approximately 64 mph, struck the pickup from behind, smashing the pop-up camper to pieces and forcing the trailer hitch into the Dodge’s gas tank, igniting a hot fire that spread rapidly forward and backward. The pickup burned, the Toyota burned, the semi and its load of discount brand furniture burned. Two fatalities in the pickup and three in the Toyota. Only the driver of the semi, who extracted himself from the overturned cab with broken arms, survived.
Boggs was contacted just days after the accident by an attorney associated with the manufacturer of the pickup. After landing at the airport, Boggs and Ellis had driven first to look at the Toyota, which was held in a vehicle storage yard of a kind that Ellis – still early in his career – had never seen before, a collecting place for vehicles involved in ongoing disputes. Towering racks held vehicles atop one another, three-high, like shelved pieces in a gigantic museum. A rack ran five hundred feet or so, ended at an aisle, and then began another set of racks, and these rows of racked vehicles ran out to a distance of a half-mile or more. Big trucks with long lifting forks hurtled between the rows and spun at speed around the corners.
They found the Toyota, and Boggs hailed a forklift to pull it from its second-level rack and set it on the ground. The forklift then went away, diesel engine gnashing. Through the stacked vehicles, more of the lifting trucks were sometimes visible, charging around like beasts with great horns. Ellis looked at the vehicles to either side of himself – a Yukon with the front end flattened as if a slab of concrete had landed on it; a Dodge Ram with the circular imprint of a wheel in the damage of its grille; a Mini with the sheet metal ripped off one side as if it had run into a big planing saw.
‘Ellis, hello?’ Boggs said. ‘Still with us? What’s going on in your noggin?’ He was unwinding a plumb bob. He had already laid four tape measures around the Toyota.
‘Just looking.’
‘And thinking?’
‘Not really.’
Boggs grinned. ‘Now that’s a talent.’ Boggs shuffled and kicked his feet, still grinning. ‘As for me,’ he said, ‘my dancing frightens children and makes adults nauseous.’
When they came to the scene – here, the place that Ellis now sat watching – the tyre marks had been still visible on the road, only a little faded. And as they worked at documenting them, Ellis glanced at their photos of the vehicles’ tyre treads and noticed that the police had confused the tyre marks of the pickup and the Toyota. Which was bad for their client, the defendant’s attorney, because it meant that the Toyota had braked longer than the police had assumed, and hit the pickup at a lower speed, which made the breakout of a fire seem less reasonable.
‘Of course,’ Ellis said, when he showed the error to Boggs, ‘we could pretend we didn’t notice.’
Boggs cocked his head. ‘That would be a little unscrupulous, wouldn’t it?’ He held Ellis’s gaze a second, then shrugged. ‘Anyway, when you start doing stuff like that in this business, it catches up. The other guys are smart, too, and we end up looking stupid.’
Much later, Ellis described that conversation to Heather, and the shame he’d felt. She had, slowly, smiled, and asked, ‘But you still love me more than him, don’t you?’
Watching the traffic and the golf course, sorting his moods, he passed the day. A membrane of tension that had been stretched through his mind seemed to be weakening. He’d never understood the use of idle vacations, of endless sitting under the sun, but maybe this was it.
Immediately behind this thought, however, regret flipped itself back into view, and with a sense of compulsion he called the hospital and asked for room 312. The fifth ring cut off as the phone picked up. ‘Hello?’ Mrs Dell said, tentative.
Ellis hesitated.
‘Hello?’
‘I’m Ellis Barstow. I stopped in a couple of days ago.’
‘Yes?’
‘I was wondering if there’s any change in your husband’s condition.’
‘They cut him open and did some things, to alleviate pressure, I think. And tests. Scans. He looks -’ She was silent. ‘Not good.’ She breathed. ‘They say wait. Wait and see. They try to be kind, but they make me feel like a child.’
‘I’m sure they’re doing their best.’
‘Sometimes when I ask a question there’s a strange look. I wonder if maybe they just don’t like to say, “I don’t know.” Sometimes I wonder if they know anything, really.’
‘They’re doing what they can,’ he said, without conviction.
‘Fifty per cent,’ she said. ‘I asked if he would live. Thirty said another. Per cent.’
‘I’m sorry.’ A pickup glided over the highway before him, pulling a camper trailer sheathed in aluminum, the sun dancing on it.
‘As if we were talking about the humidity.’
‘It is meaningless,’ he said.
‘I can’t even think about it.’ She added, in a odd tone of complaint, ‘He loves me.’
‘Of course.’
‘He loves music. He’s an excellent dancer. I doubt if he’ll be able to dance any more.’
‘I hope so.’
‘I should ask what per cent they have on dancing.’
Ellis laughed but caught himself and said again, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘No, no. You’re kind to listen to me.’
Some seconds passed.
‘Are you still there?’ she asked.
‘I am.’
‘I’ll let you go.’
That night he returned to the Olive Garden. He had the Buick-driving waitress again. She was heavy from the waist down, her face sagging with fatigued skin, but her smile was broad and earnest. She interpreted his return as a compliment to the food. She said the cooks here took greater care than at the Red Lobster where she used to work, and she attempted to talk him into a dessert. He said no but ordered another drink.
The restaurant emptied, he sat contemplating his beer, thinking his work with Boggs had made him strange. No one except Boggs saw the road and the world as he did, so that they seemed to live in a world of the same stuff as everyone else, but terribly rearranged. No wonder Boggs had become his friend. No wonder he didn’t know what to do now except to look for Boggs. His waitress brought him a piece of chocolate cherry cake, whispering, ‘Free free free!’ It would just be thrown away, she said. He began eating only to placate her, but the stuff tasted marvellous. He forked through it slowly, then worked the crumbs up one by one, thinking to himself that it might be as good as anything that he had ever eaten. This idea made him teary-eyed. The waitress stopped to pat his wrist. ‘It does that to me, too.’
Late the next morning he was sitting on the balcony again when his phone rang. He answered, and Heather said, ‘I’m here.’
‘You’re where?’
‘The guy at the desk won’t tell me which room you’re in.’
‘How can you be here?’
‘By the miracle of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Interstate Highway System. Will you tell me your room number?’
‘I’m just surprised!’ He told her the room number and sat waiting. Giddy. Anxious. She seemed to take a long time. And then yet longer, so that he began to worry that he had hallucinated her call, that he had been alone for too long with his own brain, and now some of the synapses were firing up delusional echoes and distortions.
When a knock sounded at the door, he flung it open. Heather stood there – small in the dim hallway, wearing a snug black T-shirt, jeans, flip-flops, hair pulled back, eyes red, tired, intent on him.
‘Please -’ he said, reaching. They clung to each other and soon were talking energetically, nonsensically. Suddenly Ellis lifted her and dropped her on the bed.
They made love with the clumsiness of delirium, then lay cupped together until Ellis stood and dressed. They talked and joked about her drive, about the weather. She talked to the ceiling and Ellis drifted around the room. He
