He said, ‘Are you sure you can’t talk about Christopher?’
‘I’m going to hang up now,’ she said, ‘but you understand that you deserve it, right?’
‘Please, I don’t -’
‘Let’s talk later. I can’t now.’ She hung up.
He called her again, but she did not answer, and he smashed the cellphone against the steering wheel, repeatedly, until it had broken into several pieces. Then he looked at the pieces and regretted it. He gathered the pieces and put them in a cup holder.
When he closed his eyes his thoughts clawed at one another in a kind of terrible dreaming. A tap on the window woke him. A security guard told him to go on. Ellis asked about the RVs parked nearby, and the guard said, ‘RVs allowed, cars not allowed.’ Ellis stared at the young man, but the absurdity did not seem to penetrate.
‘This is a minivan,’ Ellis said.
‘Minivans not allowed.’
He drove on, down an unknown road, into darkness, trees flickering at the periphery. He saw no good prospect for stopping. His eyelids trembled.
The asphalt ended and he continued into the darkness on gravel and jarring washboard ruts. A glow appeared in the distance. A hand-painted sign, illuminated with floodlights, said ‘The Cricket Bar’. A bar seemed like a good place to rest – if he were questioned he could claim to be sleeping off his drinks. The bar itself appeared to be little more than a hut of weathered wood. He stopped in a far corner of the rutted parking lot, nosed into some brush, away from the handful of cars and trucks clustered around the building, where a couple of windows showed small, dim light. He could faintly hear voices. Cicadas screaming. No music. No one came or went from the building.
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.
