David Koon
They were married in Memphis,
then drove through an all-day thunderstorm that came down so hard that
sometimes he had to pull their rented car over to the shoulder of the road and
wait for the rain to slow before they drove on. For the first hundred miles,
they chatted over the thud of the wipers about the wedding, and the things that
had suprised them about it, and the hundred little joys and insults of it.
After awhile, however, the conversation lapsed and they rode in silence,
smiling at each other from time to time, only interrupting the noise of the
tires to comment goodnaturedly about something they were passing along the
road. Roger’s wedding ring was new enough to feel sharp on his finger, and he
twisted it absently until she reached up and took his hand off the wheel and
covered it with her own on the seat between them. North of Greenville
Mississippi, they finally broke through the line of thunderheads, and the last
hour’s light of their wedding day showed them to be crossing an ugly country of
leaning houses and frowning people. He was a fan of the Blues, and even though
it would turn the six hours to New Orleans into nine, he had insisted on
driving the old highway, to see where it all began. He imagined his mind as a
vast roomful of shelves, and had learned after awhile that the placement of one
memory against another was the difference between something forgotten and
something remembered with a little shock of recognition and a smile. He always
tried to bring his joys in twos and threes, so that to remember one would be
like lucking upon a thin but hugely satisfying volume of poetry.
Even though they had agreed
long before on a quick civil ceremony, Beth’s mother had been able to bully her
into a wedding over time, reminding her of her failing grandparents and a first
cousin who had contracted throat cancer three months before and was not
expected to live another three. Roger was a Ph.D candidate in British
Literature; a proud atheist since seventeen, who held organized religion and
its ceremonies in roughly the same contempt he reserved for the Ku Klux Klan
Still, the wedding had been kept small, and they had been able to talk the
minister into omitting the word “Obey” from Beth’s vows, and once it was
done—at the reception—she was as happy and vital as he had ever seen her, and
some of that happiness still surrounded her now, bright as the scent of roses.
Just before they got into the car, Roger’s sister-in-law (a rotund fireplug of
a woman who some years before had succeeded in converting Roger’s
happy-go-lucky older brother into both a Catholic and a frowning father of
five) waddled forward from the crowd and put a Saint Christopher’s medal around
Beth’s neck, her meaty arms encircling his wife’s throat while she clasped the
chain and looking for a second like the inflatable flotation devices
demonstrated by flight attendants. The medal was old, and lay flat and
shineless against her skin, and the second it was around her neck he had
reminded himself to have her take it off before they made love.
Beth seemed exhausted by her
excitement, and after a few silent miles she put her head against his shoulder
and slept. It was middle summer, and the cotton baked alongside the road, stark
green against the ground, all of it hazy and sodden in the distance with the
steam of the new rain. When he rolled down his window to toss out a lump of
gum, the air that rushed in smelled as sensual as fresh perspiration, and he
rolled the window up quickly, knowing there was still two hundred miles between
them and their hotel room. The air conditioner was on high, and ruffled her
hair.
After Greenville, the highway
narrowed to a sullen two lane strip. By the time she woke again, they were in
the featureless expanse between towns, with only the highway and the cotton and
the occassional piece of derelict equipment to make a person believe human
beings had ever been there at all. The sun was sinking toward the edge of the
fields, and the light seemed to curve and double. When he saw she was awake, he
produced a tape from the pocket of his shirt: a compilation of old men groaning
over their broken hearts, accompanied by guitar. The music perfectly suited the
land, as if the singers’ troubles were unique to that place, and he settled
back in his seat and looked around, smiling at the perfectness of it. The road
followed the twists of a crooked slough for a few miles, then hooked suddenly
around a stand of cottonwoods. After that it ran out to the horizon, flat and
straight and undramatic as a length of gauze.
Even in the dusk, he could see
the wreck long before they reached it. At first, he took it for another flaking
lump of machinery. But as they drew nearer he could tell it was a rusty red
pickup laying on its side, steam curling up sullenly from it into the air. The
truck’s fiberglass campershell had been shattered into palm sized chunks and
they lay all about the wreck like snowflakes. By the flattened grass and
disturbed earth, he could recreate the crash. The truck had veered inexplicably
off the road, crossed the ditch, then carved two looping tracks through the
mud, mowing under whole rows of cotton and leaving them broken in the dirt. At
the point where it began to roll, there was a hollow depression in the earth,
six inches deep and full of glass and paintchips and bits of chrome, all
pressed there like flowers in an album. There had been rain here too, and the
field lay smooth and slick as unfired pottery except where a bumper or jagged
edge had caught. In those places, the mud had been turned over in dark clods
the color of slate. The truck’s hood had come completely off, and was lying
fifty feet from the wreck as if it had been ridden to the spot.
Roger stepped on the brake as
they came parallel with the truck, and only when they were completely stopped
did he lower his window, the electric motors purring inside the door. He
expected to hear sirens, but the only noise was the hum of the car engine, and
he squinted up the road and then into his mirrors, but the world was empty and
quiet in the dusk. He had seen bad wrecks on the highway before, of course, but
those were always surrounded by motion: flashing lights, burning road flares,
brisk police and paramedics and firefighters, as if they had swooped down out
of the sky at the sound of breaking glass. Now, he could hear spring-frogs
tuning up for the night in the ditch at the edge of the road. The sound was
vacant and lonely, and he wanted to take his foot off the brake and drive on to
a phone to summon the flurry of professionals he had expected to arrive
automatically. Roger heard a click, and when he turned, Beth had her seatbelt
off and her hand on the doorhandle. The suddenness of her action shocked him,
and he found he couldn’t summon up the words to disuade her. Instead, he swung
the car over to the edge of the road. A minute later, he was slogging after her
across the field, the black mud crawling up over the tops of his shoes.
The closer they got to the
wreck, the worse it seemed. The truck looked as if it had been wadded into a
compact ball and then spread roughly back into its original shape. When they
were fifteen feet away he saw the old man, propped-up by the cab in the shade,
half his face lit by the setting sun. His clothes were covered in clay and bits
of glass, and nothing about him moved except his lips, which seemed to be
constantly whispering to a point somewhere on the horizon. He was wearing a
pair of chinos and a yellow polyester shirt that might have once been white, and
a large comma of blood arched across his shirtpocket just under the pearl snap.
His legs came away from his knees at odd, broken angles and his big lined hands
lay palm-up in the light, pale and vulnerable. His nose was sharp and regal,
and the only thing about him which seemed unharmed. A headful of fine hair the
color of powder lay matted in sweat and blood against his forehead. A line of
oil snaked out from the engine compartment and crept toward him, finding its
way in the uneven dirt, though from the look of his ribcage, and from the
fluttering, wet noise of his breathing, Roger was nearly sure the old man would
be dead before it reached him. His lips were bright red. Water dripped slowly
from the undercarriage and hissed on the hot exhaust, and he smelled gasoline
and antifreeze and some high, smoky odor like burning sugar.
The old man blinked blood out
of his eyes and looked down at himself sadly, as if he were embarassed at the
shape he was in. He was shivering from the top of his head to the tips of his
broken boots, and his lips moved constantly. Beth knelt beside him and told him
to lie still, that help would be there soon. As she spoke, his head panned as
smoothly as a weathervane to the Saint Christopher’s medal dangling at the
hollow of her throat. He reached out for it weakly, and Beth took his hand and
pressed it down on her thigh and held it, and Roger loved her then more than he
ever had, for her kindness and the compassion in her eyes. She was wearing the
ivory dress her mother had bought her for the reception. Now it was ruined, he
saw, marred at the hem by dark clay and darker blood. The old man closed his
eyes and Roger thought he was dead until he spoke.
“I need,” the old man said. He
took a long gasp that sounded like tearing paper and coughed. Roger saw
pinpricks of blood appear on the bodice of Beth’s dress. ”To tell you
something,” the old man said. He opened his eyes, and they swam cloudily in
their sockets. He stared at the medal and licked his lips, then cleared his
throat thickly.
“Something I’m ashamed of,” he
said, “Something bad.” His shivering broke the words into their syllables, “You
got to tell my wife something for me. My wife.”
“Lie still,” Beth said, “We’ll
find her. Just lie still.” The old man raised his free hand six inches out of
the mud, as if that was all he could manage.
“Listen,” he said, “Listen.”
He took another gasping breath, then began to speak. Roger expected her to
shush the old man, to tell him it would be all right. Instead, she leaned
forward the tinest bit, turning her ear toward him just slightly. Roger heard
“Brother-in-Law” and “My” and “Drowned” before he turned away. He shoved his
hands in his pockets and stared out at the horizon.
As if he wished it to appear,
he heard the noise of an engine. When he looked toward the road, a van was
rounding the corner in the far distance, headlights crawling toward them. The
driver shifted up, and then the truck came swaying toward the place where their
car stood at the side of the road. Roger turned and began trudging out of the
field, his shoes picking up mud until they were two lumps of wet dough at the
ends of his ankles. He was out of breath by the time he reached the road. He
began flagging the truck down wildly, flailing his arms as if he were trying to
hail the driver in pitch dark. The van coasted to a stop, and Roger could see
it was a bread truck. On the side was a six foot loaf of wheat with a child’s
face hovering fatly over it like a full moon. That close, the kid’s freckles
were ugly splotches the size of nickels that made Roger think of melanoma. The
man behind the wheel looked as if he had been hacked out of hardwood with cheap
tools, and he stared past Roger at the wreck. He was wearing a jumpsuit, and on
one breast was a patch that said “Donald” and on the other was a patch that
said, “Golden Loaf Bread! Ummmm, Good!”.
“Jesus,” the driver said,
“What a mess.”
Roger explained about the old
man as the driver bent around the huge steering wheel and turned on the hazard
flashers with a switch under the dash. He turned off the truck’s motor and left
it where it was, in the Southbound lane. The driver had a cellular phone, and
as they worked their way out to the wreck through the mud, he phoned 911 and
explained and told them they were about fifteen miles south of Greenville and
then flipped the phone closed and dropped it into his pocket. Beth did not look
up at them as they came, and by the time they drew close enough to hear her
crying, it was very clear the old man was dead.
The police came roaring up,
then an ambulance, then a slow white hearse with the name of a funeral home on
the side, followed by a clattering blue tow-truck. Members of the volunteer
fire department were the last to arrive, men with t-shirts stretched over their
bodies and identical mustaches, all with a red light bolted to their top of
their pickup. Roger and Beth sat in their rented car as dark fell, waiting for
the police to finish their reports and release them. The volunteer firemen
stood in a cluster behind the towtruck. A few minutes before, as a cop led
Roger past the firemen to his cruiser to make a statement, he learned they were
laughing about wrecks they had seen in their time. No matter how gruesome or
bloody or terrible, there was always another which made the one before one a
goddamned turkeyshoot. When the rare car approached on the road, they stopped
talking and flagged it past as a group as if they were doing calestenics. They
frowned non-committally in the passing headlights: amateurs who wanted to
appear professional in the presence of death. Roger though Beth was asleep
until a truck swung around in the road and he saw the lights reflected in her
eyes.
“You okay?” Roger asked.
“Yes,” she said. Then, after a
long time, “No.”
She reached out her hand and
took his. Then she pulled her legs up from the floorboard and put her head down
on top of her knees so she occupied the smallest possible space. He could feel
her hot breath on his hand. After the ambulance came, she had gone behind it
and changed into a pair of leggings and a blue t-shirt. Her ruined skirt and
hose and shoes were in the trunk, sheated in a red plastic bag that said
“Warning: Medical Waste” One of the paramedics had given it to her when she
knocked at the back of the ambulance, the man holding the bag open while she
dropped her clothes in. She had pulled her hair into a ponytail, and now she
looked the way she might on any other day of her life. As she held his hand, a
Pinto stationwagon motored up in front of them and a man went around to the
back and began unloading camera equipment. After awhile, he produced a pair of
green hipwaders and tugged them on before mucking out into the dark field,
holding a tripod-mounted camera above his head like a soldier carrying his
rifle across a bog.
“It’ll be better in the
morning,” he said, “With some miles between you and here, you’ll feel better. I
promise.”
“No,” she said, then unfolded
and stared at him, “We have to go back to Greenville. Tonight.” Before he could
stop himself, he took his hand out of hers and put it on the steering wheel.
“We’ve got reservations in New
Orleans,” he said, “We don’t show before midnight, they cancel us for the whole
week.” He looked at his watch.
“I told him I would,” she
said. In the field out to the left, the photographer’s camera flashed. For a
second, Roger could see the hulk of the truck, red against the black earth like
a piece of sculpture.
“Well,” Roger said, and fished
for somethig to attach to it before settling on, “We can’t.”
“I have to,” she said.
“No,” he said. The word jumped
out of his mouth, and it occured to him that this was the first time he had
ever used it to deny her something. He closed his eyes and pressed forward,
“This is not going to ruin our trip any more than it has already.”
“I have to,” she said, “I told
him I would.”
“Christ, Beth. Would you just
forget it?” Roger said, “You did your bit for the war effort. It’s over.” His
tone was sharper than he wanted, and when it dropped in mid-sentence, it was
even more noticeable
“What was I supposed to do?”
she said, “Not listen?” Her voice was high and seemed to be on the edge of
tears. He understood that she had asked the questions as much to herself as to
him, and he counted to five slowly and put his hand on her knee before he
spoke. The camera flashed, lighting up her face.
“Beth,” he said, “If we do
drive back, what possible good can come from it? Words are not going to help
anything.”
“That’s not the point,” she
said, “If they help or not, I told him I would.”
“Pacifying some old man is one
thing. Ruining the most memorable week of your life is something else.”
“I don’t give a shit about
memories,” she said, quietly, “I’m talking about now. I won’t be able to live
with myself if I don’t.” Roger sighed deeply.
“It’s stupid, Beth, “ he said,
“If you think about it rationally, you’ll see that.”
She turned and glared at him.
“So,” she said, “Now I have to defend my thesis? Because I’m your wife, Roger.
How’s that? Because you love me. Good enough?” Roger frowned down at the
embossed figure in the middle of the steering wheel for a moment. Some part of
him wondered how the best day of life had come unmoored and drifted here. In
the dark, he could feel her staring at him, waiting. Finally, without looking
at her, he spoke.
“Didn’t you listen when the
cop took your statement, Beth?” he said, “You got listed as ‘passerby’. Same as
me. Same as the breadman who called the ambulance. Not ‘witness’ or ‘victim’.
‘Passerby’”
“So,” she said, “A word takes
away my obligation?”
“It means there was no goddamn
obligation in the first place,” he said, loud enough that at the edge of the
road, a few of the firemen glanced up at them. Roger jabbed his finger at the
glass, at the dark field beyond, “Whatever you owed him was right out there.
Now it’s over.”
“That’s what you think?” she
said, and seemed to rise menacingly in her seat, “That you can promise
something and then just piss on it the first chance you get?” She stared at
him, waiting for an answer, until he looked away. He willed himsefl to be calm;
to not speak until the tightness had eased in his throat.
“Beth,” he said, quietly, “Do
you really want to get involved in some backwater soap opera? It’s none of our
goddamned business.” The photographer came trudgiing up through the mud,
lifting his legs high and giving them a shake with each step like a snowshoer
clearing his laces.
“It is my business now,” she
said darkly, and folded her arms. She stared out at the field, where the old
man’s body lay. After awhile, Roger looked at her and could see she was
crying.
“I wish we had come along
sooner,” she said, “They saw that in an accident, the first few moments are
crucial. I just wish we could have—”
Roger gripped the wheel hard
enough to make it creak under his hands. “I’ll tell you what I wish,” he said,
“I wish the old bastard would have had the common decency to die without
burdening a stranger with his problems. That’s what I wish.” There was a long
silence. Slowly, she turned to him. Her mouth was open and he could see the
white shelf of her teeth.
“Who are you?” she said. Her
eyes were squinted and hurt and confused, and he found he could not help but
look at her. Finally, she shook her head once as if to clear it, then slumped
back in the seat. When he glanced at her again, she had put her head against
the window and closed her eyes above a solemn frown.
As the photographer loaded his
equipment into the back of the Pinto, the men from the funeral home went out
into the dark with flashlights and a blue bodybag. When they returned, they
were carrying the bag unsteadily between them, a man on each side. A few of the
volunteer firemen ran out and took a corner to augment their stories for next
time. Roger saw the undertakers were wearing green rubber boots, their black
suitpants tucked into them. As the old man came out of the field, the rest of
the men standing about took their hats off and stared after the body as it was
loaded into the hearse.
She woke when
the policeman tapped on the window and told them they could go. Once she wiped
the sleep from her eyes, she was apologetic and tearful, and kissed him, and
asked him to forgive her for ruining things, and when he took the onramp
heading South to New Orleans, she did not object. In the coming years, the
question of what the old man had told her would gnaw at him, but she never
spoke of it, or their wedding, or their honeymoon. After awhile he understood
she had packed it all away in some corner of her heart; bundled it up together
so she never had to chance stumbling across it while thinking of something
else. In the coming years, he found she would do the same with those early days
when they had been happy, and the same with her love for him. After that, Roger
would spend many long nights reaching back in his mind, trying to find the root
of all the bitterness and pain that had grown between them. But, no matter how
hard he tried to see something else, he would only be able to call up that last
moment when they brought the old man’s body from the field. He could only
remember how a general look of distaste had fallen over those standing around.
How, for a split second as the old man was loaded into the hearse, the men
there looked both broken and freed: as if a great injustice had been levied
against them, while at the same time a great burden had been lifted from their
shoulders.
Go
to Creative Writing Home Page
Go to English
Department Home Page
This site designed and maintained by The Creative Writing
Concentration of the English Department of the University of Louisiana at
Lafayette.
To contact us by mail: Director of Creative Writing, English
Department, Box 44691, UL-Lafayette, Lafayette LA 70504-4691; by telephone,
337-482-5478;
by email, jlm8047@louisiana.edu.
Last updated: May 1, 2001.