“Yeah?” I said.
It was Oliver DeForest, a guy who worked in a shoe store downtown, one of the Sheriff’s Patrol-a group of citizens who worked as part-time deputies. He said, “Accident, Mallory, kinda confused up there, better turn around.”
“Got the sheriff’s stepson here to see him, Ollie.”
“Oh….” He bent down and looked into the car and nodded to John. “Good to see you, son.” He scratched his head. “Go on through, I guess.”
I kept on at my slow pace as the hill steepened and finally approached the point of the slope that turned sharply, and would level out flat with a high, sheer wall of rock on one side and a bottomless drop-off on the other. The latter provided a postcard-picturesque view of the Mississippi, only on this dark a night, you’d have to take my word for that. A pair of flares was set just before the turn, one on the left against rock, the other to the right under a 20-mile-an-hour-curve sign. The flares glowed hot pink.
When I rounded the turn and drove onto the flattened-out area, the night lit up like a small, cheap carnival. Half a dozen more flares were set, several stuck into holes in the rust-rock of the upward cliff, others along the fence of stubby white posts and thick wire that guarded the drop-off. Two cars were parked flush against the rock, neither official (more civilian deputies, I supposed); the sheriff’s gold Buick, the only official car there as yet, was on the gravel parking area next to the drop-off fence, the metal bar atop the car swinging its two lights, one red, one blue, slowly around. Front and back lights were on all three cars, and six or seven men were running around the small area aimlessly, waving flashlights, moving through the darkness like big fat fireflies.
Brennan was standing at the point in the fence where one of the stubby posts was crushed and the heavy wire trampled down; there were no skid marks on the pavement, but tire tracks were visible in the gravel in front of the crushed post.
I pulled in next to Brennan’s car and John and I hopped out.
Brennan took off his obligatory Stetson and tugged at a lock of brown, greased hair as he watched John and me approach.
“Jesus H. Christ,” he said. “You pick a fine time to come calling.”
John shrugged, thrust out his hand, and Brennan took it with mock reluctance.
“Glad to see you, son,” Brennan said, “no matter the conditions.”
“Glad to see you, sir.”
Brennan turned and glared at me. “Mystery writer,” he said, derisively, then nodded toward my Rambler and said, “We already got one accident, let alone you driving up in another.” He looked at John’s fringed jacket and said, “Nice goddamn coat you got there. You had one like it during the Davy Crockett craze, too, if I remember right.”
Nice guy, Brennan.
I said, “What happened here?”
This time Brennan shrugged. “Just got here myself. Car lost control, went over, far as I can tell.” He walked beyond the fence to the edge of the drop-off and looked down and pointed. “Car’s down there. You can see it didn’t catch fire when it hit or anything, don’t ask me why. Ambulance is on the way, but we don’t have any idea who or how many’re in the car, or in what shape. After a ride like that, hell…. I just hope we can haul it up with the crane on the wrecker, if there’s enough coil on the damn thing.
“I was just getting ready to try to walk down the hill a ways when you boys dropped in for tea.”
“We could join you,” I suggested.
“We’ll just tag along, sir,” John said.
“Okay….Hey, Russ!”
One of the guys with the flashlights stopped flitting long enough to come over and say, “Yeah?”
“You try and keep these idiots organized up here-I’m gonna try and get down to the wreck. Wrecker or ambulance get here, tell ’em what’s going on.”
“Okay, Sheriff.”
Brennan went back to his car, grabbed a flashlight out of the front, and returned to lead John and me on foot back down the slope of the highway. At the point at which John and I’d met Ollie DeForest on the way up (he was standing faithful guard over his pair of flares), Brennan trailed off the highway, stepped across the fence and began angling down the underside of the drop-off at the place where it became less cliff and more hill.
It didn’t take long for me to lose all sense of direction: I just followed the Stetson and flashlight up front of me and stumbled along after. John was behind me, but wasn’t having any trouble; he was used to seeing at night, and, to a jungle fighter like him, the dry dead weeds, brush and trees we were moving through must’ve been nothing.
Four minutes later we saw the car.
It was in a small, relatively open space of ground, standing on its head, a blackly humorous monument balancing with its ass in the air, just off-center in the semi-clearing. It was a dark color Ford, fairly new, but that was all I could make out: it’d squashed itself down like a bug in the process of its nose dive.
At that moment, for the first time since I’d got out of the car up on the Hill, I noticed the cold. There was no breeze, just silent dead cold, smoke-breath cold. I stood at the edge of the little clearing and let Brennan and John run over to the upended car, digging my hands down in my pockets, hunching my shoulders together, listening to my teeth chatter in my head. I stood among the trees that circled the open area, trees standing ’round like old women with tall thick bodies that for icy instants became their own long, cartoonish, wrinkled faces, with hair of skeletal branches that reached into the sky like dark seaweed, hanging upward.
They were having trouble getting the door pried open, so I went to help. Above us the sound of an ambulance’s siren cut the air, distant and remote as a weak radio signal, but growing; the ledge up there where we’d been a few minutes ago cast an orange blush against the darkness. The door finally gave, and the smell of alcohol crawled out.
An empty bottle of Haig amp; Haig rested on the floor on the rider’s side in the front, unbroken, the sole ironic survivor of the trip. The driver was not so lucky: a young blond woman crushed against and into the steel and glass of the smashed auto, a limp rag doll barely containing her stuffing, with the doll-face turned toward us, pretty much intact, eyes mercifully closed.
“Christ,” I said, and covered my mouth, trying not to heave. I leaned against the wreckage and looked away. Looked out toward where the river was supposed to be, but through the trees and blackness I could see nothing, though the presence of the river was there, in the soft but distinct sounds of waves lapping, lapping.
Brennan snorted, disgusted by my reaction. “Seen a hell of a lot worse,” he said.
“So has he,” John said. “What is it, Mal?”
“The woman. In the car.”
“What? Who? Somebody you know…?”
“Somebody I just met.”
“Christ,” John said, understanding, and covered his mouth, and looked away.
PART TWO
SIX
“So you told Brennan all of it,” John said.
“That’s right.”
“The bruiser at the bus station, Janet Taber’s story about the burning house, everything.”
“Yup.”
“And he just sat there. Didn’t say a thing.”
“Oh, he said something. He said, ‘Why don’t you go write one of your silly stories and leave me alone?’”
John was sitting across the table from me, wearing a blindingly orange turtleneck ski sweater. It was too early in the day to look at that sweater. John and I were upstairs in Brennan’s living quarters over the jail, a study in drab browns except for the yellow kitchen the two of us were sitting in. It was nine o’clock, give or take a few minutes; I’d waited till this morning to tell my story to Brennan, downstairs in his office-last night at the accident scene, things had been too harried for that.