“Good taco,” I said.
“You talked to the police?” asked Robles.
“Yes,” I said.
“I don’t have anything more to tell you than I told them,” he said after a long drink of water. “I was walking home. I see this kid in the street. There’s a car behind him. Kid runs down the street, right in the middle, you know? Kid turns, holds up his hand, but the guy in the car just…”
“Ran him down,” I said.
“Ran him…?”
“Hit him on purpose.”
“Looked that way to me,” said Arnoldo.
“What was the boy doing in the street?”
“I don’t know. I could see him like I see you now. He turns, headlights on his face, and the guy in the car steps on the gas, screeches the tires. I can hear it.”
“What did the kid’s face look like?”
I kept my eyes on him and worked my taco.
“Look like? I don’t know. Afraid and then another look. Don’t know what it was and he puts up his hand maybe like he wants the guy to stop, but the guy in the car steps on the gas and I’m just standing there.”
“You couldn’t see the driver?”
Robles shook his head.
“In my dream, he’s a big guy, big shoulders, but I didn’t get a good look at him. In his car he was just…”
He held out his hands.
“… like a shape. Like the one in the backseat.”
I put down my taco.
“In your dream there’s someone in the backseat of the car?”
“In my dream? Yeah, but in the real car too. Someone not so big. Maybe a girl. Maybe a kid.”
“You tell this to the police?”
“Yeah, sure, cop named Ralston.”
“Ransom,” I corrected.
“Ransom, whatever. I told him. He said maybe I was seeing things. I said maybe but I didn’t think so. He said maybe the kid who got hit had run onto the street. I said no way. He said maybe the screeching I heard was the driver trying to stop before hitting the kid. I said for sure, no. I could see.”
“Anything else you remember?”
“Blood, maybe brains on the street. Boy was dead when I got to him. Car was driving fast down the street. Boy’s body all twisted. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a doctor. No more. You really working for the boy’s mother?”
I nodded.
“Find the guy,” he said. “Find out what it was all about. Let me know. I need to sleep. My wife and I need to know our son is safe on the streets, at least safe from that crazy guy.”
He got up. So did I. We shook hands. His was damp with cool moisture from the water bottle. He went back to the kitchen and I dropped six dollars on the table and left.
I started across the parking lot toward my car, reaching into my pocket for the car key. I didn’t see it coming. I heard the screech of tires close by and started to look up. I sensed it almost on me. Maybe I held up my hand the way Kyle McClory had done about a week ago. I didn’t freeze. I dived over the edge of the fender, my knee hitting something, maybe the headlight, as the car passed by and made a sharp turn at the end of the aisle onto Lime. I didn’t see it turn. I heard it. I was sprawled on my back, knee throbbing, left shoulder numb, Cubs cap still on my head.
I got up as fast as I could, rubbed my hands against my jeans, picked up the car keys where I had dropped them as I limped toward my parked car.
“Oh my God. Are you all right?” a woman said, rushing across the parking lot. She was small, huge busted with big round glasses, carrying a baby.
“Fine,” I said.
“It looked like that maniac was trying to kill you,” she said, rubbing the baby’s back to comfort him or her, though the baby didn’t seem the least bit upset.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Maybe I should call the police,” she said. “Driving like that through a parking lot. He could have hit my baby or me. I’m calling the police. You wait here.”
“Did you see his license number?”
“No,” she said.
“Make and color of the car?”
“I… no. But a man was driving it. I think he had a beard or something. I could tell the police that.”
The baby decided to cry.
“You could,” I said, going to my car.
“You’re sure you’re all right?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, thinking that I was all right until the next time.
I got in and closed the door.
My hands were shaking. I closed my eyes. I had not been there when my wife had died. The police had pieced together a likely narrative in their report, but it left a universe of imagined scenarios. I had tried to come up with one I could cling to but it kept changing. Sometimes Catherine is struck by a huge Caddy driven by a distracted old man. Catherine doesn’t see it coming. She was alive one second, dead the next. Or, sometimes Catherine is frozen in the path of a pickup driven by a drunken, grinning ex-con. Someone she had put in prison.
Now I was juggling three hit-and-run scenarios, Catherine’s, Kyle McClory’s, mine.
My hands stopped trembling. They hadn’t been trembling with fear. They had been trembling because the person who had tried to kill me had opened the curtain, letting in memory.
Since my wife had died, among the things I had lost were fear and a willingness to experience joy.
The woman and the crying baby were back on the sidewalk standing in front of Ace Hardware. I drove slowly. There was a predator on the streets and my knee and shoulder hurt.
I caught what there was of a rush hour as I headed down Fruitville toward Tamiami Trail. The Gulf Coast was in season, which meant lots of tourists, lots of snowbirds. Jaguars, red convertibles with their tops down, a Lexus or two, pickups, SUVs, almost all being driven badly.
Traffic rules in Sarasota: (1) If the light recently turned red, step on the gas and go. (2) If you come to a stop sign, do not stop. Just slow down a little and look both ways. (3) At a four-way stop, it doesn’t matter who gets there first. What matters is how big a vehicle you have and how mad at the world you are that day. (4) If there is just enough room for you to fit, you can speed up and cut off another driver. (5) Checking the rearview mirror before changing lanes is optional and checking side mirrors is to be avoided. (6) The law is wrong. It is the pedestrians who should yield to the cars.
Driving badly is an infectious disease on Florida’s Sun Coast. I think it started with native Floridians in pickups and baseball caps who zipped in and out of traffic in a hurry to win the race that had no winner. A variation, in mutated form, had been imported from the North with little old retired men and women who kept their eyes straight ahead, drove a dangerous ten miles under the speed limit, never looked at their side or rearview mirrors even when they changed lanes as they sat with necks craned so they could see over the dashboard. Finally the disease had been passed on to people angry at the pickups, angry with the ancient drivers. This group drove a few miles over the speed limit and had an uncontrollable urge to curse at everyone who hogged or shared the road.
Someone inside one of those cars on the streets of Sarasota with me that day was even more dangerous than all the rest of the drivers on the road. He was the one who had tried to kill me.
6
