the way of a temper. The rush of almost blinding rage that I felt building behind my eyes was startling to me. I broke out in an uncharacteristic sweat, and experienced what I felt sure was a panic attack.
I paced back and forth on the sidewalk opposite Murray’s, infuriated by my inability to simply barge in and confront Janice and Greer with their deception. I’ve always despised public scenes. That, at any rate, was my dim and cowardly rationale at the time.
I tried to think my way through the situation, but I couldn’t get my head around it. Greer, I felt certain, did not have transportation, unless he’d somehow borrowed a car from one of his criminal acquaintances, or—and this was certainly a possibility—stolen one. Janice would have driven her own car downtown, and must have parked in one of the ramps near Murray’s. I crossed the street and spent half an hour wandering the levels of the garage nearest the steakhouse, but I didn’t stumble across Janice’s Honda.
My car was parked over on Washington Avenue, and I thought of moving it someplace nearer, but there was no metered parking anywhere around Murray’s. I figured I had perhaps an hour to hatch some plan of confrontation. A short time later, feeling increasingly desperate, I headed back down Hennepin to get my car. I have no idea how long I spent circling blocks on the maddening system of one-way streets that comprises downtown Minneapolis, but it felt like I trolled past Murray’s at least twenty-five times.
Finally, just as I was turning down 6th Street one more time, I saw Janice and Greer emerge from the restaurant. I immediately pulled my car to the curb and illegally parked. I didn’t have to wait long. They exchanged a few more words, Janice fished in her purse and handed Greer what was almost certainly cash, and then they embraced one more time and parted. Janice headed east along the sidewalk and Greer strolled west toward the heart of downtown. Sixth was a one-way going in the opposite direction, so I had to circle back around again onto Hennepin. At the intersection of 6th I saw Greer on the next block, and I drove up to 5th and wound my way back around to First Avenue. As I turned the corner I encountered Greer, perhaps fifty yards away, getting into a beat- to-shit blue Impala. I stopped and waited for him to exit his parking space, and then I followed him east through downtown and onto 35 south.
There was almost no traffic on the interstate at that hour—it must have been around 10:30—and Greer was driving at a surprisingly modest speed. I was trying to stay back at least several hundred yards, but I had to resist the growing urge to overtake him and drive him off the road. At the Crosstown Highway he turned off 35 and headed east again, toward the airport.
Holy shit, I thought. That fucker was going to climb on a plane and skip town, probably with money he’d received from my wife. Greer continued right past the exits to the airport, though, and steered the Impala south onto highway 52. I was in familiar territory—I’d once taught at a junior college out that way—but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why Greer might have been headed in that direction. There was nothing much out there but drowsy suburban development, the grimy industrial sprawl beyond the airport, and a giant oil refinery, the gleaming spectacle of which was already visible in the distance.
Greer kept plunging further south, and I was blindly determined to stay on his tail, for what purpose I still had absolutely no idea.
He eventually pulled into the parking lot of a desolate-looking strip motel. The sign out front was faded and dark, and if it weren’t for the presence of several pickup trucks backed up to rooms, the place would have appeared abandoned. I passed it and turned into the first street that I came to on the opposite side of the highway. I swung the car around and parked. The motel was perhaps two hundred yards away, and I could still see Greer’s brake lights in the parking lot. The driver’s side door was half open, illuminating the car’s interior. Greer was clearly visible to me, and it appeared he was leaning over in the seat, studying something.
I popped my trunk, got out of the car, and fished a tire iron from the wheel well. Without thinking I dashed across the highway and crept along the edge of the service road toward the motel.
There was a cluster of scrub maples and weeds at the southern edge of the place, and I crouched in the darkness, breathing heavily, waiting for Greer to make a move. It seemed like I waited a long time. Greer remained slumped in the front seat. I could hear strains of rock music coming from the open door of the car.
Tiptoeing from the brush, I managed to get within perhaps twenty feet of the Impala, where I took shelter behind one of the trucks. I could smell marijuana, and peering across through the windows of the truck’s cab I could see Greer, almost reclining, his head tilted back and his eyes closed, taking a long drag from a joint.
I crawled around the back of the truck and moved to a position directly behind the Impala. It took me perhaps two seconds to lunge forward and fling the car door wide open. Greer sat up straight, started to speak, and then turned his upper body away from me. The first time I swung the tire iron I hit him directly across the back of his head, almost at the base of his neck. When he hunched forward over the steering wheel, I hit him again, and he rolled over onto his back in the front seat. His eyes opened wide for a moment and then closed, and I heard a pitiful moan as I turned and ran.
Back at my car I settled in behind the wheel and tried to stop trembling. I rolled down the window and flung the tire iron out into the grass. I’d never really hit anyone in my life, and it was a strange, almost euphoric experience. The combination of rage and ecstasy is a feeling that I would have certainly described at that moment as wonderful. I tried to remember if I had said anything to Greer before I swung the tire iron, but I had no recollection, and regretted that I had not made some memorable statement. I also tried to recall at exactly what point, if ever, my actions had been premeditated. Did I even have what I could classify as a real memory of the moment I decided on a precise course of action, the instant I went to the trunk and removed the tire iron? I honestly don’t believe I did. The whole thing just happened, but I felt an immense sense of satisfaction, and had absolutely no regard for potential consequences.
The bottom line was that Francis Greer had ruined my life, perhaps once and for all. And at that point, sitting there in the darkness alongside the highway, I truly didn’t care. In that moment, for the first time in my life, the future literally did not exist in my mind.
I started driving back into the city. Somewhere en route I turned off highway 52 onto a dark little county road. There was no real thought involved in this decision. The road was entirely unfamiliar, but maybe I just felt like driving, and had some weird faith that I’d end up where I needed to be. I thought about all my days on the straight and narrow, all the times I’d awakened surprised to find myself where I was, and doing whatever it was I was doing; surprised by the clean-shaven face I’d see in the mirror every morning and the smiling man I’d frequently encounter staring me down from the family portraits around my house and on my desk at work. Some guys I suppose get a sort of disoriented feeling when they study a picture of themselves from an old high school yearbook. I’ve always had that same feeling whenever I see a photograph of my present self. I’m not saying I feel embarrassed or abashed; it’s more a feeling of befuddlement, almost like I’ve literally never truly recognized myself in whomever I was pretending to be at any given moment.
I don’t know, perhaps these thoughts came later. Maybe I wasn’t really thinking or feeling anything that night other than the blank rush of adrenaline. I know I was driving very fast. They’ve told me that much. And then all of a sudden there were a pair of bright lights hurtling toward me down that dark road. I saw the approaching car swerve into my lane, and then the driver—some punk, I’d later learn, eighteen years old and roaring on Old Style—killed his lights.
I was in the hospital for almost two months, most of it spent in rehab learning to crawl back into my body. It was like my body was this empty suit in the corner and I couldn’t do anything until I learned all over again how to put it on and move around in it. The whole time I was in that hospital there was a card from Francis Greer on the stand next to my bed.
The doctors tried to tell me that I had to learn to remember, and that I had no recollection of what happened the night of the accident. That’s not true. I have a very precise memory of the accident; in fact, I know it was no accident at all.
The whole thing was deliberate, a game of chicken. The kid challenged me. I remember there was an instant when I could have jerked the wheel and conceded the lane, a moment when the collision could possibly have been avoided. I’d already yielded once; maybe two hundred yards before the crash I had instinctively swapped lanes with the oncoming car, but the other guy had followed my lead. And in those last few seconds I resolved I wasn’t going to budge again. I’d done enough budging.
The kid who was driving the other car was killed instantly, and I’m told that neither of his surviving passengers had any memory of the accident. I know exactly what happened, though. The little bastard would too, if he’d lived: I won.
