The Reconstructionist

and lamps – Ellis didn’t know how to begin to make an intelligent guess. He said, ‘Um -’

‘Rollover damage,’ Boggs said, ‘at highway speeds. Happens every day, more or less. The left rear tyre blew out, and the causes of that are being argued, but whatever the reason, it blew out and induced a leftward drift. The driver attempted to steer back to the right but over-corrected, and very quickly the vehicle had turned almost sideways. The left-side wheel rims bit into the roadway, the right-side wheels lifted, and the whole thing vaulted. After that, it spun and bounced along like a punted football.’

‘How many people were inside?’

‘Five occupants. Two fully ejected, three partially ejected. Five fatalities.’

‘All of them?’

‘Dead before the vehicle stopped moving. A matter of seconds.’

‘That’s horrible.’

‘It is. It really is. And now it’s part of a very expensive lawsuit.’ He put a hand back through his hair, and it stood out yet more from his head. ‘So. Let’s say that you are a reconstructionist. You’ve been asked by an attorney involved in a very expensive lawsuit to examine this vehicle. Could you tell him how many times it rolled over?’ After a second he amended, ‘At least how many times.’

Ellis touched a scarred door, the metal cold and abrasive. He stepped back and examined the forms of the damage, the denting, scraping and tearing. It looked as if it might have been spun inside a concrete mixer. He admitted, ‘I really have no idea.’

‘Look at the scratch patterns,’ Boggs said.

Ellis wasn’t sure what he meant by patterns. Random scratches seemed to be everywhere – single long scratches, scratches in pairs and threesomes, groups of light scratches and areas that looked as if they had been attacked with a power sander. Boggs pointed to a location on the passenger-side fender. ‘Like these.’

Here was some scratching of the power-sander variety, gouged deep into the sheet metal, while above and coming down into the deeper ones at a slight angle ran a second set of scratches, longer, less deep. Ellis moved a finger over them. He crouched to get out of the sun’s glare and saw that almost perpendicular to the longer scratches lay yet a third set, very light, little more than minor disruptions in the paint.

‘Three?’ he said.

‘Three?’ echoed Boggs.

‘Three rolls?’

‘Three rolls? Why three?’

Three sets of scratches. Could that mean three rolls? Why?

‘Think about it,’ Boggs said. ‘Let me know.’

Stacks of cardboard banker’s boxes filled the corners of Boggs’s office and paperwork sprawled over the desk. Littered among the papers, as if stranded in snow banks, were toy cars – a Ferrari, a Land Rover, a GTO, a milk truck. Beside the banker’s boxes stood a shelf lined with textbooks, technical manuals, collections of conference papers. They talked through Ellis’s resume in about fifteen minutes – college engineering classes and projects, and the supervisory job at the axle plant, which Ellis tried to gloss. He ticked through other jobs: a lawn service, a coffee shop, running deliveries, selling appliances. The conversation began to wallow, Boggs seemed subdued, and Ellis grew embarrassed. He had an engineering degree that he’d hardly applied and no useful skills. He sat here only because years ago his now-dead half-brother had been the boyfriend of a girl who was now this man’s wife. Absurd.

Yet he wanted this job. He saw an opportunity to set his life on a new path. He felt he badly needed a new path.

From the clutter on the desk he picked out the toy Land Rover and turned it. Like a bouncing football. A thought came. ‘At least three times,’ he said. He moved the Land Rover slowly over the desk, as if rolling. ‘Each time this corner hits the ground, it picks up new scratches.’ Growing excited, he elaborated: a vehicle couldn’t slide in two directions at once, so each set of overlapping scratches indicated a different time that that part of the vehicle had been on the ground. He had seen three separate sets of scratches in the area Boggs had pointed out, so that fender had hit the ground at least three times.

Boggs smiled. He took the toy and illustrated some other aspects – that the orientation of a set of scratches indicated the direction the vehicle had been travelling as it struck the ground; the deeper scratches were made when the vehicle hit asphalt while the lighter ones came as it hit softer soil off the roadway; looking closely, one could see the sequence in which the scratches were made, because the cutting of a new scratch pushed paint into the existing scratches that it crossed.

‘We do lots of reports for our clients,’ Boggs said. ‘Can you write?’

‘I won a prize for something I wrote in college.’

‘Really? Why isn’t that on your resume?’

‘Well, it was fiction. And it wasn’t really so much an award as an honourable mention. And, in retrospect, it sucked.’

‘You like to read? Have you read Coetzee? I’ve been listening to him on tape.’

‘In your car.’

‘Yes.’ Boggs grinned. He talked happily for a few minutes about books, of Dostoevsky, of War and Peace, which he loved and which Ellis had to admit he had never read. ‘I like the Russians,’ Boggs said. ‘Do you know this one?’ he turned to his computer and clicked and a voice began -

‘… why, where in the world has his character gone to? The stead-fast man of action is totally at a loss and has turned out to be a pitiful little poltroon, an insignificant, puny babe, or simply, as Nozdrev puts it, a horse’s twat…’

‘Poltroon!’ Boggs laughed happily and turned it off. ‘Dead Souls. Did you know that Gogol could pull his lower lip up over his nose?’ He grew distracted in straightening the vehicles on his desk. ‘This job,’ he said, ‘is emotionally odd. Are you ready for that? It’s analytic, and you sometimes have to remind yourself: people died.’

‘I don’t know if -’ Ellis stalled and let the sentence lapse.

‘Well, there is no way to know. I’m just warning you, it’s odd. You look at terrible events and analyse them minutely. It’s not normal. It’s strange. Then, after you’ve done it for a while, what’s also strange is how you get used to it, and even how much you forget. It seems a little indecent to forget. That’s what bothers me, now. It’s as if, if I were a better man, I’d go back to tour the old accidents from time to time. Like those old soldiers revisiting the Somme or Gettysburg or Vietnam. Austerlitz. But no one remembers Austerlitz any more.’ He looked hopefully at Ellis, as if he might be the exception.

Ellis admitted that he didn’t remember Austerlitz.

By the time he left, Boggs had offered the job outright, and Ellis had accepted. In the parking lot he stopped to look again at the aqua-blue SUV. He scrutinised a few of the scratches, then leaned through the vacant space where a window had been. A strand of gleaming purple and green Mardi Gras beads was wrapped around the gear shift. Black tyre shards and an empty can of diet soda littered the cargo area. Dry leaves lay on the back seat, along with a yellow receipt that was, he saw, from Babies R Us. He returned to his car and sat, lightly touching his hands together, hesitating now to drive into traffic, onto the streets, the interstate. But after a minute he started the engine, and he drove.

Ellis had largely fallen out of touch with his father, so that was easy. He spoke regularly with his mother, but he waited until he had already accepted the job and begun working before he told her about it. He worried that she might think of Christopher’s death and disapprove of this work; perhaps she would articulate certain objections that he had not yet articulated to himself. But she only asked what his salary would be. He told her, and she sounded happy, and soon she was complaining that the neighbour’s cottonwood was dropping branches onto her lawn, and Ellis thought, maybe that’s all it needs to be – a job.

Later, after years, it seemed to him almost as if he had always been a reconstructionist, and he recalled only with effort that at one time it had been new to him, that it had felt like entering an obscure nation with its own language, customs and peculiar manner of thinking. On his first day Boggs had handed him a stack of technical papers – ‘A Comparison Study of Skid Marks and Yaw Marks’, ‘Physical Evidence Analysis and Roll Velocity Effects in Rollover Accident Reconstruction’ and ‘Speed Estimation from Vehicle Crush in Side Pole Impacts’. Even the word reconstructionist felt odd in the mouth.

Ellis sat at a desk in a cubicle with five-foot-high foam-core walls, two shelves for books, two file drawers, a