She really meant it. I had begun to wonder how sane Jesse was. Or how sane either of them were. “When will he be gone so we can talk?”
“Tomorrow evening.”
So we left. I looked back. She was kneeling beside him, smoothing his lank hair back from his forehead.
After we had gone three miles back toward Cold Brook, I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the red-and-white Bronco overtaking us, coming on at high speed. I made several guesses, all of them bad news as I floored the accelerator. The little car jumped out pretty good but, as I soon saw, not quite good enough. My speedometer said seventy-two on the flat, less uphill, more down. When he came up behind me and didn’t smack into my rear end with his big steel bumper, I knew that he was waiting for enough clear vision ahead to come up beside me and edge me off the road. That gave me a better chance.
When the road was clear ahead, he came on up alongside. I could see him, sitting high and grinning.
The instant he started to move in toward my front corner, I warned Meyer and hit the brakes hard. Jesse went shooting on ahead. The moment I slid to a full stop, I put it in reverse and backed it on up to speed, then banged the brakes again, turning the wheel hard right as I did so. The front end slid around beautifully and we rocked up onto two wheels momentarily, bounced back down, and I had it in gear and gaining speed, leaving a teenage pattern of black rubber on the pavement behind us.
I had come to my dead stop, and gone into reverse, right near the brink of that long upcurve to the left, that climbing curve a little way out of Cold Brook. Jesse had gone down the downhill curve to the right, out of sight. I kept looking back. No Jesse. Meyer said, “I heard something back there.”
“Such as.”
“Well… a thud. A kind of crunch-thud noise.” At the end of a long straight stretch, I found an unmarked dirt lane. I turned in, went up a way, turned around, and came back to where I could park out of sight of the main road, yet see anything that sped past the leafy mouth of the lane. Nothing came from the south. A bread truck and a pickup passed by from the north. After ten long minutes, we started up and headed south, after them.
From his tire marks and the location and condition of his vehicle, it was easy to see what had happened: an error of judgment. When I had out-smarted him again, it had made him very very angry. And in his rage he had tried to make a U-turn halfway down that slope. He probably knew his vehicle well enough so that, had he tried the same turn at the same speed on the flat, he would have had no problem. But on the slope, the inside wheels were at a slightly higher level, and about two thirds of the way around his U-turn, he lost it. The Bronco tipped over and rolled. It threw him out ahead of the roll, and rolled over him, and kept rolling until it wedged itself into a grove of small trees beyond the ditch.
He lay face down amid bits of glass and twisted little pieces of tarnished trim. His back was bloody. We parked beyond the bread truck and walked up to the scene. He had tried to make his turn where the curving downslope had been widened to three lanes to accommodate cars turning left into a side road. He was stretched out on the shoulder, face down, only his head on the paving. As we neared him, it looked as though his face had sunk into the concrete road surface as if into a liquid. The pool of red around his head revealed the basis of this curious and sickening illusion. Some part of the vehicle, probably one of the big tires, had rolled across the back of his head, and under the pressure the facial bones had given way, leaving the back of the skull undamaged. A spectator who had been headed north brought a frayed old blanket from his car trunk and spread it over the upper half of the body.
The pickup driver said to the bread-truck driver, “You know who it is, don’t you?”
“I know who it was, pal. Crazy Jesse that played piano weekends up to Heneman’s Grill. Moved in with the Fox woman last year. I said he was going to kill himself sooner or later the way he drove that souped-up Bronco.”
There were seven of us standing there by now, and we all turned and looked down the hill slope to the southwest as we heard the distant keening of the ambulance siren, coming closer.
“No need to hurry.” Bread truck said.
“Funny thing,” Pickup said. “If they had put Jesse away for a couple of years for assaulting that Jamison kid, like they should have, instead of giving him probation, he wouldn’t have been out getting himself killed today.”
The Dodge ambulance pulled up, and two attendants ran to the body, slowed when they saw the blanket. One lifted it up, felt for a pulse in the neck dropped it again, shrugged. The other strolled over to slide the body basket out of the back of the ambulance. A couple of northbound cars slowed for a look, then hurried on. A State Police sedan arrived. Meyer and I walked back to the rental. and got in.
Meyer said, “If there is anything at all useful that she can tell us, we had better be the ones who tell her about Jesse.”
“I want to thank you for thumping him.”
“Not exactly a frontal assault. Not exactly meritorious. You would have taken care of the problem.”
“Don’t be too sure. He was reaching to unsnap that little knife case on his belt when you turned off his lights.”
“I was too angry and too humiliated to stop to think about what I was doing. Look at my ear.” He turned and looked to the rear so I could see his right ear. It was puffy and bright red.
I had turned back north, leaving the little roadside scene behind. I said, “I think you’ll be better at talking to her. Okay?”
“If you wish.”
He was silent until we turned into the dirt driveway, to park where the red-and-white Bronco had been. Then he said, “Stay in the car.” A direct order. Unusual and unexpected.
She came out, trotting toward him when he was halfway to the trailer, her strong face vivid with the unasked question. The left side of her face was swollen and was turning dark. I heard her helpless cry. “I tried to stop him! I tried. I really tried!” Then I could hear the murmur of his voice, explaining. She seemed to become a smaller person, to collapse in upon herself. He touched her shoulder and she turned into his arms. He patted her, comforted her. They walked together to the steps, his arm around her thick waist. He lowered her to a sitting position on the middle step, and she put her face down on her knees.
Meyer looked toward the car and made a small beckoning gesture. I got out and went to them. Her shoulders were shaking, but I could hear no audible sobbing. Finally she raised up and looked at both of us, tears running down her face, and tried to smile. “You’d miss even a lizard if you lived with it and fed it for over a year. He could be real sweet sometimes. I told him not to go after you and he knocked me down. Is the Bronco ruint?”
“It isn’t very pretty,” I said, “but I think it’s just damage to the body. Frame, engine, wheels, and radiator should be okay.”
“I’ll have to see about getting it fixed up. I got to have a car, living way out here. I bought it for him. I traded my old car in on it, and it’s in my name.”
“Insurance?” Meyer asked.
“Only what they make you take out. I don’t even know where they’ll take the body. I haven’t got any phone out here any more. It was a party line, and Jesse cussed the people who were talking when he wanted to use it, so they complained and one of them recorded what he said to them, and they came and took it out. I didn’t know they could do that, but they can.”
“We’ll take you down to the village,” Meyer said. “You can find out there, and make arrangements about the truck.”