UNDER AN AFTERNOON sky whitened by haze he walked past low houses, past square graceless apartment blocks, past gas stations, past a strip mall. An adult entertainment cabaret named Lavender. An Applebee’s. A sallow office complex with tinted windows. After a mile and a half he came to a used-car lot. He walked among Fords and Pontiacs and Buicks and Chryslers and Jeeps, disliking all of them without particular reason, until he found a grey Dodge minivan – six years old, 87,349 miles. He looked at the interior, looked at the underbody, looked at the engine then started the engine and looked at it again. Light scratches marked the hood, a crack spanned vertically the passenger-side mirror, something orange had stained the carpet behind the driver’s seat, but otherwise it appeared to be in good shape. A goateed salesman in a blue blazer with anchors stamped on its shining buttons watched. ‘You have a family? Kids?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Well, it’s terrific for hauling cargo.’
‘Minivans are pretty safe,’ Ellis said. ‘You don’t see a lot of fatal accidents involving minivans. Some, but not a lot.’
‘Huh,’ said the salesman. He thumbed and twisted his anchor buttons.
‘At least I haven’t,’ Ellis said. When he had written a cheque and transacted the paperwork he sat unmoving in the driver’s seat a minute, then started the engine, let it idle, did not touch the controls but stared at them. He took out his phone and called Boggs, but Boggs did not answer. He set his hands on the steering wheel to absorb the engine’s trembling. He had not driven since coming to a stop as James Dell flew into the darkness of the street ahead. He thought about driving. In some gentler world devoid of cars and highways and stop lights and parking lots and accidents he would not need to drive. But in this world he needed to drive. When he lifted a hand it shook, but he put it to the gear shift. The minivan lurched from reverse into drive. But otherwise the process of crossing the parking lot and turning into the street was routine.
‘Human error is to be expected,’ Boggs had said, shortly after Ellis began working for him. ‘You’ve got a lot of people hurling themselves around in machines weighing two tons plus, under the regulation of laws that the people driving these machines understand only poorly. And they’re going to be making mistakes anyway because of limited attention spans, flawed perceptions, psychopharmaceutical use, poor decisions, haste and et cetera. So you really have to expect that from time to time someone will crash into someone else, and someone will be hurt. Which doesn’t stop anyone from suing anyone else for their errors.’
Ellis bought a map at a gas station, and with the map and his phone lying on the passenger seat he drove to the interstate and joined the westward flow. The broken white line flickered beside him, the odometer wheels rolled, the sun moved down.
Boggs had claimed that the accidents didn’t shock him. What shocked him was that there weren’t more. He said, ‘The ability to drive on a road with thousands of others and probably survive the experience gives me a little faith in the humanity of humanity.’
Ellis phoned Heather. He’d begun to doubt himself, he told her. Even if he found Boggs, what could he say?
‘Tell him that he’s -’ She stopped. ‘A friend. Tell him that he’s loved.’
‘He’ll laugh. I’ll be lucky if he doesn’t kill me.’
‘You’ll know what to say. You’ll think of it.’ But her voice was uncertain.
He passed a series of middle-size cities with big box stores by the interstate exits, then ramped off the interstate and passed white-clad homes and the dark vertical lines of telephone poles and reaching trees, the lowering sun flickering yellow in the leaves. He travelled north, slowing in the limits of little towns with a block or two of storefronts. Pizzeria. Barbershop. Bar. Pharmacy. Bank. Auto body shop. Between towns, small ranch houses squatted over flat, aggressively green lawns. He passed a bar with a painted sign, ‘The Cloverleaf Lounge’ – a vinyl-sided structure with a couple of high, small windows and a sagging banner: ‘Bud Light $1.50’. He came down a gradual hill to an intersection where, off to the side, a swathe of raw earth lay levelled and heaped beside two enormous yellow machines. Ellis waited under a green light for a semi to clear the opposite lane, then turned left toward the lake.
He travelled a couple more miles before it struck him that he had been in that intersection before. With Boggs. They had done an accident-scene inspection there – an old motel had stood on the ground now scraped down by the yellow machines. The neon had been gone from the motel sign, its lawn had been untended and overgrown, but a handful of cars had stood in front of the rooms and a shirtless man had been loitering in the parking lot, scratching his thighs while Ellis and Boggs dodged in and out of the intersection with measuring tapes and cameras. Three years ago? More or less.
A sign pointed at the park entrance.
Narrow, high-crowned roads led to three different camping areas, and Ellis drove through the loops of each, past RVs, SUVs, pop-up campers, pup tents, fire pits, tiki torches, lawn chairs, and a few couples, children, solitary men. None were Boggs, and none of the vehicles were Boggs’s convertible. He phoned Heather to be sure that he had come to the right place, to see if she had any ideas, and she directed him back to the most remote of the camping areas. He circled through it twice more. Then he drove by the others again, then turned at the sign for the boat ramp, followed a short road to the water, and found the area empty. He parked and walked down to the wavelets lapping and rattling small round stones. Above him, forest loomed and reached toward the water and the spectacle of the setting sun. Haphazard on the beach lay pale rounded driftwood, beer bottles, a tyre. Seagulls rose and fell. To the south a man and a couple of children were prancing at the water’s edge. In the other direction, smeared by distance into anonymity, a single figure moved. Impossible to say that it wasn’t Boggs.
Ellis started that way. The sun balanced on the horizon and cast a street of dazzle over the water, and the distant figure resolved into a woman in a bikini top stooping to collect stones. Past her the beach lay empty. Ellis turned back and a wind gusted from the lake and pulled his clothes out against his body. Inland, campfires glowed amid the trees, faint and skittish.
At the boat ramp he stood looking at the water, indigo under a cavernous twilight, listening as the waves moved and ticked stones against one another, thinking of what he had done to the stranger, James Dell, and to his friend, Boggs, and he felt that the condition of his soul, if he granted that such a thing existed, was wretched and very possibly beyond repair. That he would have been glad to trade places with James Dell in his hospital bed.
He drove away from the lake, out of the park, through the murk of the forest, between the open dark fields. At the intersection where the earth movers had rid the world of the motel that he remembered, a startled rabbit bolted and raced toward the piles of dirt.
He turned, but stopped on the shoulder. The night had absorbed the twilight and stars glowed. He attempted to phone Boggs, but there was no answer. He sat with a gnawing in his chest, and when he could not bear to be still any longer, he stood out of the minivan. A single overhead street light cast a thin, pinkish illumination on the intersection. He studied the asphalt, the painted lane lines, the timing of the stop light suspended overhead. Little traffic moved through. A black pickup. A silver SUV. The drivers glanced at him and went on.
The accident that had occurred here, three years ago or more, involved a Mercury Grand Marquis – a chromed, civilian version of the big Crown Vics that the police liked. The Mercury had crashed into a tiny Ford Fiesta. The Ford was stopped, waiting for the light, when the Mercury impacted it from behind and sent it careering diagonally through the intersection, hitting two other cars along the way, then sliding off the roadway where it stopped with a telephone pole enfolded in its driver’s side and the driver – a young woman, a cosmetology student – dead in her seat.
Witnesses reported that the Ford had been waiting at a red light. The timing of the stop light relative to the collision was impossible to verify, but even if the light had been green, the driver of the Mercury had an obligation to attempt to slow and stop, and there was no physical indication that the driver had touched his brakes. Also, the driver admitted fault. In fact, he told police that he had accelerated into the impact. He said that he had been possessed by demons – an assertion that the police recorded without comment in their report alongside licence numbers, scene information and vehicle descriptions.
At issue had been whether the Ford should have protected its occupant better, but through an evaluation of crush damage Ellis and Boggs had calculated that, at impact, the Mercury was travelling at about 70 mph, far exceeding any governmental test standard. The Ford had also deposited a set of tyre marks that swooped across the intersection and which he and Boggs had carefully documented, but were now long erased from the asphalt by weather and passing traffic. Ellis crossed the road to the telephone pole. At about waist height he found an impression of crushed and splintered wood where the Ford had struck. He remembered photographing it years before.
Scuffing at the base of the pole he found bits of glass – maybe from the Ford, maybe from some other collision. He watched several cars move by. None were Boggs’s. Although the case had never gone very far, he and Boggs had referred to it often. The notion of demon possession came in handy when faced with inexplicable driver actions.
He drove up the road to the Cloverleaf Lounge. Inside, the dimness made it impossible to discern the colour of the walls or the tables or even the tie of the short, broad bartender who stood projecting an attitude of everlasting patience. Ellis ordered a beer. When it was set before him he asked if there had been anyone here who looked like Boggs – tall, big, with bright blue eyes and a brownish beard. The bartender, studying a point behind Ellis, shook his head.
Ellis hunched at the bar, sipping his beer, looking around whenever the door opened. He wished he had brought a photograph of Boggs. He felt tense with futility. He drank up and ordered another. The space was filling, mostly with men in blue jeans, boots and bas-relief belt buckles, slouching, laughing, turning from time to time to stare at the TV in the corner where a baseball game played.
‘You lose something?’
Ellis discovered at his side a man with a circular face and quarter-circle shoulders from which hung a sack-like T-shirt.
‘Me?’
‘Saw you standing around on the corner like you’d lost something.’
Ellis hesitated.
‘Maybe you found it,’ the circle-faced man offered. He smelled of armpit and deodorant.
‘There was a bad accident there,’ Ellis said. ‘Years ago.’
‘Sure, there’s been plenty of accidents there.’ The circle-faced man grinned – tiny, even teeth with gaps between. ‘My girlfriend and I met in an accident there.’
Ellis stared.
‘Love works in mysterious ways.’
‘I guess so,’ Ellis said.
The man introduced himself: Mike. He said he knew a guy who was deer hunting and accidentally shot some woman’s dog, and that was how he met her and fell in love. He knew another guy who broke into an apartment to steal a stereo and was surprised by a woman coming out of the bath, so he ran his mouth like crazy to keep her calm, ended up marrying her.
Mike talked on like this and led Ellis to a table under the little TV, where a woman with heavy shoulders and breasts and gleaming wide eyes sat over a glass of cola. Mike said her name was Lucy, and she said hello. When Ellis glanced around everyone in the bar seemed to be watching him – but it was the TV overhead. He searched the faces, and when he began listening again Mike was saying that after four years he and Lucy still had not married, which was his own fault. ‘I just can’t seem to settle into the idea of being a claimed man.’ Lucy sat sipping her cola. She peered at Ellis as if he were a figure atop a far hill and she was trying to decide whether she had anything worth saying considering the distance to be crossed.
A sheen of sweat flashed on Mike’s forehead in time with the TV. He asked Ellis what he did, and Ellis explained – reciting his usual answer – that he analysed things like tyre marks and crush depth to determine the movements and velocities of vehicles involved in crashes, and that his analyses supported the work of his boss who testified as an expert witness in civil litigation. He described, for an example, the accident that had occurred just down the road, and as he spoke of it he recalled a police photo of the Ford at its point of rest, with the cosmetology student slouched over the steering wheel, eyes closed, skin pallid, blood seeping from her mouth and ears.
‘Sure,’ Mike said. ‘That’s the same one. That’s the crash where I met Lucy.’
Ellis looked at Mike, then Lucy, and she did an odd thing, curling herself, as if she hoped to fit into a crate.
‘I was turning left,’ Mike said, ‘and Lucy was turning right and that first car was hit by a truck and came spinning through and whacked Lucy then me and she spun and I spun and we came together -’ He clapped his hands and held them. ‘My door against hers. Our windows were broken, and I looked over and said, “Are you all right?” and she said, “I think so. Are you?” and I said, “Except for my heart. My heart! I’m in love!”’ He grinned at Lucy. ‘Anyway, the truck turned turtle in the ditch. I knew the guy that was driving the truck, too, by the way, my step-uncle. When I was a kid he carried worms in his pockets to scare me.’ Mike giggled and showed his teeth.
‘It didn’t roll into the ditch,’ Ellis said. ‘And the driver was demon-possessed.’
‘What?’
‘And it was a Mercury Grand Marquis, not a truck. I think we’re talking about different accidents.’
‘No, no,’ Mike said, with the enunciation and patience of a gentle man speaking to a moron, ‘the first car was stopped and hit from behind and came bang into her and me and then the first car went flying off the road. Killed a girl.’
‘Well, that is similar.’
‘Sure it is. What did you figure out about it?’
‘We had the Mercury going seventy.’
‘A truck all right, a GMC. I know that because it was my step-uncle’s. Seventy? No. I don’t believe that.’
Ellis shrugged. He wasn’t sure if they were talking about the same accident or not, but it didn’t seem to matter. ‘Step-uncle?’ he said.
‘Banged the jeebus out of my old Monte Carlo. Never aligned right again. And my uncle’s still getting his tighty-whities sued off by that dead girl’s family. Some good came of it, though, since we met.’ He flickered a smile toward Lucy.
Ellis shook his head. He said that he was looking for someone that might have been through that intersection recently, and he described Boggs and Boggs’s convertible.
‘Going to be tough to find the guy,’ Mike said, ‘if that’s all you’ve got to go on.’
Which was right, Ellis knew. He wished everyone in the bar weren’t looking toward him. He felt small and suspect, and the image of James Dell kept coming up before him. The air here smelled like urine. He had not eaten all day, and the beers were moving in him.
‘Could be I saw him,’ Lucy said.
‘You did not,’ Mike said.
‘It was a blue convertible.’
‘It’s green,’ Ellis said.
Mike laughed. But Lucy said, ‘Sure. Green. He had the top down, and he was playing the radio loud.’
‘Did you hear it?’ Ellis asked.
‘Someone talking,’ she said. In the crowd noise and the noise of the television and the thud of a jukebox, they were now leaning close over the table, and Mike’s little, bright teeth stood only inches from Ellis’s face. ‘I saw him pulling away from the corner there,’ Lucy said. ‘Went south.’
‘Did you notice the licence-plate number?’
She only stared.
‘Anyway,’ Mike said. ‘Another drink?’ Ellis shook his head. Mike pressed his fat hands on the table so that they flattened and the table rocked as he stood and walked away.
Ellis, avoiding Lucy’s saucer eyes, looked again through the crowd. ‘What did you mean when you said he was pulling away?’
‘He was pulling onto the road there.’
‘From off the road shoulder? He had stopped? What was he doing on the shoulder?’
She shrugged.
‘Went south?’ Ellis said. She nodded, but her gaze was fixed over Ellis’s shoulder. ‘How did he look?’ he asked. ‘Happy? Sad?’
‘When he hit my car, Mike didn’t ask if I was all right,’ she said. ‘He just sat. He was crying pretty hard. The airbag broke his nose.’ She aimed her glare at Ellis from atop her distant hill. She was drunk, he realised; her drink wasn’t just Coke.
‘That green convertible, was it dusty? Clean?’
‘You worked for that awful attorney.’
‘My boss and I worked for an attorney, but it wasn’t the accident that you’re talking about.’
‘Mike’s uncle’s been sued broke, so he’s living with Mike now. Mike would’ve married me if it weren’t for what happened.’
‘We just present a side of an argument, that’s all. It’s not personal. We operate in an argumentative, oppositional legal system.’
‘Mike’s said it himself, that he’d have married me by now, except for what’s happened to his uncle and all that that’s put onto him. How can he afford a wife, he says, when he’s paying his uncle’s debts? Since the accident his uncle can’t hold a job, gets really bad headaches. But his uncle’s the one who gets blamed, gets sued. It was an accident. He didn’t want anything like that to happen. But you people come after him, and you take his guts out and throw them around the room while he watches.’
‘I never worked a case like that.’
‘It must be the same. How could it be so much the same but different? It was this kind of car or that, whatever. You weren’t there. I was there.’
He had been certain, but now he admitted to himself that it had been years, and this would not have been the first time that he had misremembered or transposed details between cases. Yet, he kept referencing his memory, and the only vehicle he found there that had been driven in a demon-possessed state was a Mercury. ‘You don’t remember anything else?’ Ellis asked. ‘At all? About the convertible?’
‘You can’t help,’ she said.
‘No.’
‘You could get them to drop it all. You could talk to the family.’
‘With due respect, you ever wonder if Mike’s just feeding you a line?’
She opened her eyes and gazed at him with liquid, hopeless hate. And then Ellis felt a meaty hand on his neck. ‘What’s that?’ Mike said into his ear. ‘Say that again?’ He sounded sad.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ellis said.
‘That’s all right. I heard you.’ Mike pulled out his chair and sat. ‘I’m just doing the best I can, like you, right? Like anyone. Right? That’s OK. It’s all good.’ He peered at Lucy. ‘So you’ll talk to him, but you won’t talk to me?’ He laughed. To Ellis he said, ‘I’m in the doghouse.’
Lucy said, ‘Mike’s a good man.’
‘Really, everything’s beautiful,’ Mike said.
Ellis sensed the edge of a vortex. ‘I have to go,’ he said, standing.
Lucy had her gaze fixed hard on him, but Mike said, ‘See you round,’ and then Lucy’s expression suddenly turned melancholy. ‘Luck finding your friend,’ she said. Looking at Mike she said, ‘If everything were beautiful, then it wouldn’t be so hard, I don’t think.’
Ellis started shouldering by people. In the parking lot he ran, and in the minivan he reversed and turned and accelerated. A mile down the road he stopped on the shoulder and sat in the dark. He watched the mirror as if Mike’s white shirt might reappear.
Eventually he convinced himself that the important thing was that someone had seen Boggs. He switched on the dome light, spread the map over the steering wheel, and looked at the line of the road he was on and its route south, the branchings of that line, the branchings of those branchings. Occasionally a car came up with a whisper and a light that slowly filled the minivan, then flashed past, replaced by dwindling red tail lamps and the yammering of insects.
He felt his eyes with his fingers and weighed his exhaustion and his options. He was very tired and the beer had fogged him. He decided he had to try to sleep a little. He drove back through the intersection and into the park, turned into the boat-ramp area, eased into a swathe of tall grasses at one side. A wind thrashed the tops of the trees, the lake made a great open space where moonlight sparked on the waves. He reclined his seat and crossed his hands over his stomach.
The noises of the insects were apocalyptic. The day had been hot but now a chill settled into him. Despite exhaustion, he slept poorly. The figure in the road – James Dell – approached out of the darkness and made noises of impact as he broke at the knee and then came down on the hood with a leg up in the air, and he thought also of the sheet-obscured figure on the bed, the noise of the breath in the respirator, the wife’s hand that had gripped his own.
He opened his eyes and watched the vague, irresolvable shapes of the trees, then stirred and looked at his watch. 3:11. He groped in his pocket, brought out his phone and called Boggs. Four rings, a click, and the quality of the quiet on the phone changed. Ellis waited.
‘Hello?’
‘Boggs.’
‘Who is this?’
‘You know who this is.’
‘Well, to hell with you, too,’ Boggs said. ‘It is the middle of the night.’
For perhaps an entire minute neither of them said anything. Finally, Ellis said, ‘Boggs, I’m really sorry.’
‘Great apology. Good job.’
‘Whatever you want me to say, I’ll say.’ Another silence, and in the darkness Ellis had a sensation of the minivan floating, as if the lake had risen to bear him away. ‘Heather says you’re talking about killing yourself.’
‘Do you know,’ Boggs asked, ‘why I answered the phone when I saw that it was you calling?’
‘No.’
‘Me neither.’
‘But here we are,’ Ellis said.
‘Do we have to talk about who is and who is not going to kill themselves?’
‘No, we don’t.’
‘I don’t think I want to talk at all.’
‘But you answered the phone.’
‘I can’t explain it.’
‘Where are you? Let me come see you.’
‘I’ve got hold of some conclusions, Ellis. I won’t say it was a lifting of a darkness, but more like reaching the end of a road and saying, “Now I see, this road doesn’t go through. It ends.”’
‘I don’t know what you mean by that, but I’d like to.’
‘Please, don’t talk that way. Have some dignity. And maybe the road ran off the top of a cliff. Maybe it ran smack into the sea. Maybe it was a road done up in gold brick and candy and banners and whiskey bottles, and when I say it ended, maybe I mean that I woke up.’
Ellis smiled. ‘Maybe you’re talking nonsense.’
‘Maybe. It’s late. I can’t seem to sleep. Here’s what it is. I feel as if I’m trapped by the action of some huge machine, a complicated arrangement of motors, gears, shafts, all turning and grinding, and what’s worse is that the machine is me, and its design is my own, which caused me to give you your job, to give you my wife, and finally to give you even my own job. To give you, basically, my life.’
‘I’m not going to take your job, Boggs. I don’t want your job -’ Ellis stopped. Having said this, he regretted how it implied the truth of the rest. He said, ‘That guy I hit isn’t doing well.’
‘I’m surprised he’s alive.’
And again neither spoke. It seemed a mutual feeling might begin to seep into these intervals, but Ellis detected none. ‘I talked to this couple tonight,’ he said. ‘They met in a car accident.’
‘That’s lovely. You ever talk to Heather about your brother’s accident?’
‘Not really. Why?’
‘That’s what I thought. I thought it was a little curious.’
The comment made Ellis wary. He said, ‘That accident with the driver who was possessed by demons – what was he driving?’
‘Something big. I don’t remember.’
‘Come on.’
‘Really, I don’t,’ Boggs said. ‘Why?’
‘Tell me where you are.’
‘No.’
‘I know that you drove to the lake. Then you turned south. Didn’t you?’
Boggs said nothing.
‘Possessed by demons?’ Ellis asked.
‘Righto,’ Boggs said. ‘They’re everywhere.’
And the line died. Ellis looked at the phone until the screen’s backlight went dark. He reclined in the seat. Heather had interpreted the comment about the lake through her frame of reference, but if Boggs’s interest was actually the accident site, then the correct frame of reference was the one Ellis knew.
The feeling of sleep never came, but suddenly he woke to a sky stained crimson.
He unfolded his map again and contemplated it. He recalled an accident that they had worked on a couple hundred miles or so to the south of here. Another somewhat to the east of that. Another south of that. Touring accident sites. Over the years, once or twice, Boggs had mentioned the idea.
Waterfront cottages. A solitary and vast weeping willow. The cars on the road had their lights on, then one by one they switched off as the sky’s first dark blush retreated before a more forceful blue. Ellis pulled over for gasoline, a bottle of orange soda and a package of Pop Tarts. The stop, although short, sparked an anxious guilt – if Boggs was on the road, he was gaining distance.
He skirted the lake southward, along a two-lane highway through dull, weathered towns like wrack along the shore. Marinas full of idle white boats. A gift shop advertising seashells far from the sea. Outspread water the colour of rolled iron. In the distance dark clouds dangled wraiths of rainfall. Moving away from the lake he crossed a terrain of flat reedy marshes where only the road seemed solid. At a light he waited behind an SUV and watched through its rear window a small screen that played a cartoon that involved many computer-animated insects. He merged onto an interstate and passed between broad ditches and lines of wire fencing while further out stretched cornfields and here and there a house and sometimes a road running parallel to the interstate, a car there moving in near synchronisation with himself. The mile markers fled by. A white pickup tailed him for thirty miles, then he glanced in the mirror, and it was gone. He watched for Boggs’s car, not only among the vehicles around himself but also in the traffic across the median. But traffic went by constantly and fast, his thoughts wandered, and he caught himself staring at the lane ahead. A black tyre mark arced toward the median. Another extended straight ahead, stuttered, then stopped. Another showed the doubled wheels of a semi.
When the phone rang it startled him, and the body of James Dell leapt onto the windshield – he answered breathlessly.
‘Where are you?’ Heather asked. ‘Are you coming back?’
Ellis told her about his conversation with Boggs the night before. He told her that he was going to look at a couple of accident sites. ‘I think I can find him.’
‘I don’t know,’ Heather said. Her breath caught. He said her name softly a few times.
After hanging up he drove on.
When calls came from the office, he ignored them.
He exited the interstate and came to an empty road between flat fields of low soybean plants. He stood out of the minivan and walked the road’s edge. He knew the place he wanted by the bent lip of a steel culvert that spanned under the road. A Thunderbird had veered off and hit the culvert, tearing open the gas tank. The occupants lived, but in the fire one boy lost thirty per cent of his skin, lost his eyelids, lost his ears. His deposition had been an interminable accounting of medical conditions and complications – a vision of the life that might have been Christopher’s if he had lived. Or, at least, that had been the thought that had edged into Ellis’s mind before he forced it away.
The state highway department had been sued for leaving the sharp edge of the culvert exposed, but the case had settled out of court, and it appeared the state hadn’t bothered to make any changes. Ellis stooped to peer inside: darkness, a trickle of water moving through. He walked the road shoulders looking for a sign that a car – Boggs’s car – had stopped. Cumulus cluttered the sky. Sweat traced slow paths down his skin. When he’d begun working for Boggs he hadn’t anticipated how very many of their cases would involve fires. But burn victims made juries sympathetic, so car fires attracted lawsuits.
It had been autumn when he and Boggs had inspected and documented the accident scene here. A lean mutt, white in the muzzle, had trotted across the harvested fields and stopped to watch. Then it wandered over to the hard-sided case in which they carried their equipment – camera, measuring tapes and rods, plumb bob, rolls of tape, orange safety vests – and lifted a leg. Boggs had shouted and sprinted toward the dog. When it ran, Boggs went after it, grabbing clods of dirt off the fields and throwing them while the dog trotted ahead. The chase was hopeless, but Boggs ran until he became a small figure far across the dark earth of the fields. He returned slowly, laughing, and asked Ellis if he knew the joke about the guy who took his dog to the vet. ‘“My dog is cross-eyed,” the guy says. “Can you do anything?” The vet looks at the dog’s eyes, then at the dog’s ears, and then its teeth. After a minute the doctor says, “We’re going to have to put him down.” “My God, because he’s cross-eyed?” “No,” says the doctor. “Because he has cancer.”’ When the dog circled around a few minutes later, Boggs tossed it a granola bar. Ellis had loved the joke, but when he repeated it a few days later to a woman beside him at the bar – he and Boggs were out for a drink after work – she only granted it a frown, and Boggs, shaking his head solemnly, said, ‘I think that’s maybe the worst joke I’ve ever heard.’
Ellis moved slowly, peering at the ground. Looking for what? He was unsure, but he had some experience in looking without knowing exactly what he was looking for. The knack for it lay in guessing where to look for what you didn’t know. Was this, then, where to look? But it was impossible to say. A solitary vehicle, a large old Lincoln, passed by, rattling, the driver’s grey sexless head hardly higher than the steering wheel, wavering in the lane. It startled a few sparrows from the weeds at the edge of the road, and then the car was gone, and Ellis stood alone again. Nothing here, but a culvert and a memory of a dog joke. Nothing. Nothing, and what had he really expected? There were a lot of places like this. He decided to go on, but he felt as a chill the notion that he might now be compounding any number of mistakes.
A strange insect of stunning size met its end on his windshield, and over the miles its parts lifted away. He entered again the hurly-burly of the interstate. A little Toyota with glistening rims flashed by in the left lane – it had to be moving at near 100 mph, and Ellis expected to watch it oversteer and begin barrel-rolling down the lanes, bodies flying out the windows. Energy increased with the square of velocity. But the Toyota only dwindled into the distance and vanished.
That afternoon he walked back and forth over an intersection of two gravel roads. This was the place where he had found an unopened package of lime-green boxers abandoned in the weeds, and he and Boggs had spent a few minutes prancing around with underwear on their heads. It was also the place where a Honda had propelled itself deep into the side of a Jeep Wrangler and fractured the spine of the Jeep’s driver. Now there were traces here of any number of vehicles, but the tyre patterns were disorganised by the gravel, and Ellis couldn’t see a means of connecting any of it to Boggs. When he sat again in the minivan, he discovered that most of the day’s hours had already been destroyed. He thought, Should I give this up? Was it absurd to be doing this? Why would Boggs be doing this? He thought, I need to give this up. But the idea of sitting still somewhere – his duplex, an office – seemed horrible, a hell. Driving again, he phoned Heather and talked once more about the idea that Boggs was driving between accident sites, as if to keep the idea warm by the chafing of repetition.
She was quiet. He heard a TV in the background. ‘I keep thinking that this is my fault,’ she said. ‘I’m going to go to work tomorrow. I think it would be good to see the kids. What are you going to do about your work?’ she asked. ‘Your job?’
‘I don’t think I’m going back.’
‘Oh.’
‘If Boggs were there or if he weren’t, either way, I would feel like shit.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I know you liked it.’ A couple of seconds passed. ‘I’ve been looking at his things,’ she said. ‘I can’t bear to touch them. These folders he set out. His shoes. His magazines. His skim milk in the fridge. His mug that says, “You’re OLD when gettin’ lucky means finding your keys.” I hate that one. I’ve been trying his phone number every few hours. Since you got him at three in the morning, I’ll be up all night trying him.’
‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea. You’ll drive him crazy.’
‘Crazier?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, he always wanted some magical life, not this one,’ she said, ‘like a child.’
Ellis said nothing. He passed a semi pulling a long tank with a polished surface that drew the world into shining horizontal lines. ‘Enough about him,’ Ellis said. ‘Tell me how you feel.’
‘I’ll tell you what I feel.’ Then she was silent for a long while before she said, in a rush of exasperation, ‘I’m sad.’
He laughed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. But she laughed, too. ‘We’re a couple of clowns,’ he said, ‘crying on the inside.’
‘I hate self-pity,’ she said. ‘I hate it. It’s useless.’
‘Go on.’
‘But it’s a cruel, cruel world. It’s a darkness.’
‘Last one out turned off the lights.’
‘I was once in a bathroom stall,’ she said, ‘and someone turned out the lights as they left.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing happened. I calmed down and felt around to find the wall and I followed it out. But it was terrifying! A dark restroom is the archetypal darkness.’
‘Life is a dark restroom full of blind clowns crying on the inside.’
‘Is it a crime if a blind clown shouts fire in dark restroom?’
‘If a clown falls in a forest of deaf clowns in a dark restroom, does he cry on the inside?’ He was laughing. ‘What are we talking about?’ he said. He tried to stop his laughing, but it only grew worse.
‘Send in the clowns,’ she said.
His diaphragm hurt.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’
‘The crying leading the crying,’ he said.
They were silent a minute.
‘It’s going to be hard for us,’ she said. ‘To explain to friends. And, to live together, to be a couple together, when all that we’ve had until now were snatches of moments.’
‘I’ve thought about that, too.’
‘Is that why you’ve gone off?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, no, of course not.’
‘Listen, I need to be angry, and you won’t give me any room to do it. I’m losing my mind. And you’re out there. Why are you out there, when I’m so furious?’
He was silent.
‘Say something.’
‘Do you want me to say I’m sorry?’
‘No, no. I don’t know. Maybe, I want you to say you’re angry, too.’
‘I am. I’m very angry.’
‘You don’t sound like it.’
‘I’m angry!’ he shouted.
‘I’m angry!’
‘I’m fucking pissed!’
Heather laughed, chokingly. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘We’re both losing our minds. You will come back?’ she said. ‘I feel like everyone has left me.’
‘Of course I’ll come back.’
‘I’ll hold you to that. I can be ruthless.’
‘You know,’ he said, stopped, debated, went on, ‘Boggs mentioned Christopher, and it made me wonder what you remember about when he died.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What do you remember?’
‘Let’s not talk about that now, for God’s sake.’
‘We should’ve talked about it a long time ago.’
‘Maybe, but we didn’t. Now John says something, suddenly it’s urgent?’
‘You were at the Exxon station when it happened, right?’
‘A Mobil station, or whatever it was. I don’t want to get into this.’
‘Exxon, I think.’
‘I remember a Mobil,’ she said.
‘A red sign. I remember it was red.’
‘Yes, Mobil.’
‘Exxon is the red one,’ Ellis said.
‘Really?’
‘I drove past one a few miles ago.’
‘I guess I could be mixed up.’
‘But you were there, right? Were you actually looking directly at the intersection when the collision occurred?’
‘Stop it,’ she said.
‘I’m wondering, what’s Boggs getting at?’
‘Nothing?’ she said. ‘You know him. We can talk about this, but I want to see your face.’
‘You’re putting me off.’
‘I am.’
‘Please, just talk.’
‘Not about this.’
They said a few empty things. Gaps opened between phrases. She said goodbye.
He phoned the hospital and asked about James Dell. Dell was still in 312, the receptionist said, but no one answered the phone there.
He put the phone in his pocket and bit down on his tongue until it bled.
Later he caught the minivan drifting over the white line and into the rumble strip. He startled awake, but soon he was struggling again with his eyelids, and he had to defer to a staggering exhaustion. He took the next exit and followed a two-lane road until he came to an abandoned Gulf station, graffiti-tagged, windows boarded, pumps gone. He parked behind the building and reclined the seat to sleep.
His watch marked creeping minutes. A haze softened the moon. His back ached. He called Boggs a couple of times, without success.
Screaming, he woke from a dream that he could not remember. Nor did he want to; to prevent its return he kept his eyes open and sat feeling stunned and wishing the night over. But accidentally he slept again, this time in a deep oblivion.
He bought breakfast bars and orange juice and ate in the minivan, watching vehicles move between gas pumps, watching drivers talk on their cellphones with mirthless expressions. James Dell’s pallid, desiccated skin suddenly hung before him, as if in a curtain, and with it the choking antiseptic odour of the hospital – he remembered that these had been elements of the dream that woke him the night before. He started the minivan and began to drive.
He drove another hour, road to interstate to exit, parked, stood out of the minivan on a gravel shoulder, walked the acceleration lane to the point where it tapered out, then turned and strode into fallow land.
Milkweed, tall grasses and clusters of sumac patched the ground. In the middle distance stood a few maples, and past those the land rolled with hill-backs bristling with serried corn. The interstate exit provided access on and off a two-lane that extended straight out of sight to either direction. Beside it, near the interstate, stood a lonely rectangular brick structure covered with extravagantly flaking white paint. On one wall were three large blue block letters: VFW. A red Chevy pickup, at least twenty years old, rested beside the building. In front stood a vintage howitzer, also painted white, weeds brushing the bottom of its barrel.
Ellis moved slowly in the grasses and weeds, some of which offered clusters of small white flowers. When he turned, he could see the trail he had cut, pressing down the plants as he walked. He looked for a similar trail that Boggs might have left if he had been here, and studied for several minutes a couple of weeds he found broken, but he had no experience in this kind of tracking and could make no conclusions. An hour passed. He stopped after each step, examined the ground and its objects. The delicate pale bones of a bird. A pizza box collapsing into the earth. An oval sink basin. Then, half buried in the dirt, he discovered a wooden shingle.
It was from a Toyota Tacoma pickup that had carried on its bed a home-made camper sided with wooden shingles. In the midst of a snowstorm it had slid off the roadway and mired here in snow. A tow truck had come out to help. And the tow-truck driver was killed when a semi came off the roadway, slid through the snow and pulverised his upper torso against the back of the Toyota – like fingers in a stamping press. In the police photos that Ellis had studied, nothing could be seen of the man except for the blood smeared over the two surfaces that had killed him and a single booted foot extended from beneath the semi. When Boggs saw it he said, ‘Like the witch in Oz.’ Using photogrammetric techniques, Ellis had analysed a stack of police Polaroids of tyre marks in the snow to prove that the tow truck had been parked fully on the shoulder and not in the highway’s right lane, as the semi driver claimed.
After the shingle, finding nothing more, Ellis drifted into abstraction, staring at a runnel-fed low place a short distance away, full of cattails and redwing blackbirds that moved in bursts and called in trills. The humid atmosphere resonated with the yellow-white hammering of the sun.
Finally he walked up the acceleration ramp and down the road to the building with the howitzer.
It had a concrete parking lot with crabgrass flaring from the cracks. Here and there lay a few scattered cinder blocks. A plastic lawn chair tilted on a broken leg. The building’s windows were glass block, and Ellis could see nothing in them. He knocked, and a stout, blue-eyed man of seventy or so opened the door immediately – as if he had been waiting – and said hello.
Ellis said hello and the man nodded and shook hands earnestly and said hello again. ‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ Ellis said.
‘So you know,’ the man said, ‘this hadn’t been a VFW post for the fifteen years since I bought it from the VFW. I never have gotten around to painting.’ He scuffed a head of crabgrass with his foot. He wore a brown T-shirt marked with Harvey Mudd College and a pendant oblong of sweat. He said, ‘My wife, now in heaven, always said a man living alone would forget how to live in the world. But I don’t give a damn, I don’t have anyone to impress.’ He had his hands in the pockets of his jeans and held his elbows flared out.
‘A while back,’ Ellis said, ‘I did some engineering work on an accident that occurred down there by the ramp. Do you know the one I mean?’
‘You’re an engineer? I used to design ball-peening systems. I designed ball-peening machines for GM and ball-peening machines for Ford and ball-peening machines for Boeing and ball-peening machines for the National Mint. Do you know about the famous eleventh-century swords of Toledo – not Ohio! – Spain? They could be bent almost double and they would spring right back, good as new. Guess how they did it?’ The old man stood happy and flexing his hands.
‘Ball-peening?’
‘Ball-peening!’ the old man exclaimed. ‘The guys who knew how to do it took the secret of it to their graves and the idea was lost for a thousand years, until GM tried blasting their springs clean with steel shot instead of sand. They lasted longer! Ball-peening!’ He bounced on his feet and leered. ‘I saved the Feds millions of dollars when I showed them how to peen the money-printing dies. I told them that they could take it out of my taxes. Guess what happened to my taxes.’
Ellis felt his feet sweating in his shoes. ‘What?’
‘Nothing!’
‘I’m looking for a friend of mine,’ Ellis said.
‘The gentleman in the green convertible?’
Ellis lifted his hands but stopped short of grabbing the man. ‘When was he here?’
‘Yesterday afternoon, stereo blasting some book at top volume.’
‘Did you recognise the book? What did the driver look like?’
‘Never took to books. Driver seemed like, I’d say, a man in a convertible – sunburned, wind-blown. He asked about this accident, the one that you mentioned. The guy, Chuck, who died there, was someone I’d seen a couple of times. At the Cracker Barrel at breakfast. He was a grits-and-gravy guy. Personally, I hate grits.’ He sucked his lips and looked around as if he regretted this last comment. A single haggard willow stood behind the VFW building, its branches low and trailing in circles under the pawing of a breeze. Traffic ran steady and fast on the interstate lanes. ‘I didn’t know what had happened at first. From here all you could see was the flashing lights, the red and the blue, bouncing off the falling snow, colouring that part of the sky. The snow had been coming and going all morning. So I walked a little closer. It was a horrible mess. I stood above it, and I didn’t know exactly what had happened, but an ambulance came, and I could see it was bad. I remember thinking it seemed strange, that mess, someone dead maybe, I didn’t know yet, and all around it was a really beautiful morning. The air had that edge in it, that cleanness, like you should bottle some for later. A clear blue sky coming out of the clouds, sky the colour of those original powder-blue Ford T-birds, the ones with the porthole side windows. And these hills are pretty in winter, white, rolling. I never get tired of them. My footprints in the snow looked like the footprints of the last man on earth. I remember I thought, it’s bad down there, but it’s nothing to do with me. Nothing to do with me and I feel fine, just fine, I thought, by God, I’m happy. I hadn’t had a clear feeling like that in a long time. Course it turned out it did have something to do with me, as I knew Chuck a little, and I felt pretty bad about it then.’
They stood looking at the traffic. A convoy of five semis. A Prius.
‘Funny how you think things like that,’ he added.
Ellis made himself speak and asked a few more questions about Boggs – had he seen which way Boggs had gone, or paid any attention to the condition of the convertible? – but learned nothing. ‘I explained to your friend that ball-peening is badly neglected at most of the major engineering schools.’
Ellis excused himself and returned to the accident site. He’d not noticed anything beautiful about it, which made him think he might have missed something. He scuffed around until a thought came, and he went back up the ramp and knocked and asked where Boggs had parked the convertible.
‘About there,’ he said, pointing.
One tyre had made a light impression in the soil. With a pen, on the back of a receipt, Ellis sketched the pattern of the tyre print. He stared at it to try to brand it into his mind. Then he took out his map again, thinking, I’ll never catch up by following him. I need to jump ahead.