandparents who lived two miles from the accident site. In the police photographs toys in primary colours lay scattered along the path of the rolling Chevy. Ellis got out and a wind pulled at his clothes. He recalled a photograph of the driver of the semi standing by his rig, bowed. And another photo, of the body of an obese child, face down on the earth, an enormous plastic soda cup inches from an outstretched hand.
After a time, scuffing in the grass, Ellis found a green pacifier, half buried. He had forgotten that the youngest was so young. Earth clung to the plastic and it trembled in his shaking hand. He felt cold at his core although the sun gaped bright and hot.
He sat by the edge of the road, huddled. A mouse skittered through the grass. A grasshopper stood a minute on his thigh, then leapt away. He picked a piece of asphalt from the crumbling edge of the roadway and let it rest heavy and warm in his hand. He set both hands on the road surface, to feel its absorbed heat. Then he lay down in the lanes, on their warmth, and watched the sky.
Bright low clouds scudded from the west and away beyond the eastern hillbacks. There was no traffic, none at all, and he wondered at the terrible chance that three vehicles had met here. He heard the wind sifting through the grasses beside the road, but he could not feel it. The wind in the grass made a simmering, gorgeous sound. He thought, I am learning something important. But if so he could not describe it to himself with any clarity, and then he thought, Perhaps I am not really learning anything at all. Perhaps I am only following deeper and deeper into a vacant delusion.
A vehicle approached – he felt it in the road before he heard it, a low vibration that gathered to itself the whisper of tyres turning.
He rolled out of the road just as the car, a Chrysler Sebring, barked its tyres, swerving and pushing a wind that flapped his pant legs. The Sebring didn’t stop. Ellis lay in the gravel and here, pressed into the dirt beside him, was the shape of Boggs’s tyre mark.
He walked over the site again, starting at the tyre mark and moving in widening circles, and eventually discovered a small piece of white paper hung in the weeds. A receipt for gasoline with a name at the bottom: John Boggs.
A ball of snakes writhed in his stomach. Now, after all, here was a new point of data. The gas station address named a town that he found on the map. The date was yesterday. The town lay in the east, and east was the direction he would have gone next, but apparently Boggs had been there, so he turned west.
He made two brief stops – one at the scene of a collision between a street sweeper and a scooter, the other at the place where a garbage truck had crashed into a pickup with two kids in the bed playing with a set of magnetic chequers – before he came to a curve of roadway under a high hill. He and Boggs had spent most of a day working here, surveying, photographing. Not far away, perhaps a half-hour by foot, stood a mate to the hill, a little taller, with three windmills rising off it. Eight months after working below the first hill, they had been brought out to work on a second accident that occurred at the foot of the second hill, with the windmills.
The air here blew hot and dry, despite a lake that lay not far away. From the road he could not see the water; he remembered it from looking at aerial photos of the site. He had a bottle of soda that he sipped from but could not rid his mouth of a parched sensation. His chest ached vaguely. Tremors moved through his hands and arms, into his jaw and eyelids. His eyes, too, felt dry. Near the road the soil was sandy with tufts of grass, and he scuffed around with his foot until he found a swathe of broken glass. He picked up a piece the size of a housefly and felt its edges, watched it catch the sunlight. By examining the thickness and laminated qualities of a piece of glass it was possible to determine whether it had come from a windshield or a rear window or a side window. This appeared to be windshield glass, and he likely stood where the front of the van had come to rest. How many years ago now? Four? Six? The van, a rental, had burned, killing five of fourteen inside. They were grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, children, out on a weekend holiday. With so many dead and burned, some of them children, large amounts of money had been at stake. He and Boggs had worked a long time on this case and came to know it in great detail. They had never uncovered anything unexpected – after the first day’s work, they probably could have predicted their ultimate findings to within a couple of mph. But they had produced reports and diagrams and animations, and Boggs had prepped for weeks to provide several hours of deposition testimony.
Traffic now moved on the two-lane road at about sixty, rattling the brush around Ellis. A double yellow line indicated a no-passing zone on the curve around the hill, but a small silver Plymouth had nonetheless been passing, and so came head-on toward the rented van. Both drivers swerved, so that the front left corner of the Plymouth struck the front left corner of the van and the left
side of the van pushed upward, as if it had hit a ramp. It fell onto its right side and slid into the sand and grass. The deformation of a frame cross-member under the van punctured the fuel tank, and the gasoline ran down, pooled under the van and began to burn.
Ellis sat sifting sand and shards of glass. He picked out the shards and examined them one by one and set them aside in a little pile. He kept thinking that he needed to call someone, then losing track of the thought.
On the hill across the road a sign advertised Texaco gasoline, which contained useful additives.
He looked at the sand he held with thoughts of examining the grains individually. Boggs claimed that there was so much information in photographs that if you studied a job’s book of photos long enough, you would always eventually see something new and useful. In Ellis’s experience that was sometimes true and sometimes not, but there was always the possibility that in those cases where he had failed to find anything new it was because he had failed to study long enough. He turned the sand a little one way and then another to see how the sun played on it. Certain grains were black, others red or orange or white, their size inconsistent, with some nearly pebbles.
He walked down the road to a fading two-track trail that disappeared into a wire fence. At the time of the accident, there had been a gate. Two men had been sitting in a truck in front of the gate, talking about a possible cellphone tower, to be placed on the hill – Ellis saw now that it had never been built. One of the men in the truck, an ex-marine, had run to the burning van, found a window broken out of the rear doors, and reached in. Fighting through the smoke and flames thickening in the van, unable to see, grabbing hands or legs or shirts or belts, he dragged out seven people. He was a hero, but in his deposition he was taciturn and grim and spoke at length only of the screams of those he had had to abandon.
