When he finally spoke his voice was strangled. “Why did you do it?”
“We just found her. We didn’t do anything.”
Bill looked around him as though he didn’t know where he was, then stared hard at me again and screamed, “I don’t understand!”
Marla moved forward a little. There was a tremor in her voice when she spoke. “Bill, you’ve had a terrible shock. You should be at home. Do you want me to take you?”
“You bitch! You fucking evil bitch! Do you know what you’ve done to me? What did I do to you? What did I do? I paid you. I didn’t touch you, I just watched. What did I do wrong?”
Marla looked uncertainly at me. I felt out of my depth. I didn’t understand his anger and I didn’t know how to help him.
“Bill, come on, man-”
“Fuck you! Fuck you!”
He broke down then, sobbing, clenching his fists in front of his chest. A couple of people on the sidewalk stopped to watch and one of the security guys from the town hall came over. He recognized Bill and stepped between us.
I felt Marla pulling me, dragging me away. It didn’t feel right to leave him like this, crying and so obviously broken, but she pulled harder and we walked away and left him there collapsed in the arms of the guard.
We went back to where I’d parked the pickup. We were both shaken and we locked the doors after we got in. Marla shuddered.
“He was talking about what we did at the lake.”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus Christ,” she groaned. I put my hand on her arm but she jerked away angrily.
“Don’t touch me!”
“He’s just feeling guilty. It’s not our fault if he feels bad about it now. We’re just someone he can take it out on.”
But Marla wasn’t listening. Without warning she twisted in her seat and slapped me across the face. The blow wasn’t hard but it caught me on the same side of the face as Bill’s punch and it stung.
“What the fuck!”
“Why did you have to leave me? Why the fuck couldn’t you have stayed? Look what you turned me into! Someone who can fuck in front of another man. I’m disgusting. We could have bought a house and had a kid. We would have been normal and clean. We would have been fucking happy.”
She put her face in her hands and fell against me and sobbed.
“Jesus, Johnny, Jesus…”
I held her and let her cry and stared blankly through the windshield. The town bustled about its business, people walked along the sidewalk, cars drove down the street, but I saw nothing through the glass except the cold shine of my own guilt. Later, when Marla had quieted, she went back to work and I drove fast along country roads for a long time with all the windows open and the air rushing in.
CHAPTER 11
The day they buried Patricia Prentice my father was almost killed. And because I’d accepted his offer to drive into town with him and have breakfast before he started work, I was almost killed too.
Earlier, I’d tried to talk to him about Patricia Prentice but when I raised the subject his conversation became monosyllabic and guarded and he avoided saying anything except that he was okay and I shouldn’t worry about him. I didn’t press the point, I knew from experience that any coming to terms he had to do he’d do deep down inside, in that hidden part of himself where his emotions were sealed.
The end of our street joined a long road that ran downhill. As my father turned the car into it I saw him frown a little.
“Brakes are a bit soft.”
He shrugged and wound down his window. We gathered speed and he took an exaggerated breath of the air coming in.
“I like this time of morning. Before everything starts.”
He frowned again.
“These brakes really don’t feel right.”
There was very little traffic about at this time and going downhill we’d reached a speed of about fifty miles an hour. A hundred yards ahead of us the road curved sharply to the left where it crossed a culvert before flattening out against the floor of the basin. We needed to slow quickly to make the turn but the car continued to pick up speed. I looked across at my father. He was staring through the windshield, gripping the wheel so hard his knuckles showed white beneath the tan of his hands. His right foot pumped rapidly on the brake pedal. He shouted, “The brakes have gone. Hold on!”
He yanked the emergency brake and the scream of the locking rear tires added to the cacophony of sound that had suddenly engulfed us-the engine of the car, the rush of our passage through air and over tarmac, the thudding of our hearts and the roar of our blood, our shouts in the last sickening second as we entered the turn, my father wrenching the wheel around, fighting the weight of the car.
“Cover your face, John!”
And then the howl of the wheels losing their grip and the sideways drift of the car, beyond any hope of control now, out across the angle of the curve as though it floated on oil, the white beams of the guardrail across the edge of the culvert suddenly at my window. And then our impact, a single explosive bang and a hail of shattered glass, the final slewing through a quarter turn, the lurching drop as the back of the car went through the guardrail and over the concrete edge of the culvert, the shriek of metal being scraped from the bottom of the car. And then silence.
For a moment, after it all stopped, neither of us moved or spoke, sure that we must be hideously injured and that movement of any kind would reveal to us the terrible nature of our wounds. But the seconds passed and we did not find ourselves dying or drenched with blood and we peeled ourselves away from the positions into which we’d been thrown.
“Are you all right, John? Are you hurt?”
I flexed my legs and arms. I’d hit the side of my head on the doorframe and I had small cuts on the backs of my hands, but I was uninjured.
“No, I’m okay. I’m not hurt. Are you?”
My father moved a little in his seat and then smiled like he didn’t believe it. “You know, I think I’m all right.”
“You’re bleeding a little.”
He had a small cut on his cheekbone and a drop of blood had run halfway down the side of his face. I pointed to it and he took a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed it away. He held the handkerchief in front of him and looked at the small red mark his blood had made. He turned it so I could see it. And we both began to laugh at the insanity of surviving such violence and noise and danger with nothing more than a few drops of blood to show for it. For a long time we couldn’t stop, but eventually the tension left us and we climbed out of the car.
The impact with the guardrail had buckled the panels along the entire right-hand side of the car. Although the back wheels had gone over the edge the car was stable on its belly and didn’t shift as we both got out through the driver’s door. Six feet below us a small creek entered the mouth of a tunnel which allowed it to pass beneath the road. On either side of the culvert there was a margin of woodland and then houses. In the garden of one of these a middle-aged couple stood watching us anxiously. They were holding hands and they waved at us.
The police turned up ten minutes later and my father answered questions for their report. They figured the only thing that had saved us was hitting the guardrail side-on. If we’d ploughed straight through it, they said, we would have gone nose-first into the culvert and the impact would have killed us for sure. A couple of people who’d come out to look at the damage nodded and made agreeing noises and said how amazing it was we weren’t dead. The police radioed a garage to come out and tow the car, then they gave us a lift into town.