THE SUN HAD begun to set when he turned onto a road that followed along the edge of a lush ravine. A stream of water ran at its bottom and it turned and oxbowed and from out of it rose cottonwoods, willows and brush. Ellis drove slowly. He remembered that the place he was looking for came just after the road curved a long left then sharply right. The driver of the accident vehicle, travelling at 60 despite the 45 mph speed limit, had felt the back end break free in the transition between curves, began to swerve, fishtailed with increasing violence and launched into the ravine.
But as the road curved back and forth, back and forth, and the trees and brush of the ravine all looked much the same, Ellis began to doubt whether he could identify the right curve.
But then it was easy. A white-painted cross stood beside the road.
He parked. He had driven here as hard and fast as he dared, hoping that he might have a chance to arrive before Boggs – unless the way Boggs had pulled into traffic from the golf course indicated a recklessness that he could not match. He stood looking around. What had happened here? An idiot had killed his best friend. Was that the reason that Boggs had chosen it?
A photo of a smiling young man clung to the centre of the cross while at its foot lay a scatter of sun-faded plastic flowers. A beaded plastic necklace. Some broken crockery. A Yankees baseball cap slowly interring into the roadside.
A single-vehicle accident involving two occupants, young men, not yet old enough to vote, friends since kindergarten. During the driver’s deposition, an attorney asked how far the steering wheel was turned when the car went off the road.
‘I had let go.’
The attorney said, ‘Excuse me?’
‘I let go of the wheel. And I closed my eyes.’
The car, a little Dodge Neon, helixed into space over the ravine, smashed into the rocky stream bed, overturned and came to rest on the wheels. The driver said he kept his eyes closed – waiting, waiting, waiting, to be sure that the car had stopped and he was alive. Then he opened his eyes and turned to the passenger seat, and it was empty.
The passenger-side window had smashed open.
His friend stood a few feet away.
The two looked at each other. The one standing in the water said, ‘I don’t feel good.’ He sat.
The driver dragged him over to the bank. When the ambulance arrived the EMTs put his friend onto a board and hauled him up to the road. He had no exposed wounds, but he had suffered a laceration of the liver, and twelve hours later, during surgery, he died.
Half of a year passed before Ellis and Boggs were hired and arrived to inspect the vehicle – a dozen energy-drink cans rolling in the rear-seat footwells, worn tyres, no load markings on the seat belts – and then came here to inspect the scene, plodding through the water to find and document bits of broken glass among the rocks, clambering up and down the slope to identify broken branches in the brush, using a machete to hack open view planes for their surveying equipment. Later they built an analytical simulation of the motion of the Dodge as it fishtailed, its subsequent leap, its initial impact with the ground, its crashing rollover. Painstakingly, they accounted for each dent in the sheet metal and the vehicle-to-ground contacts that had deposited window glass as well as the passenger-seat occupant, which allowed them to calculate forces to pass along to biomechanics experts so that those experts could say whether the vehicle’s seat-belt design was likely responsible for the damage to the liver of the passenger seat occupant.
Whose name Ellis would not have remembered except that it was printed on a sticker affixed to the cross:
Rick Elwin
1987-2005
We love you, Foxy!!
A photo showed Rick Elwin with big teeth, a droopy right eyelid, not much chin, and it was not obvious in what sense he might be considered foxy. He smiled but looked a little desolate, as if something in him already anticipated how the photo would be used.
Ellis picked up the baseball cap and beat the dirt off and set it atop the cross. He looked at the road for tracks or markings, but there were only the faint tyre marks his minivan had made in the dirt. He peered into the brush, wondering if Boggs had been down there. He didn’t want to go down. It was muddy and the water was cold, he remembered.
He walked the road, through the S-curve where the driver had lost control. The road had been dry, the tyres worn but not bald, the vehicle otherwise in fine condition. Drug test negative. Just dumb. Not that anyone could say that in court. One could say, too much speed and an inexperienced driver. Possibly the two friends had been screwing around, but if so the driver never let it slip, and he seemed to have been honest otherwise, stricken and bewildered by the death of his friend. And as Ellis walked the curves suddenly, briefly, James Dell’s horrible broken body lay on the ground in front of him.
He turned from it and watched as a Honda went by; it took the turns without difficulty. He crossed the road and stood under high old pines on a broad floor of needles and listened to the trees creak. The sky was darkening. He returned to the cross, and then, cursing, plunged down the side of the ravine to the water’s edge. He took off his shoes, rolled his pants. The water was as cold as he remembered. He lurched through the water until he stood at approximately the location where the Dodge had come to rest.
In the mud was a shoeprint.
Ellis compared it to the size of his own shoe – the print was a bit larger, as Boggs’s would be. He examined the tread, but he could not remember looking closely at Boggs’s shoes recently. He moved upstream and down, looking for more prints, without success. He worked up the ravine slope above the print, but saw nothing, and he went back down and crossed the water and looked along the opposite bank. A heavy gloom gathered. He ended standing in the water where the Dodge had been, his feet numb with cold.
He closed his eyes and tried to think. If Boggs had been here and left, what now? Where next? Was it possible that this was a ploy to pull him away from Heather?
A wind stirred the cottonwood leaves into faint slapping noises.
The driver of the Dodge, too, had been here, with eyes closed. Ellis imagined the terrifying crash and the jarring halt. Eyes closed. No motion. No noise except a gurgle of water around the car. Waiting. Wishing it could all be reversed. Hoping to find it was OK. Then, opening his eyes, looking to his right, and there his friend stood in the water like an apparition.
Ellis opened his eyes and looked to his right: mud and rocks and weeds.
Except, of course, he was the one standing in the water. Like a man standing and breathing though already killed, already killed but not yet dead, an apparition.
The water chuckled. A tree creaked. A car approached on the road above – cars had passed there periodically, but this one slowed. Right above him, it halted.
Then it honked.
Ellis scrambled up the slope as quickly as he could, but as he came out of the brush, the car had already accelerated away. He heard its tyres shrieking a little around a curve.
He ran to the minivan. The road wound beside the stream for five miles before it came to an intersection, a four-way stop, and in the distance, left, right and ahead, he saw no one. A honk! It must have been Boggs. He hit the steering wheel.
Then his phone rang. From it Boggs said, ‘Right.’ And hung up.
‘Fuck you!’ Ellis shouted. But with a sensation of internal flailing, he turned right and drove as fast as he could.
A couple of dozen miles passed with no sight of Boggs. He called Boggs and listened to it ring several times. Then, to his surprise, it clicked and he heard Boggs say, ‘This jerk in front of me keeps tapping his brakes. Going uphill for God’s sake.’
‘Uphill?’
‘It’s a little hill.’
‘Are you tailgating?
‘I am now, because he keeps tapping the brakes.’
‘I guess anyone who wants to gets to be a jerk.’
‘That’s right. It’s an equal-opportunity society.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Just drive and drive and maybe I’ll hit something.’
‘You’re crazy. You’ll kill someone.’
‘People out here know the risks,’ Boggs said. ‘If you’ve put yourself out on the road, then by implication you’ve accepted the associated risks.’
‘I doubt that most people think of it that way.’
‘People do all kinds of shit without thinking.’
‘You’re not an asshole. Stop it.’
‘The problem,’ Boggs said, ‘is that you still want to think that we’re friends. Look at what’s happened. Look at where we are. What does friendship mean? This isn’t it.’
‘We don’t have to be friends. We don’t have to be anything. If you’ll just get some help. Just go home.’
‘You don’t really want me to go home and inject myself into Heather’s life again, go in and stir things and make a mess of the situation you’ve got.’
‘Whatever you need to do to work it all out.’
‘It would be a mess. I’m just thinking of your interests, Ellis.’
‘Sarcasm is the lowest form of humour.’
‘No, really you have to agree that puns are lower. I’ll take bad sarcasm over a good pun any day.’
‘If you have your humour, Boggs, then life’s OK, don’t you think?’
‘Not really. What’s the one got to do with the other?’
Ellis said, ‘You said right, right? But where are you going?’
‘Right, wrong. Left, right.’
‘What?’
‘With a W.’
‘Oh. Oh.’ Jacob Wright had been one of their clients. Ellis pulled to the shoulder and stopped the car.
‘Now we’re getting somewhere, huh? Get it? We’re driving, getting somewhere. It’s a pun, pretty low.’
‘We’re not getting anywhere.’ He wasn’t. He was stopped on the shoulder.
‘Now, that’s what makes it funny, because it’s sarcasm, too.’
‘Boggs,’ Ellis said.
‘Boggs. Boggs, Boggs, Boggs. Boggs, can I have a job? Boggs, can I have your wife? Boggs, can I have your sympathy? Boggs, can I save your life? Boggs, can I feel good about myself?’
‘I’m -’
‘Boggs, will you accept my apology?’
‘Shut up, Boggs.’
‘Am I bothering you?’
‘You can talk a circle right around me. Good for you.’
‘OK. Talk to the Dostoevsky.’ Ellis heard an audiobook playing. ‘That I should cast a dark cloud over your serene, untroubled happiness; that by my bitter reproaches I should cause distress to your heart, should poison it with secret remorse and should force it to throb with anguish at the moment of bliss. Oh, never, never!’
Then the silence of the dead phone line.
Jacob Wright had been a major defence client, a fat, affable attorney representing a manufacturer. Including everything, including even the jobs on which he and Boggs had only spent a few hours before everyone concluded that the case looked bad and should be settled, they must have worked for Wright on more than a dozen different jobs. Maybe twenty. Maybe more.
Ellis took out the map. The nearest Wright job that he could recollect lay – like a confirmation – 180 degrees off his current course.
He turned around.
Night had now taken the world completely. He passed an array of towering antennas with blinking red and white lights. An enormous solitary ghostly lit church. Fields where large numbers of fireflies were lighting, pale green sparks in great numbers all across the landscape – they glowed only as they flew upward so that they appeared to be always rising. Some rose over the road, and the ones that struck the windshield flashed brightly into green smears of phosphorescence that slowly, slowly faded. They began to mass in swarms that pelted the minivan – three, four on the glass before him, startling him with every impact, dead and luminous and beautiful. Then the fields ended with an eruption of residential housing developments; the fireflies vanished.