Ellis bought a map at a gas station, and with the map and his phone lying on the passenger seat he drove to the interstate and joined the westward flow. The broken white line flickered beside him, the odometer wheels rolled, the sun moved down.
Boggs had claimed that the accidents didn’t shock him. What shocked him was that there weren’t more. He said, ‘The ability to drive on a road with thousands of others and probably survive the experience gives me a little faith in the humanity of humanity.’
Ellis phoned Heather. He’d begun to doubt himself, he told her. Even if he found Boggs, what could he say?
‘Tell him that he’s -’ She stopped. ‘A friend. Tell him that he’s loved.’
‘He’ll laugh. I’ll be lucky if he doesn’t kill me.’
‘You’ll know what to say. You’ll think of it.’ But her voice was uncertain.
He passed a series of middle-size cities with big box stores by the interstate exits, then ramped off the interstate and passed white-clad homes and the dark vertical lines of telephone poles and reaching trees, the lowering sun flickering yellow in the leaves. He travelled north, slowing in the limits of little towns with a block or two of storefronts. Pizzeria. Barbershop. Bar. Pharmacy. Bank. Auto body shop. Between towns, small ranch houses squatted over flat, aggressively green lawns. He passed a bar with a painted sign, ‘The Cloverleaf Lounge’ – a vinyl-sided structure with a couple of high, small windows and a sagging banner: ‘Bud Light $1.50’. He came down a gradual hill to an intersection where, off to the side, a swathe of raw earth lay levelled and heaped beside two enormous yellow machines. Ellis waited under a green light for a semi to clear the opposite lane, then turned left toward the lake.
He travelled a couple more miles before it struck him that he had been in that intersection before. With Boggs. They had done an accident-scene inspection there – an old motel had stood on the ground now scraped down by the yellow machines. The neon had been gone from the motel sign, its lawn had been untended and overgrown, but a handful of cars had stood in front of the rooms and a shirtless man had been loitering in the parking lot, scratching his thighs while Ellis and Boggs dodged in and out of the intersection with measuring tapes and cameras. Three years ago? More or less.
A sign pointed at the park entrance.
Narrow, high-crowned roads led to three different camping areas, and Ellis drove through the loops of each, past RVs, SUVs, pop-up campers, pup tents, fire pits, tiki torches, lawn chairs, and a few couples, children, solitary men. None were Boggs, and none of the vehicles were Boggs’s convertible. He phoned Heather to be sure that he had come to the right place, to see if she had any ideas, and she directed him back to the most remote of the camping areas. He circled through it twice more. Then he drove by the others again, then turned at the sign for the boat ramp, followed a short road to the water, and found the area empty. He parked and walked down to the wavelets lapping and rattling small round stones. Above him, forest loomed and reached toward the water and the spectacle of the setting sun. Haphazard on the beach lay pale rounded driftwood, beer bottles, a tyre. Seagulls rose and fell. To the south a man and a couple of children were prancing at the water’s edge. In the other direction, smeared by distance into anonymity, a single figure moved. Impossible to say that it wasn’t Boggs.
Ellis started that way. The sun balanced on the horizon and cast a street of dazzle over the water, and the distant figure resolved into a woman in a bikini top stooping to collect stones. Past her the beach lay empty. Ellis turned back and a wind gusted from the lake and pulled his clothes out against his body. Inland, campfires glowed amid the trees, faint and skittish.
At the boat ramp he stood looking at the water, indigo under a cavernous twilight, listening as the waves moved and ticked stones against one another, thinking of what he had done to the stranger, James Dell, and to his friend, Boggs, and he felt that the condition of his soul, if he granted that such a thing existed, was wretched and very possibly beyond repair. That he would have been glad to trade places with James Dell in his hospital bed.
He drove away from the lake, out of the park, through the murk of the forest, between the open dark fields. At the intersection where the earth movers had rid the world of the motel that he remembered, a startled rabbit bolted and raced toward the piles of dirt.
He turned, but stopped on the shoulder. The night had absorbed the twilight and stars glowed. He attempted to phone Boggs, but there was no answer. He sat with a gnawing in his chest, and when he could not bear to be still any longer, he stood out of the minivan. A single overhead street light cast a thin, pinkish illumination on the intersection. He studied the asphalt, the painted lane lines, the timing of the stop light suspended overhead. Little traffic moved through. A black pickup. A silver SUV. The drivers glanced at him and went on.
The accident that had occurred here, three years ago or more, involved a Mercury Grand Marquis – a chromed, civilian version of the big Crown Vics that the police liked. The Mercury had crashed into a tiny Ford Fiesta. The Ford was stopped, waiting for the light, when the Mercury impacted it from behind and sent it careering diagonally through the intersection, hitting two other cars along the way, then sliding off the roadway where it stopped with a telephone pole enfolded in its driver’s side and the driver – a young woman, a cosmetology student – dead in her seat.
Witnesses reported that the Ford had been waiting at a red light. The timing of the stop light relative to the collision was impossible to verify, but even if the light had been green, the driver of the Mercury had an obligation to attempt to slow and stop, and there was no physical indication that the driver had touched his brakes. Also, the driver admitted fault. In fact, he told police that he had accelerated into the impact. He said that he had been possessed by demons – an assertion that the police recorded without comment in their report alongside licence numbers, scene information and vehicle descriptions.
At issue had been whether the Ford should have protected its occupant better, but through an evaluation of crush damage Ellis and Boggs had calculated that, at impact, the Mercury was travelling at about 70 mph, far exceeding any governmental test standard. The Ford had also deposited a set of tyre marks that swooped across the intersection and which he and Boggs had carefully documented, but were now long erased from the asphalt by weather and passing traffic. Ellis crossed the road to the telephone pole. At about waist height he found an impression of crushed and splintered wood where the Ford had struck. He remembered photographing it years before.
Scuffing at the base of the pole he found bits of glass – maybe from the Ford, maybe from some other collision. He watched several cars move by. None were Boggs’s. Although the case had never gone very far, he and Boggs had referred to it often. The notion of demon possession came in handy when faced with inexplicable driver actions.
He drove up the road to the Cloverleaf Lounge. Inside, the dimness made it impossible to discern the colour of the walls or the tables or even the tie of the short, broad bartender who stood projecting an attitude of everlasting patience. Ellis ordered a beer. When it was set before him he asked if there had been anyone here who looked like Boggs – tall, big, with bright blue eyes and a brownish beard. The bartender, studying a point behind Ellis, shook his head.